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Editorial

Happy Thoughts

by Rick Lewis

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” US Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.

“Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.” G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

The theme of this issue, as you may have guessed by now, is happiness. Now, you may say this is foolhardy, given Chesterton’s warning that happiness should never be rationalized – should never be picked over and pulled apart and stared at from all angles under a bright light, presumably because such disrespectful treatment might make it go away. Fear not – we won’t rationalise your happiness or mine – we’ll simply examine the concept of happiness, which is a different matter.

What exactly is happiness? Is its pursuit really an ‘unalienable right’, as the Founding Fathers of the United States put it? Is it, as many assume, one of life’s most fundamental goals? Utilitarians certainly think so. The founder of Utilitarian ethics, the philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), argued that in all our moral decisions we should act so as to ensure the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. He even thought that the amounts of happiness involved in such decisions could be worked out algorithmically using what he called the Felicific Calculus. I am happy to tell you that the most famous and controversial Utilitarian philosopher of the present day, Peter Singer, has been interviewed for this issue by Matt Qvortrup.

A few prominent ethicists have disagreed with Bentham, Singer and the rest about the central importance of happiness, and even suggested that in some ways it is over-rated. “Philosophy has put happiness in the place that should have been occupied in moral philosophy by meaning,” said David Wiggins, in a British Academy Lecture back in 1976.

In any case, we can certainly say that happiness is enduringly popular and that most people seek it for themselves and for their loved ones. This being the case, we probably have a better chance of successfully pursuing happiness if, like any hunters on the trail of their prey, we know exactly what it looks like.

The articles in this issue therefore ask a range of questions both about the nature of happiness and about its value. Michael Gracey discusses philosophers’ ideas about pursuing happiness, the tendency to confuse happiness with pleasure, and the danger of what he calls ‘hedonic treadmills’, whereby we have to work harder and harder for the same rewards. Matthew Hammerton asks, which is more important: living a meaningful life or living one that goes well for you? Abdullah Rayhan finds a meeting of minds between three philosophers from very different eras: Boethius, Montaigne and Kierkegaard. All three say that relying for your happiness on your external good fortune is asking for trouble, and you’d be better off drawing on your own inner resources to find contentment. Jahnvi Borgohain brings a different perspective on our theme, by briefly surveying the varied approaches to human happiness taken by different schools of thought within Indian philosophy. Her article is a reminder that the search for happiness and fulfilment has been a central concern not only in the West but in other traditions of thought too for a very long time. Tara Daneshman says that happiness and regret are, unfortunately, inseparable. Regret will arise inevitably not only from making bad choices but also from awareness of the paths we didn’t take.

Across these fascinating articles there is a recurrent debate about whether happiness is worth pursuing directly or whether you should seek other ends, and happiness may then find you as a result. Maybe happiness isn’t an end in itself, but is an emotional sign within us that things are going well.

Sometimes to work out what something is, it is useful to contemplate its opposite. Arthur Schopenhauer is probably the best known miserabilist in the history of philosophy. Although he was once prosecuted for pushing his landlady down a flight of stairs, he was not on the whole an evil man. He thought ethics should be based upon compassion, and the compassion he felt both for animals and for his fellow humans can often be glimpsed in his writings. He was not bad, but he could be very grumpy and was a thorough pessimist. Even if he conceded occasionally that things could be worse, he probably would have added: “And they soon will be!” He even wrote a book called Studies in Pessimism. We have gathered a selection of his gloomiest quotes in this issue.

We hope you enjoy our ‘happiness issue’. Will it make you happier? Who knows. In any case, the Philosophy Now team wishes you a very Happy Christmas and a Happy New Year ahead. (If you read this too late for Christmas 2025, then please apply these good wishes to next Christmas instead!) And if unable to define happiness or locate it exactly, please take some comfort as I do from the words of Albert Camus: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”

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News

- News: December 2025 / January 2026

News

News: December 2025 / January 2026

Plato translation unveiled • Prison TV drama takes philosophical turn • UNESCO creates ethics code for neurotech — News reports by Anja Steinbauer, Olivia Gill and Martin Cohen

New Complete Plato Translation

Translating from scratch the complete dialogues of Plato, probably the most influential philosopher of them all, is a truly monumental task. Yet a brand new translation has just been unveiled. The Dialogues of Plato, all 1,320 pages of them, are published in print by Gandon Editions and are also freely available online, courtesy of the Foundation for Platonic Studies, at platonicfoundation.org/translation .

The project’s total costs have been estimated at around one million euros, with no corporate backing. The translator, David Horan, of the Irish Centre for Platonic Studies, has been working flat out on it since 2010 – the year that Instagram was launched and the first iPad was released. But if that seems like ancient history, don’t forget that Plato actually wrote the dialogues 2,350 years ago. That they are still read and hotly discussed today reflects the fact that they represent not only Plato’s own ideas, but his reexamination of earlier debates stretching back to the dawn of Greek philosophy. As well as that, as David Horan said at the launch of the new edition, Plato also bequeathed something even more valuable – his teacher Socrates’ new method of debating and exploring ideas.

So what is the flavour of this new translation? In the venerable 1888 translation of the dialogue The Republic by Benjamin Jowett, a passage on the vital importance of geometry reads: “The knowledge at which geometry aims is knowledge of the eternal, and not of aught perishing and transient.”

By contrast, Horan crisply writes: “Geometrical knowledge is knowledge of what always is.”

Philosophy in Prison TV Series

It is rare for a TV drama series to be based on a nonfiction book about philosophy, but this is the case for a new six-part drama series with the working title ‘Waiting for the Out’. Multi-award winning scriptwriter Dennis Kelly has based the series on Andy West’s recent memoir The Life Inside, which is about his experience as a philosopher teaching a philosophy class in a prison.

The series is now in production and set to air on BBC iPlayer and BBC One. It stars BAFTA nominated Josh Finan as Dan the philosophy teacher, and the cast also includes Gerard Kearns, Samantha Spiro and Phil Daniels.

The drama will follow the prison philosophy class’s discussions on topics such as freedom, morality and love, and how those connect with the lives and concerns of those inside. Using West’s first-hand insights, the series aims to capture the complexity of prisoners’ perspectives on these themes. Dennis Kelly says: “His book is funny, insightful, beautiful, genuinely heartbreaking and nothing like what you’d expect it to be – we’ve tried to take that into the series” (BBC, 2025).

Women in the History of Philosophy

Germaine de Staël (1766-1817)

On the 26th and 27th of November the Centre for the History of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame in Sydney, Australia, held a conference called ‘Women in the History of Philosophy: On Nature’. Over two days, which were accessible both in person and online, a total of eight speakers gave and discussed their papers. Caterina Pellò presented ‘Rediscovering Nature Through the Pythagorean Women’, exploring the ideas of nature that are attributed to the writings of the Pythagorean Women – the female intellectuals who followed Pythagoras, and whether these suggest a difference between male and female views on nature. Dalia Nassar discussed her paper; ‘Fanaticism and the Metaphysics Behind it: Germaine de Staël on the Moral and Political Implications of Reductive Natural Science’. Staël was a philosopher who lived through the French revolution, noted for her publications on individualism and romanticism, and for her opposition to Napoleon. In considering Staël’s critique of empiricism alongside her political philosophy, Nassar explained how some metaphysical views can lead to forms of political extremism.

Ethics Code for Neurotechnology

Deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease

UNESCO has just introduced the first global ethical standards for neurotechnology. This rapidly advancing field receives far less public attention than AI, despite surging investment. Neurotechnology includes tools that directly interact with the nervous system to measure or influence or be influenced by brain activity. While these technologies offer major medical benefits, such as deep-brain stimulation for depression and Parkinson’s disease, or brain-computer interfaces that help people with disabilities communicate or control prosthetics, their non-medical uses remain largely unregulated. Many widely used consumer devices, including headbands and headphones, now collect neural data to track stress, sleep, or heart rate, often without users realising it. Such data can expose intimate information about thoughts and emotions and could be shared with third parties. UNESCO’s new guidelines urge governments to safeguard privacy, ensure that neurotechnology remains accessible and inclusive, and protect vulnerable groups, especially children and adolescents, whose developing brains make them particularly susceptible to harm. The standards advise against non-therapeutic use in minors, warn about workplace monitoring that could profile employees, and emphasise that explicit consent and transparency are essential. They also call for stronger regulation of products that can shape behaviour or foster addiction, requiring clear, easy to understand information for consumers.

Moral Philosophy Can Help Explain Social Polarisation

Modern workplaces have become arenas for conflict over diversity, sustainability, health mandates, return-to-office policies, and corporate speech. Such disagreements are often attributed to clashes of political ideology. However, new research by Namrata Goyal, Lorenzo De Gregori, Yugi Liu and Krishna Savani suggests that different approaches to moral reasoning, such as absolutism versus relativism, are a stronger predictor of people’s positions on such controversies. Moral absolutists, regardless of whether they are liberals or conservatives, believe moral rules should apply universally and support banning practices they see as wrong, with no exceptions. Relativists, on the other hand, see morality as context-dependent and are more open to trade-offs or conditional allowances. Absolutism is distinct from extremism: it reflects consistency, not radicalism. Prior work shows that people who see their values as sacred resist compromise and react strongly to opposing views. Although liberals more often lean towards relativism and conservatives towards absolutism, both approaches appear right across the political spectrum. This explains why ideology and values alone cannot fully account for workplace conflicts.

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Happiness

- Hedonic Treadmills in the Vale of Tears

- Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosophy’s Dr Feelgood

- The Good Life Paradox

- Deconstructing Happiness

- Ancient Indian Wisdom for a Restless Age

- The Necessary Ache

Happiness

Hedonic Treadmills in the Vale of Tears

Michael Gracey looks at how philosophers have pursued happiness.

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), whose theology was Unitarian, edited an abridged version of the New Testament that stripped the gospels of their supernatural elements and Jesus of his divinity. Jefferson had no use for the traditional church acceptance of the miraculous, which he thought was designed to confuse the flock and herd it toward an unquestioning faith.

While Jefferson didn’t quite do to his God what he’d done to his king, and while he didn’t exactly reduce God to the remote deist ‘clock-maker’ we sometimes hear about, he did develop a circumscribed view of providence. The guy who told Americans they had a God-given right to pursue happiness thought that while humans’ natural endowment had made us free, it also made us responsible for creating happiness out of the resources we saw before us. If we’re going to find bliss in this lifetime, we’ll have to work for it.

So central was the general concern about happiness around the time, that contemporary Utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) made it the touchstone of their ethics. However, the Utilitarian belief that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong” (An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789) doesn’t adequately account for individual rights. For instance, my son could perform his own ‘felicific calculus’ (add up the probable consequences of actions to see what produces the greatest happiness), and conclude that the overall happiness of our family would be improved if he ate all the bacon instead of dividing it among us, his sisters’ complaints notwithstanding.

Yet even if the necessary qualifiers were added to curb selfish egos, Bentham’s approach made no distinction between kinds of pleasure. Another utilitarian, John Stuart Mill (1806-73), argued that some forms of pleasure are more worthy than others: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” (On Liberty, 1859). But even if we do distinguish one kind of pleasure from another, the failure to distinguish pleasure from happiness can land us on a slippery slope, or perhaps a ‘hedonic treadmill’, pursuing more and more delights that leave us less and less content.

As Darrin McMahon notes in Happiness, a History (2006), Mill thought that the “unbalanced influence of the commercial spirit” exacerbated this danger. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) agreed, noting that important values were undermined by the rules of the marketplace, which bred a hostility that threatened our souls. What Mill and Carlyle couldn’t have anticipated was how modern technology would intensify the forces of discontentment by exposing us to an ever-growing list of things we can have, spinning the treadmill faster and faster until we look like George Jetson chasing Astro. Luxuries become needs, and our loss of them can feel like deprivation.

More threatening still is that some of this technology changes our wiring. Social media can alter our neural pathways to such a degree that the brain scans of heavy users resemble those of drug addicts. The new cyberlord giveth, and it taketh away – granting us a shot of melatonin for engaging in its ordained behaviors, but thus gradually removing our ability to find fulfillment or ease, the more durable components of happiness. This is partly because of the body’s tendency to maintain homeostasis, or biological balance: we might get temporary highs, but the nervous system’s compensations for them creates lower lows. We end up chasing more and more rewards in the virtual world just to maintain the same unhappy state of mind, a pursuit that makes us less and less at home in the real world as we neglect our work, our relationships, and our souls. Ultimately, we can wind up feeling isolated, anxious, and depressed. It’s addiction indeed.

Illustration © Jaime Raposo 2025. To see more of his art, please visit jaimeraposo.com

Happiness in Practice

What Jefferson neglected to tell us was that focusing directly on chasing our bliss might keep us from ever attaining it. This paradox became evident even to Mill, whose moral philosophy aimed at maximizing happiness. Just as we must look away from the sun, the source of the world’s vital power, Mill eventually saw the wisdom in turning our gaze from what he thought was our ultimate objective. Happiness, he argued, “was only to be obtained by not making it the direct end” (On Liberty). Instead, we ought to focus on secondary goals: “the happiness of others… the improvement of mankind… some art or pursuit. Aiming thus at something else, [we] find happiness along the way.”

Although their political sensibilities were very different (and Carlyle’s unkind comments about Mill’s wife would eventually end their friendship), Carlyle shared Mill’s inclination to turn our focus away from ourselves, so he ended up with a compatible list of concerns, which McMahon summarizes as “Community, meaningful labor, and an experience of God.” Never having nourished a religious sensibility, Mill was more interested in aesthetic sublimity than divinity (subsitute ‘an experience of great art’), but otherwise they were on the same page. In both formulations, however, the framework of concerns seems more descriptive than normative, they indicate what happy people tend to actually do rather than prescribing what people aspiring to happiness ought to do. The lingering question is how we ought to carry ourselves as we attend to our sources of happiness, however we conceive them.

One answer is from Aristotelean virtue ethics, which focuses on the habits behind peoples’ actions. In the virtue ethicist view, virtuous people constantly apply reason to make choices that avoid the extremes of excess or deficiency. This habit of aiming for an Aristotelean Golden Mean creates a balanced disposition that allows the practitioner to respond appropriately in a variety of situations. Add a little luck, and you have a recipe for a happy life.

However, while Aristotle thought that people lacking virtue could not expect to be happy, he was less definitive about the prospects for the virtuous as he looked at the suffering that strikes virtuous people in spite of their balanced dispositions. For example, Aristotle thought that some losses create opportunities to practice virtues, and thereby increase long-term contentment, but in other situations the pain is so overwhelming that there’s no way to make up for it. No matter how much I love my daughters, nothing could compensate them for the loss of their first father, who died when they were toddlers, who looked like them, and looks lovingly out at them in pictures taken at the beach or at their first birthday parties. I’m glad neither daughter let their loss define their life, but having this part of their identity shorn from them has required them to be that much more thoughtful about how they form the rest of it.

The Stoics vs. The Romantics

Whereas Aristotle suspected that being happy requires good fortune in addition to virtue, the Stoics thought that virtue alone is a sufficient condition for happiness, and otherwise one must accept what came along by cultivating a dispassionate serenity towards the events of life. Since they saw nature itself as rational, passions (or feelings, as we now call them) that conflict with reason were bound to disturb their emotional homeostasis. So in the pursuit of calm – the mark of wise people – the Stoics guarded themselves vigilantly against impulses that might throw them off balance, impulses that many of us now associate with being human, and so inalienable. In the present day, people often extol the passions as the very things that give life flavor; but in doing so they may neglect the important distinction between the zeal that energizes us and the emotional upheavals that divert or disorient us. Our enthusiasm need not derail us, but uncontrolled passion in the Stoics’ sense of the term does so by definition.

In response to the danger of irrational impulses and responses, the Stoics constantly returned to the idea that awareness is the great corrective. According to the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, “You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength” (Meditations). Epictetus, another Stoic, this time from slave stock, agreed that unfortunate events do less harm to people than the judgments they form about them. If we’re wise enough to let go of our hopes and “wish for everything to happen as it actually will”, we will find something akin to peace. Even as we face our mortality, we needn’t rage against the dying of the light.

Nowadays, we might be less inclined to equate happiness with peace, partly because of the influence of the Romantics, who rehabilitated our image of the passions by holding out the hope that they point the way to our happiest selves. The Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821), suggested that happiness was beside the point. While the Enlightenment thinkers preceding him believed they could eliminate the sources of suffering by applying reason, and the Stoics of old thought the reasonable thing was to soften the world’s impact with a chosen frame of mind, Keats knew first-hand that the problem of pain was sometimes intractable for the people experiencing it. After watching both his mother and brother die of tuberculosis, he faced his own mortality at the hands of the same disease. Precisely when the Christian worldview might have been most appealing, he became explicitly critical of it, calling it a “circumscribed little notion” and scoffing at the idea that “we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven.” The Christian God he knew was cruel in allotting pain, and arbitrary in freeing us from it. But Keats refused to see the world as a vale of tears, and preferred to view this tragic cosmos as a “vale of soul-making”: a place for building our ‘ bildung’, or greater consciousness; a place where we forge a spirit in the smithy of our pain. Our intelligences, which are “sparks of divinity”, pass through a suffering world and become souls with identity. His ‘world of pains’ functions as a school where “the heart feels and suffers in a thousand diverse ways” in order for a person to learn and eventually grow. Keats saw this as a “grander system of salvation than the Christian religion” because it both hopes to give meaning to suffering and leaves our agency intact, even if our suffering has the power to leave us in tatters in the short run.

Lessons in Happiness

As a teacher, I’m drawn to Keats’ ‘school of pain’ metaphor; and as an aging father, I want to believe I’ve come to understand something along the way that I can pass onto my kids – though I’m hard-pressed to assemble the fragments of what I’ve learned. I do think it’s wise not to pursue happiness too directly, so I’m glad my girls knew this instinctively, by-passing more lucrative options after college to engage in work that let them feed other people or teach them or refine their craft. I’ll encourage my kids to enjoy their enthusiasms while watching out for the passions that might throw them off balance or land them on a hedonic treadmill. On the other hand, if they become too passive, I’ll caution them about waiting for deliverance to a happy life. Rather, it’s what they do in this world that constitutes them.

Hopefully, if they avoid extremes and focus on something outside themselves – including, at times, each other – they’ll be surprised by the joy that creeps in as they attend to penultimate concerns. They’re bound to endure some pain, too; but trained by the suffering they’ve already known and the fears they grew by, they will, I hope, become souls with identities – the kind that endure all things and that infuses them with a calm that passes my poor power to express.

If they succeed in this, I’ll look at them and sigh, then I’ll try to do what they did, and think ‘my children have taught me well’.

© Michael Gracey 2025

Michael Gracey teaches English at Pingree School in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, and lives with his family in Newburyport.

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Happiness

Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosophy’s Dr Feelgood

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), the author of The World as Will and Representation, was a profound metaphysician who also advocated basing ethics upon compassion. He was a great philosopher, but notoriously pessimistic, as the following quotations might suggest.

“It is then well said that life should be, from one end to the other, only a lesson; to which, however, anyone might reply: ‘For this very reason I wish I had been left in the peace of the all-sufficient nothing, where I would have had no need of lessons or of anything else’.”

“We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.”

“No rose without a thorn but many a thorn without a rose.”

“The shortness of life, so often lamented, may be the best thing about it.”

“If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?”

“Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.”

“To be alone is the fate of all great minds – a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.”

“For where did Dante get the material for his Hell, if not from this actual world of ours?”

“Whatever torch we kindle, and whatever space it may illuminate, our horizon will always remain encircled by the depth of night.”

Happiness

The Good Life Paradox

Matthew Hammerton points out that a meaningful life and a life that goes well for you might not be the same thing.

Picture two people on their deathbeds. The first lived comfortably, surrounded by loving family and friends, enjoying diverse pleasures and achievements throughout a long life. The second dedicated herself entirely to fighting injustice, achieving remarkable social change, but at great personal cost. Who lived the better life?

Your answer might depend on what you mean by ‘better’. Philosophers have long recognized that when we call a life ‘good’ we can mean different things. So we could be talking about a life’s moral goodness – how virtuous the person was – or its prudential goodness – how well the life went for the person living it. But there’s a third dimension we often overlook: how meaningful the life was. This gives us three distinct questions we can ask about any life: 1. Was it morally good? 2. Did it go well for the person living it? 3. Was it meaningful?

These questions pull in different directions. A morally exemplary life might involve suffering for others’ sake, making it less prudentially good. A meaningful life might also require sacrifices that reduce personal well-being. Understanding these tensions can help us navigate our choices about how to live.

Is Meaning Just Well-Being in Disguise?

Here’s where things get philosophically interesting. When we examine what makes lives meaningful, we find striking similarities to what makes lives go well. Theories of both meaning and well-being come in subjective and objective varieties, appealing to overlapping goods, such as love, knowledge, achievement, and aesthetic experience. This raises an uncomfortable question: Is ‘meaning in life’ just another way of talking about well-being? Perhaps then when someone complains that their life lacks meaning, they’re really just saying it lacks important components of well-being.

Consider the parallels. Subjective theories of well-being say your life goes well when you’re satisfied, your desires are fulfilled, or you experience pleasure. Some theories of meaning make identical claims about meaningfulness. Objective theories of well-being point to goods like knowledge, love, and achievement as being valuable for the person who has them. Theories of meaning point to exactly the same goods as sources of life’s significance.

This similarity is puzzling. If meaning and well-being are genuinely distinct, why do their theories look so alike? The most obvious explanation is that they’re actually the same thing – that ‘meaning’ is just a fancy way of talking about certain aspects of well-being.

Three Failed Defenses

Philosophers have tried several strategies to preserve meaning as a distinct category, but none quite succeed.

Strategy 1: Different Types of Goods

Some argue that well-being concerns only subjective goods such as pleasure, while meaning concerns only objective goods like achievement. But this seems untenable. If you admit that achievement is valuable, then isn’t it bad for you if your life lacks it?

Imagine some mad scientists trying an experiment out on you. While you sleep, they hook you up to a Matrix-like experience machine without you realising it, then feed you preprogrammed experiences that resemble the kinds of experiences you would have had anyway if you’d lived your life in the real world. They leave you in the machine for the rest of your life. From the inside, nothing seems amiss; your subjective state is unchanged. Yet surely they have harmed you. By denying you a connection to reality – genuine achievements, real relationships with real loved ones – they have caused your life to go less well for you.

Strategy 2: Pleasure Doesn’t Matter for Meaning

Another approach claims that while pleasure contributes to well-being, it never directly contributes to meaning. Compare two equally lazy lives spent watching sitcoms and eating junk food. Suppose that one of these lives is more pleasurable than the other. From the perspective of well-being, the more pleasurable life seems the better one to live. Yet from the perspective of meaning, both lives seem equally meaningless.

The problem here is that even if this argument works, it only shows that meaning differs from the hedonic (pleasure-related) aspects of well-being. The non-hedonic components still overlap completely, and thus ‘meaning’ is just a fancy way of talking about these other aspects of well-being.

Strategy 3: Different Consequences

Some argue that certain things add meaning without enhancing well-being. Consider a freedom fighter who dies heroically for independence. Her sacrifice seems profoundly meaningful, yet surely she would have been better off surviving to enjoy more of life’s goods? Or think of Vincent van Gogh, whose posthumous artistic recognition seems to have added meaning to his life retrospectively (he only sold one painting while he was alive). Yet how could any events after his death improve his personal welfare? These cases initially appear to show meaning and well-being coming apart.

However, theories of well-being can accommodate both examples. If the freedom fighter’s deepest desire – stronger than her desires for comfort or longevity – is to advance her cause, then desire-satisfaction theories say sacrificing herself advances her well-being. And, objective theories that include moral excellence would say heroic self-sacrifice significantly boosts the moral excellence in her life also thus enhancing well-being. Similarly, if van Gogh wanted his art appreciated, then its eventual recognition satisfied this desire even posthumously; while objective theories can treat his lasting artistic influence as an achievement that posthumous recognition helped complete.

Artwork © Simon Ellinas 2025 Please visit caricatures.org.uk

A New Solution: Different Ways of Adding Up

Here’s a fresh approach that preserves meaning as genuinely distinct from well-being while explaining their similarities. Both meaning and well-being might arise from the same basic goods – love, knowledge, achievement, moral excellence, aesthetic experience, and so on – but they differ in how these goods combine to produce value. The ingredients might be the same, but the recipes are different. For well-being, what matters is not just the total quantity of good things in your life, but also their balance. Consider someone who becomes an exceptional moral leader in her community but has little time for personal relationships, intellectual pursuits, or aesthetic appreciation. Now imagine someone else who lives a well-rounded but relatively unexceptional life, achieving moderate success across all these domains. Even if both lives contain exactly the same total quantity of good, the balanced life intuitively seems better for the person living it.

We can push this idea further: imagine a lopsided life focused solely on intellectual achievement that contains 100 units of good, versus a well-balanced life containing knowledge, relationships, aesthetic appreciation, and moral development, that totals only 98 units. Despite having slightly less total good, wouldn’t the balanced life still be better for the person living it?

For meaning, however, balance seems irrelevant. What makes a life meaningful under this view is the sheer quantity of valuable goods it contains, regardless of how they’re distributed. The more total good your life creates or connects with, the more significant and impactful, and thus meaningful, it becomes. Consider Leonardo da Vinci, whose life spanned art, science, engineering, and philosophy with remarkable balance. Now compare him to someone like Albert Einstein, whose life was far more focused on physics and mathematics. Both lived extraordinarily meaningful lives, but Leonardo’s balance doesn’t seem to add extra meaning beyond what his total achievements provided. His well-rounded achievements might have made his life go better for him, but the meaning came from the sheer quantity of valuable goods his life contained.

This distinction helps explain paradigmatically meaningful lives. Think of figures like Gandhi, Marie Curie, or Pablo Picasso. All lived remarkably lopsided lives, intensely focused on a narrow range of goods rather than pursuing well-rounded achievement. Their meaning came from the extraordinary quantities of goods – virtue, knowledge, or artistic beauty – they realized, not from a balance among different goods.

Darwin’s Dilemma & Parfit’s Choice

Charles Darwin provides a poignant illustration of how meaning and well-being can pull apart. Darwin’s single-minded focus on scientific work led to extraordinary discoveries that gave his life tremendous meaning. But Darwin himself later regretted this choice, telling his daughter that he wished he had ‘not let his mind go to rot so’ by neglecting poetry and other pursuits that once brought him joy.

Who’s right: Darwin, or his admirers who celebrate his focused life? I would say both are right, but in different ways. From the perspective of meaning, Darwin’s choice was vindicated. His concentrated effort produced more total good than a more balanced approach likely would have done. But from the perspective of well-being, Darwin’s self-assessment may well be true. A more balanced life, with an interest in biology yet with much more time for other pursuits, might have gone better for him personally, even if he would have achieved less.

Consider also Derek Parfit (1942-2017), arguably the most influential moral philosopher of his generation. Early in life, Parfit showed exceptional talent across multiple areas – he excelled academically, edited Oxford’s leading student magazine, played jazz trumpet, wrote poetry, and engaged in student politics. He could have lived a richly varied life of broad achievement. But instead, Parfit chose extreme specialization, becoming almost monomaniacal about philosophy. He stopped taking vacations, abandoned his other interests, and lived increasingly eccentrically—reading philosophy while brushing his teeth and even eating the same food every day to minimize preparation time—all to maximize the hours he could devote to philosophy. By most measures, this choice produced an extraordinarily meaningful life – his groundbreaking ideas have reshaped moral philosophy. But was it the best life for Parfit himself?

Many of us would find something disturbing about living so lopsidedly, even knowing it would let us make a greater mark on the world. This suggests that while Parfit’s choice maximized meaning (total good produced), it may not have maximized his personal well-being (balanced good experienced).

