The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions 1st Edition by David Benatar (PDF)

Description

Are our lives meaningful, or meaningless? Is our inevitable death a bad thing? Would immortality be an improvement? Would it be better, all things considered, to hasten our deaths by suicide? Many people ask these big questions — and some people are plagued by them. Surprisingly, analytic philosophers have said relatively little about these important questions about the meaning of life. When they have tackled the big questions, they have tended, like popular writers, to offer comforting, optimistic answers. The Human Predicament invites readers to take a clear-eyed and unfettered view of the human condition.David Benatar here offers a substantial, but not unmitigated, pessimism about the central questions of human existence. He argues that while our lives can have some meaning, we are ultimately the insignificant beings that we fear we might be. He maintains that the quality of life, although less bad for some than for others, leaves much to be desired in even the best cases. Worse, death is generally not a solution; in fact, it exacerbates rather than mitigates our cosmic meaninglessness. While it can release us from suffering, it imposes another cost – annihilation. This state of affairs has nuanced implications for how we should think about many things, including immortality and suicide, and how we should think about the possibility of deeper meaning in our lives. Ultimately, this thoughtful, provocative, and deeply candid treatment of life’s big questions will interest anyone who has contemplated why we are here, and what the answer means for how we should live.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I hope David Benatar continues to write books. Having read The Human Predicament (THP), it’s hard for me to imagine what a follow-up project would look like. THP is one of those works that reads as a definitive statement of a thinker’s main ideas. And the topics Benatar discusses – which essentially revolve around the (un-)reality, extent, and practical significance of life’s meaningfulness, worthwhileness, and burdensome character – come close to exhausting the most fundamental concerns of any sensitive and philosophically inclined person. (How close? That depends, say, on how far one agrees with Camus’s opening to The Myth of Sisyphus. It is perhaps more urgent to get straight on the question of suicide, than to adjudicate between Aristotle’s and Kant’s accounts of the categories.)Many readers of THP should already be familiar with Benatar as an advocate of antinatalism, a view which maintains that, for any being capable of suffering harm, it is a misfortune to have come into existence, and moreover, as a consequence, we should never choose to procreate.Benatar discusses antinatalism and its implications in an earlier book called Better Never to Have Been (BNTHB), and some of the discussion is reiterated in THP. To my mind, antinatalism receives more interesting treatment in THP, because THP emphasizes the more interesting aspect of antinatalism: the view that life is an affliction (to plagiarize Edgar Saltus) – or simply, pessimism. BNTHB, in contrast, spends more time on the anti-procreative aspect of antinatalism, to the point of asking whether abortion should be regarded as morally obligatory (and not merely permissible), and whether the ideal population size is zero; these, even when handled professionally, can be little more than philosophically interesting issues which nevertheless reinforce people’s image of philosophy itself as juvenile and pointless.But upon finishing THP, I felt that pessimism had gained a respectable voice, as a consequence of both the book’s substance and its style.Benatar’s writing is mostly clear, sober, and dispassionate, helpfully organized, professional but conversational, devoid of stuffiness and excessive jargon. It isn’t relentlessly depressing; most of what he writes (as with much philosophical literature) is intended to develop, clarify, and support his arguments – but it isn’t too much of a chore to read. And not all of it reads like an academic article: There is some unobtrusive humor (see, e.g., the “atheist T-shirt”). There’s a glimpse of nature’s jaw-dropping cruelty, for which Benatar borrows another author’s description of some predatory animals in the act of killing. And finally, the discussion of suicide at times seems consciously “restrained,” by which I mean that I could picture Benatar struggling not to be overtaken by righteous anger against his more callous and thoughtless opponents (who would have it that suicide, with few if any exceptions, is “obviously” wrong, irrational, cowardly, etc.). Otherwise Benatar maintains an even tone, and the book – and the credibility of pessimism itself – benefit from it; it should accordingly be difficult for his opponent to ridicule or pathologize his position, or write it off as a mere eccentricity.As for the substance, Benatar’s key conclusions may be identified as follows: (1) Human life can, fortunately, be meaningful, but only in limited, qualified ways: Our lives can mean something (i.e., can make a valuable difference) to other humans, but rarely to society at large, and never to the universe. (2) Our cosmic meaninglessness is regrettable. (3) Most people greatly overestimate the quality of their lives. (4) Life is actually quite bad overall. (5) Death, too, is quite bad, and not merely because it deprives us of agreeable future experiences; it is intrinsically bad for us to be annihilated. (6) Although immortality could be very bad, it could instead under certain conditions be very good; and this makes our mortality regrettable. (7) Suicide, while tragic, is not always immoral or irrational; it is conceivable for a sane individual to judge her suicide as the most warranted response to her (or our) condition, and morality and compassion oblige us to respect the rights of such persons to make such decisions. (8) We are morally obligated not to procreate. (9) Our limited sources of meaning (e.g. among family, friends, and the community) may be welcomed as “distractions” from the harsh realities of the human situation.I won’t elaborate on these here; nor will I mention which of these conclusions are, to my mind, supported more or less persuasively, or which should be rejected in favor of something else. I see those as tasks to be undertaken throughout one’s life. I’m grateful to Benatar for the clarity and stimulation, and for demonstrating about as well as one can nowadays that pessimism can be a respectable philosophical outlook.Now, some readers will regard Benatar’s treatment of these perennial concerns as a tad breezy and superficial. To them (and to anyone interested in philosophical pessimism) I would suggest looking into Frederick Beiser’s Weltschmerz for a taste of the great pessimism controversy of 19th-century German philosophy. The participants in that controversy supply some insights and alternative perspectives that don’t receive treatment in THP – and Beiser recreates them in summary form. (I only wish there were more English translations of the philosophers Beiser discusses.) Also, I am much less acquainted with Eastern philosophy, but I fully expect an eventual research into, say, Buddhism to enhance my understanding of pessimism.

