READING A MODERN PHILOSOPHY BOOK

I never studied philosophy in college, but as real-life started I found it useful.

I say this to make plain that my goal in reading philosophy books is to live a better life. My motivations are to live a better life

but I don’t read many modern titles. I’m sure there are some gems out there, but most of the titles that come across my path feel derivative.

Most of the titles come my way via the Boston Athenaeum Philosophy discussion group.

In any case, the next one up is a book called “Life is Hard.” I want to give a shot. I read it this morning and made notes on the sections that jumped out to me.

My opinions below are what I believe when I wrote it. I don’t here insist that they are what is to be believed.

This isn’t about pointing out who said what first. That’s a foolish game to play since everyone was influenced by everyone else. The thing I’m getting at is that I don’t think it’s useful to use my scarce reading time to read works that are regurgitating old ideas.

Overall I get the impression that this is a book written at the public but aimed at academic philosophers. Perhaps they find these ideas nuanced and profound. But for folks like me, I’m not impressed.

We need more philosophers and less professors of philosophy

Preface

On philosophy

But philosophy is, and can be, more than that. To study the discipline is to become an artisan of arguments, learning to dissect and reason through intractable problems. That is what I learned to do in college; it is what I have taught with conviction for many years. Yet I’ve come to want a philosophy that can speak more intimately to life. When I took my qualifying exams in graduate school, the examiners’ report was mostly positive. But I’ve forgotten all the nice things it contained. What I remember is a critical phrase: my ideas, the examiners warned, had not been “tested in the crucible of direct moral experience.” My friends and I made fun of that remark. But it stayed with me. The point was less that experience disproved my nascent theories than that those theories were too distant from it.

This strikes me as an inauspicious start. The author at once introduces himself as an academic and describes his eventual coming to a realization that strikes my of self- evident. I can’t help but think of Thoreau’s words in Walden

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher 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. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

On your experience vs mine.

What would a philosophy look like that was tested in the crucible of direct moral experience? It’s an intimidating question. No one’s experience is broad or deep enough to stand for everyone’s. Our perspective is always limited, with its unique distortions and blind spots. But there could be a philosophy that speaks from one’s own life, even as it draws on arguments and thought experiments, philosophical theories and distinctions.

The timidity here puts me off. I’m reminded of this line from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius… the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato,and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought.

Introduction

What Aristotle says

I accept every part of that. But the aspiration to live well has frequently embraced a more quixotic goal: the best or ideal life. In Plato’s Republic, justice is imagined through a utopian city-state, not as a fight against injustice here and now. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Plato’s student Aristotle aims for the highest good, eudaimonia—a life that is not merely good enough but one you should choose if you could choose any life at all.

This hits my ear as wrong read of Aristotle. In using words like quixotic the author seems to say that Aristotle’s approach–to aim at the highest good–is foolish and unrealistic. For sure an all-or-nothing approach seems unwise, but Aristotle sounds much more pragmatic in Book I when he says:

If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good. Will not the knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right?

I read that as “if we know what the best good is and aim at it, we’ll get closer to it than if we didn’t know.” Sounds practical to me.

What the stoics say.

With rare exceptions, even those who set their sights a little lower tend to theorize the good life, not the bad. They focus on pleasure, not pain; love, not loss; achievement, not failure…Even the ancient Stoics—philosophers explicitly concerned with how to weather life’s adversities—were surprisingly upbeat. They believed that we can flourish whatever our circumstance; well-being is entirely up to us. In each of these conceptions, hardship is repressed as we pursue the good.

A premise of this book is that this whole approach is wrong. We should not turn away from hardship; and the best is often out of reach. Striving for it only brings dismay.