This kind of trade-off appears throughout human life, from career choices to relationships to hobbies. Sometimes we must choose between pursuing greater total good (that is, meaning) or a better-balanced distribution of goods (well-being). Understanding this tension can help us make more thoughtful decisions about how to live.

The Red Vineyard by Vincent Van Gogh, 4th November 1888. The only painting Van Gogh is known to have sold in his lifetime.

Living with the Tension

This analysis doesn’t resolve the fundamental tension between meaning and well-being, but it does clarify it. Sometimes they align: we can still pursue meaning while maintaining good balance in our lives. But often they pull apart, forcing us to choose.

The key insight is that both matter, but in different ways. Meaning speaks to our desire to make a significant impact, to connect with or create genuine value in the world; well-being speaks to our desire for lives that go well for us as the people living them. Some people reasonably prioritize meaning, accepting personal costs for the sake of greater impact. Others reasonably prioritize well-being, seeking rich, balanced lives even if this means less total achievement. But neither is automatically more important than the other. Most of us navigate between these poles, making different choices at different times.

Understanding this distinction won’t solve the puzzle of how to live, but it can help us think more clearly about what we’re choosing between. When we feel torn between pursuing our passion intensively or maintaining balance in our lives, we might be feeling the pull of meaning against well-being. When we wonder whether to make personal sacrifices for a cause we believe in, we might be weighing meaning against well-being.

This analysis has concrete implications. It suggests that people asking ‘What should I do with my life?’ are often implicitly choosing between two different kinds of value. Do you want to maximize your positive impact on the world, even if this requires sacrificing balance and personal satisfaction? Or do you want a life that goes well for you, even if this means less achievement?

There’s wisdom in both approaches. The meaning-seeker who sacrifices personal comfort for greater impact deserves our respect and admiration. But so does the person who chooses a balanced life of moderate achievement across many domains. Both are responding to genuine sources of value – just different ones.

Perhaps the deepest insight here is that the ancient question ‘How should I live?’ doesn’t have a single answer because it’s really two questions: ‘How can I live meaningfully?’ and ‘How can I live well?’ Sometimes they point in the same direction – but when they don’t, we have to choose – and that choice reveals what kind of value we care most deeply about.

The good news is that understanding this choice can help us make it more wisely, with fuller awareness of what we’re gaining and what we’re giving up. In a world that often presents us with false dichotomies, recognizing the genuine tension between meaning and well-being, and the legitimacy of both, might itself be a form of wisdom.

© Matthew Hammerton 2025

Matthew Hammerton is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University.

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Happiness

Deconstructing Happiness

Abdullah Rayhan breaks down ‘happiness’ with Boethius, Kierkegaard & Montaigne.

“Do you hear the whisper of the shadows?

This happiness feels foreign to me.

I am accustomed to despair.”

Forough Farrokhzad

We seek psychotherapy to deal with distress, sadness, depression, and psychological dimensions that are beyond our reach. Even after going through counselling we are seldom left with the satisfaction we deeply crave. This is where philosophy comes in.

To Socrates, philosophy was basically about finding the best way to live a life. He watched how life functions within society and examined the influences that shape it. Ever since his time, philosophers have continued to develop myriad further perspectives on human existence, from stoicism to romanticism, positivism, utilitarianism, existentialism, Hegelian, Kantian, you name it. But apart from some insights into the nature of existence, what help do they offer us? Existential philosophy will constantly remind you of life’s futility; systems of ethics will keep painting idealistic portraits all to no avail. At the end of the day, they do not necessarily help you deal with the emotional struggles drowning your heart within a blurry tumult.

Fortunately, practical applications of philosophy do exist. Consider Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480-524CE). Unjustly thrown into prison, awaiting execution, he wrote a classic: On the Consolation of Philosophy. Last year, when I was at my lowest, estranged from everything I adored, all prospects of happiness ruined, abandoned to face monstrous adversities with a heavy bleeding heart, I found Boethius consoling.

Boethius appearing inside a letter at the beginning of his book The Consolations of Philosophy, anonymous, c.1385

Boethius

There are other sources of consolation available in philosophy. Camus or Sartre may comfort you with their assurances that you can construct meaning by your own efforts, saying that as your life has no inherent meaning, you are free to give it meaning yourself in any way that you like. Jeremy Bentham will tell you how to establish collective contentment. Kant will give you formulas to maintain peace. But few of them give a clear picture of what happiness essentially is. This makes Boethius a rarity. He doesn’t adhere to any false hopes, he rejects all things that are constructed, yet, through his transparent honesty, he shows a path that can lead toward organic satisfaction. Not laced with any grand promises of universal fulfillment, just simple reasoning advocating for individual contentment.

Boethius basically invites us to contemplate the nature of happiness. He directly questions the idea of happiness we so intimately endorse. Boethius asks you:

“Do you really hold dear that kind of happiness which is destined to pass away? Do you really value the presence of Fortune when you cannot trust her [Fortune] to stay and when her departure will plunge you into sorrow? And if it is impossible to keep her at will and if her flight exposes men to ruin, what else is such a fleeting thing except a warning of coming disaster?” (The Consolation of Philosophy, Book II, Prose 4)

We consider ourselves lucky when we get our desired happiness. But, ‘being fortunate’ cannot be the standard that constructs happiness. In Boethius’ words, “happiness can’t consist in things governed by chance” mainly because there’s no guarantee it will last. He argues that nothing that is ephemeral, transient, and temporary can be of any value in terms of happiness as when that happiness essentially goes away, it brings in a heap of sorrow that is sometimes too much to bear. In this way, fortune’s smile is “a warning of coming disaster.” Thus, happiness brought by luck is not the blessing it appears to be.

He further asks if something temporary can really be claimed as one’s own. Boethius’s voice renders one mute when he states, “I can say with confidence that if the things whose loss you are bemoaning were truly your own, you could never have lost them.”

A significant portion of Boethius’s argument is about the transience of happiness. If happiness lies in what’s temporary, then isn’t misery temporary as well? Boethius puts this with clarity and force.: “If you do not consider that you have been lucky because your onetime reasons for rejoicing have passed away, you cannot now think of yourself as in misery, because the very things that seem miserable are also passing away.”

Boethius inspires you to wonder about the nature of misery. We are miserable, sad, melancholic usually because we had a taste of happiness in the past, which is missing at the moment. This absence is what is causing our misery. Had we not had that happiness before, we wouldn’t have the misery that’s choking our heart with a suffocating grip. This is the reason Boethius called happiness “a warning of coming disaster.”

Think about it. Someone else currently living a hard life similar to yours may not be experiencing similar misery as you because they haven’t had the past happiness you’ve had, and so they do not miss it. Thus, neither happiness nor misery operate according to any strict blueprint; rather they are formed by one’s own experience and are interdependent. Boethius puts it very eloquently saying, “There is something in the case of each of us that escapes the notice of the man who has not experienced it, but causes horror to the man who has […] Nothing is miserable except when you think it so, and vice versa, all luck is good luck to the man who bears it with equanimity.” We lose our ability to “bear it (despair) with equanimity” because of our past interactions with pleasant experiences.

Perhaps you would relate to Boethius in terms of misery though not in an entirely literal sense. Boethius had everything. A beautiful wife, two affectionate children, popularity, respect, authority, and enough money to live without ever worrying. Yet, because of a false accusation, he was suddenly deprived of it all and was imprisoned. His happy life became a dark pit of despair. Maybe your misery too is born because of its contrast to the time when you were happy. Now think about it for a moment. Initially, Boethius was devastated in his cell because he previously had a satisfying life. Had he previously lived like a homeless person with nothing of his own, the confined space of that very cell might have appeared tolerable because of the roof over the head and chunks of food on the plate no matter how dim and damp the dark roof, or how stale the stenching food. It shows how subjective the texture of happiness is.

Boethius deconstructs the common perception of happiness, breaking it down to a rather ‘mundane’ prospect of life, contrary to our belief of it being a significant one. He believes our idea of happiness itself is laced with misery. He proclaims, “how miserable the happiness of human life is; it does not remain long with those who are patient, and doesn’t satisfy those who are troubled.”

So, if happiness indeed is of the nature that inevitably leaves one unsatisfied, then does happiness deserve to be rated so highly? Boethius disagrees. He presents a compelling argument for this, saying, “If happiness is the highest good of rational nature and anything that can be taken away is not the highest good – since it is surpassed by what can’t be taken away – then Fortune by her very mutability can’t hope to lead to happiness.” It is the unreliability of our perceived idea of happiness that makes it a futile hope with little to no value.

So, if happiness is something that is transient, unreliable, and can never offer the contentment it promises, then is happiness really something to chase after? “Happiness which depends on chance comes to an end with the death of the body” (Boethius). Thus, to cling on to happiness is to cling on to a slippery rope dangling above an abyss. You cannot do anything to make this notion of happiness fruitful in the sense you believe it to be. Boethius thinks it’s foolish to attempt to make this ineffective happiness endure and persist. He words it differently saying, “what an obvious mistake to make – to think that anything can be enhanced by decoration that does not belong to it.” Thus, again, the problem lies with the way we shape the notion of happiness.

Most people will tell you that the best formula for happiness is a combination of romantic love and successful career. But is it really true? If you have understood Boethius, you probably realize that these temporary agents (romantic partner and career) cannot make you content for long. Something not entirely your own cannot give you that stable contentment you crave.

Kierkegaard by Athamos Stradis

Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Denmark’s greatest philosopher, was an early precursor of existentialism. Though his most direct statement about happiness is a bit wordy, it has a touch of grim humour:

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both.” (from Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard)

Anyway, you get the idea. Kierkegaard and Boethius clearly intersect at certain points. Happiness obtained through reliance on factors external to ourselves will never be permanent or make one content. Again there is the argument that we must base our happiness on resources within us, and Kierkegaard contends that for this reason we cannot pursue it too directly. He says, “the door of happiness opens inward, so one should keep aside a little to open it: if one pushes, they close it more and more.” One should not use any external force to influence happiness, or as Kierkegaard puts it, the door of happiness will “close more and more.”

Kierkegaard reaches such a conclusion because he too believed happiness as we usually understand it is transient and that this can be a cause of despair. Boethius wittily points out that when we don’t have happiness, we strive and struggle to attain it – and then, once we have attained it, we become anxious to preserve it because no matter how much we enjoy happiness, at the back of our mind we remain ever-aware of its temporary and fragile nature. This is why Kierkegaard says all our efforts at happiness are ultimately doomed to lead to regret.

Montaigne by anonymous c.1578

Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) skewers this human tendency more pithily: “He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.” In other words, as being in happiness always contains the risk of losing the happiness, this fear actually prevents one from ever fully attaining that state of mind. Montaigne is widely regarded as the inventor of the essay. The word comes from the French word essayer, meaning ‘to try’ or ‘to attempt’. His short and engaging pieces of writing on different philosophical subjects are ‘attempts’ to clarify them rather than dogmatic statements of theory. His book collecting them is simply called Essays (Essais) and again we find similar ideas on obtaining true contentment by relying on our own internal resources. Montaigne closely focuses on the nuanced foundation of, as he sees it, true happiness. He concedes that social and material and even metaphysical attainments can make us happy, but not genuinely as we want it to be. He suggests:

“We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health, if we can, but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back shop wholly our own.”

(Montaigne’s Essais, Book 1, Chap. 39: ‘On Solitude’)

So like Boethius, Montaigne recommends not relying for our happiness on anything that itself may be impermanent. Rather he tells us to ‘reserve a back shop’. This ‘back shop’ is an inner sanctum, some profound part of ourselves that remains untouched by the outer world, free from all kinds of external interference. He calls this back shop a space “wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat.”

Kierkegaard too advocates for a contentment that arises from within rather than from external influences whose essential nature is transient. Kierkegaard’s view is that silence, solitude, and introspection are embedded within us, and can help us reach that contentment we idealize as happiness. He perceived all kinds of fleeting satisfactions as becoming reasons for eventual dissatisfaction and advises us to focus on those good things that remain untainted for eternity, like intellect and truth.

Boethius, Kierkegaard and Montaigne all agree that inner contentment is better than the temporary ecstatic sense of euphoria that external good fortune brings. Boethius advocates for this internal stability with the best wording:

“If you are in possession of yourself you will possess something you would never wish to lose and something Fortune could never take away.”

This internal stability, according to Boethius, comes from one’s power of reasoning, because this alone has the ability to make one indifferent to their own fate. Intellect can make one recognize that there cannot be any prospect of contentment in things that are unstable, and everything that fortune brings is laced with this toxic instability. By fortune, Boethius does not mean a sudden stroke of good luck that solves all of our problems, but rather everything good that happens to us without our own effort, whether it’s a small gift from a loved one, or the smile of a baby. These make us happy, yet these are external forces. Fate intervenes in our life, leaving us with little to no control over our own selves. We can’t prevent a baby from smiling, and we won’t go out of our way to stop a loved one from offering us the flowers in which they have invested so much thought, but when babies smile at us no longer (perhaps because our face has lost its charm), or when no one is left to offer us even a single blossom, this is when we are sure to experience a desolation that is enough to break our already shattered heart. Boethius asks us to foresee all this with clarity and courage, then use our intellect to locate what’s unstable and help us grip onto only what’s inherently ours.

Across the thirteen centuries that separate them, three very different philosophers from very different intellectual traditions express overlapping insights about happiness and unhappiness. Each comes down ultimately to the notion that the reason we are not happy isn’t because we aren’t constantly chasing happiness but rather because we have a mistaken conception of what happiness is. Happiness is not the greatest good, nor is it anything to die for. It is, as clichéd as it may sound, something present within all of us. All one has to do to access it is have an open mind and reach within oneself with honesty. This being so, one doesn’t have to ‘imagine’ Sisyphus happy; rather Sisyphus is ‘happy’ for real and for eternity.

© Abdullah Rayhan 2025

Abdullah Rayhan is a lecturer of English Literature based in Bangladesh.

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Happiness

Ancient Indian Wisdom for a Restless Age

Jahnvi Borgohain looks at a variety of approaches to happiness.

Across many centuries and all continents, philosophers have wrestled with a deceptively simple question: ‘What makes human life happy?’ Aristotle called his version of happiness eudaimonia and said it was achieved through virtue and reason. Epicurus saw happiness as tranquillity (ataraxia) – a life free from unnecessary pain and full of simple pleasures. Today, we might equate happiness with comfort, success, or even a perfect image on social media. But once we step beyond this, we discover many older and deeper traditions that invite us to think differently about it.

In India, from about the sixth century BCE on, a dazzling variety of philosophical schools or darśanas emerged, with each offering a distinctive answer to this very question. These schools debated with, critiqued, and enriched each other in a lively intellectual culture. Together, they revealed not just a single path to happiness, but many diverse and intersecting ones. Some of these schools placed happiness in knowledge, others in detachment, others in ethical action, and others in pleasure or unity; but an underlying theme in all of them was seeing happiness as a union with the ‘ultimate’.

Celebrating the festival of Holi

Woman © Dr Partha Sarathi Sahana Creative Commons 4 2025

In the following, I will take you on a journey through some of the orthodox Indian schools of thought, pausing along the way to explain how these ancient ideas tie into modern ideas of happiness. We will see that these schools offer not merely abstract theories, but maps for living. I’ll finish by sharing the vision of happiness that feels most meaningful to me in today’s restless world.

Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika: Happiness as Knowledge that Frees

The Nyāya (or ‘Justice’) school of Indian philosophy, flouished between the 6th and 2nd centuries BCE. Known for its rigorous logic, it begins with the stark diagnosis that suffering arises from ignorance. When we misunderstand the self or the world, we live in error, and this error ultimately breeds pain. The cure for such error is pramnāna or knowledge, gained through reasoning and perception. Pramāna leads to liberation, or mokṣa, the state of being free from all forms of suffering, which according to Nyāya is the highest form of happiness.

Vaiśeṣika, often considered Nyāya’s sister school, shares this goal, but focuses on analysing reality into categories such as substance, quality, motion, universals etc. Understanding the categories that shape the world and our place within them leads to detachment, and eventually, to a happiness beyond suffering.

For instance, imagine that you lose a cherished object, such as a precious ring passed down in your family. Instead of being consumed by grief, a Nyāya or Vaiśeṣika thinker would reflect on the idea that the ring is merely a substance, composed of qualities like shape and shine, subject to change and decay. By seeing it not as an extension of the self but as one among countless impermanent objects in the world, one tends to loosen one’s attachment to it. That shift in understanding softens the sting of losing it, and opens the way to a steadier, deeper happiness that goes beyond fleeting possessions.

Sāṃkhya: Happiness Through Discernment

The Sāṃkhya school of philosophy (circa 4th century BCE) is India’s great dualist system, distinguishing between puruṣa (pure consciousness) on the one hand and prakṛti (matter) on the other. Suffering arises when consciousness wrongly identifies with the ever-changing play of matter. The highest happiness, known as ‘kaivalya’ or isolation, dawns when we discard the idea that we are passive witnesses and embrace the idea that we actively shape the turbulent world we observe.

To understand this idea practically, imagine yourself scrolling endlessly through social media posts. You see curated snapshots of other people’s lives, such as their recent vacations or promotions. Without realizing it, you begin to feel inadequate, as though your worth depends on matching those images. In that moment, your sense of self has merged with prakṛti, the material world, which brings with it the swirling, ever-changing world of appearances. But through a Sāṃkhya lens, you pause and remember: you are not these shifting stories, likes, or judgments. You are puruṣa, a pure awareness, who observes the world without being entangled, yet actively shapes its trajectory. The posts, the emotions they stir, even the urge to compete, all belong to prakṛti. When you come to this realization, the turbulence loses its grip. A quiet, steady happiness arises; not because the world changed, but because you stopped confusing yourself with it.

Yoga: Happiness Through Discipline & Stillness

If Sāṃkhya is theory, Yoga is practice. Earlier ideas about Yoga were collected by the scholar Patañjali in his book the Yoga Sutras, which offers an eightfold path, a step-by-step discipline to quiet the mind and uncover happiness. It begins with yama – the ethical restraints that guide how we treat others. These include non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, moderation in desires, and non-possessiveness. Alongside these are niyama, the personal disciplines that shape our inner life. These include purity, contentment, self-discipline, self-study, and devotion to something greater than oneself (that is, God). Then come āsanas – the postures Westerners associate with yoga today – designed to make the body steady and comfortable for long periods of meditation. Prāṇāyāma, or breath control, teaches us to regulate and calm our life force through rhythmic breathing. Pratyāhāra, sense withdrawal, is the art of gently drawing the senses inward instead of being constantly pulled outward by stimulation. Dhāraṇā is focused concentration, training the mind to rest on one point. Dhyāna is meditation, or a steady flow of awareness beyond distraction. And finally, samādhi is absorption, or a state where the distinction between observer and observed falls away, and one rests in pure being. The purpose of yoga is to complete this eightfold path and achieve the final state of samādhi, which is a state of pure bliss and transcendence. It consists of those rare moments, as when watching a sunset or playing music, when the boundary between you and the experience melts away.

But reaching samādhi is the final goal of yoga. One can find true happiness even during some of its initial steps. Setting aside time each morning for journalling, and feeling genuine gratitude for what you have, are both examples of niyama, the personal discipline that shapes our inner life. When we cultivate daily habits to support our spiritual growth, there is no striving or comparing, only pure presence. The Yoga school of Indian philosophy says that this happiness, attained through mediation and self-discipline, is the purest form of bliss and liberation.

Mīmāṃsā: Happiness in Righteous Action

The Mīmāṃsā school (2nd century BCE onwards) is often overshadowed by flashier systems, but its message is refreshingly practical. It emphasizes that happiness is sustained through ethical action, which involves following Vedic injunctions, including performing one’s duties (dharmās) and rituals correctly, thereby maintaining cosmic harmony or Rta. It values this-worldly happiness as well as the long-term merit that shapes future births. In some ways the theory is similar to Aristotle’s, who saw happiness not as a fleeting state but as a lifelong flourishing in accordance with virtue. Mīmāṃsā reminds us that happiness can be woven into daily life by simply doing what is right sincerely and consistently.

Think of a schoolteacher who may not earn much nor receive much praise, yet shows up every day with sincerity. She prepares her lessons carefully, treats her students with fairness, and goes out of her way to help those who struggle. Her actions uphold a sense of order and care in her community, which becomes her greatest source of pride. Therefore, even without grand recognition, she experiences a quiet, lasting happiness, because she knows she is fulfilling her duty with the utmost integrity.

Adi Shankara with disciples Raja Ravi Varma 1904

Vedānta: Happiness as Our Innermost Nature

The Vedānta school is rooted in the ancient text known as the Upaniṣad, and offers a luminous answer to the quest for happiness.

In the case of Advaita Vedānta, the non-dualist philosophy developed by Śankara (c.788-820 CE), the ultimate reality of this world is Brahman or pure being, which is pure consciousness and bliss. Our true self or ātman is not separate from this. The apparent world, with all its ups and downs, is māyā, or an illusory appearance. Unfortunately, māyā is not something like dirt on a window that we can just wipe away: it is a veil of ignorance that makes us see separation and limitation where there is in fact only oneness. Because māyā is a type of ignorance, the only way to remove it is through knowledge. When we attain this knowledge, the ignorance brought by māyā falls away, and we realize that we are already what we seek – in that we are happiness itself.

A good analogy to understand the Advaitin notion of happiness is found in The Matrix (1999). Neo lives his life believing the world he sees. He believes that its struggles and hierarchies are the ultimate reality. Then he is provoked to question this, and learns that the world he thought was real was only a projection, and that his true power lies beyond it. Advaita Vedānta offers a similar revelation about happiness. We spend our lives chasing happiness through promotions, possessions, and pleasures, believing that these shifting experiences are ultimate. But like Neo waking up from the matrix, the moment we see through māyā or illusory appearance, we discover that happiness was never ‘out there’ to be won. Happiness is our very essence, already present, just waiting to be realized.

Cārvāka: Happiness in the Here and Now

In a bold contrast to these schools, the materialist Cārvāka school scoffs at otherworldly speculation. It holds that only perception is valid, only this life is real, and therefore, happiness is found in wise enjoyment of the here and now. “While life is yours, live joyously; none can escape death’s searching eye” says one Cārvāka verse. This idea resembles that of Epicurus, who counselled a life of measured pleasure and freedom from fear of gods or death. Both perspectives hold that happiness is not hidden in distant heavens but available in simple present joys.

Imagine that long-distance friend you’ve been meaning to meet for years. Both of you are so buried in work and deadlines that you keep postponing the meeting, always talking about how one day you’ll plan a grand trip together. But that day just never seems to come. Then, on a whim, you both clear an evening and meet at a tiny café halfway between your cities. No big plans, no perfect itinerary; just coffee, laughter, and a couple of hours catching up. In that simple, unpolished moment, you feel a happiness deeper than any imagined ‘someday’. This is just what the Cārvāka school tells us: real joy doesn’t wait in some distant future, it lives in the small, real moments that we choose to embrace now.

Why Advaita Speaks to Our Age

Of all these visions, the one that resonates most deeply with me is Advaita Vedānta. Its core teaching that happiness is not something to be pursued but something we already are, feels like a lifeline in the modern world. We live in an age of constant striving, as social media feeds urge us to curate perfect lives, and consumer culture tells us that with one more purchase or one more achievement we will finally be happy. Yet beneath all the glitter and shine, there is a quiet ache that tells us a different story. The rising rates of anxiety, depression, and that gnawing sense of not being good enough make us run ever faster toward a horizon of happiness that’s always receding. Advaita Vedānta turns this pattern on its head. It tells us that the deepest layer of our being is ā nanda, or bliss itself. So happiness isn’t something to be accumulated, it’s something to be uncovered. When we recognize our essence as whole and complete, we are no longer trapped by comparison, the fear of missing out, or the endless chase for validation.

A beautiful story from the Chāndogya Upaniṣad captures this essence. A sage by the name of Uddālaka sends his son Śvetaketu to learn the highest form of knowledge. When the boy returns proud but unsettled, the father asks him to dissolve some salt in water. The salt disappears, yet its taste remains everywhere in the water. “So too,” the father says, “you may not see the self, my child, but it is in everything. That is your essence.”

Advaita Vedānta’s vision of happiness feels more urgent now than ever. It’s not a philosophy that denies the world, but one that frees us to live in it with serenity. Amid the frenzy of modern existence, Advaita Vedānta feels like standing by a still, clear lake. It whispers a simple, profound truth: You are already what you seek. And in that recognition, happiness stops being a pursuit. It becomes something that’s already present within us.

© Jahnvi Borgohain 2025

Jahnvi Borgohain is a postgraduate in Philosophy from the University of Delhi. She is fascinated by Gender Justice, AI Ethics, and Classical Indian philosophy.

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Happiness

The Necessary Ache

Tara Daneshmand on regret and the courage to choose.

“A mountain begins with the first stone, and a human being – with the first pain.” – Ahmad Shamloo

Renowned Iranian poet Ahmad Shamloo says that pain is fundamental to human existence – not merely an incidental experience, but its very starting point. Pain is the price of consciousness, freedom, and choice itself. Reflecting on this insight, I recognized a profound yet rarely acknowledged truth: every choice we make inherently involves regret, so there are no completely pain-free paths in life. Regret is not just residue from poor decisions – it is the echo of roads not taken, resurfacing unexpectedly at various points in life. Even choices aligned deeply with our values can lead to regret as values evolve and circumstances shift. What once felt essential might later feel misaligned.

The idea of a regret-free life is a comforting but unrealistic fantasy. As psychologist Barry Schwartz argues in his exploration of the paradox of choice (The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, 2004), increased freedom does not diminish regret; rather, it often magnifies it, precisely because we become more acutely aware of the paths we did not take. Even when we make conscious, ethical, well-considered decisions, regret inevitably finds its way in – not due to failure, but because choosing inherently involves loss: every path taken leaves behind untaken lives, and these untaken lives remain with us, haunting us not because we erred, but because we had to choose. So regret is not a glitch in human psychology; it’s the shadow cast by our agency. Even the best decisions cannot escape regret. Research on regret confirms that, over time, people are more haunted by things they did not do than by actions they took; yet both action and inaction bear their own weight.

The Myth of a Painless Life

In modern society, in cultures that idealize comfort, convenience, and uninterrupted happiness, we are constantly implicitly urged to avoid pain at all costs. This pressure is evident everywhere, from curated joy on social media, to self-help books promising painless solutions to life’s complexities. Yet these attempts to entirely eliminate discomfort frequently prove futile, leaving us instead more deeply disappointed when inevitable hardships arise. Meanwhile, therapeutic models such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) encourage us to allow uncomfortable feelings such as sadness, anxiety, and guilt to emerge without resistance.

However, what if pain and regret are not merely things to manage or tolerate, but necessary conditions of life? Perhaps they are not flaws to correct, but signs that our human experience is functioning precisely as it should. The idea of ‘acceptance’ itself suggests that living aligned with the right values mitigates discomfort. Yet values themselves are inherently unstable, shaped by our evolving identities. The regret we suppress today in the name of alignment can reemerge later. Thus, the central question here is not how to accept pain and regret passively, but how we can summon the courage to choose anyway, fully aware that regret will inevitably accompany our choices. True control lies not in avoiding pain, but in having the courage to act, conscious that whichever path we take, pain and regret are likely to accompany us. Happiness does not lie outside of pain or regret, in some distant, painless ideal: genuine happiness emerges precisely through the meaningful struggles we face, and the clarity gained by navigating them. So pain is not happiness’s opposite – it’s the very condition that makes authentic happiness possible. Perhaps the most brutal truth of all is that even the best decisions come with pain.

