Chapter 16

COMMITMENT

“Here I stand, I can do no other.”

- Martin Luther (1483-1546), Speech at the Diet of Worms, 1521

            We each find meaning in life by finding that which truly matters for ourselves. We discover people who are truly honorable, places that are truly marvelous, experiences that are truly joyful, projects that are truly fascinating, and relationships that are truly loving and happy.  Out of these emotional truths we build meaningful lives. Our quest is to become persons, and to build lives, that are worthy of our own respect and esteem. The requirements for a meaningful life are not just the feelings of self-esteem, self-respect and self-worth. The requirements for a meaningful life are the truth of certain self-regarding emotional judgments. We must believe ourselves and our lives to be truly worthy of these life-affirming, self-regarding emotions. And our beliefs must be true.

            The things that truly matter do not determine the life we should construct for ourselves, but they do define a perimeter within which we must work. When deliberation runs out and judgment is indeterminate, then we must choose. By these choices, choices made within the limits of judgment, we construct our particular lives. Indeterminacy encourages particularity and allows many paths to meaning. No one path is the meaningful life. By our choices, we build our individual identities.

            The world contains many people, some loveable, some not. Judgment discovers those who are loveable, but choice turns some of them into your friends and lovers. The world offers many things to create, tasks to accomplish, causes to further, and careers to follow. Judgment discovers which are worthy accomplishments, but choice turns some of them into your projects. The world offers many places to live. Judgment discovers the liveable places, but choice turns one of them into your home.

Choice and Commitment

            Human lives extend through time. We do not live just in the moment; instead we have both histories and futures. This abstract fact is important to our individual quests for meaning. For a choice, to be any sort of choice at all, projects us into the future. To be meaningful, a choice made now must bind our actions in the future. In making a choice, we commit ourselves to a future course of action. (Anderson 1996:542) If we do not commit ourselves into the future, then we have not really chosen.

            To see this, recall the choice made by the young man who came to Sartre for counsel. During the Nazi occupation of France, the young man had to choose between joining the Resistance and supporting his mother. Sartre counseled the young man that reasons had run out and that he had to invent himself by making a radical choice. Suppose that he chose to join the Resistance. Then on the way to the train station, he returned to his mother. Then he headed for the next train, then he returned, and so on. Choice without steadfastness in a course of action becomes silly. A choice has to bind a person into the future. No real choice exists without commitment.

            The future is continually becoming the present, and the present is continually becoming the past. If a choice, now, binds us in the future, then our choices in the past must bind our decisions in the present. So choices we have made in the past must guide the decisions we make in the present. In other words, our decisions must be backward-looking. (Anderson 1996:541) A past commitment is always a reason to be considered in a present decision.

            Think again of Sartre’s example. Leaving Sartre’s office, the young man, we will suppose, chooses to join the Resistance. He commits himself to the Resistance. He becomes a person who has made this choice and not the other, a different person from the one he could have been if he had stayed with his mother. When he gets home to his mother, the commitment he has made is a reason for him to pack his bags, buy his ticket, and catch the train south toward Portugal. Judgment ruled out collaboration, ruled out self-indulgence, and presented him with two options. In choosing the Resistance, he furthered the construction of his own life. Constructed within the limits of true judgments, his self is still worthy of his own respect and esteem. His choice is tragic, for he has no way to avoid sadness and regret. His respect for himself, the self who has chosen the path of the Resistance, is now a reason that must operate in his decisions. To go back on his commitment is to betray his self-respect.

            Recall the house construction analogy from the last chapter. Judgment determines which materials are appropriate and assesses their strength, but it still leaves many options open at each stage of construction. Choice at each stage commits us to one of these options, and thus guides what we do in later stages. When we go to build our roof, we have to look back at what choice we have made about the walls. Our choice of roof design is limited not only by the strength of our materials, but also by our previous commitment to a particular shape of wall and foundation.

            Commitment allows reevaluation. Making mistakes in constructing a life is easier than making mistakes in constructing a house. Yet, reevaluation is difficult. Reevaluation always involves tearing down and rebuilding, and reevaluation always finds itself in tension with commitment.

            Another metaphor for self-construction is story-construction. As a writer tells a story, her choices of situations, events, and characters constrain, but do not fully determine how her story can go on. It is important that her scenes are consistent, her events follow a plausible time-line, and that the people in her story do not act out of character. As we live our lives, we are writing our own history. We are the authors of our own narratives, and our lives should exhibit what philosophers have called “narrative unity.”

