How to become a mensch—a decent person—is the question posed by Halberstam (Philosophy/NYU) in this slim volume marbled with insight and clichÇ. ``Relax,'' recommends Halberstam. ``You won't find any preaching here.'' But the man does preach, or at least offer pounds of avuncular advice, perhaps the necessary price of writing on morality. His interest isn't in social issues—abortion, capital punishment—but in personal moral behavior. Whatever the pickle, his solution is old-fashioned: common-sense, integrity, and responsibility win the day. Sometimes Halberstam's advice is obvious: ``maintain friendships with people with different interests''; ``get yourself friends who know how to laugh.'' He distinguishes between love and lust (``falling in love is a decision'') and counsels each person to develop his or her own theory of sexual morality. He excoriates ``creeps''—verbose name-droppers flushed with self-interest—and, more interestingly, also raises doubts about ``saints,'' who can grow so devoted to duty that self-righteousness drowns out compassion. Rules of proper discourse emerge: Don't argue with arguers; avoid pet peeves; don't debase the language by, say, calling Republicans ``fascists.'' Nothing new or controversial here. But things pick up when Halberstam steps into messier ground. He suggests that we bear responsibility for our emotions, which carry moral weight; that we must judge others objectively, without making excuses; that morality isn't a matter of taste, and that we must therefore beware of confusing cultural relativity (eating different foods in different lands) and ethical relativity (accepting foreign customs that violate basic human rights). He ends on a high note, by shooting down nine moral clichÇs: ``What goes around comes around''; ``moral values can't be taught,'' etc. Like Dad's good advice, but, despite real effort on the author's part, still delivered with too much dull oatmeal and yucky vitamins.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-670-84247-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993
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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