Intro to Ethics Aim for 300 words per answer. Please. 1) What is the similarity
ID: 108740 • Letter: I
Question
Intro to Ethics Aim for 300 words per answer. Please. 1) What is the similarity between David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” and Schopenhauer’s “On the Suffering of the World?” Intro to Ethics Aim for 300 words per answer. Please. 1) What is the similarity between David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” and Schopenhauer’s “On the Suffering of the World?” Aim for 300 words per answer. Please. 1) What is the similarity between David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” and Schopenhauer’s “On the Suffering of the World?”Explanation / Answer
Wallace committed suicide in September of 2008, for reasons impossible to know. But the freedom that he writes about in This Is Water is focused elsewhere. It is entirely on the living—on life, on the sweet insistence of its fullness and its detail. To be free in the world, as opposed to being merely free in your skull-sized kingdom, you must wonder into the finer reasons for things—you must look, as Jules Verne said, “with all your eyes” at everything around you all the time.
The speculative nature of the origins and influences of This Is Water is not, for better or worse, my concern here; my goal is simply to present Wallace’s pragmatic approach to spirituality in a clear way that dissects it into its philosophically and theologically interesting component parts. In doing this, I hope to show the practical reasons for taking Wallace’s theology seriously
Essays with titles like “On the Suffering of the World,” in which he argued that we would be better off if we could just accept that the world is a giant penal colony. This thought is meant to be consoling. As a reliable compass for orientating yourself in life nothing is more useful than to accustom yourself to regarding this world as a place of atonement, a sort of penal colony. When you have done this you will order your expectations of life according to the nature of things and no longer regard the calamities, sufferings, torments and miseries of life as something irregular and not to be expected but will find them entirely in order, well knowing that each of us is here being punished for his existence and each in his own particular way. This outlook will enable us to view the so-called imperfections of the majority of men, i.e. their moral and intellectual shortcomings and the facial appearance resulting
therefrom, without surprise and certainly without indignation: for we shall always bear in mind where we are and consequently regard every man first and foremost as a being who exists only as a consequence of his culpability and whose life is an expiation of the crime of being born. The conviction that the world, and therefore man too, is something which really ought not to exist is in fact calculated to instill in us indulgence towards one another: for what can be expected of beings placed in such a situation as we are? From this point of view one might indeed consider that the appropriate form of address between man and man ought to be, not monsieur, sir, but fellow sufferer, Compagnon de Miseres. However strange this may sound it corresponds to the nature of the case, makes us see other men in a true light and reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes.
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