A professor's casual, more or less philosophical ruminations on the liberating function of dialogue. This volume of Grudin's philosophical essays follows Time and the Art of Living (1988) and The Grace of Great Things (1990). The tone of this collection is conversational, and its intention is vague. Perhaps it aims, as the publisher opines, to reveal ``how the use of dialogue can open the door to greater creativity.'' It often has the feel of a self-help book, as when Grudin (Literature and Humanities/Univ. of Oregon) talks about dialogue between lovers. But his interdisciplinary ambitions are much larger. He explains how dialogue can fix the former Soviet Union; how it can renew the university; how it makes science work; how it is an intrinsic element of American freedom; how it functions in literature; how it can heal the breach between nature and modern consciousness. Though the amiable Grudin is often entertaining and imaginative, he conceives of dialogue in an impossibly amorphous way. Dialogue has a long tradition in philosophical thinking, but Grudin does not bother to position himself within that tradition. In addition there is much preening: he likes to tell the reader about his sabbaticals to prestigious universities, trips to interesting places, dealings and with big publishers. And what will happen when the world at last cottons on to the Grudin dialogics (which he finds already at work in environmentalism)? ``The mental landscape of Western intellectuals will be much less alienated, much closer to the vision of a mystic and intuitive confidence of a child. Community and engagement will become intellectual rallying cries, and the European prophets of alienation and absurdity will leave the bookstore shelves to join the Chartists and Prohibitionists in underground library repositories. There will be just as many loonies and dilettantes as ever, but everybody will be happier.'' Nostradamus in a tweed jack and a Volvo.
Pub Date: June 26, 1996
ISBN: 0-395-77187-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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