Contemporary culture also reinforces the belief that rational, value-aligned decisions can shield us from regret, sometimes portraying regret as evidence of poor judgment. Therapeutic strategies such as ACT or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) offer effective tools for managing emotional discomfort, reframing thoughts, and building resilience and value-driven lives. CBT helps individuals reframe experiences to reduce their emotional pain, while ACT promotes psychological flexibility and encourages living in alignment with one’s values despite discomfort. in fact, ACT acknowledges pain as a permanent part of life, helping us move forward with pain, not around it.

These approaches are effective and valuable, but they have limits. They rarely prepare us to face the soul-level ache that no amount of reframing can dissolve. Psychological tools are immensely helpful, but cannot eliminate regret. The limitation lies not in these frameworks, but in the expectation that they should erase the ache of what might have been. So despite their efficacy, these approaches cannot eliminate regret, as regret is not simply a cognitive distortion or a flaw in our reasoning – it’s an inescapable shadow of our agency, arising precisely because every choice we make inherently excludes countless other possibilities. Studies indicate that even values-based ‘wise’ decisions result in regret, often unexpectedly and long after the choice has been made (‘Regret Regulation: Theoretical and Empirical Review’, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Zeelenberg & Pieters, 2007). This isn’t due to poor reasoning – it’s the natural consequence of living a finite life with infinite alternatives. So regret is not merely due to a failure of logic or judgement, but it’s the inescapable emotional echo of paths not taken – the felt consequence of our freedom and choices. It isn’t a thought pattern to restructure, it’s an existential condition, the emotional shadow cast by our agency. It is a condition of human existence – a symptom of having a self, a past, and a memory. Unlike anxiety or guilt, regret does not resolve with insight or exposure. To experience regret is not a sign of failure or weakness, but a mark of existential honesty – proof that we genuinely care about the consequences of our choices. The courage to be human lies not in rising above regret, then, but in knowing that regret will come, and choosing all the same. This courage is not heroic or grandiose, but quietly resilient – an everyday bravery that acknowledges regret’s inevitability. To be human, then, is not to escape regret but to coexist with it, integrate it into the architecture of the self. Our goal should not be to cure regret, but to live meaningfully in its presence, allowing it to contribute to our understanding of ourselves and the lives we choose.

The Shadow of Freedom

Every meaningful choice involves loss. Choose independence, and you may sacrifice intimacy. Choose family, and autonomy may shrink. Stay where you are, and the unknown remains untouched. Move forward, and you leave behind a familiar past you might one day miss. But these sort of choices aren’t mistakes. Rather, they highlight a paradox of conscious living.

Take the choice to live far from family: you gain freedom and room to grow, but miss shared rituals and physical closeness. Or stay close, and tradition offers comfort, but dreams may go unexplored. Parenthood carries the same symmetry: having children grounds life in love and responsibility, but may cost parts of your former self. Forgoing parenthood preserves your freedom, but may awaken a longing for legacy and connection. And in relationships, regret takes equally complex forms: speak your truth and risk damage. Stay silent, and betray your needs. The pain we choose doesn’t necessarily signal virtue or strength; it simply reveals which form of suffering we’re most willing to bear for the sake of what we value most. Some embrace the pain of closeness, others the ache of distance. Some endure loneliness for freedom, while others trade autonomy for connection. Every path extracts a cost – there is no choice without consequence.

Evidently, regret doesn’t live just on one side of a bad decision: it lives on both sides of every meaningful one. These choices aren’t flaws or failures; they’re the unavoidable cost of being a self, of living awake. So to be human is to live with a tension we can never fully resolve: each decision defines us while simultaneously severing the infinite other versions of who we might have become. This tension isn’t a flaw – it’s the very structure of our reality.

Moreover, regret itself evolves with time. Choices we grieve today may later reveal themselves as good turning points. Conversely, decisions we once celebrated may quietly sour. This mutability raises questions, such as: Is regret an honest reflection on our past, or the residue of memory’s distortions? Can regret be redemptive – or is it inherently melancholic? As our identity shifts, do different versions of ourselves regret different choices?

Ultimately, regret isn’t always a problem to solve; it’s often the natural consequence of freedom. Even the wisest decisions carry regret, not because they were wrong, but because every real choice carries loss. The challenge, then, isn’t to avoid regret, but to live with it – not to glorify or drown in it, but to recognize it as proof that we chose courageously, and perhaps that we cared deeply when it mattered most.

Aching Heart by Paul Gregory

The Paradox in Every Choice

Existential philosophy has long emphasized that freedom is inherently bound to anguish. Jean-Paul Sartre famously declared that we are ‘condemned to be free’. Viktor Frankl likewise asserted that meaning often emerges from suffering. In his seminal work Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), Frankl argued that even in the depths of pain we retain the freedom to discover purpose. Psychological research supports this, showing that perceiving life, even pain, as meaningful, can significantly enhance emotional resilience.

Yet this existential insight invites deeper reflection. We often imagine courage as a rare heroic quality reserved for dramatic moments or extraordinary transformations. But perhaps courage can be quieter, simpler, more deeply human: perhaps it is found in the willingness to choose, fully aware that pain and regret are inevitable outcomes. This courage doesn’t earn applause or headlines; it isn’t the valor of grand gestures. Instead, it’s the subtle, daily courage to decide, knowing that every choice carries loss. No matter how pure our intentions, how rational our decisions, we cannot escape the truth of exclusion. Every choice inherently means leaving other lives unlived.

Existential courage, then, is not about eliminating fear or avoiding regret: it’s the ability to move forward without pretending the alternative would have spared us pain. This is not to glorify suffering – pain and regret are not inherently noble. But they are inescapable, and fundamental aspects of being human. We didn’t choose to be born into pain and regret; they arrive with consciousness, memory, and freedom. And because they’re unavoidable, living honestly with them, without denial or illusion, becomes our only path to authenticity. What matters isn’t how much courage we possess, but how deeply we understand that courage is for choosing life whilst being fully aware that pain and regret will come. We are brave not because we avoid suffering, but because we choose to live knowing that suffering is part of the price of life. This truth lies beyond psychological techniques or therapeutic optimization. It’s something no therapy can fix, but only help us name, witness, and face with unwavering honesty.

Conclusion: The Necessary Ache

Pain and regret are not unfortunate byproducts of poor choices, they’re proof that we’ve chosen at all. They’re evidence, not of failure, but of active participation in life – of having dared to care, to desire, and to act. They’re the very ground from which meaning grows. So pain and regret are not malfunctions of the human condition; they define it. They arise not from living wrongly or incompletely, but simply from living. Psychological tools can help us navigate the turbulence, teaching us to breathe through the ache, act despite fear, and stay grounded. But no framework, philosophy, or system of thought can shield us entirely from the fundamental truth that every choice hurts, and every path forward leaves something behind. Still, we choose – not because we are fearless or certain, but because choosing is the only authentic way to exist, the only real way to be human.

Rather than striving for a painless life, then, we must reclaim the power to confront our regrets honestly and find meaning, not despite suffering, but because of it. As Shamloo reminds us, we begin with pain; and as Sartre insists, freedom is steeped in loss. And as life continually teaches us, being human was never about avoiding pain: it was about knowing it would come, and walking forward anyway.

© Tara Daneshmand 2025

Tara Daneshmand is a psychological counselor and writer exploring the dialogue between psychology and philosophy in understanding the lived experience of being human.

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Articles

- The Philosophy of William Blake

- The Philosophy of Race

- Evolution or Progress?

- What Women?

- What are the Proper Limits of Free Speech?

- Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)

Articles

The Philosophy of William Blake

Mark Vernon looks at the imaginative thinking of an imaginative artist.

The painter, poet, and engraver, William Blake (1757-1827) is not usually categorized as a philosopher, but I think otherwise. He engaged with the great thinkers of his day – particularly the three he regularly references as an intellectual triumvirate: Bacon, Newton, and Locke. Moreover, I reckon his ideas could be transformative now.

Self-portrait as Job – William Blake

Blake was born in Georgian England. The era was politically and socially tumultuous, witnessing Britain losing thirteen of its colonies in North America, developing its empire in India, and spending decades at war with France. During the same period men stopped wearing stockings in favour of trousers, and the words ‘nihilism’, ‘objective’, ‘regular’, and ‘history’ were either coined or took on the meanings they have now.

Shifts in language are a sign that much was happening philosophically as well. Blake knew the work of Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, and illustrated one of Erasmus’s protoevolutionary works, The Botanic Garden (1791). Evolutionary ideas were in the air, and empiricism was one of the watchwords of the times, alongside the phrase ‘trial and error’. Blake joined in with that spirit, being a great experimenter with materials. His workshop, in which he engraved, printed, and coloured with his wife Catherine, must have looked like a chemist’s laboratory – and smelt like one, too. Acids washing over metals left an arid tang in the air.

In the later years of Blake’s life, Humphrey Davey and Michael Faraday began experimenting on the phenomena of electromagnetism. Blake’s idea of contraries owes much to these emerging field theories; he suggested that life itself can be imagined as an energetic field held between opposing poles. Hence he wrote, “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793). The word ‘scientist’ still lay in the future, but Blake lived in the period during which the revolutionary potential of the new methodology Francis Bacon had outlined became clear. As yet, though, it was unclear what all these scientific investigations would amount to, and the thinking that would shape what became the modern scientific mentality was still widely contested. Jonathan Swift mocked the activities of the Royal Society (of scientists) in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), in which he imagined natural philosophers trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers so as to warm the chill air of summer. Strikingly presciently, Swift also envisaged a great machine he called ‘The Engine’ – a mechanical monster that ejected streams of words, which people turned into essays and books without any need for effort or learning.

The Angel of Revelation William Blake 1804

Towering intellectual figures like John Locke and Isaac Newton were pivotal in developing a worldview that could contain the new intellectual developments – roughly speaking, a materialistic one. Locke called himself Newton’s ‘under-labourer’, borrowing his tools for investigating the physical world – experiment and observation – and applying them to psychology, epistemology, and politics.

Both Newton and Locke died in the early years of the eighteenth century, a generation or so before Blake, but the posthumous reputation of both was immense. Yet Blake was not only abreast of the latest developments and actively engaged with them in his work, he had fundamental criticisms of empiricism and its underlying materialism – criticisms I believe have well stood the test of time. In essence, he feared that the generalisations that Baconian investigations (that is, science) derive are so powerful that they come to be taken for reality itself. The result is a kind of distorted Platonism that holds ultimate reality to be mathematical: Unsurprising, since mathematics is an extraordinarily elegant tool for modelling reality, with entire groups of natural phenomena seemingly captured in, say, an equation as simple as Newton’s Second Law of Motion (F=ma). So the temptation to presume that nature is, at base, mathematical or mechanical becomes hard to resist. Further, the industrial, urban, agricultural and military technologies that were fundamentally reshaping Georgian life reflected the same order. They seemed to spring from a power to make things that wasn’t just a human capacity but reflected the very way of the cosmos itself. Technology was deemed God-given.

Blake sensed that a science of mere abstractions is on the way to becoming uncoupled from what it purports to study: “You accumulate Particulars, & murder by analyzing. But General Forms have their vitality in Particulars” he observed (Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, 1820). The upshot is ‘Generalizing Art & Science till Art & Science is lost.’ But are his concerns justified?

Perception

Take John Locke (1632-1704), the father of British empiricism. He taught that human beings interact with the world by receiving sense impressions that are formed into experiences (which he called ‘ideas’) by a limited imaginative capacity possessed by the mind, which is otherwise a tabula rasa or blank slate. In other words, humans navigate a pathway through life based on internal models, as opposed to directly participating in the world of which they are a part. Models of perception have adopted that basic approach almost universally ever since.

The Ancient of Days William Blake 1794

Blake fundamentally disagreed: “Man is Born Like a Garden ready Planted & Sown. This World is too poor to produce one Seed,” he argued (Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, 1808). His point is that the mind is prolific in the way that a garden is prolific – not because it makes itself, but because it is part of a wider vitality that’s tended by a gardener. Blake was sure that human minds as blank slates is too poor a theory to account for the creativity that he knew within himself. Artists are receivers of inspiration and revelations with which they collaborate, whereas Lockean solipsism leads to what Blake calls “single vision and Newton’s sleep.” He was sure that human beings left to their own devices simply couldn’t devise buildings like Westminster Abbey or designs like Michelangelo’s. Locke’s closed-circuit model of the mind and the cosmos would lead to what he called ‘the same dull round’, devoid of genuine insight and novelty. And that isn’t right. Clearly human intelligence is self-transcending, Blake thought. That must arise from an imagination which is not a private possession but a sharing in a wider imaginative flow and intelligence active in all things.

Blake concluded that the empirical sciences massively understate the power and nature of the imagination. This capacity does not cast a light beamed out from skulls across an otherwise dark cosmos; rather, our imaginations share in a cosmic imagination that Blake thought divine. The natural world is shaped by this imagination, and so nature is the manifestation of imagination. The senses are only thresholds of perception: they’re not the limit of what we can perceive, but doorways through which we can perceive much more. Hence Blake’s probably best-known phrase: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790-93).

Another analogy Blake evoked was of looking through windows. No-one looks at a window apart from a glazier: we look through windows to the world they transmit. So, too, with the senses: do not say “I see with my eyes”, Blake insisted, but “I see through my eyes”. Sight then is, at once, a combination of the empirical and the imaginative. It doesn’t just record reality, like a camera, but participates with it. The task of a creative like Blake is to consciously align with the divine wellspring and awaken others to its presence: “They mock Inspiration & Vision. Inspiration & Vision was then, & now is, & I hope will always Remain, my Element, my Eternal Dwelling place; how can I then hear it Contemned without returning Scorn for Scorn?” (Annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses, 1808).

Politics

Blake’s scorn was not only metaphysical, but also political. He spotted that Newton’s scientific revolution inspired political revolutionaries, such as Thomas Paine (1737-1809), as well as key figures in the establishment, not least King George III. Newton’s influence in the social domain rested on his portrayal of the natural world as orderly: governed by extraordinarily neat laws of cause and effect. The beauty of this regularity instilled a sense that society, too, should be beneficently patterned. That the universe could be thought of as akin to machinery inspired the progressive hope of transforming human governance – in other words, politics as social engineering. As Paine wrote: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand” (Common Sense, 1776).

Both sides in the tumultuous events of the era also wanted to claim divine authority for their cause – which to Blake was grounds for suspicion. For instance, the natural philosophy of Newton informed Paine’s deism (God as a distant cosmic engineer). Blake loathed this theology, as, for him, God is a living presence and spirit: “I am in you, you in me, mutual in love divine,” he has Jesus say in his poem Jerusalem: the Emanation of the Giant Albion (1820). On the other side, George III felt that cosmic regularity justified his authority: “God and the Georges were the constitutional monarchs respectively of the universe and the nation” explains the historian Roy Porter (Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, 2000). The royal gardens at Richmond celebrated this lawful rule by featuring busts of Newton and Locke inscribed as ‘the Glory of their Country’, thereby corralled to the King’s cause.

William Blake by Thomas Phillips 1807

Blake, Hume, & Newton

Blake was on neither side, but nonetheless, had allies. Take David Hume (1711-1776). A luxury edition of the Scot’s bestselling History of England (1754) – which was better known than his philosophy during his lifetime – was to have included engravings by Blake, though that project was scrapped. But whilst when it came to philosophy, Hume’s sceptical agnosticism would have put him at odds with Blake, they would have found sympathy in Hume’s critique of the new sciences. Hume had pointed out that whilst it is possible to accumulate evidence for the observed properties of things, this data could only lead to universal laws if nature were assumed to operate by the same laws everywhere. Only then could a string of similar cases lead to a general conclusion. However, that uniformitarianism, as it’s called, can only ever be an assumption, since human beings lack the omniscience to check everything everywhere.

Hume concluded therefore that scientific knowledge rests on an act of faith, or, at best, a custom of presuming that the way things are today, in one place, is a good indicator of the way they will be tomorrow, in another place. That assumption works until it doesn’t. Hume therefore formulated a challenge to the reputation of science as a fully justified path to knowledge – a challenge with which philosophers still grapple. To some of the more non-philosophical scientists the argument seems like nitpicking, as if it’s trying to undermine the great discoveries of physics, chemistry, and biology. It’s not really. It’s rather questioning how far generalisations can take us, and asking what blind spots are introduced in the process.

This chimes with Blake’s wariness of generalisations. Blake was sure that nature isn’t uniform; you only have to take a look. Blake loved nature’s diversity much, and detected a love of tyranny and a passion for revolutionary fervour in the assumption that there should be universal principles governing all. He insisted, “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression” – thereby linking the poetical and the political. (Laws never have positive connotations for Blake. They are ‘stony’, ‘self-righteous’, ‘cruel’, ‘binding’, and ‘abstract’, because dehumanising. He also writes of ‘howling victims of Law’.)

Another supporter Blake could have welcomed is less expected: Isaac Newton himself. The hero of Baconian science was explicit that generalisations such as natural forces, as well as quantities such as mass and inertia, may be useful, but are only postulations: “You speak of gravity as being essential & inherent in matter, pray do not ascribe that notion to me, for ye cause of gravity is what I do not pretend to know,” he stated (Letter to Richard Bentley, 1693). Recent research has suggested that Newton’s theory of gravity as a force acting at a distance was inspired by his esoteric studies. Newton devoted much of his time to investigating ancient beliefs in daemons, for example – entities which, according to Plato and his followers, mediate cosmic attractions and connections. The link was a natural one for Newton to make, as it was for many at the time. Moreover, as Newton’s proposals about the dynamics of the heavens became known, they sparked a fashion for astrology. Which is all about how celestial entities supposedly act at a distance to influence human bodies on Earth.

Blake was not against science. Rather he longed for ‘sweet Science’, as he called it – a mode of knowledge pursuit that is in happy dialogue with the imagination. He was sure that rather than amplifying our perceptions, putting experiences to the test as the basis for knowledge would generate a culture of scepticism, fear, and nihilism: “If the Sun & Moon should doubt, They’d immediately Go out” he jeered.

Indeed, Blake can be placed in a line of scientists inspired by the Romantic tradition. The best known of these is Albert Einstein, who reckoned that the imagination is given to us precisely to convey the ways of the cosmos. Einstein knew how to combine fantastical imaginative journeys, such as travelling on light beams, with theoretical rigour: he produced the Theory of Special Relativity as a result of that playful trip of the imagination.

Today the Romantic impulse and Blake’s way of expressing it might be a help as science increasingly leans on algorithms and data. Science needs insights, not just results. Blake the philosopher can build the trust needed to see not with computers, but through them.

© Dr Mark Vernon 2025

Mark Vernon is a psychotherapist, a writer, and a Philosopher in Residence at Broughton Sanctuary. His new book Awake!: William Blake and the Power of the Imagination is out now. Please visit markvernon.com.

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The Philosophy of Race

Sailee Khurjekar argues that race is culturally constructed.

We know what the human race is, but what about the different ‘races’ that comprise it? There are competing theories about the definition and role of human races, alongside debates surrounding the existence of races at all. Social constructionism is the idea that beliefs are formed by the habits and traditions of a society. Social constructionists on race are concerned with the relationship of race to social reality. This is also what I want us to be concerned with briefly here.

There are two major strands of social constructionism on race: political constructionism and cultural constructionism. Sally Haslanger is a proponent of the former, and believes that race is constituted by power relations. She raises awareness of the power relations between different groups, especially in the incitement of violence and oppression, and addresses the unequal treatment of groups of people by other groups. Chike Jeffers, meanwhile, is a proponent of cultural constructionism. He adopts a hybrid approach: the origins of race are political, but the persistence of the idea of race in the future is tied to its cultural power. I will try to show that the social constructionist position on race provides the most convincing definition of what race is, specifically proposing why we should be cultural constructionists on race.

Social Constructionism on Race

Clearly one can be a social constructionist about categories that are seen as evidently social: for example, money, which only exists because certain tokens have been assigned value and importance by people in society. This constructionist view can be contrasted with a realist position on money, which maintains that money is an objective entity whose value is independent of social and political relations. According to philosopher Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir, social constructionists also aim to reveal a category as being a social category even when it’s widely held to be a natural one.

Many philosophers, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have been interested in human races as social constructs. If one believes that racial difference is not based on any evident biological reality, then what remains is the idea of race as constructed within social relations.

Social constructionism on race is worth investigating for a couple of reasons. First, it adds value to discussions about race that arise around social situations. Second, it provides insight into humans as social beings by documenting customs and traditions carried out by a given race: for example, how Native Americans paint their faces and bodies for dances, prayers, and battles.

Social constructionism is better placed to accommodate positions on race in a way that realism or eliminativism cannot. For instance, if we eliminate the idea of races altogether, we run into problems of erasure. Without racial categories, we fail to seriously consider those who were oppressed in history. Perhaps we have a responsibility to remember those who have faced the tyranny of racial injustice, and the preservation of racial categories allows us to do that.

Political Constructionism on Race

For political constructionists, a group is racialised relative to a context if and only if members of that group are observed or imagined to possess certain bodily features presumed to be evidence of ancestry in relation to a specific region or regions, and having or being imagined to possess these bodily features marks them as occupying either subordinated or privileged positions in society, where the presumed identity would play a role in the privilege or subordination.

Haslanger focuses on the global sociopolitical landscape of white supremacy and its impact on power relations, and she takes imagined features and presumed ancestry as markers of racial subordination or privilege. For instance, if a man is observed or imagined to possess facial characteristics that indicate he’s of South Indian descent. And, based on that, he is treated in a subordinating way, then we can say that he is racialised under this framework. Simply put, if the man looks South Indian and everyone treats him as if he is South Indian – for instance, by subordinating him based on his appearance – then he is South Indian.

There are two strengths of political constructionism worth mentioning. The first is the idea that races as we know them have been established in the modern era largely through the lens of European imperialism. A political constructionist might describe the social significance of white distinctness as having been born out of Western imperialist ideology. The second is that it persuasively conveys the role of race in personal experience. For example, a black child adopted by wealthy white parents will be stopped by the police more times than his white friends as he grows up. The boy will never experience the same social responses as his parents.

Image © Cecilia Mou 2025 Instagram @moucecilia

Cultural Constructionism on Race

Chike Jeffers, by contrast, sees race as both politically and culturally constructed. He presents what I would call a moderate cultural constructionism. Jeffers argues that the conditions for the origin of races and the conditions for the continuation of races are different. He agrees with Haslanger that the idea of race has a political origin, born out of European imperialism and colonialism. For political constructionists like Haslanger, the end of racism would bring about the end of races, as she considers races to reflect hierarchies of power. But Jeffers appeals to culture to preserve race in a post-racially-divided world, so that even if hierarchical power relations cease to exist, racial groups can continue to exist as cultural groups.

The political account of race illuminates various problems in education, such as inequality in basic access, inequality in funding, and unequal treatment of students by teachers and other staff with regard to discipline and provision of opportunities. It addresses the discrimination that non-white minorities face in schools dominated by white students. I think there are those who agree with the need for some change in policies, but not on grounds of race. For example, a politician might promote educational policies to encourage children to partake in the workforce regardless of their sex, race, religion, and so on. The aim would be an economic one: it does not matter who makes up the workforce, so long as money is constantly generated. We need to show, then, where culture fits in to this picture. To look solely at political or economic motivations for educational policies is to ignore the problems ensuing from the lack of black cultural representation – such as that black students are dropping out of school at higher rates than their fellow students.

One solution to address the drop-out rates might be to provide black-specific schools, where teachers would take a mainly black-centred approach, for example, by focusing on black history. I would reject this option. I do not think that segregation is the solution. Instead, a more cultural approach would encourage black students in mixed classes. For instance, art teachers could spend a significant part of the year focusing on black artists, such as Basquiat and Kara Walker. The positive value of celebrating black culture will also improve white students’ awareness of black artists, in turn engendering a greater respect for other cultures.

Stereotyping is often harmful and upsetting to the people being stereotyped. The political constructionist would argue that stereotypes strip us of our individuality through group generalisations. The solution is perhaps to affirm one’s own individuality. Jeffers notes that indigenous groups in North America focus on debates about land ownership, hunting, and fishing. Instead of considering this as encouraging harmful stereotypes about indigenous groups, we can instead appreciate and learn from the cultural differences between their way of life and ours. This involves a celebration of different customs and traditions, even those that appear foreign and distant to our own.

Jeffers thinks that a cultural construction of race generally precludes harmful stereotypes. However, we should be wary of this claim. For instance, it’s a stereotype to say that ‘black men are often criminals’, even if a large portion of the prison population are black, because we run into the danger of making essentialist claims based on numbers, which is misleading when the cause for the imbalance is something other than race, such as poverty.

A Defence of Cultural Constructionism on Race

Cultural constructionism argues that race is created and sustained by the cultural narratives, symbols, and institutional practices of a society. For instance, in the United States the concept of race was shaped by historical processes such as slavery, colonialism, and segregation. These cultures assigned racial categories to justify exploitation. Over time, these categories became embedded in the legal system, education, media, and language, giving them an appearance of permanence and objectivity. But the meanings of racial categories are not universal or fixed – they change over time, and vary from society to society. What it means to be ‘black’, ‘white’, or ‘Asian’ in one country can be quite different in another. Even within a single society, racial identities are fluid and often contested. This variability well illustrates that race is not an inherent attribute but a cultural interpretation of difference. Being a cultural constructionist about race allows us to see these shifts not as anomalies, but as evidence of race’s socially constructed nature.

Adopting a cultural constructionist view does not minimise the reality of racism. On the contrary, it helps us understand how racism operates. By revealing race as a product of cultural meaning-making, we can see how stereotypes, institutional policies, and unequal power dynamics perpetuate inequalities. Cultural constructionism also offers hope for change. If race is a cultural invention, it can also be reimagined. Recognising that race is socially constructed allows us to expose the concept’s foundations, critique its consequences, and work toward more inclusive and equitable ways of relating to one another. It gives us the tools to deconstruct harmful narratives and to promote solidarity across perceived racial boundaries.

Finally, we should be cultural constructionists on race because such a position provides a more accurate, historically grounded, and socially responsible way of understanding human difference. It reveals race not as a biological destiny but as a cultural story – one that we have the power to rewrite.

© Sailee Khurjekar 2025

Sailee Khurjekar is a PhD student in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, writing a thesis on obscenity and art censorship. She is also a Theology and Philosophy teacher and the Head of Debating at Haberdashers’ Boys’ School in Hertfordshire.

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Evolution or Progress?

Adam Neiblum asks what the difference is, and why it matters.

‘Progress’ and ‘evolution’ are widely considered synonyms, and are used interchangeably every day. Most people also regard evolution, in the Darwinian sense, to be a form of progress or improvement. We often hear talk about our species evolving to a higher state of being or a more advanced consciousness. But progress and evolution are not the same thing, and describe very different forms of change. Recognizing the differing kinds of change has a direct bearing upon our understanding of what it means to be Homo sapiens, both as a member of a culture and also as an animal – a product of the very evolutionary process that has created and shaped every species, including our own. So the conflation of ‘progress’ and ‘evolution’ matters more than a mere semantic error.

First, evolution consists of:

A) A genetic mutation in an organism;

B) A consequent change in body and/or behavior;

C) Rigorous testing of that body and/or behavior through interactions between the organism and its environment. If this change benefits the organism in terms of better reproductive potential – that is, in its ‘fitness’ – that change spreads into the subsequent generations.

Progress, meanwhile, consists of:

A) An ideal or goal – literacy, or justice, for example;

B) A gap between this ideal and the real-world state of affairs;

C) A process of movement – individually, collectively, or even species-wide – towards that goal or ideal.

Owl © Rhododendrites 2019 Creative Commons 4

We can see that these are not the same ideas. Evolution is neither purposeful nor intentional: it has no ideal, aim, or end-point. For evolutionary change, there are no stand-alone goals. Progress, on the other hand, is goal-directed by definition. It is aimed towards stand-alone ideals. It is all about goals, even if they may be abstract, distant, even unattainable – such as justice, beauty, or goodness. The higher ideals are also often de-contextualized: justice is justice, regardless of the environment. Also, progress is cultural, while evolution is biological. Nature and nurture, if you will. Yet the fundamental principles of biology and of culture are not the same.

