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10 Philosophy Books That Will Change How You See the World FOREVER
Matt Karamazov
November 28, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 33 minutes
“These books changed my life” is one of the most overused phrases on the entire internet, but in my case with these 10 philosophy books, it’s absolutely true.
My life was one way before I read them, and by the time I had finished, I looked up and everything was different. The world hadn’t changed, of course, but I had.
These books changed the way I viewed the world forever, simple as that.
A few of them are on the difficult side (I’m thinking of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche, in particular), but in my opinion they’re all 10/10 books, and my notes/summaries below should help you decide which to start with and whether you want to read the whole thing.
Before we get into the philosophy books, though, I wanted to pass along my friend Christopher’s latest book, CAPitalize Your Sales, the follow-up to his previous book, CAPitalize Your Finances, which I read a few years ago and thought was great.
But here’s a philosophical conundrum for you:
Why am I keeping you waiting so long before I dive into these 10 fantastic philosophy books?! I don’t really have a good answer for you, so…
Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
We’ve got lots to learn today, so let’s hit the books!
“I believe you need to be hyper-conscious of the disappearance of time by the minute or the hour - not in retrospect at the end of a week, month, or year - and hyper-conscious of the dollar value of what that time is disappearing into.”
"Looking back on them, looking at a canvas by Van Gogh, or at the manuscript letters of T.E. Lawrence, or at Nijinsky's L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune in the British Museum, we can feel the full poignancy of the fact that these men did not understand themselves, and consequently wasted their powers.
If they had known themselves as well as we can know them, their lives need not have been tragic. The Outsider's first business is self-knowledge."
If ordinary life usually seems a bit...well, ordinary...it may be because the way most human beings live their lives can be compared to an extraordinarily powerful jet airplane flying on only one engine. That's Colin Wilson's basic contention in The Outsider, where he outlines his fundamentally optimistic philosophy of New Existentialism.
It's meant to contrast with the "old" existentialism of philosophers such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, and others for whom the universe is a rather cold, dreary, abysmal place.
While they wrote about futility, "Being-towards-death," the absurd, and the inevitability of suffering, it was always Colin Wilson's contention that there is a deeper, more meaningful, and vibrant dimension to life that all human beings have access to if only they would put forth the proper effort.
I usually avoid using the words "most people," because I don't know "most people." However, it's a safe assumption that most people are nowhere even close to reaching their full potential or to living as deeply and intensely as they could be living if they tried.
Most people just "coast" on one engine, never even realizing that they are much more powerful than they've ever imagined.
The Outsider can be thought of as a survey of some of the most profound responses to urgent questions about existence, meaning in life, and how to confront death. Wilson explores the lives of key literary and cultural figures such as Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, T.E. Lawrence, Vincent van Gogh, H.G. Wells, George Gurdjieff, and a multitude of others, discussing their effects on society, and society's effects on them.
I just happened upon this book one time – I had never heard of it before – and thought it looked interesting, given that he references philosophers and writers I enjoyed reading, such as Kierkegaard, Camus, Dostoyevsky, etc. I had no idea that it would completely change my life forever after and would radically alter how I lived out each day of my one and only life.
“If the whole world were to appear to mortals now, for the first time; if it was suddenly and unexpectedly exposed to their view; what could one think of more marvelous than these things, and which mankind would less have dared to believe?"
If you took a few required philosophy courses in university, hated it, and subsequently wrote off philosophy forever as “not really my thing,” then it probably wasn’t philosophy.
You might have heard some version of this joke where a doctor is asked what he specializes in, and the doctor replies, “I specialize in the treatment of the left earlobe.” The joke is that medicine has become so ultra-specialized and exact - finely technical - that you could have a specialization like that and no one would know if you’re even joking or not!
Well, it’s kind of the same thing in philosophy nowadays. It’s become so unbelievably stuffy and academic that you could present a thesis on “Semiotic De-Temporalization in Abstract Existentialist and Metaphysical Meta-Realities” and you’d probably get your doctorate! Did I make that up? Or is it a real thing? Who knows!
Anyway, it’s so far away from the actual philosophy that real people used to practice to, you know, improve their actual lives! Hadot’s book is about real, honest to goodness philosophy (a word that means love of wisdom), and it’s about real people (everyone from slaves to Roman Emperors) who used it to become mentally stronger, more joyful, less afraid, and more fully alive.
