VII's bookshelf: all en-US Fri, 28 Feb 2025 13:32:51 -0800 60 VII's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Burnout Society 25490360
]]> 60 Byung-Chul Han 0804795096 VII 5 The main thesis is that about the time of the USSR collapse, we moved from an immunological age to a neuronal one. In this age, threats do not come from the Other but from the same. Where before the other who was the negative and provoked an immunological response which had to negate this enemy, now the enemy comes from the same, a surplus of positivity and triggers a neuronal response. This scheme explains much better the modern threats and violence like overachievement, overproduction, over communication, which cause depression, ADHD or burnout.
This makes our society no longer a disciplinary one, but an achievement society. The verb that governs it is not the “may not�, neither the intermediary “should� but the “can�. The “should� remains but hidden so the obedient subject is still disciplined but by their own self. Depression is a failure to become oneself but it also stems from the atomization and fragmentation of society and also from the pressure to achieve which also comes from society. The “nothing is possible� of the depressive occurs because of the prevalence of the “nothing is impossible�. The result is a compulsive freedom which is an auto-exploitation.
Our relationship with time has changed. We multitask which is a regression. Animals multitask because they are in a state of constant threat. It is the capability of contemplative immersion and deep attention that has produced society's cultural achievements. Deep boredom which is relaxation is required for creation. There is a state of marveling of the way things are, which doesn't need to refer to a transcendental Being, but even everyday phenomena that are long and slow and can only be grasped by a deep contemplative attention.
Against this vita contemplativa, there is that vita activa. For Arrendt this was the goal because she thought that modern society reduces the individual to a mere animal laborans to the unconscious, passive animalistic processes. But for him, it is the opposite. In the achievement society individuality is fostered. Life has become fleeting and has been reduced to mere life. Our life is more expendable than a homo sacer (Agamben) though it cannot be killed absolutely. Bare life can remain, stripped of what is important. It is a life of compulsion in which the prisoner and the guard is one and results in apathy and depression like in concentration camps.
Vita contemplativa requires making oneself capable of deep and contemplative attention, learning to say no to stimuli and avoiding yielding to every impulse. It requires pausing. It's opposite, hyperactivity, is not freedom. In this age there is no rage which is to put everything in question and attempt to build something new. It is a negative energy and it is active, it is about something other than the own. Positivity turns us into autistic performance machines, computers, which lack otherness.
Bartleby describes workers who have become animal laborans. But his negativity is not potent as he still inhabits a disciplinary society. He is not monitored by himself, he is not pressured to become an I. Agamben is wrong in seeing him as having pure potentiality.
The achievement society is also a society of solitary tiredness which destroys all that is shared. This is different from Handke's reconciliatory tiredness in which the I shrinks and the world is trusted. This last tiredness does not exhaust but inspires one to not do things, but instead remain calm, experience wonder and rejuvenate. It is an aura of friendliness which enables connection. It is not to be incapable of doing something but to be capable of not doing it.
The last chapter appears to be a combination of the above. He shows why the immunological theme and psychoanalysis can no longer describe modern man. One additional idea is that whereas in Kant one performs their duty and gets rewarded by God with happiness, in our society this link to the other has been broken so the subject feels compelled to do their duty. But also that we don't produce complete products and unlimited growth is the goal so there is no closure. This absence of the Other turns us into narcissists who seek experiencing, not Experience. Experience encounters the Other, experiencing expands the Ego into the Other. Building character requires abandoning some object-cathexes, but the depressive and the modern man in general does not do this so he never builds character. They are able to assume any form and play any role. The lack of Other has also altered depression, we are now exhausted by ourselves. The real makes itself known through resistance and there is none in the virtual world. We are also incapable of intensive bondings. Melancholy and mourning occurs after a loss but we do not have attachments. It is wrong to equate melancholy with depression. The first existed in ancient times and it was not to be lacking power to be oneself. Depression is lack of a conclusive decision and is often preceded by burnout, a consequence of auto exploitation. It is wrong to read depression in terms of conflict, this negativity is gone. Events are not clashes between classes or ideologies but between individuals. Now, instead of being subjected to the superego, we project ourselves to it and we are compulsed by it. We are subjects to none but it. The Ego is a loser compared to the Ego ideal, the superego. Violence is self generated. The sovereign who generates bare life is not an other but the self. Agamben cannot grasp the violence of positivity, the violence of consensus. And it is not sovereign man but the last man who exploits his vassal, the sovereign is a critique on the hyperactive person. And in capitalism, bare life is emphasized, health is the goddess, not the good life. All transcedent value has been stripped from it.
]]> 3.87 2010 The Burnout Society
author: Byung-Chul Han
name: VII
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2024/03/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:
Great book, short and relatively easy to understand. As always, I like something more because it is a fresh (for me) look on things than on taking everything in face value. His ideas can elucidate many things, though I am usually suspicious of the underlying assumption that things used to be better.I usually write a summary while reading and then shorten that summary but since it is short, here it is in full. Or you, or me when I want to remind myself of it, can just ask chatgpt, my method is outdated.
The main thesis is that about the time of the USSR collapse, we moved from an immunological age to a neuronal one. In this age, threats do not come from the Other but from the same. Where before the other who was the negative and provoked an immunological response which had to negate this enemy, now the enemy comes from the same, a surplus of positivity and triggers a neuronal response. This scheme explains much better the modern threats and violence like overachievement, overproduction, over communication, which cause depression, ADHD or burnout.
This makes our society no longer a disciplinary one, but an achievement society. The verb that governs it is not the “may not�, neither the intermediary “should� but the “can�. The “should� remains but hidden so the obedient subject is still disciplined but by their own self. Depression is a failure to become oneself but it also stems from the atomization and fragmentation of society and also from the pressure to achieve which also comes from society. The “nothing is possible� of the depressive occurs because of the prevalence of the “nothing is impossible�. The result is a compulsive freedom which is an auto-exploitation.
Our relationship with time has changed. We multitask which is a regression. Animals multitask because they are in a state of constant threat. It is the capability of contemplative immersion and deep attention that has produced society's cultural achievements. Deep boredom which is relaxation is required for creation. There is a state of marveling of the way things are, which doesn't need to refer to a transcendental Being, but even everyday phenomena that are long and slow and can only be grasped by a deep contemplative attention.
Against this vita contemplativa, there is that vita activa. For Arrendt this was the goal because she thought that modern society reduces the individual to a mere animal laborans to the unconscious, passive animalistic processes. But for him, it is the opposite. In the achievement society individuality is fostered. Life has become fleeting and has been reduced to mere life. Our life is more expendable than a homo sacer (Agamben) though it cannot be killed absolutely. Bare life can remain, stripped of what is important. It is a life of compulsion in which the prisoner and the guard is one and results in apathy and depression like in concentration camps.
Vita contemplativa requires making oneself capable of deep and contemplative attention, learning to say no to stimuli and avoiding yielding to every impulse. It requires pausing. It's opposite, hyperactivity, is not freedom. In this age there is no rage which is to put everything in question and attempt to build something new. It is a negative energy and it is active, it is about something other than the own. Positivity turns us into autistic performance machines, computers, which lack otherness.
Bartleby describes workers who have become animal laborans. But his negativity is not potent as he still inhabits a disciplinary society. He is not monitored by himself, he is not pressured to become an I. Agamben is wrong in seeing him as having pure potentiality.
The achievement society is also a society of solitary tiredness which destroys all that is shared. This is different from Handke's reconciliatory tiredness in which the I shrinks and the world is trusted. This last tiredness does not exhaust but inspires one to not do things, but instead remain calm, experience wonder and rejuvenate. It is an aura of friendliness which enables connection. It is not to be incapable of doing something but to be capable of not doing it.
The last chapter appears to be a combination of the above. He shows why the immunological theme and psychoanalysis can no longer describe modern man. One additional idea is that whereas in Kant one performs their duty and gets rewarded by God with happiness, in our society this link to the other has been broken so the subject feels compelled to do their duty. But also that we don't produce complete products and unlimited growth is the goal so there is no closure. This absence of the Other turns us into narcissists who seek experiencing, not Experience. Experience encounters the Other, experiencing expands the Ego into the Other. Building character requires abandoning some object-cathexes, but the depressive and the modern man in general does not do this so he never builds character. They are able to assume any form and play any role. The lack of Other has also altered depression, we are now exhausted by ourselves. The real makes itself known through resistance and there is none in the virtual world. We are also incapable of intensive bondings. Melancholy and mourning occurs after a loss but we do not have attachments. It is wrong to equate melancholy with depression. The first existed in ancient times and it was not to be lacking power to be oneself. Depression is lack of a conclusive decision and is often preceded by burnout, a consequence of auto exploitation. It is wrong to read depression in terms of conflict, this negativity is gone. Events are not clashes between classes or ideologies but between individuals. Now, instead of being subjected to the superego, we project ourselves to it and we are compulsed by it. We are subjects to none but it. The Ego is a loser compared to the Ego ideal, the superego. Violence is self generated. The sovereign who generates bare life is not an other but the self. Agamben cannot grasp the violence of positivity, the violence of consensus. And it is not sovereign man but the last man who exploits his vassal, the sovereign is a critique on the hyperactive person. And in capitalism, bare life is emphasized, health is the goddess, not the good life. All transcedent value has been stripped from it.

]]> <![CDATA[Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures]]> 20863042 232 Mark Fisher VII 2 The only thing I noted is that he builds on the idea that we no longer see the possibility of anything other than capitalism. He describes this idea of being stuck in a timeless place in which what we have now is what it will always be. He mostly shows it through music, for which he claims that today's music could have easily been produced 25 years later and there is no further evolution, while before there was ton of innovation. It is difficult now for the artist to isolate themselves to create, since we are somehow simultaneously overstimulated and exhausted. I guess that explains the number of remakes being done. He also connects it with Derrida’s hauntology, which “refers to that which is no longer, but which remains effective as a virtuality� and to “that which has not yet happened but which is already effective in the virtual�. And his definition of melancholia is not inaction or paralyzing guilt, but a refusal of adjusting to reality which means feeling like an outcast.
]]> 3.98 2014 Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
author: Mark Fisher
name: VII
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at: 2024/01/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:
I started writing my usual summary because of the first few essays but quickly gave up. It is hard to not like his persona, as it is hard to not like anyone who kills himself for -presumably- not stupid reasons but I am not very impressed by his writings. This one was especially boring for me since 90% of it is about a strand of electronic music and 80’s British culture that do not interest me at all. There is almost no philosophy or his struggle with depression.
The only thing I noted is that he builds on the idea that we no longer see the possibility of anything other than capitalism. He describes this idea of being stuck in a timeless place in which what we have now is what it will always be. He mostly shows it through music, for which he claims that today's music could have easily been produced 25 years later and there is no further evolution, while before there was ton of innovation. It is difficult now for the artist to isolate themselves to create, since we are somehow simultaneously overstimulated and exhausted. I guess that explains the number of remakes being done. He also connects it with Derrida’s hauntology, which “refers to that which is no longer, but which remains effective as a virtuality� and to “that which has not yet happened but which is already effective in the virtual�. And his definition of melancholia is not inaction or paralyzing guilt, but a refusal of adjusting to reality which means feeling like an outcast.

]]> The Immaculate Void 34381059
When she was six, Daphne was taken into a neighbor's toolshed, and came within seconds of never coming out alive. Most of the scars healed. Except for the one that went all the way through.

"You wouldn't think that the serial murders of children, and the one who got away, would have any connection with the strange fate of one of Jupiter's moons."

Two decades later, when Daphne goes missing again, it's nothing new. As her exes might agree, running is what she does best � so her brother Tanner sets out one more time to find her. Whether in the mountains, or in his own family, search—and—rescue is what he does best.

"But it does. It's all connected. Everything's connected."

Down two different paths, along two different timelines, Daphne and Tanner both find themselves trapped in a savage hunt for the rarest people on earth, by those who would slaughter them on behalf of ravenous entities that lurk outside of time.

"So when things start to unravel, it all starts to unravel."

But in ominous signs that have traveled light—years to be seen by human eyes, and that plummet from the sky, the ultimate truth is revealed:

There are some things in the cosmos that terrify even the gods.]]> 232 Brian Hodge 1771484373 VII 3 3.91 2018 The Immaculate Void
author: Brian Hodge
name: VII
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2024/02/23
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:
The main idea was an Interesting one but I didn’t like the plot. There are two stories which are somewhat independent for a long time and for me, one of the two is boring while the other one just mediocre. He alternates between the two a bit too often, which I also found annoying.
]]> The Hermit 12098 Le Point, "that in a few years we will come to realize that The Hermit is one of the essential works of our time, probing and detailing the illness of our century.]]> 169 Eugène Ionesco 0714539899 VII 3 3.81 1973 The Hermit
author: Eugène Ionesco
name: VII
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1973
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/14
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:
It could have been a Bernhard story if the main character was more interesting. I always enjoy weird loner type of character, but the hero was too basic. The first half in which he was trying to philosophize (hopefully the superficiality was intentional) was a bit better. Towards the end some kind of revolution takes place which doesn’t offer much. Generally nothing happened which is fine for me, but just read Bernhard instead.
]]> Vastarien: Vol. 1, Issue 1 39714751
Vol. 1, Issue 1 Contents:

� Foreword to Teatro Grottesco
essay by Thomas Ligotti
•The Nightmare of His Art: The Horrific Power of the Imagination in "The Troubles of Dr. Thoss and "Gas Station Carnivals"
essay by W. Silverwood
•The Gods in Their Seats, Unblinking
short fiction by Kurt Fawver
� Affirmation of the Spirit: Consciousness, Transformation, and the Fourth World in Film
short fiction by Christopher Slatsky
•Try the Veal
poem by Robert Beveridge
•How to Construct a Gun from Your Own Flesh
short fiction by Michael Uhall
•Notes on a Horror
essay by Dr. Raymond Thoss
�"Eccentric to the Healthy Social Order" : Inversions of Family, Community, and Religion in Thomas Ligotti's "The Last Feast of Harlequin"
essau by Michael J. Abolafia
•W°ů˛ąľ±łŮłó˛ő
poem by Wade German
•Eraserhead as Antinatalist Allegory
essay by Colby Smith
•The Alienation of the Self: Marx, Polanyi, and Ligottian Horror
essay by S. L. Edwards
•The Theatre of Ovid
short fiction by Aaron Worth
•Infinite Light, Infinite Darkness short fiction by Martin Rose
•Night Walks: The Films of Val Lewton
essay by Michael Penkas
� Solar Flare
short fiction by Paul L. Bates
•Strange Bird
poem by Ian Mullins
•Nervous Wares & Abnormal Stares
short fiction by Devin Goff
•My Time at the Drake Clinic
short fiction by Jordan Krall
•Singing the Song of My Unmaking
short fiction by Christopher Ropes
�"They say I should kill myself and not try to spoil their enjoyment in being alive": An Interview with Thomas Ligotti
interview by Wojciech Gunia]]> 284 Dagny Paul 0692089276 VII 4 4.35 2018 Vastarien: Vol. 1, Issue 1
author: Dagny Paul
name: VII
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/25
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:
Much better than I expected, though of course not all of it since it is a collection. A mix of stories and borderline academic essays.
]]> Alien Clay 195443798
On the distant world of Kiln lie the ruins of an alien civilization. It’s the greatest discovery in humanity’s spacefaring history � yet who were its builders and where did they go?

Professor Arton Daghdev had always wanted to study alien life up close. Then his wishes become a reality in the worst way. His political activism sees him exiled from Earth to Kiln’s extrasolar labour camp. There, he’s condemned to work under an alien sky until he dies.

Kiln boasts a ravenous, chaotic ecosystem like nothing seen on Earth. The monstrous alien life interacts in surprising, sometimes shocking ways with the human body, so Arton will risk death on a daily basis. However, the camp’s oppressive regime might just kill him first. If Arton can somehow escape both fates, the world of Kiln holds a wondrous, terrible secret. It will redefine life and intelligence as he knows it, and might just set him free . . .]]> 396 Adrian Tchaikovsky 1035013770 VII 5 3.98 2024 Alien Clay
author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
name: VII
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:
Really good sci-fi. It is about an alien planet that has life, but at the same time it is a dystopian story of oppression with interesting characters and a good enough villain. The science was also coherent enough.
]]> <![CDATA[A Dark and Rising Tide (Dark Earth Rising)]]> 198915837 When a massive storm surge hits the central coast of California, the ferocious surf destroys buildings, floods streets, and washes up something sinister from the depths of the Monterey Bay.

Peter, a retired state lifeguard, knows the water better than anyone. Carla, owner of a beach-side restaurant, is still mourning the loss of her son in a boating accident. While both love their quaint small town with spectacular views, their personal lives are as complicated as the changing weather forecasts.

After a mysterious creature in the water kills two men, Peter and Carla are plunged into a living nightmare as a massive tidal surge traps them and their friends in a battered, unstable building.

While the storm rages through the night, they discover something horrifying swims between them and escape, just waiting to attack anyone within reach.

They need to make life or death decisions to survive.

But first, they need to make it to morning.

Inspired by real events, A Dark and Rising Tide is part of Debra Castaneda’s Dark Earth Rising series of standalone novels. Read the books in any order.]]> 289 Debra Castaneda VII 4 4.08 A Dark and Rising Tide (Dark Earth Rising)
author: Debra Castaneda
name: VII
average rating: 4.08
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/28
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:
Another relatively simple kind of thriller, kind of cosmic horror book that was decent enough, mostly because it had a good atmosphere and a dark tone, though it was certainly not something special. It could be that I listen to them while biking and it’s actually due to endorphins, who knows.
]]> Veiled 169272180
The second time is a chance meeting at a grocery store. Or is it by chance? It’s a little weird, but either way, Nate and Alice hit it off immediately.

He really likes her. They have great chemistry. But there’s something a little off—okay, a lot off—about her. Not just the unexplained sadness. It’s an intense desire, almost a desperation, for things to move much faster than Nate is comfortable with.

Alice has an obvious secret. What’s she hiding?

When Nate finds out…well, nobody said this was a romantic comedy�

From the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of My Pretties and Autumn Bleeds Into Winter ł¦´Çłľ±đ˛őâ€�. Veiled .]]> 223 Jeff Strand VII 4 3.83 Veiled
author: Jeff Strand
name: VII
average rating: 3.83
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/24
date added: 2025/02/28
shelves:
review:
For a thriller book it was very good. The premise might be a bit hard to believe but it held its mysteries and had a good ending.
]]> Blood Music [novel] 340819
This is a novel Greg Bear wrote in 1985. For novelette by the same name written in 1983 and published in Analog magazine see here: Blood Music.]]> 344 Greg Bear 1596871067 VII 2 3.85 1985 Blood Music [novel]
author: Greg Bear
name: VII
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1985
rating: 2
read at: 2023/08/26
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun, #1)]]> 60211 262 Gene Wolfe 0671540661 VII 3 3.86 1980 The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun, #1)
author: Gene Wolfe
name: VII
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1980
rating: 3
read at: 2023/08/16
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)]]> 77566 500 Dan Simmons 0553283685 VII 3 4.26 1989 Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)
author: Dan Simmons
name: VII
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1989
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/27
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Roadside Picnic 331256
First published in 1972, Roadside Picnic is still widely regarded as one of the greatest science fiction novels, despite the fact that it has been out of print in the United States for almost thirty years.]]> 145 Arkady Strugatsky 0575070536 VII 5 4.16 1972 Roadside Picnic
author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: VII
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1972
rating: 5
read at: 2023/09/03
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Gollitok 197998826 294 Andrew Najberg VII 2 3.75 2023 Gollitok
author: Andrew Najberg
name: VII
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2023
rating: 2
read at: 2024/07/23
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves:
review:
This was not very good. On paper it had many interesting elements, like some kind of dystopia, some kind of odd, otherworldly horror and a mystery to be discovered, but ultimately, they weren’t that engaging. Perhaps more importantly, I didn’t care about the characters and their adventures.
]]> Concrete 92575
"Certain books—few—assert literary importance instantly, profoundly. This new novel by the internationally praised but not widely known Austrian writer is one of those—a book of mysterious dark beauty . . . . [It] is overwhelming; one wants to read it again, immediately, to re-experience its intricate innovations, not to let go of this masterful work."—John Rechy, Los Angeles Times

"Rudolph is not obstructed by some malfunctions in part of his being—his being itself is a knot. And as Bernhard's narrative proceeds, we begin to register the dimensions of his crisis, its self-consuming circularity . . . . Where rage of this intensity is directed outward, we often find the sociopath; where inward, the suicide. Where it breaks out laterally, onto the page, we sometimes find a most unsettling artistic vision."—Sven Birkerts, The New Republic]]> 156 Thomas Bernhard 0226043983 VII 4 4.13 1982 Concrete
author: Thomas Bernhard
name: VII
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1982
rating: 4
read at: 2023/07/23
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves:
review:
Bernhard is my go-to writer when I feel depressed. His books tend to be a struggle to read as they are very very repetitive but usually, they are short. They always describe unhappy people, who tend to have an obsessive goal that consumes them. This time, the narrator again has something to do, but instead he avoids it forever. He keeps contradicting himself, constantly coming up with potential things to do, that other people do, very often his sister, but only comes up with arguments for why he doesn’t do them, while constantly whining about how bad other people are. I always really like his characters, but I also get tired of his books very easily while reading them. Thankfully this one had the right length.
]]> <![CDATA[The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All]]> 16000349 The Croning, Laird Barron has arisen as one of the strongest and most original literary voices in modern horror and the dark fantastic. Melding supernatural horror with hardboiled noir, espionage, and a scientific backbone, Barron’s stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards.

Barron returns with his third collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. Collecting interlinking tales of sublime cosmic horror, including “Blackwood’s Baby�, “The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven�, and “The Men from Porlock�, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All delivers enough spine-chilling horror to satisfy even the most jaded reader.]]> 280 Laird Barron 1597804673 VII 3 4.00 2013 The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
author: Laird Barron
name: VII
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/23
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves:
review:
Very hit and miss. I usually complain about short stories being too short but at least these were not. My problem is that he seems to have an affinity for more macho � rural kind of characters instead of nerdy, intellectual ones and that many stories go for the nature type of cosmic horror, which does not do much for me.
]]> The Secret of Ventriloquism 32451736 The Secret of Ventriloquism, named the Best Fiction Book of 2016 by Rue Morgue Magazine, heralds the arrival of a significant new literary talent. With themes reminiscent of Shirley Jackson, Thomas Ligotti, and Bruno Schulz, but with a strikingly unique vision, Padgett's work explores the mystery of human suffering, the agony of personal existence, and the ghastly means by which someone might achieve salvation from both. A bullied child seeks vengeance within a bed's hollow box spring. A lucid dreamer is haunted by an impossible house. A dummy reveals its own anatomy in 20 simple steps. A stuttering librarian holds the key to a mill town's unspeakable secrets. A commuter's worldview is shattered by two words printed on a cardboard sign. An aspiring ventriloquist spends a little too much time looking at himself in a mirror. And a presence speaks through them all.


Contents:

Introduction by Matt Cardin
The Mindfulness of Horror Practice
Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown
The Indoor Swamp
Origami Dreams
20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism
Infusorium
Organ Void
The Secret of Ventriloquism
Escape to Thin Mountain]]> 201 Jon Padgett VII 4 3.93 2016 The Secret of Ventriloquism
author: Jon Padgett
name: VII
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/23
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves:
review:
Some of the stories are not that good but generally, I prefer having this kind of horror taking place in a familiar world instead of the surreal words that Ligotti’s characters usually find themselves in. I also like that the stories are somewhat connected. But, more importantly, one of the stories included in this collection has been featured in the horror podcast pseudopod and listening to the writer whispering to my ear his instructions on how to become a Great ventriloquist, while I was running (which actually focuses you on the story) was an unforgettable experience (second to running after dark in a woody area while re-listening The Bungalow House by Ligotti from the same podcast).
]]> <![CDATA[The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, #1)]]> 43615
He is a haunting figure, a loner on a spellbinding journey into good and evil. In his desolate world, which frighteningly mirrors our own, Roland pursues The Man in Black, encounters an alluring woman named Alice, and begins a friendship with the Kid from Earth called Jake. Both grippingly realistic and eerily dreamlike, The Gunslinger leaves readers eagerly awaiting the next chapter.]]> 231 Stephen King 1501143514 VII 2 3.95 1982 The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, #1)
author: Stephen King
name: VII
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1982
rating: 2
read at: 2023/11/23
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves:
review:
I don’t like surreal worlds and stories as much and I certainly don’t like it when no context about them is provided. It is also in a western setting. I stopped reading a third of the way in.
]]> Spin (Spin, #1) 910863 Spin is Robert Charles Wilson's Hugo Award-winning masterpiece―a stunning combination of a galactic "what if" and a small-scale, very human story.

One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his backyard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.

The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk―a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world's artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they'd been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, a space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside―more than a hundred million years per year on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future.

Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who's forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses.

Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans� and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earth's probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun―and report back on what they find.

Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.]]> 458 Robert Charles Wilson 076534825X VII 5 4.02 2005 Spin (Spin, #1)
author: Robert Charles Wilson
name: VII
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2023/07/23
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves:
review:

]]> While the Black Stars Burn 27181342
As the follow-up to the Bram Stoker Award winning collection Soft Apocalypses, this book's darkly imaginative tales inexorably draw the reader in. Whether you're a connoisseur of Lovecraftian and King in Yellow fiction or a fan of adventures through time and space, crossing this collection's event horizon will open your mind to unearthly enchantments.]]> 166 Lucy A. Snyder 1935738771 VII 3 3.91 2015 While the Black Stars Burn
author: Lucy A. Snyder
name: VII
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2023/06/23
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves:
review:
I was binging on a horror short story podcast called pseudopod and I really like one of her stories (Magdala Amygdala) so I gave it a chance, but from what I remember it wasn’t anything special.
]]> Our Share of Night 61111034
A young father and son set out on a road trip, devastated by the death of the wife and mother they both loved. United in grief, the pair travel to her ancestral home, where they must confront the terrifying legacy she has bequeathed: a family called the Order that commits unspeakable acts in search of immortality.

For Gaspar, the son, this maniacal cult is his destiny. As the Order tries to pull him into their evil, he and his father take flight, attempting to outrun a powerful clan that will do anything to ensure its own survival. But how far will Gaspar’s father go to protect his child? And can anyone escape their fate?

Moving back and forth in time, from London in the swinging 1960s to the brutal years of Argentina’s military dictatorship and its turbulent aftermath, Our Share of Night is a novel like no other: a family story, a ghost story, a story of the occult and the supernatural, a book about the complexities of love and longing with queer subplots and themes. This is the masterwork of one of Latin America’s most original novelists, “a mesmerizing writer,� says Dave Eggers, “who demands to be read.”]]> 588 Mariana Enríquez 0451495144 VII 2 4.07 2019 Our Share of Night
author: Mariana EnrĂ­quez
name: VII
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2019
rating: 2
read at: 2023/05/24
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves:
review:
I wouldn’t say it’s that bad, I just didn’t care about it. It’s a father-son story which just doesn’t do anything for me. I abandoned it 20% of the way or so.
]]> Blindsight (Firefall, #1) 48484 Two months since the stars fell...

Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.

Two months of silence while a world holds its breath.

Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune’s orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever’s out there isn’t talking to us. It’s talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.

So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn’t want to meet?

You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won’t be needed, and a fainter hope she’ll do any good if she is needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called “vampire,� recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist � an informational topologist with half his mind gone � as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.

You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they’ve been sent to find.

But you’d give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them…]]> 384 Peter Watts 0765312182 VII 4 Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals is the questions regarding consciousness. It's been a while since I had such an interesting new topic to consider.

After reading it again (June 2016) I am even more impressed. And the amount of research involved, as shown from the dozen of books and papers referenced had to be enormous.]]> 4.01 2006 Blindsight (Firefall, #1)
author: Peter Watts
name: VII
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2014/10/07
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:
The sci-fi jargon and the action were annoying but everything else was perfect. There is a certain feeling of nostalgia, regret or despair throughout the book that I especially enjoyed. What really got me though, after reading this, but also Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals is the questions regarding consciousness. It's been a while since I had such an interesting new topic to consider.

After reading it again (June 2016) I am even more impressed. And the amount of research involved, as shown from the dozen of books and papers referenced had to be enormous.
]]> The Call of Cthulhu 15730101 The Call of Cthulhu is a harrowing tale of the weakness of the human mind when confronted by powers and intelligences from beyond our world.]]> 43 H.P. Lovecraft VII 3 3.97 1928 The Call of Cthulhu
author: H.P. Lovecraft
name: VII
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1928
rating: 3
read at: 2018/08/09
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror]]> 24783930 To Walk the Night, Bark Jones and his college buddy Jerry Lister, a science whiz, head back to their alma mater to visit a cherished professor of astronomy. They discover his body, consumed by fire, in his laboratory, and an uncannily beautiful young widow in his house—but nothing compares to the revelation that Jerry and Bark encounter in the deserts of Arizona at the end of the book. In The Edge of Running Water, Julian Blair, a brilliant electrophysicist, has retired to a small town in remotest Maine after the death of his wife. His latest experiments threaten to shake up the town, not to mention the universe itself.]]> 464 William Sloane 1590179064 VII 4 3.87 1964 The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror
author: William Sloane
name: VII
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1964
rating: 4
read at: 2023/04/23
date added: 2024/01/23
shelves:
review:
Not anything original or thought provoking but well written and easy to read.
]]> <![CDATA[The Escapement (Engineer Trilogy, #3)]]> 946054
Duke Valens dragged his people into the war to save the life of one woman - a woman whose husband he then killed. He regrets the evil he's done, but he, equally, had no choice.

Secretary Psellus never wanted to rule the Republic, or fight a desperate siege for its survival. As a man of considerable intelligence, he knows that he has a role to play - and little choice but to accept it.

The machine has been built. All that remains is to set it in motion.

]]> 409 K.J. Parker 0316003409 VII 3 3.86 2007 The Escapement (Engineer Trilogy, #3)
author: K.J. Parker
name: VII
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/23
date added: 2024/01/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Evil for Evil (Engineer Trilogy, #2)]]> 2161614
Duke Valens, of Civitas Vadanis, has a dilemma. He knows that his city cannot withstand the invading army; yet its walls are his only defence against the Mezentines. Perhaps the only way to save his people is to flee, but that will not be easy either.

Ziani Vaatzes, an engineer exiled by the Mezentines for his abominable creations, has already proven that he can defend a city. But Ziani Vaatzes has his own concerns, and the fate of Civitas Vadanis may not be one of them.

]]> 684 K.J. Parker 0316003395 VII 4 3.87 2006 Evil for Evil (Engineer Trilogy, #2)
author: K.J. Parker
name: VII
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2006
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/23
date added: 2024/01/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Devices and Desires (Engineer Trilogy, #1)]]> 202544
In a compelling tale of intrigue and injustice, K. J. Parker's embittered hero takes up arms against his enemies, using the only weapons he has left to him: his ingenuity and his passion -- his devices and desires.]]> 720 K.J. Parker 1841492760 VII 4 3.72 2005 Devices and Desires (Engineer Trilogy, #1)
author: K.J. Parker
name: VII
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2005
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/01/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Solaris 95558
When Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface, he finds a painful, hitherto unconscious memory embodied in the living physical likeness of a long-dead lover. Others examining the planet, Kelvin learns, are plagued with their own repressed and newly corporeal memories. The Solaris ocean may be a massive brain that creates these incarnate memories, though its purpose in doing so is unknown, forcing the scientists to shift the focus of their quest and wonder if they can truly understand the universe without first understanding what lies within their hearts.]]> 204 Stanisław Lem VII 5 4.00 1961 Solaris
author: Stanisław Lem
name: VII
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1961
rating: 5
read at: 2023/01/31
date added: 2024/01/23
shelves:
review:
I was very pleasantly surprised by this classic one. The mood and the "alienness" of the alien reminded me a little of Blindness by Peter Watts.
]]> <![CDATA[Behind the Throne (The Indranan War, #1)]]> 28118539
Quick, sarcastic, and lethal, Hailimi Bristol doesn't suffer fools gladly. She has made a name for herself in the galaxy for everything except what she was born to do: rule the Indranan Empire. That is, until two Trackers drag her back to her home planet to take her rightful place as the only remaining heir.

But trading her ship for a palace has more dangers than Hail could have anticipated. Caught in a web of plots and assassination attempts, Hail can't do the one thing she did twenty years ago: run away. She'll have to figure out who murdered her sisters if she wants to survive.

A gun smuggler inherits the throne in this Star Wars-style science fiction adventure from debut author K. B. Wagers. Full of action-packed space opera exploits and courtly conspiracy - not to mention an all-out galactic war - Behind the Throne will please fans of James S. A Corey, Becky Chambers and Lois McMaster Bujold, or anyone who wonders what would happen if a rogue like Han Solo were handed the keys to an empire . . .]]> 413 K.B. Wagers 0316308609 VII 2 3.84 2016 Behind the Throne (The Indranan War, #1)
author: K.B. Wagers
name: VII
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2023/01/23
date added: 2024/01/23
shelves:
review:
Not very interesting, no sci-fi ideas at all.
]]> <![CDATA[I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream]]> 20813135 Ich denke, also bin ich109 Jahre nach dem Ende des Dritten Weltkriegs leben nur noch fünf Menschen. Sie hausen in unterirdischen Stollen, immer am Rande des Verhungerns, und werden jede Minute ihres Lebens von einem Supercomputer gefoltert, der ein Bewusstsein erlangt hat � und mit ihm unendlichen Hass auf seine Erbauer. Es gibt nur einen einzigen Ausweg für die gequälten Menschen � doch welcher von ihnen wird stark genug sein, ihn zu wählen? Die Kurzgeschichte „Ich muss schreien und habe keinen Mund� erscheint als exklusives E-Book Only bei Heyne und ist zusammen mit weiteren Stories von Harlan Ellison auch in dem Sammelband „Ich muss schreien und habe keinen Mund� enthalten. Sie umfasst ca. 22 Buchseiten.]]> 20 Harlan Ellison VII 3 3.73 1967 I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream
author: Harlan Ellison
name: VII
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1967
rating: 3
read at: 2014/03/20
date added: 2023/10/28
shelves:
review:
Besides having a kick-ass title, it really manages to communicate that sense of despair inside the story. It's too bad it is so short.
]]> Oblomov 1179063 Oblomov 484 Ivan Goncharov 0140440402 VII 3 3.98 1859 Oblomov
author: Ivan Goncharov
name: VII
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1859
rating: 3
read at: 2013/09/12
date added: 2023/08/01
shelves:
review:

]]> Fictional Worlds 3151117 190 Thomas G. Pavel 0674299655 VII 2 3.75 1986 Fictional Worlds
author: Thomas G. Pavel
name: VII
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1986
rating: 2
read at: 2022/11/15
date added: 2023/03/15
shelves:
review:
It is not terrible but this too is more of a textbook than a book that argues for a thesis, and the approach is way too analytical. He distinguishesĚýbetween three independent questions about fictional worlds: their metaphysical status when it comes to truth, whether there is a difference between the "real" and the "fictional" worlds and whether fiction is important (institutional), and then goes on in our very familiar analytic fashion. Sometimes (but rarely) he gives examples and talks about actual literature and we get a glimpse of how the book could have been good, but for the most part it deals with things like reference or withĚýwhether the world of a book is incomplete or not, or whether books that have more pages, also contain a larger fictional world. These are just silly for me.
]]> <![CDATA[Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism]]> 52688761 178 Tracy Llanera 3030450570 VII 2 3.00 Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism
author: Tracy Llanera
name: VII
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2023/01/15
date added: 2023/03/15
shelves:
review:
It is more of a summary of the relatively simple parts of Rorty than a book that has a thesis and there are certainly better books if that is what one was to read. I didn’t feel like I learned anything important while reading it.
]]> <![CDATA[Scourge of the Betrayer (Bloodsounder's Arc, #1)]]> 13279692
Hired to chronicle the exploits of a band of rugged Syldoon warriors, Arki finds himself both frightened and fascinated by the men’s enigmatic leader, Captain Braylar Killcoin. A secretive, mercurial figure haunted by the memories of those he’s killed with his deadly flail, Braylar has already disposed of at least one impertinent scribe ... and Arki might be next.

Archiving the mundane doings of millers and merchants was tedious, but at least it was safe. As Arki heads off on a mysterious mission into parts unknown, in the company of the coarse, bloody-minded Syldoon, he is promised a chance to finally record an historic adventure well worth the telling, but first he must survive the experience!

A gripping military fantasy explores the brutal politics of Empire–and the searing impact of violence and dark magic on a man’s soul.]]> 320 Jeff Salyards 1597804061 VII 3 3.50 2012 Scourge of the Betrayer (Bloodsounder's Arc, #1)
author: Jeff Salyards
name: VII
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2023/03/07
date added: 2023/03/15
shelves:
review:
Interesting characters and story but it’s one of the slowest fiction books that I have ever read. Almost a fifth of the book is taking place in an inn and another fifth on some battle that described what everyone was doing in way too much detail for my taste. I might read the next one though.
]]> Less Than Zero 9915
Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs, and into the seamy world of L.A. after dark.]]> 208 Bret Easton Ellis VII 2 3.62 1985 Less Than Zero
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: VII
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1985
rating: 2
read at: 2023/02/25
date added: 2023/03/15
shelves:
review:
This one wasn't able to keep me interested either. I get the point (not that it is hidden), but all these random situations and the boring shallow people who keep repeating themselves just make for a boring book. American psycho had dark humor at least.
]]> <![CDATA[The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia]]> 13651 387 Ursula K. Le Guin VII 3 4.24 1974 The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
author: Ursula K. Le Guin
name: VII
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1974
rating: 3
read at: 2023/02/03
date added: 2023/03/15
shelves:
review:
I suppose it was great at its time but all this supposed questioning of society that one is supposed to do while reading it has become relatively commonplace. Leaving all that aside, as a story it was ok but nothing special.
]]> Milkman 36047860
Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.]]> 352 Anna Burns 0571338763 VII 3 3.51 2018 Milkman
author: Anna Burns
name: VII
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2023/01/25
date added: 2023/03/15
shelves:
review:
Somewhat interesting because of the atmosphere of the world that it managed to convey, but, once again, I couldn’t really relate to the characters so I kinda lost interest.
]]> Seveneves 22816087
A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space.

But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain . . .

Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown . . . to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth.

A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.]]> 872 Neal Stephenson VII 1 4.01 2015 Seveneves
author: Neal Stephenson
name: VII
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2015
rating: 1
read at: 2023/01/15
date added: 2023/03/15
shelves:
review:
I don't know why I put up with it. From the beginning the book was more about describing speculative future science than having a story. Even when things were happening, the narrative was stopping to describe for like 10 pages a random piece of equipment. Almost all the characters were completely bland and the antagonist was unrealistic. The second part, which is basically a different story was better and more interesting as a story but it wasn't worth the pain of the first (way larger) part. I also think that it betrays some weird worldviews.
]]> Το Ď€ĎĎŚĎωπο και Ď„Îż ιεĎĎŚ 40357547 ΠĎĎŚĎωπο και Ď„Îż ιεĎĎŚ είναι πολεμικό κείμενο. ÎŁĎ„Ďέφεται με ένταĎη εναντίον της ιδέας του Ď€ĎÎżĎώπου και κυĎίως εναντίον της ĎύνδεĎης του ανθĎώπινου Ď€ĎÎżĎώπου με Ď„Îż ιεĎĎŚ. ΥπάĎχει Ď€Ďάγματι κάτι ιεĎĎŚ Ďτον άνθĎωπο, δέχεται και η Βέιλ, αλλά αυτό δεν είναι Ď„Îż Ď€ĎĎŚĎωπο, ιεĎĎŚ Ďτον άνθĎωπο είναι Ď„Îż απĎĎŚĎωπο, και μόνο αυτό. ΜέĎα Ďε κάθε άνθĎωπο ζει ανεπίγνωĎτα, ĎĎ„Îż βάθος της καĎδιάς του, η Ď€ĎÎżĎδοκία του καλού. Η ιεĎότητα του ανθĎώπου είναι ακĎιβώς η επιθυμία να μην του κάνουν κακό, Ď„Îż παĎάπονο όταν του κάνουν κακό, και η Ď€ĎÎżĎδοκία να του κάνουν καλό. Στη μακĎά ÎąĎĎ„ÎżĎία του κακού, οι αναĎίθμητοι άνθĎωποι που έχουν βαĎανιĎτεί από τους κάθε λογής ÎąĎχυĎούς, οι Ď„Ďαλαπατημένοι άνθĎωποι, οι Ďκλάβοι, αυτή την επιθυμία και Ď€ĎÎżĎδοκία δεν μποĎούν πάντα να την εκφĎάĎουν. Μένει ωĎĎ„ĎŚĎÎż ανεξάλειπτα ζωντανή, ένας αλάλητος Ďτεναγμός, μια ανεκφώνητη διαμαĎĎ„Ď…Ďία. Αντηχεί μέĎα τους αδιάκοπα η βουβή ÎşĎαυγή «γιατί μου κάνετε κακό;». Îź αλάλητος Ďτεναγμός των αδικημένων, Ď„Îż ĎέλλιĎμά τους, η βουβή ÎşĎαυγή της οδυνηĎής έκπληξής τους όταν τους κάνουν κακό, τίποτε από όλα αυτά δεν έχει Ď€ĎÎżĎωπικά χαĎακτηĎÎąĎτικά. Αυτή η απĎĎŚĎωπη, βουβή διαμαĎĎ„Ď…Ďία ενάντια ĎĎ„Îż κακό, αξεχώĎÎąĎτα με την ανεπίγνωĎτη Ď€ĎÎżĎδοκία του καλού, αυτό είναι Ď„Îż ιεĎĎŚ!]]> 75 Simone Weil 9604356127 VII 4
The bookstore had it catalogued as political and the Greek translation also includes a post-face from the translator who has no clue and only comments on its political aspect. Weil indeed is famous for defending the rights of the poor, even working on a mine herself to put herself in the place of those who suffer the most, who are "afflicted", but the heart of this paper is about morality. The central question is what is it that we respect in a person and her answer is not what makes everyone unique, meaning their personality, but what everyone has in common. This is not rationality or humanity or something empirical but a part in their soul that expects that others will not hurt it and when they do, it makes a silent (as in outside of language, concepts, rationality etc.) cry. To hear this cry one only has to pay attention without their self and their interests blocking their view.

To translate this into philosophical arguments, mostly developed by Murdoch, one has to say, using as empirical evidence maybe that deep down we all know what is good, that we all have a certain orientation towards the Good. To act morally, to see the reality of the other, one doesn't need arguments but vision, perception. Attending to the other without one's ego getting in the way, with love, is to automatically know truth. Truth is reached by looking at something lovingly, by an activity that in previous terms would be called moral, and thought as an evaluation that is not about publicly available true facts but about what we personally prefer. But in her conception truth is not open to view for everyone, but requires effort, contemplation, faith and escaping the self in order to be reached. And the truth that matters is the reality of the other. In this conception I am good when I see things as they are and I am bad when I see things using conceptions that are affected by my own personal fantasies and history. And the opposite, I see the Truth (not just the moral truth, there is only one kind of truth and it is moral) when I am morally active, when I put my ego aside and let reality come in. Ultimately, this model is platonic, but not in a reading that makes Good or Truth or Justice residing in another world, but in ours. It's just that the access to it is in our minds and it is not through an activity that in previous terms would be called epistemological, but ethical. Some of those ideas are developed in The Sovereign of the Good by Murdoch (my review there is old and superficial, I will replace it eventually), who, fascinatingly, presents them as an alternative metaphysical image with no neutral ground between it and our familiar one, but they really seem to fit with what Weil had in mind. Weil also seems to think that another way to access this truth is by suffering and even martyrdom. She really was a fascinating person.
]]> 4.02 1943 Το Ď€ĎĎŚĎωπο και Ď„Îż ιεĎĎŚ
author: Simone Weil
name: VII
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1943
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/27
date added: 2023/01/06
shelves:
review:
I have read this paper before, because Iris Murdoch has been influenced from her and I am working on her. I recently decided to gift it to a christian friend of mine because, although I am too cynical for it, I am also a filthy relativist who loves seeing people defend their unfashionable views with decent arguments.

The bookstore had it catalogued as political and the Greek translation also includes a post-face from the translator who has no clue and only comments on its political aspect. Weil indeed is famous for defending the rights of the poor, even working on a mine herself to put herself in the place of those who suffer the most, who are "afflicted", but the heart of this paper is about morality. The central question is what is it that we respect in a person and her answer is not what makes everyone unique, meaning their personality, but what everyone has in common. This is not rationality or humanity or something empirical but a part in their soul that expects that others will not hurt it and when they do, it makes a silent (as in outside of language, concepts, rationality etc.) cry. To hear this cry one only has to pay attention without their self and their interests blocking their view.

To translate this into philosophical arguments, mostly developed by Murdoch, one has to say, using as empirical evidence maybe that deep down we all know what is good, that we all have a certain orientation towards the Good. To act morally, to see the reality of the other, one doesn't need arguments but vision, perception. Attending to the other without one's ego getting in the way, with love, is to automatically know truth. Truth is reached by looking at something lovingly, by an activity that in previous terms would be called moral, and thought as an evaluation that is not about publicly available true facts but about what we personally prefer. But in her conception truth is not open to view for everyone, but requires effort, contemplation, faith and escaping the self in order to be reached. And the truth that matters is the reality of the other. In this conception I am good when I see things as they are and I am bad when I see things using conceptions that are affected by my own personal fantasies and history. And the opposite, I see the Truth (not just the moral truth, there is only one kind of truth and it is moral) when I am morally active, when I put my ego aside and let reality come in. Ultimately, this model is platonic, but not in a reading that makes Good or Truth or Justice residing in another world, but in ours. It's just that the access to it is in our minds and it is not through an activity that in previous terms would be called epistemological, but ethical. Some of those ideas are developed in The Sovereign of the Good by Murdoch (my review there is old and superficial, I will replace it eventually), who, fascinatingly, presents them as an alternative metaphysical image with no neutral ground between it and our familiar one, but they really seem to fit with what Weil had in mind. Weil also seems to think that another way to access this truth is by suffering and even martyrdom. She really was a fascinating person.

]]> When Nietzsche Wept 21031
Josef Breuer, one of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, is at the height of his career. Friedrich Nietzsche, Europe's greatest philosopher, is on the brink of suicidal despair, unable to find a cure for the headaches and other ailments that plague him. When he agrees to treat Nietzsche with his experimental "talking cure", Breuer never expects that he, too, will find solace in their sessions. Only through facing his own inner demons can the gifted healer begin to help his patient.

In When Nietzsche Wept, Irvin Yalom blends fact and fiction, atmosphere and suspense to unfold an unforgettable story about the redemptive power of friendship.]]> 310 Irvin D. Yalom 0060748125 VII 2 4.36 1992 When Nietzsche Wept
author: Irvin D. Yalom
name: VII
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1992
rating: 2
read at: 2022/12/06
date added: 2023/01/06
shelves:
review:
A friend gifted this to me and he wanted my opinion on it so I was forced to read it. I probably would have abandoned it if it weren't for that. I think it is meant as an empowering, feel-good book and I never really enjoyed books like that. I also (unfortunately) cannot take psychoanalysis seriously, though at least it didn't have that many of its weird principles. But the main problem was that it was about Nietzsche, a philosopher I am familiar with and consider important but also think that it is hopeless to credit him with some non-trivial unity or to be certain of what he was like or what he really believed. The effort to describe him or awkwardly attempt to pair those descriptions with his philosophical writings felt insulting to me.
]]> Psychologism 10606697 0 Martin Kusch 0203983890 VII 3
The method he uses is similar to the ones Bloor and Latour use for their sociology of science. What they care about is to find out what exactly happens before we come to accept something as fact or what they call blackboxed. It becomes something that is taken completely for granted and it doesn't even occur to anyone to challenge it. To show this they go back to history and usually emphasize sociological reasons like conflicts between scientists and their interests, while prohibiting themselves from invoking concepts like true or rational as this is precisely what is up for grabs in this process in which a statement becomes accepted as fact. Generally, I find this idea very interesting.

Kush, in this book, aims to do the same to philosophers, for the specific issue of psychologism. There is no precise definition for it, but, roughly, it is the idea that we can explain everything using science and more specifically psychology. So this book is full of quotes by mostly German philosophers of the era of Husserl and Frege that provide their reasons for rejecting this idea, and also includes some commentary of the social dynamics that were at work at that age. I actually think I am making it much more interesting than it is. The amount of research involved is admirable but the result is so dry that I doubt anyone without a phd level of interest in this would tolerate it. Maybe reading the first two chapters and the conclusion to learn about the method is worth it.]]> 4.33 1995 Psychologism
author: Martin Kusch
name: VII
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1995
rating: 3
read at: 2022/08/31
date added: 2022/12/19
shelves:
review:
This was just to boring to read, even though I find the topic interesting. His method is interesting, I just don't like what it is to read a book that uses it.

The method he uses is similar to the ones Bloor and Latour use for their sociology of science. What they care about is to find out what exactly happens before we come to accept something as fact or what they call blackboxed. It becomes something that is taken completely for granted and it doesn't even occur to anyone to challenge it. To show this they go back to history and usually emphasize sociological reasons like conflicts between scientists and their interests, while prohibiting themselves from invoking concepts like true or rational as this is precisely what is up for grabs in this process in which a statement becomes accepted as fact. Generally, I find this idea very interesting.

Kush, in this book, aims to do the same to philosophers, for the specific issue of psychologism. There is no precise definition for it, but, roughly, it is the idea that we can explain everything using science and more specifically psychology. So this book is full of quotes by mostly German philosophers of the era of Husserl and Frege that provide their reasons for rejecting this idea, and also includes some commentary of the social dynamics that were at work at that age. I actually think I am making it much more interesting than it is. The amount of research involved is admirable but the result is so dry that I doubt anyone without a phd level of interest in this would tolerate it. Maybe reading the first two chapters and the conclusion to learn about the method is worth it.
]]> <![CDATA[Musonius Rufus: Lectures and Sayings]]> 11041525 102 Musonius Rufus 145645966X VII 3 4.01 80 Musonius Rufus: Lectures and Sayings
author: Musonius Rufus
name: VII
average rating: 4.01
book published: 80
rating: 3
read at: 2022/11/01
date added: 2022/12/19
shelves:
review:
This version has an extra text but lacks an introduction and the Ancient text, compared to Cora Lutz's more classical version.
]]> <![CDATA[That One Should Disdain Hardships: The Teachings of a Roman Stoic]]> 50131070 Perennial wisdom from one of history’s most important but lesser-known Stoic teachers
Ěý
“He knew that all a philosopher could do was respond well—bravely, boldly, patiently—to what life threw at us. That's what we should be doing now.”—Ryan Holiday, Reading List email
Ěý
The Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus was one of the most influential teachers of his era, imperial Rome, and his message still resonates with startling clarity today. Alongside Stoics like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, he emphasized ethics in action, displayed in all aspects of life. Merely learning philosophical doctrine and listening to lectures, they believed, will not do one any good unless one manages to interiorize the teachings and apply them to daily life.
Ěý
In Musonius Rufus’s words, “Philosophy is nothing else than to search out by reason what is right and proper and by deeds to put it into practice.� At a time of renewed interest in Stoicism, this collection of Musonius Rufus’s lectures and sayings, beautifully translated by Cora E. Lutz with an introduction by Gretchen Reydams-Schils, offers readers access to the thought of one of history’s most influential and remarkable Stoic thinkers.]]> 160 Musonius Rufus 0300226039 VII 3
As for what Rufus has to say, it's hard to say it's worth reading. Standard stoic philosophy with an emphasis on everyday life (he even has a text on how long you should keep your hair). On the one hand too conservative (no sex even among married people except for childbearing, because in his mind it is animalistic and unhumanlike), on the other hand he says that women should study philosophy too and respects them somewhat more than what was usual.]]> 3.96 1947 That One Should Disdain Hardships: The Teachings of a Roman Stoic
author: Musonius Rufus
name: VII
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1947
rating: 3
read at: 2022/11/05
date added: 2022/12/19
shelves:
review:
Another book I wouldn't have picked up if I didn't have to. This version is has a helpful introduction and includes the ancient Greek text. The newer book by Cynthia King has an extra text but no introduction or the original text.

As for what Rufus has to say, it's hard to say it's worth reading. Standard stoic philosophy with an emphasis on everyday life (he even has a text on how long you should keep your hair). On the one hand too conservative (no sex even among married people except for childbearing, because in his mind it is animalistic and unhumanlike), on the other hand he says that women should study philosophy too and respects them somewhat more than what was usual.
]]> Hellenistic Philosophy 40027029 304 John Sellars 0199674124 VII 3 4.37 Hellenistic Philosophy
author: John Sellars
name: VII
average rating: 4.37
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2022/09/19
date added: 2022/12/19
shelves:
review:
I don't really care about the philosophers of that era and I chose to read this after researching which books that cover them are the most reputable. This and Antony Long's came up and I chose this because it's more recent. I have nothing negative to say, but it's just a standard textbook, which means that it was quite boring to me.
]]> <![CDATA[The Gap Into Ruin: This Day All Gods Die (Gap, #5)]]> 537148 564 Stephen R. Donaldson 0553071807 VII 4 4.22 1996 The Gap Into Ruin: This Day All Gods Die (Gap, #5)
author: Stephen R. Donaldson
name: VII
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at: 2022/10/31
date added: 2022/12/19
shelves:
review:
Way better than the last few of the series. I actually cared for what will happen in all fronts.
]]> <![CDATA[The Gap Into Power: A Dark and Hungry God Arises (Gap, #3)]]> 22877
The stage is set for confrontation at Billingate—illegal shipyard, haven for pirates and brigands, where every vice flourishes and every appetite can be sated. Gateway to the alien realm of the Amnion, the shipyard is a clearinghouse for all they require to fulfill their mutagenic plans against humanity.

It is here that the fate of Morn Hyland is to be decided amid a kaleidoscopic whirl of plot and counter-plot, treachery and betrayal.

