A Fragile Life: Accepting Our Vulnerability - Hardcover

May, Todd

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022643995X ISBN 13: 9780226439952

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2017

Synopsis

Offering a guide on how to positively engage suffering, Todd May ultimately lays out a new way of thinking about how we exist in the world, one that reassures us that our suffering, rather than a failure of physical or psychological resilience, is a powerful and essential part of life itself

It is perhaps our noblest cause, and certainly one of our oldest: to end suffering. Think of the Buddha, Chuang Tzu, or Marcus Aurelius: stoically composed figures impervious to the torments of the wider world, living their lives in complete serenity—and teaching us how to do the same. After all, isn’t a life free from suffering the ideal? Isn’t it what so many of us seek? Absolutely not, argues Todd May in this provocative but compassionate book. In a moving examination of life and the trials that beset it, he shows that our fragility, our ability to suffer, is actually one of the most important aspects of our humanity.
           
May starts with a simple but hard truth: suffering is inevitable. At the most basic level, we suffer physically—a sprained ankle or a bad back. But we also suffer insults and indifference. We suffer from overburdened schedules and unforeseen circumstances, from moral dilemmas and emotional heartaches. Even just thinking about our own mortality—the fact that we only live one life—can lead us to tremendous suffering. No wonder philosophies such as Buddhism, Taosim, Stoicism, and even Epicureanism—all of which counsel us to rise above these plights—have had appeal over the centuries. May highlights the tremendous value of these philosophies and the ways they can guide us toward better lives, but he also exposes a major drawback to their tenets: such invulnerability is too emotionally disengaged from the world, leading us to place too great a distance between ourselves and our experience. Rather than seeking absolute immunity, he argues most of us just want to hurt less and learn how to embrace and accept what suffering we do endure in a meaningful way.

About this title

About the Author

Todd May is the author of eighteen books of philosophy, including A Decent Life and A Significant Life, both published by the University of Chicago Press. His most recent book is Should We Go Extinct?:  A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times. He teaches philosophy at Warren Wilson College.
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Fragile Life

Accepting Our Vulnerability

By Todd May

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-43995-2

Contents

Preface, 
[1] Our Lives and Our Vulnerability, 
[2] The Weight of Our Past and the Weight of Our Future, 
[3] Invulnerability, 
[4] From Affirmation to Acceptance, 
[5] Living Vulnerably, 
Notes, 
Suggested Additional Readings, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Our Lives and Our Vulnerability

There are periods of my life when darkness threatens to envelop me. The image I have is that of a Queen of Darkness: powerful, inescapable, shrouded and shrouding. The Queen grips my shoulder. Sometimes it is more than that. Sometimes it is a full, cold embrace. I wish her arrival could somehow be announced ahead of time. There might be a signal, a warning, a note dropped off at my door, or a quick email: "The Queen is on her way." But there isn't. I never even feel the grip itself, the way one does when a friend touches one's back or a flirtatious acquaintance brushes one's forearm with a hand. The cold grip is there, the embrace is wrapped around me, the world is leeched of its brighter hues, all before I recognize what has happened. Nothing has turned to the good, nor will it ever. Or, if it has, that was all in the past. Before me there is left only to soldier on.

I get depressed.

Of course, that is not how I live it: I get depressed. That is not how anybody with periods of depression lives it. The depression is not in here; it is out there. And it is out there not as depression. It is not that others are depressed or that the world is depressed. Rather, it is that the world is structured poorly. It is badly put together. When I was younger, this poor structuring seemed more personal. Things were arranged so that my own life wouldn't work out. I was living a meaningless, mechanical existence, like everyone else. However, I among them had the misfortune to know this, and not only to know it but to feel its meaninglessness deeply. On the subway I would see the empty faces of my fellow riders and wonder how they could not recognize the poverty of their own lives, a poverty that was etched into their features. The old Chinese woman with overfull shopping bags staring straight ahead; the construction worker slumped and asleep after a day too tiring to allow him to enjoy his evening; the businessman holding a New York Times in the classic folded position, looking like every other businessman holding the Times in the classic folded position. It was all so pointless. How did they not see it? And why was it given to me to be tortured by that recognition?

I am older now and realize even in my worse moments that the world is not arrayed against me. And so, when the Queen of Darkness decides to visit, there is no conspiracy against me. The futility is equally distributed. We are all born to no point, live out our days as best we can, and are then dissolved into the earth. It is not just me, and my recognition of this is not a peculiar form of torture. My wife will live in disappointment for having married someone who could not meet her expectations, reasonable though they were. My children will suffer in ways I fear I can foresee but am helpless to prevent. The misery and disappointment and despair and loss and pain that are the lot of so many lives become salient to me, they crowd me, dimming the light of the world until it is difficult to see anything but their shadows.

