Questions NOV 25

 Concluding 4,000 Weeks... See audio review link for Dec. 2 exam below... Final draft of final report blogpost due Dec.5.  Don't forget to add links etc.*

1. Have you found Burkeman's message of life's finitude, brevity, and imperfectability helpful, in thinking about what it might mean to live a happy, purposeful, meaningful, good life? How would you summarize that message and its practical application to your life? 
2. Looking back over all our texts (Happiness: A Very Short Introduction, Epicurus, The Good Life, Against Happiness, 4,000 Weeks) what total message do you take away from the course? And what other texts would you recommend we read next time this course is offered?
3. What does it mean to "enter space and time completely"? 218 Have you? Will you?
4. How would you answer any of Burkeman's Five Questions? 220-27
5. What do you think of Jung's advice to Frau V.? 227-8
6. Do you agree with Burkeman's definition of hope? 230 Does it sound to much like resignation? Or do you define hope as I do: modest confidence that our efforts to ameliorate the human condition may not be wholly futile? Or do you propose a different definition?
7. Will you commit to Orwell's perspective? Do you resolve to enjoy your life, come what may? 234
8. What's your answer to Cousin Mary's question at the end of The Summer Day? 
9. Which of Burkeman's Ten Tools do you, or will you, use?v 235-45. Do you have any better ones?

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*How to add links, embed videos etc. in final report posts (post early drafts at will, final draft due Dec.10)--

To insert links:
1. Highlight a word or phrase in your text
2. Click on the link icon
3. Paste the URL address of the site or passage you want to link to
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Videos: in Blogger, after clicking on "New Post"--
1. Copy the URL of the video you want to share.
2. Click on "More options" on the far right of the toolbar above, then Insert Video icon (3d from left)
3. Select YouTube
4. Select Search 5. Paste the URL & Select it
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To insert graphics, either just copy-&-paste... OR, click on the "insert image" icon (to the right of the link icon, to the left of the "insert video" icon) and select the appropriate option
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To embed Google Books pages:
1. Find the book you want to embed.
2. Select Preview
3. Select (click on) the page you want to embed.
4. Click More Actions (the three vertical dots in the upper right)
5. Select Embed (unless you just want to link the page)
6. Copy the code
7. In edit mode on blogger, select the pen icon in the upper left and click on HTML view
8. Paste the code
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Familiarize yourself with the edit icons in the drop-down menu (link, insert image, insert video, etc.) Always make sure, after you Publish, that the formatting is correct on the blogsite. If not, click More options (the three horizontal dots in the upper right) and then Clear Formatting on the far right (the T with a diagonal slash).

What’s gloriously possible: Burkeman’s meliorism

What Oliver Burkeman calls "hope," in his Afterword, I would call wishful or delusional thinking. Whatever you call it, he's right: give it up. Giving up delusions of personal infinitude, he concludes,

"kills the fear-driven, control-chasing, ego-dominated version of you—the one who cares intensely about what others think of you, about not disappointing anyone or stepping too far out of line, in case the people in charge find some way to punish you for it later… the "you" that remains is more alive than before. More ready for action, but also more joyful, because it turns out that when you're open enough to confront how things really are, you're open enough to let all the good things in more fully, too, on their own terms, instead of trying to use them to bolster your need to know that everything will turn out fine. You get to appreciate life in the droll spirit of George Orwell, on a stroll through a war-dazed London in early 1946, watching kestrels darting above the grim shadows of the gasworks, and tadpoles dancing in roadside streams, and later writing of the experience: "Spring is here, even in London N1, and they can't stop you enjoying it."

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn't a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It's a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible—the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you're officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what's gloriously possible instead."

— Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

https://a.co/aV7pMQz 

“Hope is a precondition of what matters”

Kieran Setiya, like Oliver Burkeman, calls for "acknowledgment and close reading of the lives we have" as the prerequisite of genuine and not merely delusional hope--the sort of hope that, as Rebecca Solnit points out, needs to act and not just lazily wish for a winning lottery ticket. I highly recommend Setiya's Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help...

