<\/a>My plan is to work my way through David Benatar's latest book, The Human Predicament<\/em>, Oxford UP 2017, chapter by chapter. Herewith, some notes on the Introduction, pp. 1-12. I will summarize the main points and add such critical comments as seem appropriate.<\/span><\/p>\n Benatar appreciates that the human condition is a predicament<\/em>, an unsatisfactory state of affairs that calls for some sort of amelioration or escape. For Benatar, however, our predicament is a tragic one from which there is no escape. We are caught in an "existential vise" between life and death. "Life is bad, but so is death." Neither are bad in every way, but both are "in crucial respects, awful." (1-2) We are in a bind, a fix, a jam, we can't get out, and there is no one to help us.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n Cosmically viewed, our lives are meaningless. "We are insignificant specks in a vast universe that is utterly indifferent to us." (2) I would say that indifference is a human attitude, a deficient mode of caring. So I would put Benatar's point by saying that the universe is not even indifferent to us. That our lives are ultimately meaningless is of course consistent with our lives being suffused with various mundane or proximate meanings and purposes.<\/span><\/p>\n Some might grant that our lives are cosmically or ultimately meaningless, but take this to be just an axiologically neutral fact, neither good nor bad. This is not Benatar's view. It is bad<\/em> that our lives are ultimately meaningless. We cannot satisfy the need for meaning in the mundane.<\/span><\/p>\n But not only are our lives meaningless, the quality of our lives is very poor: "even the best lives . . . ultimately contain more bad than good."(2) That's a very strong statement. It implies that no matter how good your life is, it is more bad than good.<\/span><\/p>\n Is death then a welcome release from our nasty predicament? No! Death too is bad, pace<\/em> Epicurus and his followers: ". . . death is the second jaw of our existential vise." (2) It is bad that we will all be annihilated in the near future. I take him to mean not just that dying is bad, but being dead is as well, even if there is no one who is aware of one's being dead. Life is bad and death is bad and the squeeze is on.<\/span><\/p>\n Benatar is a resolute mortalist. There is no immortality of the soul or resurrection of the body. Nor is there any hope for transhumanist life extension here below.<\/span><\/p>\n Suicide, although sometimes both rational and morally permissible, is not a satifactory solution to our predicament because of its negative effects on others and because it issues in annihilation. (3)<\/span><\/p>\n Overall, Benatar is a pessimist, but he is not pessimistic about everything. For example, convinced as he is that there is no immortality, he considers it optimistic to hold that immortality would be bad (because it would be boring). It is good that there is no immortality given that it would endlessly boring. So even though annihilation is bad, immortality would be worse. (4-5) On this point he is optimistic!<\/span><\/p>\n There are no good reasons in support of the standard optimistic answers to life's big questions. To the extent that optimistic answers are actually believed, they are believed because people want to believe them. Those who cannot bring themselves to accept the optimistic answers and yet will not face reality are left in a state of bewilderment. (7)<\/span><\/p>\n For Benatar, life's big questions have answers knowable to us here and now. (One could hold that the big questions have answers, but not answers accessible to us in our present state. Or one could hold that there are answers that no one will ever know.) Benatar is not a solubility-skeptic: the problem of the meaning and value of human life is not an aporia<\/em> as I tend to think. Nor is he a mysterian. "There is no great mystery, but there is plenty of horror." (7)<\/span><\/p>\n Our condition is a predicament, Benatar insists, and none of us can avoid the horror of it. Palliation is possible, but not a cure. <\/span><\/p>\n Benatar concludes the Introduction by considering whether he is justified in depriving people of their optimistic delusions. He concludes that he is justified in the relatively mild, non-crusading, way he has to chosen to do so: by writing books. For optimistic delusions, he thinks, are not innocuous, and are justifiably combated.<\/span><\/p>\n For one thing, the delusions ". . . facilitate a reproduction of the human predicament by creating new generations that are thereby thrust into the predicament." (10) A second reason is that putatively "redemptive ideologies," whether religious or secular, often "cause a great deal of gratuitous suffering." (10)<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My plan is to work my way through David Benatar's latest book, The Human Predicament, Oxford UP 2017, chapter by chapter. Herewith, some notes on the Introduction, pp. 1-12. I will summarize the main points and add such critical comments as seem appropriate. Benatar appreciates that the human condition is a predicament, an unsatisfactory state … Continue reading “David Benatar, The Human Predicament<\/i>, Introduction”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[281,282,207],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anti-natalism","category-benatar-david","category-pessimism-and-optimism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}