How to Deal with Adversity (The School of Life) by Christopher Hamilton

Author:Christopher Hamilton [Hamilton, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2014-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

3. Vulnerability; or, Adversity in the Body

I am sometimes struck, when teaching my students, by our good fortune. Here we are, able to spend two hours thinking about some problem in philosophy – say, the nature and meaning of religious faith, or the relationship between comedy and tragedy, or what we understand by the concept of a human being. One of the major reasons we can do this is because we are in good health – we are not troubled by our bodies in such a way as to make prolonged reflection and discussion difficult or even impossible. Of course, there are sometimes students who are suffering from some illness, more or less serious, and they are admirable in their determination to continue to study. But they represent the exception. And the fact remains that, for most of the history of humanity, most people were not generally in a state of health good enough to leave their minds free to reflect on the kinds of things that occupy my students and me in our lessons. On the contrary, ill health and sickness dogged people’s lives in a way that, fortunately, is much less common in the developed world – though there are, of course, plenty of people elsewhere in the world who are not so lucky.

Nonetheless, illness has not been wholly eradicated from the human world, and it never will be. And in illness we realize how fragile and vulnerable the body is, how much we accept good health as if it were the norm when, in fact, it is more a matter of good fortune than anything we have by right. In illness, we have to face our essential weakness: the adversity of the body. In this chapter, I propose to reflect on some ways in which we might do that.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.