Product Description
This toothsome classic takes on the combined challenges of discovering the meaning of the universe and eliminating fat at the same time. Its topic sentence contains a promise that should sell millions: "In this book, I tell how to take weight off and keep it off." He doesn't stop there, but continues, "The book also embodies a philosophy of life. The weight program is the content of the book, the philosophy of life is its form." If Descartes had sat down to write a treatise on losing weight as a metaphor for maintaining discipline amidst life's vicissitudes, it would have read much like this.
Clearly, Mr. Watson has not written a low-fat, new-age, easy-fix solution for the weight challenged. After all, losing weight is hard work. But for our money, it is the most erudite, fascinating, and eccentric book ever written on the subject of weight control, a combination of common sense (driven by human experience), Cartesian philosophy, and the presumption that understanding the mysteries of weight loss and the universe are somehow compatible, even sympathetic, ambitions.
The author is (of course) a professional philosopher, and this extraordinary exegesis is at once a moral manifesto, a philosophical discourse, and a practical manual (although the chapter on "How to Live" and "How to Die" take it a few steps beyond the ordinary). We love this book for its humor, its iconoclasm, and its weird and wacky mixture of high seriousness and low humor. Read it. Even if you're not overweight, it's a book to treasure.
Customer Reviews:
It's a fun book.......more helpful than most diet books!!.......2006-09-17
What an enjoyable book. This may be helpful to both lighthearted (myself) dieters as well as those more serious ones. Thanks to Mr. Watson, counting calories doesn't seem so boring or even restrictive anymore. It may be my newest noble pursuit to build my character and along with exercise I will strengthen my spirit and eventually my cause...to change the world.
Loved this book. And by the way, 900 calories is just a number. I think most readers can make the leap that depending on your age, activity level, muscle mass, metabolism, ect., one may need more calories per day. I mean, the author is a philosopher for goodness sake!
The Philosophy of Personal Change.......2006-07-03
Do not buy this book expecting a regular diet/nutrition book! Rather buy this book if you are interested in an intelligent writer's musings on personal change interspersed with amusing and moving thoughts and anecdotes. I enjoyed this book very much and got some great new insights into an approach to personal change which just might include some dieting as well.
Something different to change your viewpoint.......2003-12-23
If you've been falling on and off the diet and exercise wagon for awhile now, you may be beginning to realize that the problem isn't your plan, but your ability to stick to it - and that your ability to stick to it is low because you HATE doing it. How do you change the way you view diet and exercise? Can you ever come to see it in a way that you'll like it, rather than view it as something you MUST do but hate doing? If you're looking for a new viewpoint, I highly recommend this book. It isn't about "how-to" stuff so much as it's about WHY to, and a new way of looking at things. It's an easy read, and well worth your time and money. You will particularly enjoy it if you like philosophy, but that's by no means a prerequisite.
weight loss, common sense, and taking charge of your life.......2002-12-17
There is so much to love about this little gem. The author speaks to you like a curmudgeonly uncle who takes you seriously enough not to coddle you or offer you comforting excuses. You want to lose weight? Fine. It's going to be the hardest thing you've ever done, but here's how you go about it. While everyone else is counting calories and grams of this and that, he cuts straight to the point: cut calories (900 may be too few for some people, but he gets your attention with the dramatically low figure) and exercise (again, 4 miles in 30 minutes may be a bit much to ask for some of us penguins, but he doesn't set the bar too low to be a challenge). His voice, while caring, is uncompromising. He is not sympathetic in the cloying manner of many self-help gurus, but in the manner of a teacher who is confident that you can do what you set out to do - as he has - and if you don't succeed, it's because you don't really want to. Some people have medical conditions that may contribute to weight gain, and his simple approach does not address those complexities. I think the author would suggest that you know enough to take care of yourself, which is what this is all about anyway. He removes the weight loss/diet genre from the gnostic realm of medical professionals, and returns it to the accessible realm of common sense, where it belongs. The book is a metaphor for how you can take charge of your own life, give meaning to your own life, without waiting for someone with credentials to tell you you're doing it all wrong if you don't do it his/her way. If you're looking for more complexity, you may be looking for a program that's so difficult to follow that it comes with its own built-in excuses. You won't find excuses here, but encouragement and prodding. Americans are not fat and slovenly because we've failed to eat nothing but protein or failed to find The Zone, but because we eat too much and don't get enough exercise. Do something about that, and then, with the discipline you develop in the process, go change the world, why don'tcha. Lose the weight, and get over it.
Not recommended for long-term weight loss.......2002-10-28
I have to admit I didn't make it past the first chapter of this book, for two reasons. First, his insinuation that people who are drastically overweight (which by his definition appears to be more than 30 pounds) don't really care and aren't serious about losing weight. Now THAT's motivation! Second, his recommendation of a draconian 900-calorie-a-day diet, when it's been proven time and again that deprivation diets (just like the fad "grapefruit and steak" diets to which he refers) don't work in the long run. Mr. Watson may be a professional philosopher, but he is obviously not a weight-loss expert (and if he consulted with any while writing this book, I didn't see that referenced anywhere). So while the book may provide some entertaining and perhaps even valuable advice on behavior and life in general, its diet advice should be taken with a grain of salt. Most important, check with your doctor before beginning ANY weight-loss program!!
Book Description
Being-in-the-World is a guide to one of the most influential philosophical works of this century: Division I of Part One of Being and Time, where Martin Heidegger works out an original and powerful account of being-in-the-world which he then uses to ground a profound critique of traditional ontology and epistemology. Hubert Dreyfus's commentary opens the way for a new appreciation of this difficult philosopher, revealing a rigorous and illuminating vocabulary that is indispensable for talking about the phenomenon of world.
The publication of Being and Time in 1927 turned the academic world on its head. Since then it has become a touchstone for philosophers as diverse as Marcuse, Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida who seek an alternative to the rationalist Cartesian tradition of western philosophy. But Heidegger's text is notoriously dense, and his language seems to consist of unnecessarily barbaric neologisms; to the neophyte and even to those schooled in Heidegger thought, the result is often incomprehensible.
Dreyfus's approach to this daunting book is straightforward and pragmatic. He explains the text by frequent examples drawn from everyday life, and he skillfully relates Heidegger's ideas to the questions about being and mind that have preoccupied a generation of cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind.
Hubert L. Dreyfus is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.
Customer Reviews:
Best Available Secondary Source on Heidegger.......2004-02-09
The best secondary source on Heidegger's early philosophy available in English. Sets the standard for clear and forthright assessment of Heidegger's achievement.
A highly misleading interpretation of Heidegger.......2004-02-01
There's no getting away from Heidegger; most of the intellectual life of the later 20th century is a series of commentaries on or arguments with Being and Time. But the book is almost as difficult as its reputation would have it. Most of us need some help.
Probably the best short summary of its thesis came from Samuel Johnson: "Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." But Johnson died about 140 years before the book was published, so he didn't actually get to read it. Those of us born after its publication could use a more detailed guide to Heidegger's dense and unwieldy work. This, unfortunately, isn't it, in spite of Dreyfus's decades of teaching and the testimonials on the back cover from Charles Taylor and other luminaries.
Dreyfus, who teaches at UC Berkeley, reduces Being and Time to a neutral quasi-psychology in which "being-there is doing something it makes sense to do given the public situation, and given already taken-over public for-the-sake-of-whiches." And that's all, folks. Dasein (Heidegger's term for us human folk) and the world are knowable only through everyday public practice, and according to Dreyfus the point of Division I of this two-part work is to show how it's possible to get through one's day without thinking about it and how that provides the only basis for knowledge.
After being criticised for his failure to address Division II, Dreyful admitted that he had "overlooked warnings, scattered about in Division I, that the average intelligibility desribed there would later be shown to be an inferior form of understanding." Well, duh. Those aren't hints; they're screaming tirades. Dreyfus not only undervalues the importance of Division II; he is deaf to the emotional character of the whole work, which conveyed as much by its literary qualities as by its argument.
Although he tossed in a few half-hearted denials that he's doing anything more than ontology, Heidegger clearly loathed the world of everydayness, the inauthentic being of the "they," and he longed for its supercession. "Existential analysis," he said, "has the character of doing violence, whether to the claims of the everyday interpretation, or to its complacency and its tranquillized obviousness." (H 311) In retrospect it's clear how this position led to his embrace of Hitler--not that one can read Nazi ideology off from the book, but because its hopes and fears were just those played on so expertly by the Nazis. Heidegger saw Hitler as the truly authentic man who could be the conscience of the nation. (He tried to cast himself in a similar role at Freiburg, with results that would be comical if anything about that time could appear humorous.)
But one doesn't need literary sensitivity to see what's wrong with Dreyfus's Heidegger. Why would young German intellectuals have flocked to his lectures if he were simply showing them that everyday skills were the be-all and end-all? It's simply impossible to imagine this spectacled epistemologist as "the secret king of philosophy," the charismatic magus who captivated the young Hannah Arendt in presenting "the thinking that springs as a passion."
Dreyfus's book contains a long Appendix on Kierkegaard, authenticity, and Division II; but its conclusions are just as bathetically deflationary as the main text. Here, too, Heidegger comes across as a multiculturalist liberal. Authenticity is supposed to make available a salad-bar of "marginal practices," a phrase which appears nowhere in Being and Time and which is not supported by the citations adduced. Instead of a stoic and joyful acceptance of one's fate--one of the themes that leads Heidegger to Nietzsche--Dreyfus sees merely a free choice of commitment from the social resources available and a concomitant choice of a role model like Jesus or Florence Nighingale.
