Scheffler begins this philosophical treatise with a question, “What is it to lead a human life?” More precisely, perhaps, Scheffler is concerned with the idea of human flourishing and what it means to have led a good life. “The attachment-sensitive conception that I will be developing affirms the importance of the temporal and interpersonal dimensions of human life, and it sees these two dimensions as being intimately related…. Both dimensions are fundamental features of human experience.”
First, Scheffler seeks to dispel the notion of temporal neutrality. “I have three aims. The first is to argue that temporal neutrality, if thoroughly internalized, would compromise our ability to form and sustain the personal and social relationships we most value. The second is to argue that temporal neutrality is not a general requirement of rationality, so the fact that future bias represents a departure from neutrality does not make it irrational. The third is to argue that an excessive reliance in the framing distinction between temporal neutrality and temporal bias is liable to distort our understanding of the diachronic dimension of our lives…. Properly understood, the very idea that one has a life to lead depends on one’s viewing the past and the future asymmetrically…. The phenomenon of future bias is best seen as a special case of a more general phenomenon, which is that various of our attitudes change with the passage of time…. The puzzle is why our prospective and retrospective attitudes toward purely pleasurable and purely painful episodes differ so greatly in their intensity…. I don’t think that our aim, in trying to answer it, should be to establish that a bias toward the future is rationally required or rationally defensible. I am sympathetic to the bias where it exists and is deeply entrenched, and I am disinclined to criticize it in the name of an abstract norm of rationality. But my inclination to defend the bias, or at least not to criticize it, has less to do with a belief that it is endorsed by such a norm than with a conviction that it is woven into the fabric of human life in such a way that dislodging it would compromise much that we care about and much that makes us recognizable to ourselves.”
Scheffler discusses the persistence of a life and how that reality stands in contrast to the fact that we can only live in the present moment. “The fact that our emotions and feelings have different diachronic profiles is symptomatic of the complexity of our response to the temporal dimension of our lives. We are, after all, persisting beings. We live always in the present, yet at each moment most of our lives lie either in the future or in the past…. Through the establishment of patterns of activity that express our values or desires or preferences, we mark the world with continuities that are expressive of ourselves…. When, as agents, we direct our actions in accordance with our personal portfolio of values, desires, and aims, we create and extend a record of our distinctive presence in the world. In this sense, we are all performers. What we perform are actions, countless actions, day after day, month after month, year after year. And what guide those actions are not scripted roles but rather our values and aims. Taken together, these performances provide much of the content of our lives…. And the lives we shape testify to our persistence over time.”
Despite living in the constant present, Scheffler recognizes the asymmetry between the life that has happened and the life that is to come. “We confront the future as agents: our agential capacities are essentially forward-looking, and by exercising those capacities we seek to influence or shape the future, or at least some portion of the future. Things are different when we look back to the past. Here our epistemic position is improved but our practical position is much weaker. We generally know more about our pasts than we do about our futures, yet we cannot change the past through the exercise of our agential capacities.”
Next, Scheffler discusses our role as social beings, leading our lives through interpersonal interactions. “It is in the company of the people who matter most to us that we experience and interpret the world around us…. And it is, to a great extent, through communication and interaction with the people who matter most to us that we make sense of the world and our place in it…. Our relationships with the people to whom we are most deeply bound serve to structure and to shape our engagement with the world, and one of the primary ways in which we lead our lives is by forming and sustaining such relationships.”
For Scheffler, our nature as temporal beings is as important to our lives, as our interpersonal relations. “One of the most basic challenges of living is to come to terms with the temporal dimension of our lives. Our temporality is as fundamental a feature of us as our embodiment…. I believe that our sense of ourselves as persisting creatures goes hand in hand with a sense of ourselves as participants in an ongoing chain of generations…. We have lost a sense of ourselves as being involved in a kind of notional partnership with our ancestors and descendants, as participants in a common enterprise. And we have lost the sense that one of our important roles, whether we play it wittingly or unwittingly, is to transmit cultural materials, including knowledge, skills, values, and understanding, from our ancestors to our descendants…. It is humanity as a biologically grounded, interpretively rich, historically situated, and temporally persisting form of life—a form of life in which we ourselves are participants—that we want to survive under conditions conducive to human flourishing…. We face the future, not as independently defined agents confronting an array of actual and possible beneficiaries, but as creatures whose values and self-understanding already incorporate, if only implicitly, a rich set of assumptions about our place in history and our relations to our predecessors and successors.”
Partiality towards one’s relations is, for Scheffler, a reasonable aspect of living a particular human life, across time and space. “In general, to value one’s relationship with another person non-instrumentally is, in part, to see that person’s needs, interests, and desires as providing one, in contexts that may vary depending on the nature of the relationship, with reasons for action that one would not otherwise have…. If I have a relationship with you, and if I attach non-instrumental value to that relationship, then I will see myself both as having reasons to do things on your behalf that I have no comparable reason to do for others, and as having reason to give your interests priority over theirs…. Valuing a relationship is not best thought of as an alternative to valuing the person with whom one has the relationship…. One’s emotions, when one values a relationship, are sensitive to what happens both to the person with whom one has the relationship and to the relationship itself…. What contributes to a good or successful life is not the mere existence of people one admires, but one’s relationships with (some of) those people…. It is both because they are sources of contentment and because estrangement is so painful that people make such efforts to sustain relationships…. The people with whom we have close relationships matter a great deal to us, but so do our relationships with those people…. A personal relationship is a joint human creation or construction, and each particular relationship has its own distinctive qualities and character. To suppose that valuing a relationship is self-referential is to elide the distinction between this joint creation and oneself.”
Scheffler concludes with a note on objective morality in the face of this particularism, “Although my participation in valuable relationships gives me special reasons to do things for the people with whom I have those relationships, it does this not because those people are more valuable than other people but despite the fact that they are not…. Thorough internalization of a utilitarian or consequentialist theory of justification, with its associated commitment to interpersonal neutrality, would jeopardize our capacity to form and sustain the personal attachments that matter to us most…. The only way that one can engage with the world is to engage with particular bits of it…. An estrangement from one’s own standpoint would be a form of estrangement from life itself: or, more precisely, from the enterprise of leading a life.”
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