Even if receiving the most dire news from a doctor, the one question I would hope never to ask is: Why me?
For no question is more metaphysically naive and egocentric than this request not only for meaning, but for a coherent narrative that unfolds in relation specifically to one's self. This may be all too human, but it's all too shameful for a philosopher.
For a philosopher should know better than attempt to explain, justify and integrate a random event into a
personal life story, or start asking crypto-theological questions of the universe.
And even if the question is more rhetorical than anything else - a venting of natural emotion - it should still never pass the lips of a philosopher; i.e., one who always remains stoical, always refuses to take things tragically, and always favours the Warholian response when given terrible news: So what? [1]
Notes
[1] See The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again), (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), in which he writes:
"Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, 'So what.' That's one of my favorite things to say. 'So what.' [...] I don’t know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget." (Ch. 7)
What price 'amor fati'?
ReplyDeletePhilosophy, to follow Heidegger, is a unique kind of discourse organised around the privileging of the question (and its own self-questioning), rooted in the question of Being itself (Seinsfrage). As such, I'm not sure how this authoritarian image of the philosopher as some kind of compulsory stoic and/or peculiar kind of tragedian fits with the demands of self-reflexivity (two 'shoulds' in what is a comparatively short text is odd for a blog that claims to have done with judgment) - or indeed TTA's own stated aim to 'interrogate everything' (which, in the interests of intellectual decency if nothing else, ought surely to include its own - in this case - massive assumptions).
If the 'rage for order' is so objectionable, why is the 'assumption of randomness' any less so as a picture of the cosmos? Life may not be wholly ordered, but it is far from random either - as anyone who has experienced the eruptive power of synchronicity will readily attest. Not for the first time, I would suggest it behooves the thinker not to settle for these crude dichotomies.
Hediegger, of course, also looked back to the Greeks, for whom the notion of (daimonic) destiny was pivotal to their world-view - for which, demonstrating their sophistication in this domain, they actually had four words: Μοῖρα; Αἶσαa; Πεπρωμένον (applied, in fact, to tragic destiny) and Ἀνάγκη.
Perhaps the 'little Greek' could metamorphose into a big Greek and comment here?
'Why Me?' is, in fact, the paradigmatic question concerning personal fate, which James Hillman explores with marvellous psychological dexterity in his book THE SOUL'S CODE. In short, life isn't all about you - unless it is all about you (which it usually is in some way or other)!