And Dreyfus knew Heidegger. No doubt the sage listened politely to whatever he had to say and took it as further proof that Americans had no culture.
The clearest account of Heidegger's thought to date........2001-07-09
BEING-IN-THE-WORLD : A Commentary on Heidegger's 'Being and Time,' Division I. By Herbert L. Dreyfus. 370 pp. Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, Eighth Printing 1999 (1991). ISBN 0-262-54056-8 (pbk.)
Anyone who attempts to study Heidegger's commentators will quickly discover that many of them can be even more difficult than Heidegger himself. One notable exception is George Steiner, whose 'Martin Heidegger' (1989) is such an interesting book that one wishes it had been two or three times longer. As a general introduction to Heidegger's life and thought, however, it can only take one so far, and those wishing for a fuller treatment would be well advised to take a look at the present equally lucid and stimulating study by Dreyfus.
He explains that he has limited detailed treatment of 'Being and Time' to Division I of Part One (i.e., the first half), because he considers this "the most original and important section of the work, for it is [here] that Heidegger works out his account of being-in-the-world and uses it to ground a profound critique of traditional ontology and epistemology" (p.vii). Division II, though containing important material, is marred by "some errors so serious as to block any consistent reading" (p.viii), though it is taken up in a 57-page Appendix.
In his brief but extremely interesting Introduction, Dreyfus sets out to answer the question, 'Why study Heidegger?' If I have understood Dreyfus correctly, what he seems to be saying is that Western thought has been fundamentally in error since the time of Plato : "Plato and our tradition got off on the wrong track by thinking that one could have a theory of everything.... Heidegger is not against theory. He thinks it powerful and important, but limited" (p.2).
Heidegger, in other words, although accepting a reasonable use of reason, has seen through the folly of that worship of reason which leads to its unreasonable and excessive use. Dreyfus tells us that Heidegger seeks to clear away five main false assumptions :
1. Explicitness. "Heidegger questions both the possibility and desirability of making our everyday understanding explicit" (p.4). There are and always will be many things in life that cannot be made explicit, that cannot be explained, that are not amenable to "critical reflection," things, for example, such as human skills.
2. Mental Representation. "Heidegger questions the view that experience is always and most basically a relation between a self-contained subject with mental content (the inner) and an independent object (the outer)." For him "there is a more fundamental way of being-in-the-world that cannot be understood in subject/object terms" (p.5).
3. Theoretical Holism. Heidegger "insists that we return to the phenomenon of everyday human activity and stop ringing the changes on the traditional oppositions of immanent/transcendent ... subject/ object ... explicit/tacit ... etc." (p.6).
4. Detachment and Objectivity. "From the Greeks we inherit not only our assumption that we can obtain theoretical knowledge of every domain, even human activities, but also our assumption that the detached theoretical viewpoint is superior to the involved practical viewpoint" (p.6). Heidegger, following the insights of Nietzsche, Peirce, James and Dewey, denies these assumptions.
5. Methodological Individualism. Heidegger, "in his emphasis on the social context as the ultimate foundation of intelligibility [shares with Wittgenstein] the view that most philosophical problems can be dis(solved) [sic] by a description of everyday social practices" (p.7). In other words, they are pseudo-problems.
If Heidegger were only clearing the ground of 2,500 years of sheer wrongheadedness, he would of course still be an extremely important and valuable thinker. But, as Dreyfus explains, he goes further, for "he has a positive account of authentic human being and a positive methodological proposal for how human being should be systematically studied" (p.8). His influence, which today extends into many areas, has been and continues to be enormous as more and more specialists and experts and technicians of every kind begin to appreciate the fruitfulness of his way of thinking in contrast to the often dismal results produced by their own.
Heidegger's 'Being and Time' is a notoriously difficult book, and Dreyfus' commentary is to be welcomed as the first study that succeeds in making it both intelligible and exciting, even to the non-specialist reader such as myself. As one of the clearest accounts of Heidegger's thought to date, it belongs in the library of anyone who is at all interested in this revolutionary and amazing thinker.
For those concerned with "living life at its best".......2000-09-18
I got to this book after reading "Disclosing New Worlds" by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, a very profound work that tries to recover our abilities to make sense of each of us as historical beings, helping us to "live life at its best."
Reading Being-in-the-World has had a great impact on the way I now understand our everyday life in terms of the practices that we pick up -as Heidegger puts it- from the society we are brought up in and not in terms of abstract theories that try to relate our specific actions to mental states. As a management consultant, it guides me away from trying to specify precisely, say, the 'things' a salesman should say and do in a conversation with a client. I'd be better off if I can find another salesman that exhibits the results I'm interested in, and managing a "learning-in-action" program, so that the first salesman learns from the more experienced salesman. As a father, it guides me away from getting my son to hold on to vast amounts of information -the purpose of our modern educational system- but to situating him in an environment where he can pickup successful practices for dealing with diverse situations- including technical and interpersonal problems.
Being-in-the-World was not an easy read for me, since my background is in Computer Science and Management (I had to do some research in the philosophical traditions and problemas that Heidegger was attacking). However, Dreyfus' commentary is most relevant to people in Computer Science and Management - guiding them away from the utopias of Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems.
I recommend this book to anyone willing to make an effort in understanding one of the deepest thinkers on what it means to be a human being "living life at its best."
The essential companion to the challenge of Heidegger.......1999-11-02
I am amazed that this book has not been reviewed. For 30-odd years Hubert Dreyfus has been the beloved guide to Heidegger and Continental philosophy for thousands of undergraduate and graduate students, first at MIT and then at Berkeley. This book is constructed from the courses he taught on Heidegger's work, Kierkegaard, and especially that difficult centerpiece of Heidegger's opus, Being and Time. For the beginner and the expert, he opens Heidegger's questions and claims in distinctive, poignant, simple, accessible ways. I cannot imagine attempting to grasp Heidegger's thought without Dreyfus at my side. Dreyfus' account shows Heidegger in the middle of the struggle with those who came before him as he attempts to make sense of the question of what a human being is. I strongly recommend this book as a helpmate. If you are interested in confronting Heidegger's thought and work, get and read Dreyfus.
Average customer rating:
- The great defender of individual liberty
- Liberty for all
- Triumph of the individual
- On "On Liberty..."
- Liberal, Utilitarian and First Feminist. Essential reading.
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On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford World's Classics)
John Stuart Mill
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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ASIN: 0192833847 |
Book Description
Collected here in a single volume for the first time, On Liberty, Utilitarianism, Considerations on Representative Government, and The Subjection of Women show John Stuart Mill applying his liberal utilitarian philosophy to a range of issues that remain vital today--the nature of ethics, the
scope and limits of individual liberty, the merits of and costs of democratic government, and the place of women in society. In his Introduction John Gray describes these essays as applications of Mill's doctrine of the Art of Life, as set out in A System of Logic. Using the resources of recent
scholarship, he shows Mill's work to be far richer and subtler than traditional interpretations allow.
Customer Reviews:
The great defender of individual liberty.......2006-12-24
John Stuart Mill, 1806-73, worked for the East India Co. helped run Colonial India from England. Minister of Parliament 1865-68 he served one term. Maiden speech was a disaster his second was great success. He was first MP to propose that women should be given the vote on equal footing with the men who could vote. He got 1/3 support, England gives franchise to women after U.S. He was a great Feminist, his essay "Subjection of Women" is written with great passion and prose. It was a brave position for him to take he was ridiculed for it. He favored democracy, and letting more men from lower classes the right to vote, but believed that people that are more educated should have more votes then less educated because they would make better decisions about what government should do. He would have wanted to extend education to the masses, so that all may have gotten 2-3 votes and so on. He didn't think it should be extended to where a small elite could carry the day on votes. The idea was that if the working class, and middle class, where divided on an issue, the people with more intelligence would have the power to tip the balance. Mill thought that people with more education would probably not only be better able to make political decisions, especially in terms of intellectually being able to see what would be best for the government to do, but that they would also be more concerned about the common good publicly then people in general. He was intensely educated by his father James. John could read Greek, and Latin at 6 yrs.; his Dad tutored him at home. Dad thought environment was everything. He was treated like an adult, never played games with kids; he had a very cerebral upbringing. He had a period of depression in his twenties, it changed his philosophy, and he recognized the importance of developing feelings along with the intellect, this is something that he stressed in his work. He read poetry to get out of depression; he became devoted to poetry and became a romantic. He fell in love with a married woman Harriet Taylor, was a platonic relationship, after her husband's death they married 3 years later and probably never consummated the marriage maybe due to his having syphilis. His dedication to "On Liberty" is to her, very devoted to each other. Both buried together in Avignon France where they used to vacation.
