Readers expecting a meal will find only a snack, but a tasty one.
The author of On Bullshit (2005, not reviewed) returns with an itty-bitty disquisition on the personal and societal importance of truth.
Frankfurt (Emeritus, Philosophy/Princeton Univ.) takes a common-sense approach. Although there are some allusions to Spinoza and Kant and Shakespeare, and although he drops into his text a quotidian here and a prolegomenon there, the author addresses throughout the average educated reader who perhaps needs some pages to turn on the New York–Boston shuttle. He begins by admitting an oversight in his surprise bestseller Bullshit: He didn’t really discuss therein what truth is and why we should care about it. Frankfurt has no interest in esoteric arguments about the nature of reality, no concern (here, anyway) with the peculiarities of quantum mechanics. No, he’s interested in verifiable, everyday fact. It’s true that the moon orbits the earth; it’s false that the moon is green cheese. He notes we cannot live without the truth (red lights really do mean stop) and argues that “it is nearly always more advantageous to face the facts of which we must deal than to remain ignorant of them.” He discusses lying (it’s almost always bad) and shows how both liars and lie-ees are damaged—the former because their lies create enormous loneliness (they can tell no one), the latter because lies confine them to a world unreal and thus unpredictable. Frankfurt detours briefly to look at lies that everyone knows are lies and uses as illustration Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138 (“When my love swears that she is made of truth”). Here, Frankfurt turns gentle and even compassionate—though he ought to have addressed the Bard’s layered meanings of lie and habit. Frankfurt ends by showing how we develop our sense of self by banging up against reality—against the truth. He declines all comment on an enormous condor named Religion that’s flapping noisily around in his small room. Which is it, truth or bullshit?
Readers expecting a meal will find only a snack, but a tasty one.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26422-X
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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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