I won’t say that this is an easy read because it’s not. It’s more of a philosophy textbook than something you’d bring with you to the beach, but the whole purpose is to show you that philosophy’s a real, live activity, that can actually improve your one and only life.
Reading it, you’ll see why people like Socrates felt that real communication with other human beings was infinitely superior to knowledge gained from books, how Marcus Aurelius used philosophy to help him run the Roman Empire without losing his mind, and how you can go from where you are now, to where you want to be.
“The evil that is within us is finite, as we are. The good by whose help we fight it is outside us and is infinite. Therefore it is absolutely sure that evil will be vanquished.”
I’d like to introduce you to one of my favorite people ever. Her name is Simone Weil, and I’ve learned more from her than from almost anyone I’ve ever read or been in contact with, ever. That’s three “evers” I just used. That shows you how serious I am!
She might actually be one of the greatest and most compassionate human beings who ever lived (fourth “ever”), and when I think of truth, or goodness, or beauty, or justice, I tend to think of her. She taught me how to listen, how to really “see” other people, how to demand the most from myself, and how to give the most of myself. In fact, Albert Camus (next book on this list) called her “the only great spirit of our time.”
This was back in the middle of the 20th century, as she died in 1943 at the age of 34. Dying so young, you almost have to ask, What could such a brilliant philosopher like her have contributed through her works that would have had a much larger positive impact on the future health and flourishing of humanity?
No one knows, and that’s part of the tragedy and absurdity of her death, which was a result of malnutrition brought on by her refusing to eat any more food than the French citizens were allowed to have during the Nazi occupation in World War II.
What you almost have to respect about her though is her total commitment to her ideals. Unlike pseudo-intellectuals like Karl Marx and friends, she actually spent time working in factories herself so that she could understand more about the life of the urban poor and gain insight into what they were actually like and what they needed.
She didn’t disdain physical labor but instead embraced it as a chance to get closer to what’s most real. She thought it unusual - as I do - that we complain about low pay, but not about soul-crushing work itself. It’s like saying, “That’s not enough money! My soul is worth at least twice that amount!” Ridiculous, right?
As I hope you’ll see from these book notes below, Simone Weil was a very special philosopher, a woman of unimpeachable intellectual honesty, and the possessor of the type of limitless compassion - and stubbornness - that could have only ended with her death. In so many ways, I just wanna be like her!
“At that subtle moment when man glances over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death.
Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well.
This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
This book has no business being as uplifting as it is, given that Camus’s stated aim was to deal with what he considered the most important question in all of philosophy: the question of suicide.
If you’re unfamiliar, in Greek mythology, Sisyphus is the dude who was condemned to push a boulder up a hill for all eternity, which would then roll back down to the very bottom every time he finally reached the top.
Camus uses this myth to explore what he calls the “absurd,” or the contradiction between the deep human need for meaning and the unreasonable silence of the universe in response.
I know, I know, totally uplifting, right? But Camus’s whole deal was that he believed human life should be a revolt against this absurdity, and that one should “live to the point of tears,” which is to say as intensely and passionately as conceivably possible - to give meaning to existence, where none may have existed before.
In the existentialist view, every human being is in the same position as Sisyphus, pointlessly pushing a rock up a hill for all eternity (or at least until we die), with the exception that we have a way out. We can just…well, kill ourselves if we want to.
We don’t have to push the boulder anymore; we can just cease to exist. So, should we? Why or why not?
Exploring that question was Camus’s purpose here, and he comes up with a fundamentally positive, life-affirming answer, one that’s stayed with me ever since I read this beautiful book.
A book that, I will say, is a lot easier and more wonderful to read than pushing a boulder up a hill. And it won’t take forever, either.
“‘Wealthy’ is meaningless and has no robust absolute measure; use instead the subtractive measure 'un-wealth,' that is, the difference, at any point in time, between what you have and what you would like to have."
You thought you knew exactly how the world works. You thought you had the major answers all figured out, and that your personal picture of reality was fully updated. But then, you happen to read just one perfectly-crafted aphorism, quote, or sentence, and then you realize that "Yes! Actually, the world is like that!"
