These nine essays comprise a kind of sequel to the author's famous foundation work of ``logotherapy,'' Man's Search for Meaning, with a focus on a person's spiritual rather than existential striving. Vienna-based psychiatrist and neurologist Frankl, the author of 31 books, makes some profound observations about the nature of religiosity, awareness of which he believes must be incorporated into psychology. For example, he says that humans have a ``spiritual unconscious,'' that each person has a latent intuition and yearning for the transcendent, and that this is often activated when a person must deal with the ``tragic triad—pain, guilt and death.'' Unfortunately, Frankl's prose never quite brings his important subject to life; it's too academic, with a dearth of vivid anecdotal material or case studies. And it sometimes lapses into Latinisms and abstruse formulations, as in his reference to ``pre-reflective ontological self-understanding,'' when what Frankl really means is ``the wisdom of the heart.'' As important, the author's notion of the transcendent is so broad as to be almost meaningless; thus, he defines God as ``the partner of our most intimate soliloquies,'' a definition that seems to involve a kind of theological sophistry which has little if anything to say about a person's responsibility to others. At the same time, Frankl's notion of faith is black and white; he states, ``I personally think that either belief in God is unconditional or is not belief at all. If it is unconditional, it will stand and face the fact that six million died in the Nazi holocaust,'' as if belief could never coexist with doubt, as if any theology could ``stand and face'' the shattering reality of mechanistic mass murder. Frankl's question about ultimate meaning and a few of his observations are profound, yet much else in this sometimes rambling book disappointingly stops at the surface.
Pub Date: Oct. 7, 1997
ISBN: 0-306-45620-6
Page Count: 190
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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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