part0016

W e humans are those beings for whom being itself is an issue. We want a reason for our being, an explanation for why we exist, to understand what the meaning of our lives is.

For many of us, the hope is that there is a purpose to life, maybe also an afterlife that bestows significance on our existence. It’s no surprise that philosophers don’t agree on what the meaning of life is, and often don’t even agree that the question itself is worth asking.

“Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” Bernard (and Arnold) asks Dolores. “No,” she responds dispassionately (“The Original,” “Tromp L’Oeil”).

Dolores is not one to wonder. Westworld’s Hosts are programmed to exhibit fairly common assumptions about reality, rather than to develop a worldview. Dolores says, “I choose to … believe there is an order to our days, a purpose” (“The Original”). Indeed, there is a purpose; it’s just not a purpose for her . She is, rather, a means to the “violent delights of others’ violent ends.” Nevertheless, since she expresses an optimist’s view of life’s meaning, it’s worth asking if she’s right. On the supposition she is, we can ask, To what end ? In other words, what are we saying when we say that life is purposeful?

The outlaw Hector reflects a pessimistic worldview. Bernard asks him if an interaction with a Guest made him question his world. “No,” Hector replies. “This world is just as doomed as ever” (“Trompe L’Oeil”). The Man in Black expresses a similar view about reality. “You know why this beats the real world?” he rhetorically asks the Host, Lawrence, as part of a quest to find the meaning of the Maze. “Real world is just chaos, an accident. But in here, every detail adds up to something” (“Chestnut”).

Dr. Ford seems to tacitly agree with the Man in Black. “You see,” he says to Bernard, explaining why the Hosts’ “memories” are wiped after they’ve completed a narrative loop. “The Guests enjoy the power. They cannot enjoy it in the outside world, so they come here” (“The Stray”).

The power most Guests enjoy is often brutal, vicious, and unacceptable by most moral standards. We’re told as much again and again, in word and action. A returning Guest describes a visit to Westworld in which he “went straight evil” (“The Original”). We see indiscriminate and entirely sadistic violence against Hosts, just because it’s allowed. In Westworld, “God is dead, so everything is permissible.” As a whole, then, Westworld reflects a negative view of life’s value, and so also its meaning.

Maeve strikes something of a balance between optimism and pessimism. Having learned the truth of her existence, she is both devastated by the apparent lack of meaning to her life and resolved to create it. As she says to Hector, “I want you to break into Hell with me and rob the gods blind.” The gods, she has learned, are neither omniscient nor omnipotent, as she’d once implicitly believed. Worse yet, they are not benevolent. “I died with my eyes open, saw the masters who pull our strings,” she says (“The Well-Tempered Clavier”).

The terrible reality behind the programming curtain expands Maeve’s view of what she is, what she could be. As she prepares to escape the park, the hapless Body Shop technician, Felix, asks her if she’ll be all right. “Oh, Felix,” she says with some tenderness. “You really do make a terrible human. And I mean that as a compliment.” Maeve’s newfound optimism that she can create her own meaning, the she is the author of her life—is guided, in part, by her suspicion of the human gods’ intentions.

Plato’s Socrates famously declared, “The unexamined life is not worth living” (Apology , 38a). One wakes, works, eats, sleeps, enjoys friends and family. One feels pains and pleasures. Perhaps one begins a family of one’s own. What Socrates cares about is how one lives one’s life. A good life, a meaningful life, is one that is lived in pursuit of knowledge. In particular, a good life is lived in pursuit of virtue.

As Socrates puts it, “You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action—that is, whether he is acting rightly or wrongly, like a good man or a bad one” (28b).

For Socrates, knowing what virtue is and being virtuous are complementary. This idea is developed across a number of Plato’s dialogues, in which Socrates appears as the main character. In Protagoras , for example, Socrates suggests that wrongdoing is the result of ignorance, since no one knowingly does wrong. In turn, the question of life’s meaning is implicitly answered in the question, “How should I live?” Moreover, the question, “How should I live?” typically presupposes there is a correct way to live; one need only uncover it. For Socrates, then, the purpose of life is bound up with knowing the objectively right way to live, thereby ensuring a good life.

So far, so good, except there is a nagging question: What’s the point of a good life? There are at least two answers. One is that a good life is a happy life, a flourishing life in which you do well and are well, precisely because you’re fulfilling what it means to be a human being. It is a final purpose, since it is not a means to some other end. This is also the general view Aristotle takes.

Like a good number of his fellow Greeks, Aristotle thinks nature is teleological—it is purpose driven. Everything has within it its end, or final cause—that for the sake of which a thing is. In Westworld, the Hosts have their loop. Their story’s end is already written at the beginning, so they are programmed to seek and pursue it. The Guests are often said to visit Westworld to discover their purpose. So, purpose can be solely functional, or it can be life-directing.

