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July 15 - July 16, 2017
Love should be two people trying to grow together – and helping each other to do so. Which means you need to get together with the person who contains a key missing bit of your evolution: the virtues you don’t have.
Plato
We need new heroes
Plato
These people would be distinguished by their record of public service, their modesty and simple habits, their dislike of the limelight and their wide and deep experience.
The task of art, as Aristotle saw it, is to make profound truths about life stick in our minds.
to courageously come to terms with the very worst possibilities – and then make ourselves entirely at home with them. When we look our fears in the face and imagine what life might be like if they came true, we stand to come to a crucial realisation: we will cope.
Seneca/Marcus Aurelius
Each morning, a good Stoic will undertake a praemeditatio: a premeditation on all the appalling things that might occur in the hours ahead. In Seneca’s stiffening words: ‘Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth. So you must reckon on everything, expect everything.’ Stoicism is nothing less than an elegant, intelligent dress rehearsal for catastrophe.
angry outbursts are only ever caused by one thing: an incorrect picture of existence.
The task of the wise person is therefore never to believe in the gifts of fortune: fame, money, power, love, health – these are never our own. Our grip on them must at all times be light and deeply wary.
To regain composure, we must regularly be reduced in our own eyes. We must give up on the very normal but very disturbing illusion that it really matters what we do and who we are.
There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy … So long as we persist in this inborn error … the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of being content. That’s why the faces of almost all elderly people are etched with such disappointment. Schopenhauer offers two solutions to deal with the problems of existence. The first is for rather rare individuals that he called ‘sages’.
art and philosophy, whose task is to hold up a mirror to the frenzied efforts and unhappy turmoil created in all of us by the Will-to-Life.
‘Life has no intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by want and illusion.’
Hegel imagined an ideal history in which gradually all the good aspects of the past would be liberated from the unfortunate things that accompanied them. And that the best future would gradually amalgamate them all. We
Hegel was a great believer in learning from one’s intellectual enemies, from points of view we disagree with or that feel alien.
Hegel believed that the world makes progress, but only by lurching from one extreme to another as it seeks to overcompensate for a previous mistake.
‘dialectic’.
what happens in history will occur in individuals as well.
5. We need new institutions
Everything that makes us envious is a fragment of our true potential,
Christianity had in Nietzsche’s account emerged in the late Roman Empire in the minds of timid slaves, who had lacked the stomach to get hold of what they really wanted (or admit they had failed) and so had clung to a philosophy that made a virtue of their cowardice.
Christianity amounted to a giant justification for passivity and a mechanism for draining life of its potential.
the gap left by religion should ideally be filled with culture (philosophy,
the 19th century was reeling under the impact of two developments: mass democracy and atheism. The first threatened to unleash torrents of undigested envy and venomous resentment; the second to leave humans without guidance or morality.
Mystery of Being. His entire philosophy is devoted to getting us to appreciate,
Heidegger
das Nichts (The Nothing), which lies on the other side of Being.
2. We have forgotten that all Being is connected
We are – in Heidegger’s unusual formulation – ‘thrown into the world’ at the start of our lives: thrown into a particular and narrow social milieu, surrounded by rigid attitudes, archaic prejudices and practical necessities not of our own making. The philosopher wants to help us to overcome this Geworfenheit (Thrownness) by understanding its multiple features. We should aim to grasp our psychological, social and professional provincialism – and then rise above it to a more universal perspective. In so doing, we’ll make the classic Heideggerian journey away from Uneigentlichkeit to
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an appropriately intense focus on our own upcoming death.
When, in a lecture in 1961, Heidegger was asked how we might recover authenticity, he replied tersely that we should simply aim to spend more time ‘in graveyards’.
Camus railed against those who would dismiss such things as trivial and long for something higher, better, purer: ‘If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.’
A good politician – in Machiavelli’s remarkable view – isn’t one who is kind, friendly and honest, it is someone – however occasionally dark and sly they might be – who knows how to defend, enrich and bring honour to the state.
The Prince (1513), about how to get and keep power and what makes individuals effective leaders.
question of whether it was better for a prince to be loved or feared, Machiavelli wrote that while it would theoretically be wonderful for a leader to be both loved and obeyed, he should always err on the side of inspiring terror,
Eventually they will be faced with a problem which cannot be solved by generosity, kindness or decency, because they will be up against rivals or enemies who do not play by those rules.
to what extent should we patiently obey rulers, especially those who are not very good – and to what extent should we start revolutions and depose governments in search of a better world?
Hobbes
Leviathan, was published in 1651. It is the most definitive, persuasive and eloquent statement ever produced as to why one should obey government authority, even of a very imperfect kind,
The only right that people might have to protest about an absolute ruler, or Leviathan as he called him, was if he directly threatened to kill them. However, if the ruler merely stifled opposition, imposed onerous taxes, crippled the economy and locked up dissidents, this was absolutely no reason to take to the streets and demand a change of government. ‘Though of so unlimited a power, men may fancy many evil consequences, yet the consequences of the want of it, which is perpetual war of every man against his neighbour, are much worse.’
Rousseau’s ‘state of nature’ (l’état de nature),
What was it about civilisation that he thought had corrupted man and produced this moral degeneracy? Well, at the root of his hostility was his claim that the march towards civilisation had awakened in man a form of ‘self-love’ – amour-propre – that was artificial and centred on pride, jealousy, and vanity.
competitions for status and money.
The two phenomena are (strangely) intimately related, as Adam Smith was the first to understand through his theory of specialisation.
luxury goods and stupid consumerism in fact had a very serious role to play in a good society – for it was they that provided the surplus wealth that allowed societies to look after their weakest members.
humans have many ‘higher’ needs that are in fact very sensible and good, and yet that currently lie outside of capitalist enterprise: among these, our need for education, for self-understanding, for beautiful cities and for rewarding social lives. The capitalism
is honour and respect. The rich accumulate money not because they are materially greedy, but because they are emotionally needy.
educating people about how to exercise this choice in judicious ways. Capitalism needs to be saved by elevating the quality of demand.
how human values can be reconciled with the needs of businesses. He deserves our ongoing attention because he was interested in an issue that has become a leading priority of our own times: how to create an economy that is at once profitable and civilised.
1. Modern work is ‘alienated’
3. Workers get paid little while capitalists get rich
out, we have crises in capitalism not because of shortages, but because of abundance; we have too much stuff.
used it to control their wives and children. The idealised bourgeois family was in fact fraught with tension, oppression, and resentment, and stayed together not because of love but for financial reasons.
