The Art of Insight

Epilogue: Teachers, Mentors, and Meaning

Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

— Charlie Chaplin

My wanderings are about to come to an end. In Chapter 2, I quoted a passage from David Le Breton's Marcher la vie: Un art tranquille du bonheur (2020), “Like Ulysses, sometimes we need to travel around the world and lose ourselves in a thousand follies before returning to Ithaca.” Have I returned to the place from where I departed? I think I have, reinvigorated and, like Shirley Wu in the introduction, hopeful.

Pierre Hadot's What is Ancient Philosophy? (2004) is one of those books worth revisiting regularly. To Hadot, philosophy isn't just an academic discipline, but an inquiry into what a good life is and how to pursue it. He also wrote that philosophical theories and schools are influenced by the temperament (innate dispositions) and character (learned traits) of the people who construct them.

For example, we can better understand Plato's ideas by studying where and when he lived, his biography, and his personality. A tale popularized by one of his biographers, ...