How can we be justified in claiming that life is difficult, or hard, or a hassle, or just complex, very complex, fairly complex? I've been wondering about this for the last days. On the one hand my dear Shen-Yi has a hard, Nietzchean, hammering answer: life is not hard, or a hassle, or complex at all, it is just that we, humans perhaps, are just too weak for life. Thus, we'll never be justified to claim what I thought could be claimed. On the other hand, my dear Mr. DeVore, thinks (and this is my assumption) that life may scape our epistemic capabilities. Thus, leaving some space for me to offer an argument. I'll try to say why I think Shen-Yi may be right, as well as Mr. DeVore. I'll try to offer, once more, a dilemma.
I was about to offer you premisses and arguments, all the analytical way. But this is my blog, and this is not a paper. And this is not this, if you were wondering. So I'll let myself write down what has to be written. And I'll let my pen go down as it has to go. This is what I believe.
Life is more encompassing than just a biological process. Life includes will, desire, experiences, reflections, doubts, certainties, uncertainties, passions, sensations, infatuations, love, hatred, and all that bunch of beautiful things that we philosophers never dare to talk about. Human weakness, of course, is a part of all this bunch. I just wonder whether this makes life difficult or not.
More than once we - I mean humans, intellectuals, or pedantic people - have argued that this feature of life should be cashed out, scratched off or something like that. It is just like we don't want to deal with it. But this makes weakness a very unnatural, unhuman, uncontrolable thing. If the goal is to reduce it, then pushing it outside life is not going to do the work. Weakness is not beyond life, as much as hassles, obstacles and problems are not beyond either. I believe, following this train of thought, that the claim that life's complexity is just a matter of human weakness is either redundant or misleading.
If human weakness is not supossed to be a part of life, of our all encomapssing notion of life, then how are we supossed to deal with it? If it is part of life then our claim that life is complex should be embraced; although with some restrictions. Of course, it should not be taken as justifying irresponsibility. That life is complex does not offer us an easy way out of our problems. It just helps understanding them. Life is complex, and our weakness (whatever that might be) helps making it more complex, and so we must live. And so, I think, it must be faced.
Thus, as a matter of weakness or not, life is complex. We should start accepting this fact in a very concrete manner. If we want to deal with life, that is.
