Knowledge and courage



Knowledge and courage contribute in turn to greatness. I say to you increase your knowledge because you are what you know. With small amounts of knowledge you can only act in a small arena. Expanding your knowledge base, increases the stage to play on. A truly wise person has the world as a stage.

 

But you also need courage. Without courage wisdom is sterile. You will not step on to the stage, you will not display your knowledge, you will not impact the world in any sort of positive way without action. Which is why you must seek both knowledge and courage if you are to achieve greatness.

Be the oracle



 

 

In your affairs, create suspense. The oracle of Delphi would talk in a manner where interpretation was difficult and could be construed to mean different things. This is how you should conduct your affairs.

 

Never reveal all your plans openly and straightforward, rather play your cards close to your chest. Drop hints, let slip small inconsequential things you have playing in your mind.

 

In this way if a big plan pays off, people will be surprised and genuinely pleased at your success. If however it goes pear shaped, as so often happens in life, there is no room for criticism or mockery at failed plans.

 

Make plans, work on them, try your best, but keep those plans close until either successful completion or a re-working on a theme. Keep the mystery around you and earn that respect.

On being a true individual

All things are now at their peak, above all being a true individual. It takes more today to make one sage than seven in years gone by, and more to deal with a single person than an entire nation in the past. - Gracián, Baltasar

 

If we think back to Aristotle, a true Polymath of his time, he conquered various sciences and philosophical path ways. Now with the rapid advancement of information, technology and science, it would take a person a life times study to scratch the surface of one strand of science, for instance, those that devote their lives to the study of the fruit fly.

 

New branches of Mathematics are occurring all the time, no one person could hope to have a thorough knowledge of all mathematics, perhaps in Plato's academy, where you could not enter without a working knowledge of geometry, you could master mathematics, but now, think yourself lucky if you call yourself master of a few branches.

 

To be sage now, with the world no longer your city, town or village, but rather the whole world, with new ethical and moral problems being unearthed on a daily basis, we cannot hope to be able to answer every dilemma satisfactorily, but then again, Philosophy never promised us answers, just more questions.

 

This being said, we should not be depressed by the thought that it is more difficult now to become a true individual, if anything, the Democratisation of information has made it easier for each of us to achieve our true potential to be an individual, even easier than those in the past. The hard work has been done for us, we just need to pick up where others left off and carve our own paths in history, no matter what that may be.

 

If we act with 'true selfishness' in the sense Adam Smith advocated, we can all leave an indelible mark on the world, it is simply choice as to whether or not we want to strive or not.

 

 

 



My reputation



My reputation is because I do what I say I am going to do when I said I would, and I refuse to compromise quality or ethics for any reason. I will not be late and I will not tolerate anyone else being late. I will not lie and I will not tolerate being lied to. I deliver the best possible product I can to the best of my ability every time and I expect the same from those who do business with me. This makes me a total pain to do business with because I have a standard by which I perform and I expect those who do business with me to perform to the same standard. Because of this, I am known as an asshole. Better to get this reputation for the right reasons instead of the wrong reasons.

What constitutes a 'good life'?

25 Centuries ago, Greek philosophers asked what constitutes a good life? We are still trying to figure out the answer. The only thing certain about ethical enquiry, is that nothing is certain; but that doesn't stop us asking the question and coming to our own conclusions.

 

For some of us, we turn to religion to guide our morality, to say this is the word of God, this is how morality is spelled out, this is how we should behave in our mortal time here for if we do not, the gates of Heaven may be barred to us when we are judged.

 

This in my interpretation is morality by fear and morality by fear in my opinion is not a morally true path. If our moral path is chosen by fear, for example, we choose not to kill or rape or steal only because of fear of God or in fear of police intervention, then are we really living a moral life at all?

 

This of course goes back to Plato's analogy of 'Gyges ring' which states for example, if we were invisible and had no way of being detected, we would simply fall in to evil ways of murder and rape and theft! This is the belief we live moral lives out of fear, not out of choice and given true freedom, we would all be living out our base animal desires.

 

For Aristotle the question was not so much "What is the right thing to do?" but more "What is the best way to live?" Aristotle came to the conclusion of 'Eudaimonia' a sort of flourishing and this was to be achieved by aspiring to moral excellence. This Aristotle would bring about the greatest happiness to a persons soul.

 

Jeremy Bentham created 'utilitarianism' that being maximisation of pleasure and minimisation of pain. Utilitarianism is a flourishing and popular philosophy today for obvious reasons, unfortunately many people have not actually read the original source and bastardised the original Philosophy to suit their own interpretations.

 



Monty Python concluded that it was ‘nothing very special’: ‘try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then …’

 

Jean Paul Sartre believed we are 'condemned to be free' we are our own authors of the meaning of our own lives. By this Sartre meant there is no religious punishment, only that the punishment may well be social ostracisation.

 

This plays well with Darwin's 'theory of evolution' and more recently supported by Richard Dawkins that we are simply an accident of nature and we should live a more moral life as a way to live a good life, because the moral life would maximise our overall happiness. Perhaps a selfish reason but no more selfish than doing the right thing out of fear.

 

Then again Machiavelli's advice to princes everywhere was 'It is better to feared than to be loved'. We see this almost daily on the news and in our lives where people either singularly or in gangs, prefer to instil fear in others to maximise their happiness quota, of course, there's always a bigger fish...

 

So do we live a good life now for a ticket to a better world after our mortal death? Or should we do as the ancient Greeks insisted and make man the measure of all things? Shouldn't we as privileged with the power of logic and choice over our base instincts strive for the higher moral ground? Shouldn't we all try to do the right thing by each other?

 

Until we reach a satisfactory consensus I doubt humanity will ever be able to 'get along' together and the debate of what constitutes a 'good life' may well rage on another 25 centuries.