What is Enlightenment?

This essay by Immanuel Kant, written in 1784 at the height of the Enlightenment, is the most famous answer provided to Zöllner's open question of what was going on. It's very short (seven pages, six if you don't care about footnotes) and can be summed up with its opening quote - "Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity," said immaturity being the inability to use one's own reason to move meaningfully through the world without the guidance of others.* Such an exit occurs when people are granted intellectual & spiritual freedom, though Kant also brings this into dialogue with obedience to the law, making the somewhat perplexing point that "a lesser degree of civil freedom... creates the room for spiritual freedom to spread to its full capacity." Historically this is a very influential essay, and certainly roundedly answers its title question, but if you're genuinely interested in seeing the answer unpacked I would instead recommend you read Fichte's The Vocation of the Scholar, which treads very similar ground but with much more useful & insightful depth.

* Concerningly I think there is a good case to be made that as of the 2020s we are entering a period of disenlightenment, in which independent "mature" thinking persons are increasingly outsourcing their own critical reasoning skills to the likes of ChatGPT... but that's a whole 'nother thing I won't pick apart thoroughly here.

Poetic Diction

This book by Owen Barfield* is one I've read before but I didn't do a very nice job at the post last time round so I promise to be a bit more helpful on this go. It's a theory of meaning, blending philology, linguistics, cultural history, the evolution of poetic form, psychology, philosophy &etc to sketch a broad & deep body of theory into how poetic diction, thereby poetry, thereby meaning, thereby knowledge - function. Its contents are, in brief, as follows:

• the original preface from the 1927 first edition & a second, much meatier, one from the 1951 second edition
• chapters proper:
1. defining "poetic diction" with a few examples
2. the aesthetic effects of poetry
3. metaphor
4. meaning & myth
5. language & poetry
6. the poet as individual
7. the making of meaning
8. verse & prose
9. archaism
10. strangeness
11. concluding remarks
• four appendices: on the aesthetics of nature; on the philosophical difficulties of establishing & using concrete definitions; on "accidental" metaphors; & on the unhelpfulness of the objective/subjective distinction
• an afterword from 1972 which is basically just acknowledging intellectual debts to various other thinkers

   I found this book even more insightful & revelatory than I did on first reading.** It does for poetics what Wittgenstein's Tractatus did for logic; and since logic is by nature devoid of actual meaning, only being able to establish logical relations between propositions, it is a much more fruitful book in every way. Barfield was a thinker of immense depth, breadth, scope & sensitivity, & in my opinion he deserves to be far more widely known & read. If you're interested in the philosophy of meaning in a grounded & pragmatic way, this will be an exhilarating synthesis of ideas; if you're more interested in a theory of poetry that will help you in your own artistic understanding & endeavour, you will not be disappointed either - probably not directly inspired, but certainly better-equipped. Highly recommended little book. The chief prompt for me re-reading it was that I'm running a poetry writing workshop for my church on Sunday, and while this is largely too academic & big-picture to be of much practical help for that, I certainly found it thoroughly fecund & fertile as a guiding text.

* One of the Inklings - the casual but serious gang of Oxford literary professors who would go for pints (in a pub called The Eagle & Child; it's still there, I've been, it's nice. Quiet & cozy. The dudes have a demure but noticeable little plaque in their memory) & chat about ideas & their work. The gang notably also included J.R.R. Tolkien & C.S. Lewis, both of whom were in not-small part inspired by Barfield's profound thinking around language.

** To be fair I was in the run-up to a psychotic break at the time, which I didn't know, obviously, but it was significantly colouring my apprehension of everything that I was experiencing, including reading. One quibble from my previous post from that time that I will repeat is that it's rather irritating that the myriad quotes in Latin, Greek & French are, with one exception, left untranslated, even in the footnotes, which makes sense for an academic philological text's intended audience but feels a tad obscurantist as a general reader.

the Vocation of the Scholar

This book [available from that link online for free] by Enlightenment-era German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte* is a rigorous examination of its title theme, as presented in a series of five lectures. They proceed as follows:

1. the vocation of man - in a general sense, being the harmonisation of the Ego so that it can intellectually & sensibly apprehend things in the world & also promote their harmonisation.
2. the vocation of man in society - expanding on the first lecture in application to the reality that all Ego finds itself in world where other free & rational beings exist: this being society, which through coordination of diversity & resultant cooperation leads us to mutual perfection.
3. the distinction of classes in society - a relatively convoluted attempt to discern the cause of social inequalities between free rational beings, followed by a moral exhortation that overcoming such is the chief end of society.**
4. the vocation of the scholar - a specific examination of the unique vocation of scholarship in promoting the cultural unity & moral perfection of humankind through progressive development & communication of knowledge in pursuit of truth.
5. a repudiation of Rousseau's doctrine that mankind's greatest good would be found in the state of nature rather than a developed culture.

