Human beings​ seem to have a unique relationship to time. We carry within ourselves a sense of our past and future lives extending over decades. (Other creatures appear to live mainly in the present, though we know too little about the inner lives of elephants, for example, to have a firm opinion about this.) We can all second William Faulkner: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ Or T.S. Eliot: ‘Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past.’ Our lives don’t just play out over time: we lead them over the course of that time, shaping them as an extended whole, remembering and reacting to the past, anticipating, planning and creating the future. To lead a life is to be always aware that the moving present is embedded in an extended history, which helps determine the significance of what one does or feels now.

Two broad themes bring together the many topics discussed in Samuel Scheffler’s new book, One Life to Lead. The first is how we live in time: the way our emotions and attitudes change with the passage of time, the asymmetry of our attitudes towards the past and the future; more generally, the incompatibility between leading a life and maintaining a detached stance of neutrality concerning all the points in that life – a neutrality ostensibly based on the premise that the particular time when something happens, per se, can have no bearing on its value. The second theme is the rejection of a different kind of detachment, or more positively, the insistence that certain strong attachments – to particular persons, groups, personal projects and aims – are essential to leading a life. Scheffler opposes this ‘attachment-sensitive’ conception to the religious and philosophical forms of detachment from the contingencies of life that offer to make us less vulnerable to disappointment and loss.

To begin with time. Scheffler takes up a curious topic that was made salient by Derek Parfit: the difference in our attitudes to past and future pleasures and pains. Most people would prefer to have suffered two hours of pain yesterday than to be going to suffer one hour of pain tomorrow and would prefer to have one hour of pleasure tomorrow than to have had two hours yesterday. Parfit thought this ‘bias towards the future’ was irrational, since two hours of pain are worse than one hour, no matter when they occur. He thought it would be better to be neutral about the good or bad things that happen – to look back with as much satisfaction at a past pleasure as forward in anticipation of a comparable pleasure in the future, to be as distressed at the memory of a past pain as by the prospect of a future one.

Scheffler rejects this rationalist folly, and not merely because it tries to override a strong natural feeling with an abstract argument. He observes that this past-future asymmetry is just one of the ways in which our attitudes change over time – quite appropriately – by virtue of the temporal structure of our lives. There are differences in our epistemic and practical relations to the past and the future. We remember the past, not the future. We can affect the future by our actions, but we can’t affect the past. These differences make asymmetrical attitudes appropriate. The future, as Scheffler puts it, is in our ‘deliberative landscape’. The prospect of intense pain galvanises us into wanting to do something to prevent it if possible, and to prepare ourselves for it if not. Its unpleasantness demands of us the special kind of attention associated with action and decision. Once the pain is past, it is no longer part of our deliberative landscape, and we can instead feel relief that it’s over – a temporally different way of recognising its badness.

The alternative to living in the present is not a life of timeless neutrality but a life that proceeds directionally in time, with many asymmetric attitudes towards past and future. We feel guilt, shame, remorse and pride about what we have done, not what we will do; we feel hope and fear about the future, not the past; our appetites are directed forwards, not backwards. More broadly, Scheffler is concerned with the diachronic character of the emotions. Leading a life, he says, is ‘not only an agential undertaking but an emotional and affective one’.

He explores this subject through the example of grief, an emotion that relates us to the past, and that usually, and we think appropriately, changes over time, as we ‘move on’ from a grievous loss. In this example the themes of time and attachment are joined, since it is the death of someone we love that causes grief. The question Scheffler poses is why it is appropriate for grief to subside over time, given that the reason for grief seems not to have diminished: the person is still dead. Why is there not something disloyal about ceasing to grieve?

Here again Scheffler points out that temporal neutrality ignores the complex directional character of our lives in time. Grief is not just a painful feeling, but an emotionally wrenching disruption of the ordinary forward-looking, active, practical stance towards life, the pursuit of plans and projects. The death of someone loved focuses all one’s attention on the person one has lost – on the past. The progress of one’s life comes to a stop. This is an appropriate reaction to the brutality of death. But eventually, Scheffler says, ‘one’s commitment to leading one’s life gradually reasserts itself, and one again becomes receptive to one’s standing future-oriented reasons. It is less that there is a discrete reason for grief to end than that the reasons to lead one’s life, which never themselves expired, gradually prevail.’ He observes that emotional trajectories differ: there is no comparable reason for gratitude to diminish over time, for example. ‘We need to consider individually the “diachronic profiles” of pride, shame, guilt, remorse, regret, surprise, exasperation, hatred, sadness, repulsion and so on.’ This is a rich subject, about which there is much more to be said.