Mill as a moral theorist subscribed to a theory we call Utilitarianism. It means---In some way morality is about the maximization of happiness. Whether actions are right or wrong depends on how happiness can be most effectively maximized. I say in some way, because there are allot of different kinds of Utilitarians. Allot of different ways of saying exactly how it is the maximization of happiness comes into morality. Therefore, happiness is clearly an important idea for Utilitarians. Mill has a hedonistic view of happiness, he thinks that happiness can be defined in terms of "pleasure in the absence of pain." What is distinctive about Mill in this area is that he believes that some kinds of pleasure are better than others are, and add more to a person's happiness than other kinds of pleasures. He believes in what he calls, "higher quality pleasures." These are pleasures, he says, that we get from the exercise of faculties that only human beings happen to have. So the intellect, imagination, the moral feelings, these are the sources of higher quality pleasures people use. His view seems to be that a certain quantity of intellectual pleasure just adds more to your happiness, and a given quantity of some lower pleasure like a kind we would share with the animals such as sensation, taste, sexual pleasure, etc. His "higher quality pleasures" in a way echo Aristotle's ethics. The idea of those things that make us distinctly human that are the real key to our happiness, that is in Mill also. It is not as limited to reason and intellect as Aristotle thinks. Mill recognizes the importance of the appreciation of beauty, aesthetic pleasure, and moral pleasure. He frankly owes a debt to Aristotle that he never properly acknowledges, never gives him proper credit.
"On Liberty" is Mill's is his most widely read and enduring work. It is an indispensable essay on political thought, which strenuously argues for individual liberty. He is defending what he calls the "liberty principle." It is a principle that guarantees individuals quite a bit of personal freedom. "That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant." These quoted sentences in John Stuart Mill's book, "On Liberty," embody the crux of his argument; that the power of the state must intrude as little as possible on the liberty of its citizenry. In essence, Mill was against using the power of the state through its lawmaking apparatus to compel citizens to conduct themselves in ways that society deems moral or appropriate. Mill thought that people had not only a right, but also a duty to develop their intellectual faculties, which is indispensable to maximize their happiness. He believed that society improved for all its citizens when they where left unfettered to the maximum extent possible, allowing them to use their imagination and intellect to improve themselves. Mill postulates a theory that societies usually institute laws based primarily on "personal preference" of its citizenry instead of established principles. This lack of clarity of opinion often leads to the government frequently interfering in the lives of its citizens unnecessarily. For Mill, there are very few times when the state can infringe on the personal liberty of others. Firstly, the state has the right to promulgate laws that prevent a person's actions from harming others. Secondly, the state must protect those citizens who are not mature enough to protect themselves, such as children. Thirdly, he exempts, "... backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage." In Mill's view, immature societies need a benevolent leader to rule them until they have developed to a point where they, "... have attained the capacity of being guided to their own improvement by conviction or persuasion ..." Mill said this third exemption did not apply to any of the countries in Europe. Mill believed that forced morality by the state on its citizen's liberties was destructive to their inward development, and could even lead to a violent reaction by them against the government.
There are different parts of his defense of this, different arguments that he gives. He has a long chapter on freedom of speech and press. He has some very specific reasons why he thinks those freedoms are important. Always in the background for Mill is the idea of development, and making it possible for more people to enjoy these higher quality pleasures. How do we help people develop their distinctly human faculties, in ways that will help them enjoy their higher quality pleasures? Because for him that is the way, we maximize the total amount of happiness that is enjoyed in the world, and that is the object of morality as far as he is concerned. Utilitarianists believe that maximizing happiness is ultimately, what morality is all about. That does not mean maximizing your own happiness that means maximizing the total amount of happiness that is enjoyed, not only by yourself but also by everybody else as well.
Roger Kimball, in his book "Experiments Against Reality" wrote, "On Liberty" was published in 1859, coincidentally the same year as "On the Origin of Species." Darwin's book has been credited--and blamed--for all manner of moral and religious mischief. But in the long run "On Liberty" may have effected an even greater revolution in sentiment.
I read this book for a graduate class in Philosophy. Recommended reading for anyone interested in philosophy, political science, and history.
Liberty for all.......2005-09-12
It is surprising to me how many people assume that 'On Liberty' was written before or during the American Revolution - Mill was certainly influenced by the spirit of American liberty, which was variously romanticised and adapted in Britain and Europe during the nineteenth century. Published in 1859, 'On Liberty' is one of the primary political texts of the nineteenth century; perhaps only the writings of Marx had a similar impact, and of the two, in today's world, Mill's philosophy seems (please note that I only said 'seems') the one that is triumphant.
One of the interesting ideas behind 'On Liberty' is that this may in fact be more the inspiration of Harriet Taylor (later Mrs. J.S. Mill) than of Mill himself; Taylor wrote an essay on Toleration, most likely in 1832, but it remained unpublished until after her death. F.A. Hayek (free-market economist and philosopher) noticed this connection. Whether this was the direct inspiration or not, the principles are similar, and the Mills were rather united in their views about liberty.
'On Liberty' is more of an extended essay than a book - it isn't very long. It relates as a political piece to his general Utilitarianism and political reform ideology. A laissez faire capitalist in political economy, his writing has been described as 'improved Adam Smith' and 'popularised Ricardo'. Perhaps it is in part the brevity of 'On Liberty' that gives it an enduring quality.
There are five primary sections to the text. The introduction sets the stage philosophically and historically. He equates the histories of classical civilisations (Greece and Rome) with his contemporary England, stating that the struggle between liberty and authority is ever present and a primary feature of society. He does not hold with unbridled or unfettered democracy, either (contrary to some popular readings of his text) - he warns that the tyranny of the majority can be just as dangerous and damaging toward a society as any individual or oligarchic despotism. Mill looks for a liberty that permits individualism; thus, while democracy is an important feature for Mill, there must be a system of checks and balances that ensures individual liberties over and against this kind of system. All of these elements receive further development in subsequent sections.
The second section of the text is 'Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion'. Freedom of speech and expression is an important aspect here. Mill presents a somewhat radical proposition that even should the government and the people be in complete agreement with regard to coercive action, it would still be an illegitimate power. This is an important consideration in today's world, as governments and people contemplate the curtailment of civil liberties in favour of increased security needs. The possibility of fallibility, according to Mill, makes the power illegitimate, and (again according to Mill) it doesn't matter if it affects many or only a few, people today or posterity. It is still wrong. Mill develops this argument largely by using the history of religious ideas and religious institutions, in addition to the political (since the two were so often inter-related).
The third section is perhaps the best known and most quoted, 'Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being'. It is perhaps a natural consequence of Enlightenment thinking that individuality over communal and corporate identity would dominate. Our world today goes back and forth between individual and communal identities (nationality, regionality, employment, church affiliation, school affiliation, sports teams, etc.). Mill's ideas of individual are very modern, quite at home with the ideas of modern political and civil individuality, with all of the responsibilities.
Mill states, 'No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions.' He recognises the increased limitations on individual liberty given that we do live in communal settings, but this does not hinder the idea of individuality and individual liberty, particularly as it pertains to thoughts and speech. Mill explores various ideas of personal identity and action (medieval, Calvinist, etc.) to come up with an idea of individuality that is rather modern; of course, this is political personhood that pre-dates the advent of psychology/psychoanalytic theory that will give rise to a lot more confusion for the role of identity and personhood in society.
The fourth primary section looks theoretically at the individual in community, 'Of the Limits to the Authority of Society Over the Individual'; the final section looks at specific applications. Mill discounts the idea of social contract while maintain that there is a mutual responsibility between individuals and community. Mill looks at the Temperance movements and laws as an example of bad laws (not only from the aspect of curtailment of liberty, but also for impractical aspects of enforcement); in similar examples, Mill looks at the role of society in regulating the life of the individual, calling on good government to always err on the side of the individual.
Mill puts it very directly -- Individuals are accountable only to themselves, unless their actions concern the interests of society at large. Few in the Western world would argue with this today; however, we still live in a world where 'thought police' are feared, and 'political correctness' is debated as appropriate or not with regard to individual liberties.
Mill wrote extensively beyond this text, in areas of philosophy (logic, religion, ethics). The particular text here includes other essays of interest: 'Utilitarianism', 'Considerations on Representative Government', and 'The Subjection of Women', and also has a useful bibliography and index. The essay on Utilitarianism is one of the more contentious works of Mill; the later two contain ideas well ahead of their time, and many parts can be seen at work in modern democracies.
This should probably be required reading in civics classes, if not in the pre-university years for students, then certainly in the early university years.
Triumph of the individual.......2005-01-12
This Oxford collection of four definitive essays by John Stuart Mill, arguably the most famous Victorian writer who could be called a philosopher, gives an excellent profile of a rigorous social reformer and political thinker. The subjects of these essays--liberty, utilitarianism, government, and women's rights--are interrelated to the extent that they reveal a man with a sharp sense of history and its impact on the methods and mores of contemporary society. Mill, after all, was of Charles Dickens's generation and therefore witnessed an era in which the British crown was inclined to manifest its power through tyranny in its efforts to maintain a costly worldwide empire.
Mill's basic concern is liberty, both social and civil. He identifies a difference between freedom and liberty--freedom is the state of being free, while liberty is the freedom that a government or governing body grants its people. Briefly a member of Parliament (the workings of which are described in great detail in "Representative Government") and heavily informed and influenced by Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," Mill recognized that the most important (and perhaps the only proper) function of a government is to protect the liberties of its citizens. However, people generally get the form of government they deserve; if laws they allow to go unchecked become the tools of despotic powers, they have only their own ignorance or indolence to blame.
