Chapter 4

SELF-REALIZATION

“Aside from the nature common to the species each individual brings with him at birth a distinctive temperament, which determines his spirit and character. There is no question of changing or putting a restraint on this temperament, only of training it and bringing it to perfection.”

- Jean-Jaques Rousseau (1812-1867), La Nouvelle Héloise, cinquième partie, lettre 3. Quoted in (Hurka 1993:14)

            Developing our human potential promises to make our lives meaningful. Our potential could be a common human potential, a potential that we all share as members of the same species, or our potential could be an individual potential, a potential that is unique to each of us. Perhaps realizing our potential is the source of all that matters to us.

Evaluating Human Potential

            Let us look first at the idea of developing our common human potential. This route to meaning has many branches. Each branch corresponds to a different conception of human nature and thus of human potential. Aristotle, for example, thought that rationality was distinctive of human beings, and that a meaningful human life involved perfecting its potential for rationality. Marx thought that the capacity to produce goods in a cooperative setting was the essential nature of human being, and that communism would perfect this potential. Some branches of the contemporary human potential movement think that human beings should achieve transpersonal states of consciousness through meditation or mind-altering drugs. Other branches of the human potential movement think that people should retrieve their natural, authentic emotional responses through psychotherapeutic techniques.

            The various branches of the human potential movement have a common structure. First, each proposes a factual theory of human nature. The examples above each conceive human nature differently, as either rational, productive, suffering, conscious, or emotional. Second, each proposes a factual theory of the potential inherent in this nature, perfecting rationality, perfecting social production, developing consciousness, or getting in touch with authentic feelings. Third, each branch implicitly makes a value judgment. Developing its favored potential, each assumes, is what truly matters in human life.

            Self-realization theories always contain this third, evaluative component. Each of the above theories offers an attractive theory of human nature and its potential for development. Nevertheless, we must move with care. If we accept its factual judgment about human potential, then we can easily accept its value judgment that developing the recommended potential will give meaning to our lives. We make a value judgment when we decide which potential to develop.

            All of the above theories, and others besides, do describe real human potentials. People do have the capacity to develop their rationality, their productive powers, their level of consciousness, and their ability to feel. Choosing which potential to develop requires evaluation. We must assess our choices against some independent standard of what is important or worthwhile.

            Humans have, by their nature, many potentials that are not worthy of development. Human beings have the capacity to develop their strength, their body weight, their hair length, and many other aspects of their nature. Of course, developing any of these latter human potentials would not give meaning to our lives. Developing some potentials is trivial; developing others is worthwhile. The point, though, is that we are always making implicit value judgments. Always, we must judge the relative importance of developing one potential rather than another.

            Another example: All human beings, by their nature, are born with the potential for death. By actively developing this potential, we could die more quickly. Yet thinking that dying more quickly makes our lives meaningful is a crazy thought. Dying more quickly is not what truly matters. Nonetheless, in saying this, in ruling out dying more quickly as a human potential worth developing, we are implicitly making a value judgment.

Distinctiveness

            One way to build value judgments into theories of developing human potential might be to select for development only those aspects of human nature that are distinctive of human beings. All living things die, so death is not a distinctively human potential. Animals can grow in strength, body weight, and hair length, so these are not a distinctively human potential either. On the other hand, rationality, social productivity, detachment, and transcendent consciousness are potentials that only human beings can have.

            Consider, however, that selecting only human traits for development is a highly chauvinistic strategy for defending self-realization. Plants, by their nature, have a potential for growth and reproduction. Animals, by their natures, variously have potentials for developing in size, strength, speed, agility, and even suffering. Ecosystems have a potential for integrity and homeostasis. By valuing only the potentials of human nature, the distinctiveness strategy implicitly devalues the potentials of other living species and communities. If human flourishing were all that mattered, then we should achieve it no matter what the cost to the flourishing of other living things. The unattractive speciesism of the distinctiveness strategy underlines the implicit value judgments it is making.

            Consider, too, that some distinctively human potentials obviously do not give meaning to life. Only humans have a sense of humor. Does this make the telling of jokes the meaning of life? (Nozick 1981:516) Of course not. Nevertheless, judging that humor is too unimportant a potential to be the meaning of life is still a value judgment. Humans are the only species that kills for fun. Does this make destruction for the sake of pleasure to be the purpose of life? (Hurka 1993:11) No, wanton destruction is evil. This judgment may be uncontroversial, but it is still a value judgment. Showing that developing some potential is distinctively human is not enough to show it to be the meaning of life. We must always appeal to further sources of value. To discover what truly matters, we must look in other directions.

            Consider, also, the following thought experiment: A potential is distinctive of human beings only if human beings have this potential and nonhuman beings do not. Suppose that humans, and only humans, presently have the potential for transcending ordinary consciousness through meditation and other spiritual disciplines. Presently, transcending ordinary consciousness is a distinctively human potential. Suppose that, in the future, chimpanzees were to evolve the potential to meditate and transcend ordinary consciousness. Then the potential for transcending ordinary consciousness will no longer be a distinctively human property. At this point, does the attainment of transcendent states of consciousness suddenly lose its value? More likely a meditation practitioner would judge, not that human lives lose their potential for meaning, but that chimpanzee lives gain the potential for meaning. So it is not because the potential to transcend ordinary consciousness is distinctively human that it is important.