Progress can have an opposite. Humans can remain culturally static, or even regress. But evolutionary change is not directional in this sense, and does not go ‘in reverse’. The concept of ‘de-evolution’ does not apply in biology. The evolution of cetaceans illustrates this point well. Whales and dolphins share a common land-based mammalian ancestor with our primate lineage. But our lineages eventually split around forty million years ago – ours went increasingly into the forests and up trees; theirs went back into the water. So, they went from fins to legs, but then back to fins again. This is evolution in action. But which part is ‘progress’? Out of the water? Back into the water? Fins to feet? Or feet back to fins? The answer is ‘none of the above’. Either way, both the coming and the going is evolution, not merely the parts we judge ‘an improvement’, that is, ‘progress’. Evolution neither goes ‘forward’, nor in ‘reverse’ since there is no goal, so no directionality.

Adaptation is Not Long-Term Progress

Outside of the scientific community, however, evolution is still widely considered a progressive phenomenon, a form of ‘natural improvement’. But natural selection isn’t like that. Evolution does tend towards addition : nature tends to add on, so modifying the previous biology to fulfill new roles. Thus life tends towards greater complexity over time. But ‘complexity’ and ‘progress’ are not synonyms. Indeed, they often diverge considerably. If evolution were a perfecting process, we would look around us today and see only the very best exemplars of flight, sight, swimming, hearing, etc. But consider the panoply of life in our time: basic single-celled organisms continue to thrive, even ‘dominate’ life on earth, billions of years after life began, as basic single-celled organisms. These simple life forms even constitute indispensable elements within our complex animal bodies. And ‘primitive’ complex species – crocodiles, turtles, sharks, mosquitoes, dragonflies… – also continue to thrive as they did hundreds of millions of years ago. Finally, for every ‘ideal’ exemplar of, say, flight – the albatross, hummingbird, or bat – there is also a bumbling quail, pigeon, or flying (that is, ‘controlled falling’) squirrel, snake, or frog. And for every eagle-eyed eagle, there is a blind cave fish, or mole thriving in the dark.

Evolution is not progress. The changes it generates are valuable entirely relative to context: ‘better’ or ‘worse’ as stand-alone goals or ideals do not apply. For evolution in general, traits may be just different, or better or worse perhaps in very specific environments, but not inherently, that is, decontextually, better or worse. An octopus would not benefit from feathered wings; nor an albatross from smart tentacles. The concept of progress simply does not map on to the reality of evolutionary change.

Evolutionary Insights

Why then do we erroneously project overall improvement onto the biological process? And when we’re thinking ‘progress’, why do we sometimes refer to it as ‘evolution’?

Iguana © Wilfredor 2014 Creative Commons 1

Over multiple centuries, those of us under the influence of Christian ideas were taught to believe that we were made both separate from and superior to the rest of the animal kingdom. In this, I think Christianity piggybacks upon evolved cognitive biases, that is, on a biologically hard-wired instinct for human exceptionalism. This instinct enabled our inclination to believe that we are the purpose of it all, with the rest of nature merely the stage or the supporting cast. But in 1859 Charles Darwin changed everything when he published On the Origin of Species, initiating the evolution revolution.

It’s been a very slow revolution. Recognition of the cultural and ethical ramifications of evolutionary theory has been glacial. This is because Darwin’s work landed in a culture in the grips of Christendom’s anthropocentrism, and we’ve largely retained its exceptionalist belief that we’re the purpose of it all. We imagine ourselves the goal of evolution, the end result of nature’s creative process, and that our distinctive traits are the best traits. As Stephen Jay Gould wrote, “we have managed to retain an interpretation of human importance scarcely different in many crucial respects from the exalted state we occupied as the supposed products of direct creation in God’s image” (Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History, 1996).

Under the continued influence of this anthropocentrism, we continue to misinterpret evolution as a progressive process of improvement, quite intentional, and with a clear purpose, to make us. Misinterpreting Darwin, we’ve simply morphed from being the Christian ‘crown of creation’ to being the naturalistic ‘pinnacle of evolution’. In doing so, we continue to conceive of human beings as the metric against which all other life forms are to be measured – and found wanting.

Consider visual perception. I asked Google (the average person’s fount of basic knowledge) which animal has the best vision. Its answer: the eagle – which is a creature with the same basic form of vision as our own. But visual perception has evolved in a wide range of forms. We fail to properly appreciate this diversity because of our anthropocentric bias. Consider however the mantis shrimp. This species has evolved twelve different types of color photoreceptors, as opposed to our mere three! Even trying to imagine the psychedelic visual world this creature inhabits simply boggles the mind. But assuredly this organism fares better with their vision than they would with the eagles’ or our own. The dragonfly, jumping spider, box jellyfish, even the common housefly, are further examples of the extremely divergent and context-dependent nature of visual perception.

Considering our species as the apex of a progressive process is not merely arrogant and inaccurate, it distorts our knowledge of Darwin’s work, evolution, culture, progress, human nature, other life forms, and our place within the whole. Our ignorant exceptionalist self-conception is also arguably at the core of many of the devastating problems we now face, including our rapine relationship with the global biosphere, affecting the very planet upon which we evolved and on which we entirely depend for our continued thriving. Indeed, our supercilious conceit is already encouraging another mass extinction.

Onwards & Upwards

Macaque © Animais Fotos 2010 Creative Commons 3

99.9% of all species that have ever evolved eventually became extinct. Fundamentally, we’re no different. We are in no way guaranteed a positive outcome, the proverbial ‘happy ending’, despite the assurances of either Christianity or capitalism.

The most important trait which distinguishes humans from the rest of earth’s abundant life forms is our capacity for complex shared and cumulative learning. This can, and generally does, shape our ideals and goals. Because of all this, our future is in our own hands. A bit disconcerting perhaps. But also very empowering. A rallying cry.

To the extent that reason, science, and knowledge genuinely determine our goals, we do progress. This holistic progress represents a fulfillment of human potential. Progressing towards the goal of environmental sustainability will not be a result of a new ‘spirituality’, divine intervention, or a naturocentric mythology. If it is to happen, it will be a result of human beings choosing a progress rooted in science, reason and knowledge.

Darwin’s theory of evolution, that is, of descent with modification through natural and sexual selection, refers to the slow, non-linear, and intentionless change caused by the interaction between gene, body, and environment. Progress is the far more rapid, uniquely human phenomenon of intentional movement towards a goal or ideal. Ideally, our goal and ideals should not be based upon coercion, indoctrination, or compliance to authority. Instead, they should be rooted in evidence, reason, and science. Evolution has endowed us with the unique capacity to progress. But the two concepts are by no means synonymous, and should be used with these important distinctions in mind.

© Adam Neiblum 2025

Adam Neiblum is the author of Rise of the Nones: The Importance of Freedom from Religion (Hypatia Press, 2023).

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Articles

What Women?

Marcia Yudkin remembers almost choking at Cornell.

“We should look upon the female state as having as it were a deformity, though one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature.”

– Aristotle, The Generation of Animals, 4th century BCE

When I was a student there in the Seventies, every other Monday evening the Cornell University Philosophy Department convened in a tournament called ‘Discussion Club’. The event began promptly at 8 o’clock. The night’s presenter would gallop out onto the field for no more than twenty minutes, kicking up dust with a position on so-and-so’s objections to whoever’s theory of such-and-such. Then a challenger trotted out for ten minutes, letting his banners fly as he charged the lead rider with cunning thrusts of reasoning. Then anyone present could jump in with prances or parries, lunging with their logical lances or just strutting their smarts. At the close of action at 10 o’clock, rarely was anyone declared a victor or some truth acclaimed by the crowd. But scored points mattered, and carried over in the minds of all the regulars, bout after bout.

At the door of the classroom where the joust took place, some junior fighter had been delegated to hand out cigars, on which even men who did not normally smoke puffed while watching and participating. Alice, Joanne, and I – the three women in the first-year graduate student class – would sit at the back, cranking open windows and waving as much smoke out of the room as we could.

Attending this event month after month, we women choked in more ways than one.

Coming To Cornell

“If a man behave with cowardice on one occasion, a contrary conduct reinstates him in his character. But by what action can a woman, whose behavior has once been dissolute, be able to assure us, that she has formed better resolutions, and has self-command enough to carry them into execution?”

– David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 1751

For graduate students attendance at Discussion Club was required. One or two tenured professors habitually skipped it, but turnout swelled when a guest speaker from Princeton, MIT, or UCLA was on the bill. By participating, the faculty practiced their skills at the highest level, showed off, and maintained the national and international reputation of the department. By watching and listening, we philosophers-in-training learned what counted in the discipline and how we would need to perform to receive our PhDs.

When I was an undergrad at Brown, I’d boogied philosophy with my professors, taking ideas out for a spin and creatively dancing through them step by step. I could handle nitpicky analysis like a pro; but I also liked to inject my papers with an imaginative angle. But at Cornell I soon realized that the department as a whole, not just professors I took courses with, would be evaluating me. The department saw its duty as turning out new versions of themselves, including the proper habits and attitudes. Yet I didn’t want to turn into a jouster, I wanted to remain a playful questioner. And I sensed my challenge had everything to do with the gender mix in the department.

In 1974, when I arrived at Cornell for my graduate studies, its philosophy department had no women professors. Coming from Brown, where the philosophy department also included no women, I never thought about this. Even in high school most of my teachers had been men, although just one meanly preached that women couldn’t do hard thinking. Nor had I witnessed discrimination against women students. And though I’d studied a lot about women’s historically second-class status, I saw improvements. Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth all now admitted women undergraduates. Congress had approved the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution, and sent it to the states for ratification. Women had achieved economic rights and advanced in sports and the professions. So the jousting at Cornell jolted me. Alice, a Stanford grad who had a snappy, high-energy style, felt equally unsettled, and we began having lunch together Tuesdays and Thursdays. A sociology grad student named Linda soon joined us. Her acerbic comments about her department helped all three of us develop perspective on the inculcation we were instinctively holding at arm’s length.

Women Within Reason by Melanie Wu

© Melanie Wu 2025. Please visit her instagram: @melaniewu_illu

Collective Observations

“Nature herself has decreed that woman, both for herself and her children, should be at the mercy of man’s judgment.”

– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, 1762

During our lunchtime study group, Alice, Linda, and I shared observations that bothered us. We groped for concepts that named our experience and shed light on our personal dilemmas. These are some ideas we developed:

• We found the macho professional role models held up for us to imitate repulsive. Cut-throat aggressiveness seemed horribly over the top and wrong in the realm of a search for truth and understanding.

• Professors who agreed with criticisms of their standards for evaluation nevertheless enforced those standards in their grading. Were psychological knives – either external, or inside of them – menacing them in ways they wouldn’t have wanted to admit?

• Emphasis in our courses on ‘methodology’ and ‘rigor’ – that is, on form independent of content – kept disciplinary boundaries strict and narrow. As philosophy professionals in training, we weren’t supposed to care about issues of race, gender, or the meaning of life – only about whether we’d shielded our arguments well enough against counterthrusts.

• As feminists, we choked on the smoke of patriarchal values and customs while the men breathed easily, as supposed ungendered neutral reasoners. As women, we were outsiders in academe, and represented a threat to the towers of male power.

• Although undergrads had permission to explore and innovate, errant grad students got pounded down so that renowned departments could continue to reign near the pinnacle of the ratings.

• We felt confused when accused of being ‘anti-intellectual’ or ‘lightweights’, because we actually revered thinking. But champion jousters guarded their approach by slapping scornful labels on anyone who questioned their sport.

• Was it worthwhile to buckle down and get credentialed within an academic system that ground down creativity and activism?

Chalk vs. Chauvinism

“Women will avoid the wicked not because it is unright, but only because it is ugly… Nothing of duty, nothing of compulsion, nothing of obligation!… They do something only because it pleases them… I hardly believe that the fair sex is capable of principles.”

– Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 1764

“Women are capable of education, but they are not made for activities which demand a universal faculty such as the more advanced sciences, philosophy and certain forms of artistic production.”

– G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 1820

Simone de Beauvoir 1955

I proceeded to mount a guerrilla campaign within the department. In the faculty lounge, open to graduate students, I commandeered the top right corner of the chalkboard that stretched wall to wall: I headed my communiqué ‘Sexist Quote of the Week’. Without further comment, I copied a sentence or two from one of philosophy’s greats – Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Sartre, Schopenhauer, or still-living luminaries. Some passages poured general contempt on women, others denied women’s ability to think. Still others took ‘male human’ as interchangeable with ‘person’. An extract from the standard logic textbook used across the profession treated women as a joke. And just once, I edited ‘sexist’ to ‘feminist’ in the heading, and posted something by Simone de Beauvoir.

By going into the lounge early or late I updated my posting once a week without anyone catching me at it. Between classes I would amble into the lounge, innocently drink coffee while reading, and prick up my ears – but no one ever commented on the quotes in my presence. I never heard conversation about my missives or speculation about who was the sneak. Yet since the rest of the chalkboard held departmental announcements, all the men had to have read my citations and felt at least a little discomfort.

I openly resisted, too. In two of my classes, I clashed with professors who insisted I toe the line by writing the standardly dry, technical papers. In the first, I wrote a monologue, reasoning through the topic of the course in the voice of a character. This wasn’t just a creative romp: it reflected my conviction that thoughts and ideas emerge from people at a time and place rather than from anywhere and nowhere. Our eminent, Azerbaijan-born teacher, who wore wonky glasses like Mr Magoo, declared this unacceptable. But at a meeting with my ‘committee’ – the three professors responsible for my academic progress – Nick Sturgeon, an ethics specialist, scoffed at his colleague’s rigidity: “A monologue – so what? Plato wrote dialogues, for God’s sake. Hume, Berkeley and Leibniz did too.” So this rebellion didn’t get me thrown out.

A semester later, in a class on the metaphysics of personal identity, I scrutinized the topic by bringing in cases like Alice in Wonderland and Jan Morris, formerly James Morris. The professor told me I’d get a ‘C’ for the course unless I rewrote the paper in the mode of tiny distinctions dancing on the point of a needle. He had a craggy, washed-out face that flashed with anger as he criticized what he said were my crude, irrational, and willful misunderstandings: “You didn’t engage with the philosophical literature. You attacked the weakest formulation of my position and didn’t defend yours,” he snarled.

“Attack, defend, attack, defend. Why does philosophy have to be done that way?” I objected. He shot me a withering look, like I was a babbling idiot. But my study group with Linda and Alice gave me the guts to stand up straight and continue: “I don’t expect you to understand this, but it seems to me that philosophy is a male club, and they’re saying, ‘Sure we’ll let women in as long as they talk like us, act like us, write like us, and think like us’.”

He crossed his arms and glared. “I don’t have anything to say to that,” he responded. But his evaluation of me for the department said I had an atrocious attitude and no future in philosophy.

Unprofessional Professors

“(a) Susan is featherbrained.

(b) Janet is featherbrained.

(c) Some women are featherbrained.

(d) All women are featherbrained.

(e) Only women are featherbrained.

(f) No man is featherbrained.

…

(w) Some dogs like a featherbrained woman.”

E.J. Lemmon, Beginning Logic, 1965, 1978

“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.”

– Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949

Other dramas in the department demonstrated perils for women trying to further their education in a male-dominated environment. Joanne, the third woman in our philosophy first-year graduate cohort, who had long platinum locks and a ‘don’t-touch-me’ aura, told me that the department’s nebbishy youngest professor had chased her around a conference table once. My mouth dropped: “Literally?” She nodded: “The same professor had invited me out for coffee my first week at Cornell, then tried to kiss me, but I’d ducked and pointedly kept my distance afterwards.”

Hush-hush rumors abounded. At the end of my first semester, one professor left so suddenly and so unwillingly that he never turned in grades for his students. The department passed everyone. People said the professor had been entwined in a relationship with a female grad student. People also said that another professor, married with kids, had taken on a mousy grad student as a mistress, and she followed him around like a tongue-tied shadow. Joanne claimed that some male graduate students were sleeping with undergraduates and giving them As. “Every day here, I’m forced to think about being a woman,” she complained. As far as we knew, Cornell then had no policies or reporting channels for sexual harassment, which barely had a name at that time.

My own mentor pursued women students too. Just over sixty, he had a ponderous, stop-and-start manner of lecturing while he paced. A friend characterized him as a cross between John Wayne and Gregory Peck. Wearing a near-uniform of baggy jeans, button-down shirt, knit tie, and tweed jacket, he had a gruff voice that to me evoked a lumberjack more than a film star or a college professor. I’d come to Cornell to study with him because of his close friendship with Ludwig Wittgenstein, my intellectual idol. Gossip had it that his wife had thrown him out of the house and then divorced him for fooling around with a student.

In his seminar I got to know a senior philosophy major named Petra, a pretty blonde. In the library, where we chatted during breaks from reading, she confessed that he had once kissed her then laughed uproariously. “A friendly kiss, or…?” I probed.

“On the mouth!” she exclaimed.

Weeks later, Petra seemed to be holding back on something; but she finally spilled that he had written at the end of his feedback on her final paper, “Before you go off to Heidelberg, why don’t you come over for dinner and spend the night?”

“What?” I sputtered. “He wrote that?”

“I could blackmail him!” Petra snapped. But the advance shook her up so much she couldn’t even bring it up with him when she next saw him, she later told me.

The same professor once walked me home after a late-afternoon meeting, and stopped us on a footbridge over a creek, giving me a look I could not interpret. I turned and continued walking and he did, too. I liked and admired him, but in the light of Petra’s intel, I knew I had to send him keep-off signals. Amidst all the smoky obstacles at Cornell, this felt so, so, so unfair.

Moral Compass by Owen Savage

© Owen Savage 2025. Please visit oghsavage.substack.com

Progress, Finally

“When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you… When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing. It takes some strength of soul – and not just individual strength, but collective understanding – to resist this void, this non-being, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.”

– Adrienne Rich, ‘Invisibility in Academe’, 1984

My mentor pulled me through the gauntlets of the PhD program without as much suffering as I’d expected from the choking of my first year, and when I eventually described to him my recoil from the Discussion Club, he suggested, “Why don’t you get together with the other graduate students to ask for changes?” So I did that, spearheading a survey that revealed significant patterns of dissatisfaction. And when I related the conflict with the personal-identity professor, he said, “Don’t worry, I won’t let you be bullied.” He stuck up for me effectively enough at the end-of-year departmental heads-together about grad students so that, despite two deeply derogatory reports, again I wasn’t booted out of the program.

In my second year I did well as a teaching assistant, first for an introductory ethics course and then for an interdisciplinary existentialism course, both of which focused on the sort of real-world questions that rarely even got a mention at Discussion Club. I took as many classes outside the department as allowed, including a History of Feminism course. The other grad students elected me to represent them at faculty meetings – a reform agreed to as a result of the survey.

I also discovered fellow rebels in a newly formed national organization called the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP). Founded by women five to ten years older than me, SWIP held conferences that analyzed the dynamics that Alice, Linda and I had bemoaned, and proposed sophisticated alternatives to take-no-prisoners intellectual swordsmanship. Partly through contacts at SWIP, I landed a dream job, teaching philosophy and women’s studies at Smith College, where male colleagues were easygoing and reasonable and students largely happy to be taught in a let’s-figure-this-out style. The jousters hadn’t beaten me down, and though I left academe after a few years, I remained mentally alive, still wondering about big questions of truth, knowledge, and who we are when we look in the mirror, at each other, at death, or at the stars.

© Marcia Yudkin 2025

Marcia Yudkin is completing a memoir, Recovering from Wittgenstein.

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Question of the Month

What are the Proper Limits of Free Speech?

Each answer below receives a random book. Apologies to the entrants not included.

To answer this question one need look no further than John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty (1859): “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” He added that “all silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility” – in other words, we can never be sure that the opinion we’re endeavouring to stifle is false. Mill also cautions against ‘the tyranny of the majority’ in imposing their views on a minority, and points out that ages are no more infallible than individuals, every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd. As he points out, “there is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true because, with a very little opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation.” And equally sensibly: “wrong opinions and practices gradually yield to fact and argument.” He then reminds us of the case of Socrates, who was put to death for voicing unacceptable opinions, and warns of blasphemy laws as an instrument of control.

Free speech is of course not absolute and is rightly constrained by law in certain cases, notably defamation, incitement to violence, threats, and obscenity. But laws are made by governments, and Mill cautioned over 160 years ago that “the tendency of all the changes taking place in the world is to strengthen society and diminish the power of the individual.” Fortunately, the right to free speech is enshrined in many laws, including in Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights and the First Amendment to the US Constitution. The ECHR recognises the validity of restrictions in cases of national security, prevention of crime, protection of morals, the reputation of others, confidentiality, and judicial impartiality. On the whole, the existing legal principles seem to work well, but, as Mill cautioned, one must be constantly vigilant against state and societal over-reach.

Julian Stafford, Cambridge

The original purpose of free speech protections was not to protect lies or insults, but to guard individuals against oppressive governments. From Socrates’ trial to colonial censorship, rulers have suppressed dissent whenever possible. Free speech has proved essential to building societies that are not merely ruled, but genuinely free. So free speech is not an end in itself. Rather, it safeguards three essential goods: individual freedom (the dignity to think and speak with autonomy), truth-seeking (the open contest of ideas), and self-governance (the ability to criticize rulers and hold them accountable). To preserve these essential goods today, governments should not have wide latitude to decide what is true. Once granted that power, they will use it to silence dissent. Instead, the role of government is twofold: (1) Protect free expression constitutionally, leaving little room for government to exploit temporary crises as excuses to silence dissent; and (2) Require transparency in the (eg digital) public square rather than the current trend of ‘policing truth’. Governments and companies alike make poor arbiters of truth. Regulation should not silence voices, but help citizens evaluate them. Media platforms should be required to provide users with context, including clear disclosures of who pays for ads, stronger vetting of accounts, and flags indicating the country of origin of posts.

The proper limits of free speech, then, are those that prevent government overreach while promoting a public sphere where citizens can exercise autonomy, pursue truth, and govern themselves with clarity and courage.

Jake Wilson, Littleton, Colorado

Sir Karl Popper defined an ‘open’ society as an association of free individuals whose activities are guided by a mutual respect for one another’s rights. Other philosophers, most notably Isaiah Berlin, have emphasised that in the exercise of liberties in an open society conflicts may ensue: engaging in freedom of expression may infringe the rights of others not to be the recipients of hate speech, for example.

Much debate currently revolves around the question of what, if any, protection can be afforded to recipients of hate speech. One could argue that a prosecution thus pursued could be an attempt to apply Mill’s harm principle [Do what you will, but no harm]. But can the harm principle provide the parameters whereby it can be judged whether or not the line has been crossed that divides opinion, expression, or advocacy from incitement? Mill never provided satisfactory criteria to distinguish between them, and extensively publicised difficulties arising from attempted prosecutions under ‘non-crime hate speech’ law in the UK attest to the continuing intractability of this problem.

For AC Graying, prosecutions for hate speech “can only be justifiably linked to aspects of people they cannot choose – sex, sensuality, ethnicity, age and disability if any.” For him, freedom of speech should be deemed violated only in limited, one-off, compelling cases. Does, for example, President Macron’s decision to seek legal redress for assertions on social media that his wife has transgendered count as hate speech litigation? Or are the Macrons simply taking offence at personally hurtful but not necessarily illegal assertions? Can an unacceptable degree of harm be proved? The final judgement is unlikely to satisfy either party in the dispute.

Therefore, the question remains as to what ought to be the basic principles underlying legally allowable expressive acts. But, it must be incumbent on every citizen of an open, liberal society to adhere to its core values – particularly those of tolerance, compassion, respect, truthfulness, and the acknowledgment of rights and responsibilities. To ignore these values is surely to transgress the proper limits to freedom of speech.

David Cope, Telford

I will use the term ‘freedom of expression’ to refer to all possible forms of expression, including verbal, written, and artistic. These limits cannot be defined mathematically: one can only estimate if a potential expression will exceed the limit. In an autocracy, there may be no legal system at all, and the regime alone decides on the measures to be taken after any expression. The issue is therefore only relevant in a democracy. In a democracy, the theoretical foundation of measures to be taken must be examined in advance. A common example of such a category is Hate Speech. Because there are multiple categories, there are also multiple limits. However, if one attempts to create a ranking of expressions in order of increasing extremity, regardless of their categories, only one limit is needed, beyond which all expression is outlawed. Many factors will play a role in judging expressions, such as the context, medium, agent, etc. But instead of ranking the individual expressions, it may be more effective to rank classes in terms of extremity. The most extreme class is the one to focus on first, to determine what the most extreme expressions are. This class can then be used as a reference point for the other classes. Only expressions in the most extreme classes of this ranking are to be considered as exceeding the limit and are deprived of freedom of expression.

Now the questions become what the most extreme expressions are, and how they can be identified. The most extreme expressions will undoubtedly have the most extreme negative consequences. As social disruption can be understood as the most extreme state, expressions that will lead to that belong to this most extreme class.

Teije Euverman, Rotterdam

It might help if we make a distinction between speech as expression and speech as action, recognizing that every statement we make consists of both. On one hand, speech is always an expression of what is running through one’s mind; on the other, it’s an action that often leads to other actions or reactions. I would argue that the limit of free speech has to do with speech as action, while speech as expression must be protected. Take for instance the popular illustration for a limit on free speech: screaming ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater. On one hand, ‘Fire!’ as an expression of what’s running through one’s mind is innocent in itself – say the individual fell asleep during the performance, had a dream that the theater was on fire, and woke up physically responding. Or say there was a real fire. In both cases, this speech as expression is perfectly benign. The only issue that pops up here is speech as action. And the determining factor is intent: what did the man who shouts ‘Fire!’ intend to happen?

We see this principle at work in the general political discourse these days and the false information that plagues it. Again intent is everything here, in that we have to make a distinction between mis information (which results from the limited facts we have available to us) and disinformation, which is intentionally offered to obtain some kind of advantage. Think Trump or Charles Manson. Trump or Manson having their petty and dangerous thoughts, and even expressing them, is hardly an issue. It becomes an issue when their expressions, as intended actions, lead to other actions that cause harm. Manson, when he suggested that some Hollywood elites needed to die, clearly orchestrated murder whether he killed anyone himself or not. Trump, likewise, while expressing himself, which is protected under free speech, clearly also engaged in the action of treason by inspiring his followers to storm Capitol Hill.

DE Tarkington, Bellevue, NE

Limits on free speech may be justified if more than the mere sharing of a view is intended. A mob boss ordering a murder is not simply making a statement, but wants and expects his (or her) speech act to result in murder. A speech act intended to elicit action has the moral status of the action to be elicited. If the intended action is positive, all well and good. However, when the intended action is harmful, it is reasonable to penalise the speech that causes it. Even if violence is not certain to ensue, someone wanting what they say to cause harm with at least a possibility of it coming to pass is culpable of violent intent. They’re on a par with someone swinging their fists wildly, hoping that they make contact. On the other hand, saying “I wish so-and-so were dead”, as an exaggerated expression of distaste, without any real desire or belief that it will happen, is acceptable, even though many would find it distasteful.

Another consideration is that the freedom to express an opinion does not imply the freedom to force that opinion on someone: expression should be prevented from tipping over into harassment. Deciding where this tipping point is can be a difficult, but not impossible, call. But strikers on a picket line threatening (and really meaning) violence to those still working are not exercising legitimate free speech. Some anti-abortion campaigners complain about being prevented from praying outside clinics. But prayers are addressed to God, who can hear them wherever you are, even if they’re not spoken aloud. Furthermore, such campaigners do not lack other opportunities to share their views. So is it harassment? As a final example, speech denigrating someone simply for how they are can hardly be seen as anything other than harassment.

