An erudite opus demanding substantial patience, intelligence and education from its readers.
Journalist and intellectual historian Watson (The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New, 2012, etc.) analyzes what people have done to supplant or supplement religion since Nietzsche declared the death of God in the late 19th century.
The author begins with the horror of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie (religion out of control) and returns to Rushdie some 500 pages later. In between is a rich mixture of cultural, intellectual, political and religious history that demands much of readers and is in ways a multilayered chronicle of the past 140 years. But a basic question underlies all: What do we do without God? Watson looks initially at the effects Nietzsche had on the arts (Thomas Mann and Isadora Duncan write and dance through this section) and then looks at American thinkers including Emerson William James, John Dewey and George Santayana. Poets and artists of various stripes also figure prominently (Rimbaud, Cézanne, Bergson), and Freud makes an early appearance as well (he returns periodically). Playwrights are next (Strindberg, Shaw, Chekhov most prominently) before he devotes a chapter to the impressionist painters and their successors. In a solid chapter about the power of desire, a topic to which he returns, Watson explores the works of Gide, Henry James, Wells and Proust. And on the author goes, moving seamlessly from literature to art, philosophy, psychology, political movements, world war, drama and popular culture (the Doors, Dylan, etc.). Watson blasts the world’s religions for their failures during the Holocaust, but he doesn’t have a lot to say about music (a little bit about Charlie Parker and bebop). He delivers a sturdy chapter on the works of today’s scientific atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Pinker) and ends with praise and analysis of Ronald Dworkin.
An erudite opus demanding substantial patience, intelligence and education from its readers.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5431-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
American pragmatism and delight in clashing values characterize this well-informed survey of contemporary moral issues. Tivnan (The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy, 1987) sees Americans as increasingly unsure about what they believe, as the moral authority of ethnic and religious traditions plays less of a role in our society. He attempts to assemble the best arguments on all sides of the current heated debates on abortion, suicide, euthanasia, the death penalty, and affirmative action. Devoting a separate chapter to each, he begins with a brief history of the issue concerned, follows with a sampler of the arguments for and against, and concludes with his own opinion. This format makes for stimulating reading. On assisted suicide we learn of ancient philosophers' very nuanced views for and against, see how these were synthesized by Christian thinkers such as Aquinas, then observe the question blown open again by the opposing views of Kant and Hume before we reach the contemporary controversy involving the Hemlock Society and Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Here, as in most cases, Tivnan takes a liberal stance. On the fiercely contested topic of abortion, he gives an excellent summary of pro- life and pro-choice views, including feminists on both sides, and holds that abortion is the sometimes justifiable taking of a human (but pre-personal) life. Tivnan occasionally fudges on thorny philosophical issues (e.g., he equates martyrdom with suicide) and seems content with a merely legal or social stance. He celebrates American diversity and suggests that beyond tolerance there are no objective moral values; his heroes are Isaiah Berlin, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty. For Tivnan, truth is simply the way a society describes how it determines what is right. He does not ask how this would apply in Germany of the 1930s or in contemporary China, where human rights are dismissed as a purely Western cultural phenomenon. Provocative reading, whatever your point of view.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-74708-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Damasio is the first to admit that he cannot prove all he says. In the meantime, one can read with pleasure and share the...
Few neuroscientists today would defend Cartesian dualism—the idea that mind and body are separate—but Damasio takes one more leap: Not only are philosophers wrong to separate brain and body, but psychology's separation of reason from emotion is also wrong.
Most neuroscientists agree that what we call the mind reflects the functions of the nervous system—in short, crudely speaking, the body. Modern science, however, has transferred the old mind- body split into a brain-body dichotomy in which the brain occupies a hierarchically privileged place. But Damasio (Neurology/Univ. of Iowa College of Medicine) democratizes the relationship between brain and body; he posits a powerful interdependence in which our physical experience of the world around us is central to the creation of our sense of self, and colors our behavior. His persuasive argument begins with Phineas Gage, a 19th-century railway worker who suffered brain damage when an iron rod shot through his head like a missile, destroying his left eye and parts of his frontal lobes. The result was not a loss of speech or memory but profound personality and emotional changes and an inability to make rational judgments about the present and future. Damasio and his wife, Hanna, have studied patients with similar frontal-lobe damage and similar effects: IQ, memory, and language are intact, but there is a lack of feeling and an inability to put current events in context and make future judgments. These points are eloquently expressed, along with the anatomical/physiological evidence linking the frontal cortices with sensory-motor areas and emotional networks that feed forward and backward from the body surface and internal organs.
Damasio is the first to admit that he cannot prove all he says. In the meantime, one can read with pleasure and share the excitement of a neuroscientist who sees that in the union of the many parts of the human brain lies its strength.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13894-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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