I read 100 Philosophical Books. Here's the best one.

I remember feeling completely aimless in high school. None of my classes felt particularly meaningful to me. I would sit in class, stare straight ahead, and my mind would often just wander. At home, I would try to avoid thinking too much by playing video games or watching TV. At a time in my life when I should have been growing, I was stagnating. I just really didn't care, and that's kind of when I started getting interested in philosophy.

I took a philosophy class with a teacher who was very passionate about it, and that passion affected me deeply. He read philosophical books to the class and would show us inspiring movies. I started reading some of those books on my own, and I was inspired to live my life differently. I can't say I adhere to a specific philosophy or religion, but I definitely live what I feel is a more meaningful existence. I look at the world in a more clear way.

After reading over a hundred philosophy books, I definitely have my favorites. For this video, I picked the books that had the biggest impact on how I think. They've stayed with me, and my mind frequently returns to them when I think about life's bigger questions. The book Ishmael follows a nameless protagonist who responds to an ad in the newspaper. It's from a teacher of sorts, looking for a student who is generally interested in saving the world.

When the narrator arrives for his first lesson, his teacher turns out to be a gorilla who can speak to him telepathically. The gorilla's name is Ishmael. The gorilla's goal is legitimately to save the world. He believes that human civilization is instructed by a myth that will lead to its own destruction and that of the natural world. The myth is that nature is an evil to be conquered, that life is humans versus nature rather than humans living in harmony with it.

Only by rejecting this deeply embedded myth can humans avoid annihilation. It's a beautiful book that asks us to question the narratives in our lives that support a destructive way of life. It's a myth that we still largely live, even if we're willing to acknowledge our destructive ways. We still resign to them almost by default; we look for ways to control the natural world.

Aristotle likened all things, including humans, to an acorn. Everything has a purpose or a telos, and just as the acorn's telos is to become a tree, the telos for humanity is to use reason. It's what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. From this point of privileging human reasoning, Aristotle developed his virtue ethics. It is a different way of thinking about morality than we're used to. It's not about establishing a code for right and wrong, but adjusting your behavior to become virtuous.

To act with virtuous behavior is to exercise reason. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines virtue as a mean between two extreme states of excess and deficiency. He referred to it as the golden mean. When considering courage, a virtuous person, for Aristotle, finds a middle ground between recklessness and cowardice. One is a deficiency, and the other is in excess. The golden mean wasn't intended to be the same for everyone. Aristotle acknowledged that we're all different, and what is virtuous for one might not be virtuous for another.

For example, a middle ground between recklessness and cowardice is likely different for someone with a serious medical condition. The Nicomachean Ethics is an exciting philosophical text because you can immediately incorporate its virtue ethics into your daily life. It's something you can take to work when considering how much space to take up in a meeting or how much to drink at a party. You find the golden mean using reason.

Trying to understand Buddhism can be overwhelming. In the 2,000 years plus since the Buddha first sat under the Bodhi tree, a lot of very different schools of thought have grown out of his teachings. What the Buddha taught brings it all back to the basic teachings of the Buddha. You get a foundational understanding of the core concepts of suffering, no self, and the path to enlightenment.

The Buddhist teachings can be a great way to think about our daily existence and how endless craving impacts our well-being. We get hooked on buying things to make us happy, and we cling to all the stuff we own. We cling to the people in our lives and to our own sense of self, only for these attachments to hurt us deeply over and over again. But as the Buddha says, there is a path out of the cycle, and it's definitely worth reading about.

In the teachings of the Buddha, you learn to unlearn your ingrained notion of the self as something permanent. In Zen Buddhism, you're trying to uproot thinking in terms of a self and no self at all. You're also letting go of the Buddha himself. We commonly think of Zen as being in the moment, and this isn't actually too far off. In a way, Zen Buddhism is a very deep dive into what it actually means to exist purely in the moment, which entails letting go of the idea of the moment itself.

The goal of Zen Buddhism is to grasp the real nature of your own mind. You need to go beyond logic, words, and concepts. Everyday language fails to convey it. It's the ultimate peace of mind, and it comes from your inner being. In this introduction to Zen Buddhism, you get an understanding of what Zen is and what it is not.

And also how Zen is also what it is not. Before we go on, if you're interested in philosophy, chances are you're also interested in science and technology. If that's you, then I have the best recommendation for you: brilliant.org. This is a sponsor of today's video. I've been using Brilliant for almost five years now, and I can confidently say that it's one of the best ways to learn STEM subjects.

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Back to our story: like other existentialists, Simone de Beauvoir insisted that existence precedes essence. We create our own essence through our choices and actions. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, she expands on this core idea to create a moral obligation for how we treat others. Whereas we usually consider ourselves free to make the choices that change who we are, we often don't consider other people the same way. We tend to treat them as something fixed based on their past, and even worse, humans literally treat others as material things—things that exist for another.