An enumeration of Mill's finer points may suffice as a summary of his ideas:
1. Freedom of the press and freedom of expression are essential rights of man. You don't have to accept as true what other people say, but let them say it because there's always the chance that they're right and you're wrong. Mill points out that even the Roman Catholic Church, most intolerant of religions (his words, not mine), allows a "devil's advocate" to offer repudiative evidence before it canonizes a new saint. He notes instances in which religious intolerance still rears its ugly head in the British Empire of his day.
2. Christianity does not have a monopoly on moral authority; literary history gives evidence of this.
3. Individuality should be fostered so that new ideas may flourish, but society, specifically the middle class, establishes the normative values that unfortunately tend to stifle individuality. You have an unlimited right to your opinion, but you are free to act only so far as you do not harm or molest others. Long before Orwell, Mill had the insight that institutional deprivation of liberty is effectively suppression of thought, for how can someone train himself to think independently when doing so could lead to persecution for heresy or treason?
4. State-sponsored education should restrict itself to teaching scientifically provable or reliably documented facts rather than push religious or political agenda. When or if polemical issues are raised, arguments for and against are to be presented as opinions so that students may draw their own conclusions.
5. The utilitarian principle states that actions that promote happiness (in its most obvious form, pleasure) are "right" and those that reduce happiness are "wrong"--in other words, utilitarianism is the opposite of puritanism. Consider how much better it is to be a dissatisfied human being than a satisfied pig, because the human has the potential for so much more happiness than the pig, whose breadth of experience is contained entirely between the trough and the slaughterhouse, could ever know.
6. Women deserve the same rights as men because the social and mental limitations attributed to women are for the most part a male-conceived artifice. Chivalry is a fallacy.
And so on. I'm not sure if it's correct to call Mill a libertarian in modern terms, but he was certainly concerned with the issues with which modern libertarians are concerned. Much of his discourse is relevant to today's world, even though he often draws upon the past for contrast in order to make his conclusions, the implication being that improvement comes with increased knowledge and experience. Anyone who is interested in nineteenth-century thought on democracy and individualism will find much to ponder in Mill's eloquence.
On "On Liberty...".......2004-05-15
Don't get me wrong. This book is quaint and it certainly has its merits. However, I was disappointed that the character on the cover isn't featured anywhere within. Who is the man with outsretched arms? Is he pleading for alms? Is he offering to pull someone out of a river? In fact, if you look closely he appears to be standing in a body of water which could support the latter theory. Who is he pulling from the river? Or is this a metaphor... do these essays figuratively pull one out of the river - the river of intellectual darkness? Perhaps not, which brings me back to my original point. Who is this man? Like all great philosophical questions... we may never know.
Liberal, Utilitarian and First Feminist. Essential reading........2004-03-31
JS Mill is rightfully so one of the most studied political theorists and philosophers. His radical ideas on women started a womens revolution during the Victorian era. His ideas about good government and freedom are applicable today, and obviously not being listened to in this neofascist age. His 'harm principle' for freedom remains one of the most enlightened theories out there, and it is with an open heart that I recommend his readings to anyone with an open mind, who is not afraid of change.
Book Description
What is the self? The question has preoccupied people in many times and places, but nowhere more than in the modern West, where it has spawned debates that still resound today. Jerrold Seigel combines theoretical and contextual approaches to explore the ways key figures have understood whether and how far individuals can achieve coherence and consistency in the face of inner tensions and external pressures. Clarifying that recent "post-modernist" accounts belong firmly to the tradition of Western thinking they have sought to supercede, Seigel provides a persuasive alternative to claims that the modern self is typically egocentric or disengaged. Both a Fulbright Fellow and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Jerrold Seigel is currently William R. Keenan Professor of History at NYU. His previous books include The Private Worlds of Marcel Duchamp (University of California Press, 1995) and Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life (Viking Penguin, 1986).
Book Description
Time magazine called Mortimer J. Adler a "philosopher for everyman." In this guide to considering the big questions, Adler addresses the topics all men and women ponder in the course of life, such as "What is love?", "How do we decide the right thing to do?", and, "What does it mean to be good?" Drawing on his extensive knowledge of Western literature, history, and philosophy, the author considers what is meant by democracy, law, emotion, language, truth, and other abstract concepts in light of more than two millennia of Western civilization and discourse. Adler's essays offer a remarkable and contemplative distillation of the Great Ideas of Western Thought.
Customer Reviews:
How to Think About the Great Ideas by Mortimer Adler.......2004-06-20
This is an excellent book for academicians, journalists, historians,
philosophers, linquists and a whole host of thinkers in the
arts and sciences. The author discusses theoretic universals
in some level of detail. For instance, he roughly equates
consistency with truth. In mathematics, a proof is not complete
without enough consistent examples of an application and no
deviations from the theorem. The author discusses the distinction
between knowledge and opinion. He states succinctly that ignorance can be preferable to academic errors. In addition, he points out that opinions are accepted voluntarily. Emotions are
likened to instinct in that they are not learned. Freud discussed things to avoid; namely, bad love, pride and too much
reliance on monetary things to the exclusion of aesthetics.
The good thing is desirable over the bad. Goods are classified
into wealth, goods of the body, goods of the soul or spiritual
domain, knowledge, truth and wisdom which is the highest
form of knowing. Children spend much time learning skills;
while adults and elders develop and impart wisdom. Learning is
discovery and discussion. We learn things in the natural sciences
by observing them in a lab. For instance, a drop of blood may
be examined under the microscope for specific characteristics.
A frog may be dissected and examined under the microscope to
learn more about the vital organs-their placement and functioning.
This book is a wonderful acquisition for a continued discussion of philosophical, theoretical and scientific techniques and processes. It is a good value for the price charged.
A great "Cliff Notes" version of Adler arguments.......2003-03-24
I found this book very helpful.
I was introduced to Adler's writing about a year ago and have read 4-5 of his books, his two autobiographies, and 30 or so of his papers through the TGI website with Max W.
This book is a great summary of basic ideas in very accessible manner, such as: definition of truth; the moral *obligation* not just the right, to be controversial; crystalization of Adler's arguments against Darwin of why man's mental capabiliteis are a difference in kind and not degree from apes and other animals, etc.
The consice presentation clarified earlier readings and more than made up for any shortcomings due to editoral sloppiness, lack of charts, and difficulty in general with transcripts of a TV show.
A good book for those just beginning their reading of Adler's summary and critique of philosophy and a good reference summary book for those well read with Adler's books.
Paul Baier
Boston, MA
Basic introduction to some of Adler's Great Ideas........2002-05-04
Each chapter represents one program and most consist of a dialogue of sorts between Adler and Luckman, with Adler also answering viewer questions. But as it must already be clear what this book is, I will seek to establish why I gave it only three stars. Firstly, because Amazon does not permit assigning 3 and 1/2 stars. Second, that it is rather long considering how much there is to actually gain from it. The number of subjects that he attempts to cover reduces most of the discussions to a rather elementary introduction. This is good in the sense that it might whet the appetite, before you might get bored by a tedious analysis, but often you get a sense that Adler's final word is good enough before he moves on. Some of the brevity and incompleteness is a function of the presentation, and this limits how much you might actually gain in understanding the topics. The accurate presentation of dialogue adds nothing to the book. Probably it would be most interesting to those who are fond of Dr. Adler and like reading his other books. It is hard to recommend another book that would fulfill the same function that this one does, and this is the first of his that I've read.
Enlightening history and nice reference.......2002-01-17
This work is a handy reference to which I refer often. Adler provides a very useful "history of ideas". Each section covers what the some of the greatest thinkers have said about a particular idea, ideas such as "justice", "knowledge", "truth","God", etc. This book is a must if one wants to get a quick "birds eye" view of ideas and what great thinkers have said about them, and provides a nice springboard and direction for further study.
Summary Without Loss of Depth.......2001-07-04
How do you summarize a summary of 2500 years of thought? Great! Mortimer Adler was one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th Century, primarily because of the literally ecyclopaedic nature of his knowledge. I say literally encyclopaedic because he edited the Encyclopaedia Britanica and wrote The Synopticon, a summary of Western philosophy, among the scores of other books bearing his name. He is best known for popularizing the Great Books theory of education. This is based on his own original reseach distilling the essence of Western Thought into 102 "Great Ideas." How To Think About The Great Ideas is a condensation of transcipts of a popular TV show of the 1950's, but the superficiality such an origin suggests does not permeate the book. The TV show covered only 21 of the great ideas, while the book deals with about half of the 102. The somewhat colloquial style will surprise readers who may have read Aristotle, Decartes, or Kant in full. We are not accustomed to hearing about philosophy from TV. But the simplicity of the presentation only serves to heighten the clarity of the ideas. The Great Ideas which you struggled over in college really can be discussed in ordinary language, and this is the real achievement of this book. The ideas build from the basic question of "What is truth?" to a consideration of the nature of man, human freedom, society and even a review of the arguments for the existence of God. Adler himself came to faith from agnositicism in his 80's before his recent death at the age of 98. Even so, the book is more of an invitation than an argument. It is best approached as a string of pearls, a series of thoughtful but isolated studies, rather than an essay in how to approach life or a true philosophical treatise. Refer to the Synopticon the academic treatment. But Adler never wrote just for academics. He believed philosphy is for everyone, and this book proves it. Now that Mortimer Adler has recently passed away, How To Think About The Great Ideas will remain as his exortation for all of us to lead thoughful lives.
