Goebel

Hi there, and welcome to what is destined to become your new favourite blog. Unless, of course, you’re not very cool. In which case, you probably won’t like it very much. My name is Goebel. I’m a student of philosophy attempting to avail and live out answers to some of life’s most important questions. I have a particularly strong interest in ethics as I believe that philosophy’s main focus ought to be guiding us through the process of living and helping us to do so well. I suppose it could be said that I’m advocating applied philosophy; and any sort of such application must involve constructive dialogue with other people, so I encourage others to ask questions if they are so inclined. In addition to my main subject of study, I’m quite interested in chess, nutrition & fitness, psychology, history, and literature. Below are some of my favourite quotations; they should help you to acquire a strong conception of what you’ll find on this blog: You don’t speak well, Sir, if you believe that a man worth anything at all would give countervailing weight to the danger of life or death or give consideration to anything but this when he acts: whether his action is just or unjust, the action of a good or of an evil man. — Socrates in Plato’s Apology When a man said to Diogenes of Sinope that it was a bad thing to live; ‘Not to live,’ said he, 'but to live badly.’— Diogenes Laertius, The Lives & Opinions of Eminent Philosophers The thesis Socrates undertakes to prove to Polus … is at the heart of his vision of the good life. It is that he who commits injustice inflicts upon himself a greater injury than on the one he wrongs. Let us ponder this for a moment. Imagine someone living under a brutal dictatorship, accused of political crime, who saves himself by incriminating falsely a friend, whereupon the latter is apprehended and tortured, coming out of the ordeal a broken man to die soon after, while the accuser, well rewarded by the regime, lives on to a healthy and prosperous old age. Socrates is claiming that the perpetrator of this outrage has damaged his own happiness more than his victim’s. Has any stronger claim been ever made by a moral philosopher? I know of none. — Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher Excellence withers without an adversary: the time for us to see how great it is, how much its force, is when it displays its power through endurance. I assure you, good men should do the same: they should not be afraid to face hardships and difficulties, or complain of fate; whatever happens, good men should take it in good part, and turn it into a good end; it is not what you endure that matters, but how you endure it. — Seneca, On Providence Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not … to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues.— Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue The time of a man’s life is as a point; the substance of it ever flowing, the sense obscure; and the whole composition of the body tending to corruption. His soul is restless, fortune uncertain, and fame doubtful…. What then is there which can guide a man? One thing and only one: Philosophy. — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations The clouds of my grief dissolved and I drank in the light. With my thoughts recollected I turned to examine the face of my physician. I turned my eyes and fixed my gaze upon her, and I saw that it was my nurse in whose house I had been cared for since my youth—Philosophy. — Anicius Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy How very paltry and limited the normal human intellect is, and how little lucidity there is in the human consciousness, may be judged from the fact that, despite the ephemeral brevity of human life, the uncertainty of our existence and the countless enigmas which press upon us from all sides, everyone does not continually and ceaselessly philosophize, but that only the rarest of exceptions do. — Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World One could say that what differentiates ancient from modern philosophy is the fact that, in ancient philosophy, it was not only Chrysippus or Epicurus who, just because they had developed a philosophical discourse, were considered philosophers. Rather, every person who lived according to the precepts of Chrysippus or Epicurus was every bit as much a philosopher as they…. Ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living. By contrast, modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists. — Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life For Socrates, then, philosophical reflection and analysis concerning the human good, as well as concerning human deficiencies, dictate a quite particular way of life. This way of life is, practically speaking, though not in theory, the best for a human being. It is a life in which the practice of philosophical discussion is itself the central activity. Philosophical insight and knowledge show us that the good of the soul is the highest good, and that this good is wisdom—a permanent, deep, and complete grasp of the whole system of human values, in all their ramifications and applications to the varying circumstances of life…. However, an assiduous and self-critically demanding philosophical investigation of existing views on questions about human values, including one’s own, leads to the conclusion that, though human nature opens the possibility of wisdom to us, wisdom is too demanding a goal for us to attain in practice. Hence, though in principle the best life is one in which we possess and live on the basis of wisdom, in practice the best human life—the best life any human being is ever going to live—is the one in which, like Socrates, we constantly and ceaselessly pursue wisdom through philosophical inquiry and discussion. The practically best human life is a life, not of wisdom (sophia), but of philosophy (philosophia), wisdom’s love and pursuit.—John M. Cooper, The Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus In both classical philosophy and Christian practice, happiness of this immanent variety was exceedingly rare—the preserve of a ‘happy few,’ whose outstanding virtue or exceptional favor made them more than mere men. As Aristotle observed, a life of happiness ‘would be superior to the human level,’ tantamount to the divine. His happy few were a ‘godlike’ few—a description that applies equally well to the Socratic sage or the Platonic philosopher, the Stoic ascetic or the Epicurean Wise man, the Catholic saint or Calvin’s predestined elect. In all of those incarnations, the happy man—and less frequently, the happy woman—was thought of as one who approached the gods, who had gone beyond the merely human, who had achieved a form of transcendence. For much of Western history, happiness served as a marker of human perfection, an imagined ideal of a creature complete, without further wants, desires, or needs…. The Enlightenment fundamentally altered this long-standing conception, presenting happiness as something to which all human beings could aspire in this life.The basic default position of humanity, happiness was not a gift from God or a trick of fate, a reward for exceptional behavior, but a natural human endowment attainable in theory by every man, woman, and child. Indeed, where human beings were unhappy, Enlightenment thinkers argued, something must be wrong… with their form of government, with their living conditions, with their customs…. Slowly, the goal became less to make more of man—to ask him to rise above—than to feed him the ambrosia that had been taken from heaven, to deliver him his due. And over time, this would create a sense of entitlement and expectation that was fraught with danger.— Darrin M. McMahon, Happiness: A History I know that not everybody majors in philosophy; and it’s distressing — Alvin Plantinga