Leading a Worthy Life: Finding Meaning in Modern Times

by Leon R. Kass

Overview

Most American young people, like their ancestors, harbor desires for a worthy life: a life of meaning, a life that makes sense. But they are increasingly confused about what such a life might look like, and how they might, in the present age, be able to live one. With a once confident culture no longer offering authoritative guidance, the young are now at sea—regarding work, family, religion, and civic identity. The true, the good, and the beautiful have few defenders, and the higher cynicism mocks any innocent love of wisdom or love of country. We are super-competent regarding efficiency and convenience; we are at a loss regarding what it’s all for.

Yet because the old orthodoxies have crumbled, our “interesting time” paradoxically offers genuine opportunities for renewal and growth. The old Socratic question, “How to live?”, suddenly commands serious attention. Young Americans, if liberated from the prevailing cynicism, will readily embrace weighty questions and undertake serious quests for a flourishing life. All they (and we) need is encouragement.

This book provides that necessary encouragement by illuminating crucial (and still available) aspects of a worthy life, and by defending them against their enemies. With chapters on love, family, and friendship; human excellence and human dignity; teaching, learning, and truth; and the great human aspirations of Western civilization, it offers people who are looking on their own for meaning, and as well as to people who are looking to deepen what they have been taught or to square it with the spirit of our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594039416
Publisher:	Encounter Books
Publication date:	12/19/2017
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Leon R. Kass is the Madden-Jewett Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Professor Emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Originally trained in medicine (M.D., Chicago, 1962) and biochemistry (Ph.D., Harvard, 1967), he shifted directions from doing science to thinking about its human meaning, and he has been engaged for almost fifty years with ethical and philosophical issues raised by biomedical advance, and, more recently, with broader moral and cultural issues. He taught at St. John’s College (Annapolis) and Georgetown Universitybefore returning in 1976 to the University of Chicago, where he was until 2010 an award-winning teacher deeply involved in undergraduate education and committed to the study of classic texts. His books include: The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature; Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marrying (with Amy A. Kass); Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics; The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis; and What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song (with Amy A. Kass and Diana Schaub). Dr. Kass served on the National Council on the Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities; in 2009 he delivered the Jefferson Lecture for the NEH. From 2001-2005, he was Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, which, under his direction, produced seven books on topics ranging from human cloning to biotechnical enhancement to the care of the elderly. In 2003, he was one of four inaugural recipients of the Bradley Prize.

Table of Contents

Introduction 9

1 Finding Meaning in Modern Times: An Overview 23

I Love, Family, and Friendship: Some Reflections on Modern Culture

2 The End of Courtship 39

3 The Higher Sex Education: Help from an Old Story (with Amy Kass) 62

4 Virtually Intimate: Is the Internet Good for Love and Friendship? 87

5 What's Your Name? (with Amy Kass) 109

II Human Excellence and Human Dignity: Real and Distorted

6 Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness 137

7 Human Dignity: What It Is and Why It Matters 159

8 For the Love of the Game: The Dignity of Sport (with Eric Cohen) 179

9 A Dignified Death and Its Enemies: Why Doctors Must Not Kill 202

10 A More Perfect Human: The Promise and Peril of Modern Science 228

III In Search of Wisdom: Learning, Teaching, and Truth

11 The Aims of Liberal Education: On Seeking Truth 249

12 Lookinng for an Honest Man: The Case for the Humanities 272

13 Science, Religion, and the Human Future 294

IV The Aspirations of Humankind: Athens, Jerusalem, Gettysburg

14 Human Flourishing and Human Excellence: The Truth(s) of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics 323

15 The Ten Commandments 346

16 The Gettysburg Address: Abraham Lincoln's Refounding of the Nation 375

Acknowledgments 389

Notes 391

Index 397

Editorial Reviews

Leon Kass's new book is a gift so great that one feels any expression of thanks to be inadequate. Kass deals with fundamental subjects with an extraordinary combination of grace and depth; he shows us how a life of penetrating questioning can lead to a deep and powerful understanding of the human things.

William Kristol

As a scientist, humanist and teacher of the young, Leon Kass has studied the ills of late 20th century American culture as closely as anyone, never failing to ask the big questions: what is a worthy life and how can one live it? In these sobering but hopeful essays, Kass ponders the challenges and the prospects for finding meaning in family life, work, public service and the quest for knowledge under present circumstances. Each essay is a treasure, to read, ponder, and read again.

Mary Ann Glendon

Learned Hand Professor of Law, Harvard University

Leon Kass presents the attractions of morality in subtle detail and graceful prose. His essays, most of them done with his late wife Amy Kass, seek to grasp what is permanent rather than charge or drift into restless, unmeaning change. Neither grouch nor censor, Kass earns his readers' respect for argument, utility, and wisdom.

Harvey Mansfield

Professor of Government, Harvard

Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution

From the Publisher