Four Thousand Weeks p.156

Taking a walk in the countryside, like listening to a favorite song or meeting friends for an evening of conversation, is thus a good example of what the philosopher Kieran Setiya calls an “atelic activity,” meaning that its value isn’t derived from its telos, or ultimate aim. You shouldn’t be aiming to get a walk “done”; nor are you likely to reach a point in life when you’ve accomplished all the walking you were aiming to do. “You can stop doing these things, and you eventually will, but you cannot complete them,” Setiya explains. They have “no outcome whose achievement exhausts them and therefore brings them to an end.” And so the only reason to do them is for themselves alone: “There is no more to going for a walk than what you are doing right now.”

As Setiya recalls in his book Midlife, he was heading toward the age of forty when he first began to feel a creeping sense of emptiness, which he would later come to understand as the result of living a project-driven life, crammed not with atelic activities but telic ones, the primary purpose of which was to have them done, and to have achieved certain outcomes. He published papers in philosophy journals in order to speed his path to academic tenure; he sought tenure in order to achieve a solid professional reputation and financial security; he taught students in order to achieve those goals, and also in order to help them attain degrees and launch their own careers. In other words, he was suffering from the very problem we’ve been exploring: when your relationship with time is almost entirely instrumental, the present moment starts to lose its meaning. And it makes sense that this feeling might strike in the form of a midlife crisis, because midlife is when many of us first become consciously aware that mortality is approaching—and mortality makes it impossible to ignore the absurdity of living solely for the future. Where’s the logic in constantly postponing fulfillment until some later point in time when soon enough you won’t have any “later” left?

Oliver Burkeman – Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals p.156

Love and Terror in the God Encounter p.140

In “Confrontation,” R. Soloveitchik discusses three images of the human condition. The first is natural man, who lives in total harmony with nature and exhibits no separate selfhood. The “I” is absorbed by the womb of nature and lives with nature’s rhythms. This portrait is similar to Kierkegaard’s aesthetic or hedonistic stage, in which human existence is not regarded as at all problematic. R. Soloveichik argues gives them the modern representatives of this type of person and gives them the label “non-confronted man.”

Man who was created out of the dust of the ground, enveloped in a mist rising from the jungle, determined by biological immediacy and mechanical necessity, knows of no responsibility, no opposition, no fear, and no dichotomy, and hence he is free from carrying the load of humanity.

In a word, this man is a non-confronted being. He is neither conscious of his assignment vis-à-vis something which is outside of himself nor is he aware of his existential otherness as a being summoned by his Maker to rise to tragic greatness.

When I refer to man at the level of naturalness, I have in mind not the Urmensch of bygone times but modern man. I am speaking not in anthropological but typological categories. For non-confronted man is to be found not only in the cave or the jungle but also in the seats of learning and the halls of philosophers and artists. Non-confrontation is not necessarily restricted to a primitive existence but applies to human existence at all times, no matter how cultured and sophisticated. The hedone-oriented, egocentric person, the beauty-worshipper, committed to the goods of sense and craving exclusively for boundless aesthetic experience, the voluptuary, inventing needs in order to give himself the opportunity of continual gratification, the sybarite, constantly discovering new areas where pleasure is pursued and happiness found and lost, leads a non-confronted existence. (1964: 6-7)

David Hartman – Love and Terror in the God Encounter: The Theological Legacy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik p.140

The Doors of Perception p.77

Systematic reasoning is something we could not, as a species or as individuals, possibly do without. But neither, if we are to remain sane, can we possibly do without direct perception, the more unsystematic the better, of the inner and outer worlds into which we have been born. This given reality is an infinite which passes all understanding and yet admits of being directly and in some sort totally apprehended. It is a transcendence belonging to another order than the human, and yet it may be present to us as a felt immanence, an experienced participation. To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness—to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves. Meanwhile, however, there are gratuitous graces in the form of partial and fleeting realizations. Under a more realistic, a less exclusively verbal system of education than ours, every Angel (in Blake’s sense of that word) would be permitted as a sabbatical treat, would be urged and even, if necessary, compelled to take an occasional trip through some chemical Door in the Wall into the world of transcendental experience. If it terrified him, it would be unfortunate but probably salutary. If it brought him a brief but timeless illumination, so much the better. In either case the Angel might lose a little of the confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning and the consciousness of having read all the books.

