Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way by Kieran Setiya

 

Your Kindle Notes For:

Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way

Kieran Setiya

Last accessed on Monday December 12, 2022

There is no cure for the human condition.

Note: No salvation either

 

It’s wrong to justify your own or others’ suffering, to mute pity or protest in that way.

Note: Only in a relative sense; there are no moral absolutes.

 

Our task is to face adversity as we should—and here truth is the only means.

Note: Even relative truth. "Death is the only fact we have." - James Baldwin

 

The flaw in Aristotle’s view is not that he draws this distinction, which makes perfect sense, but that he concentrates on the life you should want to live, if you could live any life at all—not on the realistic range of good-enough lives.

Note: Relativism!

 

 

debating the philosopher Peter Singer, who believes that parents should be able to “euthanize” infants born with her condition. Her reply to Singer is a pithy expression of my argument. “Are we ‘worse off’?” Johnson asks. “I don’t think so. Not in any meaningful sense. There are too many variables.”

Note: As Hume says, we can never account for all the variables.

 

The projected bliss of painlessness is accessible only to those in pain: it’s a finkish experience, one that recedes just as you hope to reach it; you are missing less than you think.

Note: Heaven is a finkish concept!

 

What makes loneliness bad for us, then, is not that solitude subverts our self-awareness. It’s bad for us because we are social animals for whom society is not a given. The harm of loneliness springs from human nature, not the abstract nature of the self.

Note: Im starting to understand Jungian "collective"

 

When one is dead, one’s activities are circumscribed.

Note: "One" isnt. There are no activities of one because one ceases to exist.

 

(It is a puzzle, on reflection, how one could lay unqualified claim to land, or sea, or sky, whatever the needs of people to come.)

Note: Chief Seattle: who owns the sky?

 

A protest may not change the world, but it adds its fraction to the odds of change.

Note: The beauty of relativism

 

Even the final generation can find value in their lives.

Note: No, they don’t FIND value, or discover value; they CREATE value...sculpt and mold it...

 

We shouldn’t welcome imminent extinction; but we shouldn’t let it lead us into nihilism.

Note: I don’t brood over death, I’m too busy living. Leo Buscaglia

 

The afterlife it calls for is collective. The meaning of life—the truth that tells us how to feel about the whole residual cosmos—would lie in our halting, perhaps perpetual, progress toward justice in this world.

Note: Tell the Abrahamic religions.

 

The virtue of hoping well is a matter of belief, of standing with or searching for the truth, attending to what’s possible.

Note: What to do when truth is relative?

 

There’s no surviving death by natural means: it takes something transcendent, like reincarnation or the will of God. If you’re not religious, you can’t hope to live forever. Nor can you hope your loved ones will. It still makes sense to grieve their deaths: a form of rational despair. Each relationship is archived, each ability lost, one at a time or all at once but finally and forever. In the end, it seems, there is no hope: the lights go out.

Note: Death is the only fact we have. James Baldwin