A Guide for the Perplexed

A Guide for the Perplexed is a short book by E.F. Schumacher, published in 1977. While better known for his 1974 environmental economics bestseller Small is Beautiful, which made him a leading figure within the ecology movement, Schumacher himself considered A Guide for the Perplexed to be his most important achievement. His daughter wrote that her father handed her the book on his deathbed, five days before he died and he told her "this is what my life has been leading to"'.{{Ref|Pearce}} As the Chicago Tribune wrote "A Guide for the Perplexed is really a statement of the philosophical underpinnings that inform Small is Beautiful."

The tasks of man

Schumacher notes that within philosophy there is no field in more disarray than ethics. He argues that this is because most ethical debate sidesteps any "prior clarification of the purpose of human life on the earth."{{Ref|AGFTPp146}} Schumacher believes that ethics is the study of divergent problems; which require transcendence by the individual, not a new type of ethics to be adopted by all.

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Schumacher argues that there is an increasingly recognition among individuals that many solutions to human problems must be made by individuals not by society, and cannot be solved by political solutions that rearrange the system. For Schumacher, the "modern attempt to life without religion has failed".

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Schumacher says that the tasks of an individual can be summed up as follows:

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• Learn from society and tradition.
• Interiorize this knowledge, learn to think for yourself and become self directed.
• Grow beyond the narrow concerns of the ego.

Man, he says, in the larger sense must learn again to subordinate the sciences of manipulation to the sciences of wisdom; a theme he further develops in his book Small is Beautiful.

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