Abstract
Robert C. Solomon (“Bob”) took a narrative conception of the meaning of life and of death, and this is of a piece with his existentialism. Through the ongoing process of engaging and reflecting, we reposition ourselves and rework our stories, each new version a potential means for responding to the world from a more mature and encompassing stance. Death is meaningful in the context of this narrative, providing the closure to an individual life that gives it a place within a larger whole. Bob’s conception of narrative meaning is evident in his own life, and it is that life as well as the thinker who led it that we celebrate in this volume.
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Notes
- 1.
I cannot resist the impulse to mention here that in articulating his idea about emotional integrity, Bob points out that he had shifted from the rhetoric of emotional judgments to that of emotions as “engagements with the world because I now see my former emphasis on judgments suggests more intellectualism in emotions than I intended, despite twenty years of qualifications and explanations.” He goes on to say, however, that he remained convinced that “evaluative judgments…are essential to the emotions” (Solomon 2007: 204–205). I want to emphasize his point that his understanding of “emotions as judgments” was misunderstood and caricatured when it was taken to be exclusively cerebral. Bob did not equate judgment with conceptual belief about one’s circumstances, formulated in analytical philosophy’s familiar terms of “propositional attitudes” as “believing-that p.” Instead, his sense of judgment was a fuller notion, drawing on the continental tradition, in which the term has a reflective and an aesthetic dimension, and in which we might see the judgment as bridging one’s own feelings and an external situation. Comparing emotional judgments to kinesthetic judgments, Bob saw the judgments involved in emotion as embedded in an on-going process of relating and responding to the world and revising one’s outlook and behavior. Emotional judgment involves “learning and detailed knowledge about the world and our place in it” (p. 206).
- 2.
These are discussed in Richard Schacht and John Bishop’s essays in this volume.
- 3.
The mention of “opening one’s heart to the universe” is a reference to Albert Camus’s The Stranger (Camus 1988: 122).
- 4.
One of Bob’s favorite passages in Nietzsche is the opening epigram of his autobiographical Ecce Homo:
On this perfect day, when everything is ripening and not only the grape turns brown, the eye of the sun just fell upon my life: I looked back, I looked forward, and never saw so many and such good things at once. It was not for nothing that I buried my forty-fourth year today: I had the right to bury it; whatever was life in it has been saved, is immortal. The first book of the Revaluation of All Values, the Songs of Zarathustra, the Twilight of the Idols, my attempt to philosophize with a hammer – all presents of this year, indeed of its last quarter! How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life? – and so I tell my life to myself (Nietzsche 1888/1967: 221)
.
- 5.
The reference here to shaking one’s fist at the Gods in scorn and defiance is to Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus (see Camus 1955: 90).
References
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Higgins, K.M. (2012). Bob on Meaning in Life and Death. In: Higgins, K., Sherman, D. (eds) Passion, Death, and Spirituality. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4650-3_19
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