Top highlights from How to Be Perfect
in the words of Samuel Beckett: Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
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Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. MAYA ANGELOU
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true happiness comes from remaining focused on the things we do, and doing them with no purpose other than to do them.
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A person is a person through other people.
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in as few words as possible, how to try to pull off the nearly impossible task of living a good life on earth. Heres what they wrote: Know thyself. and Nothing in excess.
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Nature, habit, and teaching, says Aristotle, are all needed. Because flourishing, you see, doesnt just require us to identify and then acquire all of these virtuesit requires that we have every one in the exact right amount. We have to be generous but not too generous, courageous but not too courageous, and so on.
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Quoting the great Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, she tells us that knowledge makes men gentle, just as ignorance hardens us.
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Descartes saw his own singular consciousness as proof of existence. Practioners of ubuntu see our existence as conditional on others' existence.
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President Trump put his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of constructing a new Israel-Palestine peace plan. Kushner had no experience authoring international treaties of any kind, so the announcement was met with skepticism. When Kushner released his plan at the beginning of 2020, he proudly announced that he had read twenty-five books on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To date, Israel and Palestine have not achieved peace.
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This habituation, the practice of working at our virtues, is really the whole shebang here.
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in those rare times when you have to make a decision and you assemble the pieces in exactly the right way, so the image of what to do comes sharply into focusyou will feel alive and fulfilled and elated. You will feel like youre flourishing.
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The individual does not and cannot exist alone. He owes his existence to other people including those of past generations and his contemporaries. He is simply part of the whole. Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say, I am, because we are; and since we are therefore I am.
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The most important part of becoming better people, Ill say yet again, is that we care about whether what we do is good or bad, and therefore try to do the right thing. If we love a problematic person or thing too much to part with it altogether, I think that means we have to keep two ideas in our head at the same time: I love this thing. The person who made it is troubling.
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The best thing about Aristotles constant learning, constant trying, constant searching is what results from it: a mature yet still pliable person, brimming with experiences both old and new, who doesnt rely solely on familiar routines or dated information about how the world works.
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I, for example, have a terrible sense of direction. I do not know where I am at any given moment unless I am in a place I have been ten thousand times before, and even then its diceyI frequently got lost during the seven years I lived in Manhattan,
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Virtue comes about, he writes, not by a process of nature, but by habituation. We become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.
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But theres a serious point here: the shifting of an Overton window often happens gradually, and we readjust to its new range very quickly,9 so there is risk in allowing ourselves to do anything we know is bad just because we want to. In fact, even with good intentions and level heads, if we give in to our lesser instincts too often theres a far more likely outcome than we become black market weapons dealers. Its simply that we become selfish. We start to believe that our own right to do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it, is more important than anything else, and thus our sense of morality concerns only our own happiness or pain.
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These momentswhen we are caught in a situation that has no clear answer, no heuristic to employ that will spit out a theoretical but practically impossible correct decisionare when we see the true value in failure. Were deciding to do something that will, someday, backfire. The more we chew on it and work it through, the more meaning we can derive from that backfire when it happens.
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Act only out of duty to follow a universal maximDerive these maxims using your pure reasonHappiness is irrelevantEnd of poem
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The golden mean of angerwhich, again, Aristotle calls mildnessrepresents an appropriate amount of anger, reserved for the right situations, to be directed at people who deserve it. Like fascists, or corrupt politicians, or anyone associated with the New York Yankees.
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What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Is there something we could do thats better? Why is it better?
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(Side note: So much of philosophy involves investigating embarrassing human activities and inclinations. We really are weird little creatures.)
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To put cruelty first, she writes, is to disregard the idea of sin as it is understood by revealed religion. Sins are transgressions of a divine rule and offenses against God. However, crueltythe willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fearis a wrong done entirely to another creature. When we think only of religious sins as the ultimate bad stuff we want to avoid, we end up manufacturing justifications for horrible atrocities; her example is the European conquerors coming to the New World, encountering its Indigenous peoples, and rationalizing genocide as the will of a Christian God. If we elevate crueltytransgressions against other humansto the top of the worst crimes we can commit list, we can no longer find and exploit any such loopholes.
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called pragmatism a mediator and reconciler thatand I love this phraseunstiffens our theories. Pragmatism, has, in fact, no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof. She is completely genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidenceas long as its reasoning is tethered to the right facts.
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scenarios isnt necessarily good. In fact, the political scientist James C. Scott actually thinks breaking a rule every once in a while is morally necessary: One day you will be called upon to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it. How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters? You have to stay in shape so that when the big day comes you will be ready. What you need is anarchist calisthenics. Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if its only jaywalking. Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, youll keep trim; and when the big day comes, youll be ready.
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As odd and annoying and unpredictable as the people around us can be, given that theyre the people we have to live with, I think its often a better idea to design the moral boundaries of our world with their cooperation than it is to do it abstractly, in their absence. And I further think its a better idea for them to do so with our cooperation.
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What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Is there something I could be doing thats better? Why is it better?
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What We Owe to Each Other by T. M. Scanlon.
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One day you will be called upon to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it. How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters? You have to stay in shape so that when the big day comes you will be ready. What you need is anarchist calisthenics. Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if its only jaywalking. Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, youll keep trim; and when the big day comes, youll be ready.
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are, indeed, things. 3. Heidegger employs the German word IchschtzedieMhediesnachzuschlagen, which has no direct translation,
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lives and feelings of others, and I believe that consideration to be the glue that
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I had a panic attack and lay on the floor and put a cold compress on my head.
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Overton window,
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How do we respond to the unintended ethical dilemmas that sometimes result from our attempts to solve ethical dilemmas?
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Contradictions within our own system of integrity are simply opportunities to try, again, to make decisions true to our own beliefs, our understanding of ethics, and our sense of who we are.
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Act only out of duty to follow a uniersal maximDerive these maxims using your pure reasonHappiness is irrelevantEnd of poem
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... There is no way to achieve a higher-level enjoyment from running, because there's no way to achieve any enjoyment from running, because there is nothing enjoyable about running. Running is awful, and no one should ever doe it unless they are being chased by a bear.
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said that the world is absurd, but what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational7 and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment it is all that links them together. It binds them one to the other as only hatred can weld two creatures together. This is all I can discern clearly in this measureless universe where my adventure takes place.
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Thats what pragmatism asks: What difference would it practically make to any one [sic] if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the others being right.
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The amount of time something has been done is not, by itself, a good reason to keep doing it. By relying solely on precedent and failing to critically examine the problems that precedent might create for us, were basically just flipping the middle finger to the idea of progress, or finding ways to be better people.7 Were actively not trying to be better, and worse, were seeing the not-trying as a virtue. This benefits no one.
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Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.
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