The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to life

by A.C. Grayling

The religious attitude is marked by a robust refusal to take things at face value if inconvenient.

argumentum ad baculum,

If there exists a deity with the punitive vengefulness of the Judaeo-Christian variety, then it might be prudent to obey it, and thus avoid the flames of hell; but the threat of punishment is not a principled reason for obedience.

Why are the churches given a privileged – almost, indeed, an exclusive – position in the social debate about morality, when they are arguably the least competent organisations to have it?

The great moral questions of the present age are those about human rights, war, poverty, the vast disparities between rich and poor, the fact that somewhere in the third world a child dies every two and a half seconds because of starvation or remediable disease.

Right Reverend Richard Holloway,

Godless Morality,

of all the diseases that afflict humankind, religious moralities are among the worst.

Religious belief, meanwhile, whatever it might do in comforting the fearful in the dark, has always and everywhere brought war, intolerance and persecution with it, and has distorted human nature into false and artificial shapes.

As real knowledge and mastery advance, there is diminishing need to invoke supernatural agencies to explain the world.

The great advantage of science’s careful and thorough hypotheses, always ready to yield if better evidence comes along, is that it makes use of no materials or speculations beyond what the world itself offers. Religions, in sharp contrast, offer us eternal certitudes on the basis only of ancient superstitions.

Humanity’s sense of beauty, and decency, our power to love, our creativity – all the best things about us – belong to us, to human experience in the real world. They neither need, nor benefit from, some alleged connection with supernatural agencies of one kind or another.

Freud all his life opposed religion as a sinister force that must be defeated

A ‘Blue Book’ of suspect publications was circulated to Chief Constables by the Home Office; its existence was kept secret not just from the public but also from MPs. It contained 4000 titles, including books by Mickey Spillane and James Hadley Chase, Sartre, and Upton Sinclair, and – amazingly – it also listed Moll Flanders and Madame Bovary.

for liberty is not licence, it is something better: it is open-minded, tolerant and reasonable restraint.

One of the measures of a good society is how it treats the poor.

Poverty is not a virus, a natural disaster, or an accident. It is man-made.

In the rich West it is now orthodox to think that the ideology of the free market has won the argument – and so comprehensively that the future, like the present, belongs to it; hence Francis Fukuyama’s claim that ‘history has ended’.

Education, and especially ‘liberal education’, is what makes civil society possible. That means is has an importance even greater than its contribution to economic success, which, alas, is all that politicians seem to think it is for.

By ‘liberal education’ is meant education that includes literature, history and appreciation of the arts, and gives them equal weight with scientific and practical subjects.

the aim of liberal education is to produce people who go on learning after their formal education has ceased;

a community cannot afford to be unreflective and ill-informed if civil society is to be sustainable.

To that extent the contemporary view distorts the purpose of schooling, by aiming not at the development of individuals as ends in themselves, but as instruments in the economic process.

Above all, education involves refining capacities for judgment and evaluation;

Heraclitus remarked that learning is only a means to an end, which is understanding

elective oligarchies

Good actors are good because of the things they can tell us without talking. CEDRIC HARDWICKE

It seems to be a human need, because it is a human universal, to tell – or more tellingly, to enact – stories about human experience.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The arts have always been, and always will be, avocations for minorities.

‘Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life’, said Henry Miller; and most people never get to the second half of the sentence.

‘Thanks to art,’ said Proust, ‘instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied, and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal.’

‘Health exists for life, and life exists for the love of music and beautiful things,’ said Chesterton; and he is right on both counts.

In the season of plenty – which, paradoxically, was winter, when the grain and the salted pork were safely stored – darkness and hard frosts kept people indoors, making things; including songs, stories, carvings and textiles. From this change of occupation which the flux of seasons enforced was born painting, poetry, theatre and music. From it also came science, in reflection on experience gathered during the working parts of the year.

leisure is not the opposite of work, it is – as Mark Twain and Aristotle both suggest – something better: the opportunity to work for higher ends.

To read is to enter other points of view; it is to be an invisible observer of circumstances which might never be realised in one’s own life; it is to meet people and situations exceeding in kind and number the possibilities open to individual experience.

books as the distillations of time and man’s endeavours –

It is always a mistake to underestimate how long it takes for mankind to understand the traumas it has suffered, especially the self-inflicted ones.

For the on gun violence essay

To remain ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain always a child. CICERO

History

As James Baldwin put it, ‘People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.’

A leader is a dealer in hope. NAPOLEON

people know too little about their own country if they know no other.

When Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States, was travelling in Europe during the 1780s, he came to two conclusions: that travel is best done alone, because one reflects more on what one sees; and that travel makes men wiser but less happy.

We usually only place the right value on things when we have lost them.

La Rochefoucauld observed, that ‘old men like to give good advice to console themselves for no longer being able to set bad examples’,

Men trip not on mountains, but on stones. HINDUSTANI PROVERB

Rilke, in his remarkable Letters to a Young Poet, who said that if the world does not appear magical, ‘blame yourself; tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.’

a cliché no less true for being one, and no less worth remembering.