Book notes: The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions, by David Benatar
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“Humankind can not bear very much reality.” -TS Eliot
This is a book about facing up to reality — to our cosmic insignificance, to the suffering in life, and to the predicament that human life represents: that life is bad, but so is death.
Benatar is an analytical philosopher, so unlike a Camus or a Cioran, Benatar focuses on logical argumentation. And although the above might seem bleak, his argument is that it is merely realistic. FWIW, he also counsels a sort of engaged pessimism in response to the truth of our predicament. In this sense, he follows in the footsteps of other engaged pessimists like Leopoldi, Nietzsche and Camus.
Topics include:
Life’s big questions (“Do our lives have meaning? Is life worth living? How should we respond to the fact that we are going to die? Would it be better to live forever? May we, or should we, end our lives earlier—by suicide—than they would otherwise end?”)
Meaning (at four scopes: cosmic, species-wide, community, individual)
Meaninglessness (ultimate cosmic meaninglessness, and the theistic and secular rejections of the facts)
Quality (the optimism bias in cog-sci; why in fact there is more bad than good)
Death (specifically, a pessimistic refutation of Epicurus’s thesis that “death is nothing to us… there is nothing terrible in not living… So long as we exist death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more.” The refutation combines the deprivation account and the annihilation account).
Immortality (his pessimistic take is that under a number of significant constraints, immortality would be better than mortality, all things considered)
Suicide (how it solves none of the problems of meaninglessness or insignificance, although it is easy to see how to someone facing unbearable pain and suffering with no hope of getting better would be justified in considering it at the very least)
He concludes with an overview of the points made, and ends by counseling “pragmatic pessimism” (as opposed to “pragmatic optimism”) in which people do not delude themselves about the human predicament, allow themselves moments of despair and angst, but nonetheless take each day as it comes and try to create meaning in the here and now, by, for example, positively helping others.
