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Aprīlis 23., 2012
 | 21:57 - alain de botton: status anxiety
In his "Discourse on the Origin of Inequality" Jean-Jacques Rousseau went on to sketch the history of the world not as a story of progress from barbarism to the great workshops and cities of Europe, but as one of regress away from a privileged state in which we lived simply but had the chance to sound out our needs, towards one where we were apt to feel envy for ways of life with few connections to our own characters. In technologically backward pre-history in Rousseau's state of nature, when men and women lived in forests and had never entered a shop or read a newspaper, the philosopher pictured people more easily understanding themselves, and so being drawn towards essential features of a satisfied life: a love of family, a respect for nature, an awe at the beauty of the universe, a curiosity about others, and a taste for music and simple entertainments. It was from this state that modern commercial "civilization" had pulled us, leaving us to envy and yearn and suffer in a world of plenty.
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Sviesta Ciba |