   I found Fichte remarkably easy to read, many thanks to the translator - and overall this is a very stimulating & edifying book urging anyone engaged in the human vocation of scholarship to take seriously the responsibilities of their intellectual activity. Worth checking out if that sounds interesting to you, it's pretty short.

* He wins the prize for Most German Name of Enlightenment philosophers I have yet read.

** Karl Marx read Fichte, & it shows.

Tao Te Ching

This book is the ancient text attributed to the probably-legendary Lao Tzu, and forms the foundation of Taoist philosophy. Check out the link at the start of this post for my main thoughts on it from the last time I read it - something that I now plan on re-doing every year, as there is much to be mined from this beautiful, elusive, deeply mysterious little book.

On Liberty

This book is a long essay by John Stuart Mill about the moral, social, political and psychological elements of liberty. It wasn't a particularly tricky read but I would struggle to summarise his ideas beyond: liberty is good for both the individual and their society; liberty of the individual in terms of their capacity to hold their own opinions free of coercion and to do what they will insofar as this harms no others is of profound value to the stability and ethical virtue of a society and these rights should be protected politically. He obviously says more than this but it all boils down to over-verbose circlings rhetorically of this core notion. Despite being written in the Victorian era the vigour of his argumentation feels astoundingly contemporary - indeed Mill as a philosopher of liberty still has much still to hope for in the 21st century, when such basic political assumptions as are enshrined in this text are losing that enshrinement when it comes to our basic political institutions. This isn't a particularly practical book, but neither is it an abstract series of obtuse or irrelevant speculations - Mill doesn't tell us where liberty comes from or how it is best used, he simply makes the case, in great detail and using very long sentences, for its being a personal and communal value and practice of profound importance to human flourishing. 

Against Method

This book by Paul Feyerabend is one of the most important and certainly the most radical books of philosophy of science to come out of the twentieth century. It forms almost a perfect sequel to Thomas Kuhn's book in the same field - only, where Kuhn gave us an objective "what happens and how" of revolutions in scientific fields, Feyerabend here gives us a more subjective "what could maybe happen, and how to do it". To use a comparative metaphor, Kuhn wrote of scientific revolution like Marx wrote of its socio-economic equivalent, while Feyerabend writes of it like Che Guevara, chock full of grassroots incitement to properly-informed action and ample tactical advice (using Galileo's career as prime example).

   I won't go into depth with a summary of what he talks about in this book as it spans a huge arena of the history of science, its present and future capacities, and the dynamics at play in determining what we may consider progress in all of this. To give a very brief summary of the main point of the text though, I will say that Feyerabend sees the only sustainably trustworthy epistemological approach to science as that of anarchism. That is to say, when approaching theory, fact, experiment, and so on, the only reasonable guideline to guarantee that progress can intuit itself into the field's grasp on its object is: "anything goes." I like this a lot. It's a healthy reminder that even the most open-minded empiricists can, and do, get bogged down in the accumulation of the best thinking of all the open-minded empiricists who came before them, and thus often cease being effective open-minded empiricists. Epistemological anarchism is an approach that rightly inspires terror in the hearts of academics who have devoted their careers to the minutiae of issues under particular paradigms; however as an approach deigning to liberate and guarantee the continual advancement of any kind of knowledge, it's very difficult to argue with given how unpredictable are the paradigm shifts in any given field of study.

