The myth of Sisyphus

When discussing criteria of personhood, one should marshal one's vocabulary with care.

On the Usefulness of Final Ends, last few bits of §8: Can something to whom its own condition and activities do not matter in the slightest properly be regarded as a person at all? Perhaps nothing that is entirely indifferent to itself is really a person, regardless of how intelligent or emotional or in other respects similar to persons it may be..  First sentence and three words of §11: Suppose there is someone to whom nothing is important.  Such a person ….

But … I thought you said …

(I'm sure he says something about really utterly selfless devotion somewhere, maybe The Reasons of Love, and probably doesn't actually think that entities that strongly resemble persons, and perhaps even used to be persons, but for their being comatose, aren't really persons, but, damn, that's some kind of criterion.  I also think it's kind of funny that throughout Necessity, Volition, and Love, The Reasons of Love, and Taking Ourselves Seriously & Getting It Right one sees the same arguments cropping up often in word-for-word identical form.  Maybe Scott McLemee's reference to Žižek in a discussion of Frankfurt was more right than he thought.  Or perhaps composition by copy and paste is just more common than I thought.)

What follows is a bunch of half-digested semi-thoughts.

It's really too bad that the argument as I've made it out in the second reading (but only the first with any care) has the order of the sections completely out of whack, going roughly like this:

1. No entity that does not care about itself is a person; part of the essence of persons is that they care about themselves. (§8)
2. What people care about determines what is important to them, in two ways.  First, if you care about something, then it is important to you.  Second, if you care about something, then those things that can relevantly affect that thing are important to you.  (Thus if you care about your health, it is simply the case that vitamins are important to you, even if you have no notion what they are.) (§6)
3. Therefore, a person is important to himself.
4. Boredom is a threat to the self, though it's not clear to me that the self threatened by boredom (the active self is one characterization of the self in question, though we also get the claim that boredom is, at the limit, tantamount to the cessation of conscious experience altogether, which sounds pretty heady) is the same thing that is important to the person in the previous step. (§ 7)
5. Boredom arises from a life without meaningful activity (§ 7)
6. Therefore meaningful activity is important to a person.

Eventually we get the idea that, therefore, it's important to have final ends (§§3–5 and 9 play roles here), and in fact that the pursuit of such ends is intrinsically valuable itself.  Of course the essay is called On the Usefulness of Final Ends, and part of the reason it's kind of hard to make out, I think, is that it's not always clear whether Frankfurt is advising the reader to get some final ends, or giving a sort of transcendental deduction of their necessity, or anyway, importance.  (Millgram's article mostly on this article, On Being Bored out of Your Mind, makes this point.)

There are some questions that remain outstanding.  First, there's an extremely confusing thought experiment early on (§3) about someone who has no aims.  It is contended that, since we are creatures who cannot avoid being active, we will be active even without aims, and that, furthermore, being without aims does not mean being without preferences (though, and this is not contended, it certainly does not continue to mean being with preferences); thus, someone without aims may still be capable of having his preferences satisfied or not, and such a person may also be quite capable of recognizing the value of [his conduct's] effects upon him:

This means that regardless of how empty we are of intent, what we do may nonetheless be important to us.  It may serve our interests, or defeat them, even though our interests do not guide it.

I'm just not sure what to make of the claim that such a person, capable of recognizing the value of something, really doesn't have any goals, especially since Frankfurt thinks that it would be true of such a person to say that he never did anything that [he] believed to be useful and his activity would appear empty and vain.  Why would it be empty and vain? It would promote something that he values!  We have a situation in which someone (a) has preferences, perhaps even strong preferences; (b) recognizes the value (which I suppose must be subjective) in the satisfaction of those preferences; (c) is active; but (d) does not actually aim at accomplishing his preferences because he doesn't have any goals at all. Imagine that I would like a glass of water, but don't get one.  Do I, you ask, prefer even more to stay seated? No; there's nothing I would more prefer now than a glass of water.  Do I understand that no one will bring me one and that, by remaining seated, I'm only harming myself? Yes, perfectly.  Am I being held down or otherwise prevented? No.  But I say that it's important to me to get a glass of water.  Yes, very.  So why do I remain seated? I literally cannot produce a reason, for I do not act with regard to goals. But some things are important to me? Yes.  Surely the only response to this situation is befuddlement? Yet it is not introduced as if the situation is absurd, nor even as if I am behaving irrationally, merely undesirably.  I simply cannot make out why it is that F asserts that even when we have no aims there will still be preferences and values, which he more or less baldly does: Now being without purpose does not entail having no preferences concerning the possible outcomes of behavior, nor does it entail being invulnerable to harm (so much for Hamlet).  (I suppose I could accept this more easily if he added the proviso, "so long as one is irrational".)