Customer Reviews:
Educated arrogance as bad as ignorance.......2005-09-26
This book is overly opinionated, peppered with bitter pomposity, and simply melodramatic -- a real annoyance as it was required reading. One star for effort, another star for not being a page longer than it was.
Environmental Awareness..."Landscapes and Mindscapes.".......2004-03-08
David Orr has approached the subject of "Environmental Literacy" from a series of diverse perspectives. As a Professor of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College, and founder of the Non-Profit Meadowcreek Peoject, he has made a significant and thought-provoking contribution to the field of Contemporary Ecological LIterature. Orr sees "Sustainability," as being "about the terms and conditions of human survival," and that "this crisis can not be solved by the same kind of education that helped to create the problems."
The Author feels that the contemporary social problem of Alienation from the Natural world has reached a level which is unprecidented in Human History, and that our success in healing this "division" will be the difference between extinction or survival of the Human Race.
This book represents a an in-depth contribution to the growing field of Neo-Ecological Literature. Althought it is wtitten in an academic format, the concepts are clearly defincd, and written in an interesting readable style. This is a basic "Must Read" for anyone seriously interested in becoming "Ecologically Literate."
Offers educators a new view on how to teach ecologically.......1999-03-30
Orr has plenty to say about how the educational system can play a key role in ensuring that future generations better understand how to live in harmony with the earth. For example, on pp. 85-86, he writes, "The failure to develop ecological literacy is a sin of omission and of commission. Not only are we failing to teach the basics about the earth and how it works, but we are in fact teaching a large amount of stuff that is simply wrong. By failing to include ecological perspectives in any number of subjects, students are taught that ecology is unimportant for history, politics, economics, society and so forth. And through television, they learn that the earth is theirs for the taking. The result is a generation of ecological yahoos without a clue why the color of the water in their rivers is related to their food supply, or why storms are becoming more severe as the planet warms. The same persons as adults will create businesses, vote, have families, and above all, consume. Orr's book is a wake-up call to educators worldwide. It is a lesson on the value of integrative teaching strategies. His underlying message: Don't be an ecological yahoo.
Book Description
Volume 1 of the definitive English translation of one of the most important philosophical works of the 19th century, the basic statement in one important stream of post-Kantian thought. Corrects nearly 1,000 errors and omissions in the older Haldane-Kemp translation. For the first time, this edition translates and locates all quotes and provides full index.
Customer Reviews:
How is Hegel held over him?.......2007-08-11
I have read Schopenhauers works and would heartily agree with the other writers on its beauty, simplicity and philosophy. This author strikes me as a philosopher in the classic sense(a lover of wisdom). Ive read Hegel, Wittgenstien, Kant and attempted Heiddeger and none come close to Schoppenhauer's great work. Not to dismiss the others but their writing style is dodgy, unclear or badly translated. Its fairly clear that Schopenhauer is somewhat of an underdog in scholastic circles as most philosophy professors tend to stress Hegel over A.S. No writer in philosophy writes with as much wit and clarity, if you have read this far and this many reviews stop persecuting yourself and buy this book.
Towering work of genius from the philosopher of gloom.......2006-11-18
Arthur Schopenhauer is one of the most interesting great philosophers. A misogynist, misanthrope and great lover of music and art, he was kinder to his dogs than he was to people.
Despite his oddities, Schopenhauer provides us with one of the most fascinating philosophical systems a great philosopher has ever produced. Perhaps one of the last philosophers who tried to produce a unified vision of the entire universe, Schopenhauer's universe is as depressing as it is majestic.
Schopenhauer's vision is spelt out at great length in his great masterpiece, the World as Will and Idea. For Schopenhauer, the key to understanding reality is that everything is the product of a blind, unconditioned energy or force called Will. Deeply read in Eastern philosophy, especially Buddhism, Schopenhauer regards the universe as a dark place filled with evil and suffering, caused by the endless activity created in the world by the Will (which as the cause in itself is the One or Absolute as understood traditionally by philosophers East and West) which appears in the world of sense experience in infinitely diverse ways, yet in ways which are perpetually in conflict and war with each other. For Schopenhauer, this dark force shows itself no more truely in the biological and human worlds, in the terrible struggle for existence which relies on killing and destruction of other life along with rapine, greed and war essentially for one being to triumph over the other. Schopenhauer, writing about three decades before Darwin, remarkably anticipates some of the ideas of evolutionary theory and also the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, which sees concious human activity as being the result of deeper unconcious, instinctual drives, especially those of sex and survival. He also anticipates some aspects of physical science which see the universe as a whole being the product of chaotic energy and forces acting at the deepest levels of reality.
Schopenhauer, despite being an idealist, marshals many powerful philosophical arguments as well as quotes from writers, poets, mystics, and also evidence gathered from science and even newspaper reports to support his worldview. He is deeply empirical and believes his idea explains not just philosophical issues but the very way the world is as it is found by scientists and naturalists. Indeed, his close attention to science makes Schopenhauer one of the most astute philosophers of the natural world, along with Aristotle and Descartes.
Schopenhauer also deduces a system of ethics and salvation from his system. His ethics are essentially Buddhist; indeed, Schopenhauer argued that of all the world's religions, Buddhism is the best because it accords most closely to the truth (salvation comes through renouncing the world and through a selfless ethic of compassionate love for suffering) although he also greatly admires the Hindu sages who wrote the Upanishads, a work he quotes very frequently. He also admires Christian mystics, especially Eckhart and Boehme.
Schopenhauer like Plato is a great writer as well as Philosopher. Unlike many German philosophers who wrote very obscurely, Schopenhauer believed strongly in expressing ideas clearly and very often he uses many rhetorical and literary tropes to create beautiful concrete illustrations of his philosophical ideas. This is especially so in his brilliant and witty essays, which earned him more fame than his true magnum opus ever did. He also viciously attacks Hegel and his school, feeling they have betrayed the legacy of Kant (of whom Schopenhauer claimed he was a true disciple) through obscure sophistry designed to reintroduce the metaphysical bugbears Kant had properly banished forever from Philosophy. For Schopenhauer, clarity was always central, unfortunately something many later German philosophers did not learn.
Schopenhauer's work had a massive influence on many leading lights in European thought. People influenced by his ideas and who quoted him readily included Goethe, Joseph Conrad, Nietzsche, Wagner, Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, Schrodinger, Wittgenstein, Thomas Mann, and many others. Today he remains a fascinating philosopher to study and his relevance remains, particularly as his ideas seem to have anticipated some of the ideas of modern evolutionary biology and physical science, and also for his keen interest in Eastern philosophical and religious thought, which is starting to strongly impact the West today. He is certainly one of the greatest philosophers Germany ever produced after Kant.
More than a precursor to Nietzsche..........2006-08-23
First, a word about the form of this two-volume work. Volume One contains the core of Schopenhauer's philosophy and is his one absolutely essential book. Volume Two, which is longer, consists of elaborations upon the themes of Volume One. So, if you're strapped for cash and desperately need to own some Schopenhauer, it's fine to buy only Volume One. You won't be missing anything essential.
This book is one of the most provocative and readable works of 19th-century Western philosophy. Anyone who has waded through the soggy, muddy-bottomed marshes of Hegel's prose will be delighted by the clarity of Schopenhauer. While I remain unconvinced by his theory of all-pervading Will, seeing it as a way of sneaking transcendentalism back into a fortunately disenchanted world (Will seems at times too much like an omnipresent god for my tastes), I still highly recommend Schopenhauer. Even if you don't agree with him, arguing with him keeps you on your intellectual toes.
The Knight calmly facing Death and Devil!.......2006-03-10
Written when he was 30 Schopenhauer single-mindedly preserved the book and abstained form changing it in the subsequent decades and publications (however he wrote a supplemental volume II years later to expound on the main themes of the volume I). This English translation beautifully conveys the clarity, simplicity and magnificence of Schopenhauer's perfect German prose. As a person who reads philosophy for pleasure and insight, I must say I enjoyed it immensely and gained insight into fundamental questions of existence. Influenced by Eastern (Indian) philosophies, Schopenhauer courageously expounds his profoundly Pessimistic ideas without ever entering into dogmatism, characteristic of many philosophers, and "mystification" which he accused Hegel and other contemporary "Philosophy Professors". A familiarity with Kantian philosophy and Schopenhauer's other works (especially: On the Fourfold Root of Principle of Sufficient Reason" and "On the Will in Nature") is needed in order to clearly grasp the fundamental ideas of this book.
Philosophy for independent thinkers.......2005-12-04
Schopenhauer's magnum opus towers high above the silly word games of the analysts. This book is philosophy at its very best- a book that no educated person should miss for Schopenhauer wrote primarily for the layman. Like Nietzsche, he was highly skeptical of the "professionals" of his time. One thing that immediately strikes the reader is Schopenhauer's clear and crisp command of the written word unlike the severe case of abstractionitis that both Hegel and Heidegger seem to suffer from.
The World as Will and Representation clothes Transcendental Idealism in a pessimistic dress and offers a glorious, bold and innovated view of Kant's critical philosophy. Its scope and breadth reaches the outer limitations of human understanding creating a new and beautiful, yet cold and austere, vision that will forever challenge, shake, and destroy most people's views of reality. This book along with Kant's Critique gives a possible answer to one of the most perplexing problems of human understanding: it challenges and attempts to disarm Hume's powerful attack against the perceived "illusion" of causality. Whether it succeeds or not is left to the reader to decide.
