Your Kindle Notes For: The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think by Robert Pantano

 Your Kindle Notes For:

The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think

Robert Pantano

Last accessed on Thursday January 26, 2023

35 Note(s)

A helpful philosophy first realizes and admits the sad, troublesome, and often tragic conditions of our life, and then attempts to grapple with and overcome them so that we might live in spite of those conditions.

Note: "With," not "in spite of."

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In the dirt of life, it is up to us to plant the seeds, watch the flowers grow, and enjoy their beauty, even in spite of the fact that we know that they will die.

Note: A fellow thanatist I see.

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Platonic idealism, Plato would separate the realm of truth from the material world, distinguishing the world of things as we perceive them from the world of things as they really are.

Note: Yuck

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Plato creates the distinction between the shadows and the objects they are cast by to parallel the Forms and the material world we experience—how we are all caved inside our own senses, restricted from and ignorant of the true forms of things.

Note: And we begin the problem of parallelism

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‘Human’ is part and parcel of nature, and so, how could humans act in any other way? How could manmade material or action ever not be natural?

Note: The dichotomy of dichotomies

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we tend to extract our identities out of our beliefs and ideas, and thus, our minds work very hard to hold onto them.

Note: "extract" our identities

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Psychologically, the individual is able to think and consider everything beyond the mere urges and physical conditions of their body and environment.

Note: I disagree

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Once one has done everything that is rationally and realistically preventative, one should work to revert their attention back to the present,

Note: What is rationally and realistically preventative???

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we must live not as if we are one of the ones who will live into old age, but rather, one of the ones who might not. Only in such a case can the finitude of life begin to reveal itself.

Note: Christianity prevents this en masse

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In a lot of ways, for me, philosophy is like music. It is often less about what it says and more about how it sounds and makes me feel. I don’t come away from listening to a beautiful piece of music having learned anything concrete or academic about the world, but nonetheless, with the right song, I often feel I have learned all there is to know.

Note: Just a killer capture here.

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with a limited intelligence, like our own, comes a limited ability to see the larger picture of which we are truly a part of.

Note: PERSPECTIVE! Any moment you take a point of views, other views are blocked.

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Building on his interpretation of Kant, Schopenhauer essentially suggested that the world as we know and experience it is exclusively a representation created by our mind through our senses and forms of cognition.

Note: I prefer "synergy."

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The pursuit of universal objectivity or meaning in the world beyond this one took the spirit out of the present, earthly human experience of meaning, which is inherently subjective, independent, and expressive.

Note: Today, it is a public health issue. Embrace relativism.

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And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

Note: Tina Fey: say yes.

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The Trouble with Being Born, he discusses how since death necessarily follows from birth, it is actually the memory of our birth that is the tragic problem of life, and not death in and of itself.

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Consider The Worm At The Core.

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The process of forming meaning, it seems, can perhaps not be escaped,

Note: Meaning and values are subjective; built in with our human experience. What would experience be without meaning? The issue is lack of objective meaning.

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Cursed with the gift of consciousness, we are all inescapably forced into a beautiful confrontation of the void and the absurd inevitability of creating meaning and somethingness out of it.

Note: This is existentialism, not nihilism.

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How many Kafkas have lived and died without ever sharing their voice with the world;

Note:But he did share his voice w/the world. Just the written voice.

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Kafkaesque refers to the bureaucratic nature of capitalistic, judicial, and government systems—the sort of complex, unclear processes in which no one individual ever really has a comprehensive grasp of what is going on, and the system doesn’t really care.

Note: Maybe Kafka is the or a key to our understanding or excusing of anything as SYSTEMIC.

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To have been born into a faulty family, a bad place in the world, or a weak body or brain; to live and die having never recognized one’s potential; to have been stuck in a bureaucratic cog of a business organization or government system; to have felt the guilt and anxiety of existence for no clear reason; we have all, at least at times, experienced the Kafkaesque.

Note: Geworfenheit

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We each have our little flickers of time here.

Note: Consider geologic time

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Unlike anything else in the known universe, we are able to consciously observe, consider, reason, and act. As a result of our unique abilities, we ask ourselves why.

Note: A being such that its being is in question

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In the acceptance of our absurd human experience, we realize that the point is not to eliminate absurdity or find and defend some ultimate truth, but rather, it is to be conscious and appreciative of the things within the absurdity—to look for, find, and create things that are interesting and personally meaningful.

Note: And what do I say to the christian? Yes you can choose your paradigm, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum - there are social and public health repercussions.

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Is it even possible to live well without being able to live well with others (in at least some sense)?

Note: No. Psychology (and biology ans sociology) show us we are social beings through and through.

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But it could be argued that a certain compassion is still applicable even if a conflicting response is necessary.

Note: Carrying this out in praxis is a Herculean task.

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This problem is made even more difficult when trying to understand what is experienced in other people’s minds, which is the concept known as the explanatory gap. And so, even here in this simple, everyday example, we cannot confirm that anybody is objectively right.

Note: A reason to embrace relativism?

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consequently, is not attempting to think and talk in generally true, objective terms also impossible? Not useless, but impossible in the absolute sense. If we cannot arrive at any grand, fundamental, objective truths in life, but we must build all conclusions, ideas, and discourse on top of some sort of sufficiently shared subjective foundation, then this places discussion, thinking, and believing on a constantly shifting, unstable, and wide-spanning ground of various types of subjective, ideological worldviews.

Note: Ah behold, the reason for and power of RHETORIC.

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Our wellbeing depends to some degree on the quality of our social relations,

Note: A large degree

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For Sartre, we naturally identify our sense of self through what he referred to as the look, which essentially refers to the experience of knowingly being in other people’s gaze or perception. In a sort of self-reflective function of consciousness, Sartre argued that a full comprehension of our self forms as a result of our perceiving that we are being perceived by others. He would refer to this construction of self as the other.

Note: The looking-glass self; the world is a mirror.

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Emerson argued that all of nature is an expression and permeation of one metaphysical essence of the universe, or God, and that we are all both the expressions and expressors of this singular oneness.

Note: Sounds like pantheism.

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systems of convention.

Note: There IS a sense of systemic!

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As a result of each generation of human offspring essentially imitating the behaviors of the previous generation (to at least some degree), an unbroken chain of psychological imitation has formed, going all the way back to the beginning of human history.

Note: ACCUMULATIVE!

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In all cases, this sort of self-realization requires an effort of radical self-acceptance;

Note: Yikes

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Becker essentially argued that all efforts toward this causa sui or heroism or immortality project are futile and destined to fail. With the belief of religious afterlives and solutions increasingly being eclipsed by modern knowledge and understanding, man finds himself unable to do anything ultimately significant or immortalizing as the universe is revealed to be utterly chaotic, indifferent, and meaningless.

Note: Entropy wins.