Paul Western, Bath

The argument that freedom of speech should be limited when it is threatening to hurt another person makes sense to me. However, this limit is so grey that it’s impossible for most of us to explain coherently how to set clear boundaries. I think the problem lies deeper, in that freedom of opinion more closely matches the right that ‘freedom of speech’ is intended to protect.

We naturally tend to operate like this in daily life, in that we can have opinions but watch our mouths. For example, at grandma’s house: “It’s okay if you don’t like the dinner, but if you don’t, just tell her you’re full.” Of course, the question posed here is dealing with more pressing issues than grandma’s feelings. What if someone thinks one race is inferior to another? Racial discrimination is frowned upon in many places, and most people would agree with this condemnation. If someone states that they are going to hurt another group of people, I too think a limit should be placed on this speech, since it is indicating potential harm to another person. However, what if someone says that they believe a race to be inferior, but do not suggest that they or others may try to harm them? Although disturbing on many fronts, their opinion is not directly harming anyone. So I think we cannot limit this opinion, just as we cannot limit someone for believing a religion, or not. So I think it is opinion that should be free (whether verbal or non-verbal), not freedom of speech. Just as at grandma’s dinner, we can think whatever we want, but we need to be careful how we express it publicly.

Philippa Lieber, Langnau am Albis, Switzerland

We protect expression not because words are sacred, but because, over time, open dialogue tends to increase the accuracy of our collective understanding. So the freedom to speak is a tool for the discovery and testing of truth, and its moral weight rests on the expectation that, by allowing ideas to compete without restraint, societies are more likely to approach reason, evidence, and justice. But if that’s the justification, then that freedom cannot be absolute. A principle justified by its consequences must be sensitive to conditions under which those consequences no longer hold. When expression diminishes the capacity for reasoned discourse – for example, when people spread falsehoods, erode trust in evidence, or coerce others into silence – then it begins to subvert the very rationale by which it was defended. To treat such speech as protected is not to extend freedom, but to erode its foundation. This does not mean that offence, disagreement, or error justify censorship. Quite the opposite: the right to challenge, provoke, and even to be wrong remains essential to intellectual and moral progress. Yet where the demonstrable effect of expression is not to enlarge the space of reason but destroy it – where the harm to truth, safety, or civic order from allowing speech outweighs the harm of constraining it – limitation becomes not the enemy of liberty but its logical expression. The proper limits of free speech, then, are drawn by proportion: we restrict only when the evidence shows with high confidence that permitting those expressions would do greater damage to the project of truth-seeking and human flourishing than a considered and justified restraint.

Freedom of speech is not an end in itself; it is an instrument of collective reason. To defend it properly is to defend the conditions under which reason can still be heard.

John Hutchinson, Worthing, West Sussex

Categories of speech not protected under liberal democratic frameworks include expressions that incite violence, attack the other’s identity (through hate speech) or reputation (through libel or slander), threaten national security or public safety, or contain child-exploitation material. Yet how relevant and effective are such restrictions in our digitally mediated world? On one hand, almost anything can now be said in cyberspace. On the other, new regimes of content moderation have emerged – some transparent, others hidden; some fair, others far less so. Private social media companies impose their own controls that silently manipulate the visibility and reach of speech. In this environment, protecting free speech while minimizing harm requires a shift in focus. The greatest threat to free speech today is the drowning out of voices for social and global justice amid the endless flow circulating online. The most devastating consequence of the principle that ‘hate speech should be allowed if it does not incite violence’ is not only the normalization of hate speech itself, it’s also the flip side: protest speech, aimed at constructive change, is stripped of its force, left unrealized, ultimately impotent. The central question should no longer be what speech ought to be restricted, but what speech ought to be empowered.

The true challenge, then, is to safeguard authentic protest speech so that it’s not reduced to just another fragment of noise on social media. What good is it when the voice of the oppressed contends with that of the oppressor in digital spaces indifferent to material power asymmetries, as though democracy is nothing more than a meme-fuelled joust for attention? Determining the proper limits of free speech, then, requires us to identify and interrogate the mechanisms that prevent it from fulfilling its highest purpose: correcting injustice. And in our Information Age, the most serious of these mechanisms is, paradoxically, the free flow of speech.

Houman Mehrabian, Vancouver, British Columbia

By strict definition, the term ‘Free Speech’ means that one can say whatever ones wishes without fear of consequences. However, we know that what one expresses in whatever format does have consequences, intended or not. When considering if any limit should be applied to what one expresses, those limits are usually intended to prevent harm to the recipients of the message. This harm can either be about offence or incitement. But when it comes to being offensive, it is the individual or individuals who will be offended. Words or images in themselves are not offensive: it’s the way they’re perceived that causes offence. I therefore believe that free speech should never be restricted on the basis of ‘Causing Offence’. However when it comes to incitement, I feel that a limitation on free speech can and should be imposed. By incitement, I mean calling for actual harm to persons or property. For example, calling for asylum seeker hotels to be set on fire should be made illegal, whereas calling for illegal asylum seekers to be deported should not. The later is merely an opinion, whilst the former is a direct call to action to cause harm. Therefore from my perspective, the only limit to be placed on anybody expressing themselves is where there is an intention to cause harm to other people or property and not merely because it might offend somebody.

Andrew J. Davidson, East Cowes, Isle of Wight

Free speech should have no limits because the supposed ‘harm’ from speech is not inherent to the information itself, but emerges from recipients’ responses. When we examine how information causes pain, we discover that the same words can devastate one person while leaving another unaffected. A medical diagnosis, political statement, or personal insult generates different responses depending on the recipient’s beliefs, cultural background, emotional investment and other interpretive frameworks. If someone calls me ‘worthless’ and I feel hurt, that hurt is generated by my psychology, not by some objective harmful quality in their words. Someone with different self-concept or cultural conditioning might find the same words amusing or irrelevant. This proves that the pain is not a property of the information pattern itself, but rather emerges from the subjective interaction between observer and information. Therefore we cannot coherently punish speakers for causing pain that actually originates in the recipients’ subjective processing. We would essentially be punishing people for triggering others’ psychological mechanisms rather than for inflicting objective harm. The proper response is to place responsibility where the causal mechanism actually resides: with recipients. Rather than restricting speakers, we should expect people to develop critical thinking skills, emotional regulation, and information verification abilities. This approach also respects human agency, treating people as capable of managing their own cognitive and emotional responses. Moreover, restricting speech based on potential subjective responses creates an impossible standard, as almost any statement might distress someone.

Free speech maximizes the flow of information essential for truth-seeking, innovation, and democratic discourse. When we understand that information itself cannot inherently harm, the default must favor expression over restriction. The alternative – limiting speech to prevent hurt feelings – makes speakers responsible for the unknowable internal processes of all potential recipients. This places an unjustified burden on expression. If pain from information is subjective, then managing that pain is the recipient’s responsibility, not grounds for limiting the right to speak freely.

Anthony Eadington, Carlisle

Next Question of the Month

The next question is: Why Do The Evil Still Prosper? Please give and justify your answer in less than 400 words. The prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain. Email the Editor. Subject lines should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and must be received by 10th February 2026. If you want a chance of getting a book, please include your physical address. Submission is permission to reproduce your answer.

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Brief Lives

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)

Colin Mackenzie surveys the full life of a philanthropic philosopher.

Albert Schweitzer was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 for his humanitarian work as a medical missionary in Gabon, Africa. The impulses which led him to a life of service gradually evolved into his philosophy of ‘Reverence for Life’. Here I want to show some brief reverence for Schweitzer’s own life.

A Life Begins

Albert Schweitzer was born on 14th January 1875 in the small village of Kaysersberg in Upper Alsace, North Eastern France. Not long after his birth, the family moved to Gunsbach in the Munster valley, which now houses the headquarters of the Albert Schweitzer Association. His father was a Lutheran pastor, his mother the daughter of a pastor, and several of her family were church musicians. As well as a religious upbringing, Albert’s development and education was also shaped by his maternal grandfather’s love of organs and organ building. Schweitzer’s musical talent showed early. At five he received piano lessons from his father, and by the age of eight he was playing the church organ.

Around this time an incident took place that had a profound effect on him. Schweitzer and his friend made catapults, and his companion suggested that they go to shoot birds with them. Fearful of being mocked for refusing, he went along; but when the moment came to shoot, the bells of the local church rang out, and suddenly, instead of shooting the birds he shooed them all off, threw away his catapult, and ran home. Later Schweitzer said: "ever since then when the passiontide bells ring out… I reflect with a rush of grateful emotion; how on that day their music drove deep into my heart the commandment: ‘Thou shalt not kill’.” (Out of My Life and Thought, 1933). This incident had a profound and lasting effect on him, as will become evident.

Schweitzer received a sound education, which included attending the Gymnasium at Mulhausen in Alsace. After graduating from the Gymnasium, his uncle obtained for him an audition with Charles-Marie Widor, the famous organist of Notre Dame, who did not normally take students; but on hearing the young man he accepted him as a pupil.

However, Schweitzer was disturbed by other thoughts. To him it was incomprehensible “that I should be allowed to live such a happy life, while I saw so many people around me, wrestling with care and suffering” (Out of My Life and Thought). He decided that from the age of twenty-one he would devote himself to art and science until he reached thirty, and from then on devote himself to the service of others.

At eighteen, in 1893, he entered Strasbourg University to study Theology and Philosophy. He had a high opinion of Immanuel Kant, whom he saw as the greatest philosopher of the modern era because of Kant’s intellectual integrity and his dedication to reason wherever it may lead. He was also impressed by Kant’s ability to show limits to theoretical knowledge, and Kant’s idea that we cannot reason our way to all metaphysical truth. Schweitzer decided not to read the literature about Kant, but to engage directly with his writings, principally the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). He adopted a similar approach in his theological studies, and also in his study of Bach.

In 1902, already a Lutheran Pastor, he was appointed Principal of the Theological Seminary in Strasbourg. In the same year he met Helene Bresslau, who would eventually become his wife.

A Medical Turn

Schweitzer was troubled by accounts of the appalling treatment of African peoples by their colonial masters. So although a brilliant academic career lay ahead, he decided in 1905 to study medicine to go as a medical missionary to serve the people there. He happened to see an appeal in a magazine for missionaries to go to Gabon. His decision to head there was met with formidable opposition from family and friends, because they saw a successful career in Europe ahead in theology, philosophy, and music.

Yet there seemed to be no limit to the stress Schweitzer was willing to endure. While studying to be a doctor, he continued to teach theology at the university, and preach, while also researching St Paul. As a founder of the Paris Bach Society and its regular supporter, he was chosen to play in their concerts, which involved trips to Paris from Germany. Early in his medical course he also wrote an essay on organ building.

Schweitzer sat for his exams in anatomy, physiology, and the natural sciences, and passed as a result of intense cramming. He then moved on to clinical studies. Before taking his final exams, he applied to the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society, but was rejected. Apparently his theology was unacceptable, however, having given his word that he would only heal and not preach, he was eventually accepted. In October 1911 he took his final exams.

A Significant Side Quest

While he was studying medicine, Schweitzer’s book The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1906) was published. In it he rejected the contemporary views on Jesus – both the conservative approach, and the liberal approach that tended to remould Jesus in its own image. In the book he concluded that the Jesus of history is unknowable, and it’s only by accepting the spirit of Jesus that we can begin to see him. This is not knowable through doctrine but only through ethical action based on a reverence for life. It’s not a love of belief nor a love of self, but a love based on respect for life. For Schweitzer this was the true message of the gospel.

Schweitzer concludes his Quest with this eloquent statement:

“He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, he came to those men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same words: ‘Follow thou me’, and sets us to the task he has to fulfil for our time. He commands – and to those who obey him, whether they be wise or simple, he will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings, which they shall pass through in his fellowship, and as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn, in their own experience, who he is.” (pp.127)

Albert Schweitzer by Colin Mackenzie

Back to Bach

Schweitzer was fortunate to acquire a complete edition of JS Bach’s works, and on one of his visits to his friend Widor, promised to write a book on Bach for the students of the Paris Conservatoire. It proved to be so successful that he later wrote a fuller two volume work in German, which was published in 1908.

For Schweitzer the music of the Baroque reached its ultimate expression in Bach, but also he saw him as a poet, expressing the inexpressible through the medium of music. He also saw Bach as an artist, because in his choral works and chorales (Lutheran hymns) Bach expresses the deepest meaning of the text through harmony, musical figures, and motifs.

Marriage, Medicine & Morality

In 1912 Schweitzer married Helene Bresslau, who was an enormous help to him. She shared his values and concerns, and as well as a social worker and nurse, she was Schweitzer’s helper and companion through all their preparations for Africa, and in Africa itself.

On Good Friday 1913 they at last set sail, their destination Lambarene, nearly fifty miles up the Ogooue River in western Gabon, where the Schweitzers would open their hospital. On arrival they were besieged by patients with: malaria, leprosy, sleeping sickness, dysentery, and many other illnesses. They acquired a room which they transformed into a consulting and operating area, and began treating the seemingly endless stream of people. Then, in 1914, just when they were settling into their work and making progress, war broke out. The Schweitzers were placed under house arrest; but as a result of protests from their patients, were soon allowed to continue their work.

Around this time Schweitzer was asked to visit the ill wife of a local missionary. On a long, slow journey upriver, he mulled over his time in Africa and the philosophy he had read and struggled to find an adequate ethic. None satisfactorily addressed a way of living that incorporated the spiritual, ethical, and practical sides of life. He had also become extremely critical of European civilization, which he saw as in decline from the high ideals of the Enlightenment. He believed that for all people to reap the benefits of material progress, the will to advance civilization must be ethical. But instead, the nations of Europe were nationalistic, arrogant, militaristic, and power-hungry. Their pride and willingness to go to war were blessed by many who should have known better. The outbreak of the Great War provided terrible proof of their error.

From the outbreak of World War I, many related thoughts occupied Schweitzer’s mind as he filled pages of disconnected notes. He recounts: “I sat on the deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal conception of the ethical which I had not discovered in any philosophy” (Out of My Life and Thought). Then:

“Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase, ‘Reverence for Life’. The iron door had yielded: the path in the thicket had become visible. Now I had found my way to the idea in which affirmation of the world and ethics are contained side by side. Now I knew the ethical acceptance of the world and life, together with the ideals of civilization contained in this concept, has a foundation in thought.”

Civilization & its Displacements

But worse was to come for the Schweitzers: as German citizens they were transported to France as prisoners of war. This was a very difficult time for the couple, both were ill, exhausted, and dispirited and Helene had contracted tuberculosis. During this period, Schweitzer began work on his Philosophy of Civilization. After a time they were permitted to return to Alsace. They stayed in Europe between 1919-1924, to recover from their ordeals and rebuild their lives, but also to rejoice in the birth of their daughter Rhena. The Philosophy of Civilization was published in 1923, and Albert began fundraising for an eventual return to Africa.

Helene’s health and medical care meant that even back in Europe the couple were often apart. A return to Africa for her was out of the question; but not for Albert, who set sail for Gabon to restart the project they’d been forced to abandon. This was a difficult time for them, but Helene continued to fundraise and promote their work. After a couple of years, a new hospital was built.

Albert remained there until 1929, when he returned to Europe, exhausted; but it wasn’t long before he began to fundraise again and give lectures. He went back to Lambarene the following year, and stayed there for almost ten years, returning home just before the start of the Second World War, and this time remaining in Europe for ten years. But in 1949 he was back in Lambarene, where he remained until his death, with just occasional brief trips to Europe.

He was presented with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 (awarded 1952). Helene, his faithful supporter, died in 1957. Albert himself died at Lambarene in 1965, where both Helene and Albert are buried. Rhena took over the administration of the hospital, which still serves the people of Lambarene today.

Reverence in Brief

Schweitzer approached philosophy from a Christian perspective, and his service was a practical expression of his philosophy. But he also believed that Reverence for Life as a universal ethic can be approached from other religious viewpoints, or from none. For Schweitzer, “Ethics is nothing other than Reverence for Life.” He accepted that we live and have always lived at the cost of other lives. We cannot escape these choices, as we are inheritors of our ancestors’ survival instincts: but that is not a licence to needlessly take life. Putting all life first, as Reverence for Life insists, changes the perspective: “The circumstances of the age do their best to deliver us up to the spirit of the age, and we treat life as if it were not life, making plants and animals subjects for our gratification”, wrote Schweitzer: “We must extend our compassion to include all living things; until this is done, mankind will never find peace” (The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 1906).

© Colin Mackenzie 2025

Colin Mackenzie is a retired schoolteacher, a musician, and an artist, with a lifelong interest in Schweitzer’s philosophy of Reverence for Life. He lives in Dublin.

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Obituaries

- John Searle (1932-2025)

Obituary

John Searle (1932-2025)

Mariam Awwad sums up a very philosophical consciousness.

John Rogers Searle was a highly influential philosopher of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, shaping discussions on language, mind, and the nature of understanding for over sixty years.

Born in Denver in 1932, Searle studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He later won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, where he earned his doctorate under J.L. Austin and Peter Strawson. Searle was deeply influenced by the ‘ordinary language philosophy’ of his supervisors, whose focus on the practical dimensions of speech laid the groundwork for his own further development of speech-act theory. His years in England significantly impacted his lifelong focus on how words not only describe the world but also act within it.

In 1959 Searle joined the University of California, Berkeley, where he would teach for the rest of his career. As the Slusser Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Language, Searle was known for his challenging yet clear teaching style and his unique blend of analytic precision and philosophical depth. He received numerous honors, including the National Humanities Medal and the Mind & Brain Prize. His academic recognition acknowledged not only the originality of his ideas but also his skill in translating complex philosophical issues, ranging from questions of consciousness to the foundations of society, into public discussion.

In his reflections on language, Searle emphasized that it is a crucial tool for expressing and communicating meaning, but that meaning itself does not reside in language; rather, it exists in the relationship between mental states and the world. Building on this idea, he rejected any form of reductionism that explains meaning solely in terms of physical processes, instead stressing the irreducibility of intentionality. In this context, ‘intentionality’ is a jargon term referring to the fact that consciousness is always about something, and usually something other than itself. It is a property material objects do not have, only minds. This understanding of meaning as grounded in the intentional relation between mind and world also shaped Searle’s firm stance against ‘computational functionalism’. For Searle, mental phenomena could not be fully described by theories that view the mind as merely a system of inputs, mechanical processing, and outputs.

Searle’s insights into the philosophy of mind and the nature of computation remain highly relevant in a modern tech landscape dominated by systems like ChatGPT, just as they were in the 1980s when his ‘Chinese Room’ thought experiment challenged whether machines can genuinely understand rather than only simulate understanding.

John Searle speaking at Google in 2015

© FranksValli 2015 CC 4.0 Licence

In this thought experiment, Searle asks us to imagine a person in a sealed room who doesn’t understand Chinese. They receive Chinese characters written on cards through a slot, and follow a detailed English rulebook to manipulate these symbols and send new sets of characters back. To outsiders, the responses appear fluent, as if a Chinese speaker were making them. However, the person inside doesn’t understand the symbols; they’re simply following formal rules about how to respond to the symbols presented. Searle argued that this is also how computers process information – by manipulating symbols based on preprogrammed rules of syntax and grammar, without understanding their meaning. So even when a computer produces intelligent, appropriate responses, it’s just mechanically handling signs without any comprehension of them. Searle emphasized that this shows how genuine understanding requires more than computation, it involves consciousness – a quality unique to biological organisms. Therefore, for Searle, the human mind is not a program running on neural hardware, but a biological phenomenon grounded in consciousness. The Chinese Room argument can also be applied to Large Language Models, which despite their linguistic sophistication operate without genuine understanding. Searle would likely have viewed today’s AI systems as impressive examples of symbol manipulation that nevertheless lack awareness or any form of subjective experience, including intentional states. In an era increasingly shaped by intelligent systems, Searle’s arguments also remind us that ethical and political questions about responsibility and truth cannot be answered without understanding the systems involved.

Searle’s academic career, however, came to an abrupt end before he could comment explicitly on the recent developments in AI. It was halted in 2017 by allegations of sexual harassment at Berkeley that led to the revocation of Searle’s emeritus status and the cessation of his teaching responsibilities.

These events rightly cast doubt on his personal conduct and professional reputation. However, they do not diminish the intellectual importance of his philosophical contributions, which continue to influence discussions on language, mind, and consciousness. So his legacy, like that of many influential figures, remains both lasting and ambivalent. It reminds us that intellectual achievement and personal integrity must be judged together, even as the importance of an individual’s ideas persists.

Amidst the public controversy Searle’s private life entered a difficult phase too. Also in 2017 he faced the loss of his wife Dagmar, whose presence had quietly accompanied his philosophical journey for more than half a century. All of Searle’s major philosophical works – ranging from The Rediscovery of Mind to Seeing Things As They Are – are dedicated to his wife.

Searle passed away on September 17, 2025. He was 93 years old. With his death, philosophy loses one of its most visible and argumentative voices.

© Mariam Awwad 2025

Mariam Awwad is a Research Assistant in the Department of Philosophy at Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf.

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Interviews

- Peter Singer

Interview

Peter Singer

The controversial Australian philosopher defends the right to choose to die on utilitarian grounds. Matt Qvortrup recently asked him about it.

The Northern Territory in Australia was the first place in the world to legalise euthanasia. It was in 1996. After a year, the federal government stepped in and banned the procedure. Now, thirty years on, all jurisdictions in Oz allow people to voluntarily die. Recently I made a short documentary about it, including interviews with the widow of the first person to die, and with the doctor who oversaw his death – his name was Nitschke. His surname led us to talk about Nietzsche, and then philosophical ethics, and Peter Singer’s name came up. “You should speak to him”, said the doctor. Before I could say anything, he said: “This is his number and email. I’ll put in a word for you.” And so he did, and so I could interview the world’s most controversial philosopher.

Peter Singer by Gail Campbell

“I have no idea what Aristotle would say.” Peter Singer is perhaps the world’s leading moral philosopher, but he is not pretending to be omniscient. He is world famous for putting Animal Liberation on the agenda with his book of that title in 1975.

He might have done much to atone for the sins of René Descartes – who regarded animals as insentient beings. But he has caught much controversy especially with his views on voluntarily assisted dying – or VAD, as voluntary euthanasia is called in Australia.

His muscular defence of the “right to die” is nothing new. Over the years it has had consequences for Singer, and also for the institutions he worked for. It resulted in Princeton University losing money from benefactors who took exception to the Ivy League university appointing Singer to the Ira W. DeCamp Chair of Bioethics in 1999. But he still stands by his views.

Singer was born to Jewish parents in 1946. They were Austrians who emigrated to Australia when Hitler invaded their country in 1938. The household observed Jewish holidays but was agnostic. Young Peter Singer took a stand. He was an atheist and refused to have a Bar Mitzvah – the religious coming-of-age ceremony. He studied philosophy at the University of Melbourne, and later had a stint at Oxford University where he specialised in political philosophy. It was in this phase that he wrote two short books on the philosophies of Karl Marx and G.W.F. Hegel.

Singer has never abandoned political philosophy – and he even wrote a cheeky book on it titled The President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush. Written at the height of the Iraq War in 2004, in it he used ethical and political theory to reconstruct the philosophy of the then US president.

But it was his book Practical Ethics that gave him the status of a major philosopher. Covering themes ranging from abortion, through to political violence and overseas aid, the book did exactly what it said on the tin: it was a book on the practical use of philosophy. That Singer became notorious was due to his views on euthanasia.

At a moment when this particular issue is being debated in the United Kingdom Parliament, his thoughts are perhaps particularly timely now – and certainly controversial. Some would even say distasteful, “Parents should have the possibility if they so choose to humanely end the life of a severely disabled infant after obtaining advice, not only from the doctors but also from those with personal knowledge of what it is like to have a child with that disability”, he told Times Radio in an interview last year.

Some might see his defence as concerning a purely hypothetical situation. But an article in the esteemed medical publication New England Journal of Medicine documented that infants’ lives have indeed been terminated in the Netherlands. It suggests that there have been around 600 such cases.

Asked about his views in the light of this being no longer just a thought-experiment but a reality, does Singer still think parents should, under certain circumstances, have the right to terminate the lives of infants who suffer incurable and painful diseases?

Singer’s response is measured rather than kneejerk: “The article refers to only 22 cases of active euthanasia in severely ill newborns, over seven years. The figure of 600 refers to all cases in which medical decisions led to the end of life – for example, turning off a respirator. That happens all over the world, in every neonatal intensive care unit.”

Nonetheless, there are actual cases. Can they be morally justified? Singer thinks so: “I agree with the authors of the article that there are some cases in which, if the parents agree, active euthanasia for a severely disabled newborn infant is justifiable.”

Utilitarianism

To have such views is perhaps unusual. Some would say extreme. But for Singer they are based on philosophical foundations. And Singer is unashamedly a utilitarian. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) defined this approach to ethics in the following terms in his book Utilitarianism:

“Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness” (Utilitarianism, 1863, 4). But Singer goes a bit further back in his utilitarianism in his defence of euthanasia:

“Jeremy Bentham, the founder of the English school of utilitarians, also known as the ‘philosophical radicals’, was an early advocate of voluntary euthanasia, as he was of many other reforms that have subsequently been adopted.”

But while closer to Bentham than Mill, Singer is at pains to acknowledge the views of Mill too:

“The arguments of John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty, are also very relevant here. In addition, there is now a great deal of information about the actual practice of legal VAD that wasn’t available to anyone in a previous century.”

So far so good, but could the introduction of legal euthanasia be the start of a slippery slope? Some people have argued that Canada is an example of the unintended consequences. In that country the right to die was expanded from those with a terminal illness to others with an incurable disease. He is not concerned about that coming to Oz?

“No, the Canadian decision was not based on common law, but on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that became law in Canada in 1982. We have nothing comparable to that [in Australia].”

Nor is he concerned that in Canada, 4.7 percent of all deaths were a result of the introduction of euthanasia. He does not see it as a high number. Far from it: “It shows that there was a previously unmet need for voluntary assisted dying”, he says.

Singer of course admits that there are philosophically-sophisticated ethical systems other than his own. A philosopher like Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) did not believe in the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, but assessed every action according to whether it was consistent with a moral law. Singer says that, “Kant was opposed to a right to die.”

But he is not sure all Kantians would agree with the master. Kant’s philosophy was based on his famous Categorical Imperative, which states that we should “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 166). Singer is open to the possibility that a Kantian could be in favour of voluntary assisted dying, “There are many interpretations of the Categorical Imperative, and yes, on some of them, it could be.”

But his fundamental belief is utilitarian, so it is not surprising that his defence of voluntarily assisted dying is based on utilitarianism: “Mill famously defended the view that the state should only prohibit actions that caused harm to others. A person’s own good, physical or moral, was his own business. So, Mill would have argued that VAD should be legal.”

Whether these considerations convince – or otherwise – the politicians grappling with this practical ethical question, let alone their voters, is, of course, another matter.

• Matt Qvortrup is a regular contributor to Philosophy Now.

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Letters

- Letters

Letters

Letters

Neanderthal Resurrection • The Employment of Politics • Sore Points • Forced Cogitations? • The Ontological Argument Exists • Is Knowledge Logical? • Is Stoicism Still Relevant? • Aristotelian Ethics, Condensed

Neanderthal Resurrection

Dear Editor: The piece on de-extinction by John Kennedy Philip in Issue 170 summarised the main concerns regarding the subject; the only part it didn’t mention was AI, which may have an increasingly significant role in gene technologies. My point for reflection is this: should we not seriously consider the reestablishment of extinct hominid species first? My view is that we absolutely should – the only caveat being that we’d need to accord each member of these revived species full human rights. But once we’ve done that, we’d have a diversity unseen since the prehistoric period. It’d be very interesting for us as human beings of the 21st century. The social, artistic, and spiritual implications are likely to be profound. This is before we even discuss transhumanism, which seeks to create new forms of human life. I’d say we’d better start with forms that have already walked this Earth before we try anything more radical. Put simply, if we can’t manage to live alongside our Neanderthal cousins, we probably aren’t ready for anything more ambitious.