Schopenhauer starts where Kant stops and he easily transcends him showing us how the world is a hostile place to live in and how reality is forever unknown to the knower. Few professional philosophers would probably agree with Schopenhauer. This in no way dimishes the value of his philosophy.
It is amazing that today most people simply ignore Schopenhauer and take him as a minor figure in the Western tradition. Part of the reason for this is because of Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, who simply dismissed Schopenhauer and gave him a bad reputation in his popular book "History of Western Philosophy." (This book is heavily biased and is probably one of Russell's worst books causing more harm than good for people new to philosophy.) Russell basically rejected Schopenhauer's work on the premise of hypocrisy since Schopenhauer did not actually practice the philosophy that he preached; yet ironically enough, Russell, being a brilliant logician and no less than the father of modern analytic philosophy, succumbed to emotionalism via the tu quoque fallacy. (i.e. judging a claim as false based on the character of the person claiming it instead of its truth value)
The best thing to do is to simply read the book yourself. Commentaries are helpful after one has understood the work, never before. It is highly recommended that one read Kant and then follow-up with Schopenhauer's book. (Though many have still profited skipping Kant altogether.) Very few things in life will probably be more important or rewarding than doing this.
Book Description
The first history of Traditionalism, an important yet surprisingly little-known twentieth-century anti-modern movement. Comprising a number of often secret but sometimes very influential religious groups in the West and in the Islamic world, it affected mainstream and radical politics in Europe and the development of the field of religious studies in the United States. In the nineteenth century, at a time when progressive intellectuals had lost faith in Christianity's ability to deliver religious and spiritual truth, the West discovered non-Western religious writings. From these beginnings grew Traditionalism, emerging from the occultist milieu of late nineteenth-century France, and fed by the widespread loss of faith in progress that followed the First World War. Working first in Paris and then in Cairo, the French writer Rene Guenon rejected modernity as a dark age, and sought to reconstruct the Perennial Philosophy-- the central religious truths behind all the major world religions --largely on the basis of his reading of Hindu religious texts. A number of disenchanted intellectuals responded to Guenon's call with attempts to put theory into practice. Some attempted without success to guide Fascism and Nazism along Traditionalist lines; others later participated in political terror in Italy. Traditionalism finally provided the ideological cement for the alliance of anti-democratic forces in post-Soviet Russia, and at the end of the twentieth century began to enter the debate in the Islamic world about the desirable relationship between Islam and modernity
Customer Reviews:
Not good.......2007-08-22
The book is pathetic. It treats a spiritual movement and reduces it to historical facts.
Poor scholarship.......2007-06-16
If you like tabloid magazines then this book is perfect for you. If you want to know what Traditionalism is then you should read the work of Rene Guenon, A.K. Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon, Martin Lings, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr.
the reviews reveal the reality.......2007-01-24
Skim the reviews and you can see that two kinds of people read this book: Traditionalists, and others.
Most of the Traditionalists could not be more upset. Someone has taken a glance behind the curtain, cleared the smoke and taken down the mirrors. Traditionalism is just another religious tradition, as fascinating and diverse and imperfect as any other. Although Rene Guenon, the central saint of Traditionalism, comes of looking like a good, sincere and intelligent man, Sedgwick presents him not as a prophet, but as someone other people (not Sedgwick) think of as a prophet. That is not good enough for some people. Schuon seems more suspicious here, and most people who don't follow him would consider that appropriate. He often seems to fit the stereotyope of the modern guru (see Storr's "Feet of Clay"). Most of the minor figures in Traditionalism are also presented favorably, if not as favorably as Traditionalists would like. That disquieting folks such as Evola are included understandably upsets Traditionalists who reject fascism, but it is a fact that they are inseparable from at least the early history of Traditionalism.
The others, who are not Traditionalists, could not be more enchanted with this fascinating information. Essentially esoteric fundamentalism, Traditionalism shows up everywhere, along with its more laid-back cousin Perennialism. You cannot study religion academically today without encountering works by Traditionalists, often essentially polemics for their religion, labeled as if they were secular studies, and often enough even accepted as such. The examples might surprise you: Eliade, Nasr, Corbin. Nasr, I think, is particularly egregious at times; for instance, the "Islam" volumes in Crossroad's "World Spirituality" series, which he edited, ought to be labeled "Traditionalist Sufism." The announced title is not covered at all; it is at least a distortion, if not a deception.
Sedgwick has written the first outside, neutral account of Traditionalism. And--contrary to some assertions here--this book is neutral. It is written for a non-Traditionalist audience, and the author reminds us not to judge them differently than we would any other religious tradition. He is, I think, as sympathetic as an outsider can be to another religious tradition. Anyway, an academic historian should not present any tradition as the fulfilment of human spirituality.
All in all, a very high quality, reliable and fascinating study. That is to be expected from Sedgwick, a highly respected veteran scholar of Islam.
Let me recommend a few other books to consider along with this one. For entertainment and another fascinating glimpse into the unexpectedly dramatic world of religious studies, see Ted Anton's "Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu." For a more in depth look at the founding of comparative religion, and an account of how a worldviews like Traditionalism came to dominate it (until very recently), see "Religion after Religion." If you want to read a more mainstream history of religious studies, see Sharpe's "Comparative Religion: A History."
If you want to read a sympathetic history of Traditionalism, I recommend Oldmeadow's "Journeys East," also an excellent example of Traditionalist expostulation disguised as neutral scholarship. The classic presentation of Traditionalism, the place you must begin, is Guenon's "The Crisis of the Modern World." For a recent presentation, try Quinn's "The Only Tradition."
Seminal account of "Traditionalism".......2006-11-05
The secretive 20th-century intellectual movement that became known as "Traditionalism" has, until recently, received little attention in scholarly literature. This state of affairs might not only have been caused by the difficulties that researchers encountered in obtaining reliable information on this elusive, international intelligentsia circle. A reason for mainstream scholarship's relative disregard for the numerous published books by René Guénon and Julius Evola may have been also that one can not take seriously their various fantasies about humanity's history and future that often seem closer to Tolkien's novels than to serious research. Indeed, the alternative world view of perennial philosophy presented in these and other authors' writings has far more to do with faith, ideology and religion, than with science. However, in view of the influence that, for instance, Evola exerted on various political groups and thinkers outside the narrow circle of Guénon's followers during the Cold War, the continued lack of attention to "Traditionalism" has been inappropriate within such disciplines as contemporary history, political science, and cultural studies. More recently a self-ascribed Russian "Traditionalist", Alexander Dugin, has, moreover, managed to gain influence on the Russian legislature, executive, mass media and higher education system. As a result of Dugin's multifarious activities, "Traditionalism" has become a major intellectual phenomenon in post-Soviet Russia, especially within the extreme right. Thus, a comprehensive study of "Traditionalism" was sorely needed.
In 2004, Mark Sedgwick did not only deliver the definitive account on "Traditionalism." He has also provided a narrative that stands out for both, the density of its factual material and the quality of its style. I have rarely read an academic book with such ease and pleasure, and, at the same time, learnt so much novel and relevant information unavailable in mainstream Western research. Sedgwick covers more than a century of international history while, at the same time, delving deeply into the recent intellectual life of such different countries as France, Egypt, Iran or Russia. This might be one of the most fascinating books in the history of ideas published during the last years. One gets, moreover, the feeling that Sedgwick, an Assistant Professor at the American University of Cairo, has greatly benefited from the inspiration derived from the fact that he is living in the same city were Guénon spent the last twenty years of his life.
Useful and Engaging.......2006-10-25
One would think, judging from the negative reviews here, that this book was a hatchet job on its subject: the individuals who have promulgated the philosophy (and ideology) of Traditionalism in the 20th and 21st centuries. The book didn't read as that to me. Rather, it struck me as a reasonably detached, thoroughly engaging history of an influential esoteric movement whose participants have previously remained opaque and cipher-like to the world at large.
But more than that, it is a bracing antidote to the lionizing of Guenon and Schuon (and others) by their followers. Do the Traditionalists have perspectives worth considering? Certainly, and they've influenced my own outlook considerably. But Traditionalism also comes with a lot of baggage (ranging from Guenon's "mild paranoia" as Sedgwick puts it, to Schuon's near deification by his cultish inner circle). _Against the Modern World_ includes that baggage as part of the bigger picture and this is of great benefit for the reader.
If you've ever read any of the Traditionalists' works, you owe it to yourself to read this book in order to gain a sense of the context in which those works arose.
(Despite some typos and minor errors in the book, I give it 5 stars in recognition of its significance in the fields of esoteric, spiritual, and religious studies. The book is not perfect, but it is extremely valuable.)
Book Description
In an elegant, eminently readable work, one of our most distinguished intellectual historians gives us a brilliant revisionist history.
The Roads to Modernity reclaims the Enlightenment–an extraordinary time bursting with new ideas about human nature, politics, society, and religion--from historians who have downgraded its importance and from scholars who have given preeminence to the Enlightenment in France over concurrent movements in England and America.
Contrasting the Enlightenments in the three nations, Himmelfarb demonstrates the primacy and wisdom of the British, exemplified in such thinkers as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke, as well as the unique and enduring contributions of the American Founders. It is their Enlightenments, she argues, that created a social ethic–humane, compassionate, and realistic–that still resonates strongly today, in America perhaps even more than in Europe.
