How to Live a Good Life: A Guide to Choosing Your Personal Philosophy - Softcover

Pigliucci, Massimo; Cleary, Skye; Kaufman, Daniel

 
9780525566144: How to Live a Good Life: A Guide to Choosing Your Personal Philosophy
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0525566147 ISBN 13: 9780525566144
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

A collection of essays by fifteen philosophers presenting a thoughtful, introductory guide to choosing a philosophy for living an examined and meaningful life.

Socrates famously said "the unexamined life is not worth living," but what does it mean to truly live philosophically?

This thought-provoking, wide-ranging collection brings together essays by fifteen leading philosophers reflecting on what it means to live according to a philosophy of life. From Eastern philosophies (Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism) and classical Western philosophies (such as Aristotelianism and Stoicism), to the four major religions, as well as contemporary philosophies (such as existentialism and effective altruism), each contributor offers a lively, personal account of how they find meaning in the practice of their chosen philosophical tradition.

Together, the pieces in How to Live a Good Life provide not only a beginner's guide to choosing a life philosophy but also a timely portrait of what it means to live an examined life in the twenty-first century.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI is currently the K.D. Irani professor of philosophy at the City College of New York. He has a PhD in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Connecticut and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Tennessee. Pigliucci has been elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science "for fundamental studies of genotype by environmental interactions and for public defense of evolutionary biology from pseudoscientific attack." His work has been published in national and international outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Aeon, Philosophy Now,and The Philosophers' Magazine, among others. He is most recently the author of the bestselling How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life .

SKYE C. CLEARY, PhD, MBA, is a philosopher and author of Existentialism and Romantic Love  She teaches philosophy, leadership, and management at Columbia University, Barnard College, the City University of New York, and the New York Public Library. Skye authored the script for the TED-Ed animation "Why Do We Love? A Philosophical Inquiry," which has had over 2.2 million views. Skye is currently working on a second animation for TED-Ed about Simone de Beauvoir. Her work has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Philosophers' Magazine, HuffPost, Business Insider, and The New Republic.

DANIEL A. KAUFMAN, PhD, received his BA in philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his PhD in philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is professor of philosophy at Missouri State University.

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A collection of essays by fifteen philosophers presenting a thoughtful, introductory guide to choosing a philosophy for living an examined and meaningful life. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL



Socrates famously said "the unexamined life is not worth living," but what does it mean to truly live philosophically?



This thought-provoking, wide-ranging collection brings together essays by fifteen leading philosophers reflecting on what it means to live according to a philosophy of life. From Eastern philosophies (Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism) and classical Western philosophies (such as Aristotelianism and Stoicism), to the four major religions, as well as contemporary philosophies (such as existentialism and effective altruism), each contributor offers a lively, personal account of how they find meaning in the practice of their chosen philosophical tradition.



Together, the pieces in How to Live a Good Life provide not only a beginner's guide to choosing a life philosophy but also a timely portrait of what it means to live an examined life in the twenty-first century.

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Group I

Ancient Philosophies from the East

Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism

Eastern philosophies—particularly three of the most well known: Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism—tend to have a reputation in the West for being all about yoga and meditation. Although these are parts of what they are about, the essays by Owen Flanagan, Bryan Van Norden, and Robin R. Wang show that this conception is overly simplified, incomplete, and misleading. The risk of cherry-picking bits and pieces—such as meditation or yoga—without a fuller understanding of the underlying philosophy is that we end up with commercialized cults of the self, sacrificing credit cards and calories to the Yoga Fashion Gods Inc., which is a far cry from what the Buddha, Confucius, and Laozi teach. Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism are philosophies of life that present primarily practical guides for ethical behavior.

Buddhism is, by some estimates, currently the fourth largest “religion” in the world, after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, accounting for around 500 million people, or nearly 7 percent of the world’s population.1 It is hard to say how many people follow Confucianism and Daoism, because when polls are done in Korea and China, for example, only a small percentage say they officially belong to the “religion” of Confucianism, but most conform to and enact a Confucian way of life. Confucianism is more a cultural and philosophical affiliation than a religious one, and the ideas and texts of Confucians continue to exert deep cultural influences on billions of people.

The popular practices of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism could have been included as religions in Group III, but we think they merit their own section, not only because they originated in Asia, but also because they do not worship deities in the same ways as more orthodox religious traditions (such as Hinduism). They often do make reference to deities or spiritual entities, and there are religious rites and temples associated with them, but intellectuals in each tradition typically regard them as “skillful means,” that is, expedients for justifying or explaining the philosophical teachings to people. Moreover, their focus is on the individual, or the individual within society, rather than a god, and, as Flanagan argues, Buddhism in particular lends itself well to secularization for those looking for a spiritual and ethical, but not necessarily religious, philosophy.

