How to live an intellectually rich life

I am about a quarter of the way through Modern Library’s top 100 and it has been a worthwhile journey. It is “just” literary fiction but it is among the best humanity has produced. I have learned so much about the human condition, my ability to articulate ideas has improved tremendously, and I feel like my mind has been “freed from the tyranny of the present” (to quote Cicero).

https://sites.prh.com/modern-library-top-100

"Be careful… about this reading you refer to, this reading of many different authors and books of every description. You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind."

- Seneca, Letters

I was surprised to learn that the temptation to read too many things was also a problem 2,000 years ago. This inspired me to work on a short list of books that I know deeply.

St John's College is known for their Great Books curriculum - the foundation of their four year program - where students read the primary text of western civilization.

It's always held a soft spot in my heart as my own experience was mostly reading derivative descriptions and the rare times when I was able to read a primary text during my coursework were always my happiest memories.

1. https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-bo...

Based on your interest in Tacitus and Thucydides, I might recommend the The Histories of Polybius. [1] It is absolutely mind-blowing to me that he actually witnessed the events he writes about, and how analogous it is to modern-day geopolitics.

By the way, thank you for providing your list of books - I picked up a few future reads from it.

1. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44125/44125-h/44125-h.htm

One of my personal favorites, but a very difficult read: _Summa Technologiae_ by Stanislaw Lem. It's so difficult I haven't actually finished it. It's remarkably dense.

I like your idea, but it's missing any sort of practical skills (which Dantes and Faria certainly had).

What would be more interesting, IMHO, books that Cyrus Smith from The Mysterious Island had memorized.

Just from what I saw on HN, I remember Gingery books on metal workshop from scratch, and some homesteading manual from late 19th century.

> reading one non-fiction book from each major section of the Dewey Decimal system catalog

This actually sounds really fun. Not so much in an optimized way, but more like just going to the library and picking a decimal heading and then just selecting a cool-looking book in that heading and reading it, then repeat.

I only read great literature, classics, history books my whole life. This year (Aged 48) I decided to pepper in a "fluff" book or two. I forced myself to read something I normally wouldn't. I read "The Situation" (Jersey Shore) and Mathew Perry (Friends) "auto" biographies. I actually had some profound insights about depression and substance abuse from those two. Of course, I don't recommend you read either, but if you never read "airport fiction" or "pop biographies" it might prove interesting.

> But westerners have been doing stuff like this for ages and prattling on about it - it's kind of a cornerstone of Orientalism. This was actually a plot point in the recent White Lotus season. People rarely go to Appalachia to have these experiences, but you certainly can find people living simple happy lives there.

I think you're moralizing over a pretty bland bit of psychology: people need to be shaken from their frame of reference to see different parts of the world. Even if they exist next door. For many Americans, Appalachia will be too close to home to force off the blinders.

I've flown all over the US for work, and in every location found the same exact city. It's hard to take away someone's footing when they feel at home. OTOH, the preconditions that gave me many life broadening experiences within 100 miles of a single US city are not available to everyone.

Assigning someone internal character traits so that their external practice of respectful travel can still be judged is cruel.

Rather reminds me of Pratchetts character Lu-Tze, who having seen so many travel to the monasteries to achieve enlightenment decides to travel to Ankh Morpork and learns many ancient wisdoms ('Is it not written "Oo, you are so sharp you'll cut yourself one of these days."?')

It’s a common trope among urban Indians. They’re enamoured by the simple and rustic living of the villages and think of them as noble savages.

I grew up in rural India and I always recommend people to read Dr. Ambedkar’s rights on this subject.

I agree that this is a common trope but the rest of your comment reads like, "Hey westerners, go find your own rural people and stop appropriating mine".

Also completing your logic loop, this guy is apparently stealing intellectual ideas from (mediocre) westerners.

There’s also some self-selection here.

If you go to another place and someone lets you stay with them, they are probably in a good place in life. You are selecting yourself to meet with happier people.

You won’t be making as many friends with unhappy people.

A simpler explanation is that Americans have succumbed to consumerism to such an extent that the absence of it feels enlightened.

Of course the reality is just that the US has become the axis of evil, and perhaps always was, it just had the best PR.

I think you're doing yourself a disservice by belitting Asian cultures and what insights they may have, that are apparently incomprehensible as more than a trope to Americans.

Well, maybe there's something to it. I think it's great when East meets West. East should keep meeting West over and over and over. Maybe one day East will know West and vice versa.

For what it's worth, I had something of a similar experience, but it was in a plywood shack on a desert island off the coast of California.