The Roads to Modernity is a remarkable and illuminating contribution to the history of ideas.
Customer Reviews:
"Half the Truth is often a great Lie" (poor Richard).......2005-12-08
The first time I heard about Mrs. Himmelfarb was a few years ago in an essay ("The Cost of Rights. Why liberty depends on Taxes" by S.Holmes and C.S. Sunstein, 1999) illustrating the debate about rights, duties and social responsibility. At that time the recurrent adage was "communitarism" and the slogan, somewhat odd, was "Less Rights, More Duties". Mrs. Himmelfarb was cited - rather coldly - as a political thinker and academic historian, who had forewarned about the decline of those Victorian values, responsible at her eyes for the success of the Anglo-Saxon societies in the XIX and XX centuries.
I'm not fond of conservative ideas, but must admit that in these last years some interesting historical analysis has come from conservative viewpoints, specially for modern history: I'm thinking of historians like Simon Schama (his excellent "Citizens. A Chronicle of the French revolution" on top) and - more recently - of the sometimes highly controversial theses of Niall Ferguson (his "Cash Nexus", but also "The Pity of War"). These historians have been able to reconsider historical periods from fresh viewpoints, attaining challenging new and lively pictures: not the classic Marxist historiography, not the French historical school mesmerized by macro-phenomena, but a mix of economic analysis (Ferguson), philosophic cum sociological investigation (Schama) and intelligent attention to apparently minor events.
Unfortunately that is not the case of this book I decided to buy because of my great passion for the late XVIII century and Enlightenment in general.
The hope was to find a challenging portrait to confront those, often too deferential, we got used to. And must confess at first I was pleased by the book, because - after all - Mrs. Himmelfarb is a very good writer and knows how to please her reader.
But the more I kept reading, the more frustrated I became: the portrait of the era, the presentation of the Enlightenment, a pervading moralizing attitude and finally the unwarranted arrogance of the author let me truly shocked...
There are too many points to be analyzed for a short review like this, and I will be truly glad to discuss specific issues with any reader who wants to write me.
Let me focus on some of the more relevant points.
The main confusion comes by avoiding a clear definition of Enlightenment. Most of the times it is considered like a "period" (like the Middle ages, or the cold War years), sometimes as an "intellectual movement", sometimes like a social sensibility, but with no unambiguous meaning.
By these implicit assumption, Mrs. Himmelfarb is able to present as Enlightenment champions historical figures never before considered as part of it: both Wesley and Burke, for example, are given ample space in the chapters dedicated to England.
But she does not explain why - by the same standard -other thinkers living in the same period are not included (Saint Simon for France, for example, but the list is very long).
The lack of definition reverberates also in confusion about the length of the period the author considered as relevant: a careful reader cannot but realize that she considers almost only the years from 1770 to 1789, that most historians define as "Late Enlightenment", a period peculiar under many aspects (not least because of the emergence of a different sensibility both in taste and philosophy). Some scholar goes further describing this period as "Pre-Romanticism" and some has even fostered "heretical" theses blaming on it those great disasters like the French Revolution and the rise of Totalitarism (Schama).
Considering this late period the only "official" Enlightenment is highly misleading, and leaves in complete neglect all the hard background (the emergence of rationalism with thinkers like Descartes, Leibniz and Port Royal Logicians, the socio-cultural milieu in which the movement prospered and expanded - continental diffusion of the French language, the cultural salons in Paris, the emergence of a "Republic of Letters"- and the dispersion all over Europe of the new ideas thanks not just to enlightened rulers but also to brilliant and often less known intellectuals - not just Voltaire, D'Alembert and Diderot).
But nothing is so frustrating as the underlying thesis of the essay: one reader has proposed to rename the book "Reclaiming French Fries" and this can only give an idea of the arrogance of the author...
Some of her opinions are too good not to be cited.
Pag.3 "This book is an ambitious (sic) attempt to reclaim the Enlightenment ... from the French who have dominated and usurped (sic) it"
Later we are told that Enlightenment was a British creation, stolen by the evil and self-important French.
Mrs. Himmelfarb must be credited to be the first scholar with the courage to "reclaim" the Anglo-Saxon ownership of Enlightenment: no one before - not even contemporaries in Germany, Italy, England, Russia, Austria - ever realized this momentous truth.... More than 200 years and no one to understand this self-evident truth!
Pag.8 "It was only its association with the French Revolution that gave the French enlightenment the primacy it now has... "
By 1789 Enlightenment was almost finished... its legacy already in the hands of history. Even the immediate connection between French Enlightenment and Revolution is not holding anymore under the scrutiny of history - or at least not in the automatic association of cause and effect.
Pag.21 "...France having had neither a religious reformation nor a political revolution..."
Probably a lapse of the author. France DID HAVE a Reformation. It suffered a long religious war between French Catholics and French Huguenots, culminated with the St. Bartholomew night bloodbath, the murder of the pro-Catholic Guise and later with the Nantes Edict. A Huguenot reformed church is still existing today in France!
Besides, suspension of the Toleration Edict by the Sun King is still credited to have been a forerunner of the Enlightenment: diffusion of the French language all over Europe tutored by learned Huguenot émigrés and dissenting intellectuals created a common language, a common arena and a common culture over which Enlightenment spread.
Pag.5 "What is conspicuously absent (in the historical studies about Enlightenment) is virtue. Yet it was VIRTUE, RATHER THAN REASON THAT TOOK PRECEDENCE FOR THE BRITISH..."
A fresh instance about the true meaning of Mrs. Himmelfarb's true Enlightenment, resulting in complete confusion between morality, sociology and philosophy!
En passant, I have observed she is not alone today in showing a tendency to analyze history with the meter of morality in search of "Empires of Virtue". It is an attitude I already denounced for Warren Treadgold's "A Concise History of Byzantium" and it can be highly distorting. The mission of historical analysis is different from the construction of Arcadian heavens.
Pag.227 "In America today Enlightenment is alive and well..."
Which Enlightenment? Explanation is required: she means the British moral attitudes (virtue having precedence over reason) that informed the years between 1770 and 1800. Strange Enlightenment indeed..
In the following pages we are still to be lectured about Compassionate Conservatism as the sole rightful heir of the Enlightenment...
There are also some others saucy remarks, I wasn't able to trace back...
One about the supremacy of the American enlightenment over the French based on the number of reprints of "The Federalist" compared ... not with those of "The Spirit of the Laws", but of the "Encyclopédie" (by the same token we can state the primacy of "Playboy" over "The Federalist", based on diffusion and number of reprints).
An other interesting remark is lecturing the reader over the supremacy of English language over French, based on the less rhetoric emphasis of the former (I recommend readers to give a look at the instances she uses as proofs - they are too good to be true).
These are only some of the most offending parts of the book, but inaccuracies are almost countless, also in the part dedicated to America.
American Enlightenment is reduced to the political writers of the "Federalist". Only passing mention is done (and in a different context) of Franklin. The Founding Fathers are considered as demi-gods with a reverence that hinders the many differences between them and a dispassionate analysis of their ideas.
No attempt is done to frame the American Revolution in the larger debate about rights (Whig) and duties (Tory)... a debate that led more than one commentator to talk of "American rebellion" and of a British civil war exported on American soil.
If you happen to be fond of these themes, you may be interested in other works I chanced to read about the same topic:
FRENCH & EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT:
- "The Republic of Letters. A cultural history of the French Enlightenment" by Dena Goodman. Very interesting and well written, but uneven in the result, and sometimes with a too marked militant feminist approach (yet the author doesn't seem to appreciate the fact that Enlightenment was the first period in which women had a true relevant cultural role).
- "The Age of Conversation" by Benedetta Craveri - a must read for sure! Gripping like a novel and hugely learned, this is the story of the development of that culture of bonne manieres, intelligent conversation, informal culture and tact that we now tend to associate with Enlightenment and the last years of the Ancien Regime.
- "Citizens. A Chronicle of the French Revolution". One of the best works on the French Revolution I ever read, it tries to answer the question if the French Revolution was the authomatic consequence of Enlightenment ideas. The reply is no.
- "France in the Elightenment" by Daniel ROCHE. More a sociologic analysis of the age... Probably the most boring and driest book I ever read.
- "The Roots of Romanticism" by Isaiah Berlin. The great philosophers and one of his best books. Reading it cannot be but a pleasure.
ENGLISH ENLIGHTENMENT
- "Enlightenment" by Roy Porter... a more appropriate title should be "The British enlightenment", since the author focuses exclusively on the national dimension. Extremely interesting, not always easy nor pleasant.
AMERICAN ENLIGHTENMENT
- "The Long Affair : Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785-1800 by Conor Cruise O'Brien excellent. In depth study about Jeffersonian thought and French revolutionary ideas.
- "A few Bloody Noses - The American War of Independence" by Robert Harvey (columnist, editor and former British MP ), an appraisal of the war from an all British point of view. Interesting but average. Well explained the thesis of the American Revolution as a civil war
- "The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson" by William Howard Adams. Very interesting, but incomplete.
MISCELLANEA:
- "Miniature Portraits" by G. Lytton Strachey. More on the literary side, but the portrait dedicated (indirectly) to Voltaire and the one dedicated to Hume are true cameos.