It is not that, at these times, I cannot go on. There are those, I know, who cannot. The weight of the Queen upon them presses them down into their beds, or stuffs them into a bottle of whiskey, or renders them incommunicado. A friend of mine, who does not call it the Queen of Darkness but the Pit of Doom, finds herself in one or another of those places when she is in the Pit. It is not like that for me. Fortunately, I can keep going. In fact, over the years I have learned to hide our acquaintanceship. Recently, I mentioned to a friend over lunch that I was in such a period, and he commented that I didn't seem any different from how I usually am. So, no, it is not so bad for me as it is for many. And at this moment, as I write, when the Queen is not near — or at least does not feel near — I know that in the end I am lucky. There are much worse depressions that people suffer, and other, worse things that people suffer than periodic bouts of depression. And, more important, I know that my life has many good fortunes, only a few of which I might deserve. On the scale of human suffering, I'm a lightweight.

And yet the Queen does visit me, and then the world darkens. I can deal with it. I do deal with it. But the visits do not cease. I do not recognize their coming; they slip into my days unnoticed. In fact, I often do not recognize the darkness as anything other than the world's truth until the embrace is loosened and the hues brighten again. (I did recognize it at that lunch recently, but the visit had been going on a while by then and the worst had passed.) That's why a notice, some advance warning, would be helpful. But, of course, that's not how it works.

What should I make of this? How should I integrate these visits into my life? How can I think about or take up my life, given that I have these visits, without just thinking of them as periods to be endured? Or maybe that is precisely how I should take them up. Maybe there is nothing else to be done except undergo them alongside the other sufferings that life necessarily throws up before us.

I have a friend whose early life seemed charmed. When she was younger she was a model and a film producer. She came from a family that was very rich. Her one child, a son, was socially conscientious; he worked distributing humanitarian aid in poor countries. It was a life many of us could only dream of. Then her son was killed in an accident in the course of his work. Since his death, she has taken up the mantle of humanitarian aid and has done an extraordinary job of it. Her work is a daily reminder of her son's life, but also of his death.

We all face suffering of one sort or another. Our lives are disrupted; seemingly insuperable obstacles rise up before us; we become bereft of someone we love or someone we need. How do we deal with this? Or, since dealing with it is often a matter of coping at the moment, how can we think about ourselves and our place in the world that will allow us to go on the best way possible? We will see, in this chapter, some of the myriad sources through which most of us are vulnerable to suffering: physical, psychological, moral. And we will see, in the following chapter, two sources of vulnerability that none of us, lucky though we might be, can escape. How do we cope with the vulnerability of our lives, if not simply by facing each crisis as it comes and hoping it all gets better? Is there some way of conceiving a larger picture of our place in the world in which these sufferings, whether or not they can be justified or even make sense, can at least be accorded a place that brings us solace if not peace?

As we will see, there are at least two ways such a picture might be drawn. I have given these two ways names, unlovely ones to be sure. Their unlovely character is even more jarring in that at least one of these pictures — the one I will ultimately reject — strikes me as quite beautiful. This picture, which is common to a number of doctrines, I will call invulnerabilism, and the contrasting one, which seems to me the right one for most of us, I will call vulnerabilism. I do this with some hesitation. Throughout my philosophical career, I have tried to avoid jargon. It seems to me that philosophical writing is often rife with needless obscurity. To be sure, there are times when technical vocabulary of some sort or another is required to make a point. Philosophy can be difficult. However, I believe that the excuse of technical or conceptual necessity is overblown in my field. There are many important things that have been said in philosophy that, if stated with more clarity, would provide interesting food for thought to a wider audience.

In my own commitment to avoid jargon, I have, among my personal maxims, this one: do not make up new words without serious justification. And here, at the very outset, I have coined not one but two new words. My justification for doing so — and only the rest of the book will tell whether this justification is adequate — is that the distinction I am drawing will be easier to bear in mind if I use these labels. It is not that this distinction has not been recognized before. I am surely not the first to draw it. However, the distinction so shapes what is to come that it is handy to have terms, even these homely ones, to mark it. I promise the linguistic coinage will end here.

Invulnerabilism can be associated with such doctrines as Buddhism and Taoism from the East and Stoicism and perhaps Epicureanism from the West. Vulnerabilism, however, is not entirely divorced from these doctrines. It recognizes their insights and seeks to draw on them. Ultimately, though, it will reject a central tenet common to all of these views, or at least all of them in what I will call their official form. Vulnerabilism rejects the idea that we can make ourselves invulnerable to the world's predations. Thus the two names.

We will, as we progress, need to sharpen the idea of invulnerability and with it the idea of vulnerability. Invulnerabilism is not the idea that the world cannot make us suffer at all. After all, if I stub my toe, it will hurt, and no doctrine, however tenaciously embraced, can prevent my feeling the pain of a stubbed toe. But invulnerabilism is not, or at least not primarily, about stubbed toes. It is about how we can relate to our lives such that many of the things that normally make us suffer will not do so. As one of its consequences, it will give a place to stubbed toes such that, although they might hurt, they will hurt less than they would if, say, we thought of our stubbed toes as examples of how life is ultimately pitted against us. But that is a minor consequence of a larger picture of how to take up our lives.

