by Yi-Fu Tuan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1993
Tuan (Geography/University of Wisconsin at Madison) attempts to elevate the idea of the aesthetic to what he considers its proper place in the social context, in particular to its place as the impetus behind the formation and sustaining of cultural systems. In the aesthetic (which Tuan defines as ``senses come to life''), the author believes he's found the driving force behind— and the goal of—life, bringing it joy and giving it form. The aesthetic, he says, can be found reflected on every level of our existence. Tuan starts by poking around in the philosophical mode, examining the aesthetic expressions of our senses—fragrances, music, visual stimuli, the panoply of sounds—in some detail. He then muses over four diverse cultural/aesthetic milieus: those of Australian aborigines, medieval Europeans, Chinese, and modern Americans. Tuan's ruminations—on songlines and eremites, cathedrals and old hometowns, symbolic spaces and the state—are entertaining, and the breadth of his research is dazzling. But his meditations are left hanging: The linkages he hopes to construct- -between culture, nature, and the aesthetic; between the couplets of good/beautiful and moral/aesthetic—never fuse, regardless of how many curiosities are trotted out. Indeed, his legion of facts and anecdotes can come suffocatingly fast and furious. More problematical still are the times when soporifics lay thick on the ground (``metaphor reaches backward into synesthetic tendency and forward into symbol''). Tuan is a connoisseur of the arcane tidbit, but synthesis is not his forte.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55963-209-7
Page Count: 285
Publisher: Island Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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by Yi-Fu Tuan
by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
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
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by Albert Camus ; translated by Justin O'Brien & Sandra Smith
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by Albert Camus ; translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy & Justin O'Brien
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by Albert Camus translated by Arthur Goldhammer edited by Alice Kaplan
by Stephen Batchelor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020
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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