John Stewart Mill was the son of a great classical utilitarian. He was taught that happiness could be measured on a one-dimensional scale from pain to pleasure. Since he was only one of many millions of human beings, he should focus on helping others to be happy by serving them directly and by reforming laws and policies to maximize happiness. Happiness was a simple quantity determined by circumstances beyond the individual.

As a young man, Mill became deeply depressed. He asked himself:

“Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

Mill realized that other people could not make him happy, and the same was true of everyone else. Each person had to pay attention to her own wellbeing or everyone would be miserable. One reason is that we do not fall on a single spectrum from agony to ecstasy. Instead, we experience a heterogeneous batch of emotions (joy, peace, pain, acceptance, delight, equanimity, and many more) that may be in tension with each other. Mill’s ultimate response was to develop a richer philosophy in which the inner life regained its independent standing and was no longer a mere outcome of justice. “The important change which my opinions at this time underwent, was that I, for the first time, gave its proper place, among the prime necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the individual. I ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances.”

This kind of reflection recalls the intrinsic value–the beauty, complexity, and richness–of inner life itself. Introspection counters an avoidable modern tendency to disenchant the self.

Many centuries ago, the world seemed thoroughly enchanted. There were spirits, angels, or demons in the air, the forest, the water, and everywhere else. It seemed natural that there should also be a spirit inside each of us that was similarly invisible, unpredictable, powerful, and precious.

Natural science has not demonstrated that the only real things are visible and predictable. On the contrary, natural science has discovered quarks and bosons, forces and dimensions. It had yielded a world full of strange and heterogeneous objects. But natural science does presume (rather than discover) that every true statement is about something that one can demonstrate experimentally. As natural science has progressed, the enchanted world has shrunk: we now know that hot and cold fronts rather than demons cause storms, and bacteria and viruses rather than witches cause disease.

An object inside us that we might call a soul, a self, or a will seems likely to disappear for the same reasons. After all, a soul can never be observed or experimentally verified. And science is building an alternative story about networks of neurons that fire (because of forces acting on them) and cause mental states such as desire and will. In turn, these networks of neurons evolved over many millions of years to make species like ours more fit to survive. The implication is that human beings are ultimately just complicated machines, and an experience like freedom of the will is an illusion. Our thinking belongs to the same network of cause-and-effect that explains why a computer opens an application when you push a button, or a tree sprouts a leaf when the sun shines on it.

The premises seem correct, but the conclusion does not follow. Natural science may explain why mental states occur. It cannot not explain what those states are. By analogy: biology explains why most leaves look green, but it wouldn’t convey to a truly color-blind person what green looks like. Likewise, a conscious person actually experiences will, choice, and a host of other complex mental states. To say what will is, one must describe it closely and insightfully from the perspective of the person who wills something. Under close inspection, a simple thing like “will” refracts into many related emotions and beliefs. One must address questions like these: What does it feel like to want something? Can you want it and not want it at the same time? Does wanting an object feel the same as wanting a person? How does will relate to love? To happiness? What thoughts and mental practices enhance and constrain will? What forms of willing are good and which are bad?

Such introspective questions are appropriate even in a world in which natural science works just as well as advertised. If you want to know why human beings think, it’s appropriate to turn to neuroscience and evolutionary biology. But if you want to know what thought is, you must attend to thinking. Even more so, if you want to decide which thoughts are good, you must evaluate the complex, subtle, mysterious world of your own consciousness.

Both the Talmud and the Qur’an propose that to murder one person is to destroy a whole world, and to save a life is to save a whole world. Perhaps those passages reflect a recognition that each human consciousness is an immense accumulation of experience. The whole universe of which I am aware (from distant galaxies to microscopic organisms swimming in a drop of water) is all in my head. My mind contains not one thing but many things connected by a whole network of relations. And each of these things carries value. Consciousness thus requires and rewards exploration. Montaigne wrote: 

For, as Pliny says, each person is a very good lesson to himself, provided he has the audacity to look from up close. This [the book of Essays] is not my teaching, it is my studying; it is not a lesson for anyone else, but for myself. What helps me just might help another. … It is a tricky business, and harder than it seems, to follow such a wandering quarry as our own spirit, to penetrate its deep darknesses and inner folds. …This is a new and extraordinary pastime that withdraws us from the typical occupations of the world, indeed, even from the most commendable activities. For many years now, my thoughts have had no object but myself; I investigate and study nothing but me, and if I study something else, I immediately apply it to myself–or (better put) within myself. … My vocation and my art is to live (ii.6).