Aldous Huxley – The Doors of Perception p.77

Four Thousand Weeks p.67

This kind of perspective shift, I’ve found, has an especially striking effect on the experience of everyday annoyances—on my response to traffic jams and airport security lines, babies who won’t sleep past 5:00 a.m., and dishwashers that I apparently must unload again tonight, even though (I think you’ll find!) I did so yesterday. I’m embarrassed to admit what an outsize negative effect such minor frustrations have had on my happiness over the years. Fairly often, they still do; but the effect was worst at the height of my productivity geekhood, because when you’re trying to Master Your Time, few things are more infuriating than a task or delay that’s foisted upon you against your will, with no regard for the schedule you’ve painstakingly drawn up in your overpriced notebook. But when you turn your attention instead to the fact that you’re in a position to have an irritating experience in the first place, matters are liable to look very different indeed. All at once, it can seem amazing to be there at all, having any experience, in a way that’s overwhelmingly more important than the fact that the experience happens to be an annoying one.

Oliver Burkeman – Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals p.67

The Happiness Hypothesis p.206

Scientists and philosophers had traditionally held an attitude of wonder toward the natural world and the objects of their inquiry. But in the late sixteenth century, European scientists began to look down on wonder; they began to see it as the mark of a childish mind, whereas the mature scientist went about coolly cataloging the laws of the world. Scientists may tell us in their memoirs about their private sense of wonder, but the everyday world of the scientist is one that rigidly separates facts from values and emotions.
Maslow echoed Eliade in claiming that science has helped to de-sacralize the world, that it is devoted to documenting only what is, rather than what is good or what is beautiful. One might object that there is an academic division of labor; the good and the beautiful are the province of the humanities, not of the sciences. Maslow charged, however, that the humanities had abdicated their responsibility with their retreat to relativism, their skepticism about the possibility of truth, and their preference for novelty and iconoclasm over beauty. He founded humanistic psychology in part to feed the widespread hunger for knowledge about values and to investigate the sort of truth people glimpse in peak experiences . . .

His goal was nothing less than the reformation of education and, therefore, of society: “Education must be seen as at least partially an effort to produce the good human being, to foster the good life and the good society.”

Jonathan Haidt – The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom p.206

Four Thousand Weeks p.48

The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things. Adopt an ultra-ambitious time management system that promises to take care of your entire to-do list, and you probably won’t even get around to the most important items on that list. Dedicate your retirement to seeing as much of the world as you possibly can, and you probably won’t even get to see the most interesting parts.

The reason for this effect is straightforward: the more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time. Whenever you encounter some potential new item for your to-do list or your social calendar, you’ll be strongly biased in favor of accepting it, because you’ll assume you needn’t sacrifice any other tasks or opportunities in order to make space for it. Yet because in reality your time is finite, doing anything requires sacrifice—the sacrifice of all the other things you could have been doing with that stretch of time. If you never stop to ask yourself if the sacrifice is worth it, your days will automatically begin to fill not just with more things, but with more trivial or tedious things, because they’ve never had to clear the hurdle of being judged more important than something else. Commonly, these will be things that other people want you to do, to make their lives easier, and which you didn’t think to try to resist. The more efficient you get, the more you become “a limitless reservoir for other people’s expectations,” in the words of the management expert Jim Benson.

