Summary: Being good makes everything better for everyone.
Commentary: We haven't gotten any "hard" philosophy in a while (Leviathan would be the closest, and that was like two weeks ago). I have kind of a love/hate relationship with these. I took a god awful intro course in undergrad that could be summarized as, "everyone is an idiot, nothing matters, I'm going to walk out of the middle of class to go smoke pot in my office." The prof left in the middle of the final, which was full of typos that he wouldn't answer questions about. It was interesting.
A part of the reason I'm doing this whole 5FSOB thing is because I feel like my undergrad was, in general, pretty underwhelming. In my Master's I talked to people a little about how I talked to some older people with Masters and Doctorates who had to be fluent in a foreign language or do other things outside their "major," and how I wished we had to learn more of that. Most people just wanted to get their degree and get out ASAP. While I'm interested in learning more about a whole lot of things, I think philosophy really represents the core of my motivation as a subject that I feel like I didn't learn about in the past, and want to find out more about now.
On the other hand, it does feel like an awful lot of philosophy can be summarized as, "everyone is an idiot and/or evil, nothing matters and/or is real, I'm better than all of you," which makes it hard for me to get into.
I was excited when I saw Kant pop up today, since my basic understanding of him from pop culture, Wikipedia, etc., is that the key to his philosophy was "what is a good person?" which implies it is both possible to be a good person, and it somehow matters.
This is a very dense reading. I saw less than nine pages and thought it'd be quick. I was wrong. As always, I have to wonder if there's a better translation that's newer.
"Supreme good" appears in the middle of a paragraph here, so there's not a single pull quote to define it. I think the closest summary would be something like, "doing good means that you try to help others, and people are happy when they do good." He does later say:
To secure one's own happiness is a duty, at least indirectly; for discontent with one's condition, under a pressure of many anxieties and amidst unsatisfied wants, might easily become a great temptation to transgression of duty.
Which is a good thing to keep in mind. I almost did "S is for secure one's own happiness" but that felt wordy. You do have to take care of yourself before you can take care of others.
No comments:
Post a Comment