Well-crafted and thought-provoking.
Intriguing examination of the life-and-death difference between morality and ethics.
Gustafson contends that readers will be used to thinking of the terms “morality” and “ethics” as largely interchangeable. At the very least, most see both terms in a positive light. The author argues, however, that morality has been a misused and deadly social construct throughout the ages. “Morality and ethics differ,” says the author, “because morality supports civilization and ethics supports life.” Morality, according to Gustafson, is a civilization’s way of determining good and evil. Since morality changes from one civilization to another (and differs within civilizations), it is subject to abuse. Morality, he explains further, supports the “dominator system,” whereby everyone and everything is rated and valued according to a civilization’s arbitrary sense of good and bad. Hence “morality,” as the differentiation between good and evil, has been used throughout the centuries to condone everything from slavery, to racism in America, to the Nazi campaign against the Jews. Quite the contrary, writes Gustafson–ethics supports not a particular civilization, but life itself. Mercy and humility are examples of ethical behavior and thinking, which seek to serve those marginalized by society. The author points toward Native-American cultures as examples of ethical ones, in that they served the community as a whole as well as the natural world. Moreover, he holds up Jesus Christ as a foremost exemplar of ethics–“Jesus was not moral. He was ethical...because he rejected morality’s death-dealing function and supported life instead.” Overall, the book is well-written and pulls in a wide array of authors and thinkers. Gustafson’s work is not meant to be a treatise countering every argument, but instead introduces the concept of this morality-ethics dichotomy. In the end the author calls upon readers to be aware of the dominator system they live in, and how morality is used to support it, not life.
Well-crafted and thought-provoking.Pub Date: July 31, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7414-5404-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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