Why Can't We Be Good?

by Needleman, Jacob

• ISBN13: 9781585426201
• ISBN10: 1585426202
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-01-31
• Publisher: Tarcher

Summary

Here is a rare light on the most troubling-and least understood-aspect of our existence. In Why Can't We Be Good?, the widely respected philosopher Jacob Needleman identifies the crisis that therapists and social philosophers fail to see: As individuals, we know what is good-yet we remain mysteriously helpless to live by the ethical, moral, and religious ideas that are bequeathed to us, and that are intended to guide us in living authentic lives.

Author Biography

Jacob Needleman is a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University, and the former director of the Center for the Study of New Religions at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

Table of Contents

The One Question	p. 1
The First Step	p. 3
The World of Ideas	p. 5
Ideas Alone Are Not Enough	p. 6
But Ideas Are the First Step	p. 7
The Good Universe	p. 10
The Teacher Waits	p. 14
Ideas Live in People	p. 16
God Is One	p. 17
The Pupil Waits	p. 18
One God; Two Hearts	p. 19
The Problem of Evil	p. 20
The Secret of Socrates or Thinking Together as a Work of Love	p. 24
Enter Socrates	p. 26
The Secret of Socrates	p. 27
The Taste of Thinking	p. 28
The Mountain of Plato	p. 30
The Missing Page	p. 32
Freedom from Answers	p. 38
Bread and Stone	p. 40
The Ethics of Communal Thought	p. 43
The Transformation of the Question	p. 44
The World of Appearances	p. 46
Two Halves of One Great Idea	p. 49
The Real World Can Be Known Only by the Real Self	p. 50
The Question of the Heart Is a Moral Demand	p. 50
The Authentic Teacher and the Authentic Seeker	p. 52
A Kind of Love	p. 55
The White Dove	p. 58
A Rehearsal for Morality	p. 59
Life Without Ethics?	p. 60
Turtles	p. 63
Passion and Attention	p. 65
The Shock of the Question	p. 67
The Moral Power of Listening	p. 70
A Movement Toward Conscience	p. 73
Something Exceedingly Fine	p. 76
Love and Listening	p. 77
Between Wonder and Despair	p. 82
On the Way to Good and Evil	p. 91
On the Meaning of the Human Body	p. 95
The Socratic Threshold	p. 97
Interlude: The Garment of the Buddha	p. 100
Glimpses	p. 101
"Knowledge" and Knowledge	p. 103
A New Kind of Body	p. 106
Intermediate Morality	p. 107
The Ethics of Attention	p. 110
Our World and Our Life	p. 110
The Fountain of All That Is Good	p. 112
This New Power of the Mind	p. 114
Real Philosophy	p. 115
The "Least Powerful" Man in the World	p. 116
On the Measure of Friendship	p. 118
An Invitation	p. 120
"Oh, I Forgot!"	p. 124
Dr. Kinder's Misunderstanding	p. 125
Mary Adijian's Discovery	p. 128
The Ethics of Attention II	p. 132
Why Do Moral Codes Fail?	p. 136
I Am My Attention	p. 138
The First Obligation of Man	p. 140
The Great Aim of Education	p. 141
The Two Moralities	p. 142
The Log-off Club	p. 145
The Tragedy of Attention	p. 148
What Is Evil? And Why Does Evil Exist?	p. 148
The Anguish of Fred Prozi	p. 152
The Face of Fred Prozi	p. 156
At the Heart of What We Call Ethics	p. 159
The Reconstruction of Mr. Prozi	p. 160
Awakening to Darkness, or the Meaning of Silence	p. 163
Sacred Silence	p. 167
What Is Taken Away? What Is Given?	p. 169
The Essential	p. 175
Not This, Not That	p. 178
The Action of the Guide	p. 179
Words Turn Back	p. 180
Moral Mysticism	p. 180
The Freedom That Leads to Freedom	p. 182
The Ethics of the Lesser Morality	p. 191
The Duty That Is at the Heart of Duty	p. 192
We Are Not Yet Man	p. 194
The Two Truths That Are Errors	p. 198
A Dangerous Question	p. 201
The Greatest Idea in the World	p. 205
Hillel the Elder and the Idea of the Universal Moral Law	p. 205
The Life of Hillel	p. 208
What Did Hillel Find?	p. 212
The Seed and the Fruit of All That is Good	p. 216
Another Dimension of Love	p. 217
If I Am Not for Myself, Who Will Be for Me?	p. 221
And If I Am for Myself Alone, What Am I?	p. 225
The Hidden Bridge: An Essential Digression	p. 227
The Seed and the Fruit of Inner Morality	p. 228
If Not Now, When?	p. 230
The Metaphysics of Morality	p. 236
The Doctrine of Angels and the Obligation Offered to Man	p. 239
The Ethical Animal and the Meaning of Our Freedom	p. 243
A Meditation on Crossing the Socratic Threshold	p. 248
The Great Unknown	p. 249
The Birth of the Human	p. 251
A Transforming Fire	p. 252
The Shock of Love	p. 255
A Kind of Summation: Why Cant We be Good?	p. 257
For Further Reading	p. 265
Notes	p. 275
Index	p. 279
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