The Midlife Crisis

But why stop there? Suppose that we achieve this life, giving up on telic ends. We pursue projects with friends in order to spend time with them, write essays in order to do philosophy. Our final ends remain, preserved and inexhaustible, in our lives. But there is a catch. Even though they are just means, we still engage in telic activities. We cannot simply spend time with friends, we have to spend it in some endeavour. We cannot simply do philosophy: we have to read a book, work through a problem, write a paper. There is an ineluctable strain of self-destruction not in atelic ends but in our way of relating to them, even now. Perhaps, if we were gods, we could contemplate the world through basic action, just like that. But we are not. There is an ideal to which we are directed by the normative defect of pursuing telic ends, though this ideal is necessarily out of reach. Our relationship with atelic ends is inevitably mediated, perpetually threatened and renewed, never wholly freed from the paradoxical character Schopenhauer finds endemic to the will. Schopenhauer’s theory is too bleak, but it contains a grain of truth, a truth present in the observation that walking, going for a walk, that humdrum instance of an atelic end, is always scarred by imperfection, marred by telic means, one foot placed in front of the other, an obstacle over-stepped, that walking is at best, for us, “a constantly prevented falling” (Schopenhauer 1844: I.311).