I had another amazing morning reading Bernstein. As I’ve said before, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism triggered a major turning point in my intellectual life. Rereading it, I’ll also say it is one of the clearest, most insightful and most useful books I’ve ever read. I meant to post some excerpts from what I read this morning, but now I want to make a list of the books that have changed me.

1987: Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
The idea paraphrased by my ethics professor, “A good man has learned to love what is good,” has dominated my ethical thought since I heard it. A taste for virtue is cultivated through habit.

1993: Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind
This was my first glimpse of the purpose of education, beyond mere training and credentialing. I read this right after I graduated from college, and I’ve ached over wasting my time in school ever since. I don’t think this is an especially great book, but it did inspire me to educate myself and it dislodged me from my shallow “liberalism”.

1995: Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones
This was my first genuinely literary experience – a story meant less as narrative than an existential demonstration – and my first exposure to someone I recognized as experiencing the world in a distinctive way that was similar to my own experience. I didn’t fully realize how unusual my experience of the world was until I found myself feeling at home in Borges’s stories and essays.

1995: Carl Jung’s Psychological Types
Learning that I was a particular type, and not completely unique, that other recognizable types existed (very differently from me) around me, and that I could relate to them better by understanding their typological perspective were earth-shattering discoveries. I was obsessed with personality type for a decade.

1996: Houston Smith’s The World’s Religions
Smith’s chapter on Buddhism persuaded me to study and practice Theravada Buddhism. This was the point when I became serious about spiritual knowledge. The experience of meditation showed me a number of my fundamental truths: the composite nature of being, the ephemerality of consciousness, the autonomy of thoughts. This was also the first time the nations of the world made sense to me and had cultural reality: nations were characterized by the religions that formed their character.

2001: Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language
This book grounded my professional activities (design) in my spiritual interests, and triggered an ecstatic psychosis that lasted five years.

2003: Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil
Nietzsche intensified my ecstatic psychosis – and iteratively destroyed my conceptions of life and forced me to reconstitute them. Under his influence I re-grounded myself in something akin to philosophical idealism/existentialism/phenomenology and began to understand poetry and religious texts in an immediate way. The experience of reading Nietzsche was something I struggled to describe. Even the insights I had reading him defied language, and the need to communicate became increasingly painful over time.

2006: Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism
Bernstein showed me that philosophy, despite its apparent individualist character, is in fact rooted in the social. Bernstein gave me language for my experiences with Nietzsche. At first, I thought the value of Bernstein and those he inspired me to read (Gadamer and Heidegger) was merely the capacity to describe the hermeneutic process, but over the years the substance of Bernstein’s philosophy has become as important to me as Nietzsche’s.

2008: Martin Buber’s Between Man and Man
Buber opened the transcendent dimension of the inter-human and social for me – the Thou – the “where two or more are gathered in my name” – and caused me to reconsider morality and the ethics of many forms of existential philosophy and spirituality. In fact, many philosophies are attempts to persuade the thinker to practical solipsism (I’ve called it “artificial autism”) – a self-protective insulation from genuine inter-human experience. The existentialist ideal is to live in subjectively inert parallelism, each subject surrounded by objects enclosed in the thinker’s own autonomous subjectivity. The ethic of the existentialist is this: I will behave as an object within your sole subjectivity if you will return the favor to me. The existentialist is alergic to the idea of shared subjectivity: the subject is essentialy individual.