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Great Thinkers in 60 minutes - Volume 3

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
604 Seiten
Englisch
Books on Demanderschienen am11.01.20231. Auflage
"Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes Volume 3" comprises the five books "Confucius in 60 Minutes", "Buddha in 60 Minutes", "Epicurus in 60 Minutes", "Descartes in 60 Minutes", and "Hobbes in 60 Minutes". Each short study sums up the key idea at the heart of each respective thinker and asks the question: "Of what use is this key idea to us today?" But above all the philosophers get to speak for themselves. Their most important statements are prominently presented, as direct quotations, in speech balloons with appropriate graphics, with exact indication of the source of each quote in the author's works. This light-hearted but nonetheless scholarly precise rendering of the ideas of each thinker makes it easy for the reader to acquaint him- or herself with the great questions of our lives. Because every philosopher who has achieved global fame has posed the "question of meaning": what is it that holds, at the most essential level, the world together? For Confucius it is the search for the Dao, for the right path that leads us human beings to one another. For the Buddha it is a radical liberation from our needs and the approach, through meditation, to Nirvana. For Epicurus, by contrast, the meaning of life consists in the letting-be of our pleasures and the imbeddedness of existence in our bodies. Descartes, for his part, considers thinking to be the decisive quality of Man, allowing him to explore and master the world. Hobbes, finally, sees the central element of meaning to consist in humans' peaceful coexistence thanks to the founding of states, i.e. in a political act. In other words, the meaning of the world and thus of our own lives remains, among philosophers, a topic of great controversy. One thing, though, is sure: each of these five thinkers struck, from his own perspective, one brilliant spark out of that complex crystal that is the truth.

Dr Walther Ziegler is academically trained in the fields of philosophy, history and political science. As a foreign correspondent, reporter and newsroom coordinator for the German TV station ProSieben he has produced films on every continent. His news reports have won several prizes and awards. He has also authored numerous books in the field of philosophy. His many years of experience as a journalist mean that he is able to present the complex ideas of the great philosophers in a way that is both engaging and very clear. Since 2007 he has also been active as a teacher and trainer of young TV journalists in Munich, holding the post of Academic Director at the Media Academy, a University of Applied Sciences that offers film and TV courses at its base directly on the site of the major European film production company Bavaria Film. After the huge success of the book series "Great thinkers in 60 Minutes", he works as a freelance writer and philosopher.mehr
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Produkt

Klappentext"Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes Volume 3" comprises the five books "Confucius in 60 Minutes", "Buddha in 60 Minutes", "Epicurus in 60 Minutes", "Descartes in 60 Minutes", and "Hobbes in 60 Minutes". Each short study sums up the key idea at the heart of each respective thinker and asks the question: "Of what use is this key idea to us today?" But above all the philosophers get to speak for themselves. Their most important statements are prominently presented, as direct quotations, in speech balloons with appropriate graphics, with exact indication of the source of each quote in the author's works. This light-hearted but nonetheless scholarly precise rendering of the ideas of each thinker makes it easy for the reader to acquaint him- or herself with the great questions of our lives. Because every philosopher who has achieved global fame has posed the "question of meaning": what is it that holds, at the most essential level, the world together? For Confucius it is the search for the Dao, for the right path that leads us human beings to one another. For the Buddha it is a radical liberation from our needs and the approach, through meditation, to Nirvana. For Epicurus, by contrast, the meaning of life consists in the letting-be of our pleasures and the imbeddedness of existence in our bodies. Descartes, for his part, considers thinking to be the decisive quality of Man, allowing him to explore and master the world. Hobbes, finally, sees the central element of meaning to consist in humans' peaceful coexistence thanks to the founding of states, i.e. in a political act. In other words, the meaning of the world and thus of our own lives remains, among philosophers, a topic of great controversy. One thing, though, is sure: each of these five thinkers struck, from his own perspective, one brilliant spark out of that complex crystal that is the truth.