            The distinctiveness strategy makes the meaning of life dependent on extrinsic features, features not of humans, but of other species. Absurdly, the meaningfulness of human lives would thus not depend on how humans are. Instead, it would depend on how other species are not. (Nozick 1981:515-516) The distinctiveness of a feature is always extrinsic in that it always depends on whether other species also possess the feature.

Essence

            We must seek a better way to build value judgments into theories of developing human potential. One possibility is to select for development only those aspects of human nature that are essential to being human. For example, it is an essential feature of gold that an atom of gold contains exactly seventy-nine protons in its nucleus. Having seventy-nine protons is what makes it an atom of gold, and not an atom of another element. If, for example, an atom has eighty-two protons, then it is necessarily not one of gold, but one of lead. Though having seventy-nine protons in its nuclei distinguishes gold from other elements, it is still an intrinsic feature of gold. The number of protons in a gold atom is an intrinsic feature of gold because it does not depend on the nature of other elements. Perhaps human nature has a similar essential feature that determines human potential.

            Notice, however, that human beings are much more complex entities than gold atoms, and that determining the essence of humanity will be correspondingly more difficult. The most likely candidate for the human essence is human genetic makeup. Any being with an identical genetic makeup would be a human being. Yet, even if scientists did discover the genes essential to human nature, we would still need to make judgments about what mattered. The relationship between human genetic makeup and human potential is complex. Our shared human genetic makeup permits the development of many potentials. It permits not only rationality and cooperative social production, but also having a sense of humor and killing for pleasure. We are still left to decide which potentials are trivial, which are evil, and which are worthy of development. Thus, showing that some feature is essential to human nature is not enough to show the potentials it permits to be meaningful. We must always appeal to some further source of value to show the potential to be worthy of development.

Individual Potentials

            So far, we have examined those features that are distinctive of, or essential to, human beings as a species. Perhaps, though, self-realization involves developing a potential that we do not share, the “distinctive temperament” that Rousseau mentioned in the chapter motto. Perhaps we should consider potentials that are distinctive of, or essential to, each of us as individuals. Perhaps we can find meaning by actualizing some potential that belongs to each of us alone. Perhaps without appealing to a further source of value, we can see the meaningfulness of developing our individual potentials.

            What makes each of us distinctive? Possibly our individual genetic makeup distinguishes us from each other. So developing our distinctive, genetically-give abilities will make our lives meaningful. However, identical twins have no distinctive potential for self-realization because they have identical genetic makeups. The odd consequence is that, without distinctive natures, identical twins cannot have meaningful lives.

            What are our individual essences? Each of us is essentially descended from the union of a particular sperm and a particular egg. Those unions gave us individual genetic makeups. Perhaps these are our essential natures and will point to the natural potentials that we should develop. Yet, we could have been born with genetically determined natural abilities to do trivial or immoral things, like multiplying large numbers in our heads, or killing others. Developing these abilities would not give meaning to our lives.

            As well, which talents and abilities we should develop will depend not only on our essential genetic endowment, but also on the contexts of our lives.

Imagine that a person with more talent for music than for writing finds that, because of factors such as the availability of teachers, she can achieve more in writing than in music. Should she still be guided by her profile and give more time to music than to writing? The individual-essence view says yes, but most of us surely say no. (Hurka 1993:15)

Developing a particular potential is only worthwhile to a person if her circumstances are appropriate. The fact that her individual genetic essence determines her potential is not enough to make it inherently worthwhile for her to develop it.

            Perhaps our individual essences are not genetic but emotional. Beneath our everyday selves, we have authentic emotional responses, determined by our temperaments and upbringing, that are distinctive of each of us. Our task is to get in touch with and develop these authentic emotional selves. Of course, getting in touch with our feelings is important. What happens, though, if we find that underneath we are filled with anger and rage? Knowing and working through this is important. Nonetheless, not developing these feelings into action is also important. Although these feelings are authentic, we do not have a good reason to develop their potential. Here, as often before, this last judgment is implicitly a value judgment.

What Matters

            The upshot of this discussion is that self-realization is not, by itself, the source of meaning in life. We always appeal to a prior judgment of what truly matters when we judge whether the realization of some human potential is a worthy end of human endeavor. Finding the source of what matters is the proper goal of our search.

            The self-realization path is inadequate because it continues to equate meaning with purpose. People, quite rightly, use the conceptual framework of aims and goals to interpret other human beings. It is a mistake, however, to apply this framework to the interpretation of the flourishing of biological entities. We do this whenever we say things like, “The purpose of an acorn is to produce an oak tree.” An acorn is potentially an oak, but that does not mean that its purpose is to develop into an oak. Such talk is all metaphor. It is an attractive metaphor, and the conceptual framework of purposive biology tempts us. Nevertheless, to make progress, we must abandon the framework of biological purposes just as we have abandoned the framework of cosmic purposes.

            The realization of our various human potentials is a worthwhile activity, but it is not the only worthwhile activity. Understanding human nature is important. Even if human nature does not determine what a meaningful life involves, it still constrains what a meaningful life can contain. (McKinnon 1999) We must, however, look elsewhere for the true sources of meaning.