In heaven, we will be completely satisfied. We will experience no lack. And this state of joy will continue forever. To many, this sounds incredibly good. Others, however, object either that it would not be good or that it is impossible. In this and the next post, I want to present and address two of these sorts of objections. The first objects to the goodness or possibility of experiencing the absence of lack. The second objects to the goodness of eternal life. Both claim that the posited good would be boring.
We must understand the objection before we can answer it. So, what could be wrong with eternal bliss? The argument begins from the general claim that our lives are structured by ends. Everything we do, we do for the sake of fulfilling some end. Heaven, as a place of total satisfaction, would be a place where there were no unfulfilled ends. Thus, there would be nothing structuring our lives, nothing to motivate us to do anything. To act in such an environment, it seems, would be senseless. Because we would, by hypothesis, have no unsatisfied ends, there would be no purpose to any action, no end which we could achieve by so acting.
Some existentialists argue that it is in virtue of ends that anything in the world even shows up for us. This can be understood intuitively by considering skilled perception. There are some things--graphs, computer code, car engines, etc.--which appear as a mere jumble to the unskilled observer, but to someone who can do something with the thing, it appears as meaningfully structured. The existentialist claim would be the more general claim that this is how perception in general works: that everything we see, we see in virtue of how it may be used or how it resists use. So the existentialist version of the argument we are considering would claim that, not only would a state of total satisfaction be dull, it would also be impossible to experience.
I think this is a decent argument. I think we can respond well to it, but it takes some thought about how actions are structured by ends. Particularly in contemporary culture, where the means-end relation is understood primarily as an external relationship, that is, where the ends are understood to require the means only contingently and the means are understood to be means to their ends only contingently, this kind of objection to heaven is likely to be intuitively compelling to many. Likewise, as our culture understands good stories to necessarily involve overcoming one's own failures and defeating evil, the absence of failure and evil strikes many as dull.
How do we respond? Let us begin with the structure of means to end which the argument assumes. The argument we are defending against supposes that means need ends in order to get going. So far, I have no objection. The problem arises when we suppose that the end which is being fulfilled must be one which is taken as unsatisfied. I mentioned in the previous paragraph that, as a culture, our instinct is to regard ends as external to means. There are also ends which are internal to their means. Let me explain these more thoroughly.
Some activities we do are related to their ends in a contingent manner: I go to the grocery store to get food, but my aim is just the food. If there were an easier way to get food, given all my aims, I would have no problem getting my food some other way. On the other hand, there are other activities which we do for their own sake. When I play chess, I may play for the sake of having fun--an external end--but I may play for the sake of playing chess. If I am playing chess because I want to play chess, because I enjoy the game of chess, then the only way to satisfy my end is to play chess. I cannot get around the means to get to the end. I can make different moves, but I cannot play a different game and satisfy the same end. This latter variety of activity is called "autotelic" that is, having its end (telos) in itself (auto).
There are two kinds of autotelic activity: infinite and finite. A finite autotelic activity is like chess: the activity has an end point. The end point of an autotelic activity is internal to the activity: checkmate in chess, for instance. An infinite autotelic activity is one which does not have an end point. An unending dance or song, for instance, might be performed for its own sake, in which case the reason for stopping would have to come from outside the activity.
My response to the argument that eternal satisfaction is incompatible with activity and thus dull is, then, to say that, in heaven, there is an end which is eternally satisfied and yet eternally motivates us to do good as infinite autotelic activity. This end is to glorify God, to image him, and to do his will. We will be eternally satisfied because we will be doing this in every moment, and thus there will be no lack in the satisfaction of this end, and yet it is an end which requires activity of us if it is to be satisfied. It is simply that we will never fail to perform the means which are required by the end.
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