A longstanding moral tradition distinguishes between mere life or life as such and the good life. The importance of this distinction is not only its content – various ideas about what the good life or human flourishing amounts to – but that facing up to the issue is an essential aspect of what makes us persons. Personhood is determined not merely by our beliefs and desires but our attitude towards our beliefs and desires, and more specifically those we reflectively or deliberately endorse. For something to matter to us we must not only care about it but want to care about it, such that to not want to do so would involve a change in our conception of who we are. If art matters to me, for example, then caring about art is at least partly definitive of who I am, and for art to stop mattering would mean a substantial change in my identity. Human personhood is reflective, reflexive, and counterfactual.
The “Others” don’t make this distinction. For them all life, from apples to ants to human beings, is equally valuable. They see nothing special about the form of life for which personhood is possible because they don’t value personhood at all – on the contrary, it stands in the way of contentedness and therefore must be abolished, which is what “joining” accomplishes. The Others illustrate Alexandre Kojève’s description of Zarathustra’s “last man”:
After the end of Man, human beings begin building their houses as beavers, making music as cicadas and frogs, playing as young mammals, and making love as adult beasts. This means one cannot say that these human animals will be happy – they will merely be content. The discourse, the Logos will disappear – human language will be like the language of bees. Not only philosophy but also Wisdom will disappear. For in these post-historical animals, there will no longer be any understanding of the World and of the self. [Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, p. 159ff.]
C.S. Lewis’s “trousered apes” and “men without chests” (The Abolition of Man) also come to mind, along with Kierkegaard’s “aesthete” who lives a life of “lower immediacy,” drifting from pleasure to pleasure in a vain attempt to avoid boredom (Either/Or). And another Kierkegaardian concept applies, that of leveling (The Present Age). This refers to the weakening of qualitative distinctions – the idea that some things matter more and are more worth caring about than others – which are what give meaning to life. The Others have been completely leveled, such that they recognize only quantitative distinctions (the more life, any sort of life, the better). But this means that nothing can really matter to them and that they can’t care about anyone in particular.
Because we are persons who can and must relate to ourselves by taking a stand on what matters, we are prone to specifically human forms of distress: divided wills and conflicts over how to live with one another. Distress of this kind goes with the territory; it’s a feature not a bug and a central part of what it is to be human. Still, it’s understandable that some would yearn to be rid of it. The attempt to live as if this condition did not obtain and apply is what Heidegger called inauthenticity and what Sartre called bad faith.
Pluribus dramatizes the attractions and dangers of inauthenticity and the challenges and ambiguities of personhood. It illustrates the conditions required for meaningful life – reflexivity, counterfactual cognition, qualitative distinctions of value, and personhood – by depicting a form of life that doesn’t feature them. In such a life there’s no conflict, but also no meaning.
The problem is vividly demonstrated by Carol’s moment of clarity in the last episode, brought about by Zosia’s declaration that she loves Manousos in the same way she loves Carol. The love of a person, of course, is the love of a unique individual and therefore cannot possibly be “the same” as others. Zosia was in fact admitting that she loved neither Carol nor Manousos.
Although Carol is a wordsmith, she doesn’t seem to be able to put why this bothers her into words. She stutters in response to Zosia’s declaration and says “no,” but fails to articulate Zosia’s error. Instead she becomes angry and lashes out, something the Others fear but also seem not to understand. Part of Carol’s journey, I suspect, will concern whether she is able to achieve clarity about what matters to her and what such clarity will mean to her if she does achieve it.
