The Based Life

Descartes objective in his Meditations on First Philosophy is an epistemological task to ground knowledge in what can be known as absolutely certain i.e. that which can not be doubted. Descartes rather than evaluating his beliefs one by one strikes at the core of that which is necessary in order to be able to come to judgements in the first place, he states “I will attack straightaway those principles which supported everything I once believed” (Descartes, 60). One of these preconditions being that of sensory experiences, if he finds sufficient reason to doubt the truth validity of his senses, he must therefore doubt every belief which has been predicated on the certainty of his sensory experiences. The task Descartes embarks upon in his first meditation therefore is to doubt whether we can trust our senses. This is done through an argument based upon our experiences of dreams. Descartes observes that there is not enough sufficient differences between our experiences in the real world...

Reading Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy I stumbled across a section which reminded me of the importance of Ernest Becker's later work regarding the role of heroic culture as a means to deny finite existence i.e. death. We can find the origins of the denial of death  in Greek society when king Midas asks the wise Silenus what was the best of all and most desirable of man. The demon laughing responded:  Oh, wretched race of a day, children of chance and misery, why do ye compel me to say to you what it were most expedient for you not to hear? What is the best of all is for ever beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. The second best for you, however, is soon to die The Greeks were keenly aware of the terrors and horrors of existence, in Becker's words the finitude of existence with all the pain and suffering involved, in order to be able to confront these terrors what the Greeks did was to come up with a mechanism in order to deny their meaningless existe...