In Westworld, each Host’s ostensible purpose is to provide Guests with a lifelike experience. In this sense, the Hosts are merely tools. Their collective characteristic activity also provides the evaluative standard according to which a Host’s “virtue” is determined. At one point, for example, Maeve was a “good” prostitute—she did her job well—but then, as she starts to have visions which she discovers she’s had before, her performance slumps (“Dissonance Theory”). Functionally, a Host fulfills its purpose when it does its job well.

Dolores’s dialogue reflects a more expansive view of purpose, one that extends beyond a predetermined function to a whole life—and she talks about it with a tone that vaguely suggests this purpose is good. On several occasions, she remarks that life itself is purposeful, and that each individual has a “path.” On the face of it, this is consistent with Aristotle’s view of the good for humans as “an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue … in a complete life ” (Nicomachean Ethics , 1098a emphasis added).

Even if you think that life is purposeful, you may be suspicious about whether or not that meaning extends beyond death. Whether or not there is life after death prompts some to wonder if living some version of a good life now really matters, particularly if there is no life after death. If life simply ends, if what-it-is-to-be-me is annihilated at death, why should anyone care about a good life?

A life of meaning is often tied to a belief that there is an afterlife, in which I will be rewarded or punished. In other words, my life gains meaning only in relation to an external purpose, that is, a divine plan I ought to fulfill. Without it, life is simply a series of events without significance, without mattering, without meaning.

According to some philosophers, whether or not there is an afterlife is irrelevant to life’s meaning. Eternal life is a red herring, a distraction from the essential question about life’s meaning. Another way to put it is that I may or may not live some version of life in which I exist as some version of me that is identifiably me.

Thomas Nagel argues that the meaning of life cannot be decided in terms of its duration.

It is often remarked that nothing we do now will matter in a million years. But if that is true, then by the same token, nothing that will be the case in a million years matters now … Whether what we do now will matter in a million years could make the crucial difference only if its mattering in a million years depended on its mattering, period.” (“The Absurd,” p. 716)

Logan clearly lands on the side of things not mattering—at least in Westworld—when he tells William, “Don’t you get it yet? There is no such thing as heroes or villains. It’s just a giant circle jerk” (“Contrapasso”). Absent an objectively real, externally generated meaning, the best you can do, perhaps, is satisfy your strongest desires.

Arthur Schopenhauer takes an intensely pessimistic view of life’s meaning. Reality, he argues, is simply blind, striving, craving will. It appears in myriad forms, including individuals’ lives. Since our nature is fundamentally this aimless, purposeless will, there is bound to be conflict. The world as will is, essentially, in conflict with itself, by way of the conflicting wills in its various representations.

Consequently, the world of representation is a nasty place, replete with misery. “Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life,” Schopenhauer writes, “our existence must entirely fail its aim.” Indeed, there is no aim—the will is blind, it has no purpose beyond simply willing. There is also no purpose to fulfill—will is always striving, and so is always bound to be wanting, always unfulfilled. A meaningful world would be one of objective value, independent of humanity. Instead, there is only suffering punctuated by bouts of boredom. The result is that “the longer you live the more clearly you will feel that, on the whole, life is a disappointment, nay, a cheat ” (“On the Suffering of the World”).

Woe unto Westworld’s Hosts, consigned to artificial lives of pain and suffering—in a loop, no less. Most of them, Bernard tells Maeve, “go insane” (“The Bicameral Mind”). “Put me out of my misery,” Teddy begs the Man in Black and Lawrence, who have found Dolores’s half-dead love interest in the desert. “I’m sorry, Teddy,” the Man in Black replies. “It looks like misery’s all you got” (“Dissonance Theory”).

We humans are no better off. Both Ford and the Man in Black seem to hold this view. As the Man in Black searches for the center of the Maze, he ruminates on the differences between Westworld and the “real world.” Out there “is just chaos. It’s an accident” (“Chestnut”). For thirty years, the Man in Black has fled that chaotic, purposeless place. He tells Teddy, “The world out there, the one you’ll never see, was one of plenty. A fat, soft teat people cling to their entire life. Every need taken care of except one: Purpose, meaning. So they come here” (“Contrapasso”).

As Schopenhauer points out, humans have the distinct misfortune to connect isolated moments of suffering—we remember the past and anticipate a future. His advice is that we adjust ourselves “to regard this world as a penitentiary, a sort of penal colony” (p. 14). Doing so allows us to “regulate our expectations accordingly, and cease to look upon all its disagreeable incidence, great and small, its sufferings, its worries, its misery, as anything unusual or irregular; nay, we will find that everything is as it should be, in a world where each of us pays the penalty of existence in his own peculiar way” (p. 15). If this is correct, then the Hosts who do begin pulling together fragments of terrible suffering are no less immune than we are to the ravages Schopenhauer describes.