Dr Walther Ziegler is academically trained in the fields of philosophy, history and political science. As a foreign correspondent, reporter and newsroom coordinator for the German TV station ProSieben he has produced films on every continent. His news reports have won several prizes and awards. He has also authored numerous books in the field of philosophy. His many years of experience as a journalist mean that he is able to present the complex ideas of the great philosophers in a way that is both engaging and very clear. Since 2007 he has also been active as a teacher and trainer of young TV journalists in Munich, holding the post of Academic Director at the Media Academy, a University of Applied Sciences that offers film and TV courses at its base directly on the site of the major European film production company Bavaria Film. After the huge success of the book series "Great thinkers in 60 Minutes", he works as a freelance writer and philosopher.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9783756872022
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
Erscheinungsjahr2023
Erscheinungsdatum11.01.2023
Auflage1. Auflage
Seiten604 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Artikel-Nr.10715091
Rubriken
Genre9200

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe

Confucius s Great Discovery
Confucius (551 - 479 BC) is without doubt the most important of all Chinese philosophers. The name Confucius was, in fact, originally an attempt by Latin-speaking Jesuit missionaries, who first translated Confucius s works in 1687, to reproduce the Chinese Kong Fuzi, meaning Master Kong .2 This latinized form of the name has persisted in the West right up to the present day.

In the years after his death, Confucius s ideas and his doctrine spread first throughout many countries in Asia and later throughout the entire world. Wherever anyone begins a sentence with the words Confucius says⦠the listener is bound to prick up his ears in expectation of hearing some timelessly valid truth about life on which they can model their own behaviour.

And Confucius s thoughts, in fact, remain still today of astonishing contemporary relevance and psychological acuity. Confucius is not just a philosopher but a brilliant psychologist who knows every side of human beings, possessing an unerring eye for our human weaknesses, strengths and potentialities. This perhaps explains how his teachings have been able to survive and persist through two and a half millennia of stormy, convoluted history. Still today, the stamp of Confucius s ideas is plainly visible in the educations, and indeed in the later life-orientations, of billions of human beings not just in China but in Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea, Taiwan and large parts of the Philippines. After the first translations of his works into European languages were made, by Jesuit missionaries, in the course of the 17th century, he began to gain growing attention and respect also in the Western world. The great 18th-century French philosopher, Voltaire, praised him as the first great rationalist and proponent of Enlightenment . Today, the main work bearing Confucius s name, the famous Analects, exists in more than a hundred different translations. The Analects, however, are a compilation by the great sage s pupils and disciples. Like Socrates, Confucius himself left us no written works. The Greek-derived word chosen, then, for the standard English translation signifies, appropriately, selections : short sayings and recounted deeds of the Master assembled into a book after his death. Confucius s masterpiece , then, is not a systematic work of the sort we know from many of the other great philosophers but rather simply a collection of the views and opinions of Confucius expressed regarding various subjects and themes.3

These various dialogues and conversations with pupils contain, however, as Confucius himself insists, a clearly recognizable central idea around which everything turns:

What is more, this central idea has something radically new about it. For Confucius, all human beings are, by their very nature, equal. In contradiction to what had been the case in China for thousands of years before him, differences in social class and social origin play no role at all in Confucius s philosophy. Every human being, whether aristocrat or peasant, rich or poor, is capable of finding his dao , that is to say, the right way for him. Every one of us, Confucius teaches, is in principle able, through a process of character-training, education and self-cultivation, to become a junzi - or a gentleman in Confucius s special sense of this term.

Thanks to these ideas Confucius counts as one of the great thinkers of what has been called the Axial Age : the age in which, separately but simultaneously on the world s different continents, mankind set off in radically new directions, just as if human thought, after millennia of stasis and walking on the spot , had suddenly turned on its own axis and passed from darkness out into light.

Thus, Confucius s lifetime coincides almost exactly with that of the Buddha on the Indian sub-continent and that of the Greek philosopher Socrates in distant Europe. Moreover, just like these two other thinkers he gives to humanity, in a period of moral decline and of wars, an entirely new political and ethical orientation, the effects of which have stretched far beyond his lifetime. Like the Buddha and Socrates, Confucius went in search of a timeless truth which would be valid even for future generations. It is not enough, he says, simply to understand one s own time:

If Confucius s ideas have enjoyed such wide resonance, this is surely owed to his simple but brilliant core idea: the search for the dao , which is also a search for a threefold harmony: harmony between the individual and his family; harmony between oneself and society; and inner harmony between oneself and one s principles, that is to say, between our real life and our ideal image.