"…It is much easier to say why despair is bad than why hope is good. We despair when things are hopeless, but we remain attached to them. "The relationship is over; she is gone forever," cries the jilted lover. The terminal patient weeps: "There is no cure." What they feel is grief or something like it. The pain of passion for a possibility that has died...

Hope coexists with quiescence. If there's courage in hoping, it's the courage to face the fear of disappointment that hope creates. When things turn out badly, hope is more harrowing than despair.

So Hesiod has a point. Hope can be deceptive, docile, daunting. Why celebrate its role in life? In a book she wrote in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the writer and activist Rebecca Solnit rose to hope's defense: "Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky," she wrote. Instead,

hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

The problem is that hope can be like clutching a lottery ticket and it needn't shove you out the door: as I know too well, you can hope intently as you stretch out on the sofa watching the news. The call for action comes from somewhere else.

Solnit may be right that action is impossible without hope: you cannot strive for what you care about, when success is not assured, without hoping to succeed or at least make progress. This is where the myth of hope's value starts. Hope is a precondition of what matters: the pursuit of meaningful change…"

...

This is how we should approach life’s hardships, finding possibility where we can: the possibility of flourishing with disability or disease, of finding one’s way through loneliness, failure, grief. The question, then, is not whether to hope but what we should hope for. In the spirit of this book, the answer’s not an ideal life. What we need is acknowledgment and close reading of the lives we have… For who are we? Not just the living but humankind, and there is hope for humanity, and so for us… Other concepts we should leave behind: the concept of the best life as a guideline or a goal, of being happy as the human good, of self-interest divorced from the good of others… Human life is not inevitably absurd; there is room for hope.

— Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way by Kieran Setiya

“Life Is Hard” pushes back against many platitudes of contemporary American self-improvement culture. Setiya is no friend to positive thinking — at best, it requires self-deception, and at worst, such glass-half-full optimism can be cruel to those whose pain we refuse to recognize. He describes a situation many of us have experienced: We tell someone about an illness or a fight we had; they try to convince us not to worry so much, or to focus on the bright side. Worse still, they might tell us that “everything happens for a reason.” This grotesque bromide is, explains Setiya, “theodicy,” an attempt to justify suffering as part of God’s plan. The problem is not that it cannot be true — theologians can extend divine providence to anything, even childhood leukemia — but that such thinking can easily serve as an excuse to avoid compassion.

Another theory Setiya challenges is the idea that happiness should be life’s primary pursuit. Instead, he argues that we should try to live well within our limits, even if this sometimes means acknowledging difficult truths. Happiness is a matter of definition; Setiya cites Tal Ben-Shahar, the Harvard professor and psychologist who writes about not only happiness but also the importance of accepting reality. Plato, too, he reminds us, held that true happiness lies in recognizing the lies of ordinary life, famously imagined as a cave filled with shadows. If you really consider “happiness” in its everyday sense — a feeling of contentment and pleasure — its desirability is complicated; we can certainly be made to feel good by ignoring injustice, wars, climate change or the hardships of aging. But we cannot live meaningfully that way... 

And what does living well mean in practice? To Setiya, it lies in embracing one of the many possible “good-enough lives” instead of aching for a perfect one. Setiya’s liveliest writing is on the subject of infirmity, no doubt because of the chronic pain he has suffered for years...

The golden thread running through “Life Is Hard” is Setiya’s belief in the value of well-directed attention. Pain, as much as we wish to avoid it, forces us to remember that we are indelibly connected to our bodies. Ideally, it also helps us imagine what it is like to inhabit the bodies of others, imbuing us with “presumptive compassion for everyone else.” By cultivating our sensitivity to ourselves and to others, we escape another destructive modern myth: that we are separate from other people, and that we can live well without caring for them...

“Life Is Hard” is a humane consolation for challenging times. Reading it is like speaking with a thoughtful friend who never tells you to cheer up, but, by offering gentle companionship and a change of perspective, makes you feel better anyway. Irina Dumitrescu