The moral obligation here is to treat others as ambiguous. We start to think of them as free to create their own essence rather than exist for another as a material thing in the world. It's this ethics of ambiguity that supports Beauvoir's feminism. Women are more likely to be thought of as existing for another, and their ambiguity is more likely ignored.

Based on the teachings of Adlerian psychology and philosophy, Ichiro Kishimi guides you through living a more fulfilling life on your own terms. A dialogue between a young student and a philosopher frames a number of lessons about how to develop yourself into a well-rounded person. The book starts by rejecting the idea that the past shapes your identity. According to Adler, your choices in the moment are what shape you.

He moves on to discuss the most important areas for developing a well-rounded and purposeful life. These include a meaningful work life, routine, healthy relationships, deep intimacy and trust, and a rigorous self-development routine. But most importantly, you need the courage to be disliked. You have to let go of the approval of others to embrace a well-rounded life in an authentic way.

In Crime and Punishment, the protagonist, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, does something you rarely see the hero of a story do: he murders someone in cold blood and then another to cover his tracks. It's a brutal act that leaves Raskolnikov tortured by his actions. Before the murder, he rationalizes his plan to kill the woman. He thinks of her as a nasty old pawnbroker who exploits people. He needs the pawnbroker's money, and just feels justified by his belief that all great people should be exempt from laws in their pursuit of the greater good.

He envisions himself to be extraordinary, like Napoleon or Alexander the Great. But justifying an action in your own mind is much different than dealing with the emotions and persecution afterwards. Rodion suffers greatly, existing in a feverish state until the novel's resolution. Raskolnikov is also living through a time of political upheaval. Russia is transitioning from medieval traditions to westernization, and like with all political transitions, many get left behind for the greater good.

It's a philosophical novel that has a wide range of interpretations, from existentialist to a complex psychological and political drama. It's definitely worth pondering when you have the time and are in a good place emotionally. Human life is absurd. We desperately search for meaning in a world that has none.

To discover this constant futile struggle is what Albert Camus refers to as the absurd. In his novel The Stranger, the main character, Meursault, has abandoned any attempt to find meaning in his life. He experiences a sequence of absurd events and is indifferent to them. When his mother dies at the beginning of the novel, he is just unmoved. This lack of any belief system alienates the protagonist from others. His disposition ultimately becomes his downfall, as he's eventually judged for his inability to find meaning in anything.

The Stranger is a great way to experience the feeling of the absurdity in life and is a good comparison to Camus's essay The Myth of Sisyphus. The existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed that after the death of the belief in God, humanity needed something to fill the void. Otherwise, we would sink into a state of nihilism, ultimately leading to a preoccupation with distractions. He referred to this state of being as the last man.

His answer to this problem of nihilism was the concept of the Übermensch. He believed humanity should strive to continually overcome itself by affirming all of existence. Where religion and philosophy shame many aspects of life with morality, the Übermensch would say yes to it all. They would affirm all the pain, suffering, and joy of the world and be free to determine their own values.

Ultimately, the Übermensch is the best a human can be when relieved of religion and dated moralities. In his literary work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche presents us with a prophet to guide humanity to the Übermensch. In the book, Zarathustra struggles to get his followers to embrace this ultimate affirmation, as he too struggles to affirm things such as the God he declares to be dead.

It's a great guide for radical self-making and self-affirmation. When we're constantly confronted with morality and shame at every turn, despite these pressures, we can affirm our own existence and be carefree. We certainly don't need to attempt to become this Übermensch, but maybe we can find a healthier attitude to life by rejecting shame and being able to embrace some of the pain in our life along with the joy.

In this sci-fi classic, a scientist in the field of psychohistory predicts that his Galactic Civilization will collapse in a near 30,000-year period of chaos and destruction. But the same psychohistorian, Hari Seldon, believes he can shorten this period of turmoil to a thousand years by creating two foundations. Within these foundations are the catalyst for a new Galactic Empire.

The book addresses several philosophical themes throughout, including one central ethical dilemma: is it justifiable to manipulate large populations in order to bring about a more desirable future? There's also the question of whether science can master the full complexity of life. Can large populations really be predicted with certainty, or will complexity always undermine such an attempt? And if free will exists, will it make such predictions impossible?

As with any good philosophical literature, we're left with plenty of questions to contemplate. These were the best philosophy books I read, or at least they're the ones that had the biggest impact on me. Like none of the genre, philosophy will shake your core beliefs and challenge your outlook on life. Even if it sounds like a painful thought, I promise you it's worthwhile.