WHAT YOU NEED: I caught the end of a Bill Moyers interview with Leon Kass, where Moyers asked, “What is the thing that human beings most need?” Kass paused for a bit, and then answered, “I’d say there are three things.” What Kass said were the first two things I thought sensible and agreed with; my difference, or maybe my confusion, came with the third thing. Anyway, here are the first two.

(1) Deep love or friendship with another person, at least once in your life. Preferably for a long time.
(2) Meaningful work.

After this, Kass waited again, and it gave me enough time to think what I thought the third thing might be. What came to my mind was “an opportunity for self expression.” Of course, this might come in a loving relationship, or in one’s employment, but it seems distinct from them. They might not necessarily bring out what is uniquely you, what you alone can contribute, what being human means for you in particular, and the feeling that comes with that: I am living my own life and not anybody else’s. But Kass’ final thing was:

(3) A connection with something larger than oneself.

Now, this answer has a lot of intuitive resonance, but is it clear exactly what it means? The most obvious place filler for this would be a connection with God, who is literally (if he exists at all) larger than you. But the larger something could be a social cause, etc. There seems to be something about “larger than oneself” that brings one pretty quickly into the realm of the moral and the theological.

Compare Kass’ third thing with mine, and the comparison seems to come out in Kass’ favor – my answer “an opportunity for self-expression” seems, well, selfish. But the question wasn’t about what people ought to do, but what they need. People ought to think of others’ needs and tend to them. At the same time, I’m not sure people intrinsically need to do this sort of thing: they can have meaningful and deeply satisfying lives without them (they may be morally bankrupt lives, but I’m not sure about even this; it depends on what the content of our morality is).

I suppose I could try to make self-expression depend on one’s interactions with others, and so have some moral content intrinsically tied to it; but I don’t think this will go very far, because one may depend on others to be the person one uniquely is, but I don’t see the relationships that foster this sort of individuality being essentially moral.

So I fall back on criticizing the “connection with something larger than oneself.” I have learned to distrust these sorts of answers: they betray a sort of world weariness, as if the small causes that make up this world don’t amount to much, because they are small and not Large, they are too ordinary. I once had a professor tell me: Once you realize there is no such thing as the Absolutely Good, a goodness that you could connect to and which would infuse your life with meaning because by knowing it you would be linked to something larger than you – once you realize this, that there is no such thing, it turns out not that nothing matters anymore, but that everything matters – your wife matters, your house matters, your dog matters. These aren’t things larger than yourself, they are equal to you, on your level. And it’s there where our meaning resides. It is those things that we need.

- posted by Chad @ Sunday, July 27, 2003