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

 

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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

Sweet Relief

I

“I’ve had a lot of false starts,” he said. The blinds on the window were yellow from smoke. The cigarette burned in his hand then orange brightened the end when he took a drag. Noticing his shoes and taking his hands to his face to stop the shaking he said “but I’ve never lacked for love and I’ve always tried my best.”

II

It was Wednesday, June 15^th. The doctor’s appointment was scheduled for 11:45am but all parties probably knew it would do absolutely no good. There was a lack of hope among them; one that seemed to be inborn at times. But they would go through the motions: vitals check, blah blah blah, questions, drinking… What was the point? Wasn’t it some philosopher that said death is sweet relief? Why wait for sweet relief?

III

Wasn’t it Leo Buscaglia that said “I don’t brood over death, I’m too busy living?” Death may be sweet relief but it is permanent when you take it so, measure twice, cut once as they say. They say that, it’s a saying. Anyway [insert lip curl to the side] the point is that he rebounded, made a few changes, got out of the house a little bit more, seemed on the upswing. For as much as the hopelessness seemed inborn, there was a love of laughter and a wistfulness about them that could make them incredibly magnetic at times. When they were on like this, people loved to be around them. They were, in technical terms, a hoot. 

IV

When this “hootiness” ended, on an individual and on a group level is the issue.¹ It ended for him so they were there in the hospice room when he weighed 140lbs and had trouble breathing as the sweet relief drugs took effect. Was the loss of hootiness a gradual process born out over years of false starts and bad decisions and negligence to others and self or was it like a band aid: right off!? Does it matter? Relief is here.

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and
     statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Washington, DC:
     Author.

Text citation: (American Psychiatric Association, 2013)

Thoughts on Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985)

I couldn’t help but find myself comparing the end of White Noise to Camus’ The Stranger.  The terseness of the shooting scene, the insensitive harming of another with the inhumane, animalistic self-reflection…it was just very Camusian for lack of a better word. 

But the ending wasn’t the best part, not by a long shot. The weirdness of the novel, the only intimations as to deeper meaning, the fact that it made you think, made you define… “What is nature?”… These were the best parts of the book. 

A toddler that won’t speak, a maybe genius teenager who runs with an asking-for-it Guinness record attempter, a wife named “Babs,” Hitler Studies, photographic-memory-having colleagues,  a pervert colleague who hits on the aforementioned “Babs,” and of course, the airborne toxic event. 

And all of it “caged” in death (just like the snakes). Or should we say the fear of death? Just as death gives life context and delineation, death gives White Noise life and delineation. What is the airborne toxic event if not nearness to THE ownmost possibility? What is Dylar if not to push away THE ownmost possibility?  Why run the stadium stairs if not to meet THE ownmost possibility? Yes, death my friends, does it make life rare? Does it turn your years of life from a ubiquitous carbon to a rarefied diamond? 

I don’t think DeLillo knows…and that’s a good thing. That he asks in the first place is more important. Does he believe? The nuns believed, if only in a perfunctory way so that we couldn’t believe…capisce?

Is Delillo saying we need both sides of the belief coin? Maybe, just like we need both sides of life and death.

As I read the book I also couldn’t help but reflect on my undergraduate years, those years shaped by the coins with sides like Martin Heidegger and Leo Buscaglia. Heidegger taught me we are beings-unto-death facing an ownmost possibility that ends all others and Buscaglia taught me that “I don’t brood over death, I’m too busy living.”

So it’s like Delmar in O’Brother Where Art Thou?

Pete: Wait a minute. Who elected you leader of this outfit?

Ulysses Everett McGill: Well Pete, I figured it should be the one with the capacity for abstract thought. But if that ain't the consensus view, then hell, let's put it to a vote.

Pete: Suits me. I'm voting for yours truly.

Ulysses Everett McGill: Well I'm voting for yours truly too.

[Everett and Pete look at Delmar for the deciding vote]

Delmar O'Donnell: Okay... I'm with you fellas.

Life or Death?

You bet.

Good or Bad

[Context: listening to Smiley and West Podcast]

Isn’t it interesting how we bloat our own positive characteristics? I heard Nelson Mandela described as graceful and thought to myself that no one and I mean no one, would describe me as graceful. And that fits. But then the inner monologue immediately begins to defend not being graceful; “but what I lack in gracefulness I make up for with x, y, and z.”

[Extrapolation]

Well if we want to be all Leo Buscaglia about it, we can say that every person has some positive characteristics. (What would it mean to have just 1 positive characteristic?) But who is going to step up and laud the positive characteristics of Hitler or Jeffrey Dahmer, or Kirstie Alley. Kid, I kid. Kirstie was great in Woody Allen’s ‘Deconstructing Harry.’ The question remains: does every person have positive characteristics?

Or do we want to be all atomistic about it and say that some people, you know who you are, are pure evil? Not one ounce of good in these folks. Mayhem, murder, genocide, and 80’s music are left in their wake.

Is this really a grey area? Are we going to say it’s nuanced, ooooh it’s nuanced, it needs to be fleshed out as they say. It depends, you say, it’s contingent upon many, many relevant factors you say.

Oh c’mon! There are two kinds of people aren’t there? Good and bad? What is this nuance crap? Are you going to tell me people are good and sometimes do bad things? Are you going to tell me “to err is human?” Erring is one thing but making hats out of skin is another.  Again I ask, aren’t some people pure evil?

How else can you account for clogs, golf, and fox news? Kid, I kid. I love golfing in clogs.