…There’s a famous saying of Schopenhauer’s that goes like this: “A man can surely do what he wants to do. But he cannot determine what he wants.”
Things That Bother Me by Galen Strawson; Paperback, 160 pages; Published March 13, 2018 by The New York Review of Books, Inc; ISBN: 1681372207 (ISBN13: 9781681372204)
Though much of Galen Strawson’s work in this book is beyond my complete understanding I enjoyed it immensely. There was much to ponder. What a surprise the last chapter was when Strawson turned autobiographical and shared his own memory of surviving the sixties and early seventies. Because of our similar age it was easy to feel a kinship with this English philosopher who has good taste in music, and this book inspires me to pursue other Galen Strawson titles. Below I have added the quotations I felt most striking to me. Perhaps the following notes will give you a reason to read this book as well.
…I feel close to Harold Brodkey when he writes that our sense of presentness usually proceeds in waves, with our minds tumbling off into wandering…
…I agree with the Earl of Shaftesbury: The metaphysicians…affirm that if memory be taken away, the self is lost. [But] what matter for memory? What have I to do with that part? If, whilst I am, I am as I should be, what do I care more? And let me lose self every hour, and be twenty successive selfs, or new selfs, “tis all one to me: so [long as] I lose not my opinion [i.e. my overall outlook, my character, my moral [identity]. If I carry that with me ’tis I: all is well…—The now; the now. Mind this: in this is all.
That apart. I think I agree with Marcus Aurelius, who is almost as repetitious as I am, although he may well have metaphysical motivations that I lack: Whether you live three thousand years or thirty thousand, remember that the only life you can lose is the one you are living now in the present…In this sense the longest life and the shortest come to the same thing, for life in the present is the same for all…One’s loss is limited to that one fleeting instant; one cannot lose either the past or the future, for no one can take from one what one does not have…So when the longest—and the shortest—lived among us die their loss is precisely equal, because the only life of which one can be deprived is life in the present, since this is all one has.
…One has options even when one is in chains, or falling through space. Even if one is completely paralyzed, one is still free to choose to think about one thing rather than another. There is, as Sartre observed, a sense in which we are condemned to freedom, not free to be free.
…Once can put the point by saying that in the final analysis the way you are is, in every last detail, a matter of luck—good or bad…
…As a philosopher I think the impossibility of radical free will, ultimate moral responsibility, can be proved with complete certainty. It’s just that I can’t really live with this fact from day to day…
…There’s a famous saying of Schopenhauer’s that goes like this: “A man can surely do what he wants to do. But he cannot determine what he wants.”
…Eddington’s assessment of the situation in 1928 is as true now as it was then: something unknown is doing we don’t know what…
…I’m inclined to agree with Sartre when he suggests in his novel La Nausée that self-storying, although inevitable, condemns us to inauthenticity, a kind of absence from our own lives…Human beings hold many views about themselves that have very little to do with reality…