            Elizabeth Anderson gives a helpful example. She tells the story of a couple who have worked for years to build a distinctive family restaurant, and who then receive an offer for their business. The potential buyer is a large company that wants to take over their restaurant and copy it in dozens of franchise operations.

The couple might think of their choice as follows: Selling the restaurant would offer them important financial security, but it would also undermine the point of their lives’ personal investments and struggles, which were aimed not just at making money but at creating an alternative to the humdrum, homogenized, and predictable chain restaurants taking over the area. Dropping their life projects for this reason would leave them with life stories as “successful” sell-outs, rather than as people who had made something of their early struggles and fulfilled the dream of a lifetime. They did not work all those years to make millions for some brand-x corporation. A concern for the narrative unity of their lives, for what meaning their present choices make of their past actions, could rationally motivate them to turn down the offer. (Anderson 1993:34-35)

Contrast this case with that of a second couple who inherit an identical restaurant. The first couple, in the past, committed themselves to creating a family restaurant from among all the worthwhile projects they could have undertaken in their lives. The second couple did not. The first couple, in the present, have backward-looking reasons to preserve the business, reasons that involve their ability to make binding choices. The second couple do not. The first couple have a commitment to themselves that involves their self-respect. The second couple did not build the business, have no history with it, and have no commitment to themselves to preserve it. It is not a part of the second couple’s lives, and they sell it without a qualm.

Commitment and Emotion

            Choice requires commitment, and commitment requires emotion. Commitment may arise from intellectual deliberation, but commitment involves more than just the intellect. We can see this most easily in our personal relationships. Commitment requires emotional involvement with the persons who become our friends, lovers, family, and community. Commitment also requires our feelings to be engaged with the places that becomes our homes, the animals that become our pets, and the courses of action that become our projects. Our emotions bind us to our choices, make them into our commitments. Emotions make our choices operative over time.

            Not all choices are made in full realization of indeterminacy. Sometimes we find that our emotions have made choices for us. We meet a beloved and suddenly we are blind to the attractions of anyone else. Our passion brings our search for love to an end. We feel like our choice has been made for us. Yet, it would be bad faith to suppose that we have not actually made a choice.

            Commitments have a felt quality akin to that of love. Our degree of commitment can vary from lukewarm to passionate. Conversely, when our commitments are in danger, we feel anxious and threatened. When people question our commitments, we feel tense or defensive. The emotions involved in commitment focus and direct our attention. Recall this feature of emotion, and its importance in human decision making, from earlier chapters. Human beings process information slowly and use emotion to select only some portion of their available information as relevant to a decision. This selection of information makes decisions possible in finite times, but at the cost of ignoring, denying, minimizing, and distorting other information. So infatuation ends our search for love, but infatuation maintains itself by idealizing our beloved and blinding us to our beloved’s imperfections.

            Similarly, commitment maintains itself by making salient certain features of a person, situation, or ideal, and by removing other features from consideration. Commitment silences the latter in your deliberations. Bernard Williams gives a good example. He tells the story of a man who sees two people in danger, but can only rescue one. If one of the two is his wife, how should he decide whom to rescue? Any sort of deliberation here is inappropriate. As Williams says, the two thoughts that “. . . [1] it was his wife, and [2] in situations of this kind it is permissible to save one’s wife” are “one thought too many.” (Williams 1981:18) The wife might hope that the man’s commitment to her will silence any deliberation on his part. She might legitimately hope that he should have only one thought, just the thought that it is she, his wife, who is in danger. She might hope that he would simply save her without thinking about it. His emotional commitment to her would lead him to focus only on her plight and not think about, or even see, any other consideration.

            The involvement of emotion in commitment is a wonderful thing, not an irrationality caused by our own partialities. Emotional commitment makes what is meaningful feel meaningful. Hepburn writes:

To give life meaning cannot be just a matter of pursuing worthy projects, for that account fails to cope with phenomena like Tolstoi’s arrest of life -- or John Stuart Mill’s during his mental crisis of 1826. More generally, it is quite possible to make various value-judgements in cold blood, while yet suffering from a sense of meaninglessness. One may fill one’s day with honest, useful and charitable deeds, not doubting them to be of value, but without feeling that these give one’s life meaning or purpose. It may be profoundly boring. To seek meaning is not just a matter of seeking justification for one’s policies, but of trying to discover how to organise one’s vital resources and energies around these policies. To find meaning is not a matter of judging these to be worthy, but of seeing their pursuit as in some sense a fulfilment, as involving self-realization as opposed to self-violation, and as no less opposed to the performance of a dreary task. (Hepburn 1981:212-213)

The meaningful life is a committed life, a life that we take seriously. Life is not a game that we play at, going through the motions while holding ourselves in reserve. We should not take an ironic stance toward our lives, pretending to commitment while remaining inwardly dubious. People cannot lead meaningful lives as what Richard Rorty calls “ironists,” people who are “never quite able to take themselves seriously because always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies.” (Rorty 1989:73-74) If, on reflection, a judgment is contingent and fragile, then it is likely indeterminate. Indeterminacy is an opportunity for creative self-construction. Choose, commit, and become.

