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

We can wish for something, but to attain it we have to decide to take particular actions. Similarly, we can believe certain things, but it is action that forms our character.

To have a “complete life,” we must combine action with virtue, constantly refining ourselves and developing our skills. Genuine happiness emerges through work on ourselves and our aims over time.

John Doris’s book Lack of Character noted that “situational factors are often better predictors of behaviour than personal factors.” Baggini suggests that plenty of Germans living under the Third Reich would otherwise have led “blameless lives” if they had not been put in an environment that brought out their worst selves. By the same token, “many

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.

“The distinction between man and animal runs right through the human species itself: only the best (aristoi), who constantly prove themselves to be the best, and who ‘prefer immortal fame to mortal things,’ are really human; the others, content with whatever pleasures nature will yield them, live and die like animals.”

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.