Now imagine an entire book that's like that, containing more than 500 such lightning bolts to the prefrontal cortex, and you'd get something like The Bed of Procrustes, by Nassim Taleb.
It's a collection of aphorisms (memorable expressions of a general truth or principle), that investigate opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. It's also extremely thought-provoking and wise, with valuable insights concerning every vital part of life that we deal with each day.
The aphoristic form is perfectly suited for the purpose of getting us to question our received opinions, because the moment of insight comes on suddenly and catches us off guard. It's not what we were expecting. With short, almost tweet-like brevity, huge concepts are broken down into immediately digestible sentences, and we suddenly "get it."
This is not a book to be read quickly, even though you could finish it in an hour or so if you really wanted to. It's kind of like the Tao Te Ching in that way: you can read it in an hour, but you could study it for a lifetime.
“We resurrect our loved ones whenever we find ourselves thinking and feeling like them. We carry them with us, in that blueprint of how to think and feel that they have left behind. And the closer we are to them, the more we understand them, the more accurate that blueprint will be.
It turns out, then, to be the positive connections between people that provide the mechanism for our 'self' to survive death in any meaningful way. It turns out to be love."
If you had planned the greatest vacation you could possibly imagine, but you were informed that you would forget everything immediately upon your return, would you even go? Isn’t it the memories that we create in the process of living that make everything worthwhile? I mean, at the end of our lives, what do we have left?
In Happy, one of the best happiness books I’ve ever read, Derren Brown points out that the “experiencing” self is different from the “remembering” self, a psychological fact supported by research conducted by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and others.
What this means is that we’d all be far better served by stuffing our lives with the very best memories possible, than trying to fit in as much temporary pleasure as we can. The pleasure will fade, but the happy memories will make us happy forever.
There’s just so much to this book, and it took me completely by surprise. It was digitally pushed into my hands by a friend who demanded that I read it at once, and, because this friend had never steered me wrong before, I looked past the fact that the book was written by a British mentalist I had never heard of, and I dived right in.
It didn’t take me long before I encountered passages that have stayed with me ever since.
For instance, I now feel quite strongly the truth of the statement that under the same psychological conditions, we would behave much the same as anyone else. We can never step outside of our own psychological conditioning and find out what it’s like to be driven by the same internal forces as other people.
I can’t somehow “renounce” my happy childhood and come to understand, viscerally, why someone who was abandoned by their father acted the way they did.
Their motivations and psychological constitution are completely foreign to me.
This in itself has made me (slightly) more patient, more accommodating, and quicker to forgive. We are all still responsible for our actions, of course, but we are island universes, almost completely unknowable to others.
Also, Derren got me thinking more and more about just how little we would actually require in order to live a good life if we weren’t so concerned about what other people thought of us!
How much of what we spend and acquire is placed in the service of ensuring that other people’s attitudes towards us remain favorable?
How much would our expenses and stress levels drop if we decided that our own favorable attitude towards ourselves were sufficient?
Happy will teach you how to perform these mental gymnastics, and with practice, this is how you’ll live your life. The book’s also surprisingly funny; it isn’t a “serious” book, and it definitely had me laughing in places.
The subject matter is serious of course, but Derren Brown doesn’t take himself “seriously.” He’s not serious, but rather sincere.
Your “remembering” self will be glad you read this book.
“The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”
People have been misunderstanding Nietzsche and misquoting him ever since he died (and way before that), and this is perhaps his most misinterpreted book.
In fact, my favorite Nietzsche translator, Walter Kaufmann, helped rescue his reputation somewhat from the clutches of Nazi “philosophers” who manipulated Nietzsche’s ideas of the “Superman” and the “Will to Power” for their own nefarious and evil ends.
They’d seriously rip whole passages out of context and claim that his philosophy supported their cruelty and racism. Nietzsche has never truly recovered.
But this book in particular is Nietzsche’s telling of the Persian prophet Zarathustra descending from his solitude in the mountains and proclaiming that “God is dead” (and we have killed him).
What this means, of course, is that human values must come from human beings, rather than being handed down to us by the gods on high. A “revaluation of values” is what he calls for, and the surpassing (in intelligence, energy, and passion) of every human being who has ever lived before now.
