For nearly decades Jacob Needleman has confronted the central questions of our era in light of the vision that lies at the root of the world’s great spiritual traditions. Needleman’s work it takes topics that exist in disparate threads throughout our culture—new religions, esoteric Christianity, the founding mythos of America—and frames them in a manner both sensible and deeply questioning. Needleman calls forth the human meaning hidden in virtually every aspect of our modern lives.
Mitch Horowitz at Parabola recently sat down with him to discuss the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the body. Amid the current talk of “quantum fields” and “consciousness studies,” Needleman returns us to the heart of the matter: Should the mind and body be understood as two aspects of one thing, or as two distinct realities? And what does this mean for our sense of ourselves?
Goodrich Lecture
Indian Springs School
Jacob Needleman
January 22, 2004 THE ONE GREAT QUESTION
I think I should start by saying what I think a philosopher is. As some of you probably know, it means a “lover of wisdom,” somebody who seeks wisdom, who searches for wisdom—in that sense of love as the deep desire for something you do not have, but which you wish for more than anything else. And to say of someone they’re a professional philosopher is very uncomfortable for me because it’s a little like saying someone is a professional lover. Read More (PDF, 130KB).
This inaugural-and all new-Tarcher Cornerstone Edition presents a stunningly relevant and reliable translation of the thoughts and aphorisms of the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, properly placing the philosopher-king’s writings within the vein of the world’s great religious and ethical traditions.
The late antique world possessed no voice like that of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE). His private meditations on what constitutes a good life have withstood the centuries and reach us today with the same penetrating clarity and shining light as the words of Shakespeare, Emerson, or Thoreau.
In this remarkable new translation, bestselling religious philosopher Jacob Needleman and classics scholar John P. Piazza have retained the depth of Marcus’s perspective on life. They have carefully selected and faithfully rendered those passages that clarify Marcus’s role as someone who stood within the great religious and ethical traditions that extend throughout every culture in human history. The voice that emerges from their translation is a universal one, equally recognizable to students of Christ, Buddha, the Vedas, the Talmud, and to anyone who sincerely searches for a way of meaning in contemporary life.
Author Jacob Needleman visits Google to discuss his book, “Why Can’t We Be Good?” This event took place on April 30, 2007, as part of the Authors@Google series.
The widely respected social philosopher embarks on his most gripping and broadly appealing work, asking the ultimate question of human nature: Why do we repeatedly violate our most deeply held values and beliefs?
For all our therapies, resolutions, self-help programs, and the vast religious and ethical literature available to men and women today, we return again and again to the same limiting and predictable behaviors, vowing to do better “next time.”
And far beyond the travails of our everyday existence-although sometimes intruding upon it with a ghastly shock-we witness a world twisted in conflict and warfare in which religious systems are continually used to justify slaughter. For sensitive people everywhere, the question resounds: Why can’t we be good?
After nearly forty years of weighing humanity’s deepest dilemmas-working in settings ranging from university and high school classrooms to corporate offices and hospitals - bestselling author, philosopher, and religious scholar Jacob Needleman presents the most urgent, deeply felt, and widely accessible work of his career. In Why Can’t We Be Good? Needleman identifies the core problem that therapists and social philosophers fail to see. He depicts the individual human as a being who knows what is good, yet who remains mysteriously helpless to innerly adopt the ethical, moral, and religious ideas that are bequeathed to him.
In his jarring depiction of this most misunderstood of dilemmas, Needleman takes the reader through various settings and case studies: a college classroom, where students of all ages and backgrounds agonize to define goodness in an era marked by relativism and fundamentalism; a chilling psychological experiment from a generation earlier that reveals the capacity for brutality that lurks within us all-and our inability to see it; ancient stories from Rabbinic Judaism and mystical Christianity where, possibly, esoteric schools have left fragments of their own deep inner understanding of humanity’s predicament and how to begin addressing it; and the words of Socrates, which lay bare the problems of the human psyche while hinting at a missing element that would serve to instruct us not merely on that which is good, but on how to commence our own efforts toward becoming the kind of men and women we are capable of being.
In Heart of Philosophy, Needleman explores philosophy and how our human search for meaning is integral to our lives. Needleman documents his experiences teaching courses in philosophy at a high school, and shows to us how real philosophy, the love and search for meaning, is a fact of human nature.
“Needleman brings a scholar’s knowledge along with a personal warmth to this work, producing a provocative and moving study. Socrates and Plato emerge as living beings whose teaching are as vital and relevant today as they were 2300 years ago, making one feel that philosophy can play an invaluable role in aiding one’s own personal transformation.”
Our primary drive as humans, say the authors of this anthology of religious and philosophical writings, is not sexual or to do with any biological or socially conditioned impulse: It is hunger for meaning.
It is only in addressing the huge, fundamental questions such as “Who am I?”, “Why death?” and the like that humankind finds itself capable of
withstanding the worst and abiding in the best. The selections in this book are a survey of that universal quest for understanding and are particularly relevant to the awakening taking place in the world today as old orders crumble. The authors call this questioning real philosophy. It is not academic: it know that intellect must be coupled with feeling in order to nourish the whole person and the holistic vision.
Heraclitus, The Grail, Chuang Tzu, St. Augustine, The Upanishads and the Epic of Gilgamesh, Dostoyevsky, Tagore, Wittgenstein, Rilke, to name but a few—such are the guardians of the traditional human values we need to reclaim as individuals in order to break the spell both of ’scientism’ and ‘religionism’ and to rediscover our own moral worth.
Watch this conversation at Cody’s Books and the First Congregational Church of Berkeley in Berkeley, CA. Filmed on 04/24/07.
Buy this book from Amazon.
Read the new introduction for the paperback release (PDF, 28KB).
Co-authored by Jacob Needleman and David Appelbaum