   If you're interested in the philosophy of science I'm going to assume that you've already read this, but if you're merely a scientist who has given relatively little thought to the epistemological conditions of your work, I'd highly recommend this if you want a revolutionary energising shock.

the Structure of Scientific Revolutions

This book by Thomas Kuhn is probably the most significant work in the philosophy of science to come out of the twentieth century. In it, Kuhn skips around the history of scientific endeavour to sketch a theory of how progress in these fields happens. Science of a particular era subsists in what he calls a paradigm, a collectively-agreed-upon web of assumptions, problems and techniques that define the scope and limits of the field at that time. It is only when a particular paradigm begins to encounter anomalies that it is unequipped to explain, and thus enters a period of crisis, that hitherto unthought-of methods and speculations emerge, and thus a scientific revolution (think Copernicus overturning the Ptolemaic astronomical system, or Einstein going so far beyond Newton that the previously accepted physics became a redundant rump) takes place - the paradigm shifts, and new modes of understanding become possible, new questions become salient, and new experiments become required to continue advancing the frontiers of knowledge. I was pleasantly surprised by how readable this book was - I'm interested in science but don't read much of it as I find myself either feeling alienated by the abundance of jargon or patronized by the author's obvious overcompensations in avoiding jargon, but Kuhn avoids both extremes and explores this whole nest of topics in an accessible and enlightening way. Absolutely highly recommended reading for anyone interested in the history and philosophy of science.

Logic

This book by Wilfrid Hodges is an introduction to the field of elementary logic. I bought a copy of this way back in 2012 after my interview at Oxford university, having found out that this was the standard textbook for first year logic in the philosophy strand of PPE that I had applied for - then I didn't get in, so I never got round to reading it.* Until now. Formal logic straddles that bizarre border between philosophical and mathematical kinds of thinking, but despite maths being far from my best subject I found Hodges's distillation of the core principles, methods, and tools at play to be well-paced, accessible, and engaging.

   We start off with the very basics - sentences as expressions of beliefs, how we determine whether one of these is true or not, ambiguities and borderline cases entailed herein, how these simple constituents of thought can be built up into more complex forms, and how one can test these for logical consistency and validity. Moving onto the next level up, we are introduced to logical analysis and its truth-functors, the process of converting sentences into tableaux, and the formal language of propositional calculus. Then we work through designators, identity, relations, and quantifiers, all the while relating all of this back to everything we've learnt so far. The penultimate section puts it all together in predicate logic, before finally ending on a section that considers the problems that logicians are still wrestling with (as despite having been an established field of philosophy/mathematics since at least Aristotle, most of the major advancements have been made only in the last three or four centuries and there are still areas displaying niggling room for improvements to be made) and where these may, or may not logically be able to, go in the future.

   Aside from being an extremely user-friendly introductory text, never assuming you to be familiar with a term or concept or technique not already covered by Hodges himself, this book really cements itself as of academic value by its inclusion in every section of several exercises relating to what you've just read. I tried to do most** of these throughout my reading, and was pleasantly surprised to note that I got on the whole (unsurprisingly with the margins slipping the closer to the end of the book I got) about 60-65% of my answers (all the correct answers are included in a very lengthy appendix) correct - which in university terms is a 2:1 so I'm pretty chuffed about that.

   Formal logic is not a field that being good at means you're going to be right all the time. That's not what logic is or does. Formal logic is a field that being good at does, however, mean that you're going to be secure in the validity and consistency of your own truth claims in the context of their premises as your beliefs. Logic is not an answer - not does it supply these; it is a tool for working out whether any given answer is commensurate with the questions being asked. Halfway through a complex debate it's hardly reasonable to hold up a finger to request a pause in the discourse while you break down every sentence uttered thus far in the established context into a predicate tableaux to make sure that both sides are debating logically. But the more familiar you get with the linguistic and Obvious elements at play in logical analysis the easier it will be for you to spot and avoid invalid or inconsistent sets of claims. Truth is Obvious when it is so, but why then does argumentation exist? Let beliefs be what they subjectively will be, and let logic never supersede itself to determine those but only govern its own realm - that is, of thinking well. And this book will help you get better at that.

* I went on to study philosophy and economics for my undergraduate in Sheffield, then a Masters in politics - so I got to do PPE after all, screw you Oxford... that said, I still wish I'd read this sooner after acquiring this, as it may well have helped me boost my grades anyway.