The America's have the 'noble savage' trope to find enlightenment with. It became so blatantly co-opting anothers' religion that many Native American tribes still refuse to teach non-tribal members there spiritual practices.

personally I believe that

philosophy helps to "compress" more knowledge about the world into "less" knowledge by shifting quantity of data into difficulty from advanced conceptual abstractions

Nothing ends at philosophy. They reach there, but they can reach lots of different places. Without scrolling on philosophy I can see more than 50 other links from that page that are thus reachable from anywhere by at most one more step.

Pick a random thing and see if it is reachable from anywhere. A lot of them are. I suspect most are, but I don't know how to run this study (other than a brute force algorithm that will use more compute than I would want to dedicate)

I think you’d be interested in Tolstoy’s view of “Philosophy”, which he expresses in “Confession / What I Believe”.

Basically that the reason why philosophy is cold and meaningless is because it tries to separate itself from the source of meaning, which is intrinsically subjective and physical and spiritual.

Philosophy’s logical conclusions are relativism and nihilism (or at least they were in Tolstoy’s time? I’m not a philosopher), because they try to understand the world with a pretext that denies its vitality.

Common folk / common sense frown on these forms of philosophy, because they miss the point in a sense; they don’t actually tell you how to live in a moral way. Tolstoy thought intellectuals grossly underrated the perspective of folk wisdom in that way. We’ve made some progress in that department, since his time, but it’s still largely true today.

Philosophy is like math for humanities.

Years ago I realized that if I bluntly categorize the things I do with my free time into buckets of "productive" and "consumptive" it's the productive things that make me feel pretty great.

My very brief stint into woodworking and machining gave me a lifetime of looking at random objects from really close. Seeing how things are manufactured makes you look at every man-made object differently. It gives you a rare appreciation for craftsmanship and clever engineering. There are whole museum sections that have suddenly opened up to me.

I credit a few YouTube channels for creating the spark: The Engineer Guy, This Old Tony, AvE, Pask Makes, Xyla Foxlin to name a few.

“Anyone who reads poetry to improve their mind will never improve their mind by reading poetry.” CS Lewis.

I find consumer vs producer to be very interesting and useful distinction. Sometimes very enlightening and somewhat scary when applied to personal time spending.

this. folks just end up being smarmy snobs about what is universal truth when the goal should be leveraging this knowledge to produce new things/ideas

I've been trying to create/produce more but I'm stuck in the consumption mindset. I can't think of what to create. How did you decide what useful things to produce?

I agree. Knowledge-seeking can become a defense or excuse not to take action. I think it can be enriching, particularly when young, but there's a balance in everything.

Good insight about how feelings of 'superiority' or 'sophistication' can suck the joy out of life. I fell into this trap myself, and it took a long time to get out of it.

That said, there are times when a certain type of appreciation of 'sophistication' is warranted - you just shouldn't use it to believe you are therefore above other people, or beyond the simple pleasures of life.

Superiority and sophistication might ironically make you less curious and appreciative.

I personally found this very tedious to read and hard to follow. The author veered into weird unrelated tangents and came across of too self indulgent at times. I would rather read Seneca or Cicero instead of this.

Came here to say the same. Excessive writing itself is a form of self indulgence and comes across as sloppy.

Conciseness is really undervalued. Long and meandering is okay for a personal journal or diary, but if you're sharing it with the world, be concise.

Philosophy is just one of the liberal arts. This idea has declined in popularity in recent years but I still think there's a lot to be said for possessing a liberal arts education. If you have a good one your understanding of the world around you gets broader and deeper. You recognize why things are the way they are. In the long term you may spot opportunities you wouldn't have otherwise, or be able to solve problems that would have seemed intractable. Maybe most importantly you end up developing a sophisticated moral framework that's grounded in history and all the things that eventually led up to you existing and living the life you live.

You don't have to major in a liberal art or even go to college to get one, you can just read books. You also don't have to learn it all in your early 20s. You can just incorporate the great works into what you read throughout your adult life. It's very easy to find lists and recommendations online for what you should read if you want a broad-based liberal education. The general idea is simply to be informed about and understand the foundational concepts in philosophy, economics, political science, psychology, history, sociology, law, and so on. There is no need to go deep in any one them, unless you find it interesting and wish to do so. Someone who reads one or two foundational works in each of these subjects will have a wildly better understanding of the world than someone who doesn't. To me this is what living an intellectually rich life is and it's very rewarding. If nothing else, due to my liberal arts education I will never be bored in retirement, there are thousands of books that I would find it interesting to read.

> Philosophy can be valuable, but applying the ideas meaningfully requires discernment. I’m thinking particularly about the popularity of “Meditations”, for example.

