It is not fashionable in philosophy to quote Eastern philosophers -- never mind that such pre-eminent philosophers as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche both were influenced by Buddhism. Admittedly, Nietzsche's approach was one of embracing rather than diminishing one's suffering, but we can see the influence in his emphasis on practice -- thus his emphasis on where to live and what to eat and drink and the importance of exercise in being a good philosopher.
But Marinoff is not a fashionable philosopher, whether it be in his anti-neo-Marxism and anti-postmodernism or his embracing the idea that philosophy is, should be, and can be useful -- that its purpose is to help us live a better life. Thus, he rather unfashionably recommends that we know not only our Aristotle, but our Buddha and our Confucius as well.
Why Buddha? Everyone suffers -- and Buddha was quite concerned with the problem of suffering. On pg. 77, Marinoff lists some of the ways in which we all suffer: "strife, sorrow, grief, lamentation, despair, regret, sickness, death." On pg. 80, Marinoff challenges his readers to make a list. In that spirit, I challenge all my readers to make a list of all their sufferings and post them here. For those who are interested, I have posted before on how to remove regret:
No Regrets
For most people in the world, sufferings are mostly physical. Hunger and disease and homelessness and warfare, just to name a few. Most Americans don't have to face many of these kinds of things. In fact, most Americans have no real problems. While T.V. and film writers in the U.S. who make $200,00 a year or more doing what they love are on strike to make more money (I'm not disagreeing with them on why they are striking, since they do deserve to get paid a percentage of sales of their work), there are Indians facing deportation if they strike against a company in Dubai, yet are striking anyway. These latter have real problems, and are facing real hardships, including a real possibility of losing their jobs if they strike. The money they make could be a matter of life and death for their families in India. They are really suffering. The T.V. and film writers aren't. Neither are our poor suffering, if we compare them to the poor elsewhere. No emergency room in the U.S. can turn away anyone, while half the population of Africa is dying of AIDS. Americans have no real problems. So, naturally, we create problems for ourselves. Absent external causes of suffering, we create internal ones. We drive ourselves crazy over nothing. We raise our children in sanitized homes in sanitized conditions, worrying over their self esteem to such a degree that two members of the 15-member "Trenchcoat Mafia" killed 12 people because they were picked on and didn't have any friends. Apparently 14 friends isn't enough for our delicate children to have enough self-esteem to not go on a killing rampage. Oddly, you don't hear about such things in places where there is real suffering. Yet our children here in the U.S. are so delicate that you can't criticize them. It doesn't matter if they in fact can't do anything (of course not, since nobody ever criticized them, do they never learned they were doing anything wrong in order to correct it) -- the important thing is that you don't criticize them. Thus they turn into whine-bags who don't understand why everything in the world won't go their way, the way it always did when they lived with mommy and daddy. Thus, our culture, by trying to shield our children from suffering, creates suffering.
Which gets me to Buddha's four truths about suffering (80):
1) "life entails suffering" (80)
2) "suffering has causes" (80)
3) "suffering can be removed" (81)
4) there are eight ways to diminish suffering.
We have to first recognize the first three before we can move on to the last one. As for the last one, "These eight are: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration" (81). Marinoff goes into detail, which I won't go into here. If you want to learn more, may I suggest that you (to use a line from an old commercial) "read the book"? It is my hope that by now my readers do want to read this book, which is full of uncomfortable truths (those are always the best kind if you want to grow as a person or a society). We as a nation are in desperate need to hear his uncomfortable truths. We need to hear them if we are going to discover the causes of our suffering. His book has gone a long way to helping me discover some of mine, simply by seeing that some of my recent experiences are shared, meaning I now know what the underlying cause truly is, meaning I now know what I need to do in order to remove the cause of that suffering.
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