In my days as a paid-up productivity geek, it was this aspect of the whole scenario that troubled me the most. Despite my thinking of myself as the kind of person who got things done, it grew painfully clear that the things I got done most diligently were the unimportant ones, while the important ones got postponed—either forever or until an imminent deadline forced me to complete them, to a mediocre standard and in a stressful rush. The email from my newspaper’s IT department about the importance of regularly changing my password would provoke me to speedy action, though I could have ignored it entirely. (The clue was in the subject line, where the words “PLEASE READ” are generally a sign you needn’t bother reading what follows.) Meanwhile, the long message from an old friend now living in New Delhi and research for the major article I’d been planning for months would get ignored, because I told myself that such tasks needed my full focus, which meant waiting until I had a good chunk of free time and fewer small-but-urgent tasks tugging at my attention. And so, instead, like the dutiful and efficient worker I was, I’d put my energy into clearing the decks, cranking through the smaller stuff to get it out of the way—only to discover that doing so took the whole day, that the decks filled up again overnight anyway, and that the moment for responding to the New Delhi email or for researching the milestone article never arrived. One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.

What’s needed instead in such situations, I gradually came to understand, is a kind of anti-skill: not the counterproductive strategy of trying to make yourself more efficient, but rather a willingness to resist such urges —to learn to stay with the anxiety of feeling overwhelmed, of not being on top of everything, without automatically responding by trying to fit more in. To approach your days in this fashion means, instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what’s truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as you do so, the decks will be filling up further, with emails and errands and other to-dos, many of which you may never get around to at all. You’ll sometimes still decide to drive yourself hard in an effort to squeeze more in, when circumstances absolutely require it. But that won’t be your default mode, because you’ll no longer be operating under the illusion of one day making time for everything.

Oliver Burkeman – Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals p.48

Love and Terror in the God Encounter p.84

According to R. Soloveitchik, the contrast between the Jewish doctrine of creation and the Aristotelian belief that the universe has existed from all eternity must be understood in terms of the different normative perspectives and challenges they pose. Since the Greeks ascribed greater reality to whatever is unchanging and uncreated, they saw human excellence not in the active transformation of the world, but in the philosophical contemplation of eternal verities. Judaism emphasizes the unfolding of the principle of will and energy, the dynamic longing for shaping, transforming, and controlling the world.

The whole concept of creation never really took hold in Greek philosophy. As a result of this, Greek philosophy had no room for the true creative act . . . The pure, first form does not create; therefore, man is not obliged to create . . . Neither the intellectual virtues of Aristotelian ethics nor the aspiration for the contemplative life (Bios theoretikos) are in any way equivalent with the yearning for creation that has so entirely seized hold of the Jewish imagination.

The halakhic personality’s longing to create is expressed not only in the desire to change the world, but equally, and perhaps even to a greater extent, in the yearning to complete the creation of one’s individual being by unfolding one’s own unique individual capacities. By emphasizing the notion of God as Creator, Judaism introduced the significance of self-creation as a profound ethical ideal.

The most fundamental principle of all is that man must create himself. It is this idea that Judaism introduced into the world.

The belief that God created the world is translated into a normative challenge to live a heroic existence where freedom replaces necessity, where hopefulness and confidence guide one’s perception of the future. Halakhic man does not live a melancholy life waiting to be liberated from the prison of human sin and the human body. It is not grace alone that liberates halakhic man, but rather, the sense that God calls on him to build a free and spontaneous existence.

David Hartman – Love and Terror in the God Encounter: The Theological Legacy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik p.84

The Happiness Hypothesis p.163

Despite their many differences, however, the two camps agree in important ways. They both believe in parsimony: Decisions should be based ultimately on one principle only, be it the categorical imperative or the maximization of utility. They both insist that only the rider can make such decisions because moral decision making requires logical reasoning and sometimes even mathematical calculation. They both distrust intuitions and gut feelings, which they see as obstacles to good reasoning. And they both shun the particular in favor of the abstract: You don’t need a rich, thick description of the people involved, or of their beliefs and cultural traditions. You just need a few facts and a ranked list of their likes and dislikes (if you are a utilitarian). It doesn’t matter what country or historical era you are in; it doesn’t matter whether the people involved are your friends, your enemies, or complete strangers. The moral law, like a law of physics, works the same for all people at all times.

