“Philosophy is simply one thing: a guide to the good life. No more, no less.”
Um, yeah, no.
If you think that, then you don’t know what philosophy is.
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Because the author isn’t a real philosopher.
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Eh. I prefer me some Epicureanism.
Wishful thinking isn’t a great reason to believe the will isn’t a slave to causality (or to disbelieve, ftm). I think we are slaves to causality (mostly just for the sake of coherence) but this is nothing like philosophically sound, let alone scientifically supported.
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I’m very much skeptical of ‘free will’(though I admit that the illusion is occasionally pretty stubborn).
My point was mostly just that you can’t do any “and this is how you ought to regard worldly happenings” philosophy without stepping into a fairly epic morass of will, causality, qualia; and similar messy subjects.
Unless you just take the ‘blithe naive empiricism’ approach and dismiss messy problems for being messy(which is arguably a cop-out; but frustrates everyone by being vastly more effective than it has any right to be); nothing is simple.
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Everybody is a real philosopher.
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That’s pessimism: a style of philosophy that’s lesser known or respected than Stoicism, but one that rarely gets it wrong.
The big problem for pessimists?
They never accomplish anything.
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What an utterly desolate way to introduce the topic.
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May I have the patience and humility to accept what I can’t change
The wisdom and strength to change what I should
The experience(s) to teach me the difference.
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That’s better; no hokey religion to mess things up.
But you forgot the last line -
And enough ammunition to deal with the bastards that need dealing with.
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You get to choose whether you’re mean or nice back to someone whose mean to you. You get to choose what you do when it’s raining—and how much fun you have whatever the weather happens to be.
If you can learn that now and embrace it, you’ll have the best life ever and no one will ever be able to boss you around. Because you’ll be the real boss. The boss of your thoughts, feelings and decisions.
As stated, this philosophy would seem to lead the rich into uncaring hedonism while blaming slaves for their own chains. Most simplistic philosophies tend to fail those edge cases.
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God, grant me another Serenity movie
Or a new season of Firefly
Amen.
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He should be chiding her for messing with live sand dollars. That’s frowned upon, and illegal in many places. And if it’s the hard white “skeleton” which is mostly what you find of them on a beach, then she really isn’t making a difference, since it’s dead.
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Well, that film did kill the franchise. Tobey Maguire’s acting career hasn’t done too well since either.
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This post has a strong “one weird trick” aroma and I think that’s no coincidence, because this form of stoicism sounds like other self-help fads that conflate pep rallies with insight (not that I’m accusing anyone of selling anything) (other than the author selling his book, which he is). Things not going your way? Use our strategies to get what you want!
But as @fuzzyfungus has been saying, this whole angle supposes that “what you want” is (a) well-defined and (b) a good thing for you and/or the world, when both are profoundly dubious. Buddhists would argue that wanting things is itself the root of suffering, and I’m inclined to agree, but at any rate there’s clearly a flaw with asking unhappy people what would make them happy, then taking that at face value and asking only how to make it happen.
What’s really rubbed me the wrong way is the Turmp-scale bullshit-nugget that philosophy is “simply one thing: a guide to the good life”. Not a practice of inquiring about yourself and the world; a guide that tells you how to get the things you know to be desirable. Never mind how you came to “know” that. Asking questions is wrong. Getting the things you’ve been taught to want is right.
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I’m fine with just “will”. Freedom-noodling muddies waters that are already thoroughly clouded. Taking my own criticism to heart, though: my dislike of freedom-complications doesn’t mean wills aren’t actually thus complicated. I simply can’t reconcile descriptions of such freedom with the world of which I am part (and not for lack of trying; it’s such a pervasive idea in western literature and government that anyone would be foolish to ignore it).
As to your point: I don’t understand it well enough to agree or disagree. Insofar as I am a tedious monist and an empiricist wont to dismiss deepity, I’d just say that the tenacity or beauty or ugliness of ideas isn’t indicative of their truth, worthiness, utility, morality, etc. To critique my own position again: this applies as much to empirical approaches to knowledge as to any other (see the ongoing reproducibility crisis and the state of, for instance, pharmaceutical research publications).
I love it when the knives come out
Sounds like this was written by someone who tried to read Hegel but ended up curled up in a ball on the floor crying.
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Isn’t that the normal response to trying to read Hegel?
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Perhaps (although I’ve managed to stay off the floor at least), but implying that all philosophy should be explainable to a 5 year old is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. If only some articulate person had “explained it all to me” at the age of 5 I wouldn’t have wasted so many years reading all these silly books!
And this: “Philosophy is simply one thing: a guide to the good life. No more, no less.” - that, that is the 2nd dumbest thing I’ve ever read.
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