The Reflective Life: Living Wisely With Our Limits

by Valerie Tiberius

How should you live? Should you devote yourself to perfecting a single talent or try to live a balanced life? Should you lighten up and have more fun, or buckle down and try to achieve greatness? Should you try to be a better friend? Should you be self-critical or self-accepting? And how should you decide among the possibilities open to you? Should you consult experts, listen to your parents, do lots of research? Make lists of pros and cons, or go with yourgut? These are not questions that can be answered in general or in the abstract. Rather, these questions are addressed to the first person point of view, to the perspective each of us occupies when we reflect on how to live without knowing exactly what we're aiming for. To answer them, The ReflectiveLife focuses on the process of living one's life from the inside, rather than on defining goals from the outside.Drawing on traditional philosophical sources as well as literature and recent work in social psychology, Tiberius argues that, to live well, we need to develop reflective to care about things that will sustain us and give us good experiences, to have perspective on our successes and failures, and to be moderately self-aware and cautiously optimistic about human nature. Further, we need to know when to think about our values, character, and choices, and when not to. A crucial part ofwisdom, Tiberius maintains, is being able to shift to be self-critical when we are prepared for it, but not when it will undermine our success; to be realistic, but not to the extent that we are immobilized by the harsh facts of life; to examine life when reflection is appropriate, butnot when we should lose ourselves in experience.

Genres: Philosophy

235 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 3, 2008

Reviews

[Jonathan Evans · Rating 1 out of 5]

The author was a guest on one of my favorite podcasts. She briefly touched on the subject matter of the book and I was motivated to track down and read the book. Unfortunately the writing style of the book was highly unaccessible. Even though the book I borrowed from the University of Michigan library had been on the shelf for 12+years I was the first to attempt to read it . How can I tell? My tears of frustration were the first to blemish the book's pages.