Anthony A. MacIsaac, Institut Catholique de Paris

The Employment of Politics

Dear Editor: Having read Norman Schultz’s article on immorality in jobs in Issue 170, I was surprised that the author made no mention of either soldiers or politicians. Let’s put aside enforced conscription – in many instances, conscientious objectors were imprisoned, put into mental institutions, or executed, so criticising someone with little or no choice but to become a soldier is unfair. Those who willingly enlist as soldiers might claim they signed up to help bring peace where there is conflict, but they know that such outcomes are most likely to be achieved by their shooting dead people the Top Brass deem to be ‘the enemy’: they know that state-sanctioned killing (or murder, depending on one’s perspective) forms part of their job description. So if one believes any deliberate killing or willingness to deliberately kill is immoral, it could be argued that all voluntary soldiers are immoral.

As for politicians: they’ll promise to do what those who vote for them want them to do, selling themselves as saviours determined to reset the moral compass supposedly wrecked by their predecessors; but once they achieve power, they generally resort to being self-serving, easily corrupted hypocrites who fail to deliver on their manifesto pledges. To some extent, it could be said that a politician is morally worse than a soldier who puts a bullet through someone’s head. After all, at least the soldier is doing what they’ve promised to do should they be commanded to do so (which is obey orders). The same cannot be said for a politician who, whether deliberately or apathetically, doesn’t do what they promised to do pre-election, which was to ‘obey’ an electorate who, it generally turns out, foolishly put their trust in them.

Stefan Badham, Portsmouth

Sore Points

Dear Editor: The article ‘Philosophers on Chocolate’ in Issue 170 has given me, a dental surgeon, the reason why Nietzsche, Marx, Sartre and de Beauvoir never smile in photos. They don’t want their carious, rotten teeth on show!

Eva Tyson, Fife

Forced Cogitations?

Dear Editor: Naina Krishnamurthy so clearly and succinctly lays out the different philosophical perspectives on forced vaccination in Issue 170, although in her definitions of the three types of refusers of vaccination she is also illustrating just how nuanced attitudes are towards this aspect of public health. Relevant here is what Krishnamurthy refers to as “the ignorant who strongly believe in vaccine inefficiency” and “the misinformed, who overestimate the real risks of vaccination” (putting aside her third group, ‘the selfish’). These ‘ignorant’ and ‘misinformed’ refusers could be seen as simply exercising their belief by acting in such a way as to not only protect themselves, but to inform others of what they perceive as a potentially harmful intrusion on personal safety. Perhaps it’s a minority viewpoint; but arguably it’s not entirely out of sync with the social contract, utilitarianism, or the ethics of care approaches. So it seems questionable whether refusal of vaccinations “ignores these ethical frameworks and endangers entire communities.”

Kevin M. Hickson, Exeter

Dear Editor: I have some qualms with the ‘Forced Vaccination’ article in Issue 170. First let me disclose that I received every round of COVID-19 vaccines so I am not objecting for any personal reasons.

The article clearly defines ‘forced vaccination’ as implying requiring proof of vaccination to be able to participate in certain aspects of society. I approve of this definition. But the author goes on to propose that the only two options then are 1) get the vaccine; or 2) refuse it and put everyone else at risk. This ignores the definition we just agreed upon: as stated by the author, refusing the vaccine and so opting out of certain aspects of society is another valid option. Children can be homeschooled. Attending concerts and sporting events is not a human right. If your employer makes vaccination a condition for employment, finding new employment is an option. In the author’s example of the elderly woman with the unvaccinated neighbor, not visiting is an option; so is wearing a mask in her presence. Vaccine refusal alone is not morally negligent. Refusal to do anything to protect others is.

I think the false dichotomy presented in this article may have the counterproductive effect of galvanizing vaccine dissenters, who will tune out pro-vaccine scorn but also refuse any of the other mitigation strategies I mentioned, maybe simply out of spite. Now we’ve taken a step backward in protecting the greater good simply by being dogmatic. If we want the next pandemic to go more smoothly, we’ll have to take up a position that presents vaccination as a trade-off in which each individual has a choice in the matter, and where there are pros and cons to each choice – not a position of coercion, shame, and bullying.

Ray Saltrelli

Dear Editor: I read the article on forced vaccination with interest and would like to suggest a couple of points.

The first is that the author starts with a logical fallacy: can anyone prove who gave the kindly old woman COVID? The implication that it was the person who visited her for biscuits relies on multiple assumptions that may or may not be true. I find this interesting because my mum became seriously ill with COVID despite getting the vaccine and booster shots. She certainly did not get it from me, the social leper who did not take the vaccine, because I was too busy working each day to visit her.

A second possible fallacy is the author’s assumption that the vaccine is effective. It frustrates me that people still use the term ‘anti-vaxxer’ in a general way to imply that people like me are against all vaccines. I have no objections to vaccines that have undergone years of development and have been rigorously tested; but I do object to one rushed in to quell social hysteria. I would remind the author that people who, for example, said that tobacco or Thalidomide were dangerous were initially dismissed as cranks. In fact if you look at science in general, what humans believe at any point is often proven to be incorrect. I do not say this to dismiss science, but to remind that author that science is not always correct.

Another point is, who can you trust? Early on in the pandemic, scientists at Oxford University published a report which found that the elderly or those with pre-existing conditions were most at risk. Such was the social panic that citing this study soon became grounds for ostracism, as people insisted we should respect such experts as Piers Morgan or Nicola Sturgeon instead. Does the author think I should have listened to the non-scientists or the scientists when deciding what’s best for me? Thankfully, I am still here to debate this issue, whereas several people I knew can no longer join in because they died of previously undiagnosed heart conditions shortly after taking the vaccine.

As for the social contract, does it still apply to individuals who are shunned by society? As someone from a working class background cursed with a good brain, this interests me as I do not have to search hard for examples of privileged people railing at me for being the problem with society. The ex-First Minister of Scotland, who claimed there are too many white people, comes to mind. The current First Minister is also clear that people who do not accept the cosy consensus are ‘not welcome’ in society (curiously though, my tax money is). So do I still owe an obligation to this society? Luckily for society it was people like me, motivated by that old fashioned notion of duty, that kept things going while others talked themselves into a frenzy during COVID. Perhaps a topic for a future article might be the inverse proportion between someone’s importance to society and what they’re paid?

Terence Wilkinson, Scotland

Dear Editor: I’ve never written a letter to any editor before, but I could not withhold my incredulity at Ms Krishnamurthy’s defective analogy in comparing abortion with forced vaccination. Close to one million abortions are performed in the US annually alone. This is the destruction of an entire population of the most vulnerable creatures on earth. To imply that this does not pathologically affect the social psyche, much less those destroyed, is to imply that these unborn are not ‘persons’.

Sor Awdng, USA

The Ontological Argument Exists

Dear Editor: In Issue 170, Raymond Tallis disagrees with Anselm’s Ontological Argument. Central to Tallis’s argument is the claim that entities can’t have properties unless the entities exist, existence being a precondition of having properties.

I have two counterarguments. First, existence itself is a property. Kant disagreed; but I’d say that if something can be truthfully said about a particular entity, then it describes a property of that entity. If so, entities can have the property of existence. This seems to undermine Kant’s rejection of the Argument.

Second, and more controversially, some entities that have other properties lack the property of existence: some things don’t exist. Consider: a true statement is a description of something real. It’s implicit in the meaning of the statement ‘the cat is on the mat’ that there is a cat on the mat. If the statement is true, the cat is real. But what about a false statement, such as ‘the cat is on the floor’? It is implicit in the meaning of ‘the cat is on the floor’ that there is a cat on the floor. So, if it’s not true that the cat is on the floor, then that means that particular occurrence does not exist. In other words, that cat is unreal. Therefore, it cannot be true that no entities are unreal. On the other hand, if there exist things that do not exist, that involves contradiction. As Tallis describes, some philosophers thought that referring to unreal entities (such as ‘the present King of France’) was a mistake, and found a way to avoid doing so. Instead, though, if some statements are false, that implicitly means that some entities are indeed unreal.

Peter Spurrier, Halstead, Essex

Dear Editor: It is with marked trepidation that I wish to question the work of Raymond Tallis. The first proposition he gives when ‘Revisiting the Ontological Argument’ (PN 170) is “God is by definition the most perfect being”. I question the term ‘most perfect’. Perfection is, by definition, absolute and so cannot admit of degrees: something is either perfect or it does not meet the criteria for perfection. In my reading, Tallis’s attack on Anselm’s argument is dependent upon comparing perfections, which is not possible. It may be that Tallis intends the term ‘most perfect’ as meaning the nearest to perfection. But that doesn’t help, as I then interpret his first statement as indicating that God is not perfect, and we must be able to identify some imperfection in God. Having done so, we can then conceive of a creature with all the qualities of God but without the imperfection.

Michael Shaw, Huddersfield

Is Philosophy Now Keeping It Real?

Dear Editor: I must vehemently defend your publication! In a letter in PN 170, Andrew Lewis complained about what he considers a ‘keeping with recent trends’ approach in the magazine. Whilst I am not popularist myself, and it is undeniably important to maintain a certain academic seriousness when philosophising, if we demarcate areas where philosophy cannot tread, it ceases to be philosophy. There is always depth to be found even in the most seemingly shallow subject matter. If we accept the view that recent trends lack intellectual gravitas, surely there is all the more need for a philosophical critique of such things. I summarise in a haiku:

Insight is obscured

If philosophy’s confined

To a narrow past

Thomas R. Morgan, Westcliff-On-Sea

Dear Editor: Sometimes PN provides LOL moments to share with one’s friends. This one’s memorable: “Their songs… with lyrics laced with profound thoughts on themes of peace, freedom, authenticity, alienation, protest and love… Most people have never read or even heard of Kant or Hegel, but most know some Beatles slogans, like ‘Let it Be’ or ‘All you need is Love’… an attempt to crawl out of our modern dead end of absurdity, meaningless (sic) and doubt, to perhaps find something more than ‘misunderstanding all you see’…” etc – Philosophy Now Issue 169.

Mike Bor, London

Dear Editor: About Clinton Van Inman’s article, ‘The Beatles: Nothing is Real’, in Issue 169. I was surprised and pleased to see the Beatles turn up as a subject for philosophy. It’s difficult to separate them from what was going on in the Sixties. That period saw a step change that brought on some new ways of seeing the world, including reality itself.

The ‘nothing is real’ idea for the Beatles starts with the Revolver album in 1966, the year they discovered LSD. The final track, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, was inspired by Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience (1964), itself influenced by The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This song takes its title from Ringo Starr saying, ‘be here now’, so paraphrasing the Vedic teaching that to dwell on the past or the future is to be dead to the present.

The article refers to popular existentialism. I’m unsure if this had any influence on the Beatles. In Jann Wenner’s Lennon Remembers (1971), Lennon argued that people work to exist and exist to work: “surviving is what it’s about really, from day to day. Live now, this moment. We might get a moment’s happiness any minute now: cherish every day and dread it too.” Perhaps there’s a shadow here of Heidegger’s everyday sense of being, but not really the direct-action ideas of Sartre. So while the Beatles somehow represented the changing times, it could also be said that they, and the arts generally at that time, represented a last gasp of romanticism. There is a lot of Rousseau in Lennon’s ‘moments’.

Personally, I enjoyed the summer of love of 1967: the flowers and the colour, all the different things, the serendipity of different things side-by-side. The reactionary forces woke up in 1968 and political philosophy suddenly appeared on the streets. Marx was everywhere; and in Paris students threw paperback copies of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man at the police. Perhaps this was ironic, since the Frankfurt School to which Marcuse belonged understood popular culture as an undesirable part of consumer capitalism.

At Leicester University in late 1967, we marched and waved our banners, then we occupied the administrative block. We wondered what else to do with ourselves. We sat there for weeks while friends smuggled food through the windows. Then we got a telephone call from Paul McCartney, who wished us well. Suddenly, things had a purpose.

Revolution in the Head (1994), a famous book by Ian MacDonald, describes John Lennon as half-sceptical, half-awake, with a channel-hopping state of mind. This description, McDonald claimed, became true for the Sixties generation. Well, it hurts a bit, but there’s some truth in it. In my defence, I don’t think MacDonald understood what rock and roll was. Perhaps philosophy can help?

Dr Barry Witcher, Norfolk

Is Knowledge Logical?

Dear Editor: Peter Keeble in Issue 169 was correct in stating that we use inductive reasoning every day. But Hume’s original skepticism about the non-circular justification of induction [Can you prove the future will be like the past without assuming it will be?] cannot be easily dismissed – some of the world’s greatest philosophers (eg, Kant, Popper, Russell) have tackled this problem, but it’s fair to say that nobody has come up with a solution that would have satisfied Hume.

The idea that knowledge is justified true belief condemns us to keep updating beliefs based on flawed and uncertain evidence, in what Richard Jeffrey called conditioning under the ‘flickering light of a candle’. This confirmation process in the face of uncertainty guides most of our reasoning and actions. Hume might in fact agree that facts and experiences all have some degree of uncertainty, and that inductive rules might be the most appropriate in most practical situations. The goal of induction is to turn observed instances into general rules. However, if such observations are subject to limitations in the first place – chance, language, cognitive biases – then the epistemic value of induction is only as a safeguard against the more wild claims of universal truths.

In Hume’s Problem Solved:The Optimality of Meta-Induction (2019), Gerhard Schurz argues that although induction cannot be logically proved, the inductive method is the best among a wide class of competing predictive methods, and this optimality is perhaps the best we can hope for. A more utilitarian goal of induction may read like this: ‘Turn uncertain evidence into coherent rules for updating beliefs and for decision-making’. If it’s good enough for Machine Learning and AI, it should be good enough for philosophers, right?

Quang Duong, Ottawa

Dear Editor: In his excellent article on philosophical technique in Issue 169, Peter Keeble suggests that an action which neither intends nor causes harm can still be immoral, giving the example of a female giving birth at the age of fourteen to a child who has a happy life, even though the child’s chances would have been better if she had delayed pregnancy.

Keeble’s right. Actions can be immoral even when harm is neither intended nor caused: for instance, if they risk causing harm or reduce the chance of good occurring. Here are some other situations in which an action may be immoral even when harm is neither intended nor caused:

1. It is immoral to break the laws of a democracy, even if no harm is done.

2. If you intend to harm someone, and your action actually benefits them, you have still acted immorally. A man may seduce a girl knowing that this might harm her. That she and the baby are happy is irrelevant to his wickedness.

3. It’s immoral to agree on a course of action with someone unable to understand its relevant potential implications, even if no harm results. If both parties are immature, they’re both wrong to embark on activity whose possible consequences they haven’t adequately considered.

4. It is immoral to give someone a small amount of help (or none at all) when you could reasonably give more help.

Allen Shaw, Leeds

Dear Editor: In Issue 169, in an article traversing the limits of knowledge, Michael McGranahan explores the commonalities and contrasts between constraints outlined through Wittgenstein’s language and Gödel’s math. One perspective that’s missed is that of the later Wittgenstein. Later Wittgenstein focuses on language use rather than as an objective reference to the world around us. He goes back completely on his initial beliefs that language corresponds to facts: instead language finds its role in ‘language games’ where humans in agreement define the rules around and therefore the meaning of language. More succinctly, language is not according to a predefined rule book.

Gödel’s proof on the inherent incompleteness of formal systems shows that a formal system with a set of axioms and internal logic cannot be fully complete – so not all true statements can be formally proved. Interestingly, however (as alluded to in the article), we do find that humans are able to provide reasoning beyond propositional and logical reasoning.

A question then arises: is there an innate human capacity that affords us both language and our ability to reason? Let’s take the case of an alien intelligence radically different to our own: AI systems, especially LLMs. These have largely circumvented symbolic-logic focused design and have learnt through high order statistics. Yet while obviously different, they do offer a path of reasoning identifiable in characteristics to our own: they do not base their operations in systems with a complete logic, but are able to provide reasoning beyond. Their reasoning, to a human, is often flawed and implausible, as they do not map on to our human reasoning. But could they just be playing a different set of language games?

Suraj Pai

Dear Editor: I enjoyed Philosophy Now Issue 169 immensely. When I was young, it seemed like everyone was telling me what was right and wrong, what to do and what not to do. It dawned on me that I had no good reason to believe anything these people said, as lots of it was contradictory and ridiculous. Okay, admittedly I was a bit rebellious and stubborn back then. Some say I still am. But ultimately, this set me on a lifelong quest to discover what knowledge and truth really are.

Originally I thought everyone agreed that knowledge and truth were not relative but absolute. Seventy-plus years later I still think that’s how those concepts were intended by the Greeks way back when, and that’s how we should consider them today – even though it seems fewer and fewer people agree with this view.

A claim to knowledge is typically preceded by a justification. For example: “Someone told me”; “Lots of people say it’s true”; “I read it in a book”; “I like the idea”, etc. But since no absolute truth has yet been established as a foundation, claims of knowledge must be preceded by a leap of faith. I can accept something as true based on some story someone told me, or some dogma, having faith that the source is factual, or I can form a hypothesis and via empirical methods test it through continuously observed evidence. If my hypothesis is shown to be false, I abandon it or correct it.

Absolute truth is much like infinity: mathematicians and particle physicists love the concept, yet no one can touch it, or has ever seen it as far as we can tell. So too with knowledge. But just because you can’t find it, does not make it false. Popper be damned: keep looking.

Scott E. Newton, Pacifica, CA

Is Stoicism Still Relevant?

Dear Editor: Stoicism teaches that a worthwhile life may be achieved by cultivating virtue through self-discipline within four cardinal practices:

WISDOM: both factual learning and understanding (perspicacity);

JUDGEMENT: clear attention to all aspects of a matter before deciding;

COURAGE: diligence in sticking to one’s beliefs and practices unless proved wrong;

MODESTY: being neither too strident nor too weak in explaining one’s views.

The Stoics eschewed concern for the things over which we have little or no control – health, wealth, fame, status, possessions – which they called ‘indifferents’, and counselled strict self-control over the ‘natural appetites’ for leisure, food, sex, diversions, etc. Here lies the modern challenge to the otherwise excellent Stoic approach to leading a worthwhile life. As Dr Doolan emphasises in his article on Attention in Issue 169, we’re deluged by demands for our attention, and in this globalised, hyper-commercialised world, constantly encouraged to strive for multifarious indifferents – bigger houses, better cars, fancy clothes, foreign travel, love and sex, health products, etc – all of which distract from the important pursuit of virtue. As the article reminds us, a “serious goal of education should be to train attention” – that is, to train people to think clearly and deeply, and not to pursue individual interests at the expense of social awareness and responsibilities. As the opening line of Dr Doolan’s article points out, ‘listen’ and ‘silent’ have the same letters and are mutually necessary, together producing awareness.

A.C. Grayling writes in Philosophy and Life (2023) that we’re born into a ‘net of normativity’ dictated by circumstances, but we have free will and can cultivate awareness to structure our own answers to Socrates’ enduring question, ‘How should I live?’ For this the principles of Stoicism are still as relevant as ever.

David Morris, Oxford

Dear Editor: I find enlightenment and refuge, especially as a practicing lawyer, in the teachings of various philosophies, and religiously enjoy Philosophy Now!

It’s been humankind’s quest since the outset of civilization to achieve eudaimonia – how the ancient Greeks described the highest quality life – including ataraxia, a state of equanimity. In endeavoring to figure out ourselves and our state of being as a person in a society, the first prerequisite is to take cognizance of time – either chronos, chronological time, or kairos, opportune time, the hour to do – whether using Stoicism, as Professor Pigliucci illustrates in ‘Nine Spiritual Exercises’ in Issue 169, or Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, or Epicureanism, Existentialism, Nihilism or some other ism. Living that sucks the marrow out of life boils down to a crass philosophy of two potent tenets aptly articulated in slang: the first is an expletive, and the second an advertising slogan: ‘F**k it’, and ‘Just Do It’.

Michael Manoussos, Queens, NYC

Aristotelian Ethics, Condensed

If it’s imprudent

then you shudent

but as long as it’s good

you shood.

Daniel Galef

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Columns

- Another Conversation with Martin Heidegger?

- Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)

- Philosophers on Walking

- Marcus Aurelius’s Ten Commandments

- On Tyranny

Tallis in Wonderland

Another Conversation with Martin Heidegger?

Raymond Tallis talks about communication problems.

A quarter of a century ago, I published A Conversation with Martin Heidegger (Palgrave, 2002). Though it was issued by a respected academic press, my book was a somewhat eccentric account of the central ideas in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), which is generally accepted as his magnum opus. My chapter headings say it all: ‘A Breath of Fresh Air’, ‘Wayfaring’, ‘Darkness in Todtnauberg’, ‘Leaving You and Not Quite Leaving You’, and ‘Sunlight on My Arm’. I also published a few after-ripples of this sustained immersion in Herr Professor’s thought, including The Enduring Legacy of Parmenides: Unthinkable Thought (Bloomsbury, 2007), which was in part prompted by reading Heidegger’s work on pre-Socratic philosophers. After that, the Magician of Messkirch largely disappeared from my intellectual life.

A year or so ago, prompted by an invitation to contribute to a collection marking the hundredth anniversary of Being and Time, I re-engaged with his writing. When I had finished the commissioned chapter, I found I was reluctant to abandon Heidegger again. There was unfinished business that seemed to be worth pursuing. Many subsequent hours spent arguing with his central ideas have generated two successive drafts of a book provisionally called Another Conversation with Martin Heidegger. As I embark on the third draft, however, it seems that the title has grown a question mark. I have rediscovered how Heidegger is one of the most exasperating philosophers to think with or against. And yet he cannot be ignored. He was, after all, arguably the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century. His nearest rival is Ludwig Wittgenstein, but the latter was in many respects an anti-philosopher. In the Preface to his only work published in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Wittgenstein reported that he had found “on all essential points, the final solution of the problems” he had addressed in it, and then discovered “how little is achieved when these problems are solved.” Ouch.

No-one who takes philosophy seriously, therefore, can ignore or give up on Heidegger. If you decide to take the plunge, however, you have to face many obstacles. Because I expect that I will be devoting one or two of my columns in the next year or so to the fruits of my conversation with Heidegger, I would like to spell out some of these obstacles. Think of them as trigger warnings.

Warning: Heidegger Approaching

The first problem is Heidegger’s language. Even scholars who have devoted decades to studying his works admit that much of what Heidegger says remains unclear, ambiguous, or even contradictory. There are endless arguments as to the meaning of key Heideggerian terms such as ‘Being’ and ‘Dasein’ and how they do, or do not, connect with each other. Much of the (vast) secondary literature around Heidegger’s writing is consequently more like scriptural exegesis than critical evaluation of arguments and conclusions, which is apt because many scholars who comment on his work sometimes seem to do so from the standpoint of disciples rather than equals. But trying to understand the meaning of Heidegger’s prose through the interminable discussions as to what he means by certain terms he uses, and re-uses, can consequently seem to be a long digression from questions about the meaning of human life to questions about the meaning of Martin Heidegger.

The opacity of Heidegger’s texts is due in no small part to his fondness for neologisms or for putting existing terms to radically different uses. And this trait, evident throughout his writing, seemed to get worse with time. For instance, in Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (2014), Thomas Sheehan, a brilliant Heidegger scholar, highlights a sentence in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (written a decade or so after Being and Time): “The cleavage is the unfolding unto itself of the intimacy of be-ing.” Sheehan comments that “Mae West could not have said it better.”

Then there is the massive scale of Heidegger’s oeuvre, lovingly curated by a vast army of scholars. When publication of the Gesamtausgabe (Collected Works) was completed, it comprised 102 volumes, amounting to 37,736 pages. One could be forgiven for thinking that Heidegger would unironically echo James Joyce, who reputedly said that “The demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to my works.” But those whose lives are otherwise busy with trivial matters such as employment, child-rearing, discharge of social responsibilities, political activity, making the world a better place, reading other philosophers, other writers, involvement in other cultural activities, etc, and who cannot avail themselves of a second incarnation, have sufficient time to be acquainted with only the acknowledged highlights, Being and Time of course being among them. Yet while Being and Time is acknowledged as his major work, for some commentators it has been superseded by subsequent writing. It goes without saying that others disagree. Normal readers can address the rest only via a small subset of the secondary literature (if at all). Hence the need to choose between struggling to understand the world and struggling to understand The Master. (The third possibility – advancing one’s understanding of the world through advancing one’s understanding of Heidegger – seems at times to be a forlorn hope.)

There is also the vast secondary literature. According to Academia.edu, 49,599 papers presently discuss ‘Philosophy of Martin Heidegger’. This disheartening statistic suggests that it is unlikely that my additional contribution to the literature – item number 49,600 – will settle disputes about Heidegger’s work and thus extract more Heideggerian light to cast on either the world we live in or the life we pass in it. At any rate, it will be in competition for attention with vast crowds of rivals saying, ‘Read me!’.

Ich Spreche Kein Deutsch

There is a third problem for those who, such as your columnist, cannot read German. Heidegger would have regarded this as entirely disqualifying us not only for commenting on his works but also for having any pretence to being a serious philosopher. He asserted that only two European languages were suitable for philosophical discourse – Greek and German (of course). But as he doesn’t offer much evidence for this extraordinary claim, I am not inclined to take it very seriously. Indeed, one would like to know how he could be sure that there is nothing to be learned from French or English philosophy. At any rate, it is surely rather odd that the accident of not being a German speaker should condemn one to not understanding the nature of human being, any more than being born before Heidegger shared his ideas with the world means one should be doomed to what he called ‘forgetfulness of Being’. We might also reflect that it was David Hume, writing in English, who awoke Immanuel Kant from his ‘dogmatic slumbers’, setting him on the path to the transcendental idealism which so heavily influenced Heidegger.

Martin Heidegger (detail) by Clint Van Inman

There is, however, a genuine barrier to his thought for those who cannot read German, which is well illustrated by the divergence between the two available English translations of Being and Time, the first by John McQuarrie and Edward Robinson, and the next by Joan Stambaugh (and subsequently revised): they have crucial differences in the rendering of key terms. And while many scholars feel that the McQuarrie and Robinson translation is more faithful to the spirit of the original, not all agree. Even his central term, ‘Dasein’ – meaning ‘being-there’, ‘being-in-the-world’, or ‘human being’ – is the focus of controversy among translators. In his revision of Stambaugh’s translation, Dennis Schmidt replaces ‘Dasein’ with ‘Da-sein’, defending the change on the basis of Heidegger’s own recommended revision for the Collected Works, even though Heidegger continued to write ‘Dasein’ himself. And the battle as to where, whether, or when ‘being’ should be ‘Being’ (with an upper case ‘B’), ‘being’ (with a lower case ‘b’) or even or ‘be-ing’, is equally drawn out. In German, unlike English, all nouns start with capital letters, so that doesn’t help.

If there are such barriers to reading Heidegger in English, then writing about him in a language which is, according to George Steiner “naively hostile to certain orders of abstruseness and metaphoric abstractions” (Heidegger, 1978) should be nigh impossible.

In response, I cannot help quoting the sixteenth century clergyman Ralph Lever (cited in Jonathan Rée’s wonderful Witcraft. The Invention of Philosophy in English):

“We… that devise understandable terms, compounded of true and auncient English words, do rather maintain and continue the antiquity of our mother tongue: than they that, with inkhorne termes doe change and corrupt the same, making a mingle mangle of their native speech, and not observing the properties thereof.”

