More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The question we are left with at the beginning of the twenty-first century is how long we can claim these rights for without accepting they come with fundamental obligations. The time is ripe for a Universal Declaration of Human Obligations
Nisarg Shah liked this
You can’t experience being alive without realizing that you have to die, she thought. But it’s just as impossible to realize you have to die without thinking how incredibly amazing it is to be alive.
One exponent of this view was the philosopher Xenophanes, who lived from about 570 B.C. Men have created the gods in their own image, he said.
This unshakable faith in human reason is called rationalism. A rationalist is someone who believes that human reason is the primary source of our knowledge of the world.
Socrates was this joker in Athens. He was neither certain nor indifferent. All he knew was that he knew nothing – and it troubled him. So he became a philosopher – someone who does not give up but tirelessly pursues his quest for truth.
Socrates thought that no one could possibly be happy if they acted against their better judgment. And he who knows how to achieve happiness will do so. Therefore, he who knows what is right will do right. Because why would anybody choose to be unhappy?
As I explained, Plato believed that reality is divided into two regions. One region is the world of the senses, about which we can only have approximate or incomplete knowledge by using our five (approximate or incomplete) senses. In this sensory world, ‘everything flows’ and nothing is permanent. Nothing in the sensory world is, there are only things that come to be and pass away. The other region is the world of ideas, about which we can have true knowledge by using our reason. This world of ideas cannot be perceived by the senses, but the ideas (or forms) are eternal and immutable.
How should we live? What does it require to live a good life? His answer: Man can only achieve happiness by using all his abilities and capabilities.
have already read your Religion test,’ he said. ‘It was near the top of the pile.’ ‘I hope it gave you some food for thought.’ ‘That was exactly what I wanted to talk to you about. It was in many ways very mature. Surprisingly so. And self-reliant. But had you done your homework, Sophie?’ Sophie fidgeted a little. ‘Well, you did say it was important to have a personal point of view.’ ‘Well, yes I did … but there are limits.’ Sophie looked him straight in the eye. She felt she could permit herself this after all she had experienced lately. ‘I have started studying philosophy,’ she said. ‘It
...more
The Cynics emphasized that true happiness is not found in external advantages such as material luxury, political power, or good health. True happiness lies in not being dependent on such random and fleeting things. And because happiness does not consist in benefits of this kind, it is within everyone’s reach. Moreover, having once been attained, it can never be lost.
The emperor stood before him and asked if there was anything he could do for him. Was there anything he desired? ‘Yes,’ Diogenes replied. ‘Stand to one side. You’re blocking the sun.’
This led to the thought that there exists a universal rightness, the so-called natural law. And because this natural law was based on timeless human and universal reason, it did not alter with time and place. In this, then, the Stoics sided with Socrates against the Sophists.
Cicero (106–43 B.C.). It was he who formed the very concept of ‘humanism’ – that is, a view of life that has the individual as its central focus. Some years later, the Stoic Seneca (4 B.C.–A.D. 65) said that ‘to mankind, mankind is holy.’ This has remained a slogan for humanism ever since.
Epicurus also believed that a pleasurable result in the short term must be weighed against the possibility of a greater, more lasting, or more intense pleasure in the long term.
‘Death does not concern us,’ Epicurus said quite simply, ‘because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.’ (When you think about it, no one has ever been bothered by being dead.)
‘I am the cosmic spirit,’ the mystic can exclaim, or ‘I am God.’ For God is not only present in the world; he has nowhere else to be.
mystical experience can also have ethical significance. A former president of India, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, said once, ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself because you are your neighbor. It is an illusion that makes you think that your neighbor is someone other than yourself.’
In Snorri’s stories of the Old Norse gods, some of the myths are similar to the myths of India that were handed down from two to three thousand years earlier. Although Snorri’s myths reflect the Nordic environment and the Indian myths reflect the Indian, many of them retain traces of a common origin. We can see these traces most clearly in myths about immortal potions and the struggles of the gods against the monsters of chaos.
We can even trace a particular word for ‘insight’ or ‘knowledge’ from one culture to another all over the Indo-European world. In Sanskrit it is vidya. The word is identical to the Greek word idéa, which was so important in Plato’s philosophy. From Latin, we have the word video, but on Roman ground the word simply means to see. For
Lastly, the Indo-Europeans had a cyclic view of history. This is the belief that history goes in circles, just like the seasons of the year. There is thus no beginning and no end to history, but there are different civilizations that rise and fall in an eternal interplay between birth and death.
