The Beauty in This Life (with Nick Riggle)

The Doctor's Art

Henry Bair and Tyler Johnson

Medicine, Society & Culture, Health & Fitness, Philosophy

5 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2024

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We didn’t choose to live this life. In its most difficult moments, it's all too natural to ask the question, “What makes life worth living?”

This question, so central to philosophy since ancient times, is what we explore in this episode with Nick Riggle, a professor of philosophy at University of California, San Diego. Riggle is the author of several books, most recently 2022’s This Beauty: A Philosophy of Being Alive.

Over the course of our conversation, we discuss aesthetics, which is the branch of philosophy concerned with beauty and art; the various ways that we, successfully or otherwise, have attempted to find meaning in life; why finding beauty and building an aesthetic community is so crucial to human well-being; and much more.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

2:29 - Nick’s path from being a pro-skater to becoming a philosophy professor and author

8:41 - How Nick approaches surveying philosophical thought through history

10:22 - The importance that aesthetics and beauty play in Nick’s studies

19:13 - What motivated Nick to write his book This Beauty

21:04 - How Nick conceptualized answering the central question of his book

23:51 - The takeaways that Nick personally found for what makes life worth living

29:15 - What it means to pay attention to the beautiful things in life

32:18 - Are some kinds of beauty and art “better” than others?

34:47 - The value of creating an aesthetic community

39:12 - Living an aesthetic life when your physical or mental state is limited

Nick Riggle is the author of multiple books and publications, including This Beauty: A Philosophy of Being Alive (2022), Aesthetic Life and Why it Matters (2022), and On Being Awesome: A Unified Theory on How Not to Suck (2017).

Nick Riggle can be found on Instagram at @nickriggle.

Visit our website www.TheDoctorsArt.com where you can find transcripts of all episodes.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and review our show, available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you know of a doctor, patient, or anyone working in health care who would love to explore meaning in medicine with us on the show, feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments or send an email to [email protected].

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Henry Bear.
0:03.0	And I'm Tyler Johnson.
0:05.0	And you're listening to The Doctors Art, a podcast that explores meaning in medicine.
0:09.0	Throughout our medical training and career, we have pondered.
0:13.2	What makes medicine meaningful?
0:15.1	Can a stronger understanding of this meaning create better doctors?
0:18.8	How can we build health care institutions that nurture the doctor-patient connection.
0:23.0	What can we learn about the human condition
0:24.8	from accompanying our patients in times of suffering?
0:28.0	In seeking answers to these questions,
0:30.0	we meet with deep thinkers working across health care,
0:33.0	from doctors and nurses to patients and health care
0:35.4	executives, those who have collected a career's worth of hard-earned wisdom.
0:40.1	Probing the moral heart that beats at the core of medicine, we will hear stories that are by turns heart-breaking, amusing, inspiring, challenging, and enlightening.
0:49.0	We welcome anyone curious about why doctors do what they do.
0:52.8	Join us as we think out loud about what illness and healing can teach us
0:57.1	about some of life's biggest questions.
1:13.6	Life can be hard, sometimes unbearably so. In these moments, it's all too natural to ask the question, what makes life worth living? This question so central to philosophy since ancient times is what we explore in this episode,
1:19.6	featuring Nick Riggle, professor of philosophy. Nick is the author of several books, most recently
1:25.4	This Beauty, a Philosophy of Being Alive. Over the course of our conversation, we discuss
1:31.4	Aesthetics, which is the branch of philosophy concerned with beauty and art.
1:36.2	The various ways that we successfully or otherwise have attempted to find meaning in life.
	...

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