Overview

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.

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9780190633813

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Reviews

What thinking person doesn't care about the (possible) meaning of life, the quality of human life, the nature and disvalue of death, the option of suicide, and many other similar topics? David Benatar addresses these engaging and important topics along with many others. The book is well-argued and extremely well-written. I was struck by the sense that the quality was about as high as any philosophy I can remember reading: short, clear sentences, with not a word wasted or misplaced. Even someone who is sunnier in outlook than Benatar, yet willing to take his arguments seriously, may end up finding that he or she agrees with most of them in this volume. I do not see the human predicament as pessimistically as David Benatar does; but I found myself disagreeing less than I expected to - for example, in his sensitive and probing discussion of suicide. * David DeGrazia, George Washington University *

What thinking person doesn't care about the (possible) meaning and quality of life, the nature and disvalue of death, and the option of suicide? David Benatar addresses these and other engaging and important topics in this well-argued book. The quality of the writing is about as high as any philosophy I can remember reading: short, clear sentences, with not a word wasted or misplaced. I do not see the human predicament as pessimistically as David Benatar does; but I found myself disagreeing less than I expected to -- for example, in his sensitive and probing discussion of suicide. --David DeGrazia, George Washington University David Benatar's new book, The Human Predicament, offers justifiably pessimistic analyses of some of the most interesting and important issues of human existence, including birth, suffering, death, and suicide. Benatar's analyses are as beautifully crafted and written as they are scholarly and thoughtful. The Human Predicament is a grand work of philosophy, but contains important insights for many of the social and life sciences, including psychology, sociology, biology, as well as to medicine and law. Not only will I recommend this book to my colleagues and graduate and undergraduate students, but I also will recommend it to my family and friends. The Human Predicament is a stunning achievement by a deeply compassionate man. -- Todd Shackelford, Distinguished Professor and Chair of Psychology, Oakland University

What thinking person doesn't care about the (possible) meaning of life, the quality of human life, the nature and disvalue of death, the option of suicide, and many other similar topics? David Benatar addresses these engaging and important topics along with many others. The book is well-argued and extremely well-written. I was struck by the sense that the quality was about as high as any philosophy I can remember reading: short, clear sentences, with not a word wasted or misplaced. Even someone who is sunnier in outlook than Benatar, yet willing to take his arguments seriously, may end up finding that he or she agrees with most of them in this volume. I do not see the human predicament as pessimistically as David Benatar does; but I found myself disagreeing less than I expected to - for example, in his sensitive and probing discussion of suicide. David DeGrazia, George Washington University

Author Information

David Benatar is Professor of Philosophy at University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is the author of Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence (2006) and Debating Procreation: Is it Wrong to Reproduce? (2015).

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