TRANSCENDENCE FOR BEGINNERS

A meandering and often profound meditation on selfhood, literature, and biography.

Adapted from a series of lectures given on natural theology, this book invites readers to explore a new perspective on philosophy and literature that places a reader in a conceptual centerpoint and seeks profundity in the connections that emanate outward. Carlisle, whose books include The Marriage Question (2023), is unabashedly narrative in her ruminations and discovers hidden resonance threaded between personal stories and her current studies. “Philosophical thoughts blurred with my own life story in ways I felt I should resist,” she admits, and declares in her lectures an intention that “life stories would make a home for philosophy.” Much of the book circles around “how a human life…takes shape through encounters with other lives,” and Carlisle elegantly expands this idea of “lives” to include books, both fiction and biographies. “Just as a life leaves its trace, having passed through the world,” she writes, “so a book leaves its trace in us. Something slender yet diffuse, incalculable, has passed through our own inner life.” What results is a compelling clash of philosophical and literary examinations: Carlisle repeatedly conjures her own 2023 biography of George Eliot and revels in the Spinozist idea that “everything is an expression or avatar of God.” She often reaches too far in her search for connections: long discussions of Indian spiritual teachers and the ancient concept of kalon risk losing those readers better situated in the realm of literary classics. Although most of the book is rigorously academic, the collection’s magnificent final section trades its heavy conceptual lattice for something more humble and accessible. She discusses the painter Celia Paul’s intimate portraits alongside digressions on Proust and his efforts to render a life lived fully. “A human body does not look very large,” Carlisle writes with devastating clarity, “like a book, the space it occupies is dwarfed by the time it carries.”

A difficult but rewarding revelation for the academically inclined reader.