"...the first general outlook — that life is good and so the loss of it is bad and so the answer is make as much of it as we can while we've got it — you might say that is, in broad strokes, the western outlook. And in broad strokes, the notion that life isn't really as good as we take it to be, but is, in fact, bad overall, perhaps it's oversimplification to call it the eastern outlook, but at least it's an outlook that gets more expression typically in eastern thought than in western thought.
Foremost example of this second outlook is, I suppose, Buddhism. Four noble truths in Buddhism. The first noble truth is that life is suffering. Buddhists believe if you think hard about the underlying nature of life, you'll see that everyplace there is loss. There is suffering. There is disease. There is death. There is pain. Sure, there are things that we want and, if we're lucky, we get them. But then we lose them and that just adds to the suffering and the pain and the misery. On balance, life isn't good. First noble truth, life is suffering. And so, armed with this estimation, what Buddhists try to do is to free you from attachment to these goods, so that when you lose them, the loss is minimized. And indeed, Buddhists try to free you from what they take to be the illusion of there being a self. There is no me to lose anything.
Death is terrifying insofar as I worry about it being the dissolution of myself. If there is no self, there's nothing to dissolve. It all makes sense — and I have tremendous respect for Buddhism — it all makes sense, given the thought that life is suffering. But for better or for worse, I'm a child of the west. I'm a child of the Book of Genesis, where God looks on the world and says, "It's good." For me, at least, the strategy of minimize your loss by viewing the world as negative, is not one that I can be at rest with. For me, life can be good."
© Shelly Kagan
Yale Lectures on Philosophy of Death, 2007
Foremost example of this second outlook is, I suppose, Buddhism. Four noble truths in Buddhism. The first noble truth is that life is suffering. Buddhists believe if you think hard about the underlying nature of life, you'll see that everyplace there is loss. There is suffering. There is disease. There is death. There is pain. Sure, there are things that we want and, if we're lucky, we get them. But then we lose them and that just adds to the suffering and the pain and the misery. On balance, life isn't good. First noble truth, life is suffering. And so, armed with this estimation, what Buddhists try to do is to free you from attachment to these goods, so that when you lose them, the loss is minimized. And indeed, Buddhists try to free you from what they take to be the illusion of there being a self. There is no me to lose anything.
Death is terrifying insofar as I worry about it being the dissolution of myself. If there is no self, there's nothing to dissolve. It all makes sense — and I have tremendous respect for Buddhism — it all makes sense, given the thought that life is suffering. But for better or for worse, I'm a child of the west. I'm a child of the Book of Genesis, where God looks on the world and says, "It's good." For me, at least, the strategy of minimize your loss by viewing the world as negative, is not one that I can be at rest with. For me, life can be good."
© Shelly Kagan
Yale Lectures on Philosophy of Death, 2007
No comments:
Post a Comment