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Question Duty, engagement, rules, living a life "conditioned" vs. one free, maybe unconventional, following our own inspiration even if it doesn't seem supported by what we call "common sense". Many of us live a life that often is the result of choices influenced by many different conditionings, sometimes unhappily. It is not easy for everybody to understand what one really wants for himself in this life, and strong moral conditioning prevents radical choices. Where I should find more about this topic ? Thank you.

Accepted:
August 26, 2010

Comments

There are a number of classic works that treat the sorts of issues that you raise. (Interestingly, for what it's worth, relatively few contemporary 'analytic' philosophers have engaged these issues.) Chief among them, perhaps--at least in the Western tradition--are Plato's Republic and the New Testament, both of which, I think, are concerned with the kinds of issues that you mention. More relatively recent works that engage the topics that you mention include Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, and Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness. (Sartre, of course, is the popularizer of the notion of 'radical choice'.) A very recent book by a living philosopher that treats the issues to which you refer is Susan Wolf's Meaning in Life and What Matters.