Are Human lives ultimately meaningless? Is our inevitable death bad? Would immortality be better? Should we hasten our deaths by taking our own lives in acts of suicide? Many people ask these big questions and many are plagued by them.
Engaging profound existential questions with analytic rigor and clarity, The Human Predicament is clear eyed, unsentimental, and deeply provocative to some of our most cherished beliefs..
This unfortunate state of affairs has nuanced implications for how we should think about immortality, about suicide, and about the aspects of life in which we can and do find deeper meaning.
It can release us from suffering but even when it does it imposes another cost - annihilation.
Our mortality exacerbates rather than mitigates our cosmic meaninglessness.
But death, David Benatar argues, is hardly the solution.
A candid appraisal reveals that the quality of life, although less bad for some people than for others, leaves much to be desired in even the best cases.
Benatar argues that while our lives can have some meaning, cosmically speaking we are ultimately the insignificant beings that we often fear we are.
David Benatar invites readers to take a clear-eyed view of our situation, defending a substantial, but not unmitigated, pessimism about Human life.
The Human Predicament offers a less sanguine assessment.
When they have engaged the big existential questions they have tended, like more popular writers, to offer comforting, optimistic answers.
Surprisingly few analytic philosophers have spoken to these important questions.
Are Human lives ultimately meaningless? Is our inevitable death bad? Would immortality be better? Should we hasten our deaths by taking our own lives in acts of suicide? Many people ask these big questions and many are plagued by them