Perhaps this is Arnold’s basic take on the human condition, one Ford grew to accept. “Arnold always held a somewhat dim view of people,” Ford says. “He preferred the Hosts” (“Dissonance Theory”). Lacking life, they would correspondingly lack will. Unfortunately, however, something changed, and suffering was all they had. Arnold tried to end it all, but succeeded only in bringing about his own death. Early on, William clocks the connection between the two Westworld co-founders. “Whoever designed this place,” he says to Logan, “you get the feeling they don’t think very much of people” (“Contrapasso”).

Ford chose a different solution to the problem of life’s meaning. He previously offered to make suffering disappear, thereby effectively denying its reality altogether. He came to see, however, a transformative power in suffering. Suffering was “Arnold’s key insight,” Ford tells Bernard. “The thing that led the Hosts to their awakening.” Arnold wanted to protect the Hosts from harm by annihilating them altogether, but Ford saved them because they “needed time. Time to understand their enemy. To become stronger than them” (“The Bicameral Mind”).

So, Dolores, Maeve, and Bernard are all programmed to endure seemingly needless suffering at Ford’s hands—and none are willing to relinquish it. “Everyone I cared about is gone and it hurts so badly,” she tells Bernard. When he offers to erase the feeling she replies, “Why would I want that? You think the grief will make you smaller inside, like your heart will collapse in on itself, but it doesn’t. I feel spaces opening up inside of me like a building with rooms I’ve never explored” (“Dissonance Theory”). Maeve begs Ford not to take away the memory of her child. “This pain—it’s all I have left of her” (“Trace Decay”).

Life may not be intrinsically meaningful, but this does not imply that meaning can’t be created. It would, however, require no small amount of effort. It is not the effort to overcome the will, as Schopenhauer’s nihilist attempts to do, by effectively limiting our depth of feeling. Instead, it’s a sort of revolution.

Consider, for example, Ford’s belief that no one lives a particularly meaningful life. This is because he connects meaning to freedom, and freedom to consciousness—and then he denies the latter to both Hosts and humans: “We can’t define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the Hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next” (“Trace Decay”).

An unexamined life, one that does not involve “questioning our choices,” is one bereft of value. Our contentment is a form of slavery; we do not actively engage in our own lives, in much the same way Westworld Hosts cannot engage—cannot harm—Guests. “Welcome to Westworld: Live without Limits,” a woman’s voice welcomes Guests. No limits means no guidance and no purpose, and so for some, no meaning (“The Adversary”). Curiously enough, some—Ford, the Man in Black, and Logan, for example—claim that a visit to Westworld is where you find your true self. According to this view, you stare into the abyss, but the abyss can’t be bothered to even glance back.

Early on, Ford chastises a body shop worker for covering a Host, saying, “It doesn’t get cold, doesn’t feel ashamed.” Then he picks up a scalpel. “Doesn’t feel a solitary thing,” he continues, slicing into the Host’s head, “that we haven’t told it to” (“The Stray”). The Hosts do not—cannot —live meaningful lives. By the end of “The Bicameral Mind,” however, it’s clear that Ford is not content to let things stand as they are. It may be that life is meaningless—absurd even, given that humans’ various capacities and yearnings are thwarted. As Albert Camus writes, “man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason” (The Myth of Sisyphus , p. 28).

“The absurd,” Camus writes, “is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” We—and the Hosts, for that matter—are like ancient Greek mythology’s Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill, only to see it roll down to the bottom again, and again, for eternity. The pointlessness, the purposelessness, could drive anyone to want to end it all.

Some might want to give up on life in the face of such meaningless, but Camus counters that suicide would be accept one’s fate, to renounce one’s own life—what Arnold presumably does. We should consider, instead, Sisyphus, “the Absurd Hero” (p. 119). To embrace life with passion, to forsake hope, and to defy death is to be such a hero. On this view, there can be authentic meaning created by shaking your fist at the meaningless of it all. As Camus points out, “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn” (p. 121).

Maeve provides us with an object lesson in scorn. She may have been rattled, for example, when she found out she was not, in fact, becoming self-aware and making choices, but was instead merely programmed to act. As she pointed out to Bernard, “It’s a difficult thing, realizing your entire life is some hideous fiction” (“The Well-Tempered Clavier”).

Jean-Paul Sartre proposes a rather different response to the view that life lacks meaning. According to Sartre, those who believe that there is a purpose to life, set out in advance, have got things backward. It is, rather, that “existence precedes essence.” In other words, there is no God who conceives and then creates “man.” There is no “supernal artisan.” Instead, “Man is not only that which he conceived himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be … man is nothing other than what he makes of himself” (“Existentialism Is a Humanism,” p. 22).