From one translation of Meditations (I forget which), and from memory, so I may have it slightly wrong:

"You can live your life in a calm flow of happiness, if you learn to think the right way, and to act the right way".

The act the right way is the hard part. The frame-of-mind stuff that lots of people focus on is necessary, but not sufficient. On its own it can be of some help, but it can also lead to traps like going too easy on one's own deficiencies of action. The thinking bits that get most of the attention, at least in stoicism, are largely reactive—the acting is proactive, as is the thinking to support it (which gets less attention in popular takes on Stoicism, and is harder).

>But let’s not overly-romanticize ancient thinkers: Plato and Aristotle held fundamentally different views on knowledge.

1) everyone agrees “overly” Romanticizing is wrong. By definition of “overly”.

2) why should having a fundamentally different view on knowledge disqualify something from being romanticized? Isnt romanticizing precisely for things that are different?

3) i think its a mischaracterization to say Plato thought “ knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives.” He was not talking about “past lives” but the “soul” (which I think wed both agree is a loaded term). He said the soul knew it before the person was born. This goes to his theory on the forma which I think is a better way to characterize his thoughts on knowledge. In general terms id say he believes truth exists in a timeless, non-empirical realm (the Forms). With the physical reality being an imperfect imitation. Which people have some mediated access to.

The dialogue you refer to is Meno and the idea is a solution to “Meno’s Paradox”.

I like How To Think Like a Roman Emperor's analysis of Meditations but maybe it falls into pop self-help/psychology, it discusses the history around the text and how modern psychology has similarities with some of the techniques and aphorisms.

Here's how I would put this: reading the classics can be valuable, but if you want to become wise you need philosophy.

Philosophy isn't a set of ideas or texts. It's a practice.

> Take Plato, for example: He and his also-famous mentor believed knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives, an idea illustrated with an unconvincing geometry lesson in Phaedo (EDIT: It’s Meno).

I find the line of thought in "Meno" extremly impressiv. Let me try to reformulate it in modern terms.

The literary form of a dialogue emphasizes that the thoughts of the participants should not be considered as doctrines, but the whole as an investigation of a problem domain.

The dialogue starts with a distinction between empirical knowledge ("The way to Larisa") and mathematical knowledge. Empirical knowledge is something that I cannot know from introspection. In contrast, the nature of mathematical knowledge comes from inside the mind. This is demonstrated by an uneducated, but smart child (a slave boy). The child is guided to discover a mathematical insight by questions alone. At first the boy does not know the right answer to an initial question. Then Socartes starts again with a simple question the boy is able to answer. Then a sequence of other questions follows each building on the previous answers. Socrates only questions, the boy only answers. Finally the boy arrives at the correct answer of the initial question whose answer he did not know at the start.

This scene should demonstrate the essence of mathematical proof. First we do not know the answer of a mathematical problem. Step-by-step we clarify our understanding, until we arrive at an answer. At this stage we know whether the particular mathematical statement is true or false. We expanded our understanding by only just thinking. In one way it is new knowledge (we now know something we did not, when we looked for a proof), in another way the knowledge was always there, just hidden in our mind.

At this point Socrates hits a limit where he runs out of questions to invistigate this further. This is when he starts to tell a story (the greek word for story is "myth"). Such stories are just tools to further investigate a problem when purely theoretical thoughts come to an end. In the dialogue it is also accompanied by a lot of joking, and "let me speculate" and "don't take it too serious" sort of remarks. So he reminds his fellows about some old stories (that he adapts and decorates a little to match the problem) about reincarnation where one looses the memory of one's past life but has occasionally some sort of flashbacks. This is more or less the whole point of the story: Perhaps we should think of mathematical knowledge as analogous to memory, but in a in a transcendent way.

Our modern doctrins are not very much off: Our ability of mathematical thinking is something that is inherent to us, more specifically to our brains. The blueprint (a sort of memory?) for our brains are in our genes. This way we are a sort of reincarnation of our parents, but in a state were we have to undergo all the mathematical training again.

What Plato lacks is a theory of evolutionary epistemology. But this is a really new development.

This reads like someone accidentally posted their Linkedin motivational slop on HN.

Polonius. You forgot "never a borrower nor a lender be".

nah..do whatever the fuck you want.

I think one of the advantages of reading very old material is a) it's not bogged down by modern ideology, b) imparting the realization that some human issues and ideas have been around a very long time (see for instance dialogues in Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War), b) some ideas and insights have a timelessness to them. Take for instance the Tao Te Ching. I found it retains influential power, despite my not being completely on board.

I don't think this article is encouraging the reader to obsess on the pursuit of knowledge at the expense of family, work, or personal happiness.