A complex and stimulatingly provocative look at just how possible a fulfilling life might be.
Bostrom conducts a philosophical inquiry into what gives life meaning.
The author (Superintelligence, 2014) here examines what he calls “the problem of utopia: the problem we will face after we have solved all the other problems.” He refers to this post-problem “deep utopia” as a “kind of philosophical particle accelerator” that, though clearly hypothetical (as he puts it, “We appear in no imminent danger of running out of woe”), is useful in examining what gives life meaning. Bostrom breaks down a number of different kinds of meaning life might obtain if all obstacles to fulfillment were removed, ranging from pure hedonistic pleasure to “social entanglement”; generally, he’s talking about the mixture of the practical and the personal that’s typically defined as “purpose.” “If someone proclaims X to be the meaning of their life,” he writes, “we may reasonably take X to be some sort of declaration of what they’re about, what they stand for, and what they are ultimately up to.” The author examines various ideas of personal fulfillment against the backdrop of an “encompassing transcendental purpose,” often including references to various schools of philosophy. The “decabillionaire’s gigayacht” is discussed right alongside Nietzsche and Camus in a quest to understand what kinds of things might give life meaning in a world without problems—and, by extension, in a world currently full of problems. One might think that as those problems get smaller, the passion they generate would also decline, but Bostrom points out that this isn’t always so: As he observes, more people cheer a soccer goal than cheer the eradication of a disease.
Bostrom is a marvelously energetic prose stylist; it’s uncanny how often he turns subjects like utilitarianism and Malthusian superabundance into genuinely thrilling reading. He vigorously explores the ramifications of the “age of abundance” he envisions that might supplant the “shallow redundancy” of current occupational labor: “Since it would eliminate both the need and the opportunity for paid work,” he writes, “it would cause one source of purpose to dry up, namely the purpose that many people currently find in their jobs.” Some of his authorial devices might come off as a bit twee (the ongoing Socratic dialogue between voices called Kelvin, Tessius, and Firafix, for instance, which runs throughout the book and grows tiresome after three pages), and some of his contentions will strike readers as debatable, to say the least. When he posits that a “maximally technologically capable” society would also be “very good,” for instance, he might be taking optimism a bit far. But the bulk of the text is immensely accessible and thought-provoking. Through it all, Bostrom employs a wry understated humor that’s often very quiet in its punchlines. “While technically doable,” he writes in one of many such passages, “eliminating boredom feelings would incur an ethical cost by distancing us from the normative ideal that our attitudes should match reality.” Tech fans will have much to consider here.
A complex and stimulatingly provocative look at just how possible a fulfilling life might be.Pub Date: March 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781646871643
Page Count: 536
Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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