This is not only one of my favorites of Nietzsche’s books, but probably one of my favorite books of all time, even though I had an extraordinary amount of difficulty deciphering it the first time I tried to read it. It’s a tough read, and Nietzsche’s not known for making himself clear! You have to work at this one, but I believe it’s worth it.
No two people have to love the same books, of course. But if you hated this one the first time you read it, make sure you didn’t in fact read the 1939 translation, if you know what I mean!
“The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.”
They say that all of philosophy is just a footnote to Plato, and it’s also true that many of his most influential ideas originated in this book, authored around 375 B.C.
It’s not a perfect book, by any means, and many of the arguments and conclusions are just flat-out wrong, but it’s still absolutely worth reading. Even if you’re not a philosophy nerd like me!
The main “character” of this book is definitely Socrates, the book being the most famous of all the Socratic dialogs. The Republic is where Socrates explores the link between justice and happiness, and asks whether the just person is, in the end, happier than the unjust person.
There’s a tremendous amount of philosophy crammed into this one book, and besides justice, Plato has Socrates speak on such subjects as the essential qualities of an excellent leader, the substance of a worthwhile education, human happiness, virtues and vices, the role of art in society, and the structure of reality, to name just a few.
If it’s a complicated, wide-ranging book, it’s because life itself is the same way, not easily reducible to neat little theories and prepackaged ideologies. Much of what we know about Socrates the man comes from The Republic, but there’s a recent biography of Socrates called Socrates in Love that I highly recommend as well!
This book, however, has remained relevant for thousands of years and will likely remain relevant for thousands more. Reading it, you come to understand much more of what everyone’s been talking about for the past few millennia.
“On the highest throne in the world, we are still seated on our ass.”
Montaigne was a French statesman and one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance, who published the Essays in 1580 as an attempt to record “some traits of my character and of my humors,” which doesn’t sound like it’d be too interesting, right?
What’s astonishing about the Essays, though - and why they’ve endured for hundreds of years, influencing everyone from Shakespeare, Emerson, Nietzsche, and Eric Hoffer - is that he explored his own nature with ruthless honesty and good faith, earnestly trying to find out more about the nature of the Self, what’s honorable and true, and how a good person should show up in the world.
Nothing was off limits, and nothing he discovered about himself was “bad news.” It was all just information and insight, and he laid everything bare, right on the page for the whole world to see.
It’s his keen insight into human nature that’s been a good part of the reason why the Essays have survived for so long and generated so much interest. And he wrote them thinking that nobody would be interested!
The Essays cover so much ground that you could probably save time by listing what’s not explored by Montaigne. The answer is…not much. If it concerned humanity, humans, and what being alive was like for all of us, it’s pretty much covered by one or more of his essays.
I made the mistake of reading this book on my iPhone, which ended up being more than 32,000 iPhone pages long(!), but I don’t regret it one bit. Other than having to swipe left 32,000 times, stopping dozens and dozens of times to record some fascinating insight or quotation that Montaigne would hit me with out of nowhere.
Since Montaigne came to believe that human nature was finite and truth was infinite, and therefore we could never hope to rise above our limited means and grasp Ultimate Reality, he doesn’t arrive at a whole lot of solid answers.
But man, does he ask some epic questions!
“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
For some reason, I still remember that this was the 133rd book that I had ever read since I started counting. No idea why I remember that. Maybe it’s because Walden was one of the first books to hit me so hard and so fast that it shook me alive as I was reading it and forever after.
Published in 1854, it's the nonfiction account of the time when American transcendentalist author Henry David Thoreau built his own cabin in the woods at Walden Pond and lived there by himself for two years.
It’s about the calming, reorienting power of solitude, about the transformative power of great books, and it’s about how to leave society once in a while so that you can be better prepared to return to it.
We often get caught up in our cares, concerns, and Twitter feeds, and all these demands on our attention tend to crowd out that inner voice we all need to listen to once in a while if we are ever to understand our own lives or what we want them to be about.
I doubt there are too many people in North America today that would be able to live by themselves in the woods for two years, but I’m sure that most of them would be better for the experience.
There are some truly profound and memorable observations scattered throughout these pages, and like I said, this book just completely took me over when I first read it in 2015. You don’t have to move to the woods like Thoreau did in order to become a real person and reconnect with your authentic voice, but it sure as hell helps.
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OK, that’s it for now…
More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!
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With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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