A Thousand Months

‘An average human lifespan is less than a thousand months long’ is a favourite trope of mine in introducing the topic of ethics. It has the virtue of approximate truth: if you live to the age of 80, 80 x 12 = 960 months. Unless you party a lot, you are asleep for a third of them – 320 months. For another third of them you are in a supermarket queue or filling out tax returns (as examples of the boring and banal in life, clogged with the bureaucracy of existence and the husbandry of necessities). That leaves 320 months for living as vividly and fully as life can allow. I wonder if it is a coincidence that Marlowe’s Dr Faustus contracts with Mephistopheles for 24 years of knowledge and power (including the opportunity to bed Helen of Troy; it was Marlowe who coined her ‘face that launched a thousand ships’ epithet – which, btw, suggests a metric for beauty: a millihelen is enough beauty to launch one ship), for 24 years is not too far off c. 300 months.

This mensual calibration of a human lifespan owes itself to Solon, one of the Seven Sages of Greece, in his conversation with King Croesus of Lydia, the richest man by far of anyone in antiquity. Croesus thought that his wealth and royal blood made him the happiest man in the world, but Solon disabused him, pointing out that if – given the brevity of human life – he really wished to be happy, he should think seriously about what would make him so. ‘Call no man happy until he is dead,’ Solon said, meaning one of two things: that you cannot estimate whether a life was happy until it is complete, all its triumphs and sorrows counted to see which has the majority; or, that life is so full of suffering that its absence is the greater blessing. This latter interpretation is suggested by Solon’s mention of the youthful brothers Cleobis and Biton, whose mother Cydippe begged Hera the Queen of the Gods to give them the greatest gift possible, whereupon Hera immediately gave them an easeful death.

I tell my students all this, and they shrug their shoulders; when young we are immortal; old Greeks and old age mean nothing. So I ask them how many months, at age 20, they have already had; those who can multiply are shocked to find that 20x12 = 240. 240 out of 960! Worse, out of the 620 waking months! Having thus secured their attention, I tell them the good news, speaking ex officio as a chair-holding Professor of Philosophy, that there is no such thing as time. By this I mean that the real thing is experience, not time; that time is elastic around experience, so the more experience you have, the more time you have. Here are two proofs: (1) Go for a romantic weekend with someone you really fancy to somewhere really lovely, and while you are there you are there forever; yet on the Monday after your return the weekend will seem to have passed in a flash. (2) If you do exactly the same thing at every moment of every day – rise at the same hour, eat the same breakfast, read the same words on the same page, etc., over and over, all your days, how many days do you live? One.

It follows that to live richly in experience, with enthusiasm, with passion, with goals to strive for and mountains to climb, you live not 960 months but 960 lifetimes, or more. Why waste time scrolling your phone, arguing, hungover, regretting without learning from regrets?

All this, as mentioned, is propaedeutical to discussing the questions of ethics. Ethics is not the same thing as morals, note. The ethical question is: What sort of person should I be? How shall I live? By what values, with what aims? The moral question is: What is the right thing to do in this situation? Of course one’s answer to this latter question will be conditioned in general by one’s answer to the former question, but they are not the same. Ethics (from Greek ethos meaning ‘character’) is about what we are, morality is about what to do, how to act in given situations, almost exclusively in relation to our relationships with others. (‘Morals’ derives from a coining by Cicero, who adapted moralis from mos, moris, plural mores which we still use in English; mos means ‘custom’, ‘etiquette’).

How we answer ‘What shall I be, by what values and aims shall I live?’ is wholly individual. There is no one-size-fits-all answer, as the ideologies (especially religious ideologies) purport to tell us. The answer to the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ is therefore ‘It is what you make it’ – you individually, on the basis of your self-creation and endeavour, suited to your capacities, talents and desires. But! – note that not just anything goes. A person who thought, ‘Ah! I think I’d make a good murderer’ could not justify that choice before a mature-minded and far-seeing tribunal. One reason is Mill’s ‘Harm Principle’, which can be put as saying that one’s choices must not involve injury to others. (There is a ramified debate about what constitutes ‘harm’ in discussions both of Mill and ethics in general; but all focal cases are obvious enough).

The idea that we are individually responsible for creating lives meaningful to ourselves is embodied in Socrates’ dictum that the worthwhile life is the considered life – the life thought about and chosen. In fact he put the point negatively: ‘the unconsidered life is not worth living’, because it is not one’s own; it is lived at the behest of others, on their terms, in accordance with their preferences. You are a football kicked by their feet, and in directions not of your own choosing. Ethics is about choosing for oneself, on principles that stand up to scrutiny – the scrutiny that your best self will give them, that the best discussions of what is good and worthwhile in the literature and philosophy of our world suggest.

In the end the choice is whether to live 960 months, a third of them asleep, or 960 lifetimes. We do the latter in living considered lives, chosen lives.

A manifesto for this approach was provided by Walter Pater in the concluding essay of his The Renaissance: ‘…experience itself, is the end [= the aim or goal]. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to be seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike.’