Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths: A Realist's View of the Human Condition - Hardcover

Edelman, Shimon

 
9780262044356: Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths: A Realist's View of the Human Condition
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0262044358 ISBN 13: 9780262044356
Verlag: The MIT Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

A reference book for making sense of life—from action (good except when it's not) to thinking (depressing) to youth (a treasure).

This book offers a guide to human nature and human experience—a reference book for making sense of life. In thirty-eight short, interconnected essays, Shimon Edelman considers the parameters of the human condition, addressing them in alphabetical order, from action (good except when it's not) to love (only makes sense to the lovers) to thinking (should not be so depressing) to youth (a treasure). In a style that is by turns personal and philosophical, at once informative and entertaining, Edelman offers a series of illuminating takes on the most important aspects of living in the world.

Edelman avoids reductive synthesis, staying clear of both exuberance and negativity. Drawing on an eclectic range of sources—quoting from a pre-Islamic Bedouin poem on one page, from Gogol on the next, citing both Borges and Marx—Edelman offers insights into the bright and dark sides of our nature. About anxiety, he observes, “All sentient beings are capable of physiological stress response, but it takes special skills to also do anxiety.” Happiness is “a commodity that Americans pursue with almost as much verve as oil.” Human language, on the other hand, is “an essential window into the sublime.” All in all, human nature has much room for improvement. Working out ways to improve it, accompanied by this guide, is an exercise for the reader.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Shimon Edelman is Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. He is the author of Computing the Mind, The Happiness of Pursuit, and other books.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Our brains, bodies, and behavior are the products of a long history of interplay among the many factors that have determined the course of life of each of our ancestors, going back billions of years. How those lives were lived is now water under the bridge. Out of each individual’s entire life, the only thing of any consequence for evolution is the bottom line: their fitness, which is a measure of how effective their lineup of genes and their cultural repertoire are at replication.
Neither bodily perfection, nor subjective well-being are optimized by selection based on fitness. This simple fact should cut short any complaints about various deplorable aspects of our physique or about the paucity of HAPPINESS in our lives. Railing at evolution is as pointless as throwing a tantrum at the elements: one may end up as laughingstock for the ages, like Xerxes, the Persian king who ordered the waters of the Hellespont to be given 300 lashes and branded with red-hot iron for obstructing his invasion of Greece. Still, keeping a record of the iniquities that have been visited upon us by evolution makes sense: it may help us understand what we are and why, and perhaps eventually act on this understanding.
The list of regrettable traits that evolution has saddled us with runs long. Some of these—teeth instead of a nice beak; a wobbly stack of vertebrae instead of an exoskeleton—are mentioned in chapter 22, which is about OLD AGE, a condition that makes one really feel some of evolution’s worst screw-ups. Quite a few others come to mind. On the bodily side, the list includes, in addition to teeth and the spinal column, the useless appendix and the inane anatomy of shoulders and knees. On the side of behavior and culture, I find particularly lamentable the traits that underlie discord between adolescent CHILDREN and their PARENTS, due in part to the evolution sanctioned drive for territorial dispersal.
A revealing illustration of how closely intertwined biological and cultural evolutionary processes are is the case of pain. It is commonly thought that pain signals tissue damage, but there is more to it. There are striking differences in how humans and other animals experience pain. A deer with a broken leg appears much less affected by it than a human with the same predicament (which I know from personal experience, having once broken a leg and, on another occasion, both clavicles). A compelling explanation of this difference may be found in our ultrasociality: humans, but not deer, have come to depend in their survival on help from their conspecifics. In the woods, a lame deer would do well to keep quiet, lest it attracts wolves; a human with a broken leg can reasonably hope to be carried away by the rest of the foraging party before the wolves arrive.
Even if similar reasons can be found for other types of pain too, they would not justify our continued susceptibility to SUFFERING—neither with regard to our evolutionary fitness, nor with regard to our well-being or HAPPINESS. Our social environment and our TECHNOLOGY are now such that experiencing agony that makes us scream would appear to be unnecessary. When I was lying on my back with two broken clavicles after flying off my bike, the driver of a passing car called an ambulance; any screaming on my part would have only interfered with the paramedics’ work. On my solo hikes in the wilderness, where no one can hear you scream, I make a point of keeping my satellite communications device where I can reach it even after a fall. And if my ache is mental, I know where to find help. And yet, I can hardly hope to be as serene as a deer in the face of pain or suffering.

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Verlag
The MIT Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0262044358
ISBN 13 
9780262044356
Einband
Tapa dura
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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