As schemes unravel to reveal yet deeper designs, Morn, Nick, Angus' lives may all be forfeit as pawns in the titanic game played our between Warden Dios, dedicated director of the UMC Police, and the Dragon, greed-driven ruler of the UMC.ĚýĚýHere, the future of humankind hangs on the uncertain fortune of Morn Hyland in a daring novel of epic power and suspense, relentlessly gripping from first page to last.]]> 518 Stephen R. Donaldson 0553562606 VII 2 4.07 1992 The Gap Into Power: A Dark and Hungry God Arises (Gap, #3)
author: Stephen R. Donaldson
name: VII
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1992
rating: 2
read at: 2022/03/19
date added: 2022/12/19
shelves:
review:
I forgot to rate it in time so all I remember is that I was really bored while reading it and almost abandoned it.
]]> <![CDATA[Tomorrow, the Killing (Low Town, #2)]]> 15768369
His name is Warden.

He thought he had left the war behind him, but a summons from up above brings the past sharply, uncomfortably, back into focus. General Montgomery's daughter is missing somewhere in Low Town, searching for clues about her brother's murder. The General wants her found, before the stinking streets can lay claim to her, too.]]> 359 Daniel Polansky 1444721348 VII 2 4.05 2012 Tomorrow, the Killing (Low Town, #2)
author: Daniel Polansky
name: VII
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2012
rating: 2
read at: 2022/12/01
date added: 2022/12/19
shelves:
review:
Way worse than the first, which had an actual mystery to be solved and felt more original. The war stories and everyone speaking like in the movies (always trying to say something smart or funny), even though they were present in the first one too, tired me this time.
]]> <![CDATA[The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World]]> 118287 The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate.]]> 400 Elaine Scarry 0195049969 VII 0 to-read 4.14 1985 The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
author: Elaine Scarry
name: VII
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/09/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Hunger 32585 134 Knut Hamsun 0486431681 VII 4 4.09 1890 Hunger
author: Knut Hamsun
name: VII
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1890
rating: 4
read at: 2022/09/14
date added: 2022/09/16
shelves:
review:
I am not sure why this novel managed to keep me interested. There is no character progression and it's really hard for me to relate to the main hero. It's not just extreme poverty that I am not familiar with but also with how concerned he is with how other people think of him. I would have thought that if you are hungry all these social worries would disappear. He is worried sick of being found out when he gets a break but not because of the law but because of his image to others. I am not sure if this is a commentary on his education or just something that was how things were at those times. On the other hand, the writing is good and because (I assume) of the hunger, the hero is very unpredictable, bold and random, while still having a relatively coherent personality. This is hard to do and it also leaves you with an expectation that anything can happen. Overall, an interesting and easy read, though mainly because it is a small book.
]]> Ficciones 426504 Ficciones demonstrate the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything else in between.

Part One: The Garden of Forking Paths
Prologue
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim (1936, not included in the 1941 edition)
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939)
The Circular Ruins (1940)
The Lottery in Babylon (1941)
An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain (1941)
The Library of Babel (1941)
The Garden of Forking Paths (1941)
Part Two: Artifices
Prologue
Funes the Memorious (1942)
The Form of the Sword (1942)
Theme of the Traitor and the Hero (1944)
Death and the Compass (1942)
The Secret Miracle (1943)
Three Versions of Judas (1944)
The End (1953, 2nd edition only)
The Sect of the Phoenix (1952, 2nd edition only)
The South (1953, 2nd edition only)]]> 174 Jorge Luis Borges 0802130305 VII 4 4.46 1944 Ficciones
author: Jorge Luis Borges
name: VII
average rating: 4.46
book published: 1944
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/27
date added: 2022/09/12
shelves:
review:
I have read this in 2013 but I wasn't able to appreciate it back then. I read it again because John Gray mentioned something from "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" in one of his books that I kind of believe to be true, though not in absolute terms. In that world philosophies are valued not for their accuracy but for their novelty. The idea is just mentioned and not explored but I ended up reading the whole book anyway. Every story leaves you with a sense of wonder and invites you to contemplate reality. Borges seems to be obsessed with infinity, randomness, possibilities, the boundaries between chaos and order and the uniqueness of the moment. He is also very conscious that the boundary between fiction and reality is not as rigid as it is usually seen to be or at least, in weaker terms, that fiction and ideas in general have a habit of materializing in the actual world. And of course he seems to have read so much. I haven't heard so many of the authors he has read. I was tired sometimes while reading it but I can't quite explain why.
]]> Low Town (Low Town, #1) 9755449 Drug dealers, hustlers, brothels, dirty politics, corrupt cops . . . and sorcery. Welcome to Low Town.

In the forgotten back alleys and flophouses that lie in the shadows of Rigus, the finest city of the Thirteen Lands, you will find Low Town. It is an ugly place, and its cham­pion is an ugly man. Disgraced intelligence agent. Forgotten war hero. Independent drug dealer. After a fall from grace five years ago, a man known as the Warden leads a life of crime, addicted to cheap violence and expensive drugs. Every day is a constant hustle to find new customers and protect his turf from low-life competition like Tancred the Harelip and Ling Chi, the enigmatic crime lord of the heathens.

The Warden’s life of drugged iniquity is shaken by his dis­covery of a murdered child down a dead-end street . . . set­ting him on a collision course with the life he left behind. As a former agent with Black House—the secret police—he knows better than anyone that murder in Low Town is an everyday thing, the kind of crime that doesn’t get investi­gated. To protect his home, he will take part in a dangerous game of deception between underworld bosses and the psy­chotic head of Black House, but the truth is far darker than he imagines. In Low Town, no one can be trusted.

Daniel Polansky has crafted a thrilling novel steeped in noir sensibilities and relentless action, and set in an original world of stunning imagination, leading to a gut-wrenching, unforeseeable conclusion. Low Town is an attention-grabbing debut that will leave readers riveted . . . and hun­gry for more.]]> 352 Daniel Polansky 0385534469 VII 4 3.86 2011 Low Town (Low Town, #1)
author: Daniel Polansky
name: VII
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2022/09/04
date added: 2022/09/12
shelves:
review:
This was surprisingly good. Sometimes the writing is too fancy for my taste, but I really like the mood and the setting. I always enjoyed stories taking place in slums filled with crime that have their own rules and with people barely surviving. This one kind of reminded me the Arcane anime world but with way less craziness. It is actually more noir/detective story than fantasy as the magic or tech involved is more of a threat and it doesn't have a major impact in the turn of events. I was a little annoyed with how little the hero was talking to various people that could have been explored much more, for the story but also from the hero's perspective for more clues, but this can be read as a character trait. I kept thinking how much more I would talk in his place.
]]> <![CDATA[The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3)]]> 31817749
The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women.

Essun has inherited the power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to find her daughter Nassun and forge a world in which every orogene child can grow up safe.

For Nassun, her mother's mastery of the Obelisk Gate comes too late. She has seen the evil of the world, and accepted what her mother will not admit: that sometimes what is corrupt cannot be cleansed, only destroyed.

The remarkable conclusion to the post-apocalyptic and highly acclaimed trilogy that began with the multi-award-nominated The Fifth Season.]]> 416 N.K. Jemisin VII 1 4.32 2017 The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3)
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: VII
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2017
rating: 1
read at: 2022/09/12
date added: 2022/09/12
shelves:
review:
I was already bored with the second book but with this I ended up speed reading most of it. Instead of two different sub-stories we now have three and it's really impossible to care about the new one as these characters mean nothing to me and it's really hard to ascribe them motives. Another sub-story is also boring as it just involves basically two characters interacting with each other and even the third one that I previously enjoyed because of the group dynamics is now much more simplified. The ending is also very cliche and it's hard to avoid seeing it as a political and environmental message. I really regret not stopping at the first book or not reading it at all.
]]> The Folding Knife 6616466
He is ruthless, cunning, and above all, lucky. He brings wealth, power and prestige to his people. But with power comes unwanted attention, and Basso must defend his nation and himself from threats foreign and domestic. In a lifetime of crucial decisions, he's only ever made one mistake.

One mistake, though, can be enough.]]> 432 K.J. Parker 0316038504 VII 4 3.97 2010 The Folding Knife
author: K.J. Parker
name: VII
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2022/09/02
date added: 2022/09/02
shelves:
review:
I am trying to find out why I read it that fast but it probably has nothing to do with the book itself but with my current me. Maybe it's because it doesn't have many descriptions or action in general. Other than that, it is about a banker who rules a republic and constantly faces problems but almost always ends up solving them and profiting from them. The other characters are not very fleshed out and we just have the point of view of the hero. Not anything involving fantasy either, the inspiration must be 14th century Venice, though he uses Byzantine names. In any case, it was addicting.
]]> <![CDATA[The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths]]> 16059367
In a book by turns chilling and beautiful, John Gray continues the thinking that made his Straw Dogs such a cult classic. Gray draws on an extraordinary array of memoirs, poems, fiction, and philosophy to re-imagine our place in the world. Writers as varied as Ballard, Borges, Conrad, and Freud have been mesmerized by forms of human extremity―experiences that are on the outer edge of the possible or that tip into fantasy and myth. What happens to us when we starve, when we fight, when we are imprisoned? And how do our imaginations leap into worlds way beyond our real experiences? The Silence of Animals is consistently fascinating, filled with unforgettable images and a delight in the conundrum of human existence―an existence that we decorate with countless myths and ideas, where we twist and turn to avoid acknowledging that we too are animals, separated from the others perhaps only by our self-conceit. In the Babel we have created for ourselves, it is the silence of animals that both reproaches and bewitches us.]]> 240 John Gray 0374229171 VII 4 Ěý
This viewpoint should be very familiar to anyone who have read his other books. We humans think that things keep getting better but in reality what changes is the toys we have to play with and the stories we tell to ourselves. We are fundamentally and irrevocably flawed and we are ready to show it when opportunity arises, when we find ourselves in unusual circumstances. It's no surprise that many of his sections deal with stories from WW2 or similar supposedly extraordinary periods in which culture collapses. We say to ourselves that we are born to be free and that we are the only rational beings, but it is simply a replacement of God with faith in reason, truth, science and progress.
Ěý
We think that our views reflect the world but they are ready to crumble when a new one arises. It is actually a choice between myths, not a mirror of reality (he is following Rorty and post-modernist thought here). It is not us and the world, we are part of a chaotic order and we invent order and stability but only temporarily. It is hard or impossible to escape this need for meaning or order and in some cases, like in pursuit of happiness or freedom it can even be detrimental.
Ěý
The most interesting section is the one that bears the name of the book. A very common idea that started from Gadamer and Heidegger but is still here with McDowell is that whereas animals live in an environment, humans create their own world because of thought and language. This is supposedly a privilege, but for Grey it is a flaw. The animals in their environment are silent and lucky, because they don’t have this incessant endless inner talk. Humans traditionally seek silence in monasteries but now this is discouraged. As he says: “admitting the need for [silence] means accepting that you are inwardly restless� and that “much of your life has been an exercise in distraction�. Many people, philosophies or religions provide instructions on how to escape it but these ways usually came with caveats like spiritualism or reaching God or reaching some inner humanity or accessing a mysterious platonic realm. Instead, like in Straw Dogs, he endorses contemplation, a godless mysticism that doesn’t try to reach something divine or some higher self, it doesn’t have anything particular in mind as a goal, “all it offers is mere being�.
Ěý
Overall, I always enjoy this kind of books and cannot wait to escape academia and have the time to read all those authors he finds. But of course, this is only one more viewpoint, that just happens to suit my own preferences. I am fine with that.]]> 3.89 2013 The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths
author: John Gray
name: VII
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/16
date added: 2022/08/24
shelves:
review:
I miss this kind of books, especially now that I am forced to read endless, tedious distinctions about specialized subtopics that nobody besides 50 professors and a few hundred poor graduate students care about. There aren't really any arguments in this book. I think that after Straw Dogs Gray decided to focus more on the history of ideas, finding as many pessimistic anti-humanist, anti-Enlightenment writers as possible and combine them with each other to form small sections that describe his particular -and quite attractive to me- viewpoint. His Seven Types of Atheism was also very similar to this.
Ěý
This viewpoint should be very familiar to anyone who have read his other books. We humans think that things keep getting better but in reality what changes is the toys we have to play with and the stories we tell to ourselves. We are fundamentally and irrevocably flawed and we are ready to show it when opportunity arises, when we find ourselves in unusual circumstances. It's no surprise that many of his sections deal with stories from WW2 or similar supposedly extraordinary periods in which culture collapses. We say to ourselves that we are born to be free and that we are the only rational beings, but it is simply a replacement of God with faith in reason, truth, science and progress.
Ěý
We think that our views reflect the world but they are ready to crumble when a new one arises. It is actually a choice between myths, not a mirror of reality (he is following Rorty and post-modernist thought here). It is not us and the world, we are part of a chaotic order and we invent order and stability but only temporarily. It is hard or impossible to escape this need for meaning or order and in some cases, like in pursuit of happiness or freedom it can even be detrimental.
Ěý
The most interesting section is the one that bears the name of the book. A very common idea that started from Gadamer and Heidegger but is still here with McDowell is that whereas animals live in an environment, humans create their own world because of thought and language. This is supposedly a privilege, but for Grey it is a flaw. The animals in their environment are silent and lucky, because they don’t have this incessant endless inner talk. Humans traditionally seek silence in monasteries but now this is discouraged. As he says: “admitting the need for [silence] means accepting that you are inwardly restless� and that “much of your life has been an exercise in distraction�. Many people, philosophies or religions provide instructions on how to escape it but these ways usually came with caveats like spiritualism or reaching God or reaching some inner humanity or accessing a mysterious platonic realm. Instead, like in Straw Dogs, he endorses contemplation, a godless mysticism that doesn’t try to reach something divine or some higher self, it doesn’t have anything particular in mind as a goal, “all it offers is mere being�.
Ěý
Overall, I always enjoy this kind of books and cannot wait to escape academia and have the time to read all those authors he finds. But of course, this is only one more viewpoint, that just happens to suit my own preferences. I am fine with that.
]]> <![CDATA[Authority (Southern Reach, #2)]]> 18077769 The bone-chilling, hair-raising second installment of the Southern Reach Trilogy

After thirty years, the only human engagement with Area X—a seemingly malevolent landscape surrounded by an invisible border and mysteriously wiped clean of all signs of civilization—has been a series of expeditions overseen by a government agency so secret it has almost been forgotten: the Southern Reach. Following the tumultuous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the agency is in complete disarray.

John RodrĂ­guez (aka "Control") is the Southern Reach's newly appointed head. Working with a distrustful but desperate team, a series of frustrating interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and hours of profoundly troubling video footage, Control begins to penetrate the secrets of Area X. But with each discovery he must confront disturbing truths about himself and the agency he's pledged to serve.

In Authority, the second volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, Area X's most disturbing questions are answered . . . but the answers are far from reassuring.]]> 341 Jeff VanderMeer 0374104107 VII 2 3.54 2014 Authority (Southern Reach, #2)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: VII
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at: 2022/06/24
date added: 2022/08/24
shelves:
review:
Just terrible, both compared to the first one and as a stand-alone. It has almost nothing to offer to the first story, it doesn't take place in Area X and it's just boring and pointless.
]]> <![CDATA[Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism]]> 56988240 The last book by the eminent American philosopher and public intellectual Richard Rorty, providing the definitive statement of his mature philosophical and political views.

Richard Rorty’s Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism is a last statement by one of America’s foremost philosophers. Here Rorty offers his culminating thoughts on the influential version of pragmatism he began to articulate decades ago in his groundbreaking Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

Marking a new stage in the evolution of his thought, Rorty’s final masterwork identifies anti-authoritarianism as the principal impulse and virtue of pragmatism. Anti-authoritarianism, on this view, means acknowledging that our cultural inheritance is always open to revision because no authority exists to ascertain the truth, once and for all. If we cannot rely on the unshakable certainties of God or nature, then all we have left to go on—and argue with—are the opinions and ideas of our fellow humans. The test of these ideas, Rorty suggests, is relatively simple: Do they work? Do they produce the peace, freedom, and happiness we desire? To achieve this enlightened pragmatism is not easy, though. Pragmatism demands trust. Pragmatism demands that we think and care about what others think and care about, which further requires that we account for others� doubts of and objections to our own beliefs. After all, our own beliefs are as contestable as anyone else’s.

A supple mind who draws on theorists from John Stuart Mill to Annette Baier, Rorty nonetheless is always an apostle of the concrete. No book offers a more accessible account of Rorty’s utopia of pragmatism, just as no philosopher has more eloquently challenged the hidebound traditions arrayed against the goals of social justice.]]> 272 Richard Rorty 0674248910 VII 0 to-read 4.29 2021 Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism
author: Richard Rorty
name: VII
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/07/27
shelves: to-read
review:
In case you don't know it, everyone's second favourite Santa-Claus (after Dennett) posted the actual lectures in his youtube channel:
]]> The Malaise of Modernity 973962 128 Charles Margrave Taylor VII 2
Taylor describes three malaises of modernity, one, individualism that resulted from the loss of social orders that gave us meaning and now has resurfaced as a culture of narcissism, two, the primacy of instrumental reason or the culture of maximum efficiency, that converts even lives to technical problems and three, that institutions restrict our choices so much that it seems that we were helpless against them.

For Taylor it all starts because we have accepted relativism as a moral position but fail to see that it is a moral and not an epistemological position. Nowadays, it is immoral to argue that people are not free to do whatever they want, but we think that it is not something that we decided to accept as as a value but something “objective�. The first step then is to understand that it is something that can be open to argument. It is connected to the ideal of authenticity but for Taylor it is its degraded form. It is a combination of Rousseau’s and Herder’s idea that everyone has a unique way of being human and that they should be willing to cut all societal ties that prevent them from realizing it. The problem is that it’s hard to convince anyone that follows this ideal to abandon it, in favor of one that stresses that we are all part of the same community.

Taylor unfortunately thinks that the way to do it is by showing that it is a self-defeating position (as if anyone has ever changed his mind because of that), meaning that acting this way destroys the conditions of authenticity. The first argument for this is that the way we define ourselves is based on what is significant, but we can’t decide on our own what is significant; it must always come from culture. Something can be important only if there is a horizon of other things that one decides not to choose. It also requires reasoning and justification and those too always come from culture. Moreover our identity depends on the recognition of others.

What he hopes to achieve is to keep self-fulfilment powered by the ideal of authenticity but not the prevalent degraded self-centred, nihilistic one. Critics are wrong to find a necessary connection between egoism and self-fulfilment. Egoism always existed, the change is that now it doesn’t come with shame because hierarchies were destroyed and we were led to social atomism that has no ties to history, tradition, nature and so on. It is also reinforced by the idea that we have to look inside us to discover ourselves, which happened in parallel with the move from imitation to creation in art, some sort of rebellion, and by the idea that beauty is independent to moral excellence. Both these variants of authenticity go against morality. So authenticity involves creation, discovery, authenticity and opposition to rules of society, but also openness to horizons of significance and self-definition in dialogue and ignoring the latter makes it incoherent. For this we should be conscious that direction of history can easily change, resisting the temptation of pessimism, the idea that we are on a way that can’t be changed, and try to promote dialogue instead. Also, to avoid the necessity of subjectivity he notes that though authenticity is self-referential, the goals that one has are not. One can choose what they likes but what they like must be publicly available, for example God or politics or the environment.

He sketches a similar solution for the idea that instrumental reason and technology cause us to be divided and leads to an atomistic outlook that is inescapable, by focusing on the fact that there are still points of resistance, like the romantic era or current environmentalism. Instrumental reason, though it started with Descartes and is a way of getting what one wants, it is also connected to freedom and self-generating thought, and because of its emphasis on production it improved the conditions of life. It also lead us into universal solidarity (in theory), even thought it also serves domination and greater control. So again we have to retrieve the non-degraded form of instrumental reason that lead to the good effects. Disengaged reason is only an ideal and not how human agency works, as we live in dialogical conditions, so we must embrace the latter instead of looking pictures as numbers and not as stories.

And though instrumental reason encourages free market which limits democracy, we are not helpless. The problem is lack of common purpose and inability to create majorities as politicians became more self-serving. We need to stop this fragmentation and accept diversity.]]> 3.80 1991 The Malaise of Modernity
author: Charles Margrave Taylor
name: VII
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1991
rating: 2
read at: 2022/03/27
date added: 2022/07/27
shelves:
review:
I am getting the urge to write that history doesn’t go back and be done with it but I already did most of the work already. His project seems too forced for me, maybe ok on paper but without any chance of ever actually working, because it is just a philosopher playing simcity or civilization with concepts. Here is my too detailed summary:

Taylor describes three malaises of modernity, one, individualism that resulted from the loss of social orders that gave us meaning and now has resurfaced as a culture of narcissism, two, the primacy of instrumental reason or the culture of maximum efficiency, that converts even lives to technical problems and three, that institutions restrict our choices so much that it seems that we were helpless against them.

For Taylor it all starts because we have accepted relativism as a moral position but fail to see that it is a moral and not an epistemological position. Nowadays, it is immoral to argue that people are not free to do whatever they want, but we think that it is not something that we decided to accept as as a value but something “objective�. The first step then is to understand that it is something that can be open to argument. It is connected to the ideal of authenticity but for Taylor it is its degraded form. It is a combination of Rousseau’s and Herder’s idea that everyone has a unique way of being human and that they should be willing to cut all societal ties that prevent them from realizing it. The problem is that it’s hard to convince anyone that follows this ideal to abandon it, in favor of one that stresses that we are all part of the same community.

Taylor unfortunately thinks that the way to do it is by showing that it is a self-defeating position (as if anyone has ever changed his mind because of that), meaning that acting this way destroys the conditions of authenticity. The first argument for this is that the way we define ourselves is based on what is significant, but we can’t decide on our own what is significant; it must always come from culture. Something can be important only if there is a horizon of other things that one decides not to choose. It also requires reasoning and justification and those too always come from culture. Moreover our identity depends on the recognition of others.

What he hopes to achieve is to keep self-fulfilment powered by the ideal of authenticity but not the prevalent degraded self-centred, nihilistic one. Critics are wrong to find a necessary connection between egoism and self-fulfilment. Egoism always existed, the change is that now it doesn’t come with shame because hierarchies were destroyed and we were led to social atomism that has no ties to history, tradition, nature and so on. It is also reinforced by the idea that we have to look inside us to discover ourselves, which happened in parallel with the move from imitation to creation in art, some sort of rebellion, and by the idea that beauty is independent to moral excellence. Both these variants of authenticity go against morality. So authenticity involves creation, discovery, authenticity and opposition to rules of society, but also openness to horizons of significance and self-definition in dialogue and ignoring the latter makes it incoherent. For this we should be conscious that direction of history can easily change, resisting the temptation of pessimism, the idea that we are on a way that can’t be changed, and try to promote dialogue instead. Also, to avoid the necessity of subjectivity he notes that though authenticity is self-referential, the goals that one has are not. One can choose what they likes but what they like must be publicly available, for example God or politics or the environment.

He sketches a similar solution for the idea that instrumental reason and technology cause us to be divided and leads to an atomistic outlook that is inescapable, by focusing on the fact that there are still points of resistance, like the romantic era or current environmentalism. Instrumental reason, though it started with Descartes and is a way of getting what one wants, it is also connected to freedom and self-generating thought, and because of its emphasis on production it improved the conditions of life. It also lead us into universal solidarity (in theory), even thought it also serves domination and greater control. So again we have to retrieve the non-degraded form of instrumental reason that lead to the good effects. Disengaged reason is only an ideal and not how human agency works, as we live in dialogical conditions, so we must embrace the latter instead of looking pictures as numbers and not as stories.

And though instrumental reason encourages free market which limits democracy, we are not helpless. The problem is lack of common purpose and inability to create majorities as politicians became more self-serving. We need to stop this fragmentation and accept diversity.
]]> <![CDATA[The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1)]]> 19161852
Three terrible things happen in a single day. Essun, a woman living an ordinary life in a small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Meanwhile, mighty Sanze -- the world-spanning empire whose innovations have been civilization's bedrock for a thousand years -- collapses as most of its citizens are murdered to serve a madman's vengeance. And worst of all, across the heart of the vast continent known as the Stillness, a great red rift has been torn into the heart of the earth, spewing ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.

Now Essun must pursue the wreckage of her family through a deadly, dying land. Without sunlight, clean water, or arable land, and with limited stockpiles of supplies, there will be war all across the Stillness: a battle royale of nations not for power or territory, but simply for the basic resources necessary to get through the long dark night. Essun does not care if the world falls apart around her. She'll break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter.]]> 468 N.K. Jemisin VII 4 4.29 2015 The Fifth Season (The Broken Earth, #1)
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: VII
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/10
date added: 2022/07/27
shelves:
review:
Good characters and a quite imaginative world, mechanics and so on. Nothing too profound, but a good fantasy book.
]]> <![CDATA[The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2)]]> 26228034 410 N.K. Jemisin VII 3 4.27 2016 The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2)
author: N.K. Jemisin
name: VII
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2022/07/27
date added: 2022/07/27
shelves:
review:
The story follows two characters and unfortunately only one of them has an interesting story, so this kind of ruined it for me.
]]> Behold the Void 43268331 � from the introduction by Laird Barron

***

BEHOLD THE VOID is nine stories of terror that huddle in the dark space between cosmic horror and the modern weird, between old-school hard-edged horror of the 1980's and the stylistic prose of today's literary giants.

***

Praise for Behold the Void:

SHORT STORY COLLECTION OF THE YEAR � This Is Horror

“Fracassi…builds his horrific tales slowly and carefully…his powers of description are formidable; and he’s especially skillful at creating, and sustaining, suspense.� � The New York Times

“…think vintage King at his best.� � Rue Morgue Magazine (“Dante’s Pick�)

“…recalls the work of writers such as McCammon, King, and Bradbury.� � John Langan, LOCUS Magazine“With carefully drawn characters, vividly constructed situations, and deft description, Behold the Void offers the perfect blend of honest-to-goodness human nastiness and true supernatural creepiness. This is horror fiction at its best.� � Brian Evenson, author of A Collapse of Horses

“Everything here is damned near perfect� a first-rate collection.� Black Static

“Philip Fracassi is the next big horror writer to blow your mind. If you’re a fan of the horror genre at all, then this guy is a must-read.� � Lit Reactor

“These stories are scary, yes, but more than that, they’re haunting� they get inside you and they don’t go away.� � Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying

“F°ů˛ął¦˛ą˛ő˛őľ±â€™s Behold the Void is the perfect read for horror fans who expect authors to raise the bar and redefine what horror fiction means.â€� â€� Ronald Malfi, author of Bone White

“Fracassi is quickly building a reputation as a superior storyteller of incredible talent�. an author we must surely now hail as a leading light in the dark field of horror fiction.� � This Is Horror

]]> 312 Philip Fracassi VII 2 4.05 2017 Behold the Void
author: Philip Fracassi
name: VII
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2017
rating: 2
read at: 2022/04/27
date added: 2022/07/27
shelves:
review:
I don’t think that this one qualifies as cosmic horror, but just generic one. When I finished it I was expecting to rate it three stars but now I realize that I don't remember a single story, save the first.
]]> <![CDATA[Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)]]> 17934530 Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition.