These two philosophical approaches have made enormous contributions to legal and political theory and practice; indeed, they helped create societies that respect individual rights (Kant) while still working efficiently for the good of the people (Bentham). But these ideas have also permeated Western culture more generally, where they have had some unintended consequences. The philosopher Edmund Pincoffs  has argued that consequentialists and deontologists worked together to convince Westerners in the twentieth century that morality is the study of moral quandaries and dilemmas. Where the Greeks focused on the character of a person and asked what kind of person we should each aim to become, modern ethics focuses on actions, asking when a particular action is right or wrong. Philosophers wrestle with life-and-death dilemmas: Kill one to save five? Allow aborted fetuses to be used as a source of stem cells? Remove the feeding tube from a woman who has been unconscious for fifteen years? Nonphilosophers wrestle with smaller quandaries: Pay my taxes when others are cheating? Turn in a wallet full of money that appears to belong to a drug dealer? Tell my spouse about a sexual indiscretion?

This turn from character ethics to quandary ethics has turned moral education away from virtues and toward moral reasoning. If morality is about dilemmas, then moral education is training in problem solving. Children must be taught how to think about moral problems, especially how to overcome their natural egoism and take into their calculations the needs of others. As the United States became more ethnically diverse in the 1970s and 1980s, and also more averse to authoritarian methods of education, the idea of teaching specific moral facts and values went out of fashion.

Jonathan Haidt – The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom p.163

The Happiness Hypothesis p.175

Durkheim, the sociologist who found that freedom from social ties is correlated with suicide also gave us the word “anomie” (normlessness). Anomie is the condition of a society in which there are no clear rules, norms, or standards of value. In an anomic society, people can do as they please; but without any clear standards or respected social institutions to enforce those standards, it is harder for people to find things they want to do. Anomie breeds feelings of rootlessness and anxiety and leads to an increase in amoral and antisocial behavior. Modern sociological research strongly supports Durkheim: One of the best predictors of the health of an American neighborhood is the degree to which adults respond to the misdeeds of other people’s children. When community standards are enforced, there is constraint and cooperation. When everyone minds his own business and looks the other way, there is freedom and anomie.

My colleague at the University of Virginia, the sociologist James Hunter, carries Durkheim’s ideas forward into the current debate about character education. In his provocative book The Death of Character, Hunter traces out how America lost its older ideas about virtue and character. Before the Industrial Revolution, Americans honored the virtues of “producers”—hard work, self-restraint, sacrifice for the future, and sacrifice for the common good. But during the twentieth century, as people became wealthier and the producer society turned gradually into the mass consumption society, an alternative vision of the self arose—a vision centered on the idea of individual preferences and personal fulfillment. The intrinsically moral term “character” fell out of favor and was replaced by the amoral term “personality.”

Hunter points to a second cause of character’s death: inclusiveness. The first American colonists created enclaves of ethnic, religious, and moral homogeneity, but the history of America ever since has been one of increasing diversity. In response, educators have struggled to identify the ever-shrinking set of moral ideas everyone could agree upon. This shrinking reached its logical conclusion in the 1960s with the popular “values clarification” movement, which taught no morality at all. Values clarification taught children how to find their own values, and it urged teachers to refrain from imposing values on anyone. Although the goal of inclusiveness was laudable, it had unintended side effects: It cut children off from the soil of tradition, history, and religion that nourished older conceptions of virtue. You can grow vegetables hydroponically, but even then you have to add nutrients to the water. Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language—a pointless and isolating task if there is no community with whom to speak.

Jonathan Haidt – The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom p.175

The Happiness Hypothesis p.133

His findings can be summarized in one word: constraints. No matter how he parsed the data, people who had fewer social constraints, bonds, and obligations were more likely to kill themselves. Durkheim looked at the “degree of integration of religious society” and found that Protestants, who lived the least demanding religious lives at the time, had higher suicide rates than did Catholics; Jews, with the densest network of social and religious obligations, had the lowest. He examined the “degree of integration of domestic society”—the family—and found the same thing: People living alone were most likely to kill themselves; married people, less; married people with children, still less. Durkheim concluded that people need obligations and constraints to provide structure and meaning to their lives: “The more weakened the groups to which [a man] belongs, the less he depends on them, the more he consequently depends only on himself and recognizes no other rules of conduct than what are founded on his private interests.”

Jonathan Haidt – The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom p.133