Difficulties Of Reality

950 Words2 Pages

PHL100
Prompt 1
Baraa Abukhudhayr
March 12, 2014

Final Paper

In her essay, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” the American philosopher Cora Diamond discusses animal rights and our obligations as human beings to nonhuman animals. Diamond has a fascinating philosophical take on the matter of animal rights. She is concerned with reminding people that they are animals. They are just another species among a plenty of others. Diamond uses the idea of the existential other to remind us of our animality, because it is in our shared mortality that humans and animals are alike. Furthermore, our morality is simply a human construction that allows us to talk about others from a distance as Diamond calls it the “language-game” (Diamond, 45). In essence, we view ourselves as different, separate or better than those animals because of the separation that we emphasize between mind and body, forgetting that we are animal as well. By placing the animal in a position of equality which is the place of the other, we should find compassion and sympathy for it.
In her essay, Diamond states that “the difficulty of reality shoulders us out of life” (Diamond, ). What Diamond means here is that our morals, concepts, and actions in our ordinary life, pass by the difficulty of life as if it were not there (Diamond, 58). If we try to see this difficulty, it shoulders us out of life. This difficulty moves us out of life by the force of others which is against our will. Therefore, the difficulty of reality in Diamond’s sense is the reality's resistance to one’s ordinary modes of thinking and talking. It is the feeling of a discrepancy between concepts and experience. Significantly, this kind of difficulty may lead to a philosophi...

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...rent approach of conceiving the relationship between humans and animals. As she suggests, we need to grant animals rights and treat them ethically because as Diamond says, “animals cannot speak for themselves and claim rights for themselves as we can” (Diamond, 52). She wants us to behave differently to one another and to other species in respect to our shared affection. She wants us to realize the difficulty of life and act instead of avoiding and deflecting from these difficulties and problems. She encourages us to take philosophy as a guide to walk us through these difficulties. In respect to the rights of animals matter, she states that “philosophy characteristically misrepresents both our own reality and that of others, in particular those 'others' who are animals” (Diamond, 57), thus, it is our obligation as humans to realize this misrepresent and act upon it.

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