Shimon Edelman - Life, Death, and Other Inconvenient Truths: A Realists View of the Human Condition

Shimon Edelman

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2020 Shimon Edelman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Edelman, Shimon, author.

Title: Life, death, and other inconvenient truths : a realists view of the human condition / Shimon Edelman.

Description: Cambridge : The MIT Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020002123 | ISBN 9780262044356 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Life.

Classification: LCC BD431 .E2155 2020 | DDC 128dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002123

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d_r0

To my readers

pedo mellon a minnospeak friend and enter

The native hue of resolution. The pale cast of thought. And lose the name of action.

Pelf and place. A small goat.

Possession. What you know you dont know can hurt you. Whatme worry? Yes.

The imminence of a revelation. Evolutionary bait and switch. Between the world and a grain of sand. The pathos of things. The seven sad senses of beauty.

Be good. Plan B. Other ways to be.

The dark forest. A spotlight shines on an enigma. Back in the forest.

The Tempest in a teapot. The insubstantial pageant. We are such stuff as dreams are made on. The splendor and the misery.

The tragic sense of life. The Switch. Still The Switch. Only in silence the word.

To em or not to em. Us and Them. From ordinary household objects.

Einstein meets the Buddha. Enter Borges.

The mountains and the monsoon. A universal history of iniquity. Definitely maybe.

A bit of Talmudic existentialism. I think, therefore I ache. The mindfulness ruse.

Where the wild things are. True grit. We have seen the enemy.

Complications. Misapprehension. Chance. Necessity. Implications.

Machineries of joy and sorrow. Happiness fast and slow. The dark side of happiness.

No home. No homeland. No rest. No end.

The tentacles of intent. The Ring of Fire. Gaming the Game. Big Two-Hearted River.

What a lovely way to burn. Che cosa e amor. Tuqburni.

Unreasonable effectiveness. Ineffectiveness of reason. But time and chance happeneth to them all.

The waters of Naihe. Some work of noble note. Across the universe. The Time Warp again. All memory and fate.

Silentio Dei. On the genealogy of morals. Human, all too human. Away from Omelas.

Comfortably numb. Catabasis. Cassandras golden years. Volver.

Be good. Be you. Be back.

Use your illusion. Umwelten. How things really are.

The tools of the trade. A shining city on the hill. Into the catacombs. News from Nowhere.

The great chains of being. The invisible hand. Beyond Freedom and Dignity.

Cui bono? Double double jeopardy. UBI bene?

Nothing, really? The ledger. Fools and heroes.

A rose by any other name. Hanging onto the tigers tail. The heart of a heartless world. Pride and prejudice.

Truth to power. The two towers. Power-proofing science.

Human, all too human. An eclipse of common sense. The wages of folly. Worse than a fool. The stupidity of crowds. The unholy trinity.

Mindsets. Varieties. Mechanisms. Options.

Comfortably numb. The fiery sword. Cura te ipsum.

Transitional. Treacherous. Transgressional.

The sandstorm. Faster, slower, true. The tyranny of now. The arrow of time.

A melancholy pearl. Ministries of information. Into the well.

A room with a view. After Babel. Blowing in the wind.

Another difficult dilemma. Silver spoon or not. Choice and chance. Janus introversus.

Just dropped in (to see what condition my condition was in)

tat tvam asi

(thou art that [too])

Uddalaka (to his son vetaketu), Chandogya Upanishad

Thou thyself art the subject of my discourse.

Whateer men do, vows, fears, in ire, in sport

Joys, wandrings are the sum of my report

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

... for those who want to learn one of the ways to make a soul. To them, to the children I say: Listen! Avoid magic! Be aware!

Ursula K. Le Guin, Solitude

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I had written a book that bore the title The Happiness of Pursuit. To this, the publisher added the subtitle What neuroscience can teach us about the good life. It was implied that appealing to neuroscience would help my opus stand out from the spate of self-help books on happinessfair enough, although my take had more to do with how and what brains compute than with the neuro angle, which is about what theyre made of.

It was the good life bit, though, that came to haunt me, as I might have expected but did not. For one thing, during live interviews, I would get call-ins from people who described their life as a mess and wanted to be told how to be happy. As is often the case with those who have both privilege and luck, I was slow to realize that people who have little of either are kept too busy by their daily struggle and do not care much for the science of happinessunless perhaps it offers a simple, surefire prescription for being happy. And although my book did include a seven-word recipe for happiness that echoed its title, I could no longer pretend that it was a match for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

This realization pushed me to try and redress what I eventually perceived as a serious mistake that I had committed in putting that book together: my glossing over the vast darker tracts of human nature and human affairs. Because focusing on the negative would amount to committing another mistake, in this book I tried to step back from both happiness and unhappiness as such and to examine instead some of the general parameters that shape our existence. To be sure, HAPPINESS does have a short chapter all of its own, but so do thirty-seven other categories of human experience: in alphabetical order, from ACTION and AMBITION , via LANGUAGE and LOVE , to WAR and YOUTH (throughout the text, I use small capitals to highlight chapter names).

This book, then, is a kind of reference volume, a partial one for sure, for making sense of the human world and of the hard work of human soul-making, or simply life. The entries are cross-referenced and contain quite a few notes and pointers to primary sources, all collected at the end of the book. Each chapter ends with a list of films, music, stories, and placesany product of human endeavor or feature of natural environment that may help illuminate its theme.

No synthesis is offered for the list of inconvenient TRUTHS collected here, for the simple reason that there isntnor can there bea single underlying cause that makes life what it is. If this book has a central thesis, its one that is neither a revelation, nor a secret: the human condition has much room for improvement. Working out possible ways of improving it is left as an exercise for the reader.