The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.]]> 195 Jeff VanderMeer 0374104093 VII 4 3.80 2014 Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1)
author: Jeff VanderMeer
name: VII
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/27
date added: 2022/07/27
shelves:
review:
I liked the movie too, but the book is even better. He managed to create a truly eerie mood and location, and I always love the cold, detached kind of narrative. For some reason I was enthralled by the first part and read it in one sitting, though I wasn't able to maintain the same interest for the second part. It's not so much that I wanted a different ending as I doubt that any ending would have been satisfying enough, I think it was probably that the first location managed to creep me out much more.
]]> The Philosopher's Stone 715738 320 Colin Wilson 0446330302 VII 1 3.94 1969 The Philosopher's Stone
author: Colin Wilson
name: VII
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1969
rating: 1
read at: 2022/02/27
date added: 2022/07/27
shelves:
review:
This was bad in several ways. First of all it is not a horror novel at all and its "cosmic" elements start to materialize only in the last 10% of the book or so. It is also badly written, though the author warns us that he wanted to write it the same way that he writes his science books. Expect supposedly interesting info (think Sheldon from BBT) that leads to nowhere, including some random obsession with Shakespeare's life. Finally, even Kant or Descartes don't identify with, and overvalue their mind (and hate their body) as much as him.
]]> Dark Matter 27833670 A mindbending, relentlessly surprising thriller from the author of the bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy.

Jason Dessen is walking home through the chilly Chicago streets one night, looking forward to a quiet evening in front of the fireplace with his wife, Daniela, and their son, Charlie—when his reality shatters.

"Are you happy with your life?"

Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious.

Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.

Before a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend."

In this world he's woken up to, Jason's life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.

Is it this world or the other that's the dream?

And even if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could've imagined—one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself even as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe.

Dark Matter is a brilliantly plotted tale that is at once sweeping and intimate, mind-bendingly strange and profoundly human--a relentlessly surprising science-fiction thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we'll go to claim the lives we dream of.]]> 342 Blake Crouch 1101904224 VII 2 4.13 2016 Dark Matter
author: Blake Crouch
name: VII
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2016
rating: 2
read at: 2022/03/27
date added: 2022/07/27
shelves:
review:
Nothing dark about it. Easy to read but just a generic thriller that is implausible and couldn't be consistent with the rules it established.
]]> To Rouse Leviathan 51015123
In tales long and short, some substantially revised from their original appearances and including a new novella co-written with Mark McLaughlin, Cardin rings a succession of changes on those fateful words from the Book of Job: “Let those sorcerers who place a curse on days curse that day, those who are skilled to rouse Leviathan.�

Aside from his fiction, Matt Cardin is the editor of Born to Fear: Interviews with Thomas Ligotti (2014) and Horror Literature through History (2015), and co-editor of the journal Vastarien.]]> 315 Matt Cardin 1614982716 VII 4 4.00 2019 To Rouse Leviathan
author: Matt Cardin
name: VII
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2022/03/27
date added: 2022/07/27
shelves:
review:
This was surprisingly good. I enjoyed it much more than I enjoy Lovecraft and Ligotti, though many stories basically convey exactly what Ligotti is conveying, that we are just mirrors or puppets of this darkness that nobody can escape from. But Cardin has an interest in religion that brings out a few twists and for some strange reason I was always attracted to the occult. It also helps that his stories are more often than not being set in contemporary times, are less surreal than Liggotti's and he uses less descriptions than him and Lovecraft. My favourite story or maybe my favourite moment was the ending of Teeth.
]]> Intention 331667 94 G.E.M. Anscombe 0674003993 VII 0 currently-reading 4.01 1963 Intention
author: G.E.M. Anscombe
name: VII
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1963
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/07/27
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The Perils of the One 42902698
In The Perils of the One , Stathis Gourgouris offers a philosophical anthropology that confronts the legacy of “monarchical thinking�: the desire to subjugate oneself to unitary principles and structures, whether political, moral, theological, or secular. In wide-ranging essays that are at once poetic and polemical, intellectual and passionate, Gourgouris reads across politics and theology, literary and art criticism, psychoanalysis and feminism in a critique of both political theology and the metaphysics of secularism. He engages with a range of figures from the Apostle Paul and Trinitarian theologians, to La Boétie, Schmitt, and Freud, to contemporary thinkers such as Clastres, Said, Castoriadis, Žižek, Butler, and Irigaray. At once a broad perspective on human history and a detailed examination of our present moment, The Perils of the One offers glimpses of what a counterpolitics of autonomy would look like from anarchic subjectivities that refuse external ideals, resist the allure of command and obedience, and embrace otherness.]]> 264 Stathis Gourgouris 0231192886 VII 0 currently-reading 0.0 The Perils of the One
author: Stathis Gourgouris
name: VII
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/07/27
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Without God: Michel Houellebecq and Materialist Horror]]> 28192602 Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, the day that Islamist militants killed twelve people in an attack on their offices and also the day that his most recent novel, Soumission--the story of France in 2022 under a Muslim president--appeared in bookstores. Without God uses religion as a lens to examine how Houellebecq gives voice to the underside of the progressive ethos that has animated French and Western social, political, and religious thought since the 1960s.

Focusing on Houellebecq's complicated relationship with religion, Louis Betty shows that the novelist, who is at best agnostic, "is a deeply and unavoidably religious writer." In exploring the religious, theological, and philosophical aspects of Houellebecq's work, Betty situates the author within the broader context of a French and Anglo-American history of ideas--ideas such as utopian socialism, the sociology of secularization, and quantum physics. Materialism, Betty contends, is the true destroyer of human intimacy and spirituality in Houellebecq's work; the prevailing worldview it conveys is one of nihilism and hedonism in a postmodern, post-Christian Europe. In Betty's analysis, "materialist horror" emerges as a philosophical and aesthetic concept that describes and amplifies contemporary moral and social decadence in Houellebecq's fiction.]]> 176 Louis Betty 0271074086 VII 3 Submission as the best example). Another excellent observation is that often, the solutions that Houellebecq seems to offer actually use standards from that worldview. I wouldn't be so sure that Houellebecq actually understands this, but maybe he does.

For a materialist, determinist and atheistic society, that has nothing like the old spiritual or moral considerations, like say, a debt to God or the country, the atom inevitably becomes more narcissistic and the only thing that determines its decisions is the balance between pain and pleasure. And in a society that revolves around the pleasures of the body and that idolizes youth, beauty and strength, the decision to kill oneself inevitably arises when those disappear and one’s pain outweighs one’s pleasure. So, for Betty, Houellebecq explores what kind of options a society like that can have, knowing full well that a return to the past is always impossible (which means that it is probably a mistake to view him as a reactionary). Since his aim is a creation of a better society, Betty makes a comparison with Comte and some other utopian thinkers. In Possibility Houellebecq imagines a materialistic religion that tries to offer some kind of immortality, as without that promise, they seem destined to fail (but his also kind of fails). In Map he makes France a tourist destination that seem to embrace more right wing views. In Submission France converts to Islam.

So there is certainly something very appealing and convincing to this reading. The problem is that the rest of the book seems to lack substance. It is small already and there are parts of it that don’t seem to offer much, like a examination of whether the technological religion in Possibility should be considered a religion or some very brief comparison with some Utopian thinkers. There is also a section about materialistic horror that compares him to Lovecraft and Pascal, since they all emphasize our cosmic insignificance and see despair as the conclusion, at least for those who don’t have faith. I feel that these sections needed way more work to be included.]]> 3.97 Without God: Michel Houellebecq and Materialist Horror
author: Louis Betty
name: VII
average rating: 3.97
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2022/03/22
date added: 2022/03/26
shelves:
review:
The book is about Houellebecq so it is bound to be interesting, but unfortunately it is interesting because of Houellebecq and not so much of the author. It does has some interesting things to say, but there is not enough discussion and development of those ideas. I think it lacks a central clear point or conclusion. The central idea is probably correct, it conceives Houellebecq’s books as a commentary of the prevalent materialist � deterministic worldview, and more specifically, of the loss of meaning that resulted from our inability to believe in religions any more, losing the foundation of our morality. Betty also seems right in viewing the novels as a somewhat extreme portrayal of our reality, an experiment of what can happen if our culture continues on this materialist path, basically just posing questions (with the ending of Submission as the best example). Another excellent observation is that often, the solutions that Houellebecq seems to offer actually use standards from that worldview. I wouldn't be so sure that Houellebecq actually understands this, but maybe he does.

For a materialist, determinist and atheistic society, that has nothing like the old spiritual or moral considerations, like say, a debt to God or the country, the atom inevitably becomes more narcissistic and the only thing that determines its decisions is the balance between pain and pleasure. And in a society that revolves around the pleasures of the body and that idolizes youth, beauty and strength, the decision to kill oneself inevitably arises when those disappear and one’s pain outweighs one’s pleasure. So, for Betty, Houellebecq explores what kind of options a society like that can have, knowing full well that a return to the past is always impossible (which means that it is probably a mistake to view him as a reactionary). Since his aim is a creation of a better society, Betty makes a comparison with Comte and some other utopian thinkers. In Possibility Houellebecq imagines a materialistic religion that tries to offer some kind of immortality, as without that promise, they seem destined to fail (but his also kind of fails). In Map he makes France a tourist destination that seem to embrace more right wing views. In Submission France converts to Islam.

So there is certainly something very appealing and convincing to this reading. The problem is that the rest of the book seems to lack substance. It is small already and there are parts of it that don’t seem to offer much, like a examination of whether the technological religion in Possibility should be considered a religion or some very brief comparison with some Utopian thinkers. There is also a section about materialistic horror that compares him to Lovecraft and Pascal, since they all emphasize our cosmic insignificance and see despair as the conclusion, at least for those who don’t have faith. I feel that these sections needed way more work to be included.
]]> The Library at Mount Char 26892110
After all, she was a normal American herself, once.

That was a long time ago, of course—before the time she calls “adoption day,� when she and a dozen other children found themselves being raised by a man they learned to call Father.

Father could do strange things. He could call light from darkness. Sometimes he raised the dead. And when he was disobeyed, the consequences were terrible.

In the years since Father took her in, Carolyn hasn't gotten out much. Instead, she and her adopted siblings have been raised according to Father's ancient Pelapi customs. They've studied the books in his library and learned some of the secrets behind his equally ancient power.

Sometimes, they've wondered if their cruel tutor might secretly be God.

Now, Father is missing. And if God truly is dead, the only thing that matters is who will inherit his library—and with it, power over all of creation.

As Carolyn gathers the tools she needs for the battle to come, fierce competitors for this prize align against her.

But Carolyn can win. She's sure of it. What she doesn't realize is that her victory may come at an unacceptable price—because in becoming a God, she's forgotten a great deal about being human.]]> 390 Scott Hawkins 0553418629 VII 4 4.06 2015 The Library at Mount Char
author: Scott Hawkins
name: VII
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/26
date added: 2022/03/26
shelves:
review:
I was kind of annoyed with the resolution of the story and I think the last part could have been omitted, but I really liked the uniqueness and the strangeness of the world and the characters.
]]> <![CDATA[The Gap Into Madness: Chaos and Order (Gap, #4)]]> 22871 Trumpet are a handful of bedraggled fugitives from an outlaw world, old enemies suddenly and violently thrown together in a desperate bid for survival.

Among this unlikely crew of allies are Morn Hyland, once a UMC cop, now a prisoner to the electrodes implanted in her brain; her son, Davies, “force-grown� to adulthood by the alien Amnion and struggling to understand his true identity; the amoral space buccaneer Nick Succorso, whose most daring act of piracy could be his last; and Angus Thermopyle, unstoppable cyborg struggling to wrest control of his own mind from his UMC programmers.

Locked in a lethal batter against one another for control of Trumpet, they also find themselves the target of Punisher, a police ship whose human captain, Min Donner, is torn between her duty and her sympathy for the outlaw crew she’s been ordered to capture. Yet as Min races to reach Trumpet in time, Warden Dios, the director of the UMC Police, receives a darker directive from the mysterious, semi-immortal Dragon, ruler of the UMC: Kill everyone aboard Trumpet except for the one person whose blood carries the mutagenic key to ultimate Amnion triumph—the ability to appear perfectly human.

In a final titanic showdown in space, amid uncharted comets, planets, and asteroid swarms, these forces will converge in a contest of skill and survival on which their future—and the future of the galaxy—depends.]]> 617 Stephen R. Donaldson 0553071793 VII 3 4.15 1994 The Gap Into Madness: Chaos and Order (Gap, #4)
author: Stephen R. Donaldson
name: VII
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1994
rating: 3
read at: 2022/02/26
date added: 2022/03/26
shelves:
review:
Things got slower or something changed, who knows. I just cared less about it and it took me much longer to read. Still, I guess I am now committed so I will read the rest eventually.
]]> The Fisherman 29901930
Soon, though, the men find themselves drawn into a tale as deep and old as the Reservoir. It's a tale of dark pacts, of long-buried secrets, and of a mysterious figure known as Der Fisher: the Fisherman. It will bring Abe and Dan face to face with all that they have lost, and with the price they must pay to regain it.]]> 266 John Langan 1939905214 VII 4 3.86 2016 The Fisherman
author: John Langan
name: VII
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/22
date added: 2022/03/26
shelves:
review:
Half of this book is the main story about two men who lost their loved ones and find some solace in fishing and the other half, which stops the main narrative, is something like a Lovercraft-inspired legend which would easily work as a short story, and provides some background for what will happen next in the main story. It is an interesting technique but my problem was that I was way more interested in the main story so the short story seemed like a distraction. Both are good on their own though. I really liked the pace, the sense of loss and grief he managed to convey and the overall gentleness of the novel.
]]> <![CDATA[Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom]]> 317334 184 087548025X VII 0 currently-reading 4.00 1809 Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom
author: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
name: VII
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1809
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/03/26
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories]]> 824279 The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories is a collection of stories that emerged from a profound spiritual crisis, during which Leo Tolstoy believed that he had encountered death itself. This Penguin Classics edition is translated with an introduction by Anthony Briggs, David McDuff and Ronald Wilks.

These seven compelling stories explore, in very different ways, Tolstoy's preoccupation with mortality. 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich' is a devastating account of a man fighting his inevitable end, and asks the existential question: why must a good person be taken before his time? In 'Polikushka', a light-fingered drunk's chance to prove himself has tragic repercussions, while 'Three Deaths' depicts the last moments of an aristocrat, a peasant and a tree, and 'The Forged Coupon' shows a seemingly minor offence that leads inexorably to ever more horrific crimes. And in three tales about soldiers, 'After the Ball', 'The Wood-felling' and 'The Raid', Tolstoy portrays the brutality that all too often accompanies military life.

The translations by Anthony Briggs, David McDuff and Ronald Wilks capture Tolstoy's powerful, vivid prose. This edition also includes a new introduction by Anthony Briggs discussing Tolstoy's breakdown and the effect this had on his writing, as well as a chronology, further reading and notes.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born at Yasnaya Polyana, in central Russia. He led a life of wasteful idleness until 1851, when he travelled to the Caucasus and joined the army with his older brother, fighting in the Crimean war. After marrying Sofya Behrs in 1862, Tolstoy settled down, managing his estates and writing two of his best-known novels, War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1878). In 1884 Tolstoy experienced a spiritual crisis, becoming an extreme moralist, rejecting the state, the church and private property. His last novel, Resurrection (1900), was written to raise money for the Doukhobor sect of Christian spiritualists.

If you enjoyed The Death of Ivan Ilyich, you might like Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, also available in Penguin Classics.]]> 317 Leo Tolstoy 0140449612 VII 2 4.12 1886 The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: VII
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1886
rating: 2
read at: 2020/04/14
date added: 2022/03/23
shelves:
review:
It's a collection of short stories by Tolstoi that have death as their common theme, which should have made it interesting for me, but unfortunately, it didn't. The writing is quite good and at times he used a refreshing bluntness to describe the actions of the characters, something that I always like, but it also contained some -subtle- moralistic themes that I really didn't like. Of all the stories, only Polikushka was actually good and quite tragic. I suppose The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Forged Coupon were ok, but I didn't care for any of the others.
]]> <![CDATA[The Temple of the Golden Pavilion]]> 62798 The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, celebrated Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima creates a haunting and vivid portrait of a young man’s obsession with idealized beauty and his destructive quest to possess it fully.

Mizoguchi, an ostracized stutterer, develops a childhood fascination with Kyoto’s famous Golden Temple. While an acolyte at the temple, he fixates on the structure’s aesthetic perfection and it becomes the one and only object of his desire. But as Mizoguchi begins to perceive flaws in the temple, he determines that the only true path to beauty lies in an act of horrendous violence. Based on a real incident that occurred in 1950, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion brilliantly portrays the passions and agonies of a young man in postwar Japan, bringing to the subject the erotic imagination and instinct for the dramatic moment that marked Mishima as one of the towering makers of modern fiction. With an introduction by Donald Keene; Translated from the Japanese by Ivan Morris.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

]]> 247 Yukio Mishima 0679433155 VII 4
[spoilers removed]]]> 4.04 1956 The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
author: Yukio Mishima
name: VII
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1956
rating: 4
read at: 2021/10/10
date added: 2022/03/10
shelves:
review:
It took me a long time to read it unfortunately. I felt that it was good but I also wasn't very often in the mood for it. I still like it's mood though, it's very contemplative and melancholic. I have marked many philosophical passages but I think I would have to reread it in order to understand the world-view of this fascinating character more clearly. I 'll mark the incomplete version with spoilers even though they are not plot spoilers because I think that the interesting thing in this book is not what the hero will do, but how he thinks.

[spoilers removed]
]]> Radical Constructivism 16752836 Ernst von Glasersfeld 1280109386 VII 0 to-read 4.00 1995 Radical Constructivism
author: Ernst von Glasersfeld
name: VII
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2022/03/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Gap Into Vision: Forbidden Knowledge (Gap, #2)]]> 22874 The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, one of the most acclaimed fantasy series of all time, master storyteller Stephen R. Donaldson retums with the second book in his long-awaited new science fiction series--a story about dark passions, perilous alliances, and dubious heroism set in a stunningly imagined future.



Beautiful, brilliant, and dangerous, Morn Hyland is an ex-police officer for the United Mining Companies--and the target of two ruthless, powerful men.ĚýĚýOne is the charismatic ore-pirate Nick Succorso, who sees Morn as booty wrested from his vicious rival, Angus Thermopyle.ĚýĚýthermopyle once made the mistake of underestimating Morn and now he's about to pay the ultimate price.ĚýĚýBoth men think they can possess her, but Morn is no one's trophy--and no one's pawn.



Meanwhile, withing the borders of Forbidden Space, wait the Amnioin, an alien race capable of horrific atrocities.ĚýĚýThe Amnion want something unspeakable from humanity--and they will go to unthinkable lengths to get it.



In Forbidden Knowledge, Stephen R. Donaldson spins a galaxy-wide web of intrigue, deception, and betrayal that tightens with inexorable strength around characters and readers alike.]]> 480 Stephen R. Donaldson 0553297600 VII 4 3.99 1991 The Gap Into Vision: Forbidden Knowledge (Gap, #2)
author: Stephen R. Donaldson
name: VII
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at: 2021/12/14
date added: 2022/01/07
shelves:
review:
The story is not that special but the author is great at creating and describing people's motives. It's interesting how small-scale it is for a scifi and yet how hooking.
]]> <![CDATA[The Gap Into Conflict: The Real Story (The Gap Cycle #1)]]> 427353
But one person in Mallorys Bar wasn't intimidated. Nick Succorso had his own reputation as a bold pirate and he had a sleek frigate fitted for deep space. Everyone knew that Thermopyle and Succorso were on a collision course. What nobody expected was how quickly it would be over - or how devastating victory would be. It was common enough example of rivalry and revenge - or so everyone thought. The REAL story was something entirely different.]]> 241 Stephen R. Donaldson 0553295098 VII 3 3.72 1990 The Gap Into Conflict: The Real Story (The Gap Cycle #1)
author: Stephen R. Donaldson
name: VII
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1990
rating: 3
read at: 2021/10/30
date added: 2022/01/07
shelves:
review:
As a stand-alone (as originally intended) it is not very interesting. The best part is the addition of the author's thought about what was he intending to do and his inspiration. I wouldn't have read the rest if it wasn't for that.
]]> <![CDATA[The Mirror’s Truth (Manifest Delusions, #2)]]> 31303801 This is the Advance Reader Copy edition. The final published edition can be found here

Bedeckt defined himself by the list of crimes he was unwilling to commit. It was such a short list. How could straying from it have gone so wrong?

Bedeckt must undo the damage caused by wandering from his precious list. The Geborene god seeks to remake the world with his obsessive need for cleanliness and perfection, but Bedeckt is going to bring him down. Nothing can stop him. Not even death.

The two friends he abandoned in the Afterdeath chase after Bedeckt, bent on revenge. Psychotic assassins hunt him. Something cold and evil follows, lurking in the clouds above, shredding reality with its delusions. Madness and sanity war, stretching and tearing the very fabric of existence.

The dead shall rise.]]> 500 Michael R. Fletcher VII 4 4.27 2016 The Mirror’s Truth (Manifest Delusions, #2)
author: Michael R. Fletcher
name: VII
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2021/10/15
date added: 2022/01/07
shelves:
review:
Slightly worse than the first but still good. The main trio is just too interesting, even if the world feels kind of empty and their misfortunes a bit forced.
]]> <![CDATA[Beyond Redemption (Manifest Delusions, #1)]]> 23287202
Violent and dark, the world is filled with the Geisteskranken—men and women whose delusions manifest, twisting reality. High Priest Konig seeks to create order from chaos. He defines the beliefs of his followers, leading their faith to one end: a young boy, Morgen, must Ascend to become a god. A god they can control.

But there are many who would see this would-be-god in their thrall, including the High Priest’s own Doppels, and a Slaver no one can resist. Three reprobates—The Greatest Swordsman in the World, a murderous Kleptic, and possibly the only sane man left—have their own nefarious plans for the young god.

As these forces converge on the boy, there’s one more obstacle: time is running out. When one's delusions become more powerful, they become harder to control. The fate of the Geisteskranken is to inevitably find oneself in the Afterdeath.

The question, then, is: Who will rule there?]]> 480 Michael R. Fletcher 0062387030 VII 4 4.00 2015 Beyond Redemption (Manifest Delusions, #1)
author: Michael R. Fletcher
name: VII
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2021/09/22
date added: 2021/12/26
shelves:
review:
I was pleasantly surprised by this one and even considered giving it 5 stars. The rules of the world are brilliant and quite consistent, most of the characters are interesting and it is a truly dark and brutal world. I do wonder why does the author think that in such an amoral world, there would still be characters than care so much about morality and why morality seems so connected to saneness but this is me being a "philosopher" again.
]]> Yes 92572
"Thomas Bernhard was one of the few major writers of the second half of this century."—Gabriel Josipovici, Independent

"With his death, European letters lost one of its most perceptive, uncompromising voices since the war."� Spectator

Widely acclaimed as a novelist, playwright, and poet, Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) won many of the most prestigious literary prizes of Europe, including the Austrian State Prize, the Bremen and BrĂÂĽchner prizes, and Le Prix SĂguier.]]> 135 Thomas Bernhard 0704327708 VII 4 4.10 1978 Yes
author: Thomas Bernhard
name: VII
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at: 2021/12/25
date added: 2021/12/26
shelves:
review:
It's once again the usual Bernhard, full of despair and commas, and empty of fullstops and paragraphs. It felt shorter, simpler and easier to read but I could still relate with it and the ending was great, even funny maybe. What happens between the narrator and the Persian woman always happens to me, while it doesn't seem to happen very often to others. Well, I guess I can't talk about it without spoilers.
]]> Nietzsche: Life as Literature 83285
Alexander Nehamas provides the best possible guide for the perplexed. He reveals the single thread running through Nietzsche’s his thinking of the world on the model of a literary text, of people as if they were literary characters, and of knowledge and science as if they were literary interpretation. Beyond this, he advances the clarity of the concept of textuality, making explicit some of the forces that hold texts together and so hold us together. Nehamas finally allows us to see that Nietzsche is creating a literary character out of himself, that he is, in effect, playing the role of Plato to his own Socrates.

Nehamas discusses a number of opposing views, both American and European, of Nietzsche’s texts and general project, and reaches a climactic solving of the main problems of Nietzsche interpretation in a step-by-step argument. In the process he takes up a set of very interesting questions in contemporary philosophy, such as moral relativism and scientific realism. This is a book of considerable breadth and elegance that will appeal to all curious readers of philosophy and literature.]]> 276 Alexander Nehamas 0674624262 VII 4
The most interesting -for me- topic that he touches is perspectivism, the view that there are only interpretations. First of all, it is not self-defeating, as it is itself too an interpretation and not a truth in the traditional sense. It is a truth but a truth among many others, which is all that we can have. This doesn't mean that all perspectives are equal or arbitrary. The example that one needs to have in mind is one of a huge painting that looks different depending on our position and our distance from it, the zoom involved (down to the molecules) and the part of the painting that we see. In some cases it is impossible to compare two perspectives because, while we see the same thing, we have different positions or zoom, in other cases one's perspective has a bigger or a clearer view of the painting and since it incorporates more features we can say it is a better one. The point is that one can never have the complete picture. By taking a particular position or by focusing on one part or quality, we leave out all the rest. A worthy aim is to identify what (the values) make us see things this way and to be mindful of as many perspectives as possible.

But the painting analogy make the world seem too accessible, too structured, pre-chopped into distinct objects or things-in-themselves. Actually, the world is to be taken as a dense unity, a whole in which everything is interconnected and that is in flux. It is our interpretations that chop it up and divide it into different groupings, into things, causes and effects, into doers and doings. But like Saussaure's phonemes, all these points have negative content and it's what emerges that gives them meaning. Power lies in re-interpretations of the familiar, of producing different groupings that serve your own particular ends. Strictly speaking then there is no need to posit things; effects and powers are enough, which is also related to Nietzsche's Will to Power, the view that everything has a tendency or drive for maximizing its power. It is more of an effort to stop talking about intentions and free will and to talk instead in terms of a universal tendency that exists both in living and non-living things. Though it does result in violence, the change it produces destroys both the sufferer and the one acting on it since both are transformed into something different, with the originals being destroyed.

This non-existence of something more than effects and an appeal to the coherence of the whole is also exactly the way we understand characters in books. Their effects are all there is and they are parts to a whole; to understand them we need to interpret them, perhaps creating them in the process. It also means that every piece of information presented in a book about a character is essential to who they are and had it been different, the character wouldn't be who they are. Nehamas thinks that this is exactly what Nietzsche means when he is talking about eternal recurrence. It is not a cosmological theory about the world, but a theory about the self. Change one thing in yourself and you won't be you. If you think that there some minor things that can change, then they are really not part of you. And if everything is as connected as described above, then any change in one thing changes everything. When asked then if you would accept returning to this world to live the exact same life again and again, you are asked if you affirm yourself, with every positive being as important as any negative, as they are essential to who you are. Actually, affirming one single thing about the world means that you affirm every part of it.

