On living a good life...................

 

Look, alright, nobody, and I mean NOBODY, knows what they’re doing. I spent the first few decades of my life thinking everybody else received a Secret Pamphlet and that this pamphlet explained how to file taxes and when to leave a party and how to love someone without ruining it.

I didn’t get the pamphlet. I assumed it was just me. Nope. We’re all out here freestyling. Yeesh.

Still gotta answer the question though: How do we live a good life? Yeah, I’m gonna need some assistance…

Naturally, the person I decided to go to for help is a Greek guy who’s been dead for 2300 years.

-Eric Barker has the rest of the story here

Willingness.................

 

Deliverance is out of time and into eternity, and is achieved by obedience and docility to the eternal Nature of Things.  We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously in the "state of grace."  All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine Reality.  We are, as it were, aeolian harps, endowed with the power either to expose themselves to the wind of the Spirit or to shut themselves away from it.

-Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

Faith...................

 

      Tolstoy searches in science, philosophy, wisdom and reason and finds no answer to convince him that life is worth living.  Science answers many questions, but not the one that obsesses him.  He sees too that meaning does not lie in something superadded to life: possessions, achievements, honours, awards.  Those are externalities, gift-wrapping, not life itself.  The answer that eventually came to Tolstoy was religious faith.  'No matter what answers faith may give, its every answer gives to the finite existence of man the sense of the infinite—a sense which is not destroyed by suffering, privation or death.'  Faith, he said is a force of life.  'If a man lives, then he must believe in something.'  If that something is finite, it will not ultimately satisfy him, since everything finite eventually perishes.  The only thing worth believing in is the infinite.  And, 'Without faith it is impossible to live.'

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership:  Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

Truth.........................

 

Following the crowd isn’t a valid life philosophy. 

-Tony Isola

Eric Barker........................

 

.............................weighs in on self-sabotage:

Žižek says we aren’t unified. We’re not transparent to ourselves. We say one thing, do another, and then rationalize like crazy. We don’t just fail to know ourselves. We actively collaborate in not knowing ourselves. This isn’t the kind of thing you want to hear from a man who looks like he resides in a storm drain.
But we don’t need more false reassurance. We need a brilliant lunatic to point at the machinery of our lives and say: “You see, that part there? (sniffs, rubs nose) This thing you think is normal? That’s where the madness lives.”
And this is why Slavoj Žižek is our most helpful ally against self-sabotage.

Eric Barker.........................

 

...................thinks about Arthur Schopenhauer:

“You’re comparing Taylor Swift to a 19th century German philosopher who thought life was an unquenchable spiral of desire?”

Yes. And you can’t stop me, but more importantly, you can’t tell me why I’m wrong, which is the part that should bother you.

a choice................

 

Your economic future is not going to be determined by the economy, but rather your own philosophy.

-Jim Rohn, as culled from Leading an Inspired Life

Fruitless, no doubt.....................

The only interesting philosophers are the ones who have stopped thinking and have begun to search for happiness.

-Emil Cioran

Checking in....................

 

.......with the Philosophy of Life X-files:

pursuit.........................

 

Philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom; and where better to discover the truth than at a symposion, where wine does away with inhibitions to expose truths, both pleasant and unpleasant?  "Wine reveals what is hidden," declared Eratosthenes, a Greek philosopher who lived in the third century BCE. . . . The most famous example is Plato's Symposium, in which the participants, including Plato's depiction of his mentor, Socrates, discuss the subject of love.  After an entire night's drinking, everyone has fallen asleep except Socrates, who remains apparently unaffected by the wine he has drunk, and sets off on his day's business.  Plato depicts him as the ideal drinker: He uses wine in the pursuit of truth but remains in total control of himself and suffers no ill effects.

Tom Standage:  A History of the World in 6 Glasses

Likely not much better..........

 

     What is it about the study of philosophy that tends to make brilliant minds stupid when it comes down to what are known as actual cases?  Consider Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the four great names in twentieth-century philosophy: the first was a Nazi, the second died certain that America was responsible for all the world's evil, the third was a Stalinist long after any justification for being so could be adduced, and the fourth lived on the borders of madness most of his life.  Contemplation of the lives of the philosophers is enough to drive one to the study of sociology.

-Joseph Epstein, Essays in Biography

Working on a philosophy..............

 

wavelets in a ceaseless surf..........

 

     Now Aristotle understands Plato to have held that the universals have objective existence, and indeed Plato had said that the universal is incomparably more lasting and important than the individual,—the latter being but a little wavelet in a ceaseless surf; men come and go, but man goes on forever.  Aristotle's is a matter-of-fact mind; as William James would say, a tough, not tender, mind; he sees the root of endless mysticism and scholarly nonsense in the Platonic "realism"; and he attacks it with all the vigor of a first polemic.  As Brutus loved not Caesar less but Rome more, so Aristotle says, Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas—"Dear Plato, but dearer still is truth."

-Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

On particulars and generalities......

 

     A hostile commentator might remark that Aristotle (like Nietzsche) criticizes Plato so keenly because he is conscious of having borrowed from him generously; no man is a hero to his debtors.  But Aristotle has a healthy attitude, nevertheless; he is a realist almost in the modern sense; he is resolved to concern himself with the objective present, while Plato is absorbed in the subjective future.  There was, in the Socratic-Platonic demand for definitions, a tendency away from things and facts to theories and ideas, from particulars to generalities, from science to scholasticism; at last Plato became so devoted to generalities that they began to determine his particulars, so devoted to ideas that they began to define or select his facts.  Aristotle preaches a return to things, to the "unwithered face of nature" and reality; he had a lusty preference for the concrete particular, for the flesh and blood individual.  But Plato so loved the general and universal that in The Republic he destroyed the individual to make a perfect state.

-Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

cornerstone.....................

 

     The cornerstone of the company's culture was a philosophy Danny called Enlightened Hospitality, which upended traditional hierarchies by prioritizing the people who worked there over everything else, including the guests and investors.  This didn't mean the customer suffered; in fact, the opposite.  Danny's big idea was to hire great people, treat them well, and invest deeply into their personal and professional growth, and they would take great care of the customers—which is exactly what they did.

-Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect

Good luck with that.................

To devise a method of barring incompetence and knavery from public office, and of selecting and preparing the best to rule for the common good—that is the problem of political philosophy.

-Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

Why philosophy......................

 

We want to know that the little things are little, and the big things are big, before it is too late; we want to see things now as they will seem forever—"in the light of eternity."  We want to learn to laugh in the face of the inevitable, to smile even at the looming of death.  We want to be whole, to coordinate our energies by criticizing and harmonizing our desires; for coordinated energy is the last word in ethics and politics, and perhaps in logic and metaphysics too.  "To be a philosopher," said Thoreau, "is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust."  We may be sure the if we can but find wisdom, all things else will be added unto us.  "Seek ye first the good things of the mind," Bacon admonishes us, "and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt."  Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.

-Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

Eric Barker..........................

 

...................embraces Albert Camus.

Camus defines “The Absurd” as the tension between the human desire for meaning and the universe’s refusal to provide any. Meaning is not waiting for you like an unclaimed bag at a sad regional airport. It’s not included in your welcome kit at birth. The universe just shrugs and says, “lol, no.”

Philosophy...................

 

Is that the point of philosophy? To read interesting stories and lessons to feel smarter? To impress friends? No.

The point of philosophy is to make you a better person. To make your life better. And through that, to lift up the lives of the people around you.

But here’s the catch: to do that, you need to put into practice what you read. 

-Ryan Holiday, via the Daily Stoic

Bothism.........................

 

more fun here