⭐I read this book after reading the recent New Yorker article on Mr Benatar. As a life-long atheist, I thought I had the human condition figured out. Not exactly, it turns out. Sam Harris interviewed Charles Murray recently and called the podcast, *Forbidden Knowledge.* I believe if he reads this book he will retitle that, *Forbidden Topic* because this book and this book alone deserves there title, *Forbidden Knowledge.* You will need a stiff drink and a couple episodes of Dancing With the Stars after this.I will now read his more recent book, specifically on *anti-natalism* if only to see how he envisions the end of the human race if no more children were born.Although dry at times, I did not take Mr Benatar’s advice and skip any parts even though I’m not used to reading philosophy. This is a testiment to the simple beauty of his idea and their expression.

⭐I chose 5 stars because Benatar is an analytic philosopher who successfully wrote in a broad manner that could be easily digested by any lay reader. Much of what he has to say is pure common sense to any atheist who doesn’t entertain fanciful notions of immortality or speculative metaphysics like the simulation hypothesis. It’s down to earth and sympathetic to the majority of humanity. In my opinion, the weaknesses in some of his arguments can be linked to his belief in intrinsic values. Nevertheless, much of what he says can be salvaged without holding that belief. The annihilation argument against suicide seemed to be the weakest area, maybe due to his belief in intrinsic values. The deprivation argument makes more sense and is a frequent argument in many philosophy books. His solution to our predicament is to keep busy with project. This is very similar to Peter Wessel Zapffe, who elaborated in more detail on the various ways we deal with our predicament. However, I wonder how Benatar interprets Schopenhauer’s solution of asceticism. In Benatar’s conclusion chapter he discourages us against a lifetime of reflecting on our predicament, which is very similar to some varieties on asceticism.

⭐As a Christian, I profoundly disagree with Benatar. This is a distinctly atheistic book, including arguments against the existence of God that pull no punches. Yet, I listen to Benatar with gratitude and respect. While I disagree with him on God’s existence, and with his entire worldview, I find his reasoning admirable and thoroughly consistent. I can easily see the world from his vantage point, and if I were an atheist, Benatar would be my champion. This is exactly the kind of philosophy I am most interested in, and I would recommend this book to the emotionally and mentally stable who are interested in life’s biggest questions: atheist and theist alike.Benatar’s thinking and writing is clear, incisive, accessible, and moving, his subject matter and perspective harrowing. Pessimistic philosophy has been shrouded by the dense and often obscure literary presentations of continental philosophers. Benatar is analytic philosopher who brings pessimistic arguments to bear with striking clarity. My only disappointment with this book is that Benatar does not bring the considerable empirical data to bear, preferring to make general statements and make broad citations rather than drowning his writing with citations of empirical support. I would not recommend this book to everyone. In many ways it is a dangerous book, but to the right people that may commend it even more.

