Category: Meaning of Life
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David Benatar on the Quality of Human Life, Part II
This is the fifth in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). This entry covers pp. 71-83 of Chapter Four, pp. 64-91, entitled "Quality." In our last installment we discussed whether Benatar is justified in his claim that the quality of life is in most cases objectively worse than we think it is. (I cast…
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David Benatar on the Quality of Human Life, Part I
This is the fourth in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). This entry covers pp. 64-71 of Chapter Four, pp. 64-91, entitled "Quality." The Meaning Question and the Quality Question These are different questions. Although for Benatar no human life has what he calls "cosmic" meaning, a life can have a high degree of…
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Life and Thought
The tension between life and thought is a very old theme of mine, from the painfully intense youthful days when I read Hermann Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund and Steppenwolf and all the others. I rehearsed the theme once again the other night in the nocturnal twilight zone between deep sleep and wakefulness. Strange and exasperatingly elusive…
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David Benatar in The New Yorker
This New Yorker piece is worth reading. (HTs: Dave Lull, Karl White) It helps clarify Benatar's anti-natalism. One feature of his position is that death is no solution to the human predicament. As I would put it, the Grim Reaper is not a Benign Releaser. For while life is bad, so is death. Not just…
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Can Belief in Man Substitute for Belief in God?
A slightly redacted re-post from 26 September 2009. ……………………………… The fact and extent of natural and moral evil make belief in a providential power difficult. But they also make belief in man and human progress difficult. There is the opium of religion, but also the opium of the intellectuals, the opium of future-oriented utopian naturalisms such…
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Cosmic Meaninglessness and the Theistic Gambit
This is the third in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). This entry covers pp. 35-45 of Chapter 3. The good news from Chapter 2 was that there is meaning at the terrestrial level. The bad news from Chapter 3 is that there is none at the cosmic level, or from…
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David Benatar, The Human Predicament, Chapter 2, Meaning
This is the second in a series of entries on Benatar's new book. The entries are collected here. Herewith, some notes on pp. 13-34. Summary does not constitute endorsement. Note also that my summary involves interpretation and extension and embellishments: I take the ball and run with it on occasion. The sense that one's life…
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Is Life a Predicament?
My old friend Joe sent me a vitriolic statement in denunciation of David Benatar, both the man and his ideas. I will quote only a relatively benign portion of Joe's rant: I do not experience life as a predicament but as a great gift. I am surrounded by love and beauty, and even have been able…
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The Question of the Meaning of Life: Distinctions and Assumptions (2017)
What follows is a redacted version of a post from April, 2013. It will serve as a useful foil to my examination of David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP 2017). ……………………………………… What are we asking when we ask about the meaning of life? Herewith, some preliminary distinctions. Existential versus Linguistic Meaning Those for whom…
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Anti-Natalism, Zombies, and the Role of Consciousness in the Question of the Value of Life
Extreme anti-natalism is the view espoused by David Benatar according to which "it would be better if there were no more humans" (David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation, Oxford UP 2015, 13). This is an axiological thesis. From it follows the deontic conclusion that "all procreation is wrong." (12) Procreation is obviously a biological…
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Prudential Anti-Natalism
Karl White writes: If one assumes life has a negative value, or at the very least is a problem that needs solving, then surely it would follow that antinatalism is the prudential course. If we are unable to discern a meaning or a solution to life, then there can hardly be any justification for dragging…
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Salvation and the Value of Life
Patrick Toner comments: . . . as I'm reading your post on Nietzsche, you make a mistaken claim about salvation's implications: namely, that "If we need salvation from our predicament in this life, then human life, taken on its own terms, and without appeals to hinterworlds, is of negative value." Professor Toner's criticism offers…
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Nietzsche, Salvation, and the Question of the Value of Life
Giles Fraser in his provocative Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (Routledge 2002) maintains that "Nietzsche is obsessed with the question of human salvation" and that his work is "primarily soteriology." (p. 2) I don't disagree with this assessment, but there is a tension in Nietzsche that ought to be pointed out, one that Fraser, from…
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Seriousness as Camouflage of Nullity
Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, Harper, 1955, p. 61, #93: The fact of death and nothingness at the end is a certitude unsurpassed by any absolute truth ever discovered. Yet knowing this, people can be deadly serious about their prospects, grievances, duties and trespassings. The only explanation which suggests itself is that seriousness…