** Anything that could be answered by pencil scribbling in the margins of the book itself I devoted my full effort to - but a fair few of the exercises demanded a reader to construct truth tables or sentence tableaux or what have you, which are not the kind of things you can fit in the margins of an A5 textbook, and though I did attempt some of these properly, I didn't always have both scrap paper to hand AND the mental wherewithal to bother, so in these cases I simply read the correct answer in the appendix and then re-read the exercise and worked through it in my head until I was confident I understood why the answer was what it was.

Gender Trouble

This book by Judith Butler is dense & meaty but well worth the effort. I won't even try to summarise it - I think I understood half to two-thirds of it, if I'm being honest. I did get the main point though - which is that gender is not something objective & external that is metaphysically thrust upon you alongside all the other conditions of your existence; gender is a socio-psychological linguistic & normative set of patterns that can be performed bodily by anyone thus inclined. Pretty radical stuff - as history agrees: this is a profoundly influential & controversial book. I'm going to try to give it a re-read in a couple of years & see if it yields more digestible points then. In the meantime - I'm not sure I would highly recommend this book, as it's very academically written; not pretentiously, just academically in the sense that Butler wrote it to resolve specific academic problems within her philosophical field rather than to educate the general public audience - but if you're interested in gender theory & up for a challenge give it a go.

Think

This book by Simon Blackburn is a general, broad, accessible introduction of some of the key areas in philosophy. I had read it before, but shortly before I started my undergraduate in philosophy and therefore before I started this blog - but decided to re-read it because my youngest brother is currently studying philosophy for his A-levels and I want to give it him for his birthday but also make sure that it was an appropriate text for his level.

   Blackburn writes well, as eruditely as accessibly - he never introduces jargon terms without pre-empting them in common sense language, he never presumes that his readers are familiar with any particular thinkers or concepts, etc. Anyway, throughout the bitesize-enough-but-still-meaty eight chapters of the book he deals with: knowledge, mind, free will, the self, God, reasoning, the world, and 'what to do'. Across the brief sketches of philosophical history he outlines in these chapters he does manage to convey a largely helpful picture of some of the key themes that philosophers have been wrestling with for millennia, as well as diving somewhat deeper into particular thinkers who seem to shed further insight (though if you ask me, Blackburn has a bit too much of a hard-on for Hume).

   I'm confident that this book will be helpful to my brother - and in saying such, I'm saying I would probably recommend it as an introductory text for anyone of the age of fifteen or up starting to study philosophy from scratch. One small gripe I have is that this book barely deals with ethics, that being only around half of the final chapter - but Blackburn has written a whole other book similar to this one on that topic, my copy of which I am also re-reading to see if it's worth gifting to my brother, so watch this space.

the Corpus Hermeticum

This book is one I've read before and thus blogged about before, see prior post - although this text is very easily available for free online, I've not included links either there or here as maintaining an air of mystery seems key for me in these kinds of cryptic ancient documents. I can't really say I got much new out of it on a second reading - it still feels like wisdom farting in your face for fun. To discern anything meaningful from these writings would either take a lifetime of arcane study or an unthought-out kneejerk series of seemingly-brilliant hunches, neither of which I really have time for. As lurid and enjoyable as the Corpus Hermeticum is, I really don't think it has, or arguably has ever had, really that much to offer philosophy, science, or faith. So, yeh. Don't take my word for it - give it a google and read the .pdf of the thing. It will confuse you and illuminate you in equal measure, ultimately leading nowhere special.

History of Western Philosophy

This book by Bertrand Russell is pretty much what it says on the tin,* being in itself one of the most famous and influential academic works of the twentieth century. Russell being a thinker of incredible stature in his own right, this more broadly germane outline of the key figures and trends in the history of western philosophical thought never fails to be an insightful, illuminating, and surprisingly easy-to-read book.

    To give a coherently satisfactory summary of this weighty tome is far beyond the scope of a blogpost, so I will merely list out the figures and trends covered, and then give a few reflections of my own on the text as a whole. Russell divides the history of philosophy in the west into three broad chunks - ancient, Catholic, and modern.