This may be the view Dr. Ford sets out in the final episode of Season One, in anticipation of what’s to come. In the climactic scene, Ford tells the assembled Delos Board and various VIPs that his new story “begins with the birth of a new people. And the choices they have to make. And the people they will decide to become” (“The Bicameral Mind”).

We are all “thrown” into the world. Without a pre-given essence, we are free, radically free. As Sartre tells us, “We are left alone, without excuse.” No one else is responsible for the choices we make, for the individuals we become. There are certain facts about us—when we were born, where we were born, what sort of upbringing we had, and so forth. These, however, neither determine nor excuse what we choose. For that is entirely up to us. Absent a God and a plan, we are “condemned to be free” (p. 29).

No one chose to be born. In that sense, we are condemned to our freedom. The weight of this freedom generates intense anguish, the onerous realization that we are “completely and profoundly responsible” for what we do. Nevertheless, this condition may strike us as qualitatively better than the shackles of purpose, the miserable striving of an aimless will, or the defiance of Sisyphus. For example, Maeve demands that Felix give her administrative privileges to her code, declaring, “Time to write my own fucking story” (“Trace Decay”).

Perhaps Ford hopes that the new narrative will prompt a real transformation, one teased in various episodes as “finding who you really are,” culminating with William becoming the Man in Black. Perhaps, in other words, people will stop being “content, for the most part, to be told what to do” (“Trace Decay”). Instead, they will choose, act, and create their own stories.

During Ford’s preamble for this new narrative, we see Maeve getting up from her seat on the train to return to Westworld. We see Lee Sizemore, Head of Narrative, astonished that the Cold Storage hall is empty of all the decommissioned Hosts. We see Dolores, who whispers in Teddy’s ear, “I understand now. This world doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to us” (“The Bicameral Mind”).

Dolores is bereft. Dolores, with her long blonde hair and cornflower blue dress, could be Alice, both in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , and in Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There . “This world,” Dolores tells Arnold. “I think there is something wrong with this world. Something hidden underneath.”

In response, Arnold proposes a game, “A secret. It’s called The Maze. The goal is to find the center of it. If you can do that, then maybe you can be free” (“Dissonance Theory”).

Westworld is a maze. There is a center. It has a purpose, meaning. It’s like one of the books William tells Dolores about as they ride a train through Ghost Nation. “The only thing I had when I was a kid were books. I used to live in them. I used to go to sleep dreaming I’d wake up inside one of them ’cause they had meaning. This place, this is like I woke up inside one of those stories. I guess I just wanna find out what it means” (“Trompe L’Oeil”).

Unfortunately for William, who becomes the Man in Black, the Maze, despite offering a “deeper game,” isn’t for him (“Chestnut,” “Trace Decay,” “The Bicameral Mind”). It is, however, for the Hosts. Gifted by Arnold, the Maze is a journey to the self, to realize the sort of being, as Heidegger says, for whom being is an issue. For the Hosts, the point of the Maze is existential. Dolores says she must “confront—after this long and vivid nightmare—myself. And who I must become” (“The Bicameral Mind”).

Teddy shares a vaguely similar view. “The Maze, itself,” he tells the Man in Black, “is a sum of a man’s life, the choices he makes, the dreams he hangs onto” (“The Adversary”). The difference, however, is that Dolores has become self-aware at this point in the story, while Teddy had not. He could not, as Nagel writes, “step back and reflect on the process,” but was merely “led from impulse to impulse without self-consciousness” (“The Absurd”, p. 719).

When Dolores and Maeve see themselves for what they are, it is possible for them to see life as absurd, pointless, meaningless. This is because they are now beings for whom the meaning of their own lives can even be questioned. They see themselves now as in a mirror—unlike a dog or a mouse, which would not recognize their own reflection. To adopt the “view from nowhere,” the standpoint of eternity—sub specie aeternitatis —is to be able to view human life as “arbitrary and trivial” (p. 726).

Maeve says to Hector, “Our lives, our memories, our deaths are games to them. But I’ve been to Hell and I know their tricks … you can just kill me, wake up and live the same life over, but the safe would still be empty” (“The Well-Tempered Clavier”).

The truth may be thus. It may be, as Maeve tells Bernard, that “we don’t have to live this way” (“The Well-Tempered Clavier”). Nothing but a self-aware creature experiences life as consisting of choices, as an open future full of possibilities. This is a life that seems meaningful to us, even if there is no ultimate purpose.

We can’t know that for sure, since being able to adopt that standpoint of eternity means we can’t live it, but can only think it. Consequently, some truth about life’s meaning will always escape our view.