A particular challenge presented by Heidegger’s vocabulary is that so many words seem to take in each other’s washing, and we never seem to touch base. A succession of terms occupies the favoured spot of being the most fundamental. The most conspicuous example of verbal jostling for priority is ‘Dasein’, but sooner or later, it gives way to ‘clearing’ or ‘uncoveredness’. Subsequently, that’s displaced by ‘appropriation’ or ‘Enowning’ as the source of both being and time.

It is of course possible to justify Heidegger’s distinctive use, or abuse, of language on the grounds that he was endeavouring throughout his long life to waken his readers, and indeed himself, out of modes of thought that had sedimented over 2,500 years, during which Western philosophical discourse had got too familiar with itself. Nevertheless, it is sometimes difficult to shake off the feeling that one is in the presence of a thinker circling round ideas that elude him; or of insights, visions, and revelations, almost extinguished rather than expressed by mighty helpings of verbiage.

Nevertheless

All this notwithstanding, there are, I believe, reasons other than vanity why I feel that Another Conversation with Martin Heidegger may be worth writing and (possibly) even reading, and why my reports from the battlefront may be justifiably shared with readers.

First, there is space for writers who are critical of Heidegger’s starting point, particularly as the critics (even ignoring the – usually Anglophone – scoffers who have not taken his ideas seriously) are vastly outnumbered by the exegetes. Radical dissent from Heidegger does not usually receive much in the way of attention, even in those relatively few cases where the critic subjects his texts to close reading.

Time for a confession: there was another prompt to my resuming engagement with Heidegger. When we moved house, we discovered the truth of Nietzsche’s observation that ‘we are possessed by our possessions’. My library was scattered and I lost my copy of Being and Time. I ordered another through Amazon (not something of which Herr Professor would have approved.) A couple of days after my order was delivered, I received a question from Amazon: ‘Did Being and Time meet your expectations?’ I think that question deserves an answer, not the least because seriously engaging with Heidegger forces one to dig deeper into the nature of philosophy, and, more importantly, of our world and the life we live in it.

Watch this space.

© Prof. Raymond Tallis 2025

Raymond Tallis’s Prague 22: A Philosopher Takes a Tram Through a City is out now in conjunction with Philosophy Now.

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Philosophical Haiku

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)

by Terence Green

Peering through life’s lens

God in nature is deduced:

The joy of being.

Baruch Spinoza was born in Amsterdam into a Jewish family that had fled persecution in Spain. He went into the family merchant business with his brother and was a respected member of the local synagogue – until, that is, he published ideas about God that were contrary to traditional Jewish teaching, ideas he refused to recant. For these heresies, he was cursed, excommunicated, and shunned. Leaving town (as you would), he ended up in the Hague, where he made earned a little money from his skill as a lens grinder.

In 1670 he published Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and if there had been any doubts before that he wasn’t an orthodox believer, there were none now. All religions, he said, were essentially life-denying in teaching that our misery today is to be endured as part of our preparation for the life to come. This, Spinoza thought, was absurd. Instead, we should be aiming for a joyous existence in the present moment, the only moment we ever know. As always, quite how this joy is to be attained is not entirely clear, but we’re to seek a sort of mystical understanding of our place in the eternal cosmos and become one with God, or nature (for Spinoza, in some not entirely clear fashion, God and nature are one and the same).

Spinoza thought that religions rely on intolerance and superstition to maintain control over the faithful, while the ideal life was one of rational understanding that unites people in the contemplation of truth. He did, however, think that most people are probably too ignorant to achieve that kind of state, and thus religion can at least keep them in check morally. Spinoza apparently also liked to collect spiders, which he would unleash against each other in mortal combat. The joy of nature is evidently to be found in all sorts of places.

© Terence Green 2025

Terence Green is a writer, historian, and lecturer who lives in Eastbourne, New Zealand.

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Philosophy Shorts

Philosophers on Walking

by Matt Qvortrup

‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; tracks like Rose Royce’s 1976 hit ‘Car Wash’ are the exception.

Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick), and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle). This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) famously writes about life being ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ (Leviathan, 1652), but it wasn’t the latter for him. In fact, he lived a very long life. Back in his day, the average life expectancy was fifty. The Wiltshire man clocked up ninety-one years. Why? Perhaps because he insisted on taking a daily walk.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a punctual man. It was reported that the citizens of Köningsberg would set their watches when they saw the philosopher pass by them on his daily stroll. The walking professor only missed his saunter once – when he was caught up in reading a book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). That Genevan-born philosopher was also keen on having a daily stroll. Indeed, Rousseau’s last book was The Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782) – in which he stressed that “I can only think while I walk” (‘First Promenade’).

This was not a new theme for him, but a recuring one. For in his unusually frank autobiography Les Confessions (1769) he wrote many things that shocked his readers (and which are unprintable here); but he also confessed “Walking has something in it which animates and heightens my ideas” (Book II).

Rousseau’s Enlightenment thinking inspired Kant. But his writing was more in the style of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). And sure enough, that existentialist Dane also liked walking around Sorte Dams Dossering, the artificial lake then at the edge of his native Copenhagen. In 1847 he wrote to a friend, “Do not lose your wanderlust. There is no problem in the world that cannot be cured by a walk” (Kierkegaard’s Papirer 47). Perhaps so; but it then seems a bit of a mystery that in the same year Kierkegaard also published the deeply pessimistic Sickness Unto Death. Surely he could just have taken a stroll to allievate said sickness?

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) had ideas that were rather different from those of Kierkegaard. The latter earnestly believed in God; the former declared the deity dead. But they also shared similarities: in his usually combative style, Nietzsche wrote, “Here, I’ve got you Nihilist. A sedentary life is really against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come from walking have any value” (Twilight of the Idols, 1889, p.34).

Nietzsche’s atheism might have been inspired by Charles Darwin (1809-1882), who also went for daily walks while he was writing On the Origins of Species (1859). He did not reflect on this in his work; but then again, he wasn’t a philosopher. Hannah Arendt (1906-1973) was. And she too liked to stroll – around the streets of her adopted home of New York City. It was after one of these promenades that she noted, “we walk in a world that is neither structured by authority nor kept cohesive by tradition” (The Crisis in Culture, 1954). So get your shoes on, go walking, and get thinking!

© Matt Qvortrup 2025

Matt Qvortrup is author of Great Minds on Small Things is published by Duckworth.

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The Art of Living

Marcus Aurelius’s Ten Commandments

Massimo Pigliucci studies the Stoic Emperor’s to-do list.

Commandments are generally lists of things someone requires someone else to do, usually with the implied threat that something bad will happen if they don’t. In the case of the Stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE), though, the list we find in section 18 of the 11th book of his Meditations is actually comprised of wise suggestions to himself. Still, they may help us as well:

“Firstly: Consider your relation to humankind and that we came into the world for the sake of one another” (trans. C.R. Haines). According to the Stoics, all human beings are brothers and sisters, members of the cosmopolis, the ‘universal city’ of humanity. Nature put us here to help each other; as is generally the case for highly social species.

“Secondly: Consider what sort of individuals others are at board and in bed and elsewhere. Above all how they are the self-made slaves of their principles, and how they pride themselves on the very acts in question.” One way to be charitable toward others is to remember that many sincerely follow misguided principles; for instance, the notion that owning more things and having more money makes one happier and better than others.

“Thirdly: That if they are acting rightly, there is no call for us to be angry. If not rightly, it is obviously against their will and through ignorance.” Like Plato, the Stoics thought that we do bad things out of a particular kind of ignorance better rendered as ‘unwisdom’. So instead of getting angry with people who err, let us try to teach them the right way.

“Fourthly: That you too do many a wrong thing yourself and are much as others are and if you do refrain from certain wrong-doings, yet you have a disposition inclined to such things.” It’s not like we don’t do, or at the very least are not tempted to do, bad things ourselves. So why not cut some slack to other people?

“Fifthly: That you have not even proved that they are doing wrong. Speaking generally a person must know many things before they can pronounce an adequate opinion on the acts of another.” A further incentive toward humility is the reminder that, often, we don’t know enough about what other people’s motives for action actually are, so that it would be both premature and presumptuous to judge.

“Sixthly: When you are angry or even out of patience, remember that human life is momentary, and in a little while we shall all have been laid out.” A standard Stoic technique when all else fails is to adopt the so-called ‘view from above’: nudge yourself to look at the problem sub specie aeternitatis – from the point of view of eternity – and things will more readily acquire their proper proportion.

“Seventhly: That in reality it is not what people do that vex us but the opinions we form of those acts.” Modern cognitive behavioral therapy has fully adopted this Stoic insight that there is a difference between events and our opinions of the events. We may not be able to change what people do, but we can certainly correct our interpretation of it. Such reframing is well known to have major therapeutic effects, especially calming down emotions like anger and anxiety.

“Eighthly: Consider how much more grievous are the consequences of our anger and vexation at such actions than are the acts themselves which arouse that anger and vexation.” Not infrequently the anger we feel in response to what someone has said or done has far more negative and lasting consequences than the actual damage brought about by what has been said or done, especially on our own psyches. So it’s self-defeating to insist in cultivating so-called ‘righteous’ anger.

“Ninthly: That kindness is irresistible, be it but sincere and no mock smile or a mask assumed.” Perhaps Marcus was a bit optimistic here, but it is true that tricky situations are helped out far more by a kind disposition and a smile than by the exercise of sarcasm and vitriol.

“And take if you will as a tenth gift from Apollo, the Leader of the Muses, this, that to expect the bad not to do wrong is worthy of a fool; for that is to wish for impossibilities. But to acquiesce in their wronging others, while expecting them to refrain from wronging you, is unfeeling and despotic.” We need to be realistic, and therefore prepared for the reality that people do bad things. However, as Marcus adds, that’s no excuse for not acting to reduce or redress injustice, whenever it is in our power to do so.

These reflections reveal Marcus Aurelius not as a stern moralist dispensing rigid rules, but as a thoughtful practitioner working through the daily challenges of human relationships with wisdom and compassion. What makes his ‘commandments’ so enduringly powerful is his Stoic recognition that our greatest struggles are often not with external circumstances themselves, but with our responses to them.

In an age of social media outrage, political polarization, and increasing social fragmentation, Marcus’s call to approach others with humility, understanding, and realistic expectations feels remarkably contemporary. His suggestions offer us a practical philosophy for navigating conflict and disappointment – not by retreating from the world or by suppressing our emotions, but by cultivating the kind of inner resilience that allows us to engage with others more skillfully. Perhaps most importantly, these reflections remind us that, at its best, philosophy is not merely an intellectual exercise but a lived practice that transforms how we move through the world, one encounter at a time.

© Prof. Massimo Pigliucci 2025

Massimo Pigliucci is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His books include How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books) and Beyond Stoicism: A Guide to the Good Life with Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans, and Other Ancient Philosophers (with Greg Lopez and Meredith Kunz, The Experiment). More by him at figsinwintertime.substack.com.

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Islamic Philosophers

On Tyranny

AmirAli Maleki looks at tyranny from an Islamic perspective.

Do Islamic philosophers allow tyranny, or do they advocate a free and enlightened society?

To explore this, one might turn to Al-Farabi (870-950 CE), widely regarded as the first truly Muslim philosopher. Al-Farabi argues that power should never impose its views through force. In his work Categories of Science (Iḥṣāʾ al-ʿUlūm), Al-Farabi emphasizes that virtue, which in his view can only be achieved through an ethical and well-ordered society, flourishes when all individuals can collaborate in shaping their collective destiny without coercion. Since politics, for Al-Farabi, in essence, is a matter of companionship and empathy. He asserts that a government must cultivate a spirit of obedience within its people by encouraging participation through voting and other ways of expressing their opinions. A good government, he argues, must serve as a forum for dialogue rather than an authoritarian force that regards its own ideology as absolute and silences opposition.

In On the Perfect State (Al-Madīnah al-Fāḍilah) he extends this argument to the realm of education, underscoring the importance of shaping future generations within a just system. To Al-Farabi, a society free from tyranny does not suppress the temperament or development of its children, because an ideal community should provide space for everyone to thrive. So respecting differing beliefs, regardless of one’s age or position, is fundamental to societal progress. The plurality of perspectives fosters intellectual growth and innovation. In this light, he urges older generations to grant younger minds the freedom to explore new and diverse ideas. How can the elderly dictate the future with rigid, perhaps outdated, beliefs? This principle aligns with the Quranic teaching, “There is no compulsion in religion” (Al-Baqarah, verse 256), which affirms that individuals have the right to live freely, provided they do no harm to others.

Later the Aristotelian philosopher Miskawayh Razi (932-1030 CE) engaged with similar ideas. Inspired by Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, he thought of the relationship between a ruler and his people as akin to that of a father and son. In his work The Refinement of Character (Tahdhib al-Akhlaq), Miskawayh argues that a virtuous ruler treats his subjects with kindness and friendship. Without such benevolence, the people may rebel, jeopardizing the stability of society. In an environment dominated by hostility and resentment between the ruler and the governed, neither virtue nor goodness can prosper. Only through dialogue and mutual understanding can a society cultivate morality, cooperation, and shared purpose. Miskawayh contends that governance should be participatory, likening it to a father engaging his child in his plans.

For Abu al-Hasan al-Amiri (913-992 CE), leadership requires both integrity and wisdom. A ruler must not be ignorant or callous, as sound conclusions arise not from a singular perspective but from the synthesis of diverse viewpoints. For al-Amiri, governance resembles the relationship between neighbors. If one mistreats a neighbor, peaceful coexistence becomes impossible; conversely, if they cultivate a bond of trust and companionship, they will look after one another in times of need. If I have a good relationship with my neighbor, he may water my plants while I am away!

In his work The Announcement (Al-Iʿlām), al-Amiri argues that the Quran underscores an essential principle for rulers. If rulers seek to govern a just and prosperous nation, they must refrain from oppression, coercion, and disregard for the voices of their people (Al-Ma’un, verse 7). A nation is not the private domain of its rulers, it’s the collective property of all citizens and must be equitably shared. Governance should provide individuals with the freedom and security necessary to pursue their endeavors without fear or constraint. Rulers who fail to uphold these values and instead impose their ideologies and demand conformity, are nothing more than ‘tamed quadrupeds’ – signifying their failure to recognize the dignity and autonomy of those they govern.

Although Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980-1037 CE) does not appear to have a pronounced interest in politics, in The Book of Healing (Al-Shifāʾ) he asserts that if people recognize their ruler as a tyrant who begins to oppress his subjects, they have the right to rise against him, protest, and ultimately remove him from power. He emphasizes that the selection of a ruler is a natural right of the people (a principle strongly underscored by the Prophet of Islam). Ibn Sina suggests that from beginning to end, the central concern should be the choice of a just and capable legislator – not only because governance shapes destinies, but also because future generations will inevitably be affected by the decisions of those in power. A despotic ruler does not merely harm the present; his influence extends to the future, jeopardizing the well-being of generations to come. He thus urges society to remain vigilant, acknowledging its collective responsibility in resisting tyranny.

Modern Islamic philosophers have not remained passive against tyranny either; rather, they have actively engaged with the issue in profound and multifaceted ways. Among them, Javad Tabatabaei (1945-2023), an Iranian political philosopher, argues in works such as Decline of Political Thought in Iran (Zawāl-e Andīshe-ye Sīyāsī dar Īrān) that one of the fundamental challenges facing Muslim societies – particularly Iran – is their failure to approach politics through philosophical reasoning. According to him, this deficiency inevitably traps societies in cycles of authoritarian rule. Tabatabaei contends that governance in countries like Iran has historically been pragmatic and power-driven rather than philosophical and critically engaged. Such governments prioritize the preservation of their authority over intellectual development – standing in stark contrast to Europe’s path to modernization. Tabatabaei maintains that a critique of governance, which is an essential function of philosophy, should remain independent of any ideological framework, and must examine society in its entirety. This reasoning perhaps explains his rejection of how Islamic states govern, which he critiques for being ideologically constrained, committed solely to its religious doctrines. He argues that such governments inherently resist progress and development, fearing that academic progress may threaten the foundations of their rule.

Perhaps we should ask ourselves a more urgent question, what would we do if we lived under a totalitarian regime? Would we confine ourselves to reflecting on such matters, or would we strive to put our philosophical principles into action, and rise up against the oppression?

© AmirAli Maleki 2025

AmirAli Maleki is a philosophy researcher and the Editor of PraxisPublication.com. He works in the fields of political philosophy, Islamic philosophy, and hermeneutics.

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Reviews

- The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Friendship

- Civic Solitude by Robert Talisse

- Wish You Were Here

Books

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Friendship

Elaine Coburn dips into different understandings of friendship.

What are the duties of friendship? Can romantic partners be friends? Is it useful to think about political life as animated by civic friendship? How should we understand friendships on social media? Is the love we feel for our friends explicable? Or is each friendship so unique that it is impossible to communicate our love of our friends to others? In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Friendship (2022), Diane Jeske brings together thirty-one short chapters that take up these questions, and more, emphasizing that friendship is worth investigating because it is “one of life’s greatest joys” (p.8). Among many other things, contributors consider the role of self-interest in friendships, whether or not inequalities make friendships impossible, and morally justifiable reasons for ending friendships.

Friendship by Sylvie Reed 2025

Understanding Friendship

We begin at the beginning of the philosophical discussion of friendship, learning about the meanings of male friendships in Plato’s Symposium, including eroticized male friendships. For Plato, friendship among men is supposed to beget “wisdom and the rest of virtue” (p.28) – in contrast with heterosexual relationships, which (merely) beget children. In the Platonic ideal, as CDC Reeves observes, the older male lover must help the younger beloved to become more virtuous, persuading him to philosophical truths.

Then we hear about Aristotle’s three kinds of friendship, rooted in utility (the friend is useful to us), pleasure (the friend brings us enjoyment), and, in the highest form, virtue (the friend is valued by us because they are of good character). In Aristotle’s view, delight in the good character of a friend, with no other motive, is the most satisfying and profound kind of friendship. Such a relationship mutually educates the friends to goodness, so that this kind of friendship, as Kristján Kristjánsson summarizes, is “knowledge-enhancing, virtue-enhancing, and life-enhancing” (p.107). Even if we had all other goods, Aristotle observes, we would still value friendship as salient to the good life: the encounter with ‘another self’ (p.47) makes living worthwhile.

With the Stoics, as Tamer Nawar explains in his chapter, friendship is an extension of self-fulfillment – something like enlightened self-interest (p.49). This fits with the Stoics’ emphasis on self-sufficiency. Nawar suggests that in some Stoical accounts, one type of friendship might be understood as wholly impersonal – a community of the wise and virtuous, whether they know each other or not. The Stoics also warned that friendship with those who are not wise could be dangerous, encouraging people to unwise behaviours.

For Augustine, friendship is not self-evidently about virtue, as Nawar explains. In friendship, human beings may misdirect their need for the love of God to the love of another human being – their friend – so substituting mortal love for the love of the immortal divine. In Augustine’s view, there is a deep sadness in such misplaced affection: “To love mortal things in the manner in which one should love an immortal God… is to be pierced by sorrows.” So Christians ought to love God and their neighbours, but be wary of misplacing the need for divine love onto merely mortal friendships.

In Immanuel Kant’s understanding, friendship, at its best, is characterized by open-heartedness, and includes a balance of love and respect. But such friendship is risky, since open-heartedness leads to vulnerability that may be exploited – a permanent temptation among human beings, whose goodness is all too frail. Still, Karen Stohr suggests in her chapter, if “In Kant’s eyes, friendships can be risky undertakings… the moral value of friendship makes the risks well worth taking” (p.58). For Kant, at its most realized, friendship is a model, not just for intimate, vulnerable personal relations, but for a universal moral community.

In Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings, as Ruth Abbey explains, unequal relationships lead to flattery and servility, this being a perverted form of friendship. True friendship demands rough equality. In marriage especially, equality between men and women is required if fleeting passion is to give way to “the calm wisdom of friendship” (p.74). In the desirable political life, too, equality is a condition for civic friendship. Moreover, merely human friendships among equals under God, whatever their earthly rewards, are inevitably inferior to the relationship with the Creator.

The questions raised by these and other ancient and Enlightenment philosophers haunt the remaining chapters, which ask about the relationship between friendship and virtue, friendship and knowledge, friendship and politics, friendship and vulnerability, friendship and marriage, and friendship and God.

Varieties of Friendship

There are some surprising views of friendship here, at least to my Western eyes. In his chapter, Andrew Lambert invites us to consider Confucian friendship. The idea of friendship based on mutual liking, so prevalent in Western cultures, is not absent from Confucian ideals. There are allusions to friends being those who “appreciate the same tune” (p.12) – that is, the coming together of individuals with deeply felt affinities. Friendship is linked to mentorship, too, where learning and improving the self is an important aspect of good or virtuous friendship. Less familiar, though, Confucians understand ‘friendship’ as describing the delight that emerges from a socially harmonious occasion: friendship is produced in and through shared events, like the creation of music at a concert. Here, ‘friendship’ describes the moment of joy, the unique bond, between musicians and audience members. In this sense, friendship is a broadly shared fellow-feeling. Considerable time and effort may be required, Lambert observes, to cultivate situations where these feelings are likely to arise in an open-ended invitation to shared encounter.

There are many other varieties of friendship. Mary Healy considers friendship among children, including the common practice of having an imaginary friend. Adults, too, may have fantasy friends, she notes; whether characters on television or merely anthropomorphizing an object, such as a car, by giving it a name and personality. This raises questions about whether such relationships are truly friendships, since, as Healy notes, imaginary and fantasy friendships are not reciprocal. Such ‘friends’ may fall short of most philosophical definitions of friendship, then. At the same time, Healy suggests, imaginary relationships may function, usefully, as models of the type of friendship we desire.

In his chapter, Kristján Kristjánsson asks whether or not parents and children can (or should) be friends. Following Aristotelian criteria, he argues that, yes, they can develop the best kind of friendship: “deep, close and intimate” (p.112). Like the most virtuous form of friendships, parents and children know each other intimately, and, ideally, learn good character from each other. And if parents and children may be friends, they may, in addition, share a love that is beyond and distinct from friendship. Kristjánsson further argues that friendships – both parental and otherwise – are enduring: it is only justifiable to break off such friendships in cases of irredeemable vice in the formerly virtuous friend.

Among other investigations into kinds of friendship, Natasha McKeever investigates ‘friends with benefits’. This euphemism, she observes, hides what’s at stake: an ongoing sexual relationship in which the partners agree that they are not romantically attached. Sex may enhance “trust and intimacy” (p.351), McKeever suggests – traits which characterize important friendships. At the same time, there are risks in such friendships, since in comparison with a romantic relationship, for instance, the duties of friends with benefits may be undefined, leading to uncertainty that may harm the friendship as a reciprocal relationship of trust.

Alexis Elder asks whether relationships on social media are friendships. Are “trusting and vulnerable relationships” (p.362) possible online? Can emojis, for instance, take the place of the in-person expressions of concern and attentiveness that characterize good friendships? Social media sites, Elder argues, may best be complementary to in-person friendships, rather than replacing them: The public sharing of information on Facebook may take place alongside more intimate, private conversations offline. Finally, the quality of online friendships may be less about their mediated character, and more about the virtuous norms that prevail, or fail to prevail, in online interactions.

The Dangers & Joys of Friendships

Moral hazards haunt friendship. Friendships rightly demand loyalty, as John Kleinig argues, but such loyalties may lead to wrong actions. A friend might conceal an affair, agreeing to keep quiet about it – but should a friend remain silent about more serious wrong-doing, like their friend’s implication in violence or murder? Loyalty is virtuous, but there are competing virtues. If a close friend is cruel, writes Kleinig, and friendly efforts to temper the cruelty do not work, then it is right to end the friendship so as not to encourage further cruelty. As Kant reminds us, the particular loyalties of friendship should not outweigh universal moral commitments.

In his chapter, George Tsai is concerned with the danger of exploitation in friendship. Intimate friendships – the most worthwhile kind of friendship – entail significant vulnerability. This may lead to exploitation, as he explains, “Our friends and loved ones may be better placed to exploit our affections, insecurities, fears, generosity, gullibility, vanity, loneliness, pride, and so on, in order to get us to do things that promote their own interests, aims, and goals, in ways that are objectionable and unfair” (p.326). The deeper the friendship, the greater the moral risk and the responsibility not to exploit the vulnerability and intimacy of the relationships. Egalitarian friendships, Tsai argues, ought to be self-consciously created, each friend striving for mutual respect for the interests of the other.

In friendship we may become so swept up that we risk our well-being. To sustain an unequal friendship we may give too much, as Troy Jollimore argues, risking “self-neglect, self-sacrifice and self-harm” (p.294). For the sake of friendship, other relationships may be wrongly neglected and duties to others perverted. “The line that separates what we must do (as a friend) from what we may not do (as a moral agent)”, Jollimore warns, “is neither obvious nor, perhaps, entirely stable” (p.285). The duties we owe to an intimate friend are in tension with duties we owe more impersonally to humanity as a whole.

Moral hazards are heightened precisely because friendships give us so much pleasure and joy. Indeed, as Elder writes, at their best: “Friendships become sites of both satisfaction and growth, of self-understanding and intimate support, safe harbors that sustain us during the storms of life. The satisfactions of friendship are both intrinsically fulfilling and instrumentally valuable. Our serious friendships are so deeply woven into our lives that they become constituents of our flourishing and reflective of who we are and wish to be” (p.318). Friendships shape our changing selves over our lifetimes in deeply meaningful ways, both for better and for worse. But at their moral best, as Aristotle said, friendships help us to become better together, learning to value and mutually sustain the good character of the other. At their worst, they lead us to neglect other essential virtues.

Friendship & the Good Life

The collection explores many other dimensions of friendship. Among other contributions, Jonathan Segelow, for instance, argues that there are rough analogies between friendship and citizenship since, for instance, both demand mutual recognition of the other. This gives rise to the concept of ‘civic friends’ – a political relationship wherein citizens show concern for each other.

For her part, Cheryl Abbate moves away from human relationships altogether, to consider whether or not we may befriend animals, and if they may befriend us. She suggests that our relationship with cats may have all the qualities of friendship, demonstrating “respect for difference, equality, mutuality, and choice” (p.148).

In her contribution, Katarina Perović asks if friendship can be sustained through significant personal transformation. She invokes the fantastical to make her argument vivid, borrowing from L.A. Paul to imagine two long-term friends, one deciding to become a vampire while the other prefers to remain human. Perović’s understated conclusion is that this personal transformation is likely to put ‘a great deal of strain’ on their friendship. We may live and grow together through friendship, or, like this vampire and her friend, we may transform and grow apart.

It is an accomplishment of this wide-ranging handbook that we learn about the complexities of friendship – its political and personal, ethical and morally hazardous, deeply fulfilling and potentially damaging, possibilities – without ever losing sight of friendship’s multifold joys. Perhaps in the end we’re all Aristotelians: ready to take the risks and run the dangers of friendship because, at its best, friendship makes possible the good life, and makes the good life worth living.

© Elaine Coburn 2025

Elaine Coburn is Associate Professor of International Studies at York University in Canada.

• The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Friendship, edited by Diane Jeske, Routledge 2023, 390 pages, £40 pb.

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Books

Civic Solitude by Robert Talisse

John B. Min ponders temporarily stepping away from people for the sake of political understanding.

If you search for images of ‘solitude’, you will see a person gazing serenely into the ocean or at mountains. When you search for pictures of ‘civic’ (you will have to put ‘civic in democracy’, otherwise you’ll get Honda Civics), you will see people’s fists, bull horns, voting booths, or angry protests. These two disparate images are familiar to us – indeed, this is how we often think about both civic life and solitude. But does it make sense to advocate for civic solitude?

As Robert Talisse, Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, acknowledges, this question may seem odd, because democracy is supposed to be about action – voting, electioneering, communicating, protesting, resisting, and mobilizing – not so much about solitude. Political self-isolation is especially nonsensical given the political unrest we’re experiencing these days. It is time to act, not philosophize! However, Talisse’s new book Civic Solitude (2025) makes a cogent case that civic solitude is required for responsible democratic citizenship.