    The "ancient" section starts with the pre-Socratics: after an initial chapter about the rise of Greek civilisation, we look into the Milesian school, and then more closely at Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the Atomists, and Protagoras; we also have chapters on the relation of Athens to cultural developments and the influence of Sparta. Following this we get onto the Big Three Boys of classical thought - elusive as he is we only have the only chapter on Socrates, but then Plato has distinct chapters covering the source of his opinions, his notion of utopia, his theory of ideas, his ideas around immortality, his cosmogony, and his thoughts regarding knowledge and perception - Aristotle has almost as many chapters too, covering his metaphysics, politics, ethics, logic, and physics. A supplementary chapter details ancient Greek developments in mathematics and astronomy. The final section of this first third of the book ties up the ancient period with a brief consideration of Hellenism's impact more broadly, then covering the cynics and skeptics, the Epicureans, the stoics, the changes culturally wrought by the Roman Empire, and finally the only individual thinker in this part to get his own chapter, Plotinus.

    The "Catholic" section is divided between the older Fathers of the Church and the latter scholastics. We begin with a broad sketch of the history of Judaism and its evolution into Christianity, then tracing intellectual currents within the first four centuries of Church history. A particularly meaty chapter then lumps together three 'doctors' of the Church - saints Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine; the last of which gets an extra following chapter diving into his theology and philosophy more intensively. A vaguer but still fascinating chapter covers the dark days of the fifth and sixth centuries, and then the influences of St Benedict and Gregory the Great, before we consider the impact of the Papacy within the dark ages. John the Scot gets his own chapter, before we zoom back out for a wider take on ecclesiastical reforms in the eleventh century, as well as the multifarious impacts of Islam, and then the general trends of things in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. While no individual thinker is predominant in these looser historical chapters there were still many profoundly interesting people discussed who I'd never heard of. St Thomas Aquinas gets his own chapter, unsurprisingly, before the section is finished off with discussions of Franciscan schoolmen and the eclipse of the Papacy towards the end of the medieval era.

    The final third of the book, concerned with "modern" philosophy, opens with a double-barrel of general characteristics of the Renaissance and then how this manifested in Italy specifically. After smaller chapters on Machiavelli, and Erasmus and More, we plunge back into more broad historical analysis, as both the Reformation and its counter-Reformation were taking place against a backdrop of the rising tides of scientific inquiry and achievement. Most of the rest of the chapters in this part concern individual thinkers; Francis Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, after a preamble-chapter discussing the wider tendencies toward a growing liberalism Locke gets three chapters detailing his theory of knowledge, his political theory, and his influence; then we have Berkeley, Hume, a slight tangent discussing the cultural challenges and changes wrought by the romantic movement and later a broader consideration of deeper trends in the nineteenth century particularly, then Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Byron, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the utilitarian school (John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham and their ilk), Marx, Bergson, James, Dewey - and finally closing out on the most modern trend in western philosophy at the time of this book's writing** being logical analysis.

    I am obviously not going to dissect his presentation of all of this content in detail. What I will say is that he clearly knows what he is talking about to an immensely intimate degree, and even when presenting thinkers with whom he disagrees strongly (a fact he will always let the reader know, often in great detail and with sparklingly dry logically-witty remarks) he is careful to present the general details of what they thought and, most probably, why, insofar as one can surmise this from a historical perspective, with a generous degree of goodwill. Russell never shrinks from decrying what he thinks is wrong but he will never misrepresent it to make his doing so easier - in fact some of the densest writing in this book appears when he is well into the hedges of having to contend with particularly messy or convoluted ideas to unwrap just what a thinker originally thought in order to judge how much veracity it likely has. He is also always very good at situating systems of thought in their historical context, so that cultural and political influences as well as the personal circumstances of these ideas' originators can all be taken into account when we are brought to judge the evolving steps in the development of the western modes of thought.

    Russell is a superlative academic and I think anyone would get a huge amount of benefit from reading this book. It will be inordinately eye-opening for anyone who has ever wondered where our ideas have come from and how they have been shaped and reshaped over the millennia-long story of western civilisation. While I do not personally agree with Russell on everything, I cannot refute him as a keen and penetrating thinker with a sharp and soft and strong set of moral sentiments - and what is more, despite the potentially off-putting nature perhaps inherent in a book of such scale and ambition, he is remarkably easy to read, never needlessly academic for its own sake, and delightfully largely free from that habit all-too-common in professional philosophers and theologians to dump random Latin or Greek phrases at you with no translatory footnotes. Overall I think this book is well worth a visit from any reader with a general curiosity - if you're looking for a solid text on the history of western philosophy, this is almost certainly IT - and if you're just a casual reader who'd like to get their teeth stuck into something highly educational and world-broadening, this might take you a while to get all the way through but I guarantee you'll get a great deal out of the experience.