You are most welcome if you can suggest other interesting readings or just share ideas and comments!
Thanks for reading.
Reclaiming French Fries From The French.......2005-11-13
I started reading this book with some apprehension, raised by the opening sentence in which Himmelfarb purports to do to the Enlightenment what the US Congress cafeteria not so long ago did for potato fries: reclaiming it from the French. In fact, Himmelfarb's book is not so much an attack on French 'philosophes' as it is an attempt to make the Enlightenment more inclusive, broadening its scope beyond a narrow focus on reason in order to include the "sociology of virtue" of British moral philosophers and the "politics of liberty" of America's Founding Fathers. As noted by other reviewers, the chapter devoted to the French 'Siecle des Lumieres' is short and rather superficial. Himmelfarb is more convincing when she shows that the Enlightenment, at least in its Anglo-american versions, was not always inimical to religion. The chapter on Methodism makes a valid claim that religious revivals such as Wesleyanism in England and the Great Awakening in America can be seen as an extension of the Enlightenment's phenomenon, and that their ideals of social virtue and moral compassion are still very much alive today.
But did she have to reject anything French to make that point?
A TEMPEST IN A TEAPOT.......2005-10-14
Try as I might, I was barely able to finish reading this book without a rising feeling of exasperation, not to say ennui, on several levels.
I can agree with the author's thesis that the Enlightenment originated not so much in France as it did in Britain, with the French and American experiences "serving as foils for the British" (pg. 20). As a non-historian, I can't say whether she is making a significant statement. After all, most non-academic people would probably think of the "Renaissance" as an Italian phenomenon, but would have no problem if someone suddenly "proved" that in fact Italy was only one of several countries in which the Renaissance took root and developed. It all seems to me so much a tempest in a teapot.
But it was Himmelfarb's turgid prose and style that gave me the most headaches. On page x of the Preface, the author calls her 284-page book a "short book". At 284 pages, a Dicken's novel might well be considered short, but by page 22 in this book, that is, by the end of the Preface and the Prologue, Himmelfarb had really said all she had to say on her subject. The rest seemed to me to be so much over-icing on a cake. The book isn't "short": it's 242 pages too *long*.
I first became discouraged when on inspecting the book, I found that it contained not only a Preface, but also a Prologue and an Epilogue. This may seem a mean-spirited thing to criticize, I suppose, but still, a book that needs so much explanation before the author gets to the heart of the matter and that needs a 10 page commentary beyond its ending, leaves me a little disconcerted.
By all accounts I have read, Professor Himmelfarb is one of the paragons of contemporary debate on the American intellectual arena. I'm sure the accolades are well deserved. Still, when an author informs me in the Prologue to her work that she is going to "reclaim" a subject and then that she is going to "redefine" (twice) and "restore" (thrice) it, that she is "unapologetic and unironic" of her approach and that she is "engaged in a doubly revisionist exercise" (pg 6), then it seems to me she portrays a combative demeanor off-putting to the general public (like me).
After all, it's usually reviewers, readers and the posterity of a book that proclaim and establish a book as "revisionist" or declare that an author has redefined or reclaimed a certain field of study. For an author to do so, seems to me, is somewhat indelicate.
I could "forgive" all of this, I imagine, were it not for the turgid, repetitious and frankly, pretentious prose in which the book is written. On page 16, for example, in the first paragraph, we are treated to a veritable bestiary of 17 Enlightenment illuminati in such quick succession that the point of the paragraph is totally lost. The feeling one is left with after plodding through this absurd presentation is that the author wants to impress the reader with the fact that she is very familiar with all these notables, and you better be too. Something like that. On pages 11-12, a mini-dissertation on the etymology of the word "Enlightenment" is given. This is interesting but unnecessary. The book is notable for this type of thing: inflated and beside the point stances and wordy explanations that lose the reader, at least this reader.
The book ends with an Epilogue, as I said. The first sentence in this chapter reads: "In America today, the Enlightenment is alive and well." Really? I thought a "culture war" has been going on in America for the last 3 decades, in which the Enlightenment is fighting for its survival and not doing well at all. George Washington's Farewell Address may be read annually in the US Senate, as Himmelfarb goes on to say, but that's about the only place it is read, certainly not without denouncing speeches, threatened lawsuits, anti-Farewell Address marches and so on taking place trying to *prevent* the speech from being given.
I have never read any other book by the acclaimed author, but I will do so now. It just can't be that her other books resemble this one in any important way.
Judging a Book By Its Cover.......2005-09-12
My comments have only to do with the packaging of the book. Both in terms of its title and dustjacket design, it closely follows Roy Porter's brilliant 2000 book, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment. Like Porter's study, Himmelfarb's includes a reproduction of Joseph Wright's Orrery (c. 1766). And like Porter's study, Himmelfarb's employs a red ground for the letters of the title and author.
This is surely not a coincidence. It is only too bad that Porter is not still around to review Himmelfarb's text himself. Ever the model of civility and generosity, he had the wonderful ability to chart a reasonable middle way, and yet in today's political climate he would undoubtedly be described as a liberal on the side of the modern project. He, too, was convinced the story of the Enlightenment could be told from the point of view of the British, and yet, I'm not sure this is quite what he had in mind. Regardless, dressing Himmelfarb's book to resemble Porter's so closely was an unfortunate decision.
The American Concept as an Excpetional Ideal.......2005-02-21
Leveraging the concept of "American Exceptionalism" coined by de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, Lipset noted that exceptional in this sense is to be interpreted as qualitatively different from all other countries. The concept of American Exceptionalism as expressed by Lipset has broad academic acceptance and credibility. While there are those who might challenge this concept, it is fair to say that Americans continue to see themselves as different or unique from the rest of the world. This is not to say that America is better than the rest of the world, but that America is what it is because of its unique balance of public and private interests governed by constitutional ideals that are focused on personal and economic freedom.
It is through the lens of American Exceptionalism that we can best comprehend what Himmelfarb has put forward in The Roads to Modernity. Her comparison of the French, British and American Enlightenments yields some interesting differences providing greater context to the concept of American Exceptionalism. Himmelfarb completes this comparison with alacrity and evenhandedness. She does not end up being an apologist for the neo-conservative movement even though her eye is on present-day politics nor is this book a paean to Libertarians. On some level it is fair to criticize her for lightly brushing aside the Scottish Enlightenment and all but ignoring the Italian Renaissance as well as great Enlightenment thinkers outside of France, Britain and America. However, her point about the uniqueness of the American Enlightenment might have been lost if the comparison went to far a field intellectually.
Her main point is that the American Enlightenment's influence is alive and vibrant in American political discourse even today while the influence of the French and British Enlightenments are all but footnotes to the current political discourse of those nations. She opens herself to criticism from the political left because she espouses the centrality of religion to the success and endurance of American civic and political institutions, is unwilling to de-moralize political economy, and recognizes the importance of the individual and the social virtues. Many today forget that religion was viewed as key to the triumph of our democratic experiment by our Founding Fathers. Those who seemingly forget or conveniently brush over this fact only mention the two of the Founding Fathers who were deists (Franklin and Jefferson).
I am in full agreement with Himmelfarb that America was exceptional at its founding and remains so even today. Himmelfarb deftly succeeds in defining these qualitative differences. America today is a paradox to Europeans and many on the American left who can not seem to come to terms with the American focus and reliance on individuality, capitalism, and religion.
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- Bringing Violence to Law and Politics.
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The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence In Modern French Thought
Jesse Goldhammer
Manufacturer: Cornell University Press
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Dialectic of Enlightenment (Cultural Memory in the Present)
ASIN: 0801441501 |
Book Description
In The Headless Republic, Jesse Goldhammer explores how the French revolutionaries retrieved a set of ideas about founding violence from the classical Romans and early Christians and incorporated it into postrevolutionary debates that echoed into the twentieth century. By linking sacrifice as expressed in revolutionary practices to modern French theory, Goldhammer shows how ancient ideas of violent political renewal made their way into the contemporary age.
Goldhammer elucidates the theoretical and practical significance of sacrificial violence during the Revolution, and then turns his attention to postrevolutionary intellectuals whose work is inspired by the founding sacrifices of the French Republic. Showing how Georges Bataille, Joseph de Maistre, and Georges Sorel adapted concepts of sacrifice to their own particular political agendas—whether reactionary or revolutionary—Goldhammer challenges conventional readings of these three thinkers as "bloodthirsty intellectuals." Instead, he argues, their work reveals the limits of violence as an agent of political change and attacks the forms of violence later adopted by fascist regimes. More broadly, Goldhammer makes the case for including ancient concepts of collective bloodshed in the modern lexicon of political violence.
Customer Reviews:
Bringing Violence to Law and Politics........2005-06-13
Law, writes Robert Cover, "takes place on a battlefield of pain and death." The power of violence, Cover saw,is jurisgenerative. Violence, in other words, has the power to found law. In a fascinating new book, "The Headless Republic," Jesse Goldhammer explores the French tradition of thinking about sacrificial violence and its role in the foundation of political and legal authority. Goldhammer traces the idea of violence as a pregnant and generative political impulse from its roots in the French revolution through the works of the social and political theorists Joseph de Maistre, George Sorel, and Georges Bataille. This book is not only well written, it will make you think about the importance and danger of violence in our world.
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