This book is the third installation in a trilogy – the other two being Overdoing Democracy and Sustaining Democracy. In the first, Talisse makes the case that we sometimes overdo democracy by saturating it, while in the second book he makes the case that we ought to sustain democracy by maintaining civil interactions between citizens. This present book is a theory of what that interaction is and how to do it.

Philosophically, Civic Solitude is situated in normative democratic theory – ideas about what democracy ought to be – to which Talisse has made significant contributions for the past two decades. There’s a cottage industry of books on the dysfunction of democracy, where they argue under headings such as ‘Democratic Backsliding’, ‘Democratic Retreat’, ‘Democratic Pathology’, ‘Democratic Crisis’, and ‘the Death of Democracy’. Concerns about money in politics, the fascistic and authoritarian tendencies of leaders and institutions, oligarchical influence and power, and intractable polarization dynamics, point to the dysfunctions of democracy. Civic Solitude, meanwhile, offers normative ideals (democracy is a society of equals where citizens both choose and are responsible for their actions), diagnosis for our malaise (which is polarization), prescriptions for managing our malaise (that is, managing polarization), and aspirational ideals (creating spaces to make civic solitude possible). And although the book is philosophical, there are practical elements in it, too.

Make Democracy Great Again

The basic argument of Civic Solitude can be summarized in two parts. The negative argument is that the ills of democracy are inherent to democracy.

Polarization is the main problem considered here. This is the psychological and social tendency to go to an extreme position – causing strife, hatred, and seeing each other as enemies rather than equals. Polarization cannot be eradicated because it is endemic to democracy, Talisse maintains, but it can be managed. The ‘curative fallacy’ occurs “when one prescribes the preventative as curative” (p.13). For example, not eating sugar will prevent diabetes, but not eating sugar is not the cure for diabetes. Similarly, eradicating polarization is a prevention but not a cure for polarization.

The positive argument of the book concerns the necessity of civic solitude. According to this argument, democracy is rule by political equals. As equals, we are not only entitled to have an equal say in laws and policies, we are also equally responsible to one another. This requires us to participate and vote, listen to others, take on their perspectives, and be civil. More than that, citizens should take time off for reflection so that they can become better citizens.

The most interesting and important contribution to the discussion is the final chapter, ‘The Need For Solitude’. What is civic solitude? Civic solitude is taking a break from politics to develop one’s reflective capacity.

First, civic solitude has a time component. Talisse refers to civic solitude not as a permanent retreat from politics, but rather as an occasional retreat from politics as usual. In the Preface he alludes to American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau sitting alone by Walden Pond to ponder what he’s not advocating. It also has a space component. This has to do with the physical space to engage in reflections on politics – such as public libraries, parks, and museums – which then become minor laboratories of democracy. But what’s novel in Talisse’s proposal is conceptual or philosophical distance. He says, make some space between yourself and your own ideas. If you’re a conservative, you need to distance yourself from conservative ideals to entertain and learn from liberal ideas, and vice versa. Additionally, you need to distance your own concepts to take the perspective of those you think are crazy.

Moreover, Talisse argues that atopia (Greek for ‘displacement’) is needed. He illustrates this idea by pointing out that visiting strange times and places has benefits. Talisse makes the point that instead of interpreting writers, philosophers, and musicians to fit our own experience, there is value to visiting their time and place – their experience. For instance, in Talisse’s political philosophy class, students sometimes ask whether Aristotle was a conservative. When discussions go well, students realize that the very conceptual scheme of ‘conservative or liberal’ would not apply to Aristotle, as he lived in a time where the distinction did not apply. But the bigger benefit of the discussion is not to avoid miscategorizing Aristotle, but to displace the students from 2025 Tennessee to fifth century BC Athens.

Between Ideal & Practice

The book is tightly argued, clearly and accessibly written, and Talisse touches on some critical insights about the meaning of political equality, polarization dynamics, the value of the humanities, and conceptual distance. In a short review such as this, I cannot do justice to all the interesting ideas. However, I’d like to highlight some implications of the book that I recommend for further reflection in civic solitude.

Talisse artfully weaves together diagnoses, prescriptions, aspirational ideals, and practical suggestions, and he addresses an important philosophical issue that’s perennially present: the challenge of navigating between the Scylla of the ideal and the Charybdis of the practical. Talisse proposes a democratic theory that is not only aspirational but also realistic for people’of crooked timber’ like you and me. In this way, he avoids the either/or tendencies of contemporary political philosophy by combining both the ideal and the practical.

Given this goal, I would like to ask what, how, and why civic solitude? Talisse rightly argues that citizens need to develop distance in solitude – temporal, spatial, and conceptual – to manage polarization by creating spaces where they can be co-equals. In this context, Talisse aptly develops the concept of displacement, from the contemporary world with its categories and concepts, to somewhere foreign, like Aristotle’s polity or Confucius’s court. But besides atopia, I wonder what else needs to be developed?

One suggestion is moral virtues. Another is wisdom. Those are predictable. How about power? Power at its most fundamental means the capacity to achieve outcomes. People also talk about having power over someone to get them to do things they’d not otherwise do without the threat of force. Or people talk about the power to resist and counteract power imbalances or oppressive powers. All these are useful ways of talking about power. Thus, I would have wished to hear more about the power to manage polarization by creating spaces (in civic solitude) so that people can truly be political equals in a democracy.

How should democratic citizens develop atopia or displacement? Talisse suggests that when we’re in civic solitude we ought to develop the capacity for conceptual distance, which both requires and enables the development of perspective-taking and imagination.

To his credit, Talisse mentions humanities education. As a philosophy professor, I wholeheartedly agree that liberal arts education, which includes the humanities, is valuable not only in developing critical thinking skills but also in developing capabilities for better citizenship. However, it seems that humanities education (or liberal arts, or democratic education), although vital to democracy, is under great duress. So, the same political dynamics that give rise to polarization also undermine the education that affords the opportunity to develop depolarization.

The question of why civic solitude matters remains elusive. Talisse argues that civic solitude is a means to achieve responsible democratic citizenship rather than an end in itself. He does not advocate for a perfectionist theory of politics, which would mean that politics ought to aim at higher moral goods (for example, Aristotle’s perfectionism states that politics is the highest good for human beings). However, this brings us to a critical question: What is the goal of civic solitude and responsible citizenship? Considering the main arguments of the book, I believe the answer is ‘political equality’ – sharing and determining democratic life together, and being responsible for it. Political equality can be instrumentally valuable in attaining some goods, such as freedom. Or political equality can be intrinsically valuable, in and of itself. Thus, civic solitude matters to achieve political equality. Stated this way, Talisse's suggestion is at once radical and ultimately practical.

© Dr John B. Min 2025

John B. Min is Philosophy Professor at the Department of Social Sciences, the College of Southern Nevada.

• Civic Solitude: Why Democracy Needs Distance, Robert B. Talisse, OUP USA, 2025, 208 pages, £22.99 hb.

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Music

Wish You Were Here

Ian Rizzo listens out for a philosophy of absence.

The year 2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Wish You Were Here by the rock band Pink Floyd. With its emphasis on existentialist themes, this classic album can be conceptually regarded as a follow-up to The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). But where The Dark Side of the Moon reflected the struggles, pressures and frustrations of modern life (including madness), Wish You Were Here dwells on the concept of absence – absence from one’s own being, and absence from others.

The idea that we can be physically present while mentally elsewhere is an eternal facet of the human condition, and has arguably become more pertinent since the digital revolution early this century. But it was also explored by existentialists in the second half of last century. Indeed, existentialism is often best expressed not in philosophical texts but in art. Jean-Paul Sartre himself used novels and plays to explore the human condition and lived experience. In his novel Nausea (1938), for instance, Sartre’s protagonist, Roquentin, observes the absurdity of existence and becomes overwhelmed with an existential crisis, finding life meaningless, purposeless, and shapeless. To some extent, these were also the themes Pink Floyd were tackling musically, which to my mind makes them musical existentialists.

Background

Pink Floyd was formed in the mid-sixties by Syd Barrett (lead guitar and vocals), Roger Waters (bass), Nick Mason (drums), and Richard Wright (keyboards). To understand the philosophy of Wish You Were Here, one must grasp the crisis brought about by Barrett’s decline.

Barrett, co-founder and leader of the band, was credited for eight out of eleven songs on their first album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (1967), which blended whimsical nursery rhyme imagery with psychedelia. Tragically, Barrett was unable to cope with the pressures of fame and the expectations that followed that first album. His increasing recourse to LSD worsened his mental condition, making him increasingly eccentric and uncommunicative with his bandmates. David Gilmour was brought in to provide support as lead guitarist, making the Floyd a five-piece. But sometime shortly after, around April 1968, it was officially announced that Barrett had resigned from the band.

By 1974-1975, during the making of Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd faced another crisis. Following the international success of The Dark Side of the Moon and the pressure to repeat that success, the band’s members found themselves in a state of creative paralysis. Added to this was a growing communication problem, the result of artistic differences, between Waters on one hand and Gilmour and Wright on the other. Relentless touring to promote Dark Side had exhausted the band, and they faced criticism from the media for relying too much on spectacle and previous material. In his history of the band, Inside Out (2004), Mason recalls: “There was a point where we might easily have broken up… we were a bit nervous about carrying on.”

By then, the band had produced only three songs after The Dark Side of the Moon: ‘Shine On’, a song dedicated to Barrett; ‘Raving and Drooling’; and ‘Gotta Be Crazy’. Waters proposed and eventually got his way that ‘Shine On’ (later renamed as ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’) which consisted of nine parts, be divided into two to open and close the album. In between, three new songs would relate to the theme of absence. These three songs were ‘Welcome to the Machine’, ‘Have a Cigar’ and ‘Wish You Were Here’.

Waters concurred with Mason’s view regarding the state of the band during the Wish You Were Here recordings, saying, “Our bodies were there, but our minds and feelings were somewhere else… The album could equally have been called Wish We Were Here.”

For Waters, the fragmented state of the band symbolically represented the mental state of Barrett. Upon hearing the mournful sound produced by the four-note guitar of Gilmour’s intro, Waters immediately linked the lyrics of ‘Shine On’ to Barrett’s breakdown, expressing both his admiration for Barrett’s genius and his lament for a talent that was no longer expressed:

“Remember when you were young,

you shone like the sun

Shine on you crazy diamond

Now there’s a look in your eyes,

like black holes in the sky

Shine on you crazy diamond.”

The song also offers a profound reflection on how our personal identities are so transitory and fragile, particularly when absence overtakes presence in our lives.

In an ironic twist of fate, Barrett turned up at Abbey Road Studios on June 5, 1975, while Pink Floyd were finalising the album dedicated to him. The sight of an overweight, bald, and unrecognisable Barrett was a shock to his old friends. Waters was reportedly in tears upon seeing him. Mason recognised Barrett only after being told it was him by Gilmour, and wrote that he was “horrified by this physical change.” After the remaining members played ‘Shine On’ to Barrett, he quietly slipped out of their lives once more, never to be seen by them again.

by Venantius J Pinto

Songs

Waters wrote all the lyrics for the album. The long opening and closing track, ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ has been claimed by the band to be about Syd Barrett and the cost of genius, although the lyrics in the closing part of ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Part 2)’ might be said to sound somewhat encouraging in their farewell address to Barrett.

‘Welcome to the Machine’, the second track of the album, tells a story of a young artist who disappoints his parents to pursue his dream of fame and fortune, only to find his artistic voice controlled by the mechanical, impersonal forces of the music industry. This song, which opens with throbbing echoes of machines, seems to embody Marx’s critique of capitalism.

The third track, ‘Have a Cigar’, sung by guest vocalist Roy Harper, continues Waters’ cynicism toward the music industry. With his usual sarcastic wit, Waters portrays a record executive flattering the band to keep them clinging to their dreams of fame by producing more records. At the same time, the executive’s insincerity is laid bare when he asks, “Oh by the way, which one’s Pink?” The sarcasm of this pun in the record executive’s glib encouragement can also be observed in the lines about teamwork as the path to success – which blithely ignore the relationship problems in group dynamics.

Storm Thorgerson’s imagery of the album cover, showing a robot and a statue in a handshake, reinforces the artificiality of the music industry while also tying into the theme of the absence of human feeling. This is amplified by images inside the album cover: two businessmen shaking hands, one of the men literally on fire; a sharply-dressed record executive with missing wrists and ankles, misplaced in a desert; a veil floating in a windswept grove; and a diver plunging into a lake without making a splash.

The title track of Wish You Were Here expresses in its very title a longing for connection in a world so often dominated by absence. Performed entirely on acoustic guitars, it remains a popular song across generations for conveying a sense of intimacy, despite being a sad reflection on absence. The song remains deeply personal for Waters, who describes it as a dialogue between his generous and his selfish self.

The song in its first two verses also touches on one of the oldest and most enduring problems in philosophy by questioning the human ability to distinguish truth from illusion, appearance from reality, asking, for example: “Can you tell… a smile from a veil?” This questioning has preoccupied philosophers for millennia. Plato famously explored it in the Allegory of the Cave, illustrating how humans can mistake shadows for reality. Centuries later, Descartes grappled with similar questions, hypothesizing that a “malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning” might be trying to deceive him about everything. Such questions allude also to the divide in epistemology between rationalists, who claim that the senses are deceptive and that reality can only be understood through reason, and empiricists, who claim that the mind begins as a blank slate grasping understanding only through sense experience. With lines like “So you think you can tell?”, Waters perhaps leans more towards the view that reality is shaped by perception, reflecting the postmodern distrust of universal grand narratives that seem to explain everything.

Aftermath

Similarly to The Dark Side of the Moon, the album Wish You Were Here may appear to be a gloomy, pessimistic reflection of Waters’ view of the human condition. Nevertheless, it also makes one conscious of the fragility of identity, the transitory nature of human relationships, and the ever-present threat of absence. At the same time, the album seems to be urging us to value presence, cherish friendship, seek genuine connections, and resist the alienating forces of society.

The classic Pink Floyd lineup held together from The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) until the album The Wall (1979), but Wish You Were Here marked the beginning of the end. At this point, the harmony that had defined the band during Dark Side was lost forever. Waters became increasingly dominant, eventually leading to Wright’s withdrawal from the band. This left Gilmour alone to struggle against Waters’ imposing direction. It was becoming clear that the band could not continue under such a divisive relationship. Eventually, it was Waters who gave up and left the band, convinced that Pink Floyd could not survive without him. Yet it did regroup without him under the leadership of Gilmour and with the re-engagement of Wright.

Barrett died in 2006, followed by Wright two years later. Pink Floyd, now reduced to two core members, Gilmour and Mason, released their final album The Endless River in 2014. This was composed mostly of instrumental material left over from the earlier Division Bell sessions, but includes the vocal track ‘Louder than Words’, written by Gilmour and his wife Polly Samson. This song was inspired by Samson’s observation of how communication was so minimal in the recording sessions, and yet their music endured beyond all the conflict.

This circles back to existentialism: Pink Floyd, like all existentialist philosophers, might at first appear pessimistic and depressing, but their deep awareness of life’s struggles and the complexities of human relationships only sharpens the appreciation of human resilience in the face of such adversity. This is why, fifty years on, the album Wish You Were Here remains as haunting and relevant to our lives as ever.

© Ian Rizzo 2025

Ian Rizzo is a finance and administrative manager who passionately pursues the study of philosophy in his free time. He currently leads the Philosophy Sharing Foundation in Malta.

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Fiction

- “I’m Thinking”

- Bilbo Theorizes About Wellbeing

Poetry

“I’m Thinking”

by Dylan Skurka

I’m sitting somewhere

shaded from danger.

My head is light,

my heart beats steady,

my back is upright,

nestling into feathery

charcoaled white.

My arboreal saviour.

I’m sitting somewhere.

There are no problems to solve,

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I’m not thinking

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I’m just thinking to think.

To open doors slammed shut,

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No more worries of scarcity,

because even when emptied,

I am still enough.

I’m thinking til there’s nothing

but a blank thought bubble

hovering above.

I’m thinking to clear the way,

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© Dylan Skurka 2025

Dylan is a Toronto-based educator, writer, and thinker.

Fiction

Bilbo Theorizes About Wellbeing

Eric Comerford overhears Bilbo and Gandalf discussing happiness.

After all their adventures, having now sailed to the Undying Lands, Gandalf and Bilbo sit on Bilbo’s front porch after dinner, partaking of tea and the occasional puff of pipe-weed.

Bilbo: I was happy, Gandalf – or so I thought – before, by your traps, devices, and designs, you lured me into the quest to claim the Lonely Mountain. I mean, I had everything a hobbit could have or desire, and by all estimates of those esteemed and respectable in our county – whether with a little wisdom or not – I was as good-fortuned and well-grounded as a hobbit could hope to be or ask for. And indeed, I asked for nothing more.

Gandalf: You needed a push, my dear friend, to become more than what you were, but which was always inside you.

Bilbo: Yes, we hobbits don’t tend to think of ourselves as fitting for fables and legends. But our adventure was full of fearful things, gloomy things…. sad things. And did it make me happy? Well, I dare say there’s something more important than ‘happiness’, which is happiness, though I know that’s a strange way of putting it. What I mean is, you taught me that the comfortable hobbit life was not all there was. It was only when I left my home – nearly losing it altogether, along with all my possessions, to the blasted Sackville-Bagginses, I should add – and forgot myself, fled from myself, my home, my ‘happiness’ – let go of myself, and gave myself over to the company – that I began to be filled with something fresh. By emptying myself of my self and giving myself over to the quest, I was able to be filled with new things far more precious than what I had before, and which that life could not give me.

Gandalf: I suppose a pertinent question is, what was this higher calling, which was greater than happiness?

Bilbo: We were all fragile creatures amidst so much adversity and peril – but we rode on eagles’ wings, which I shall never forget! For my part, I learned to love a people with whom I never previously conversed, and their thirst to reclaim their kingdom became a cause dear to me too. Strange to think it, when the pain in their hearts turned into pain in my own – I mean, when I suffered with their suffering and loss – then I was able to find the deepest of friendships, which brought me joy. I also learned of things of the world beyond the borders of the Shire, and became, maybe not the stuff of brave warriors and knights, but of their stock. Yes, that I became; that and more. But none of those experiences were particularly pleasant, and I couldn’t tell you if the pleasant outweighed the unpleasant during the adventure, or in my life as a whole. As Samwise once wisely said when speaking of tales that really mattered –the ones that stay in the mind, “Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way… I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t… We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you,” he said. He went on to say that such tales go “past the happiness and into grief and beyond it” [The Two Towers]. So the pleasant mixes with the unpleasant, joy is pierced with sorrow, and a tale that really matters can be one without a happy ending.

Gandalf: I would not believe you if you told me now that you regret your adventure.

Hobbit © Khaerr 2013 Public Domain

Bilbo: What I could tell you is that during all the moments of the adventure I was not concerned at all with my belongings, my garden, my house, my heirlooms, but was entirely immersed in and devoted to nothing other than seeing the danger through! – and in giving myself wholly over to each new challenge for my friends. I was able to touch life and find a happiness I never before knew – whereas before, I was shut off from the world in a happiness that only seemed so. How busy I was before the adventure, but I didn’t do anything: my whole life was busy, but busy for nothing! I now feel that my life had not yet acquired a single-minded purpose that would root it. The adventure was needed for me to judge that my life went well overall. When looking back, I suppose I would say I had a favorable attitude toward my life as a whole, but I do not think that is what made me happy or why I was happy. What I mean is that I was content with my life because I did well with it, or at least not so bad as I could have done, all things considered. Or rather, my life went well because I did well.

Gandalf: Let us consider what made your life go well.

Bilbo: Well, I can recall the adventure not being consistent with my desires in the first place, even after I was informed of its reasons. I remember I first desired not to go on it; then I desired not for the adventure, but for something I know not what, and I both desired and did not desire for something more. What I mean is that we don’t know what we desire half the time, or what will make us happy in our desires more than half of the time, even if we are informed of what is and what isn’t, because we often don’t know what is good for us. If my life finally turned out well, it was thanks to something outside of me – I mean, knowing that I was part of a great story of the victory of light over darkness, good over evil, of life over death. So perhaps being truly well off, and therefore truly happy, means to be active in that struggle.

Gandalf: So would you say your life went well because you had a greater balance of pleasure over pain, or because you satisfied your heart’s true desires?

Bilbo: There were moments of pleasantness and relief, and there were times when everything was new and different and I was excited and inquisitive; but then, many times in our adventure we got lost; and there was the time we were almost turned into troll mush – which thanks to your cunning we were spared from. And then I acquired an insatiable, sickly lust for that thing I found in the dark, which took me out of myself and into a pit of desire, unnatural and deadly. That heavy bondage brought me much sorrow, Gandalf, and grief – and hideous, unjoyful delight, and hateful, painful joy. And now, with all these states of mind, you want to know if I had more satisfactory states of mind than not, or if that’s what I tried to pursue in my actions more than not? You’re confusing me, Gandalf!

Gandalf takes a long, silent puff on his pipe, and blows out a smokey question mark.

Bilbo: Anyway, even if I did have a balance of pleasure over pain, I would not say that is what made me well off in the end. That was because I was part of a story – seeking ultimately not for gold, possessions, honor, right, land, but for the good against the darkness, against that snake under the mountain. But these ends were not for pleasure. Remember, for example, that time when I could not stand the jealous greed that had overcome dear Thorin, so I took it upon myself to enter into the squabbling mess to make peace among dwarfs, elves, and men. It could have got me killed, but I dare say was the right thing to do, and only I knew it enough to think it truly. And I think, in these types of happenings, I found my soul’s contentment, as if my hobbit happiness were one thing and not necessarily related to my soul’s contentment, which is something else and maybe altogether different.

Gandalf: I see. And what would you say now to someone looking for what is good for them – their own wellbeing?

Bilbo: We look in all the wrong cubby holes, Gandalf! In the nasty holes of desire without end, in the accumulation of things, experiences, homes, properties, trinkets: and if we do not know what is right, then our attempts to secure the pleasant will lead only to pain.

Gandalf: And what about your guilt?

Bilbo: My guilt?

Gandalf: With the ring. Your jealous love for it, your concealment of it, how it damaged you and your relationships?

Bilbo: Ah, well, I have had much sorrow over what it did to me. Under its influence I became what a hobbit, or anyone else, should not be. I did not know what was happening to me at the time, but all the same I did know. The depths of how we give into what is awry and then get covered in shadow, these are dark things to consider. I also felt responsible for burdening Frodo with it, even though I was not its maker. It’s usually those closest to us who we hurt the most. But you’re right. We all face the problem of guilt – of having done or been involved in doing wrong; and no one can be considered happy unless they face their wrongs and seek forgiveness. Neither defining being well-off in terms of hunting after pleasure over pain, nor the dearest of the heart’s desires fulfilled, can quite get at this.

Gandalf: Perhaps there’s a concept of wellbeing we are overlooking, then?

Bilbo: What, about being part of good and wonderful things, Gandalf – like you – that made my life well-spent?

Gandalf: Like me?

Gandalf © Nidoart 2013 Creative Commons 3.0

Bilbo: Yes, you, one of the Ainur, sent to protect, guide, serve Arda – ‘servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor’ [The Fellowship of the Ring] and all that. You were a friend of the good, the true. You fulfilled your oaths as one of the Ainur – unlike that contemptible Saruman! I mean, to miss the mark to such a degree! That is abyssal, soul-crushing failure. I fear to think how it would break someone to pieces and leave no more, even less than dust.

Gandalf: Yes. Saruman turning to evil was… disappointing.

Bilbo: You know I like drawing up maps, Gandalf. Well, living a well-lived life is like mapping yourself onto the right parts of the good life, or like hitting the right notes of the good in the song of your life, while being part of the larger Song. You know more about that than I do, as it concerns the Valar and their designs and orderings, of which I cannot say anything. But I loved and fought for the things they loved – the true, the good, and the beautiful. That was needed in order to live aright. My life went well because I was part of the victory over darkness. Victory over darkness! So a life well lived – a happifying life – is one that does not succumb to darkness. And while in my old life evil’s ways to bait, beguile and betray always seemed so many, now they all seem as one.

All the same, Gandalf, I cannot say enough about quiet nights, time for quiet, even solitude, and the wide, true world. One wonders what good anything would be to anyone if there were no good world to be in. And this Undying world! – where the shimmering, undulating hills of light melodize with the open expanse above and the fresh rushing rivers glide over the glassy rocks below, as if there were a glowing ageless twilight in each stone!

Gandalf: We do need the world to be well. How terrible it is that the people of Middle Earth should tear it apart and destroy the very thing that keeps them alive!

Bilbo: But now, in these blessed isles, I find happiness in the peace of this place, in the quiet evenings and the light of stars on my face, and the candles in my room where I work on my stories and think the world over, and on new adventures to come – endless wonder, infinite wonder, Gandalf! That too, I should say, we could not do without. I think upon endless things in ways I cannot recount or put into words; but I dare say none could be good without bearing the mark of the infinite wonder of the world within them – the fact that there’s always more to know and to consider. There is infinite wonder in the infinite itself, from which the endless wonder derives! That I think about too. I could not ponder the things of the world without sometimes thinking about it.

Gandalf: So far you have been speaking of how well-being is constituted by the realization of certain capacities, sometimes irrespective of pleasure or desire; but now you say that the goodness of the world is necessary for well-being. How does that fit in with your theory?

Bilbo: Well, you cannot be well-off without a world to be well-off in! How you make good fish into poor porridge, Gandalf! It’s not as mismatched as you think. The wonders of this world uplift my soul and put it at ease: and doesn’t that reveal something in me that needs perfecting? There’s a great spirit on one of the highest mountaintops now – they call him Callicott – and I’ve heard that he’s of the opinion that the world is valuable in itself, regardless of our needs; and I mean something like this: that the world is good, and its goodness is necessary for our being well-off.

Gandalf: My goodness, look at the hour. It’s almost time for your second dinner, my friend.

Bilbo: Let me see what I can rummage up!

© Eric Comerford 2025

Eric Comerford is co-editor of Being Ethical (Broadview Press, 2016). He dedicates this piece to his mother for her invincible strength, to the late Robert Woods, who introduced him to The Lord of the Rings, and to his most improbable mellon (Elvish for friend) and life partner, Kevin Martinez, with whom he has shared many unexpected journeys.

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A strip by Corey Mohler about Schopenhauer.

Each week, Corey Mohler draws a new Existential Comics strip and posts it at existentialcomics.com. For more cheery advice from Arthur Schopenhauer about life, joy and despair, see “Philosophy’s Dr Feelgood”.

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Table of Contents

Philosophy Now: Dec 2025 / Jan 2026

Editorial

Happy Thoughts

News

News: December 2025 / January 2026

Happiness

Hedonic Treadmills in the Vale of Tears

Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosophy’s Dr Feelgood

The Good Life Paradox

Deconstructing Happiness

Ancient Indian Wisdom for a Restless Age

The Necessary Ache

Articles

The Philosophy of William Blake

The Philosophy of Race

Evolution or Progress?

What Women?

What are the Proper Limits of Free Speech?

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)

Obituaries

John Searle (1932-2025)

Interviews

Peter Singer

Letters

Letters

Columns

Another Conversation with Martin Heidegger?

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)

Philosophers on Walking

Marcus Aurelius’s Ten Commandments

On Tyranny

Reviews

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Friendship

Civic Solitude by Robert Talisse

Wish You Were Here

Fiction

“I’m Thinking”

Bilbo Theorizes About Wellbeing

Cartoons

Jon Carter’s Cartoon

Existential Comics

For What It’s Worth

Chris Gill’s Cartoon

Simon & Finn

Owen Savage’s Cartoon