Puzzling Existence

In ethics class this week, we’ve been talking about hedonism as an ethical theory - a lifestyle perhaps? Or at the least, a lens through which to see the world.  By and large, hedonism is an entirely selfish approach to ethical decision-making. Yet it seems we all do it. We all make decisions based on our own happiness, with little to no regard for how our actions will affect those around us.  Desire: it’s literally not something that can ever be fulfilled. The very nature of desire is that you want more. Yet we combine this with satisfaction. We believe, somehow, that we can fulfill our desires and be satisfied, that when we get what we want, we will want no more, that we will be happy, and fulfilled, and life will be complete.  That’s not how it works, is it? My mother-in-law is at the end of her life. She has had cancer several times and it’s returned. She has macular degeneration. She stopped caring for herself but she did not tell anyone just how much help she ...

The unexamined life is not worth living - I suppose any first year philosophy student has heard that one, right? Even so, I come back to it, perhaps because I heard it as an impressionable first year philosophy student many years ago. At 20, what do you have to even examine? Life has seemingly just begun and will continue for the foreseeable future.  That's not always true, though, is it? My husband lost a dear friend recently. He was 38.  Something like 700,000 people just in the U.S. have died in the last year and a half from the coronavirus. They have been young and old and everything in between.  Puzzles have been one constant in recent times. I found early in the pandemic that setting the pieces on the table, arranging them by color or shapes gave me a sense of direction and a way to order the chaos that was all around. Puzzles came to take on a greater significance. It’s hard to explain - maybe they always had this significance and I just never noticed it befor...

  When I was a teenager, I became a “vegetarian” out of love for animals - pop tarts & Mac & Cheese were my staples through college, with black beans & pizza from time to time. About seven years ago, I was teaching an ethics class and we had this exact discussion. As it turns out, I could not think of any ways to justify eating meat, so just like that, I became a vegetarian, this time one who also eats vegetables.  The first problem we encounter is Descartes. He gave us a duality that is challenging to escape. If we (humans) are bodies and minds, that makes us better. We can justify our treatment of animals because they are just bodies. Even Kant makes this argument: “But so far as animals are concerned, we have no direct duties. Animals are not self-conscious and are there merely as a means to an end. That end is man.” He does go on, however, to say that the way we treat animals is a mirror to our treatment of humans. The way we treat those who are seemingly in...

Supposing truth is a woman — what then? So begins Nietzsche’s exploration of truth in Beyond Good and Evil . I have always suspected that this line has more to do with Nietzsche’s disdain for women but reading it again, I wonder. Does it have more to do with his disdain for truth? Hear me out. The remainder of the preface to this work lambasts philosophers attempts at dogmatism. That philosophers have searched for truth in a way that is absolute, like Plato’s attempt to set reality “out there” in the world of the Forms. Nietzsche tells us in this very opening paragraph, “. . . all dogmatism is dying.” He later tells, somewhat dogmatically it might be worth noting, that dogmatic philosophy like the Vedanta doctrine or Platonic philosophy is a mask.   I’ve thought about masks a lot over the last year. We’ve been wearing literal masks as a layer of protection against a mysterious and quite deadly virus. It’s stifled our freedom, at least that’s the argument. What exactly is that free...