To do this, one has to create oneself, to become what one is. It is not to be taken as a stable essence that replaces the old one but as a copious gradual process of interpretation of the past but also of integration in the present. An attempt to have many urges but not ruled not by reason like in Plato, but a controlled multiplicity that rules jointly, as a whole, with the goal of them becoming nature, of making choices disappear. And like in novels, the criterion for whether we like a person is not whether they are good but whether they are well crafted. The ideal is coherence but also style and character.

For Nehamas this is what Nietzsche did with himself and his books. He was suspicious of philosophy and to avoid self-referential problems he made himself into a literary character, across many books, who is a philosopher. He wrote in many different styles for us to notice that there is an author, instead of appearing like some kind of personification of objectivity (like with most philosophers). He wants to be read and believed but without resorting to metaphysics and to universality, that he finds self-delusional. Same for morality. The whole problem that Nietzsche had to face was to find ways to talk about what he wanted to talk about but both without presenting a universal and prescriptive view disguised as fact and without having to say that "this is only my view" which would be too ugly. He chose to play with those who could understand him and for Nehamas he chose to see himself as a character in a novel, modelling both his "epistemology" and his moral aesthetics out of themes that we find acceptable in literature. And his specific way is not to be reproduced, as it would no longer be original.

I suppose some people would find this model ridiculous, since they are convinced that there is a very clear distinction between reality and fiction with each one having its own ideals and rules but I find it extremely attractive and for a certain kind of people believable or achievable. And that's what matters.]]> 4.13 1985 Nietzsche: Life as Literature
author: Alexander Nehamas
name: VII
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1985
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/05
date added: 2021/10/13
shelves:
review:
This is only the second book by Nehamas that I have read but he is quickly becoming one of my favourite philosophers. I have no idea if the Nietzsche he produced in this book can be supported by Nietzsche's texts but that's irrelevant for me. What matters is that he is able to create a cohere and very attractive version of him and it's clear that this was his primary goal anyway. He proposes that Nietzsche is using his books to forge himself into a literary character. He wanted to be to himself what Plato was to Socrates. But this book is also an introduction to Nietzsche, though again to Nehamas' Nietzsche, as he has to explain all the various peculiar and interesting ideas that we find in Nietzsche. Some of them can make sense even if one doesn't accept the whole argument.

The most interesting -for me- topic that he touches is perspectivism, the view that there are only interpretations. First of all, it is not self-defeating, as it is itself too an interpretation and not a truth in the traditional sense. It is a truth but a truth among many others, which is all that we can have. This doesn't mean that all perspectives are equal or arbitrary. The example that one needs to have in mind is one of a huge painting that looks different depending on our position and our distance from it, the zoom involved (down to the molecules) and the part of the painting that we see. In some cases it is impossible to compare two perspectives because, while we see the same thing, we have different positions or zoom, in other cases one's perspective has a bigger or a clearer view of the painting and since it incorporates more features we can say it is a better one. The point is that one can never have the complete picture. By taking a particular position or by focusing on one part or quality, we leave out all the rest. A worthy aim is to identify what (the values) make us see things this way and to be mindful of as many perspectives as possible.

But the painting analogy make the world seem too accessible, too structured, pre-chopped into distinct objects or things-in-themselves. Actually, the world is to be taken as a dense unity, a whole in which everything is interconnected and that is in flux. It is our interpretations that chop it up and divide it into different groupings, into things, causes and effects, into doers and doings. But like Saussaure's phonemes, all these points have negative content and it's what emerges that gives them meaning. Power lies in re-interpretations of the familiar, of producing different groupings that serve your own particular ends. Strictly speaking then there is no need to posit things; effects and powers are enough, which is also related to Nietzsche's Will to Power, the view that everything has a tendency or drive for maximizing its power. It is more of an effort to stop talking about intentions and free will and to talk instead in terms of a universal tendency that exists both in living and non-living things. Though it does result in violence, the change it produces destroys both the sufferer and the one acting on it since both are transformed into something different, with the originals being destroyed.

This non-existence of something more than effects and an appeal to the coherence of the whole is also exactly the way we understand characters in books. Their effects are all there is and they are parts to a whole; to understand them we need to interpret them, perhaps creating them in the process. It also means that every piece of information presented in a book about a character is essential to who they are and had it been different, the character wouldn't be who they are. Nehamas thinks that this is exactly what Nietzsche means when he is talking about eternal recurrence. It is not a cosmological theory about the world, but a theory about the self. Change one thing in yourself and you won't be you. If you think that there some minor things that can change, then they are really not part of you. And if everything is as connected as described above, then any change in one thing changes everything. When asked then if you would accept returning to this world to live the exact same life again and again, you are asked if you affirm yourself, with every positive being as important as any negative, as they are essential to who you are. Actually, affirming one single thing about the world means that you affirm every part of it.

To do this, one has to create oneself, to become what one is. It is not to be taken as a stable essence that replaces the old one but as a copious gradual process of interpretation of the past but also of integration in the present. An attempt to have many urges but not ruled not by reason like in Plato, but a controlled multiplicity that rules jointly, as a whole, with the goal of them becoming nature, of making choices disappear. And like in novels, the criterion for whether we like a person is not whether they are good but whether they are well crafted. The ideal is coherence but also style and character.

For Nehamas this is what Nietzsche did with himself and his books. He was suspicious of philosophy and to avoid self-referential problems he made himself into a literary character, across many books, who is a philosopher. He wrote in many different styles for us to notice that there is an author, instead of appearing like some kind of personification of objectivity (like with most philosophers). He wants to be read and believed but without resorting to metaphysics and to universality, that he finds self-delusional. Same for morality. The whole problem that Nietzsche had to face was to find ways to talk about what he wanted to talk about but both without presenting a universal and prescriptive view disguised as fact and without having to say that "this is only my view" which would be too ugly. He chose to play with those who could understand him and for Nehamas he chose to see himself as a character in a novel, modelling both his "epistemology" and his moral aesthetics out of themes that we find acceptable in literature. And his specific way is not to be reproduced, as it would no longer be original.

I suppose some people would find this model ridiculous, since they are convinced that there is a very clear distinction between reality and fiction with each one having its own ideals and rules but I find it extremely attractive and for a certain kind of people believable or achievable. And that's what matters.
]]> The Republic 30289 416 Plato 0140449140 VII 4
The focus of this book is probably not politics. It doesn't seem that Plato believes that his, utopian for him and dystopian for us, city was feasible. The city is used as an aid for elucidating justice and its effects on the individual. In any case, that's what still remains interesting, for me at least, so I won't talk at all about the city.

After a clash with Thrasymachus, Socrates is tasked with explaining why he thinks that a just person who appears unjust and has to suffer for their illusory injustice, is happier than an unjust person who appears as just and gets benefits from their reputation. It is an extraordinary and unrealistic demand, deeply rooted in the realization that someone can abuse the rules and laws we decided to form when we formed our communities. One (Plato too at the end) can even raise the stakes and say that the world itself doesn't conform to them. A cynic would say that we believed in those rules so completely that we got the impression that they express something real and universal. Plato certainly believes that they are real and has to find a reward for the just that is basically stronger and independent of the various misfortunes that one can suffer from others. To his credit, he doesn't rely on the cheap solution of an afterlife guaranteed by God (well, maybe a little, at the end of the book), like almost everyone before or after him, though unfortunately, he still has to find guidance from something like a God, the form of the Good.

Being just is an earthly reward because it is necessary for having a healthy soul or let's just say personality to make him contemporary. Plato finds three separate influences inside each person: one that forms blind desires that demand to be fulfilled, with gratification being the better one word description; a second that is hard for us to understand because it somehow combines bestial aggression but also honour, courage, pride and shame; and a third one that is about rationality and deliberation. If one is just, then their personality is healthy, because they do not allow the first two parts to ignore the third one, which is the only one that can make informed decisions and care for the whole person, but instead are guided or kept in check by it. The reward is not just good decisions but an internal happiness, order and harmony, with every part playing the role that is best suited for, thus avoiding indecision or inner conflict. The other two parts are not necessarily inferior and in they do things that rationality can't do, but for someone to be healthy, they can't allow them to influence the decisions that the whole, the person takes, too much. Gratification becomes moderation and aggression becomes bravery and courage when guided by the rational, wise part.

The problem is that one can be harmonious and rationally consistent but still be unjust and evil in general. Coherence with so many variables without axioms leads to infinite coherent systems. Plato would never have allowed something like this, so rationality, besides ruling the other parts, is the only one that has another function, of seeking and finding the truth. Plato is humble or wise enough to never describe this truth and generally avoids providing strict rules, trusting what his philosopher-leaders will find on their own, but it is certain that to be harmonious, one has to know or to have this form of good, as it will presumably show that indeed being just as we know it, is what the Good is or wants. Richard Kraut thinks that we can "have" and be inspired by this Good the same way we have friends, Iris Murdoch also believes that this kind of ideal is necessary or at least helpful for giving us guidance and inspiration, and of course billions found the same in gods.

What I find more interesting and actually consider it Plato's sneakiest and more lasting influence is not just the guidance by something external, but also the guidance by reason and rationality. Nietzsche, or at least the way Alexander Nehamas reads him, keeps berating Socrates for privileging reason and allowing it to enslave all the other potential influences that exist within a person. For him harmony is possible not only in one way and not grounded by anything external or with any regard to good or evil, but in basically innumerable unique ways that depend on one's unique circumstances and character traits, the experiences, the strengths and weakness they happened to have in their lives. But even more importantly, one can be harmonious even if rationality doesn't guide them. There is nothing that prevents a serial killer or a schizophrenic from having a harmonious, coherent, self-fueled personality that in a way, is something like a work of art.

But my greatest concern is how much I, personally, was and still am, though now less so, influenced by Plato's idea that rationality or even worse, efficiency should rule every aspect of my life. It is of course very easy to bend rationality as much as needed in order to fit your will, but why not cut the middle man and stop deluding yourself? Reason without rules, without something similar to Plato's Good becomes what Hume called "a slave to the passions" anyway. Reason for Nietzschean "freethinkers" just adds a delay to an already taken decision. It's not surprising neither that both Plato and Nietzsche (and Freud) identify indecision as the greatest disaster, nor how popular the ideal of "making the choice disappear" is, achieved by sculpting a self, probably using repetition, a kind of second nature. It's hard to not consider this "sculpting" rational and deliberate but at least it has a reduced scope this way. It no longer enslaves but it is also not a slave (to the passions).

And this was my attempt to make something interesting from something forced on me. Now I will prepare myself for thinking about my exams, by following more closely the first four books, which should be even more boring for anyone unlucky enough reading it.

The first book resembles a Socratic dialogue and stands out from the rest but also sets the stage for what will follow. Its first half deals with the traditional conception of justice which views it as a series of external acts that have the property of being just and one should perform without really giving them any thought. As usual, Socrates makes their problems apparent by introducing context and ends up confusing his opponents into accepting that their descriptions make it look like a skill, a techne, that turns out to be useless or even harmful. Its second half features Thrasymachus, a rude, aggressive and very entertaining sophist who tries to present justice in terms of power of the strongest. After a tedious argument about whether rulers, presented as craftmen, act in the interest of others or not, the real issue that will be the topic of the whole book is revealed. Thrasymachus believes that one profits and is happier when acting unjustly.

The first book ends with Socrates showing, quite unconvincingly, that being just is better even for the individuals and with Thrasymachus being reduced to silence. Nicholas Pappas argues that the first book aims to show the limits of the Socratic method, of fighting with a prejudiced opponent without end. The rest of the book is no longer a fight but Socrates talking and teaching two people that want to believe and be convinced by him. A probably not that popular idea is that Glaukon represents the brave part of the soul (thimikon) and Adeimantus its moderate part (epithimikon), with both being guided by the wise part, Socrates, in this discussion. I think we can generalize and make the first book an example of those dialectic battles that they used to have in which the goal was to win and make the other appear inconsistent without necessarily believing what you say, basically like acting in a show. Thrasymachus says that he is presenting 'a' view and avoids answering whether he believes it or not, and by the end he is ironically informing Socrates that he will agree to whatever he says, implicitly implying that he doesn't care any more. Socrates wins the argument but nobody is convinced, with even the brothers telling him that he only appeared to win. This is not the right way to converse.

The second book begins with the brothers (brothers of Plato actually) asking from Socrates to show them that justice is good for the individual in itself, without taking in account all the benefits that come from participating in a society, which leads to the unrealistic comparison between the perfectly just and perfectly unjust person. Pappas mentions the distinction between physis and nomos. The fear is that if justice is a social arrangement then its benefits can't be more than what society grants to those who are just. Consequences that come naturally, for example being strong because of being healthy are part of physis so of justice in itself, but being able to find a job because of that strength is part of nomos, so it is an "artificial" consequence. Everyone agrees that there are good artificial consequences for being just but in order to show that it is good in itself (natural consequences of it included) too, this reductive analysis is needed. It's obvious that the Greeks were placing a lot of value to what comes from nature, as it was viewed as something eternal and more true, unlike society with its relativity. It is also apparent that the terms of what is being asked lead almost necessarily to the solution that Plato favors. The reward of justice must be something internal or perhaps otherworldly, as every other kind of reward is part of society.

Socrates decides that examining cities might reveal what justice is and does more easily than examining individuals, and that perhaps they could transfer their conclusions from examing the former to the latter. This strengthens the view that wants Plato focusing on the individual, though he does spent way too many pages describing the city, so he must be interested in that too. It also points to the theory of forms, viewing justice as the same in both cities and individuals.

Then he describes how cities were born, finds injustice in luxuries, decides that educated leaders and soldiers are required if one wants to create the ideal city and describes their education without shying away from teaching "necessary" lies, bans poetry and any mention of unjust people gaining something and produces a dystopic organization that has three types of people that are only allowed to do what was decided in young age that their nature is. Since his city is perfect, it must have wisdom, courage, temperance and justice, so if we find why it has the first three, whatever remains must be justice. Unsurprisingly, wisdom comes because the wise philosopher-rulers rule, courage because the brave soldiers fight and temperance (or moderation or self-knowledge or deference, it's hard for us to pin it down) because the rest of the people know that they should obey the rulers and not overstep their boundaries (it is unclear if they do it willingly). What remains, justice, comes to the city exactly because everyone is doing what was meant to be doing. It differs from temperance because it is a virtue of the whole, of the city, something that appears above and is more than the addition of the other three, while not being reducible to any of them. It appears when classes co-operate and citizens recognize their role and do not attempt to do something their class wasn't meant to do.

And like the city that has classes, souls seem to also have parts as it is possible to both have a desire and oppose it. I already mentioned the three parts but I' ll note that the second, the thimoeides, seems to be related both to violence, possessed by children and beasts, and also to honour. Julia Annas writes that perhaps, unlike reason, the logistikon, who always knows what to do, spirit, the thimoeides has trained and untrained versions and requires to be educated in order to side with reason more often. She thinks that it is an emotive, about how one is affected by things and not how they think them, but it still makes some judgements. It seems to have features of the other two, both thinking just what it wants but also whether it fits to the whole. Another issue is that while the distinction between the three parts is done at the level of operations and not in the level of content and the epithimitikon can't be too complex or else it becomes like the logistikon, epithimitikon seems also able to do means-ends kind of reasoning and later even more complex ones like moneymaking.

Like the city then, a person is wise when the logistikon rules, brave when the thimitiko allies with it, moderate when the epithimitiko submits to reason's planning because it recognizes its superiority and just (the state of) when each part is doing its own. Justice is more like the state that ensures psychic harmony; the logistikon rules but is backed by spirit for motivation, with desires giving in to those two. He makes a comparison to health and he is not far from our conception of mental health, though he is too dismissive of desires. So he sees justice as an internal relation and not to others. And since reason rules we will learn what is justice by examining what is like for reason to rule the soul.

I will not summarize the rest of the book as it mostly talks about the city and the lives of the philosophers. As in individuals in which it is the whole that matters the most, similarly in the cities the interests of its parts, meaning the individual citizens are not important. They are to work as a unity for the good of the city. For that the leaders can't have property or not even know who their children are. His goal is to make them feel that the whole city is their family. In the end those philosophers-leaders raised by an exhaustive educational system are able to get closer to the forms and their harmony, but they will also feel the need to "come back" from them to rule the city, like in the famous cave allegory.
]]> 3.97 -400 The Republic
author: Plato
name: VII
average rating: 3.97
book published: -400
rating: 4
read at: 2021/09/25
date added: 2021/09/30
shelves:
review:
I read this because I had to, though I did read all of it, even though I didn't have to. Many of its parts seem insulting to us now, but other parts are still extremely important, not necessarily because what they say is right, but (for me) because they influenced or even created what we take as right.

The focus of this book is probably not politics. It doesn't seem that Plato believes that his, utopian for him and dystopian for us, city was feasible. The city is used as an aid for elucidating justice and its effects on the individual. In any case, that's what still remains interesting, for me at least, so I won't talk at all about the city.

After a clash with Thrasymachus, Socrates is tasked with explaining why he thinks that a just person who appears unjust and has to suffer for their illusory injustice, is happier than an unjust person who appears as just and gets benefits from their reputation. It is an extraordinary and unrealistic demand, deeply rooted in the realization that someone can abuse the rules and laws we decided to form when we formed our communities. One (Plato too at the end) can even raise the stakes and say that the world itself doesn't conform to them. A cynic would say that we believed in those rules so completely that we got the impression that they express something real and universal. Plato certainly believes that they are real and has to find a reward for the just that is basically stronger and independent of the various misfortunes that one can suffer from others. To his credit, he doesn't rely on the cheap solution of an afterlife guaranteed by God (well, maybe a little, at the end of the book), like almost everyone before or after him, though unfortunately, he still has to find guidance from something like a God, the form of the Good.

Being just is an earthly reward because it is necessary for having a healthy soul or let's just say personality to make him contemporary. Plato finds three separate influences inside each person: one that forms blind desires that demand to be fulfilled, with gratification being the better one word description; a second that is hard for us to understand because it somehow combines bestial aggression but also honour, courage, pride and shame; and a third one that is about rationality and deliberation. If one is just, then their personality is healthy, because they do not allow the first two parts to ignore the third one, which is the only one that can make informed decisions and care for the whole person, but instead are guided or kept in check by it. The reward is not just good decisions but an internal happiness, order and harmony, with every part playing the role that is best suited for, thus avoiding indecision or inner conflict. The other two parts are not necessarily inferior and in they do things that rationality can't do, but for someone to be healthy, they can't allow them to influence the decisions that the whole, the person takes, too much. Gratification becomes moderation and aggression becomes bravery and courage when guided by the rational, wise part.

The problem is that one can be harmonious and rationally consistent but still be unjust and evil in general. Coherence with so many variables without axioms leads to infinite coherent systems. Plato would never have allowed something like this, so rationality, besides ruling the other parts, is the only one that has another function, of seeking and finding the truth. Plato is humble or wise enough to never describe this truth and generally avoids providing strict rules, trusting what his philosopher-leaders will find on their own, but it is certain that to be harmonious, one has to know or to have this form of good, as it will presumably show that indeed being just as we know it, is what the Good is or wants. Richard Kraut thinks that we can "have" and be inspired by this Good the same way we have friends, Iris Murdoch also believes that this kind of ideal is necessary or at least helpful for giving us guidance and inspiration, and of course billions found the same in gods.

What I find more interesting and actually consider it Plato's sneakiest and more lasting influence is not just the guidance by something external, but also the guidance by reason and rationality. Nietzsche, or at least the way Alexander Nehamas reads him, keeps berating Socrates for privileging reason and allowing it to enslave all the other potential influences that exist within a person. For him harmony is possible not only in one way and not grounded by anything external or with any regard to good or evil, but in basically innumerable unique ways that depend on one's unique circumstances and character traits, the experiences, the strengths and weakness they happened to have in their lives. But even more importantly, one can be harmonious even if rationality doesn't guide them. There is nothing that prevents a serial killer or a schizophrenic from having a harmonious, coherent, self-fueled personality that in a way, is something like a work of art.

But my greatest concern is how much I, personally, was and still am, though now less so, influenced by Plato's idea that rationality or even worse, efficiency should rule every aspect of my life. It is of course very easy to bend rationality as much as needed in order to fit your will, but why not cut the middle man and stop deluding yourself? Reason without rules, without something similar to Plato's Good becomes what Hume called "a slave to the passions" anyway. Reason for Nietzschean "freethinkers" just adds a delay to an already taken decision. It's not surprising neither that both Plato and Nietzsche (and Freud) identify indecision as the greatest disaster, nor how popular the ideal of "making the choice disappear" is, achieved by sculpting a self, probably using repetition, a kind of second nature. It's hard to not consider this "sculpting" rational and deliberate but at least it has a reduced scope this way. It no longer enslaves but it is also not a slave (to the passions).

And this was my attempt to make something interesting from something forced on me. Now I will prepare myself for thinking about my exams, by following more closely the first four books, which should be even more boring for anyone unlucky enough reading it.

The first book resembles a Socratic dialogue and stands out from the rest but also sets the stage for what will follow. Its first half deals with the traditional conception of justice which views it as a series of external acts that have the property of being just and one should perform without really giving them any thought. As usual, Socrates makes their problems apparent by introducing context and ends up confusing his opponents into accepting that their descriptions make it look like a skill, a techne, that turns out to be useless or even harmful. Its second half features Thrasymachus, a rude, aggressive and very entertaining sophist who tries to present justice in terms of power of the strongest. After a tedious argument about whether rulers, presented as craftmen, act in the interest of others or not, the real issue that will be the topic of the whole book is revealed. Thrasymachus believes that one profits and is happier when acting unjustly.

The first book ends with Socrates showing, quite unconvincingly, that being just is better even for the individuals and with Thrasymachus being reduced to silence. Nicholas Pappas argues that the first book aims to show the limits of the Socratic method, of fighting with a prejudiced opponent without end. The rest of the book is no longer a fight but Socrates talking and teaching two people that want to believe and be convinced by him. A probably not that popular idea is that Glaukon represents the brave part of the soul (thimikon) and Adeimantus its moderate part (epithimikon), with both being guided by the wise part, Socrates, in this discussion. I think we can generalize and make the first book an example of those dialectic battles that they used to have in which the goal was to win and make the other appear inconsistent without necessarily believing what you say, basically like acting in a show. Thrasymachus says that he is presenting 'a' view and avoids answering whether he believes it or not, and by the end he is ironically informing Socrates that he will agree to whatever he says, implicitly implying that he doesn't care any more. Socrates wins the argument but nobody is convinced, with even the brothers telling him that he only appeared to win. This is not the right way to converse.

The second book begins with the brothers (brothers of Plato actually) asking from Socrates to show them that justice is good for the individual in itself, without taking in account all the benefits that come from participating in a society, which leads to the unrealistic comparison between the perfectly just and perfectly unjust person. Pappas mentions the distinction between physis and nomos. The fear is that if justice is a social arrangement then its benefits can't be more than what society grants to those who are just. Consequences that come naturally, for example being strong because of being healthy are part of physis so of justice in itself, but being able to find a job because of that strength is part of nomos, so it is an "artificial" consequence. Everyone agrees that there are good artificial consequences for being just but in order to show that it is good in itself (natural consequences of it included) too, this reductive analysis is needed. It's obvious that the Greeks were placing a lot of value to what comes from nature, as it was viewed as something eternal and more true, unlike society with its relativity. It is also apparent that the terms of what is being asked lead almost necessarily to the solution that Plato favors. The reward of justice must be something internal or perhaps otherworldly, as every other kind of reward is part of society.

Socrates decides that examining cities might reveal what justice is and does more easily than examining individuals, and that perhaps they could transfer their conclusions from examing the former to the latter. This strengthens the view that wants Plato focusing on the individual, though he does spent way too many pages describing the city, so he must be interested in that too. It also points to the theory of forms, viewing justice as the same in both cities and individuals.

Then he describes how cities were born, finds injustice in luxuries, decides that educated leaders and soldiers are required if one wants to create the ideal city and describes their education without shying away from teaching "necessary" lies, bans poetry and any mention of unjust people gaining something and produces a dystopic organization that has three types of people that are only allowed to do what was decided in young age that their nature is. Since his city is perfect, it must have wisdom, courage, temperance and justice, so if we find why it has the first three, whatever remains must be justice. Unsurprisingly, wisdom comes because the wise philosopher-rulers rule, courage because the brave soldiers fight and temperance (or moderation or self-knowledge or deference, it's hard for us to pin it down) because the rest of the people know that they should obey the rulers and not overstep their boundaries (it is unclear if they do it willingly). What remains, justice, comes to the city exactly because everyone is doing what was meant to be doing. It differs from temperance because it is a virtue of the whole, of the city, something that appears above and is more than the addition of the other three, while not being reducible to any of them. It appears when classes co-operate and citizens recognize their role and do not attempt to do something their class wasn't meant to do.

And like the city that has classes, souls seem to also have parts as it is possible to both have a desire and oppose it. I already mentioned the three parts but I' ll note that the second, the thimoeides, seems to be related both to violence, possessed by children and beasts, and also to honour. Julia Annas writes that perhaps, unlike reason, the logistikon, who always knows what to do, spirit, the thimoeides has trained and untrained versions and requires to be educated in order to side with reason more often. She thinks that it is an emotive, about how one is affected by things and not how they think them, but it still makes some judgements. It seems to have features of the other two, both thinking just what it wants but also whether it fits to the whole. Another issue is that while the distinction between the three parts is done at the level of operations and not in the level of content and the epithimitikon can't be too complex or else it becomes like the logistikon, epithimitikon seems also able to do means-ends kind of reasoning and later even more complex ones like moneymaking.

Like the city then, a person is wise when the logistikon rules, brave when the thimitiko allies with it, moderate when the epithimitiko submits to reason's planning because it recognizes its superiority and just (the state of) when each part is doing its own. Justice is more like the state that ensures psychic harmony; the logistikon rules but is backed by spirit for motivation, with desires giving in to those two. He makes a comparison to health and he is not far from our conception of mental health, though he is too dismissive of desires. So he sees justice as an internal relation and not to others. And since reason rules we will learn what is justice by examining what is like for reason to rule the soul.

I will not summarize the rest of the book as it mostly talks about the city and the lives of the philosophers. As in individuals in which it is the whole that matters the most, similarly in the cities the interests of its parts, meaning the individual citizens are not important. They are to work as a unity for the good of the city. For that the leaders can't have property or not even know who their children are. His goal is to make them feel that the whole city is their family. In the end those philosophers-leaders raised by an exhaustive educational system are able to get closer to the forms and their harmony, but they will also feel the need to "come back" from them to rule the city, like in the famous cave allegory.