Anyway, that's more or less beside the point, since that little bit's just meant to establish one reason to have goals (having them means the states of affairs to which the correspond are more likely to be brought about by you), and the focus of the essay is on another reason, namely, that it gives you something to do.

Switching sections radically, to §9, where we read that people aim also at having useful work.  Moreover, they do not desire useful work onyl because they desire its products. In fact, useful work is among their final ends. They desire it for its own sake, since without it life is empty and vain.  It's already been argued that what makes work useful is that it is towards (Frankfurt actually uses means/ends, and not things towards the end, but no matter) some end, implying that one sort of useful work could be the finding of useful work, which sounds perilously close to the pretty vacuous and unsatisfying claim of MacIntyre's the the good for man is looking for the good for man, which surely isn't true, and bespeaks, I think, a tendency to slip between the different ways something can be important or valuable to one.  Earlier in the section F notes that there are two reasons to pursue a final end (or as he's phrasing it here, something that's terminally or intrinsically valuable).  First, there's the reason that it's terminally valuable; something worth pursuit in itself.  Second, there's the reason that pursuit of an intrinsically valuable state of affairs is in itself intrinsically valuable.

But those are very different sorts of reasons, corresponding to very different sorts of importance. Certainly the pursuit of an intrinsically valuable &c isn' intrinsically valuable de re; he's prepared to grant that bridle-making as such just isn't intrinsically valuable:

Let us concede the point that making bridles is an activity without inherent value, which would be entirely pointless if bridles were not worth having.  Still, we cannot presume that the importance to a person of making bridles is wholly coincident with the importance to him of having bridles.

The first "importance" is here the importance of vitamins to the person who cares about his health but doesn't know anything about vitamins. It's obvious that, in other ways, the importance of making isn't the importance of having; for instance, the bridle-maker gets paid for making, but not merely having, bridles, so really the second part should be "with the importance to him of making bridles insofar as he considers that activity as a means to or component of some other end", that is, insofar as he considers that a useful activity; but then the former sort of importance can't have anything to do with the bridle-maker's own perspective.  It is important to me to make bridles because they're means to the end of supporting my city-state's military; it may also as a matter of fact be important for me to make bridles because it gives me something to do which I can see as meaningful, but it's not important to me under that guise; in fact, if I ever came to see my bridle-making activity primarily as something I did for that reason, I would in a stroke no longer find the right sort of meaning in it: in order for me to find the sort of meaning in my useful activity, I have to think of it under the aspect according to which it's, well, useful; that is, as towards some end other than simply providing me with something to do.

For which reasons the discussions of choosing final ends, etc, is kind of hard for me to follow.  I will say this, though; this little bit also from §9 seems as if it might answer some of Millgram's worries about one becoming too accustomed to what it takes to accomplish a final end:

Pursuing one final end rather than another may lead a person to engage in activities that are in themselves more enjoyable. It may also lead him to live a life that is more meaningful. It will do this if it entails a richer and more fully grounded purposefulness—if, that is, the network of activity to which it gives rise has greater complexity and if it radiates more extensively within the person's life.

If we accept a tight connection between meaningfulness and not being bored, then it seems that Frankfurt has an answer to Millgram's contention that, for him, obeying traffic laws is a final end (he really does contend this) but one which is not likely to save him from boredom: there are better and worse final ends, and that one's just not very good.  Of course, then the door's open to Millgram's claim that you don't really need big honkin' final ends, because a succession of many different ones will work just as well to keep you occupied, which is really what's going on; but then, the connection that Frankfurt wants to draw between meaningful activity and a meaningful life—the sort of connection that would underwrite a claim that you need big honkin' ends—seems pretty weakly made.