The meaning of mice
Thomas Nagel, in his famous essay, “The Absurd,” writes:
Why is the life of a mouse not absurd? … because he lacks the capacities for self-consciousness and self-transcendence that would enable him to see that he is only a mouse.
Here is, on the other hand, what Firmin says:
Lives in stories have direction and meaning. Even stupid, meaningless lives, like Lenny’s in Of Mice and Men, acquire through their places in a story at least the dignity and meaning of being Stupid, Meaningless Lives, the consolation of being exemplars of something. In real life you do not get even that.
Firmin is a fictional rat, blessed (or cursed) with the gift of literacy. The story, Sam Savage’s eponymous novel, is told by Firmin. Firmin’s life is meaningful as told in the novel. Maybe we can make a mouse’s life un-absurd by telling his story?
Picture yourself. You can be tickled. You can laugh. You can play with your roommates. You can feel empathy for them. Someday you’ll have babies with one of them. Your babies will have babies. Like you, they will laugh and play, bond, and suffer together. Imagine yourself in the night, looking at a bright moon shining on your life against skies darker and bigger than you could ever comprehend. Do you wonder what it all means? Do you feel insignificant? Is your little life in its little corner of the universe even remotely meaningful?
Plot twist: You are a mouse. Do these questions resonate differently now? Most of us would say yes. If I were a mouse, these questions would not make sense to me. I would not be asking them. I cannot be a mouse. A mouse cannot be me. If I were asking those questions then I would be a completely different kind of mouse; I wouldn’t know, as Nagel would put it, what it’s like to be an actual (not hypothetical, obnoxiously philosophical) mouse. I, writing now, just wouldn’t know what it’s like, if I turned into a mouse. And if I, a mouse, turned into someone who can ask such questions, then I wouldn’t be a mouse anymore.
The life of a mouse (or a rat) appears simultaneously devoid of meaning and incapable of receiving any. Perhaps it’s a mistake to ask what the meaning of such a life could be. It’s not that the life of a mouse is meaningless; it’s that it’s not the sort of thing that could have meaning. So it’s not devoid of it. A meaningless mouse life is a category mistake. Or so it seemed to Thomas Nagel.
If Nagel is right that a sense of the absurd can only arise from a gap between expectation and observation, then mice are blessed with a gift (antithetical to Firmin’s): their lives can never be absurd to them, even though by the same token they can never have meaning.
Nagel may be right that life will never seem absurd to a mouse. Does that mean a mouse’s life can never have meaning? Two natural ways to challenge Nagel’s assumption (or its application to the question of whether the life of a mouse can have meaning) present themselves.
You could claim that mice are self-aware. A long time ago — ten years, that is, in a chapter of my dissertation, I argued that probably all conscious animals are self-aware in at least some minimal but still robust sense involving bodily experience, psychological unity, and metacognition. Self-awareness is plausibly much more widespread than we typically assume when, by self-aware, we mean reflectively self-aware (see e.g. David DeGrazia, Natalie Thomas, Mark Rowlands). This claim, however, barely begins to prove that mice or rats can experience a sense of meaning or absurdity. It could still be beyond their grasp if it requires a level of self-awareness that they don’t have access to, if, say, access to that level presupposes language or a full-blown theory of mind. These are thorny, evolving empirical issues. I don’t want my argument to rest on this claim.
An alternative challenge to Nagel would be to concede that the absurd requires self-awareness in a sense that’s not accessible to mice but to deny that for a life to be meaningful its subject must be capable of whatever is necessary for having a sense of the absurd (or meaning). In other words, we can challenge the assumption that a being’s capacity to experience a felt sense of meaning or lack thereof is a condition on their life having meaning. More specifically, it calls into question the sort of assumption that leads us to devalue the lives of mice (and rats, rodents, and other small unruly creatures). Once we lift the ban on the meaning of mice, the earth starts teeming with meaning. Together with Duncan Purves, I started questioning this assumption a while ago. We argued that meaning requires contributing to value (broadly construed) through intentional agency, and that many animals (and here I unequivocally assert: including rats and mice) possess the requisite capacity.
Mice may not know their lives are meaningful, but this doesn’t mean they aren’t. We can tell their stories. The paradox may be that we can feel cosmically insignificant and yet our lives can have meaning, as both Nagel and Susan Wolf have demonstrated (cosmic significance is neither here nor there). If mice can have meaningful lives, then this paradox does not concern them, for they cannot, Nagel would be the first to note, experience cosmic insignificance. But he was also right that this is not the question. Moreover, even though mice may never experience this gap between expectation and observation, which seems so rife with both absurdity and meaning in humans, they may experience a different kind of gap, living as they do in the interstices of human spaces. “The Mice” is an aptly tiny story by Lydia Davis (“Five Stories”, in Conjunctions: 34). It is openly accessible at the link and is very short. An excerpt:
Mice live in our walls but do not trouble our kitchen. We are pleased but cannot understand why they do not come into our kitchen where we have traps set, as they come into the kitchens of our neighbors. … They patiently hunt and nibble hour after hour until they are satisfied. In our kitchen, however, they are faced with something so out of proportion to their experience that they cannot deal with it. They might venture out a few steps, but soon the overwhelming sights and smells drive them back into their holes, uncomfortable and embarrassed at not being able to scavenge as they should.