]]> <![CDATA[An Introduction to Plato's Republic]]> 267174 372 Julia Annas 0198274297 VII 2 partially-read 3.63 1981 An Introduction to Plato's Republic
author: Julia Annas
name: VII
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1981
rating: 2
read at: 2021/09/25
date added: 2021/09/30
shelves: partially-read
review:
I only read the first half of it but it was more than enough. I can't deny that I learned a few things from it, but I also won't deny that I also wasted a lot of time with her tedious and way too exhaustive analysis for issues that really didn't seem to matter. For example, I can't understand why anyone would choose to spend so much time on the initial definition of justice by Thrasymachus and its compatibility with his second one and in deciding what kind of box we would put it today, only to agree with what everyone reading it and every character in the Republic understood what Thrasymachus meant. I just prefer a pragmatic approach instead of a frequently myopic one that keeps examining arguments instead of trying to understand why these lines are chosen by the author to be there. She does that too sometimes, but much less frequently compared to the boring argument checking.
]]> <![CDATA[Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Plato and the Republic (Routledge Philosophy GuideBooks)]]> 1346377 Plato and the Republic will introduce and
* Plato's life and the background to the Republic
* The text and ideas of the Republic
* Plato's continuing importance to Western thought
Ideal for students coming to Plato for the first time, this GuideBook will be vital for all students of Plato in philosophy, politics and classics at all levels.]]> 248 Nickolas Pappas 0415095328 VII 3 partially-read 3.52 1995 Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Plato and the Republic (Routledge Philosophy GuideBooks)
author: Nickolas Pappas
name: VII
average rating: 3.52
book published: 1995
rating: 3
read at: 2021/09/25
date added: 2021/09/30
shelves: partially-read
review:
I only read half of this book also. It is slightly better than the one by Annas, since it avoids much of her tediousness, but he is doing something even worse for me, isolating "premises", once again even in places where there is nothing further to discover than what everyone would think even without the supposed added clarity that they sometimes provide. I don't understand why would anyone choose to alienate all his non-professional readers like that. Other than that, it is a much lighter and less exhaustive than Annas but that's definitely a plus for me.
]]> <![CDATA[Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (Hackett Classics)]]> 1171160 105 George Berkeley 0915144611 VII 4
With his central thesis Berkeley asks us why are we so inclined to posit an unknown material substratum that underlies things and is mind-independent when the only thing that we have access to is some impressions, some sensible qualities. Why not stay only on what can be sensed, the ideas that our spirits form as they interact with the world. This targets not only direct realists but also representationists since they admit that we use ideas to represent things, but then go ahead and claim that these ideas resemble real material things. But how can we ever get outside of our ideas to compare them with something other than them? And how can an idea resemble anything other than another idea?

So if everything is a mind-dependent idea, then only minds can create or cause anything. Something passive, like matter can never actively create anything and certainly not something different from itself, like an idea. But ideas are passive also and can't create anything either. Their essence is to be perceived. In general, the world seems to be inhabited only by spirits and ideas. Spirits like us or God, because they will, are active and cannot be represented by ideas. We understand we are spirits intuitively and from that we infer that other spirits and the perfect version of them, God, exist. When spirits will something they can act; when they sense however, they are passive as sensing is not voluntary. Anything other than spirts is always passive and can't cause anything.

Because he is using the word "idea", one can be mislead into thinking that these ideas are not real or are completely subjective. Berkeley certainly doesn't want this; technically he is making everything an appearance but the goal is to get rid of the appearance / reality distinction all-together, . After showing that all must be ideas, the next step is to explain the fact that, unlike what we imagine or dream, (external) ideas are beyond our control and are quite predictable and useful, by claiming that they must be the contents of something quite powerful and benevolent: God. Conveniently, this is also a direct proof for the existence of God: since neither we created most of the ideas, nor passive and mind-dependent things like ideas did, there must be something else that created them. The goal is not to turn things into (internal) ideas but (external) ideas into things. This allows him to claim that his philosophy is in line with common sense, since almost nothing has to change. We can still even call these external ideas matter, as long as we understand that they are not absolute beings that have an existence on their own, but ideas in God's mind. His philosophy is also branded as able to defeat scepticism (with overcoming the aforementioned distinction) and atheism (by making God necessary). Matter, by making Deism available, certainly helped those ideas, and indeed after Berkeley's time, an even more extreme version of the mix of materialism with idealism he is arguing against appeared, pure materialism.

The question is whether he successfully shows that this material substratum is as impossible as he claims. A cheap argument of his is that matter involves contradictions, one the infinite regress of requiring itself another substratum and two, that we accept both that it is passive and that it causes things. We also claim that something like pain for example, comes from a needle, but how can something non-living carry pain? It seems laughable but it's just that we have different ontology. We accept that there are some invisible forces, like gravity, which are not spirits but can cause things to move and we also accept that the effect that something produces can be different from the entity that produces it. I am not so sure that, at least when it comes to metaphysics which can't be confirmed with experience, these are anything more than premises that we or he have to take for granted to make our theories coherent. We would say that they are empirically self-evident, but Berkeley would repeatedly asks us if we ever really sensed something material in gravity or better, at its cause or this change that I spoke of. He will say that we intuitively know from our own case that since we are spirits we can will and cause things to happen, but why would we say that anything else can, on its own? We would ask about his knowledge of God but he would say that we can be sure of his existence by starting from our spirit and imagine a flawless version of it. It's all about what kind of argument passes as good or bad, something that changes depending on one's culture.

Berkeley thinks that he proves that all there is are perceptions (which again, are real) by using the relativity argument that he extends to primary qualities too. We accept that secondary qualities like colours, pains and sounds are in our mind and not properties of the external objects since different people experience them differently but he claims that the same applies for length and shape. An ant will see as huge something we see as small. Strictly speaking, he won't even accept that we see the same thing. There is not one image of a table, but a huge amount of images of it that are connected with each other in a very predictable way, making us posit a table and agreeing that it is the same by giving it a name, just because it is convenient. There is no train that we both see and listen; they are different things that usually come together, making us think that there is a train. What we get is infallible, though we can make wrong inferences, for example by assuming that we will see the same thing under different conditions. We find regularities and connections between ideas with science.

What one can even answer to all this? He seems to cut everything so early that it's hard to find a hole in his destructive part. One of course can criticize his constructive part, by challenging the existence of God, but to me his destructive part is great if one wants to stay in scepticism. Then we can just say that we cope with the world by creating the concepts that look like they can provide us with the most comfort. It used to be God, now it's matter and all the other concepts that replaced him, but none is better than the other.

I think that one could "force a draw" by challenging what counts as knowledge. Berkeley, despite being an empiricist accepts other forms of knowledge too. He knows he is a spirit intuitively and he also mentions thought (inferences), memory and revelation as potential ways of knowing things. One then could deny that all we get are perceptions and claim that somehow we know more. Berkeley gives priority to experience, but others, like Descartes, who, in a similarly reductive way tried to shave everything so that he could rely only on certain things, can choose rationality as the tool that provides us with certain knowledge. One could claim that we know intuitively or rationally that objects are something different than ideas and that a better way to explain their stability is to posit this material substratum. It would still be a less parsimonious way of seeing the world, but closer to what prevailed as common sense.

I also read three secondary sources. The stanford encyclopedia which actually takes it really seriously and examines it as if it was a modern theory, Woolhouse, who is better at showing the interactions with previous philosophers and Avgelis who is closer to Woolhouse but in an extreme way -he almost twists him to fit his narrative and doesn't even stress that rejecting materialism and defending Christianity was Berkeley's primary motivations.
]]> 3.75 1713 Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (Hackett Classics)
author: George Berkeley
name: VII
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1713
rating: 4
read at: 2021/09/13
date added: 2021/09/13
shelves:
review:
I have an important exam on this that will be really short on time, so I am kind of rumbling (even more than usual) as practice for what I might have to write. I would have never read this -so closely- if I didn't have to. It's not that his system is stupid, on the contrary it is very clever and is able to solve many problems if someone were to take it seriously. It's because almost nobody cared about it so the effect that it had to later philosophers and to our culture in general seems minimal. Right now it is history for the sake of history or at best, abstract philosophical training.

With his central thesis Berkeley asks us why are we so inclined to posit an unknown material substratum that underlies things and is mind-independent when the only thing that we have access to is some impressions, some sensible qualities. Why not stay only on what can be sensed, the ideas that our spirits form as they interact with the world. This targets not only direct realists but also representationists since they admit that we use ideas to represent things, but then go ahead and claim that these ideas resemble real material things. But how can we ever get outside of our ideas to compare them with something other than them? And how can an idea resemble anything other than another idea?

So if everything is a mind-dependent idea, then only minds can create or cause anything. Something passive, like matter can never actively create anything and certainly not something different from itself, like an idea. But ideas are passive also and can't create anything either. Their essence is to be perceived. In general, the world seems to be inhabited only by spirits and ideas. Spirits like us or God, because they will, are active and cannot be represented by ideas. We understand we are spirits intuitively and from that we infer that other spirits and the perfect version of them, God, exist. When spirits will something they can act; when they sense however, they are passive as sensing is not voluntary. Anything other than spirts is always passive and can't cause anything.

Because he is using the word "idea", one can be mislead into thinking that these ideas are not real or are completely subjective. Berkeley certainly doesn't want this; technically he is making everything an appearance but the goal is to get rid of the appearance / reality distinction all-together, . After showing that all must be ideas, the next step is to explain the fact that, unlike what we imagine or dream, (external) ideas are beyond our control and are quite predictable and useful, by claiming that they must be the contents of something quite powerful and benevolent: God. Conveniently, this is also a direct proof for the existence of God: since neither we created most of the ideas, nor passive and mind-dependent things like ideas did, there must be something else that created them. The goal is not to turn things into (internal) ideas but (external) ideas into things. This allows him to claim that his philosophy is in line with common sense, since almost nothing has to change. We can still even call these external ideas matter, as long as we understand that they are not absolute beings that have an existence on their own, but ideas in God's mind. His philosophy is also branded as able to defeat scepticism (with overcoming the aforementioned distinction) and atheism (by making God necessary). Matter, by making Deism available, certainly helped those ideas, and indeed after Berkeley's time, an even more extreme version of the mix of materialism with idealism he is arguing against appeared, pure materialism.

The question is whether he successfully shows that this material substratum is as impossible as he claims. A cheap argument of his is that matter involves contradictions, one the infinite regress of requiring itself another substratum and two, that we accept both that it is passive and that it causes things. We also claim that something like pain for example, comes from a needle, but how can something non-living carry pain? It seems laughable but it's just that we have different ontology. We accept that there are some invisible forces, like gravity, which are not spirits but can cause things to move and we also accept that the effect that something produces can be different from the entity that produces it. I am not so sure that, at least when it comes to metaphysics which can't be confirmed with experience, these are anything more than premises that we or he have to take for granted to make our theories coherent. We would say that they are empirically self-evident, but Berkeley would repeatedly asks us if we ever really sensed something material in gravity or better, at its cause or this change that I spoke of. He will say that we intuitively know from our own case that since we are spirits we can will and cause things to happen, but why would we say that anything else can, on its own? We would ask about his knowledge of God but he would say that we can be sure of his existence by starting from our spirit and imagine a flawless version of it. It's all about what kind of argument passes as good or bad, something that changes depending on one's culture.

Berkeley thinks that he proves that all there is are perceptions (which again, are real) by using the relativity argument that he extends to primary qualities too. We accept that secondary qualities like colours, pains and sounds are in our mind and not properties of the external objects since different people experience them differently but he claims that the same applies for length and shape. An ant will see as huge something we see as small. Strictly speaking, he won't even accept that we see the same thing. There is not one image of a table, but a huge amount of images of it that are connected with each other in a very predictable way, making us posit a table and agreeing that it is the same by giving it a name, just because it is convenient. There is no train that we both see and listen; they are different things that usually come together, making us think that there is a train. What we get is infallible, though we can make wrong inferences, for example by assuming that we will see the same thing under different conditions. We find regularities and connections between ideas with science.

What one can even answer to all this? He seems to cut everything so early that it's hard to find a hole in his destructive part. One of course can criticize his constructive part, by challenging the existence of God, but to me his destructive part is great if one wants to stay in scepticism. Then we can just say that we cope with the world by creating the concepts that look like they can provide us with the most comfort. It used to be God, now it's matter and all the other concepts that replaced him, but none is better than the other.

I think that one could "force a draw" by challenging what counts as knowledge. Berkeley, despite being an empiricist accepts other forms of knowledge too. He knows he is a spirit intuitively and he also mentions thought (inferences), memory and revelation as potential ways of knowing things. One then could deny that all we get are perceptions and claim that somehow we know more. Berkeley gives priority to experience, but others, like Descartes, who, in a similarly reductive way tried to shave everything so that he could rely only on certain things, can choose rationality as the tool that provides us with certain knowledge. One could claim that we know intuitively or rationally that objects are something different than ideas and that a better way to explain their stability is to posit this material substratum. It would still be a less parsimonious way of seeing the world, but closer to what prevailed as common sense.

I also read three secondary sources. The stanford encyclopedia which actually takes it really seriously and examines it as if it was a modern theory, Woolhouse, who is better at showing the interactions with previous philosophers and Avgelis who is closer to Woolhouse but in an extreme way -he almost twists him to fit his narrative and doesn't even stress that rejecting materialism and defending Christianity was Berkeley's primary motivations.

]]> Starfish (Rifters, #1) 66479
Unfortunately the only people suitable for long-term employment in these experimental power stations are crazy, some of them in unpleasant ways. How many of them can survive, or will be allowed to survive, while worldwide disaster approaches from below?]]> 384 Peter Watts 0812575857 VII 3 3.94 1999 Starfish (Rifters, #1)
author: Peter Watts
name: VII
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1999
rating: 3
read at: 2021/08/12
date added: 2021/08/16
shelves:
review:
I really liked the setting, but unfortunately, I didn't care for the characters so I kept hoping for something to happen. When it did, in the last third of the book, I found what happened really interesting so I might continue with the series, but overall I can't say I enjoyed it.
]]> The Enigma of Reason 32336635 384 Hugo Mercier 0674368304 VII 4
The second question is what does this module do and why it appeared in humans. The standard view is that it enhances cognition but the problem with that view is that reason is prone to, among others, the myside bias (their name for what is known as confirmation bias), something that animals don't have, so it can't be coming from intuitions. We are terrible at realizing that are arguments for our intuitions are flawed but at the same time we are great at spotting the flaws in the argument of others. They argue that this is not a bug but a feature. The problem that reason came to solve was cooperation and coordination. Reason evolved for social reasons; its goal is to convince others that an intuition of ours is right. In order to do this we need to believe what we say, so we don't have to look carefully to our arguments, but we also need to be able to poke holes in the arguments of others. Reason is here to justify our views and convince others. Still, because of this structure, because of our ability to find inconsistencies in the arguments of others and be very demanding from them before changing our mind, the authors believe that it allows us to reach objective knowledge. Reasoning in solitude without having anyone to argue with results in the reinforcement of our biased beliefs. Reasoning with others forces us to reconsider and indeed, it looks like groups are better at reasoning than individual.

Oddly, what I focused on when reading American Psycho, very recently, was quite close to these ideas. I will choose to exercise my myside bias and say that the claim that solitary reasoning is terrible doesn't apply to me or maybe to my kind of philosophising in which the dominant bias is being relativistic and not preserving a view in some particular matter.

Overall, a great book. Of course it is evolutionary psychology so it can't really be more than a cool story until the module they posit is identified, but still, it is pretty good for what it is. The first half of the book is kind of tiring as it seems like a reply to their fellow experts, but the second half is more fun, with many experiments and more focused in actual situations and explanations of social phenomena than with abstract theorizing. I am convinced about these flaws of reason that they identify and I find their hypothesis that it evolved for social reasons very plausible. I can't say anything about this reason module that they posit.

What's more interesting for someone like me, is where does their theory leads us concerning truth. They end the book in a quite positive note, portraying reason as something very desirable. They are very careful with the word "truth", preferring to speak of objective knowledge instead. I believe that even the latter is too bold and perhaps inter-subjective would be a better word. I can accept reason as being great for spotting inconsistencies and incoherences but I think that because of the way it is framed, it must always be grounded to our intuitions. Of course our intuitions are great and must necessarily have some kind of causal connection with the world, but it's hard to believe that they can do anything more than that and this is the limit that reason must necessarily inherit. Perhaps we can go against them, but not outside of them.]]> 4.13 2017 The Enigma of Reason
author: Hugo Mercier
name: VII
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2021/08/01
date added: 2021/08/01
shelves:
review:
Very interesting and quite convincing. In a way, they "relegate" reason to intuition, while still viewing it as crucial. They view reason as a distinct module of the human brain that is able to produce and evaluate reasons. They think that the brain is full of modules that take data as input, spot regularities and produce procedures (actions, think perspiration) or representations (knowledge). We don't have access to the internal workings of these modules but we have access to the outputs and we can discover the inputs, the causal forces too. Whether something is good or relevant for us to do is "given" through intuitive, unconscious inferences, and it is only after the fact that we create a rationalization, a justification for what we did. Reasons don't play a role in these inferences. But we can also make intuitive inferences about reasons (again, they are inferences so they don't use reasons); there are regularities about what counts as a good reason there too, so the authors posit a module that it is specifically about reasons. But since reasons apply to everything and since to have a good reason for doing something means that you should do that, this module works as something very general. It is not about the content of out intuitions but for their meta-attributes, like how confident are we about them.

The second question is what does this module do and why it appeared in humans. The standard view is that it enhances cognition but the problem with that view is that reason is prone to, among others, the myside bias (their name for what is known as confirmation bias), something that animals don't have, so it can't be coming from intuitions. We are terrible at realizing that are arguments for our intuitions are flawed but at the same time we are great at spotting the flaws in the argument of others. They argue that this is not a bug but a feature. The problem that reason came to solve was cooperation and coordination. Reason evolved for social reasons; its goal is to convince others that an intuition of ours is right. In order to do this we need to believe what we say, so we don't have to look carefully to our arguments, but we also need to be able to poke holes in the arguments of others. Reason is here to justify our views and convince others. Still, because of this structure, because of our ability to find inconsistencies in the arguments of others and be very demanding from them before changing our mind, the authors believe that it allows us to reach objective knowledge. Reasoning in solitude without having anyone to argue with results in the reinforcement of our biased beliefs. Reasoning with others forces us to reconsider and indeed, it looks like groups are better at reasoning than individual.

Oddly, what I focused on when reading American Psycho, very recently, was quite close to these ideas. I will choose to exercise my myside bias and say that the claim that solitary reasoning is terrible doesn't apply to me or maybe to my kind of philosophising in which the dominant bias is being relativistic and not preserving a view in some particular matter.

Overall, a great book. Of course it is evolutionary psychology so it can't really be more than a cool story until the module they posit is identified, but still, it is pretty good for what it is. The first half of the book is kind of tiring as it seems like a reply to their fellow experts, but the second half is more fun, with many experiments and more focused in actual situations and explanations of social phenomena than with abstract theorizing. I am convinced about these flaws of reason that they identify and I find their hypothesis that it evolved for social reasons very plausible. I can't say anything about this reason module that they posit.

What's more interesting for someone like me, is where does their theory leads us concerning truth. They end the book in a quite positive note, portraying reason as something very desirable. They are very careful with the word "truth", preferring to speak of objective knowledge instead. I believe that even the latter is too bold and perhaps inter-subjective would be a better word. I can accept reason as being great for spotting inconsistencies and incoherences but I think that because of the way it is framed, it must always be grounded to our intuitions. Of course our intuitions are great and must necessarily have some kind of causal connection with the world, but it's hard to believe that they can do anything more than that and this is the limit that reason must necessarily inherit. Perhaps we can go against them, but not outside of them.
]]> Crash 70241 Crash explores the disturbing potentialities of contemporary society's increasing dependence on technology as intermediary in human relations.]]> 224 J.G. Ballard 0312420331 VII 2 3.62 1973 Crash
author: J.G. Ballard
name: VII
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1973
rating: 2
read at: 2021/07/20
date added: 2021/07/20
shelves:
review:
I don't know what was that. The short introduction by the author, basically explaining that we live in fake world and we need real things to feel alive was interesting, but the rest of the book is just endless descriptions of sex in, with and because of cars. I didn't care about it and I admit speed-reading the last third of the book.
]]> American Psycho 28676 American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront.]]> 399 Bret Easton Ellis 0679735771 VII 4
Bateman does things but doesn't know why he does them. He has access to his desires and their affects, but the place that they come from or the reasons that make them appear is nothing more than a black box, so he has to memorize lines in order to hide the nothingness. He frequently tries to guess why he does things, but he never knows and we don't know either. Even this though is not that uncommon. His version is extreme because what he does is extreme and because his life is unusual and lonely.

Conversely, we are always convinced that we know. Others, like magazines or friends or psychologists are always ready to provide us with rational explanations of what happens inside. I am sure that the author wanted to present Bateman as the extreme consequence of people who are completely alienated from "common people", as some kind of loss of a "given" humanity or "self". It doesn't matter though; if someone like him is possible, then it either makes him a sick person or makes the "normal" access to feelings and desires nothing more than a common fiction. I choose the second.]]> 3.82 1991 American Psycho
author: Bret Easton Ellis
name: VII
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at: 2021/06/30
date added: 2021/07/15
shelves:
review:
Should have been much shorter as it gets repetitive and tiring but the greater part of it is very interesting, unique and entertaining. What is described, though extreme to the point of being a caricature, is not unreal. People who are all similar, completely self-obsessed and unable to see beyond the surface don't seem that uncommon to me.

Bateman does things but doesn't know why he does them. He has access to his desires and their affects, but the place that they come from or the reasons that make them appear is nothing more than a black box, so he has to memorize lines in order to hide the nothingness. He frequently tries to guess why he does things, but he never knows and we don't know either. Even this though is not that uncommon. His version is extreme because what he does is extreme and because his life is unusual and lonely.

Conversely, we are always convinced that we know. Others, like magazines or friends or psychologists are always ready to provide us with rational explanations of what happens inside. I am sure that the author wanted to present Bateman as the extreme consequence of people who are completely alienated from "common people", as some kind of loss of a "given" humanity or "self". It doesn't matter though; if someone like him is possible, then it either makes him a sick person or makes the "normal" access to feelings and desires nothing more than a common fiction. I choose the second.
]]> The Loser 92570
One of Bernhard's most acclaimed novels, The Loser centers on a fictional relationship between piano virtuoso Glenn Gould and two of his fellow students who feel compelled to renounce their musical ambitions in the face of Gould's incomparable genius. One commits suicide, while the other—the obsessive, witty, and self-mocking narrator—has retreated into obscurity. Written as a monologue in one remarkable unbroken paragraph, The Loser is a brilliant meditation on success, failure, genius, and fame.]]> 208 Thomas Bernhard 1400077540 VII 4
And this can be true, depending on what you are comparing life and people with. The people in the book (or at least two of the three) have gotten a taste of perfection through music, so it's not surprising that they find humans pathetic and worthless when compared to a perfect harmony. The best of them reacted by stop being a human, by become a music instrument, a work of art, music itself. For the other two, anything less than perfection was not even worth trying. It was only natural that they became recluses, indifferent to or despising humans and human matters. I won't even begin trying to explain how attractive this imagery is for me.]]> 4.10 1983 The Loser
author: Thomas Bernhard
name: VII
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1983
rating: 4
read at: 2021/06/15
date added: 2021/07/15
shelves:
review:
You can't read Bernhard without having or imposing to yourself a state of what I 'll call "satisfactory suffering". By not doing it this time it took me much longer to read it compared to his other books but as usual, I highlighted half of the book. Quote after quote usually by the "Loser", this suffering addict, describing how everyone is miserable and worthless, and how life is terrible. Perhaps the wittier one: "we don't exist, we get existed".

And this can be true, depending on what you are comparing life and people with. The people in the book (or at least two of the three) have gotten a taste of perfection through music, so it's not surprising that they find humans pathetic and worthless when compared to a perfect harmony. The best of them reacted by stop being a human, by become a music instrument, a work of art, music itself. For the other two, anything less than perfection was not even worth trying. It was only natural that they became recluses, indifferent to or despising humans and human matters. I won't even begin trying to explain how attractive this imagery is for me.
]]> A Cyborg Manifesto 16308894 88 Donna J. Haraway VII 3
The biggest problem with feminism and Marxist movements is that, while they correctly identify that there is oppression, they state or imply that this oppression denies people of some kind of natural rights or state in which they would exist without it. Early feminists tried to describe what a woman is or should be, usually by describing what she isn't, what was stolen from her. Many Marxists identify technology as the expedient force of the enemy and calls us to resist it, in favour of a more "natural" way of being. We call this essentialism and it's just isn't hip any more. (Others would say that it was somehow "shown" or worse, "proven" wrong but I don't see reality this way).

Haraway identifies three distinctions that promote this kind of thinking, the human / animal one, the biological / machine one and the material / immaterial one, with the firsts usually considered "ours" and thus our goal and the seconds the "aliens" or "unnatural" ones. Haraway urges us to lose these distinctions and accept that we are in charge of who we are and start speaking of design and not nature. The seconds are not in any way less "ours" or less "real" from the firsts. Not being bounded by these distinctions becomes even more critical because the oppressors certainly don't use them, seeing parameters and not organisms and use whatever means possible to reassemble identities in order to find universal ways of control. The world has become so complicated that it is impossible to find a coherent form of oppression to subsume everything under it. There are just too many roles one takes and factors that come into play. Reality, unlike theory is just too full of contradictions.

New strategies are needed then and this is where the cyborg imagery comes in. Cyborgs have the advantage of not having an origin story. They don't have ties to the past, any conception of a "natural" or "pure" way of living. Perhaps their "nature" is change. They are already post-sex without having fought for it. They don't even have a clear conception of their body, as they can view their tools as part of it. This allows them to orient themselves toward the future, towards survival or prosperity. And their ideal is not identity but contradicting dualisms and irony (I would be really surprised if she didn't read Rorty). They don't need boundaries or theories but ways to dissolve them. They prefer regenerating mutated limbs like salamanders instead of reproducing.

I really like the imagery and I agree with her in most but because of the fame of the text and since it was written somewhat recently I expected a lot more. The midsection was also unnecessarily difficult to read.]]> 3.77 1985 A Cyborg Manifesto
author: Donna J. Haraway
name: VII
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1985
rating: 3
read at: 2021/05/17
date added: 2021/05/23
shelves:
review:
In this somewhat famous feminist text, Haraway localizes the quite old -by then- criticisms of essentialism and also "Whiggish" and reductionist retellings of the movement's history, enemies and goals. Its appeal comes from accompanying all these with the aesthetic image of the cyborg.

The biggest problem with feminism and Marxist movements is that, while they correctly identify that there is oppression, they state or imply that this oppression denies people of some kind of natural rights or state in which they would exist without it. Early feminists tried to describe what a woman is or should be, usually by describing what she isn't, what was stolen from her. Many Marxists identify technology as the expedient force of the enemy and calls us to resist it, in favour of a more "natural" way of being. We call this essentialism and it's just isn't hip any more. (Others would say that it was somehow "shown" or worse, "proven" wrong but I don't see reality this way).

Haraway identifies three distinctions that promote this kind of thinking, the human / animal one, the biological / machine one and the material / immaterial one, with the firsts usually considered "ours" and thus our goal and the seconds the "aliens" or "unnatural" ones. Haraway urges us to lose these distinctions and accept that we are in charge of who we are and start speaking of design and not nature. The seconds are not in any way less "ours" or less "real" from the firsts. Not being bounded by these distinctions becomes even more critical because the oppressors certainly don't use them, seeing parameters and not organisms and use whatever means possible to reassemble identities in order to find universal ways of control. The world has become so complicated that it is impossible to find a coherent form of oppression to subsume everything under it. There are just too many roles one takes and factors that come into play. Reality, unlike theory is just too full of contradictions.

