Saturday, August 8, 2020

APPROACHING LIFE PHILOSOPHICALLY

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.  And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.  History has stopped.  Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”  --George Orwell, 1984

All human beings share a common desire for meaning.  Did you choose to be born?  Neither did anyone else!  Jean-Paul Sartre reasoned that once born we are “condemned to be free”.  But with freedom comes responsibility.   And even when restrained, we always have the freedom regarding how we respond to circumstances.  Pragmatism teaches that we all have the capacity to strive to make things better in life, even though we will never achieve perfection.  We may be terribly restrained in life, but we have the freedom to act well.  Compassion for a child, animal or forest comes from being aware that we’re all interconnected.

No single role such as our jobs, our relationship status, our political views, our philosophical views, etc. can ever define a person since we are always changing.  Our elders teach us that you can never cross the same river twice because by the time you cross again, both you and the river have changed.  Aristotle encouraged his students to strive for success but acknowledge that external forces can inhibit that progress.  Hedonic calculus predicts whether something will be pleasurable in the long run or not, e.g., drinking beer all evening (short term pleasure or long-term pain) or studying at a university (short term pain for long term gain).  Actually, I was able to validate both examples on my way to achieving both of my degrees!

St. Augustine reminds us that the presence of evil gives us a perspective on those things that are good, e.g., a long harsh winter gives us a much greater appreciation for the warming spring.  A visiting tourist at the preserved Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz asked a guide why the locals hadn’t simply burned such a terrible place to the ground after the prisoners had been freed.  He replied that it had been discussed but after thoughtful consideration they wanted to preserve this place of horror as a reminder to the world that the events which created it would never be repeated.   Hate has created many problems in our history but has never solved any yet.   

 

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