The Best Things in Life: A Guide to What Really Matters (Philosophy in Action) by Thomas Hurka. Hurka has made an audacious attempt to pack most of his philosophy into a puny book and spectacularly pull's it off as well. This is not a cheesy book like "The Secret", claiming to have definite answers to all the quintessential questions of life. In-fact, one would find number of passages uprooting our long held believes. Thanks to confirmation bias, it would be hard to concentrate on those passages. A wonderful, well written and a simple book, nudging us towards a better life without consoling our conscience.
Paradox of hedonism - "A sure way to lose happiness... is to want it at the expense of everything else. - Bette Davis"
On Compassion - "Compassion is a morally fitting response to another's pain and because it's fitting, it's good. Compassionate pain may also be bad as pain - may be any pain is bad insofar as it's pain - but it's also good insofar as it's compassionate, and overall usually more good than bad. On balance it's better to feel for others' troubles than to be callously indifferent to them."
On Self-Knowledge - "Understanding yourself remains as good as understanding other people or things. And sometimes it's hugely beneficial, as when it helps you choose a rewarding career or improve your character. But it's effects aside, self-knowledge doesn't seem so special: it has neither the generality of scientific knowledge nor the extra importance of knowing your place in the world. While it's good to know your inner states, it's no tragedy if you don't, and if being wrong about them helps you achieve important goods, that's probably on balance a blessing."
(bet, those lines would make Socrates cringe)
On Callousness (Vice & Virtue) - "It's not only wrong oriented attitudes that are vicious; so is not having right ones, or not caring where a good person would care. And even rightly oriented attitudes can be vicious if they're insufficiently strong. Imagine that a torture cares only a bit about his vicitim's pain, or a solider liberating a concentration camp at the end of Word War II is just slightly saddened by what he sees, as he might be by a friend's headache. These attitudes are so inadequate to their objects' evil that they too involve callousness. Great values demand strong response, and ones that fall too far short are evil.""There are three kinds of vice. First are simple vices, involving a wrongly oriented attitude such as loving an evil or hating a good; they're typified by malice and envy. Next come the vice of indifference, where without having a wrongly oriented attitude you lack a right one; these include callousness and sloth. Last come the vices of disproportion, where your attitudes are appropriately oriented and maybe on their own good, but so out of proportion to their object values that taken together they're evil; he we find selfishness and cowardice."
(that last vice was cognitive dissonance 101, right?)
On Relationship - "If we may compare longed and successful love for a person to the course of a river from its source to the sea, it begins as a violent torrent in a narrow bed full of rocks and shallows; in its middle it receives many tributaries; and in its later stages it becomes a clam wide deep stream
Too often, of course, there is no such happy endings, and the stream peters out into the shallows of mere habitual toleration or the swaps of mutual irritation and frustrations".
(those were pragmatic words of wisdom from Philosopher C.D.Broad)
My favorite lines; simplest of all wisdom:
Writing to a friend's newborn daughter, the poet Philip Larkin wished that not she be talented or beautiful but that she be ordinary. "In fact, may you be dull / If that is what a skilled, / Vigilant, flexible, / Unemphasised, enthralled / Catching of happiness is called." I'll assume that Larkin wasn't utterly misguided and the what he was wishing the young girl were indeed the one of the best things in life."
Paradox of hedonism - "A sure way to lose happiness... is to want it at the expense of everything else. - Bette Davis"
On Compassion - "Compassion is a morally fitting response to another's pain and because it's fitting, it's good. Compassionate pain may also be bad as pain - may be any pain is bad insofar as it's pain - but it's also good insofar as it's compassionate, and overall usually more good than bad. On balance it's better to feel for others' troubles than to be callously indifferent to them."
On Self-Knowledge - "Understanding yourself remains as good as understanding other people or things. And sometimes it's hugely beneficial, as when it helps you choose a rewarding career or improve your character. But it's effects aside, self-knowledge doesn't seem so special: it has neither the generality of scientific knowledge nor the extra importance of knowing your place in the world. While it's good to know your inner states, it's no tragedy if you don't, and if being wrong about them helps you achieve important goods, that's probably on balance a blessing."
(bet, those lines would make Socrates cringe)
On Callousness (Vice & Virtue) - "It's not only wrong oriented attitudes that are vicious; so is not having right ones, or not caring where a good person would care. And even rightly oriented attitudes can be vicious if they're insufficiently strong. Imagine that a torture cares only a bit about his vicitim's pain, or a solider liberating a concentration camp at the end of Word War II is just slightly saddened by what he sees, as he might be by a friend's headache. These attitudes are so inadequate to their objects' evil that they too involve callousness. Great values demand strong response, and ones that fall too far short are evil.""There are three kinds of vice. First are simple vices, involving a wrongly oriented attitude such as loving an evil or hating a good; they're typified by malice and envy. Next come the vice of indifference, where without having a wrongly oriented attitude you lack a right one; these include callousness and sloth. Last come the vices of disproportion, where your attitudes are appropriately oriented and maybe on their own good, but so out of proportion to their object values that taken together they're evil; he we find selfishness and cowardice."
(that last vice was cognitive dissonance 101, right?)
On Relationship - "If we may compare longed and successful love for a person to the course of a river from its source to the sea, it begins as a violent torrent in a narrow bed full of rocks and shallows; in its middle it receives many tributaries; and in its later stages it becomes a clam wide deep stream
Too often, of course, there is no such happy endings, and the stream peters out into the shallows of mere habitual toleration or the swaps of mutual irritation and frustrations".
(those were pragmatic words of wisdom from Philosopher C.D.Broad)
My favorite lines; simplest of all wisdom:
Writing to a friend's newborn daughter, the poet Philip Larkin wished that not she be talented or beautiful but that she be ordinary. "In fact, may you be dull / If that is what a skilled, / Vigilant, flexible, / Unemphasised, enthralled / Catching of happiness is called." I'll assume that Larkin wasn't utterly misguided and the what he was wishing the young girl were indeed the one of the best things in life."
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