New strategies are needed then and this is where the cyborg imagery comes in. Cyborgs have the advantage of not having an origin story. They don't have ties to the past, any conception of a "natural" or "pure" way of living. Perhaps their "nature" is change. They are already post-sex without having fought for it. They don't even have a clear conception of their body, as they can view their tools as part of it. This allows them to orient themselves toward the future, towards survival or prosperity. And their ideal is not identity but contradicting dualisms and irony (I would be really surprised if she didn't read Rorty). They don't need boundaries or theories but ways to dissolve them. They prefer regenerating mutated limbs like salamanders instead of reproducing.

I really like the imagery and I agree with her in most but because of the fame of the text and since it was written somewhat recently I expected a lot more. The midsection was also unnecessarily difficult to read.
]]> Zorba the Greek 53639
The classic novel Zorba the Greek is the story of two men, their incredible friendship, and the importance of living life to the fullest. Zorba, a Greek working man, is a larger-than-life character, energetic and unpredictable. He accompanies the unnamed narrator to Crete to work in the narrator’s lignite mine, and the pair develops a singular relationship. The two men couldn’t be further apart: The narrator is cerebral, modest, and reserved; Zorba is unfettered, spirited, and beyond the reins of civility. Over the course of their journey, he becomes the narrator’s greatest friend and inspiration and helps him to appreciate the joy of living.

Zorba has been acclaimed as one of the most remarkable figures in literature; he is a character in the great tradition of Sinbad the Sailor, Falstaff, and Sancho Panza. He responds to all that life offers him with passion, whether he’s supervising laborers at a mine, confronting mad monks in a mountain monastery, embellishing the tales of his past adventures, or making love. Zorba the Greek explores the beauty and pain of existence, inviting readers to reevaluate the most important aspects of their lives and live to the fullest.]]> 335 Nikos Kazantzakis 0571203132 VII 4
I suppose I should mention that there is also this character named Zorba who lives a simple, happy, passionate, spontaneous, confident life full of experiences. Bah, who cares about him.

(Oh and he probably loves black metal, judging by the fact he urged someone to burn a monastery).]]> 4.08 1946 Zorba the Greek
author: Nikos Kazantzakis
name: VII
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1946
rating: 4
read at: 2021/05/16
date added: 2021/05/23
shelves:
review:
I enjoyed most of this because I could relate to the narrator, probably Kazantzakis himself. He is an intellectual who, from all his reading (Nietzsche once again), started valuing living too instead of reading, the body over the mind, dancing over thinking or experience rather than knowledge. But intellectually valuing it is very different than living according to those values. And I doubt it's even fear that stops him; the problem is that to actually enjoy this new thing, he needs to get used to it, feel comfortable and change in the process, but of course this would take time and for a while he will be worse than before. It is just too late for him. Buddha constantly calls him, "don't care, it doesn't matter anyway, just get away" and he mostly listens. He is happy watching Zorba living for him. Once, he does it too and he gets a taste of life. It doesn't go very well but he doesn't feel that bad about it anyway.

I suppose I should mention that there is also this character named Zorba who lives a simple, happy, passionate, spontaneous, confident life full of experiences. Bah, who cares about him.

(Oh and he probably loves black metal, judging by the fact he urged someone to burn a monastery).
]]> Τι είναι μεταφυĎική; 48726785 200 Martin Heidegger 9603787604 VII 4
As I understand it, the first lecture aimed to challenge the authority of science and logic as the activities that reveal truth about beings, by offering an alternative way of finding it. This way is through a state or mood, agony, in which Dasein, by temporally forgetting the way that we happened to name or view beings in this historical situation, realize the fact that beings are and see them through a new light. This light might be the one that reveals them as they actually are and we keep getting glimpses of what is for a few moments, before losing it again, if he is accepting that this is possible (I have the impression that in Being and Time he claims that, but I haven't read it) or (and much more attractive for me) what is fundamental is that humans are creatures that constantly re-invent new lights, new ways of seeing how things are and that's all that can be said. This function is done with the help of metaphysics and precedes and shapes science itself and I get the impression that for Heidegger it's the only worthwhile function.

In the second lecture we can see the small Heideggerian "turn". While in the first lecture metaphysics is conceived as something positive, in the second it is Being that holds the central place in his thinking. Metaphysics always depends on the way we conceived metaphysics until now, so to reach Being (through the Zero) we have to surpass metaphysics too. Being is what seems to be the truth that has been forgotten and is everything that remains hidden. We get it for a moment before losing it again. But what Being really is remains unclear for me. I tend to take it as -the false hope- of a true description of what is (because this is what interests me the most), but in this lecture it seems like it can be God. He talks of a sacrifice that is based on freedom (this is what inspired Existentialists), of staying in its favor and of answering its call. Since it was written in 1943 it might also an attempt to make it compatible with Nazism. He changed his mind on whether Being is something that appears only through beings at certain times, making it something like the Hegelian spirit that exists on its own and we find it. He also answers objections that portrayed his philosophy as nihilistic or leading to inaction by being trapped in a feeling (agony) and attacks logic that turns everything into numbers, allowing it to make calculations and expand into the infinite, while forgetting that there beings behind those numbers.

In the third lecture he uses the philosophical tree of knowledge to point out that while all our knowledge originates from the ground, this ground is neither owned by the tree, nor the tree grows into that direction. We are happy with our representations of beings, never considering them from the point of Being. The turn towards history or meta-philosophy is more evident, with the bigger problem being not that metaphysics can't point to Being but that we are not even aware that it can't. Truth could have been not what is there but a pointing to what's not there. It seems like our thought, for beings' sake, constantly ignores Being and refuses to be guided by it. He also tries to reconcile his current way of thinking with the one in Being and Time, by explaining that the question of Being was always his intention and he focused on the human Dasein only to prepare the way. He claims that even then it is time that would help the uncovering of Being and Being and Time are, if not identical, then at least connected (so maybe he is trying to say that he was historicist even then). But he also admits that his attempt failed because it attempted to describe Being as a representation, thus contained metaphysical remnants. The lecture then should be viewed not as an attempt to describe Being using metaphysics but to ask why metaphysics always conceives beings as representations, as a presence and ignores zero.

Heidegger is certainly very important and interesting, if not for his thoughts, then because of how he influenced others. I think that this pointing towards what is never revealed and is ignored every time we create a representation of something is important. Overall, I get the impression that indeed he offered a way of reaching Being at first, through metaphysics, but later became more sceptical towards any attempt of describing Being because every attempt ends up making it a representation. The question remains what Being is, why is it so important and how it can help us so that it can convince us to follow it. By not providing an answer to these questions and by almost saying (I think) that we are doomed to never finding it, all I can get from his questions is a reminder of humbleness, of the realization that our knowledge is not of what Is, during those rare moments that we are not lost in our representations. However, I make these thoughts not through a mood but in an intellectual way, meaning that I do exactly what he is warning me not to do, I turn Being into a representation. Perhaps if I could have felt this agony, my questions of what Being is and why should I follow it would be answered. Unfortunately, or not, I can only talk about my experiences.]]> 4.00 1929 Τι είναι μεταφυĎική;
author: Martin Heidegger
name: VII
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1929
rating: 4
read at: 2021/05/02
date added: 2021/05/02
shelves:
review:
I read the Greek version that includes a very extensive intro and comments on the text by Thanasas, a former professor of mine, who seems to have a decent grasp of Heidegger. However, he clearly favours Hegel and this probably influences those comments and those in turn influence me, consciously or not. I am also influence by Rorty’s reading of Heidegger and I have to admit that as far as their criticisms go, they don’t seem that different, even if their constructive part is very different. They both see Heidegger as making a turn towards historicity after Being and Time and Thanasas finds this text a good introduction to Heidegger because it consists of three lectures that were written at different times, showing at least part of this turn.

As I understand it, the first lecture aimed to challenge the authority of science and logic as the activities that reveal truth about beings, by offering an alternative way of finding it. This way is through a state or mood, agony, in which Dasein, by temporally forgetting the way that we happened to name or view beings in this historical situation, realize the fact that beings are and see them through a new light. This light might be the one that reveals them as they actually are and we keep getting glimpses of what is for a few moments, before losing it again, if he is accepting that this is possible (I have the impression that in Being and Time he claims that, but I haven't read it) or (and much more attractive for me) what is fundamental is that humans are creatures that constantly re-invent new lights, new ways of seeing how things are and that's all that can be said. This function is done with the help of metaphysics and precedes and shapes science itself and I get the impression that for Heidegger it's the only worthwhile function.

In the second lecture we can see the small Heideggerian "turn". While in the first lecture metaphysics is conceived as something positive, in the second it is Being that holds the central place in his thinking. Metaphysics always depends on the way we conceived metaphysics until now, so to reach Being (through the Zero) we have to surpass metaphysics too. Being is what seems to be the truth that has been forgotten and is everything that remains hidden. We get it for a moment before losing it again. But what Being really is remains unclear for me. I tend to take it as -the false hope- of a true description of what is (because this is what interests me the most), but in this lecture it seems like it can be God. He talks of a sacrifice that is based on freedom (this is what inspired Existentialists), of staying in its favor and of answering its call. Since it was written in 1943 it might also an attempt to make it compatible with Nazism. He changed his mind on whether Being is something that appears only through beings at certain times, making it something like the Hegelian spirit that exists on its own and we find it. He also answers objections that portrayed his philosophy as nihilistic or leading to inaction by being trapped in a feeling (agony) and attacks logic that turns everything into numbers, allowing it to make calculations and expand into the infinite, while forgetting that there beings behind those numbers.

In the third lecture he uses the philosophical tree of knowledge to point out that while all our knowledge originates from the ground, this ground is neither owned by the tree, nor the tree grows into that direction. We are happy with our representations of beings, never considering them from the point of Being. The turn towards history or meta-philosophy is more evident, with the bigger problem being not that metaphysics can't point to Being but that we are not even aware that it can't. Truth could have been not what is there but a pointing to what's not there. It seems like our thought, for beings' sake, constantly ignores Being and refuses to be guided by it. He also tries to reconcile his current way of thinking with the one in Being and Time, by explaining that the question of Being was always his intention and he focused on the human Dasein only to prepare the way. He claims that even then it is time that would help the uncovering of Being and Being and Time are, if not identical, then at least connected (so maybe he is trying to say that he was historicist even then). But he also admits that his attempt failed because it attempted to describe Being as a representation, thus contained metaphysical remnants. The lecture then should be viewed not as an attempt to describe Being using metaphysics but to ask why metaphysics always conceives beings as representations, as a presence and ignores zero.

Heidegger is certainly very important and interesting, if not for his thoughts, then because of how he influenced others. I think that this pointing towards what is never revealed and is ignored every time we create a representation of something is important. Overall, I get the impression that indeed he offered a way of reaching Being at first, through metaphysics, but later became more sceptical towards any attempt of describing Being because every attempt ends up making it a representation. The question remains what Being is, why is it so important and how it can help us so that it can convince us to follow it. By not providing an answer to these questions and by almost saying (I think) that we are doomed to never finding it, all I can get from his questions is a reminder of humbleness, of the realization that our knowledge is not of what Is, during those rare moments that we are not lost in our representations. However, I make these thoughts not through a mood but in an intellectual way, meaning that I do exactly what he is warning me not to do, I turn Being into a representation. Perhaps if I could have felt this agony, my questions of what Being is and why should I follow it would be answered. Unfortunately, or not, I can only talk about my experiences.
]]> Philosophy and Social Hope 86099 288 Richard Rorty 0140262881 VII 5
I think that a good starting point for understanding him is the question of whether our beliefs represent the world or are caused by the world and used as a tool for coping with it. Rorty chooses the latter and following Davidson, he sees our beliefs always close to reality because of the causal pressures that surround us but never able to provide us with certainty. We can never escape language; to make sense of every act, like picking a stone, is to form beliefs about it. We can never check a belief against the causal stimuli that formed it. This lack of certainty applies not just for what we used to call subjective, like colour, but also with the objective, like "hardness". Neither is more intrinsic than the other; there is no point of retaining the appearance - reality distinction. There are better and worse descriptions but not of how the world is but of what we want to do with the world. For example, science is better at controlling and predicting the world, religion is better at providing meaning and there is no clash between them. There is also no reason for reconciling those two beliefs. The ideal of a coherent worldview is just another inherited one without any epistemic superiority. Humans are great at compartmentalizing their beliefs and that's a good thing.

We are used to thinking that truth will somehow save us, that something outside of us like Nature or Reason or Truth will provide guidance but now we realize that we are alone and responsible for our own future. Our ideal should be imagination because it enables us to come up with new redescriptions that will provide agreement on what to do with our future. As Rorty writes he wants us to replace certainty for hope. We have no reassurance that liberalism is the best doctrine, neither that talking is better than using violence but we don't need to have it. The fact that it is impossible to discuss with a philosophically competent Nazi to prove to him that democracy is better (because there is no common ground and each side will beg the question) doesn't mean that we have no reason to get rid of those undesirable doctrines or cultures. As one can see, his views are a blend of pragmatism and utilitarianism. The goal is human happiness and the means are basically "whatever works". There is little interest on "what's there" unless it is useful for some specific purpose.

Our children in primary and secondary schools should learn to socialize and become familiar with our values once they are old enough, by reading the classics. This is to provide continuity between generations. And then they should learn to question those values, to see the historical background that made them appear and to see how we failed to live according to them so that they can start imagining how they can be improved and to come up with new solutions for self-creation. Professors should teach whatever inspired them. Rorty then, on the one hand places much value in a connection with tradition and even pride for one's country so that its goods and its bads are owned by its citizens but at the same time he hopes for a change, for a utopia. He even hopes for some kind of global agreement that will be able to regain economic control from the corporations. He wants us to see the struggle as one between the rich and the poor, the oligarchs and the starving. He even reminds us that the 40 hour week was achieved with great sacrifice and using violence, not by following the laws.

But what is the epistemic status of Rorty's words? He certainly can't claim that he is describing how things are. His formulation of reality is only one of many possible ones and most of the others don't have enough common ground between them to discuss without each begging the question of the other. Once again, it is not about how things are but how useful this or another description is. Rorty appeals foremost to the future, believing that this way of viewing things will allow us to be more responsible for the societies we form and increase solidarity. He also thinks that this re-description is easier to be reconciled with Darwinism. It's now too strange to think that humans have a difference in kind with animals. That all the other creatures cope with reality but we understand and describe it, that our language is more than a tool of coping with the world like all the others.]]> 4.01 1999 Philosophy and Social Hope
author: Richard Rorty
name: VII
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2021/04/22
date added: 2021/04/22
shelves:
review:
I am not sure if it is Rorty or me who has matured but I got even more from this book than I took from his major works. The "relativistic" way he views the world is probably terrifying to many but absolutely inspiring to me. He is just too good at playing this game, at understanding what his views entail and at pre-emptively incorporating potential criticisms to his philosophy as features. His trick is to say that even the more obvious admissions are actually just presuppositions and if someone disagrees with them, there is almost always no neutral ground that they can be resolved, so each side can only beg the question. The question then becomes which option is the more useful one for our ends. And while epistemologically we can always play this game, when it comes to the way we should form our societies we can always appeal to human happiness.

I think that a good starting point for understanding him is the question of whether our beliefs represent the world or are caused by the world and used as a tool for coping with it. Rorty chooses the latter and following Davidson, he sees our beliefs always close to reality because of the causal pressures that surround us but never able to provide us with certainty. We can never escape language; to make sense of every act, like picking a stone, is to form beliefs about it. We can never check a belief against the causal stimuli that formed it. This lack of certainty applies not just for what we used to call subjective, like colour, but also with the objective, like "hardness". Neither is more intrinsic than the other; there is no point of retaining the appearance - reality distinction. There are better and worse descriptions but not of how the world is but of what we want to do with the world. For example, science is better at controlling and predicting the world, religion is better at providing meaning and there is no clash between them. There is also no reason for reconciling those two beliefs. The ideal of a coherent worldview is just another inherited one without any epistemic superiority. Humans are great at compartmentalizing their beliefs and that's a good thing.

We are used to thinking that truth will somehow save us, that something outside of us like Nature or Reason or Truth will provide guidance but now we realize that we are alone and responsible for our own future. Our ideal should be imagination because it enables us to come up with new redescriptions that will provide agreement on what to do with our future. As Rorty writes he wants us to replace certainty for hope. We have no reassurance that liberalism is the best doctrine, neither that talking is better than using violence but we don't need to have it. The fact that it is impossible to discuss with a philosophically competent Nazi to prove to him that democracy is better (because there is no common ground and each side will beg the question) doesn't mean that we have no reason to get rid of those undesirable doctrines or cultures. As one can see, his views are a blend of pragmatism and utilitarianism. The goal is human happiness and the means are basically "whatever works". There is little interest on "what's there" unless it is useful for some specific purpose.

Our children in primary and secondary schools should learn to socialize and become familiar with our values once they are old enough, by reading the classics. This is to provide continuity between generations. And then they should learn to question those values, to see the historical background that made them appear and to see how we failed to live according to them so that they can start imagining how they can be improved and to come up with new solutions for self-creation. Professors should teach whatever inspired them. Rorty then, on the one hand places much value in a connection with tradition and even pride for one's country so that its goods and its bads are owned by its citizens but at the same time he hopes for a change, for a utopia. He even hopes for some kind of global agreement that will be able to regain economic control from the corporations. He wants us to see the struggle as one between the rich and the poor, the oligarchs and the starving. He even reminds us that the 40 hour week was achieved with great sacrifice and using violence, not by following the laws.

But what is the epistemic status of Rorty's words? He certainly can't claim that he is describing how things are. His formulation of reality is only one of many possible ones and most of the others don't have enough common ground between them to discuss without each begging the question of the other. Once again, it is not about how things are but how useful this or another description is. Rorty appeals foremost to the future, believing that this way of viewing things will allow us to be more responsible for the societies we form and increase solidarity. He also thinks that this re-description is easier to be reconciled with Darwinism. It's now too strange to think that humans have a difference in kind with animals. That all the other creatures cope with reality but we understand and describe it, that our language is more than a tool of coping with the world like all the others.
]]> <![CDATA[The New York Trilogy (New York Trilogy, #1-3)]]> 431 The remarkable, acclaimed series of interconnected detective novels � from the author of 4 3 2 1: A Novel

The New York Review of Books has called Paul Auster’s work “one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature.� Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this uniquely stylized triology of detective novels begins with City of Glass, in which Quinn, a mystery writer, receives an ominous phone call in the middle of the night. He’s drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case that’s more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself. In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission, as well. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems.

This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition includes an introduction from author and professor Luc Sante, as well as a pulp novel-inspired cover from Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic artist of Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers.]]> 308 Paul Auster 0143039830 VII 3
It is a mystery novel that by being so cryptic, it puts you in a position of trying to solve the mystery of its meaning. This "meta" move is certainly deliberate and not the only one, as the book constantly tries to come to life by blending the lines between what is fiction and what is real. It also questions the nature of literature, personal identity, change and stability. I could really write a lot but spoiling literature books is not something I usually do (as opposed to spoiling philosophy books).
]]> 3.93 1987 The New York Trilogy (New York Trilogy, #1-3)
author: Paul Auster
name: VII
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1987
rating: 3
read at: 2021/04/15
date added: 2021/04/22
shelves:
review:
I am ambivalent about this book. It did make me think a lot about it, in search for possible interpretations, but I can't say that I enjoyed reading it. I also really didn't like the way that the three stories were eventually connected.

It is a mystery novel that by being so cryptic, it puts you in a position of trying to solve the mystery of its meaning. This "meta" move is certainly deliberate and not the only one, as the book constantly tries to come to life by blending the lines between what is fiction and what is real. It also questions the nature of literature, personal identity, change and stability. I could really write a lot but spoiling literature books is not something I usually do (as opposed to spoiling philosophy books).

]]> Upgrade 36509310 7 Roger Williams 1370466099 VII 2 3.09 Upgrade
author: Roger Williams
name: VII
average rating: 3.09
book published:
rating: 2
read at: 2021/04/13
date added: 2021/04/22
shelves:
review:
I didn't find this interesting at all. I suppose its only appeal is that it mentions (not even continues) the novel.
]]> The Gay Science 683106 The Gay Science, which he later described as "perhaps my most personal book," when he was at the height of his intellectual powers, and the reader will find it an extensive and sophisticated treatment of the philosophical themes and views most central to Nietzsche's own thought and most influential on later thinkers. This volume presents the work in a new translation by Josefine Nauckhoff, with an introduction by Bernard Williams that elucidates the work's main themes and discusses their continuing importance.]]> 305 Friedrich Nietzsche 0521636450 VII 5 Ěý
I found both this book and Beyond Good and Evil great and inspiring. I admire the most his ability to identify what he views as unfortunate outcomes of history, while at the same time sincerely praising their goods or their necessity for survival or at least their influential effect that can't be shaken even when revealed as falsehoods. Christianity is a prime example of this; while it is clearly a fairy tale, its absence now or in the future will lead to a catastrophic nihilism because the need that gave birth to it, notably meaning, is hard to replace. And yet it is not impossible; he views himself as a prophet who sees the endless possibilities of the death of God, an open ocean that presents infinite possible adventures and harbours. At his best, his sense of history always reminds us its hold, but also the temporality of our ideals and our culture, and the endless possibilities that the future may hold.Ěý
Ěý
His moral philosophy is also impressing. While certainly individualistic (see Nehamas for this), he also urges his readers to look inside their own selves to find their own principles, so perhaps a principle can be solidarity for someone. As he writes: “I am no seeker. I want to create for myself a sun of my ownâ€� (320). And this is not an empty platitude. It stems again from the realization that the contingencies that happened to form each individual are different and one ought to consider them when they decide who they want to be, ideally being able to find a balance between them, a unity that respects all of them instead of choosing one of them to be guided by (277). If successful, then one would be willing to return and relive their life infinite times, accepting every single boring moment, every pain and every joy, as all these are intertwined and necessary for each other; this is how his "eternal recurrence" is usually interpreted.ĚýHe also really urges people to live and experience things and view their senses not as something inferior but, if not higher, at least equal to spirit. Also,Ěýthe unconscious is more important than the conscious.
Ěý
And when it comes to his epistemology, he favours what he calls perspectivism. Again, he realizes that each person has their own perspective and some times thinks that perspectives are all that can exist when we interact with reality. To see what we posit as the world without our concepts is probably impossible or at least it is not possible to know if it is possible, so we are doomed to uncertainty. This uncertainty, however, is what makes life worth living and a positivistic or mechanistic future would be nothing short of a dystopia. Still, even this might come to pass, asĚýthe future can be literally anything. One just needs to invent new language games or vocabularies or new names and even the most radical reversal can happen in the way that we perceive and experience and value the world. And this is the greatest form of power.

And two more inspiring quotes:

«The thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions, as seeking explanations of something: to him, success and failure are primarily answers. To be vexed or even to feel remorse because something goes wrong � he leaves that to those who act because they were ordered to do so and who expect a beating when his gracious lordship is not pleased with the result.»

«Whoever enters here will pay me an honour; whoever does not � a pleasure.» (The best possible quote for a welcome mat).]]> 4.29 1882 The Gay Science
author: Friedrich Nietzsche
name: VII
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1882
rating: 5
read at: 2021/04/01
date added: 2021/04/03
shelves:
review:
Writing about Nietzsche seems impossible as he touches many issues but only briefly, and whatever I could write would be quite inferior to the introduction by Bernard Williams anyway. And yet here it is:
Ěý
I found both this book and Beyond Good and Evil great and inspiring. I admire the most his ability to identify what he views as unfortunate outcomes of history, while at the same time sincerely praising their goods or their necessity for survival or at least their influential effect that can't be shaken even when revealed as falsehoods. Christianity is a prime example of this; while it is clearly a fairy tale, its absence now or in the future will lead to a catastrophic nihilism because the need that gave birth to it, notably meaning, is hard to replace. And yet it is not impossible; he views himself as a prophet who sees the endless possibilities of the death of God, an open ocean that presents infinite possible adventures and harbours. At his best, his sense of history always reminds us its hold, but also the temporality of our ideals and our culture, and the endless possibilities that the future may hold.Ěý
Ěý
His moral philosophy is also impressing. While certainly individualistic (see Nehamas for this), he also urges his readers to look inside their own selves to find their own principles, so perhaps a principle can be solidarity for someone. As he writes: “I am no seeker. I want to create for myself a sun of my ownâ€� (320). And this is not an empty platitude. It stems again from the realization that the contingencies that happened to form each individual are different and one ought to consider them when they decide who they want to be, ideally being able to find a balance between them, a unity that respects all of them instead of choosing one of them to be guided by (277). If successful, then one would be willing to return and relive their life infinite times, accepting every single boring moment, every pain and every joy, as all these are intertwined and necessary for each other; this is how his "eternal recurrence" is usually interpreted.ĚýHe also really urges people to live and experience things and view their senses not as something inferior but, if not higher, at least equal to spirit. Also,Ěýthe unconscious is more important than the conscious.
Ěý
And when it comes to his epistemology, he favours what he calls perspectivism. Again, he realizes that each person has their own perspective and some times thinks that perspectives are all that can exist when we interact with reality. To see what we posit as the world without our concepts is probably impossible or at least it is not possible to know if it is possible, so we are doomed to uncertainty. This uncertainty, however, is what makes life worth living and a positivistic or mechanistic future would be nothing short of a dystopia. Still, even this might come to pass, asĚýthe future can be literally anything. One just needs to invent new language games or vocabularies or new names and even the most radical reversal can happen in the way that we perceive and experience and value the world. And this is the greatest form of power.

And two more inspiring quotes:

«The thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions, as seeking explanations of something: to him, success and failure are primarily answers. To be vexed or even to feel remorse because something goes wrong � he leaves that to those who act because they were ordered to do so and who expect a beating when his gracious lordship is not pleased with the result.»

«Whoever enters here will pay me an honour; whoever does not � a pleasure.» (The best possible quote for a welcome mat).
]]> <![CDATA[Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1]]> 7746194
"Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous." - H.P. Lovecraft

"Poison yourself . . . with thought" - Arizmenda

CONTENTS: Steven Shakespeare, "The Light that Illuminates Itself, the Dark that Soils Itself: Blackened Notes from Schelling's Underground." Erik Butler, "The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances." Scott Wilson, "BAsileus philosoPHOrum METaloricum." Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, "Transcendental Black Metal." Nicola Masciandaro, "Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya." Joseph Russo, "Perpetue Putesco - Perpetually I Putrefy." Benjamin Noys, "'Remain True to the Earth!': Remarks on the Politics of Black Metal." Evan Calder Williams, "The Headless Horsemen of the Apocalypse." Brandon Stosuy, "Meaningful Leaning Mess." Aspasia Stephanou, "Playing Wolves and Red Riding Hoods in Black Metal." Anthony Sciscione, "'Goatsteps Behind My Steps . . .': Black Metal and Ritual Renewal." Eugene Thacker, "Three Questions on Demonology." Niall Scott, "Black Confessions and Absu-lution."

