I am eighty four years of age, would like some words of encouragement for my journey ahead!?
Dear Thomasina,
Death cannot harm us because we won’t be around to experience it; so there is nothing to fear. And what dies is in any case just a particular instance of the same life that we witness everywhere around us. We tend to think that when we end everything ends. But that is just an illusion. We know that the world continues to exist and that life goes on, in other humans, in other animals, and to the extent that we are that life, we go on too. So my advice is: change your perspective. Don’t see yourself as isolated from everything else. Life is shared.
With my very best wishes,
Michael
Michael Hauskeller
University of Liverpool, UK
Website
"The insistence that morality is essentially rules may be seen as an attempt to secure us against the ambiguity of the world", writes Murdoch in "Vision and Choice in Morality". This is a fundamental insight: rules can rarely tell us what the right thing to do is in a concrete situation, let alone what the right thing for me is. They are prone to fail in the face of the "inexhaustible detail of the world" and our own unique circumstances. Love, Murdoch teaches us, is a better moral guide.
