Life's Philosophy: Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World

Preface

PREFACE As I approach my ninetieth year, I may justifiably claim to have seen life. And looking back, I am surprised at how often I have been driven by strong feelings.For example, they led to my collecting big numbers before I started school. There was something about big numbers that fascinated me, and in my innocence I thought that they were finite in number! All in all, I felt a profound attraction to the abstract and to what lay far off.On that account I subsequently took a degreein astronomy. It was only as a professor that I became aware of the difficulties of suppressing the significance of the development of feelings in human affairs while at the same time worshiping reason. Both are constantly needed. As a result, in this book I am not trying to undermine reason by emphasizing feeling.Rather, I have an urgeto try new ways of understanding how they belong to each other, and also to resort to old ways, with the help of my most important model as a philosopher of feelings, Spinoza. Life may be considered as a landscape through which wetravel in different ways. That journey on which I would like to take the reader starts out from today's crude and indefensible underestimation of the development of feelings in life and society; our destination is an awareness of the decisive role that feelings play, indeed ought to play,in human thought and action. But isit not more important to live than to read about someone else's reflections on living? That goeswithout saying.The difficulty is xi that very many people reflect too little on their own life, and many begin to do so all too late. If this book can persuade some more, perhaps only a few,to reexamine their own existence and the direction of their lives, I will have achieved my aim. There is a difference between simply functioning as a human being and realizingthat it is now that one is living. It is strange how one opens oneself more to life when death is no longer something alien and threatening. That one's life may end today can lead to a more intense feeling of how significant that day is. There is something fundamentally wrong when only older people reflect on that which is significant in life, while younger ones, who have their livesbefore them, simply have no time to do so.They often have so much to do, so many goals, big and small, that they do not have time or opportunity to reflect on what isalmost incredible: that today they actually are in the land of the living. And that the others surrounding them are their fellow creatures and human beings like themselves. Life's Philosophy is not a professional treatise; it is a short book on a few themes that are important for me personally, themes in which emotions are the point of departure and the focus of the whole. In many ways I do not consider myself particularly qualified to write a book like this—at any rate no more competent than anyone who has lived and thought a little. This is a book in which the questions considerably outnumber the answers. My aim is to give at least one person some good ideas, some thoughts to consider further, some new questions to ask himself and his closest friends. Best ofall, perhaps he might be persuaded to consider his own existence in new ways. Arne Naess Oslo, October 1998 Preface xii ...