Scheffler claims that humans are faced with a serious problem of what he calls ‘temporal dissonance’: how to reconcile the fact that our lives are extended in time with the fact that we are confined to the present moment. How can we think of ourselves in both ways at once? I confess that I am not gripped by this problem. Scheffler’s own descriptions of our links to our pasts and futures through the emotions and attitudes we experience in the present show that the present moment is not really so confining. But insofar as there is a problem to be solved, I agree with him that we solve it by living each moment not only in the present but also as part of the extended life we have been consciously leading and will continue to lead.

A life gets its shape not only through memory and expectation but through the strong and enduring attachments that are its most important content. This brings us to Scheffler’s second theme. Leading a life necessarily involves selective attachments and relationships to particular persons and groups, and selective valuing of things and activities or projects. Notably, it is incompatible with valuing equally all the persons or things that are, in themselves, of equal value. ‘Although everyone has generic reasons to treat valuable things’ – such as persons – ‘in certain ways simply in virtue of their value,’ Scheffler writes,

those who value a thing, in my sense, recognise reasons in addition to these generic reasons. They see themselves as having reasons with respect to the particular item they value that they do not have with respect to other valuable items of the same kind. To value something, then, is not merely to regard it as valuable or to believe that it has value. Valuing something also involves a kind of attachment or engagement or investment.

To value something, he writes, is ‘a selective or contrastive notion. There is no limit to the number of things whose value one can recognise, but the fact that valuing involves emotional investment and a distinctive practical orientation means that one cannot value everything.’ This means that impartiality among persons, the impersonal commitment to maximising the overall good that underlies utilitarianism, is ruled out by Scheffler’s attachment-sensitive conception of the good life. Philosophical discussions of a person’s partiality to the interests of their family, friends or community often depict it as a form of (perhaps permissible) bias – a deviation from the default of equal concern for everyone. But Scheffler says this is a mistake. ‘Displaying differential concern for the people with whom one has close personal relationships is not a form of bias. It is part of what valuing such relationships consists in.’

Without such relationships, and without engagement in projects, activities and vocations that one values, one would hardly be leading a human life. Attachments give life its content and its meaning. They also make us vulnerable to loss: ‘In valuing, we give hostages to fortune, and fortune may be cruel. Only a person who valued nothing could achieve emotional invulnerability.’ But to Scheffler, the choice is clear: the radical detachment recommended as an escape from vulnerability is an escape from life itself.

Attachments don’t only give our lives direction: they are our principal form of engagement with and submission to the world. Scheffler makes the astute point that what we want in life is not just to satisfy our own desires, but to submit ourselves ‘to needs and requirements we did not invent, whether these are the needs of other people or groups or the requirements of worldly activities in which we wish to participate or at which we wish to excel.’ We want to face demands from the world and other people, and from the standards imposed by difficult tasks, such as learning Russian or to play the violin. An important example is the relation of friendship, which is manifested partly by the deference we pay to a friend’s needs, desires and interests – and especially to their understanding of their needs, desires and interests, whether we agree with them or not. That is the way we recognise them as an independent source of constraints.

It is natural to wonder whether these strong selective attachments are compatible with the more impersonal and impartial claims of morality. But Scheffler argues that there is no conflict: on the contrary, the claims made on us by our attachments form an integral part of morality, though they are subject to some limits imposed by principles of fairness, justice and equal treatment that count all persons as of equal value. Most people believe

that an important part of what it is to be a good or decent person is to possess and exercise the virtues associated with one’s social roles and relationships: to be a good friend, a good parent or child … or a good member of one’s community … One’s personal attachments and relationships, and the social roles one occupies, define much of the content of morality as most people understand it.

Scheffler has explored these questions before, in Human Morality (1992), for example, but more discussion here of the form and scope of moral impartiality that he believes compatible with such attachments would have been useful.

The book addresses other topics: the inevitable contingency of our lives; the ‘normative poverty’ that comes with the loss of relationships in advanced age; the historicist sense of our relation to past and future generations; the love of humanity. As in all of his writings, Scheffler’s treatment of normative questions is grounded in reality and respectful of ordinary thought. He is much more attentive to the concrete details of human relations, attitudes and practices than is usual in philosophy, and resistant to the search for abstract general principles. And something else recommends the book: it is impossible not to take it personally. It will make you think about the shape of your own life.