* I'm reading it as I'm in the process of planning an application for a PhD in philosophy and not only has it been a few years since I've been involved in direct academia but I am painfully aware of my own blind spots, and this seems like a good place to start broadly rectifying those. In close tandem with reading through this I've also been watching my way through Arthur Holmes's own history of philosophy course, which is all on YouTube - Holmes deals immediately with fewer key philosophers than Russell does, but goes into far greater detail on each, and in my opinion it's a much more helpful introduction to those thinkers he does cover, as his commentary is more concerned with explaining the intricacies of each rather than, as is Russell's wont, going into somewhat opinionated digressions about why so-and-so is wrong. The comparison of these two also highlights a couple of interesting lacunas - while Holmes gives almost zero air-time to the pre-Socratics, which Russell has an entire part of the book dedicated to, Russell mentions Kierkegaard (inarguably an immensely important figure for modern philosophy) exactly zero times, and while Holmes has a full two hour-long lectures on A. N. Whitehead (whom one would expect Russell to talk about at least a bit given that Whitehead was his professor when he was just starting out in philosophy, and they wrote the Principia Mathematica together) Russell barely mentions his mentor.

** The manuscript was originally composed over the course of World War Two, which makes the occasional passing remarks about Hitler and Stalin all the more striking.

the Concept of Anxiety

This book is "a simple psychologically oriented deliberation in view of the dogmatic problem of hereditary sin" (according to its official subtitle) by Søren Kierkegaard, the grandfather of existential philosophy. I can only say that the inclusion of "simple" in aforementioned subtitle is wholly undeserved; this was a very difficult book to read. You know those kinds of books where you know every word the author is using but have no idea how they seem to be fitting together to make the points they seem to think they are? For me, this was one of those. I would love to have some insights to make about this book but I have to admit I simply didn't understand most of it. The language is simple enough, enjoyable in places, but the trains of thought at the core of this text's argument are horribly tough knots to unravel. Maybe I will revisit this in a few years when I have more hard philosophy and theology under my belt and it might unveil something to me; but for now, unless my recitation of this book's subtitle grabbed your attention like nothing else ever has, I don't think I can recommend this book to anyone. Profound? Probably. Important? Almost certainly. Difficult? Most certainly.

Defence of Socrates, Euthyphro & Crito

This collection of texts attributed to Plato are perhaps some of the most significant blobs of words in the history of western philosophy. Honestly - having never actually read anything by Plato before, when working my way through these (which only actually took a couple of days as I found them so gripping) I was seized with a sense of spiritual reverence that I have never felt in reading anything but holy texts. There is a specialness in these ancient dialogues.

   In reverse order then:

• Crito: this is a dialogue with Socrates, having been condemned and now languishing in prison, debating with someone attempting to release him what exactly is the proper relationship between an individual and the state in the moral order.
• Euthyphro: this is a dialogue between Socrates and a young aristocrat about what is the proper obligation of a human being to the gods; where morality comes from, whether we could ever owe it to the gods to do something evil, or if they would be gods were they to demand such a thing.
• Defence of Socrates: in here Socrates, accused of atheism and corrupting the youth of Athens, stands trial amongst his peers, and has to offer a coherent rational defence of his thinking, behaviours, ideas and their impacts on wider society - he knows he will be put to death should this trial not go his way, but he is not concerned with self-defence so much as he is with pursuit of absolute truth.

   I know these summaries are barely scratching the surface. If the Socrates that Plato sketches in these texts is half as wise as the real man they were based on then I must agree he was probably the wisest man in history. Anyway. So that's the book. Exactly who determined that these three should be collated together I do not know - certainly not Socrates, and probably not Plato, but it cannot be denied there is a pure and sheer brilliance of deep overlap between the ideas herein. If you like philosophy and you've not read these, you must. If you don't like philosophy but you wonder why philosophers think you should - you should read these.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

This book is both the first publication and enduring masterwork of eminent logical philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein; and it took me a very long time to read it, even while making diligent notes. This is a relatively short book about the relationship between language, logic, ideas and truth. And I would like to think that I understood at least most of it. But not wanting to embarrass myself in front of any potentially-superior philosophy-readers who may be perusing this blog, I will sum up my final thoughts on the book thus - yes, it makes perfect sense! "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence" - especially once one has climbed up and thrown away the ladder.

