In lesser Joseph Campbell style, the brainchild deity is viewed as archetype, traced over the millennia as the union of masculine/feminine, the Jungian anima/animus. In the second tribute to Athena this year (after Lee Hall's, see p. 352), Shearer, a London-Oxford Jungian analyst, finds nearly inexhaustible inspiration in the goddess of wisdom and warfare. Athene opens strongly with a summary of Athena/Pallas/Minerva's classical heritage, particularly her significance in Athens' Panathenaean ceremony and her more distant pagan manifestation as Sulis Minerva in Bath. Shearer is less diligent in arguing her thesis of the masculine-feminine deity, however, as she expands it to draw archetypal parallels with other deities: the Celtic Morrigan, the Sumerian Inanna, the Egyptian Neith, the Indian Kali, and less recognizable prehistoric goddesses. The author's arguments become progressively looser and less compelling as she canvasses the Athene-streak in Christian theology (Eve, Mary, and Sophia, i.e., Wisdom incarnate), Elizabethan politics and alchemy, and the Victorian ideals of femininity. Shearer unearths some interesting historical tidbits for symbolic touchstones: Florence Nightingale kept a pet owl named Athena, and Freud had a favorite statue of the goddess on his desk (which he described as ``perfect, only that she has lost her spear''). Discussing the modern significance of the goddess, Shearer hopes for a return to a golden-age matriarchal society of peacefulness—with Athena embodied by the ``Greenham Women'' protesting American cruise missiles rather than by the Boadicea-like Margaret Thatcher. Throughout, Shearer's prose suffers most from an affected matiness, reflected in the ostentatiously slangy translations of Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, et al., which are currently in vogue in England. Rather than sounding up-to-date, the forced conversational tone makes the reader feel trapped in a nervy Oxbridge tutorial. (24 pages b&wh illustrations)
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-670-85797-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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