"If I decide there's a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won't the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?"
-- David Foster Wallace from his essay, "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky".
PS: You can see how FD's art and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason overlap. Like FD, IK tried to resolve the inherent contradictions in the very way we perceive reality - (i.e., if we are necessarily selfish is it morally superior to steer towards unselfishness if you are doing so for selfish reasons?). While FD concluded that a "life lived without moral/spiritual values was not just incomplete but depraved", IK concluded that only in the realm of Pure Reason can pure morality be discovered.
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Why?
2 days ago