⭐In this short book (I read it in a couple of days), Benatar lucidly and trenchantly sets out the case for philosophical pessimism, that is, for the thesis that, objectively speaking, all human lives are awful. His argument is that even the most fortunate life comes to less than zero on a scale of positive value or negative disvalue. As a result, it would have been better if we had never been born.One might begin by wondering why Benatar, and those he persuades, do not respond by committing suicide, but to this objection Benatar has a ready answer. Life is awful, but death is awful as well. In fact, death is one of the jaws of the vice (the other being the poor quality of human life) between which we are squeezed and which constitutes the human predicament. This is what makes human life a predicament – there is no way of avoiding the awfulness of our condition, not even through death, which simply constitutes one half of how awful human life is. The only way we could have avoided our deaths is to not have been born, but that option is not one which is available to any human being who has ever lived, since we were all brought into existence by our parents, not by ourselves.But why is death thought to be so awful? Benatar argues that it is awful for two reasons. Firstly, he agrees with Nagel’s point that death is awful because it deprives us of the goods we could obtain through further life. However, it seems to me that this particular argument is not available to Benatar, given what he says about the low quality of human life. Though a continuation of human life might contain some goods, it will, according to Benatar, have a preponderance of negative experiences. Under such conditions, whilst death will deprive us of some goods, it will also liberate us from far greater ills. Thus suicide seems the sensible thing to do overall.It is not surprising, therefore, that Benatar has a second argument for the awfulness of death, namely that death involves annihilation, and that annihilation is itself something awful quite apart from its depriving us of the goods of life. I have two problems with this. First, his arguments are not conclusive, and don’t even strike me as persuasive. For example, he maintains that if we had the choice between, on the one hand, putting off a fixed quantity of goods of life by going into a coma and returning to consciousness at a later point to have them before dying, and on the other hand, having those goods immediately and then dying, then “many people” (p. 106) would choose the former alternative, so as to postpone their annihilation. This might be so, but if the two sets of experiences of the goods of life were truly identical for the subject, except that the first set was preceded by a coma, then I cannot see that we could rationally prefer either to the other. Our preference for the former alternative is thus probably motivated by our introducing extraneous considerations, e.g. that living the remainder of our lives in the far future might be more interesting, etc. But in such a case the two sets of goods are not identical.A second argument Benatar adduces concerns valuable objects. If it is bad to damage a valuable object, such as the Mona Lisa, or the Grand Canyon, then it is surely bad to annihilate it. This argument, besides equating aesthetic value with the value of a person’s life, is inconsistent with the preceding discussion, where Benatar has argued that human life does not have positive value, and thus is, in this sense, quite unlike the Mona Lisa or the Grand Canyon.A point that Benatar does not notice is that if annihilation is an evil in itself, then arguably simply being alive must be a corresponding good. He writes “we have an interest not only in the future goods we would have if we continued living, but also an interest in continued existence itself. Death can deprive us of the goods and also thwart the interest in continued existence.” (p. 103) But if we have an ‘interest’ in continued existence itself, then the continued fulfilment of that interest must be placed in the scales when judging the value of life – but Benatar does not take this into consideration when he is judging the value of life (as opposed to the awfulness of death).There is, though, a second problem with Benatar’s account of the awfulness of death. And that is that however awful annihilation might be, even if it is worse than the continuation of our wretched lives (and presumably he must think it is normally worse than our lives for it to be reasonable for us to go on living), the choice we have is not between continuing with our lives and avoiding death, on the one hand, and suicide, on the other. For in fact, though death can be *postponed* by our not committing suicide, it cannot be avoided. Thus our choice is simply whether to live a greater or lesser amount of a life whose value is less than zero on the scale of value – in either case we shall still be annihilated. How then can we rationally prefer to postpone our annihilation when doing so only prolongs our wretched lives? The only response I can think to this is that it might be maintained that to die sooner rather than later increases the total amount of time during which someone is dead, and that this is worse for the subject who dies. But since we are all dead for eternity, no matter when we die, it seems that we are all dead for exactly the same amount of time. Perhaps it might be maintained that nevertheless at any one time, those who have died earlier have been dead for longer. But do we really think that someone who died (say) 2000 years ago has suffered twice as bad a fate as someone who died 1000 years ago? This seems very odd. Which brings me back to the point that since death is unavoidable, Benatar has supplied us with no reason why we should postpone it if the only result of so doing is that we endure more of a life that is so bad that it would have been better if we had never been born.Well, I could go on with my criticisms, but I shan’t go into every detail of the book. The chapter on the poor quality of human life contains a list of woes, but many of them (the misery of burns victims and quadriplegics, for example) do nothing whatever to establish his thesis, since they are far from universal experiences. Remember that his thesis is not that some people have wretched lives, or even that many have wretched lives, but that every human who has ever lived has a quality of life that adds up to less than zero. If he is to establish this point, then the only things that are relevant are negative experiences that are universal to humanity (presuming there are any).Despite everything the author says, I remain rather glad that I was born, and one of the reasons why I am glad that I was born is that as a result I can read excellent, lucid and thought-provoking volumes of philosophy, such as Benatar’s.