Seriously though, this book is mental torture. It makes so much sense that it makes none. And yet it makes all. Wittgenstein famously said upon completing this work that he had solved the essential problems of all philosophy. Bit humble, right. And then he turned his back on that less than two decades later and started playing around with pragmatic linguistic theories, which if anything seems a step down from Solving Everything... but no, reading this book does feel like everything is being slowly solved; the axiomatic arrangement of its arguments, the dense interconnections of its lexicon... I was genuinely sad when I finished reading it that I couldn't see into a new dimension or something. Don't read this book ever - unless you really really REALLY enjoy problematic logical philosophy, and are happy to have your brain mangled for several weeks or months. Or years, if you try to devote serious study time to it instead of just reading it recreationally - in which case, WHY WOULD YOU DO - not even Bertrand Russell completely understood this steaming diamond of nonsense. Don't bother. Read it for its beauty, and if it illuminates very little, take that as the meaning it is - that really, philosophy illuminates very little, given that the sun exists and we all have eyes regardless of what the clever people are thinking today or tomorrow.

the Art of War

This book, the ancient Chinese classic by Sun Tzu, available for free online from that link, is one I've read before - and I don't really have anything new to say about it. I'm just re-reading to allow its insights to percolate a bit. Sorry for the disappointing post.

A Guide for the Perplexed

This book by E. F. Schumacher is an attempt to develop a simple, cohesive, holistic philosophy that anyone can access and use in their own thought and life. While I don't think his proposed system necessarily achieves all that much in terms of engaging with actual philosophical issues and questions, it certainly does achieve its goal of putting forward a simple, cohesive, holistic system, so props to Fritz for that - especially given that he isn't building academically on ideas from previous philosophers, but developing an entirely new "map" (as he calls them) for inquiry.

   I will only extremely briefly give an overview of the book: he starts with the conception of philosophy as the provision of maps for thought, then discusses levels of being within the natural order, then considers that everything in its own teleological context must be "adequate" to its aim or goal, then treats in turn the four fields of knowledge and how we best engage them, then finally closing on an examination of the two distinct kinds of philosophical problem/question. Schumacher's writing is as non-scholarly and accessible as it is lively and engaging, and his actual system of thought has a great spirit of generosity to it - though ethics and politics aren't directly treated in his book, there are clear linkages between his metaphysical, epistemic and methodological sections that if taken seriously and followed would lead one into a far humbler (and therefore may we assume) more morally-integrated kind of life.

   I would recommend this book to anyone, even those uninterested in philosophy, as it functions not so much as a treatise on this or that particular arcane issue but as an orientation to systemic thinking along the same lines as Schumacher himself, and while I obviously never knew the man and so cannot say exactly to what degree he was right about everything, he is clearly (going also from Small is Beautiful, another book of his on economics) a man who thinks deeply, well, and with a great optimism for what humankind may be capable of were we only to slow down once in a while.

the Book of Chuang Tzu

This book, along with the Tao Te Ching, is one of the foundational texts of the ancient Chinese religion/philosophy called Taoism; traditionally credited to Chuang Tzu*, though in actuality he is unlikely to have written more than the first seven chapters of its thirty-three.

   When I read Lao Tzu's work I reflected that I could no longer in the spirit of intellectual honesty consider myself anymore only a Christian - but that I must be some kind of Taoist as well: and on reading Chuang Tzu's philosophy now too, I wholeheartedly embrace this polyreligious side to my own life and mind. The work presented in this book is utterly unlike any philosophical system or idealized religion anywhere else - it performs its functions through extended usage of parable, often humourous** and somewhat absurd, never less than thrillingly thought-provoking. Many of his little stories revolve around natural phenomena and processes and how they relate to the Tao; many are to do with governance or management and the follies of humanity in regard to these; quite a few are simply sideways (generous but still) jabs at Confucianism, which are among the most radical in their philosophical position. I will make no bones about the fact that this book is one I am completely unequipped to be able to summarize or even overview to any degree that really does it justice - I can only say that this text has stuck in my brain and fundamentally altered my perceptive attitudinal modes of being in ways that very few other things have, perhaps nothing other than the Bible itself. Which is odd, considering that while it has a great deal to imply about the nature of faith, goodness, transcendence, etc - Chuang Tzu says virtually nothing about what Western thought would call God. Instead focus is given to the lived experience of humans as creatures, in their quest for meaning and purpose, failing to find it anywhere they do not surrender themselves to the overriding principles of the Tao - and though "wu wei"*** is a core concept in the work, much of what the thinkers who composed this book have to say is actually of a deep and profound practicality in reference to activity, thought and spirituality.

