Sense of life

Sense of life is a person's subconscious, emotionally held estimate of what existence is like and of man's place in it. Objectivism treats it as a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics: not a set of beliefs a person has thought out, but the summed-up effect of the conclusions he has drawn and the choices he has made, experienced as a permanent emotional tone rather than as a proposition.

“A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence.”
~ Ayn Rand, "Philosophy and Sense of Life", The Romantic Manifesto

It is a sum, not a primary

The most common error is to treat a sense of life as an irreducible given: something a person is born with, or a faculty of insight that reaches conclusions reason cannot. Rand addressed this directly and reversed it.

“This leads many people to regard a sense of life as the province of some sort of special intuition, as a matter perceivable only by some special, non-rational insight. The exact opposite is true: a sense of life is not an irreducible primary, but a very complex sum.”
~ Ayn Rand, "Philosophy and Sense of Life", The Romantic Manifesto

The point matters because everything else follows from it. A sum has components. If a sense of life is the integrated residue of a lifetime of appraisals, then it was formed by a process, the process involved choices, and what was formed can in principle be identified and altered. An intuition could only be obeyed or ignored.

This also places it correctly with respect to emotions generally. Objectivism holds that emotions are not tools of cognition but consequences of a person's values and appraisals. A sense of life is that mechanism operating at the widest level of abstraction, which is why it feels less like a reaction to a particular thing and more like the weather one lives in.

What it is an appraisal of

Its content is metaphysical rather than ethical. It is an implicit answer to questions nobody puts in words: is the universe intelligible or bewildering? Is achievement possible or futile? Is man efficacious, or is he a helpless thing in a world he cannot understand? Is happiness the normal state or a lucky accident?

Because these are the widest questions, the answers are absorbed long before a person is capable of posing them explicitly, and they are absorbed from everything: what worked and what did not, what was admired around him, whether effort was rewarded, whether the adults in his life acted as though the world made sense. Objectivism holds that man is born tabula rasa with no innate ideas, so a sense of life is entirely acquired, which is precisely why it varies so much between people who share a culture.

Sense of life and character

The forum asks how the two differ, and the distinction is worth stating carefully because it is easy to collapse.

Character is the sum of a person's chosen values and habitual virtues, held and acted on. Sense of life is an emotional integration, which includes material a person never chose and may never have examined. The two normally correspond, because the same choices form both, but they can come apart, and the interesting cases are the ones where they do: a person of genuine integrity who nevertheless experiences the world as grim, or a person of sunny disposition and no principles.

The Objectivist position is that character is the primary. Sense of life is evidence about a person, and often very good evidence, but it is not the standard by which he is judged. A person is responsible for what he chooses and does. See Virtues and Volition.

Can it be changed?

This is the question the forum asks most urgently, and the honest answer has two halves.

Yes, it can be changed, because it was formed rather than given. The method is the one Rand described for emotions generally: identify the appraisals underneath, examine them explicitly, and correct the ones that are false. See Emotions and Context.

But it does not change on command, and it does not change at the speed at which convictions change. A sense of life is an automatised sum built over years, and a newly reached conclusion has to be lived on before it reintegrates. The gap between the two is the ordinary experience of someone who has changed his mind about something fundamental and finds his reactions lagging by a long way. That gap is not evidence that the new conviction is false or that the effort is wasted; it is what re-automatisation looks like from the inside.

The practical consequence is that the work is done in particulars rather than in general resolutions: catching a specific emotional response, tracing it to a specific premise, and checking whether the premise is true. A sense of life is a sum, and sums are changed one term at a time.

In art

Rand's main use of the concept is in her theory of aesthetics. Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value judgments, and those judgments usually reach the work through the artist's sense of life rather than through an explicit philosophy. A viewer's response works the same way from the other side, which is why people respond powerfully to works whose stated content they would reject, and why aesthetic disagreement is so often disagreement about nothing that either party has articulated.

This is also the answer to the forum's recurring question about identifying the sense of life of a piece of music. Objectivism holds that music is the art form whose objective interpretation is least well understood, because there is no established vocabulary connecting musical structure to conceptual meaning. Rand said so explicitly rather than supplying one. A listener's response is real data about the listener; treating it as a measurement of the work is the step that is not warranted. See Aesthetics and The Romantic Manifesto.

Common misunderstandings

That it is intuition, instinct, or a sixth sense. It is a sum of appraisals, and Rand said so in the same essay that introduced the term.
That having the right philosophy guarantees the right sense of life. Explicit conviction and automatised emotional response are different things and are formed by different processes over different timescales.
That a bad sense of life is a moral failing. Much of it was formed before a person could evaluate anything. What is open to moral judgment is what he does about it once he can.
That it can be adopted by decision. Deciding to have a benevolent sense of life is like deciding to find a joke funny.
That it is a synonym for mood, personality, or temperament. It is specifically an appraisal of existence and of man, and it persists underneath moods.
That because it is subconscious it cannot be identified. It can, by the same introspective method used for any emotion: notice the response, name it, and find the appraisal it rests on.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. "Philosophy and Sense of Life" and "Art and Sense of Life". The Romantic Manifesto. World Publishing, 1969; revised edition, New American Library, 1975.

External links

Sense of Life at the Ayn Rand Lexicon

Epistemology Topics
Senses \| Consciousness \| Volition \| Concepts: Unit, Concept-Formation
Objectivity \| Knowledge: Context, Hierarchy \| Reason: Certainty, Truth, the Arbitrary \| Emotions