According to the invulnerabilist, we can — and according to many, we should — develop a place of peace in ourselves, a place of detachment that ultimately cannot be touched or shaken. This becomes our core. It is the development of this core which makes us ultimately invulnerable to the misfortunes that befall us. It allows us to secrete a certain distance between us and what happens to us such that, although we might be affected to a certain degree (invulnerabilist views differ on this point), we remain unmoved at the core of our being. We are like spectators of a sentimental movie or fans at a basketball game: we may feel the sadness or excitement of the moment but know that, in the end, it is only a movie, only a game. As the contemporary spiritual writer Eckhart Tolle says, "the more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering." We will discuss invulnerabilist views more specifically and in more depth in chapter 3, but what they all have in common — what makes them all invulnerabilist — is their commitment to the importance of rendering ourselves immune to what preys upon us.

By contrast, the vulnerabilist view I will develop here rejects the idea that we can or should develop such a core. It does not deny the importance of coming to some sort of peace with the world, although perhaps the better term would be truce rather than peace. It embraces some of the insights of invulnerabilist views, insights that allow us to avoid becoming abject before our suffering. Moreover, vulnerabilism can allow that, for some, invulnerabilism might work as a way to live. However, for most of us, not only would we be unable to develop an invulnerable core; we would not want to. Although we might take up aspects of invulnerabilist doctrines, or exercises associated with them, we seek to do so not to secrete a distance between ourselves and what happens to us but instead to be able to handle it a little better. Vulnerabilism concedes — indeed embraces — the idea that we can be shaken to our very foundations. What vulnerabilism looks like begins to become clear near the end of chapter 4 and is more fully developed in the final chapter.

* * *

In order to approach the issue of vulnerability, we will need to canvass different types of vulnerability. But before that, we must confront a prior question. What is a human life like such that it can be vulnerable to suffering in the first place? What makes us capable of anguish at what happens to us? Humans and some other animals are susceptible to sufferings of which many living beings are not. Mice can feel physical pain, but they cannot, like chimpanzees or humans, feel embarrassed. Nor can they feel disappointed — at least they cannot feel disappointed in the failure of a long-term commitment, since mice do not have any long-term commitments. And chimpanzees, for all their genetic proximity to us, cannot feel disappointed in the outcome of a presidential election or the ending of a novel. Although all living beings with a decent neurological apparatus can suffer physically, humans can suffer emotionally in ways that are barred to beings with less developed — or even alternatively developed — brains.

It is not merely the existence of our particular type of brain that matters, though. It is the way we live, a way that requires our type of brain but is not explained simply by pointing to the tops of our heads. To ask about suffering, then, or about the suffering we humans are exposed to, leads us to the prior and more general question of how we live. In philosophy, things are often like this. The process of answering certain questions leads to other, more basic ones. And here at the outset we already encounter this. Understanding how we can suffer requires that we first understand how we live.

We humans live primarily through what we, following the philosopher Bernard Williams, might call projects, to which we are committed with deeper or shallower engagement. A project is a set or group of activities that unfold over time, usually (but not always) in a progressive order. We do projects, we are involved in projects, and we shape our lives through the projects we are involved in.

To see this, let's look quickly at a few examples and then linger over a couple of others. Eating a good meal at a restaurant is not a project, but learning to be a chef is. Watching a sporting event on television is not a project, but coaching is — and it may involve, as one of its activities, watching game tape or a sporting event on television. Jumping into the water to cool off on a hot summer's day is not a project, but developing oneself as a swimmer is.

What projects have in common is that they unfold over time. Moreover, they often evolve over the time that they are unfolding. Coaches develop their knowledge of the game, their ability to see what is going on in their sport, and their capacity to assess the skills of their players. Swimmers become more conversant with the water; they articulate their bodies in a more efficient fashion. Chefs learn what spices go with what ingredients and can eventually expand their repertoire to incorporate different spices and ingredients in new combinations.

But it isn't just these types of activities, which are just hobbies for most of us, that are projects in this sense. Friendship and love relationships are also projects. They are in general more important ones, what Williams calls "ground projects" or what I will often call central projects. Williams notes that "a man may have, for a lot of his life or even just for some part of it, a ground project or set of projects which are closely related to his existence and which to a significant degree give a meaning to his life." These projects engage us at a deeper level than our hobbies do. They are woven into our sense of who we are and what we are about. The loss of a close friendship or a love relationship is experienced as a loss of some part of oneself. And what goes for these relationships also goes for a good career or a long-term engagement with a social justice movement or involvement with a church. It can go for something like a commitment to youth sports, in which case coaching becomes more than a hobby and instead part of who the person is. In all of these cases, our sense of self is tied up with our projects. We should think of these kinds of projects as more than just discrete sets of activities or engagements that we happen to find ourselves doing. Of course there are those kinds of projects as well, but central projects are more significant, bound up with who we are and the sense of meaningfulness our lives have.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 022643995X
• ISBN 13: 9780226439952
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 232