What Confucius was aiming at here was not, however, as one might at first glance assume, the achievement of a total conformity of the individual to his family, his social environment or the state. Nor does he aim at the eventual achievement of a total equality between all individuals or a perfect coincidence between our lives and our ideal images of how human life should be. On the contrary, the striving for harmony means, for Confucius, something fundamentally distinct from the striving to conform or agree:

Harmony in Confucius is a rich and shifting concept that is difficult to grasp. But it is only once we have grasped it that we become really able to understand the key idea behind his philosophy. When he speaks of harmony Confucius is not using the term in its colloquial sense and referring to a relaxed state without tensions. On the contrary, he is referring to a tireless, lifelong striving. Harmony , for him, is nothing other than a persistent striving for a co-humanity that would be worthy of its name. When Confucius was asked by one of his pupils whether there was one word that could serve as a guide for one s entire life , he replied:

Going on to elucidate the Chinese word shu that is rendered here as understanding , he reveals that it is in fact a matter of that basic moral principle, recurring in so many forms in so many cultures, which is called the golden rule 8 and which runs:

But just this understanding , construed in just this sense, is far from being something obvious and self-evident. On the contrary. Putting oneself in a position such that one feels what others feel is the hardest thing in the world. Not a single one of us, Confucius argues, ever really succeeds in taking the needs of others into account in just the way we take our own. Normally, we place our own interests high above the wellbeing of others, so that injuries to this wellbeing often occur in daily life.

It is only the junzi , the true gentleman in Confucius s sense, who succeeds in living his own life without impairing the lives of others. This gentleman , indeed, even consciously promotes the development of the other people around him. In principle, Confucius believes, any human being can rise, through training of his character and self-cultivation, to become such a gentleman . He concedes, however, that it is an extremely difficult thing to feel, think and act, in every situation, as a junzi . He himself, he admits, has not always been up to the task, since it demands the exercise of three virtues at the same time:

Confucius surely deserves respect for admitting that even he, the great philosopher and teacher, had not yet been able to achieve all three aspects of this threefold virtue, that is, to be at once understanding, wise and courageous. The key moral appeal that he makes, however, is the appeal never to leave off trying to be all these things. The great task, argues Confucius, is that of bringing the two forces of egoism and understanding for others, which so easily drift apart from one another, into harmony. Because it is only if we succeed in doing this that we have a chance of a fulfilled life. True happiness, Confucius argues, requires the development of ren , or humanity :

This key philosophical idea, the resolute search for harmony via understanding and humanity, may on first consideration appear to be something bland and obvious. But considered more closely, what Confucius has seized on here is an extremely vital and controversial topic. Harmony is in fact nothing that can be considered self-evident. On the contrary, it is always the exception. We all know how conflictual family relationships can be; we have all become enraged about the state, our own powerlessness in the face of it, and the whims of bureaucratic authorities; and we all know the painful feeling of failing to realize one s own wishes and potentialities. How, though, are we to deal with our own dissatisfaction? Is it possible for us ever to attain the threefold harmony ?

Confucius expresses the eternal fundamental conflict of human existence which each of us knows only too well from his or her own life: we are all born with needs, wishes and drives; but we are not alone in the world; our needs and wishes tend to clash with those of other human beings and cannot always be brought to reconciliation with...
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Autor

Dr Walther Ziegler is academically trained in the fields of philosophy, history and political science. As a foreign correspondent, reporter and newsroom coordinator for the German TV station ProSieben he has produced films on every continent. His news reports have won several prizes and awards. He has also authored numerous books in the field of philosophy. His many years of experience as a journalist mean that he is able to present the complex ideas of the great philosophers in a way that is both engaging and very clear. Since 2007 he has also been active as a teacher and trainer of young TV journalists in Munich, holding the post of Academic Director at the Media Academy, a University of Applied Sciences that offers film and TV courses at its base directly on the site of the major European film production company Bavaria Film. After the huge success of the book series "Great thinkers in 60 Minutes", he works as a freelance writer and philosopher.