The thought that only boring people get bored is such a commonplace that it’s not clear who said it first. G K Chesterton, for example, coined the similar “There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.” Like many familiar sayings, there is a wisdom here that quickly turns to folly if we don’t read it carefully…
ReadTrue self-knowledge demands neither complete trust of our introspective judgments nor deference to the calculations of the spreadsheet, but a combination of the insights of both.
ReadWhat surprises me is not that people die or get sick, but that other people continue to be so surprised when it happens. Am I unusual in this because I have devoted so much of my life to philosophy? I suspect the causal arrow is the other way round: I have devoted so much of my life to philosophy because I am unusual in this. After all, it is not as though the basic insight depends on a close reading of the Stoics, Socrates or Schopenhauer.
ReadRidicule and misrepresentation are in some sense an occupational hazard for the philosopher. “The best philosophers are always walking a tightrope where one misstep either side is just nonsense,” he says. “That’s why caricatures are too easy to be worth doing. You can make any philosopher – any, Aristotle, Kant, you name it – look like a complete flaming idiot with just a slightest little tweak.”
ReadHow can we, as adults, make promises on behalf of the people we will be in five, 10, 20 years or more?
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