Character and Identity

            Emotion takes judgments for which we have reasoned evidence and turns them into our convictions. Emotion takes our choices and binds us to them, making them our projects, causes, and deepest personal relationships. Out of judgment and commitment we build our lives. Out of judgment and commitment we build our selves, our characters, our identities.

            Our characters are the sets of traits that determine who we are. Character provides a stable backdrop to our choices and actions. Character includes our temperaments and personalities, it includes our stable, enduring emotions, and it includes our judgments, commitments, and plans of life.

            A good character is a character worthy of our own respect, esteem and admiration. Such a character is one founded on correct emotional judgments. It is a character founded on emotional truth, when such truth is available, and it is a character founded on choice and commitment when no emotional truth or falsity is to be found.

            Character is stable over time because emotional truth is timeless and commitments are enduring. Emotion fixes character, like it does both belief and commitment. The emotional fixation of character is most evident when something threatens identity. At such times, we feel anxious, defensive, and fearful of change. The emotional fixation of character is also evident in the way patterns of selective attention preserve character. When a choice confronts a person of strong character with a choice, her decision is inflexible. It is not that she sees competing alternatives, and then her will overrides them. Instead, she is unable to see the alternatives. Discussing virtuous character traits, John McDowell writes:

If a situation in which virtue imposes a requirement is genuinely conceived as such, according to this view, then considerations which, in the absence of the requirement, would have been reasons for acting otherwise are silenced altogether – not overridden – by the requirement. (McDowell 1978:26)

A truly generous person simply does not call to mind the selfish alternatives. It does not occur to the truly courageous person to run from the danger. Such alternatives are “silenced” instead of considered and rejected.

            Patterns of attention protect character, and character is emotionally charged. In these ways, character is very similar to personality. A person with a personality disorder usually does not recognize that he has one. The sufferer typically consults a psychotherapist for other reasons, perhaps complaining of loneliness or depression or anxiety. The therapist’s questions reveal problems in interpersonal behavior that are due to childish, judgmental, absolutist core beliefs. These core beliefs, as described in an earlier chapter, are fixed and maintained by schemas. Schemas are pervasive analogs of emotions, emotions with no names. They are stable patterns of selective attention that differ from person to person. (Beck 1979:12) Schemas protect core beliefs from falsification through patterns of faulty inference, and selective attention to evidence. Schemas involve denial, personalization, hasty generalization, and minimization of the significance of contrary evidence. Personality, as realized in a set of dysfunctional core beliefs, is protected by schemas, and is difficult to change. The sufferer finds the prospect of change very scary.

            The fixation of character by emotion makes self-evaluation and self-transformation very difficult tasks. Evaluating oneself is difficult because of selective attention; we simply do not see anything wrong with ourselves. Our own self-respect, the emotion most closely tied to finding our lives meaningful, ties us to our existing evaluations. We struggle to maintain our self-esteem. Self-esteem protects our favorable self-evaluations by the same means that schemas protect the beliefs producing personality disorders.

            Even if we can see through our systematic self-deceptions to the necessity for change, self-transformation is still difficult. It is a scary undertaking because it involves the tearing down and rebuilding of our very identities. Change is scary because, if the change is extensive, it is like our old self dying and a new self being born. We must, as the Christians say, be born again.

            This, now, is the task to which our quest has lead. To have a meaningful life, we must build a character and lead a life, that is worthy of our own love, respect, and esteem. This is no easy task; the way of the philosopher is no effortless route to meaningfulness. Losing one’s way is easy, as is misjudging what matters, or choosing a path where truth points in the other direction. Getting back on the path involves self-reflection and self-transformation.

            We must travel a narrow path between the continual reevaluation that prevents commitment and the complacent commitment that prevents self-reflection. When feeling of meaninglessness force reevaluation on us, we must have the courage to face the rebirth of our own identities. We need the wisdom that leads to emotional truth, the love that leads to commitment, and the courage that leads to change.