Nozick, Robert. _The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations_. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. # Progressive Summary Less technical than Nozick's previous writings. Aspires to be a meditation on life in the mode of Montaigne. # Key Points # Resonances I've come back to this book at the end of 2021, because the way David Weinstock teaches NVC made me think about it. David referred to needs as different facets of the same gem. And it made me think of Nozick's crystalline structure of reality. That's the only thing I remembered from the book. The following passage reminds me of David's inner consensus process, in which we facilitate a conversation between different areas of our body: > My concern in writing here is the whole of our being; I would like to speak to your whole being, and to write from mine. What can this mean: what are the parts of our being; what is the whole? ... Would such a philosophy have each different part of our being speak to its corresponding part, or does each one get spoken to by all; does this occur simultaneously or in sequence? # Oppositions # Questions / Comments # Quotes > What happens in philosophy now is that the same part speaks and listens, the rational mind speaks to the rational mind ... The history of philosophy exhibits a more varied texture, though. Plato argued and developed abstract theories, but he also spoke evocative myths that linger in memory – about people in a cave, about separated half-souls. Descartes rooted his most powerful writing in what was then Catholic meditative practice; Kant expressed his awe of two things, "the starry heavens above and the moral law within." Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Pascal and Plotinus: the list could continue. Yet the predominant current perspective on philosophy has been "cleansed" to leave a tradition in which the rational mind speaks (only) to the rational mind ... Yet there is no overwhelming reason to limit all of philosophy to that. We come to philosophy as people who want to think about things, and philosophy is just one way to do that.