DOCUMENTS: Lionel Maunz, Pineal Eye; Oyku Tekten, Symposium Photographs; Scott Wilson, "Pop Journalism and the Passion for Ignorance"; Karlynn Holland, Sin Eater I-V; Nicola Masciandaro and Reza Negarestani, Black Metal Commentary; Black Metal Theory Blog Comments; Letter from Andrew White; E.S.S.E, Murder Devour I.

BLACKMETALTHEORY.BLOGSPOT.COM]]> 282 Nicola Masciandaro 1450572162 VII 2 3.24 2010 Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium 1
author: Nicola Masciandaro
name: VII
average rating: 3.24
book published: 2010
rating: 2
read at: 2021/04/01
date added: 2021/04/02
shelves:
review:
I thought it would be a great idea but the papers really seemed like they were written by overenthusiastic graduate students (but they weren't). I think that the subject gave them licence to be "artistic" or "metal" and that killed it for me. A few papers towards the middle of the book were decent, but I wouldn't really missed them if I hadn't read them. I had to speed-read or skip many of them.
]]> Phaedo 982310 Phaedo is acknowledged to be one of Plato's masterpieces, showing him both as a philosopher and as a dramatist at the height of his powers. For its moving account of the execution of Socrates, the Phaedo ranks among the supreme literary achievements of antiquity. It is also a document crucial to the understanding of many ideas deeply ingrained in western culture, and provides one of the best introductions to Plato's thought.]]> 144 Plato 0192839535 VII 4
Besides being an obvious influence of Christianity, with even Socrates' description of the Underworld resembling the Christian hell way too much, what's infinitely more interesting is the influence on the way we view thought, knowledge and the body. Socrates (or, most likely, Plato) has a very coherent belief system: we have souls and they give us access through thought to a divine realm that one day we will be able to reach if we did well enough. Wisdom is certainly not something we strive for just for the afterlife, as it is supposed to provide us with earthly delights too, but all those metaphysical assurances are clearly a central part of this worldview which is actually an optimistic one.

This optimistic part is clearly gone now and yet, the other parts are still here. I spend almost all my time reading and I neither believe in an afterlife, nor I expect to find some practical use of the knowledge that I am amassing. And yet, this compulsion remains, without an obvious reason behind. What else is there to do anyway?
]]> 4.08 -380 Phaedo
author: Plato
name: VII
average rating: 4.08
book published: -380
rating: 4
read at: 2021/03/18
date added: 2021/03/19
shelves:
review:
Reading Plato from a historicist perspective can be fascinating. In this dialogue, most agree (Foucault doesn't) that Socrates calls life a disease and his death the cure that will finally allow him to achieve what he was preparing for for all his life by studying philosophy: to get rid of the body, which is what entraps the soul into a realm of falsehoods. Philosophy then, is the study of death, it is using thought, which is an ability of the soul, to achieve knowledge.

Besides being an obvious influence of Christianity, with even Socrates' description of the Underworld resembling the Christian hell way too much, what's infinitely more interesting is the influence on the way we view thought, knowledge and the body. Socrates (or, most likely, Plato) has a very coherent belief system: we have souls and they give us access through thought to a divine realm that one day we will be able to reach if we did well enough. Wisdom is certainly not something we strive for just for the afterlife, as it is supposed to provide us with earthly delights too, but all those metaphysical assurances are clearly a central part of this worldview which is actually an optimistic one.

This optimistic part is clearly gone now and yet, the other parts are still here. I spend almost all my time reading and I neither believe in an afterlife, nor I expect to find some practical use of the knowledge that I am amassing. And yet, this compulsion remains, without an obvious reason behind. What else is there to do anyway?

]]> The Problems of Philosophy 31799 116 Bertrand Russell 1421903679 VII 3
His first bold move is to make sense-data indubitable and thus a way to have infallible knowledge, though not without making some sacrifices. What reaches our minds and our senses can't be wrong but it is the only thing that we have access to. Following Kant, he makes the causes, the objects that are behind the sense-data unknowable, but against Kant, some of them can't be completely different from the "thing in itself". Time or space for example, (which Kant placed inside us) give up something "objective" that we can deduce from their relations. If two objects are similar then they must be similar "objectively", even if we can never know what kind of similarity they have. Still, he admits that we can never prove any of these.

He splits our knowledge to one of things and one of truths, with both ultimately resting in sense data or knowledge by acquaintance. We can know a thing using either acquaintance, by the direct sense data we perceive that again, are indubitable, or we can know it through description, "theoretically", meaning that it is a physical object or that it is made say, by oak wood. Knowledge of the latter kind is fallible. We know by acquaintance the objects of our memory, of our mind, universals and possibly, consciousness of our self; while we know by description physical objects and other people's minds. Knowledge by description allows us to know things that we haven't experienced, and to make a judgement we must always refer to some description that consists of particulars or universals with which we are acquainted.

Another unusual move is the way he deals with the a priori. There is a priori knowledge but it is not innate; experience can show that something is true but it can't prove it. Multiple instances of the same idea don't reinforce our belief in them; it's as if we grasp "something" the first time we see or understand it and that's all. A priori knowledge includes some general principles, some logical laws, some basic ethical truths and mathematics. We can get new knowledge too from them but usually induction provides more certainty, though never complete certainty.

He criticizes philosophers, Kant among them, who turned laws of things, relations and a priori judgments into laws of thought. He finds that most fail to notice that verbs and relations are universals too, existing outside of time and place. Again, it is not our mind that creates them but the commonality that they denote is something real, England is west of France, we don't create this "Westness". We can know them either by acquaintance (another indubitable foundation) or description and they show us that all a priori knowledge is about relation not of particulars but of universals. This makes it less mysterious as it not longer appears to control and predict the future.

Finally, he touches knowledge of truths. Not all of them need a reason behind them; general principles, simple mathematical and logical truths, some basic moral truths and what comes from sense-data and memory are self-evident or intuitive, but that doesn't make them infallible. Even those coming from sense-data can be wrong because they are never that simple and we might not be able to grasp the complex unity that they form. We frequently grasp unities that don't correspond to existing unities and that's when we have false beliefs.

In the end it is not a bad attempt of creating a coherent system of the way knowledge works, but it feels so outdated and boring that I can't see more value to it other than a familiarity with the history of philosophy and its problems (which is actually quite important, as everything influences the now).]]> 3.92 1912 The Problems of Philosophy
author: Bertrand Russell
name: VII
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1912
rating: 3
read at: 2021/03/17
date added: 2021/03/19
shelves:
review:
I would have never read this if (part of it) was not forced upon me but it is not that bad. It is old-school though; it certainly belongs to the Descartes, Locke, Berkley, Hume, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant chain of tradition, with perhaps Russel being the last of them. He still uses the Cartesian methodical doubt and some Humean scepticism and common sense, hoping to give back part of the reassurance that was lost after the Kantian synthetic a priori were lost. Not all of it though.

His first bold move is to make sense-data indubitable and thus a way to have infallible knowledge, though not without making some sacrifices. What reaches our minds and our senses can't be wrong but it is the only thing that we have access to. Following Kant, he makes the causes, the objects that are behind the sense-data unknowable, but against Kant, some of them can't be completely different from the "thing in itself". Time or space for example, (which Kant placed inside us) give up something "objective" that we can deduce from their relations. If two objects are similar then they must be similar "objectively", even if we can never know what kind of similarity they have. Still, he admits that we can never prove any of these.

He splits our knowledge to one of things and one of truths, with both ultimately resting in sense data or knowledge by acquaintance. We can know a thing using either acquaintance, by the direct sense data we perceive that again, are indubitable, or we can know it through description, "theoretically", meaning that it is a physical object or that it is made say, by oak wood. Knowledge of the latter kind is fallible. We know by acquaintance the objects of our memory, of our mind, universals and possibly, consciousness of our self; while we know by description physical objects and other people's minds. Knowledge by description allows us to know things that we haven't experienced, and to make a judgement we must always refer to some description that consists of particulars or universals with which we are acquainted.

Another unusual move is the way he deals with the a priori. There is a priori knowledge but it is not innate; experience can show that something is true but it can't prove it. Multiple instances of the same idea don't reinforce our belief in them; it's as if we grasp "something" the first time we see or understand it and that's all. A priori knowledge includes some general principles, some logical laws, some basic ethical truths and mathematics. We can get new knowledge too from them but usually induction provides more certainty, though never complete certainty.

He criticizes philosophers, Kant among them, who turned laws of things, relations and a priori judgments into laws of thought. He finds that most fail to notice that verbs and relations are universals too, existing outside of time and place. Again, it is not our mind that creates them but the commonality that they denote is something real, England is west of France, we don't create this "Westness". We can know them either by acquaintance (another indubitable foundation) or description and they show us that all a priori knowledge is about relation not of particulars but of universals. This makes it less mysterious as it not longer appears to control and predict the future.

Finally, he touches knowledge of truths. Not all of them need a reason behind them; general principles, simple mathematical and logical truths, some basic moral truths and what comes from sense-data and memory are self-evident or intuitive, but that doesn't make them infallible. Even those coming from sense-data can be wrong because they are never that simple and we might not be able to grasp the complex unity that they form. We frequently grasp unities that don't correspond to existing unities and that's when we have false beliefs.

In the end it is not a bad attempt of creating a coherent system of the way knowledge works, but it feels so outdated and boring that I can't see more value to it other than a familiarity with the history of philosophy and its problems (which is actually quite important, as everything influences the now).
]]> <![CDATA[Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: Practical Programming for Total Beginners]]> 22514127
In "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python," you'll learn how to use Python to write programs that do in minutes what would take you hours to do by hand no prior programming experience required. Once you've mastered the basics of programming, you'll create Python programs that effortlessly perform useful and impressive feats of automation to: Search for text in a file or across multiple filesCreate, update, move, and rename files and foldersSearch the Web and download online contentUpdate and format data in Excel spreadsheets of any sizeSplit, merge, watermark, and encrypt PDFsSend reminder emails and text notificationsFill out online forms

Step-by-step instructions walk you through each program, and practice projects at the end of each chapter challenge you to improve those programs and use your newfound skills to automate similar tasks.

Don't spend your time doing work a well-trained monkey could do. Even if you've never written a line of code, you can make your computer do the grunt work. Learn how in "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python.""]]> 479 Al Sweigart 1593275994 VII 3 4.29 2014 Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: Practical Programming for Total Beginners
author: Al Sweigart
name: VII
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2021/03/19
date added: 2021/03/19
shelves:
review:
I 'll be unfair once again as I can only describe what I got from it and not some kind of objective value. It might be the best book about programming there is and still be just ok or meh for me. What happened for me is that while I found the book helpful at the time of reading it, when I finally decided to work on a project I had in mind, 90% of what I learned was useless, while I had to re-read the rest 10% or get the info from another source as I had forgotten them. Almost everything that I ended up creating came from googling and finding answers in stack overflow, so in the end, besides some basic stuff, I only got the illusion of learning instead of actually learning.
]]> <![CDATA[Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason]]> 51933 Librarian note: an alternate cover for this edition can be found here.

Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 � from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the “insane� and the rest of humanity.]]> 299 Michel Foucault 067972110X VII 4
I don't care enough to shorten (or proofread) my summary for posting it here, so here is the long version:

Foucault is digging through the past to discover the breaks that separated madness from saneness, non-reason from reason. This is what's important, not how madness was treated after this split became self-evident. He focuses on the period between the creation of the General Hospital and the great confinement of the poor in 1657, and the release of the bounded in 1794. Before that madness transformed into something that arises not from non-virtue but suddenly, on its own, reflecting some kind of truth, the fool that laughs with the futility of man and the world. The theme of madness replaced the theme of death but remained about the nothingness of existence, experienced from within and wisdom became the denouncement of madness that will inevitably lead to the end of the world. Madness fascinated and the voice of madness was liberated as a revelation of the mystical powers of the world. But after the Renaissance, Reason prevailed. Both the madman and the sane can see things that are not real and the only difference is that the sane knows that they are not real. Both think reasonably and the possibility of thinking unreasonably is lost.

The creation of the General Hospital was an action not against madness but against the poor and the unemployed. Anyone could go there voluntarily, but it was also where criminals and madmen were confined. At some point more than 1% of the population was confined and their administrators had complete authority within its bounds. Although the inmates were soon put to work and became a source of cheap slavery, the major aim was not economic, but moral and religious. It was another way to demarcate reason by forcing the work ethic to people who are thought to be lazy and sin against God, since poverty was associated not with economical but moral decline. So moral virtue became for the first time a matter of the state and madness was almost accidentally connected with poverty, the inability to work and becomes a social problem for the state.

From that point on it is associated with confinement, which is an attempt to avoid scandal. Now madness was kept at a distance, though it was sometimes exhibited as a spectacle. Where before something mystical, a monster was hidden, now there was only an animal, a regression to a more basic nature that was on a disease but on the contrary even granted a brutal strength or resistance to pain, hunger, cold and heat; an unchained freedom that reveals not evil but a basic human truth. So it is also respected, connected with freedom and possibly responsible for the fall but also as a possibility of forgiveness as Christ chose to appear wearing its face. That's why it is displayed, even as a scandal. Conversely, unreason is not any more what Christ did by being sacrifices but viewed as something unnatural and more importantly as a choice to be immoral. Unreason is the context of madness, a tending towards being shallowed by darkness and not one of its faces.

As we said madness was viewed as imagination that went overboard and started believing itself. But neither the imagination is not completely arbitrary, nor the logic applied to reach the conclusions is faulty. Madness then is certainly part of discourse and depends on language. But if it follows logic, in what name can it be called madness? It is connected to dreams and errors, haring non-truth and hallucination, affirming both, but though it speaks through the unreason it does so with reason. Unreason though is seeing something where others see nothing, it is a nothing, a darkness, it's reason dazzled. It is something abstract that crystallizes as the antithesis between day and night or light without anything in-between. Now madness stops being a sign of another world and becomes a manifestation of non being that should be suppressed and corrected as an annihilation of nothingness.

To see the ways madness was recognizes he explores two pairs that were made to be related. The first is mania and melancholia, with both of them not being errors in judgement and reasoned thinking. Melancholia started as the condition of having delusions about oneself, an obsession with some thought that was a result of black bile. Soon fear and sadness was added to form a unity not by observation but because of the perceived qualities of this black bile. Qualities provide an explanation that is partly causal and partly a phenomenology of the experience, as if theory drives the changes. Mania was similar but audacity and fury instead of fear and sadness. Qualities like wet and cold (melancholia) and dry and arid (mania) were also used to create these unities. For Foucault, the creation of those unions, the grouping of those qualities and not observation are responsible for the way we see mental conditions even now. Something similar happened to the pair of hysteria and hypochondria that was less popular, but sometimes thought as the same disease in different genders. It was harder to find the right qualities but the womb played a role or at least the theme of lower qualities slowly taking over the rest of the body and soon became moral and a justified punishment, as a weakness of spirit in order to explain why idle women were more likely to get it than hard-working ones. They also used the differences in the firmness of the body, its interconnectivity and its movement to explain its many different symptoms and organs of affliction.

There were two different ways of trying to treat the mad. One that seemed more medical and was using techniques like consolidation, purification, immersion in water or movement that tried to address the unity of mind and body and were not in any way psychological. Psychological ones are connected with correction and morality, with trying to induce fear or reward the patient. These used techniques like trying to awake someone from their delirium by a sudden emotion, like scaring them, theatrical representation in which they were agreeing with the patient only to let him discover a contradiction themselves, and returning them to the immediate, for example to nature and to work, but not to the anti-nature of the beast but to the nature of the labourer, to a morally mediated return to the truth.Ěý

In the 18th century the conception of madness as something magical and mysterious returned, with people feeling that evil and contagious diseases come from mental asylums and pollute their era. Reason can be lost again st every moment and it is something timeless, always there. Madness though is viewed as historical and manifested now because of the liberty that creates uncertainty, inability to see the truth and egoism, contemporary religion that makes people idle instead of conducting ceremonies and prescribing pilgrimages, and civilization in general that turns people away from the physical and towards the abstract that hardens the mind, and theatre and literature that made people seek sentiments that don't exist. Overall, the common theme is humans distancing themselves from nature.

In the same era the idea of separating the madman from the other inmates (libertines, vagabonds, criminals) emerged, something that has been asked many times in history but for different reasons. Sometimes to not treat the mad as convicts, others to protect the rights of the convicts. This time it was because they thought that many become mad because of their company. Madness and being with madmen became additional punishments to those confined. Besides that confinement was also thought of as an economic error as it reduced the work force, the cheap labor. Soon moral crimes were abolished and everyone was freed except the mad and the criminal. Separation of madness and unreason didn't change the identification of madness with confinement. The mad were supposes to go to mental facilities but they didn't exist. Madness became a social problem; they really isn't know what to do with them.

We now have the image of people like Pinel realizing that the mad were mad because they were confined and of new more humanitarian methods used but in reality it was again a moral treatment. The mad were objectified, treated as people who are sane and are responsible for the behaviour they are exhibiting, guilty not for their madness but for allowing it to be seen. The mad were doomed to be outsiders, children that are to be educated simply by mental (at least it wasn't physical any more) coercion. The goal was to infuse virtues like the work ethic or the family ideal. Different behaviour like promiscuity, misconduct and laziness, usually by the poor, are direct attacks to the social order and feed madness, so the mad must become an example, a way to correct society. Now madness signifies, not the Fall but social failure with "disobedience by religious fanaticism, resistance to work, and theft, [being] the three great transgressions against bourgeois society".Ěý

New methods included silence (ignoring the mad), recognition in the other (forcing them to understand that other mad are mad) and perpetual judgement (to have the threats and coercions infused in their heads). But the most important method was the apotheosis of the medical personnel. The director was curing not by using medical, scientific knowledge but by being a virtuous, wise man, dominating the patient and seen as if possessing thaumaturgical properties. This made psychiatry autonomous and hard to be compatible with the emerging positivism and this turned madness into something less, something that was about persuasion and mysticism. Instead of the cure being false, it was the disease that was false. Freud abolished the first three methods but kept the fourth, with the psychiatrist even more elevated and the patient still objectified and alienated as the psychiatrist cannot really unravel unreason as he can't experience it. Unreason only manifested since "in the lightning-flash of works such as those of Holderlin, of Nerval, of Nietzsche, or of Artaud".

In the epilogue he tries to describe unreason and compares it through the works of Goya, Sade, Nietzsche and Artaud to a darkness that doesn't come from the world but from nothing, man's way of abolishing both man and the world, the end and the beginning of everything. They turn not-being into the power to annihilate. There is a connection between madness and art but once madness ensues art no longer exists. In non-mad moments they create art but their experience of madness is reflected in their work. And once these works appear the world must come in terms with its guilt and unsuccessfully tries to find a way to justify what it is excluding.]]> 4.08 1961 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
author: Michel Foucault
name: VII
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1961
rating: 4
read at: 2021/03/03
date added: 2021/03/03
shelves:
review:
I enjoyed this much more than the history of sexuality even if madness and psychiatry are not my greatest concerns. What really piqued my interest was the exposing of the way some constellations of ideas or qualities are being grouped together almost accidentally but then those groupings form unities that are much harder to break and end up spreading to other regions of discourse. Also, the exposing of the presupposition of rationality of everyone. You are either reasonable or you fail to be reasonable and nothing outside reason exists. Equally interesting is those deeper motives that he finds behind every act. Perhaps he is cherry-picking or generalizing from few sources (though this is the abridged version) but it is still an impressive task, even if it were simply an alternative commentary of the events. The "conclusion" was also great; dark but touching and even hopeful.

I don't care enough to shorten (or proofread) my summary for posting it here, so here is the long version:

Foucault is digging through the past to discover the breaks that separated madness from saneness, non-reason from reason. This is what's important, not how madness was treated after this split became self-evident. He focuses on the period between the creation of the General Hospital and the great confinement of the poor in 1657, and the release of the bounded in 1794. Before that madness transformed into something that arises not from non-virtue but suddenly, on its own, reflecting some kind of truth, the fool that laughs with the futility of man and the world. The theme of madness replaced the theme of death but remained about the nothingness of existence, experienced from within and wisdom became the denouncement of madness that will inevitably lead to the end of the world. Madness fascinated and the voice of madness was liberated as a revelation of the mystical powers of the world. But after the Renaissance, Reason prevailed. Both the madman and the sane can see things that are not real and the only difference is that the sane knows that they are not real. Both think reasonably and the possibility of thinking unreasonably is lost.

The creation of the General Hospital was an action not against madness but against the poor and the unemployed. Anyone could go there voluntarily, but it was also where criminals and madmen were confined. At some point more than 1% of the population was confined and their administrators had complete authority within its bounds. Although the inmates were soon put to work and became a source of cheap slavery, the major aim was not economic, but moral and religious. It was another way to demarcate reason by forcing the work ethic to people who are thought to be lazy and sin against God, since poverty was associated not with economical but moral decline. So moral virtue became for the first time a matter of the state and madness was almost accidentally connected with poverty, the inability to work and becomes a social problem for the state.

From that point on it is associated with confinement, which is an attempt to avoid scandal. Now madness was kept at a distance, though it was sometimes exhibited as a spectacle. Where before something mystical, a monster was hidden, now there was only an animal, a regression to a more basic nature that was on a disease but on the contrary even granted a brutal strength or resistance to pain, hunger, cold and heat; an unchained freedom that reveals not evil but a basic human truth. So it is also respected, connected with freedom and possibly responsible for the fall but also as a possibility of forgiveness as Christ chose to appear wearing its face. That's why it is displayed, even as a scandal. Conversely, unreason is not any more what Christ did by being sacrifices but viewed as something unnatural and more importantly as a choice to be immoral. Unreason is the context of madness, a tending towards being shallowed by darkness and not one of its faces.

As we said madness was viewed as imagination that went overboard and started believing itself. But neither the imagination is not completely arbitrary, nor the logic applied to reach the conclusions is faulty. Madness then is certainly part of discourse and depends on language. But if it follows logic, in what name can it be called madness? It is connected to dreams and errors, haring non-truth and hallucination, affirming both, but though it speaks through the unreason it does so with reason. Unreason though is seeing something where others see nothing, it is a nothing, a darkness, it's reason dazzled. It is something abstract that crystallizes as the antithesis between day and night or light without anything in-between. Now madness stops being a sign of another world and becomes a manifestation of non being that should be suppressed and corrected as an annihilation of nothingness.

To see the ways madness was recognizes he explores two pairs that were made to be related. The first is mania and melancholia, with both of them not being errors in judgement and reasoned thinking. Melancholia started as the condition of having delusions about oneself, an obsession with some thought that was a result of black bile. Soon fear and sadness was added to form a unity not by observation but because of the perceived qualities of this black bile. Qualities provide an explanation that is partly causal and partly a phenomenology of the experience, as if theory drives the changes. Mania was similar but audacity and fury instead of fear and sadness. Qualities like wet and cold (melancholia) and dry and arid (mania) were also used to create these unities. For Foucault, the creation of those unions, the grouping of those qualities and not observation are responsible for the way we see mental conditions even now. Something similar happened to the pair of hysteria and hypochondria that was less popular, but sometimes thought as the same disease in different genders. It was harder to find the right qualities but the womb played a role or at least the theme of lower qualities slowly taking over the rest of the body and soon became moral and a justified punishment, as a weakness of spirit in order to explain why idle women were more likely to get it than hard-working ones. They also used the differences in the firmness of the body, its interconnectivity and its movement to explain its many different symptoms and organs of affliction.

There were two different ways of trying to treat the mad. One that seemed more medical and was using techniques like consolidation, purification, immersion in water or movement that tried to address the unity of mind and body and were not in any way psychological. Psychological ones are connected with correction and morality, with trying to induce fear or reward the patient. These used techniques like trying to awake someone from their delirium by a sudden emotion, like scaring them, theatrical representation in which they were agreeing with the patient only to let him discover a contradiction themselves, and returning them to the immediate, for example to nature and to work, but not to the anti-nature of the beast but to the nature of the labourer, to a morally mediated return to the truth.Ěý

In the 18th century the conception of madness as something magical and mysterious returned, with people feeling that evil and contagious diseases come from mental asylums and pollute their era. Reason can be lost again st every moment and it is something timeless, always there. Madness though is viewed as historical and manifested now because of the liberty that creates uncertainty, inability to see the truth and egoism, contemporary religion that makes people idle instead of conducting ceremonies and prescribing pilgrimages, and civilization in general that turns people away from the physical and towards the abstract that hardens the mind, and theatre and literature that made people seek sentiments that don't exist. Overall, the common theme is humans distancing themselves from nature.

In the same era the idea of separating the madman from the other inmates (libertines, vagabonds, criminals) emerged, something that has been asked many times in history but for different reasons. Sometimes to not treat the mad as convicts, others to protect the rights of the convicts. This time it was because they thought that many become mad because of their company. Madness and being with madmen became additional punishments to those confined. Besides that confinement was also thought of as an economic error as it reduced the work force, the cheap labor. Soon moral crimes were abolished and everyone was freed except the mad and the criminal. Separation of madness and unreason didn't change the identification of madness with confinement. The mad were supposes to go to mental facilities but they didn't exist. Madness became a social problem; they really isn't know what to do with them.

We now have the image of people like Pinel realizing that the mad were mad because they were confined and of new more humanitarian methods used but in reality it was again a moral treatment. The mad were objectified, treated as people who are sane and are responsible for the behaviour they are exhibiting, guilty not for their madness but for allowing it to be seen. The mad were doomed to be outsiders, children that are to be educated simply by mental (at least it wasn't physical any more) coercion. The goal was to infuse virtues like the work ethic or the family ideal. Different behaviour like promiscuity, misconduct and laziness, usually by the poor, are direct attacks to the social order and feed madness, so the mad must become an example, a way to correct society. Now madness signifies, not the Fall but social failure with "disobedience by religious fanaticism, resistance to work, and theft, [being] the three great transgressions against bourgeois society".Ěý

New methods included silence (ignoring the mad), recognition in the other (forcing them to understand that other mad are mad) and perpetual judgement (to have the threats and coercions infused in their heads). But the most important method was the apotheosis of the medical personnel. The director was curing not by using medical, scientific knowledge but by being a virtuous, wise man, dominating the patient and seen as if possessing thaumaturgical properties. This made psychiatry autonomous and hard to be compatible with the emerging positivism and this turned madness into something less, something that was about persuasion and mysticism. Instead of the cure being false, it was the disease that was false. Freud abolished the first three methods but kept the fourth, with the psychiatrist even more elevated and the patient still objectified and alienated as the psychiatrist cannot really unravel unreason as he can't experience it. Unreason only manifested since "in the lightning-flash of works such as those of Holderlin, of Nerval, of Nietzsche, or of Artaud".

In the epilogue he tries to describe unreason and compares it through the works of Goya, Sade, Nietzsche and Artaud to a darkness that doesn't come from the world but from nothing, man's way of abolishing both man and the world, the end and the beginning of everything. They turn not-being into the power to annihilate. There is a connection between madness and art but once madness ensues art no longer exists. In non-mad moments they create art but their experience of madness is reflected in their work. And once these works appear the world must come in terms with its guilt and unsuccessfully tries to find a way to justify what it is excluding.
]]>