⭐Robert Macfarlane says that maybe once or twice in your life you will “encounter an idea so powerful in its implications that it unsettles the ground you walk on”, and this describes what this book was for me. This book argues that while there is some meaning in life, it is limited; while life is worth continuing, most of the time, it is never worth starting; and that is because the evil in life outweighs the good, despite the psychological biases that try to convince us otherwise. His sophisticated arguments in support of this philosophical pessimism rang very powerfully true to my experience and observation of the world, and none of the counter-arguments I’ve read appear to me very convincing — though I wish they did. In fact, that I can’t pretend not to think Benatar is right even though I wish I could only strengthens my conviction.In the final chapter of this dark book, Benatar responsibly addresses the question of how you should proceed in life with this worldview. He puts forth a “pragmatic pessimism” whereby you distract yourself from but refuse to deny the human predicament by pursuing those things in which you can find some terrestrial meaning. This — other than refusing to condemn any(more) beings to the tragedy of existence — is realistically the most you can do with this dark knowledge, but I do wish Benatar had tried harder to leave his readers with consolation, in the way other pessimists do. For example, Samuel Beckett infuses his pessimism with a tragic sense of humour. Thankfully, another contemporary pessimist, Mara van der Lugt, has written a book called Dark Matters in which she defends a “hopeful pessimism”. If, like me, Benatar’s book darkened your spirits because you think he’s right, then I recommend reading Dark Matters next.

⭐This book is not only pessimistic but potentially dangerous. I have been reading it with a philosophy group which I think mitigates its worst features. For Benatar, life is not worth living. His analysis is that life is “awful” – indeed, far more awful than most people realise – and that death is worse. He believes it is better not to have been born and that we should not bring children into the world. Although he argues against suicide, it would not surprise me to discover that this book has led some people in that direction; it should not be read by anyone who is depressed.Benatar is an atheist who seems to be searching for cosmic meaning for his life, which he argues does not exist. He seems to take little pleasure in life’s joys and one has to wonder what has led him to this sad and depressive position. He apparently keeps his private life very private so it’s not really possible to posit reasons for his pessimism, other than those he puts in the book. However, these arguments are not convincingly made, especially for those of us who see life as a gift and a blessing.

⭐I really like this book. It’s thought provoking, clearly written, logical, concise and the subject-matter is challenging both emotionally and intellectually. Though it should come with a bit of a health warning as at the end of the day it is a highly pessimistic book. I believe Benatar when he says he isn’t depressed. In my view the writing doesn’t come across as that of a depressed person. On the contrary he seems to offer an emotionally detached and highly analytical assessment of the human condition. However, if you are depressed or have a depressive personality I wouldn’t recommend this book.My one criticism of it is that Benatar seems to often default to a conclusion of “therefore X must be bad” where he seems to be using “bad” in an absolute sense. For example, a typical line of reasoning runs as follows: we all agree that not being alive is worse than being alive therefore having to live in the knowledge that one day you won’t be alive is a “bad” in this absolute sense. There seems to be a failure to acknowledge that the extent to which this is “a bad”, as Benatar has it, is very highly dependent on the individuals psychological well-being. For some individuals it can be highly motivating for them. For others it can cause them to commit suicide.I may not agree with everything in it at all but this is still a really great book. Highly recommend.

⭐Not complete or concise by any means but lots of food for thought. The discussion between Benatar and Jordan Peterson on YouTube is also well worth listening to.

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