ACKNOWLEDGMENTSxi
PREFACE: The Humanistic Meanings of Lifevi
I. HUMAN NATURE, ETHICS, AND THE GOOD LIFE
1. The Tragic Sense of Life and the Dawn of Humanism3
Homer: The Iliad
2. Control Yourself23
Hinduism: Bhagavad-Gita
Buddhism: Dhammapada
3. What Do You Know? How Do You Know It?
Why Should You Care?41
Plato: Euthyphro; Apology; Crito; Phaedo
4. Living the Good Life61
Aristotle: Ethics
5. The Moral Landscape of Hell78
Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy: The Inferno
6. Growing Up Naturally100
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile
7. Enough? Never!121
Johann von Goethe: Faust
8. From the Maggot Man to the Superman136
Friedrich Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morals
9. Condemned to Be Free153
Fyodor Dostoevsky: “The Grand Inquisitor”
Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism
II. LIVING IN THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL WORLD
10. Find the Right Way, Do the Right Thing173
Confucianism: The Analects; The Great Learning;
The Doctrine of the Mean
Taoism: Tao te Ching; Chuang Tzu
11. How to Succeed in the Business of Life191
Niccoló Machiavelli: The Prince
12. So It Seems205
William Shakespeare: Hamlet; Othello; King Lear
Moliére: The Misanthrope
13. The Price of Mis-Education226
Voltaire: Candide
Charles Dickens: Hard Times
14. Democracy as a Way of Life249
James Madison: Federalist Paper #10
Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
John Stuart Mill: On Liberty
15. Through a Class Darkly280
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: The Communist Manifesto
16. We Shall Overcome293
Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”
Elie Wiesel: Night
17. The Psychology of Everyday Life313
Sigmund Freud: Civilization and Its Discontents
18. It's Party Time: The Ethics of Civility328
Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway
III. THE PROMISES AND PERILS OF AESTHETICS, IMAGINATION, ROMANCE
19. The Morality and Immorality of Art345
Plato: Republic
Aristotle: Politics; Poetics
Leo Tolstoy: What Is Art?
20. All Stories Are True371
Islamic Storytelling: The Arabian Nights
Ghanan Folklore: “Why We Tell Stories About Spider”
21. How Beautiful, How Sad385
Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji
22. The Uses of Idealism405
Miguel de Cervantes: The Adventures of Don Quixote
23. The Gifts of Imagination426
William Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads; The Prelude
Percy Bysshe Shelley: “A Defense of Poetry”
24. Fantasies of Seduction and the Seductions of Fantasy446
Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
25. Art for Life’s Sake459
Théophile Gautier: Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin
Walter Pater: Conclusion to The Renaissance
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Thomas Mann: Death in Venice
26. Of Love and Marriage, Passion and Aging480
Gabriel García Márquez: Love in the Time of the Cholera
Notes501
Selected Bibliography523
Index529
