[lit-ideas] Re: Dr. Feelgood and the Interns
- From: Andy Amago <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 20:15:23 -0400 (GMT-04:00)
Robert Paul answers:
>I think that MG means that philosophy cannot _pace_ Bentham, help us
>understand our lives at the level of pleasant sensations and smiley faces.
That
>is, even if philosophy could help us understand our lives (or show us why we
>can't) it would do so at a more interesting level than this. This was
surely the
>Socratic program. And if MG does mean this, I'd agree. At what level and how
>philosophy does help us understand our lives, I have no idea: I don't really
>understand what's meant by understanding one's life, as a broadly conceived
>enterprise--no idea what would count as having understood my life, e.g. And
(for
>me), where the answer does not exist, the question does not exist.
A.A. For an illustration that understanding one's life is a question/s with
answer/s, I refer once again to the movie I saw last night, House of Sand and
Fog. In that movie, the motives of the Colonel were transparent. The Deputy
Sheriff's actions were, by contrast, bizarre but very imaginable. He and the
lead character (actress Jennifer Connolley) would have done well to examine
their motives. As to whether philosophy would have helped, I read somewhere
that Russell Bertrand was depressed to where he was contemplating ending his
life. Then while walking on a beach he began to consider life, and it gave him
enough purpose, shall we say, to keep going.
Andy Amago
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