Alain de Botton ideas Flashcards
1/ Emotional education - an area that has for too long, unfairly and painfully, seemed like a realm of intuition and luck.
2/ Meaning of life – the concept is eminently plausible
3/ Some of our most meaningful moments are to do with instances of connection or when we transcend our egos to put ourselves in the service of others
4/ An obstacle to a meaningful life is a suspicion of introspection and psychotherapy
5/ Sadness feels very taboo. Societies tend slyly to insist on cheerfulness.
6/ Schopenhauer advises us to spend as long as we can with art and philosophy. Max Weber “art provides salvation from the routines of everyday life”.
7/ Sorrow is not an individual failing; it is a basic reality for our entire species.
8/ We live so close to ourselves, we know so much about our private failings, we miss that our flaws are general
9/ If only we could see into the minds of strangers, we would feel so much less alone.
10/ Spinoza’s philosophy is founded on a rejection of the Gods that inform Abrahamic religions.
11/ The struggle for an enlightened secular democracy
12/ Spinoza is a model of intellectual courage
13/ The task of human beings is to try to understand how and why things are the way they are – and then accept it, rather than protest at the workings of existence by sending little messages up into the sky.
14/ Winning higher status makes us increasingly sensitive to its loss
15/ We may – for the sake of true riches – willingly, and with no loss of dignity, opt to become a little poorer and more obscure.
16/ We have bugs in our emotional software
17/ We should be worried by the truth and not opinion. Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, but not their own facts.
18/ Modern education says we must learn about technical subjects. What we need is an education system devoted to wisdom and emotional development.
There is no meaning in life outside of that which we can find by ourselves as a species.
We can extrapolate a theory of meaning from varieties of unhappiness.
Emotional intelligence shows up around partnerships in a sensitivity to the moods of others, in a readiness to grasp what may be going on for them beyond the surface and to enter imaginatively into their point of view.
Emotional intelligence is what distinguishes those who are crushed by failure from those who know how to greet the troubles of existence with a melancholy and at points darkly humorous resilience.
Schopenhauer deeply resented the disruption caused to intelligent people by infatuations
The romantic dominates life because “what is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation.
Life has no intrinsic worth, but is kept in motion merely by want and illusion.
Spinoza regards the following as the most pernicious doctrines promoted by organised religion: the immortality of the soul and the divine judgement it will undergo in some world-to-come. If one believes that God will reward the virtuous and punish the vicious, one’s life will be governed by the emotions of hope and fear: hope that one is among the elect and fear that one is destined for eternal damnation. A life dominated by such irrational passions is a ‘life of bondage’ rather than a life of rational freedom.
In the Ethics, Spinoza directly challenged the main tenets of Judaism in particular and organised religion in general:
- God is not a person who stands outside of nature
- There is no one to hear our prayers
- Or to create miracles
- Or to punish us for misdeeds
- There is no afterlife
- Man is not God’s chosen creature
- The Bible was only written by ordinary people
