The Human Predicament

What is the quality of our life? And it's no surprise that pessimists answer this in quite a grim way.

As we heard at the end of the last episode, David Benatar, the South African philosopher, thinks that the human condition is more accurately understood as the human predicament.

Are the pessimists right, though, or do we need to look on the bright side? In this episode, we'll be exploring what pessimists thought about the quality of our lives, and present a case for why our lives are actually much worse than people tend to think.

So without further ado, let's begin.

And it's with these features that I wanna begin our investigation into the quality of our lives.

The first of these features is that suffering and dissatisfaction are the default mode of life.

As David Benatar puts it in his Human Predicament, "We constantly have to expend effort to ward off suffering, and without putting in this effort, suffering and dissatisfaction come to us all too easily because they are the default." I find it useful to picture a kind of center of gravity that each of us have as sentient beings.

It relentlessly pulls us towards a state of suffering and dissatisfaction, and left unchecked, it will pull us into debilitating suffering and eventually death.

The third attempt to define pessimism that I wanna have a look at is one by South African philosopher David Benatar, who, as I said in the introduction, I'll be interviewing in episode eight.

But in his book, The Human Predicament, Benatar gives an account of how he understands pessimism.

He writes that pessimism is any view of the facts or an evaluation thereof that depicts some element of the human condition in negative terms.

So interestingly here, Benatar understands pessimism in quite a different way.

It is only that the answers are generally unpalatable.

There is no great mystery, but there is plenty of horror.

It is for this reason that I think that the human condition is most accurately described as the human predicament." Thanks again for listening, and remember, could be worse, could be raining.

[thunder] [gentle music]