We’re reading about Buddhist ethics in my Introduction to Philosophy course, and the Four Noble Truths are our focus. Here is how the first Truth is presented in the Sermon at Benares (attributed to the Buddha himself):

“Now, this, O bhikkhus [monks], is the noble truth concerning suffering: Birth is attended with pain, decay is painful, disease is painful, death is painful. Union with the unpleasant is painful, painful is separation from the pleasant; and any craving that is unsatisfied, that too is painful. In brief, bodily conditions which spring from attachment are painful. This, then, O bhikkhus, is the noble truth concerning suffering.”

The remaining three Truths take similar forms. First comes a headline or name for the Truth (respectively: suffering, the origins of suffering, the destruction of suffering, and the way to the destruction of suffering). Then–at least for the first two Truths–comes a list of factual claims, e.g., “Birth is attended with pain.” The paragraph ends, “This is the noble truth concerning [the topic of the truth].”

Presumably “this” does not refer simply to the preceding factual claims. The Truth is broader than that; the claims are illustrative or supportive. My instinct is to translate the final sentence into a proposition, a statement or assertion that expresses a judgment or opinion. I don’t think my instinct is uniquely “Western” (whatever that means) or philosophical. Buddhist thinkers have been debating the propositional content of the Truths for two millennia. This debate persists because it’s not self-evident how to restate the Truths as propositions. Should we say: “All life is intrinsically suffering”? “All human (or sentient) life is intrinsically suffering?” “All life includes some suffering, even if there are also happy moments”? “All life begins and terminates in suffering”? Etc.

This choice seems worth debating; the resulting conversation is fruitful. But there is also a good reason for the final sentence to take the form that it does. To assent to a proposition about suffering will not change your life. Your life may change if you really internalize the significance of suffering. In that case, you will understand the “truth of suffering.”

It’s like saying that social injustice in the US is not just a list of injustices. It is an overall condition of the society that you can absorb until it influences your whole stance toward politics. Whether you should take that stance depends on all the separate propositions about particular injustices, so you should evaluate those propositions critically. The (ostensible) Truth of Social Injustice is debatable among reasonable Americans. But the question is whether you should–and whether you have–absorbed that truth.

The Buddha’s way of thinking reminds me of Epicurus and the other founders of Hellenistic schools. Epicurus’ Letter to Menoeceus includes a formal argument that we should not fear death. Death is a lack of sensation, so we will feel nothing bad once we’re dead. To have a distressing feeling of fear now, when we are not yet dead, is irrational. The famous conclusion follows logically enough: “Death is nothing to us.” (Note that this is a proposition.) But Epicurus knows that such conclusions will not alone counteract the ingrained mental habit of fearing death. So he ends his letter by advising Menoeceus “to practice the thought of this and similar things day and night, both alone and with someone who is like you” (my translation). The main verb here could be translated as “exercise,” “practice,” or “meditate on.” You will be better off if you internalize the truth concerning death; but that takes practice, and it requires a community of people devoted to the same end. The same is true, it seems to me, of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism.

See also: three truths and a question about happiness; Philosophy as a Way of Life (on Pierre Hadot); and on philosophy as a way of life; and when East and West were one.

Justin McBrayer, a philosophy professor, wrote not long ago in The New York Times, “philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.” McBrayer attributes this situation to the Common Core, which recommends teaching young children a distinction between facts and opinions. Because values aren’t viewed as facts, they get put into the opinion basket. So the same basket that contains “I prefer vanilla ice cream” also contains “genocide is bad.”

I happen to be teaching a whole class of first year undergraduates in a philosophy course, and I asked them whether they shared the relativism attributed to their demographic group by McBrayer. About one third agreed that moral claims are “mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.” Roughly the same number disagreed. Many were uncertain. After about an hour’s discussion, it was evident that most students held quite complicated or nuanced views. Everyone’s position sounded different, but I think many would like to hold onto: 1) moral seriousness and the assumption that it makes a big difference what we conclude about moral issues, 2) an ability to decry certain horrible acts as evil, 3) a recognition of ideological diversity, 4) a distinction between moral claims and empirical claims, 5) falliblism and an acknowledgement that context affects, or even determines, everyone’s thought, including our own, and 6) tolerance, which they recognize as a value, not as an absence of values. Those assumptions are in some tension, but it’s possible to pull them together into a complex position.

I don’t want to generalize based on an “n” of 15 people at one college, but if anyone asks me for evidence that Kids Today are amoral relativists–or that they have turned into censorious absolutists–I offer this counter-evidence.