Siddhartha Gautama, more commonly known as “the Buddha,” was an Indian prince who lived around 500–400 BCE. At the age of twenty-nine, he traveled away from his palace to meet his subjects and was shocked by the sickness and suffering he witnessed. He became an ascetic and at thirty-five meditated under a bodhi tree for forty-nine days and, according to the legend, became enlightened. He set about spreading his wisdom on how to achieve enlightenment. Like Daoism and Stoicism (which we will come to soon), Buddhism aims to relieve pain and suffering. Key sources of our existential pain are emotions such as anger, resentment, and blame, which inflict suffering on ourselves as well as others. Buddhists check, or as Flanagan puts it, “deflate” their ego by exercising virtues including compassion, loving-kindness, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. “The ethical imperative,” Flanagan says, “is always to love, to substitute compassion and love whenever and wherever there is suffering, violence, cruelty, and hate.” This is part of the path to releasing ourselves from our attachments and freeing ourselves from the endless cycle of rebirth, so that we may find a state of serenity and, ultimately, nirvana. It is not always as simple as it sounds, though—and Flanagan talks us through the problem of whether a Buddhist would kill Hitler, a thought experiment that might for some end in a brain cramp.

About the same time that Buddhism was flourishing in India, China was having its own golden age of philosophy. Between 770 and 221 BCE there was intense interstate warfare in China, but also vibrant intellectual debate, as thinkers argued over the solutions to China’s problems. This spurred a widespread enthusiasm for education and learning, leading to what was called the period of the “Hundred Schools of Thought,” as new ideas flowed and flourished. This is when Confucianism and Daoism developed, along with Mohism (a form of impartial consequentialism); the School of Names (concerned with the philosophy of language and dialectics); Legalism (a philosophy of government based on clear laws that are strictly enforced); and the School of Yin-yang (which sought to understand and potentially control the course of history through the use of concepts such as yin, yang, and the Five Phases).

Kongzi, more commonly known in the West as Confucius, advocated compassion for others and personal integrity. Kongzi claimed that we have special obligations to those tied to us by personal relations such as kinship. This emphasis on filial piety is one of the best-known aspects of Confucianism. However, Confucians stress that we should have compassion not only for those close to us, but for “all under Heaven,” since we are all interdependent. The Confucian way is to treat everyone as if they were our own siblings, parents, or children, because we exist within relationships, and good relationships make for a good life.

Compassion for others is a manifestation of benevolence, one of the four Confucian cardinal virtues, along with righteousness (integrity in the face of temptations), wisdom, and propriety (skillfulness in following social conventions such as etiquette and ritual). Confucianism is similar to Buddhism in advocating compassion. However, Buddhism sees attachments as the source of suffering, while Confucianism argues that a good life is one rich in healthy attachments, to family, friends, and humans in general. Confucians and Buddhists also disagree on the nature of the self. For the Buddhist, we are impermanent and without a fixed essence. A Confucian says that to deny the fact of individual existence, “is like closing one’s eyes so that one does not see one’s nose—but the nose is still there where it belongs,” as Bryan Van Norden notes.

Another influential philosophy to emerge from the Hundred Schools of Thought was Daoism—sometimes spelled Taoism in English, but the Chinese characters are the same—or the “School of the Way,” founded by the sages Laozi and Zhuangzi.2 Whereas Confucianism is concerned with social harmony, Daoism is interested in the individual living in harmony with nature and the natural flow of the universe. As Robin Wang explains, we align ourselves with the Dao (the way) by putting our mind on a diet. We dig out the tangled weeds of anxiety and worry that clog up our mind, and clearing them out leaves some empty space for illumination and acuity. We prepare for and accept uncertainty, and go with the flow of the world, but focus on taking control of our body and nurturing it, like a garden. Happiness comes not from nirvana or relationships necessarily, but rather from trusting and following the flow and, as Mama Wang tells her daughters, when we “eat well, exercise daily, get plenty of sleep, and do well in school.” Daoism’s ultimate vision, however, is a spiritual transformation that brings the finite human life into an infinite cosmos.

Notes

1Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures, “The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050,” Pew Research Center (April 2, 2015): 102, https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/NAzdCZ6WyZF6XmrXfzi-Kq?domain=assets.pewresearch.org.

2Laozi is also sometimes known as...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525566147
ISBN 13 
9780525566144
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
320
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