The School of Life

One Sentence Summary

Emotional education is as equally important as the education conventional schools are set out to provide. (Life & Botton, 2020)

Key Takeaways

• Romanticism has been deeply committed to casting doubt on the need to apply reason to emotional life, preferring to let spontaneous feelings play an unhampered role instead. (p.2)
• The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humour, sexual understanding and selective resignation. (p.3)
• Akrasia is commonly translated as “weakness of will”, a habit of not listening to what we accept should be heard and a failure to act upon what we know is right. It’s because of akrasia that crucial information is frequently lodged in our minds without being active in them and it is because of akrasia that we often both understand what we should do and resolutely omit to do it. (p.12)

Miscellaneous Notes

• There are two solutions to akrasia (i.e. fragilities of mind) that a successful emotional education must draw upon: Art and Ritual. (p.12)
• The point of art was to render tough or knotty lessons easier to absorb; to nudge our recalcitrant minds towards accepting ideas that we might nod along to but then ignore if they were not stated in especially varnished and graceful terms. (p.12)
• Humanity invented ritual because our problem was that we were prone to forget important ideas even if we have in theory given them our assent. (p.14)
• The best rituals don’t impose upon us ideas but take us back to ideas that we are in deep agreement with yet have allowed to lapse: they are an externally mandated route to inner authenticity.

Reference