my mind on books

Love, Life, Goethe: Lessons of the Imagination from the Great German Poet by John Armstrong

I don’t often read biographies, so this is not a book I would ordinarily pick up, but since it was there on my local library’s new book shelf, with the subtitle’s promise of “lessons of the imagination,” I took it home and found it to be very readable. (Nice short chapters for one thing.)

Goethe is seen as an example of the reconciliation of life and art; he is able to say that life is good, while still striving to develop himself. (‘I am not here simply to have a good time, but to devote myself to noble objects.’ p. 178)

Goethe is determined to bridge the gaps between creative art and what is called ‘the real world.’ For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries artists have withdrawn their sympathy from the normal conditions of comfortable existence. The artist is at odds with – and critical of ‘bourgeois life.’ …

Goethe’s immense hope was that there need not be – should not be – a spiritual loathing or artistic contempt for that life. Which, after all, is normal life, broadly speaking. If depth of thought, maturity of passion and grace of feeling are to be central to a society, these spiritual qualities have to coexist with the normal demands of life. And Goethe suggests more than coexistence; he is looking at the ways in which the discipline of ‘the real world’ – the demands of power and responsibility – might actually offer special opportunities for personal growth and development. (p. 101)

Another edition has the subtitle “how to be happy in an imperfect world.” Google Book Search page for this title has links to several reviews.

Daniel Gilbert, author of ‘Stumbling on Happiness’ is scheduled to appear on the Colbert Report tonight (Comedy Central, 11:30p/10:30c).

[This is the beginning of a cumulative list to be placed in the sidebar.]

Books published in 2007

Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill by Matthieu Ricard (New York : Little, Brown, 2007)

Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment by Tal Ben-Shahar (New York : McGraw-Hill, 2007)

The Happiness Trip (Sciencewriters) by Eduard Punset (White River Junction, Vt. : Sciencewriters, 2007)

In Search of Happiness: Understanding an Endangered State of Mind by John F. Schumaker (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2007)

earlier books –

Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class by Ronald Dworkin (Carroll & Graf, 2006)

Darwinian Happiness: Evolution as a Guide for Living and Understanding Human Behavior by Bjørn Grinde (Princeton, N.J. : Darwin Press, 2002)

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt (Basic Books, 2006)

Happiness Quantified: A Satisfaction Calculus Approach by Bernard M S van Praag; Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell (Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2004)

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert (New York : Vintage Books, 2007, 2005)

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Blog The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

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Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert received the 2007 Royal Society Prize for Science Books.

p224-227. Gilbert identifies three shortcomings of the imagination that prevent us from knowing what will make us happy: 1. tendency to fill in/leave out things unconsciously, 2. tendency to project the present onto the future, 3. failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen. (Things will look better because the “psychological immune system” will transform meaning.)

The best way to predict is to see how others feel after similar experiences, but “our mythical belief in the variability and uniqueness of individuals is the main reason why we refuse to use others as surrogates” (p 232).

I hope to find a more systematic way of monitoring new & forthcoming titles, but meanwhile here are some that look interesting (found by the “poking around” method). Feel free to add more suggestions in the comments!

Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner (April 3, 2007)
The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong by Jennifer Michael Hecht (April 10, 2007)
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (April 17, 2007)
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo (March 27, 2007)
Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity And the New Science of Ideas by Richard Ogle (Amazon says “June 5, 2007” but it is already available)
Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, And Language by Maxwell Bennett, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle (May 2007)
The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God by David J. Linden (March 31, 2007)
Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind by Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth (May 15, 2007)
The World in My Mind, My Mind in the World: Key Mechanisms of Consciousness in People, Animals and Machines by Igor Aleksander (May 1, 2007)
The Character of Consciousness (Philosophy of Mind) by David Chalmers (March 1, 2008)
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker (September 11, 2007)