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The Examined Life is a collection of philosophical meditations written by Robert Nozick and published in 1989.
Introduction
His meditations aim to take his life and ours off "automatic pilot". They aim furthermore at a portrait rather than a theory. Indeed to live an examined life is to make a self-portrait. He does not say that the unexamined life is not worth living, but he does agree with Socrates to the extent of holding that the unexamined life is not lived as fully. When we guide our lives by "our own pondered thoughts", it then is our life that we are living, not someone else`s. The Introduction is also noteworthy for announcing that he judges the libertarianism of Anarchy, State, and Utopia to be "seriously inadequate".
Dying
Nozick reports that his eighty-two-year-old father is ailing. "Mingled with concern for my father is the thought that he is blazing a trail for me; I now suspect I will reach my eighties too and --- less welcome --- perhaps encounter similar woes." His suspicion was incorrect. He died of stomach cancer in 2002 at the age of 63. He proposes that a person`s regret about dying should be a function of the percent of important things he hasn`t yet done that he still has the capacity to do. He confesses a mental exercise that helps him through life: "I find I don`t like to think that I`m much more than halfway to the end of the major thing I`m engaged in." He has shifted throughout his life to new salient midpoints and different second halves, reporting that even as he smiles at this, "still it works!" He concludes that instead of clinging to life until the very end, someone who has had an ample life and is still capable should risk life or lay it down for another person or a noble cause.
Parents and Children
Children form part of a parent`s wider identity.This is something Nozick could not have written in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. It took the Closest-Continuer theory of personal identity that he developed later in Philosophical Explanations, and especially its notion of a dimension. Children form a dimension of a parent`s identity. A bequest can mark this extended identity. But now Nozick wants a tax on bequests, according to a subtraction rule that deducts from it what the parent did not add --- namely, the portion that the parent received through bequest. He is joining Rawls in using legislation to avoid deep inequalities that would arise by allowing wealth to accumulate and cascade down the generations: "The resulting inequalities seem unfair." Nozick never disavowed this tax and its dramatically anti-libertarian implications, yet he later insisted that his departures from libertarian values were minor. This is an interpretive sore point.
Creating
Nozick writes that when a person`s brain generates ideas, "however `mechanical` the explanation of how it does so turns out to be," we see those ideas as expressive and revelatory of something about the person. This backtracks from the defense of "originatory value" in Philosophical Explanations, which requires indeterminism that he tried to provide with a quantum-mechanical model of contra-deterministic free choice. Creating also enables "reshaping and integration" of (the dimensions of) the self: "The work is a surrogate for the creator, an analog of her, a little voodoo doll to tinker with and transform and remake in something analogous to the way she herself, or a part, needs to be transformed, remade, or healed." He thinks that the work is somehow effective in reconfiguring the self, not just in reshaping a surrogate or analog.
The Nature of God, the Nature of Faith
Nozick thinks of himself as having a religious sensibility suited to our intellectual time. He is not a believer, but he is willing to contemplate religion or God as a possibility. He favors a conception of God or some other conception of deepest reality as grounded in trust of revelatory experiences, not as an hypothesis invoked to explain such experiences. "Our fundamental connection to the world is not explanatory, but one of relation and trust."
The Holiness of Everyday Life
Nozick thinks that natural foods have noetic essences. (He is less certain about artful concoctions, notwithstanding Brillat-Savarin`s asking Adam and Eve, "who ruined yourself for an apple, what might you not have done for a truffled turkey?") He also advocates occasional meditative attention to breathing. The general moral is that seeing everyday life as holy is in part seeing the world and its contents as "infinitely receptive to our activities of exploring, responding, relating and creating."
Sexuality
If children are the strongest bond, sexuality is the most intense way of relating to another. He advocates the maxim to experiment attentively, and intelligence helps too. Sex is a mode of communication, "a way of saying or of showing something more tellingly than our words can say." It is also like music; he favors an analogy to jazz improvisation. Sexuality has some implications for personal identity. We let the other within the boundaries we normally maintain around ourselves, "boundaries marked by clothing and by full self-control and monitoring." He suggests a diagram of sexual intimacy, "two circles overlapping with dotted lines", as fitting well the sense of merging in intense sexual experience. In sex one can engage in metaphysical exploration in which the body and person of another is a "map or microcosm" of the deepest reality.
To continue reading this article, please go to this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Examined_Life#Dying
/Zeta
2007-01-02 23:14
(direct link)
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