Vishal, Agent Smith, and the Groundlessness of Meaning

Remark: I was supposed to post this on the day of my roommate’s birthday, but the general laziness of winter break pushed the schedule back a few days. I hope that he’ll be okay with this late gift. To give credit where credit is due, the fundamental insight of this post originated in two emails from Vishal and a conversation with Yale’s Professor Tamar Gendler.

My roommate Vishal has always had a peculiar admiration for the Matrix’s Agent Smith. In particular, he really enjoys re-re-rewatching a scene from “The Matrix Revolutions" where Agent Smith asks the central character Neo why he persists despite his knowledge that anything that remotely seems worth fighting for is “the temporary [construct] of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose.” (here is a transcript of the scene).

There is something inescapable about Agent Smith’s question: even though our actions are rarely as impressive as Neo’s, the way we act implies or presupposes a certain meaning in the world. However, the very nature of our mode of reasoning makes it very difficult to find a foundation for that meaning. This puts into question everything we do, from going to work in the morning to buying a loved one flowers. I will call the problem at hand “the groundlessness of meaning” (GM).

My thesis is that (1) there are two classical attitudes towards the groundlessness of meaning and (2) Hume’s response to the problem of induction and Descartes’ need for a “provisional morality” are paradigmatic illustrations of these two attitudes.

With his outline of the problem of induction (see a quick explanation here and a more technical exposition here and here), Hume touches on a problem that is closely linked to GM: indeed, he shows that there is no reason to think that there is any uniformity in the world. To put it differently, I cannot rationally expect the laws of physics to stay true and people I know to be themselves when I wake up tomorrow morning.

In response to this damning problem, Hume provides us with a very typical example of the first attitude towards GM: “Most fortunately it happens, that [...] nature [...] cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium [...]. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.”

Hume’s answer to GM seems to be: “life goes on, meaning is meaning,” which inevitably reminds us of Neo’s equally tautological answer to Agent Smith’s tirade: “[I persist] because I choose to [persist].”

In contrast, when Descartes engages in his experiment in radical doubt, he feels compelled to create a “provisional morality” composed of a few maxims – see the first few pages of A Discourse on Method for a description of these maxims. Descartes contends that this moral code will provide him with a certain framework for his life while he doubts everything there is to doubt. Again, Descartes is engaging with a question that is very close to GM: why should I believe anything that I believe?

Unlike Hume, Descartes is destabilized by the philosophical problems he tackles; the very possibility of living “normally” is put into question by GM as soon as this problem enters the field of consideration. Descartes’s foundations are so shaken that he needs to build a temporary house to reside in while he rebuilds a permanent residence. This is what I call the second attitude towards GM: Descartes seems to imply that a life where GM has not been “solved” cannot be truly meaningful.

The reason why this whole thing makes me think of Vishal is that his mode of thinking falls into the second category: Vishal never ceases to take a step back and decompose reality with his humorous and incisive gaze. He is constantly engaged in the existentialist project of destroying, creating, and grounding meaning. It seems to me like he will never be truly satisfied except for the second order satisfaction that comes with knowing that he has what Sartre would call an authentic attitude towards GM. I think that’s one of the things that makes his presence in my life enjoyable, and not only am I grateful for it; I selfishly ask him to never relinquish it.