50 Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting Seeing - Profound Insights and Powerful Thinking from Fifty Key Books (50 Classics)

All of our choices, Epicurus says in his letter to Menoeceus, should be toward “the health of the body or the calm of the soul, since this is the goal of a happy life.”

Emerson implies that it is hubris to believe that our little selves can have any real effect, when, as Chaucer put it, destiny is the “minister-general” that actually decides the course of war and peace, hate and love.

The Medium Is the Massage

Philosophers have spent centuries arguing about the relative weight between “subject” (I) and “object” (the world), but Baudrillard saw the debate as having long since become insignificant – the object had won hands down. A person today is not a project in selfhood, as many traditions of philosophy and theology have told us, but more like a machine

Advertising is conventionally seen as superficial in relation to the actual things and products to which it refers, but in Baudrillard’s thinking advertising is the core of our civilization. The commodities to which it points are relatively valueless – what matters is our identification with the stories, signs, and imagery that front those commodit

Baudrillard notes that people are now measured by the extent of their involvement in the flow of media messages. “Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial,”

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”

His vision was instead a world in which individuality is a myth, and where people are units reflecting whatever is happening in the media, their only purpose to consume images and signs; in this new universe, something is real only if it can be reproduced endlessly, and what is singular or unshareable does not exist.

Baudrillard calls this new world the “hyperreal” and one of its interesting qualities is that it obviates the need for the imaginary, since there is no distinction between what is reality and what is imagined. We are left with a world that is a “gigantic simulacrum” (a simulation or likeness), one that is “never exchanged for the real, but exchange