   I absolutely loved this book. It challenged me throughout, while also liberating me into a bigger sensitivity toward the world and its contents and contradictions. It made me think, made me laugh, made me aware of my smallness as well as my potentialities - all the while being nothing less than a superbly well-written series of supremely idiosyncratic anecdotal little happenings, ponderings, reflections and recollections. If you are the least bit interested in Chinese history and culture, in philosophy or spirituality more generally - I cannot recommend this book enough. Chuang Tzu may not have written the whole thing but his spirit pervades it, and in truth he has become one of my few favourite thinkers from across all time and space.

* For an excellent all-age accessible introduction to this dynamic historic personality, check out this delightfully and appropriately idiosyncratic Chinese (with English subtitles fortunately) cartoon series documenting his life, work and influence.

** I shit you not, in places it is actually hilarious. You'd never laugh this much reading, say, the Talmud, were you to approach them even with the same spirit of openness.

*** Wu wei means "actionless action", "non-action" or something like that - it's a complex phrase to translate, but essentially means not striving toward a pre-determined goal, instead merely being content to follow the natural flow of events and things as they are in themselves, and acting only when spontaneous context compels you to act freely. I think, anyway. If you're a Taoist sage reading this and want to correct me please do so in the comments, though given the inherent notion within the Tao of not contending, I recognize you are unlikely to do so.

How to Argue with a Cat

This book by Jan Heinrichs claims to be "a human's guide to the art of persuasion", to such extremes that you might not only be able to win arguments against other real people but even cats. Even cats!

   The principles of rhetoric, psychology, context sensitivity and body language discussed in this book are the direct claims of a professional in his field and they make tons of common sense. You will come away from this book feeling empowered to try out your newfound skills of persuasion on any human or cat you can - I did, and it didn't work, because I'm a rat at heart and struggled to get to grips with a lot of the theory. But I'd strongly recommend this one for anyone wishing to become a more persuasive, more effective person.

The Path

This book by Christine Gross-Loh and Michaell Puett is an unacademic, but unflinching in its acerbic accuracy of phrasal gutpunching to the Western mind; short introduction to the range and content of (an initially-seeming-somewhat-disingenuous but explored with real nuance) ancient Chinese philosophies.

   As readers of this blog will know, while my life is still in Christ Jesus the Tao has helped me walk with God through His crazy-at-times world - and there is a notable lack of talk of God, especially in the kind of personal terms monotheists often attribute to They Who Transcend All Thought - which is to say, this can be safely read by any agnostic on any fence and it will probably help you out in some form or other. We're walked through the as-if ritualization practices of Confucian living; the staunch disciplines and Chuang Zhi and the raw spontaneous whimsy of Lao Tzu clashing in midair as arguments around the Tao fail eternally to Pin it Down; Mencius helps us simplify anxiety-causing choices we have to make in the modern world; while Xunzi keeps the pattern of ethical humanity very much at the core of everyday living. There is a lot in here that a lot of people would find extremely salubrious to their mental health if they drank it in and tried to get it, not by striving to fully understand; but by submitting in ignorance to the mysterious nature of Nature and Humanity itself as we shamble about beneath the Heavens - and obeying. It is not idolatry to comply with ancient wisdoms about how our own bodies and minds work. And if it is, then that might be a jealously too far for whatever that god is - because the God I believe in made Everything for a Reason, and the Tao wouldn't be floating about in the real-spacetime arcane umbra without some kind of purpose.

   The book's subtitle; a new way to think about everything - one could, being generously cynical, argue is the case for pretty much any book assuming it has contents that would seriously affect the contents of the heads of its readers. For me it has not fundamentally altered my worldview - only helped flesh out the carpet a bit better, and vaguely try to grab snatched memories of whatever the wallpaper in Purgatory looked like.