I'm out there, Jerry, and I'm loving every minute of it!!!!
- Cosmo Kramer on wearing no underwear, Seinfeld S06E04
I'm very conflicted about this one,
I'm out there, Jerry, and I'm loving every minute of it!!!!
- Cosmo Kramer on wearing no underwear, Seinfeld S06E04
I'm very conflicted about this one, yet another random find at the local used bookstore, Bella Books.
The summary: It's a dialogue between a Philosopher and a Youth. The youth is a bit of a NEET, a shut-in, he has problems connecting with others. The Philosopher is a huge fan of Adlerian psychology so he walks the Youth through the core tenets. What makes this book so hard to judge is that it's a pop-psych summary of Adlerian thought, there's nothing 'original' here. The philosopher is 100% on the Adler train, there's nobody else he quotes or cites: everything he teaches comes straight from 1920 Vienna.
The good: - Adlerian psychology has many points that are still applicable and useful in day-to-day life: 1) All problems are interpersonal problems. These problems make us all suffer. Much of that suffering can be avoided. Most of our negative feelings come from us worrying too much about these relationships: will they like me if I do X? The greatest freedom in life comes from the courage to be disliked (which the Youth cannot get over; thus the shut-in status, as long as he stays at home he cannot disappoint people). 2) We live 'life-lies', comforting lies we tell ourselves so we don't have to work on ourselves. One such lie is the hindered author who would be famous if not for outside circumstances. That potential-author is living the life-lie of not having to actually write: in reality, they are afraid of just not being a very good writer. As long as they don't put their work out there they can't be rejected, and for that time, they could still be a great writer. It's more comfortable to just never find out whether they're good or bad. 3) The goal of all relationships is a feeling of community. It therefore follows that the best life, the happiest life, is that lived in service to the community. This is where work comes in: the happy work is the one that solves problems for others (a note: this is a huge motivator in open source work!). 4) Much of this fits with Zen Buddhist thought, but Goethe also had similar points in his life (see Goethe - Kunstwerk des Lebens).
The meh: - written dialogues around philosophy between a teacher and a student rarely work well. This one is mostly OK: the student pushes back from time to time, but it's clear that the student will 'change' to what the Philosopher has to say. (the worst I've ever read was in Ishmael, where the 'student' just agrees with everything)
The bad: - Adlerian psychology is a hundred years old. Not every part has survived the test of time; most notably, anything about rearing children is just not valid anymore. For example, the Psychologist talks about how stutterers are stuck in their ways because they get so nervous of their stutter, thereby exacerbating their stutter. My son is 6 and we can't get him to take speech therapy seriously because he doesn't care that he has a stutter, other kids in his class stutter too. He's the exact opposite of what Adler/Psychologist said.
Another example is the idea of 'tasks' in children; for adults it's an interesting concept, life is good if you focus on your tasks, but it does not work with children. Here's something I tried with my sons:
[older son] papa why does Charlie get to play Switch but I have to do Kumon? [me] focus on your tasks. what your brother does has nothing to do with your tasks; a good life focused on your own tasks! [older son] ..... [older son, visibly confused] papa why does Charlie get to play Switch but I have to do Kumon?
If you're looking to read this, be aware that it's Adler's personal psychology of life. Adler lived a hundred years ago in Vienna; not everything he thought is applicable to you. Choose and pick what fits you. It's not one logical construct.
There are some other fun philosophers in this vein who were contemporaries of Adler and Freud. One example is Georg Groddeck, one of the earliest researchers into psychosomatic issues. He worked purely by association so he wrote some wild stuff. I remember reading something like 'if you want to break your arm, you will fall and break your arm; you will not break your arm if you do not want it to break.' Fun times when the pharmacy sold opium!
P.S.: I have recently been binging old Seinfeld episodes and it's great fun watching the characters through the lens of Adlerian psychology: every episode is at its core an interpersonal problem that nobody wants to deal with. Jerry throws his parents' gifted watch away and needs to build a complicated lie, he does not have the courage to face their disappointment. Jerry and George stage social interactions to convince people that they're not a gay couple ('not that there's anything wrong with that!'), they're too worried about what others think of them. Kramer is one of the few truly free characters on 90s television: Kramer has the courage to be disliked (to the point that the other characters 'use' him to tell uncomfortable truths to other characters). ...more
We are all of us pockmarked by the scars of things that should have been otherwise, the way the moon bears the craters of collisions in space that it
We are all of us pockmarked by the scars of things that should have been otherwise, the way the moon bears the craters of collisions in space that it could do nothing to avoid. We exist on a continuum of people ranging from those who got the best at the most appropriate time to those who got little or nothing and never when they needed it the most.
I have two young sons, one is 3 years old, one is 5 years old. I love them both dearly. The 5-year old is in preprimary school, in a relatively rich neighbourhood. His classmates are unusually kind. He has a friend, his best friend in the world, and they have a love for each other that I do not remember from my own childhood. Almost every day they gift each other paintings. When my son is sick for a day I get a message from his friend's mother asking when my son comes back, her son is worried. Most days, my son's friend waits outside the school for my son to arrive, or vice-versa.
It saddens me greatly that in all likelihood, this will not last. The world's meanness will come in. Mostly in the form of others' ideas of what a boy, or what a man, should be. The first boy who mocks my son and his friend will mock from a place of his own hurt.
It took me more than ten years to look at my own preconceptions, find where they held me back, and try and start change within myself. Much has changed out there, I hope that others will walk a shorter path.
I find parts of myself in this book.
I do wish I could grab some of these more severe men and make them understand what I have had to discover by cutting away the confected, infected, parts of myself.
Morton writes about the trauma, the PTSD he has inherited from a broken home. You may have read his autobiography One Hundred Years of Dirt, on growing up in that home in rural Queensland as a gay boy. My Year Of Living Vulnerably is a follow-up in themes, on Morton trying to get past the trauma and open himself up to the world. He's a journalist by trade so some of the chapters become less autobiographical, more non-fiction investigations into the research and sociology of aspects of trauma. In other chapters he digs deep into himself (some trigger-warnings are needed - sexual violence).
Look, I'll be honest with you. Maybe I am writing this book for myself. It's a message in a bottle written during stolen glimpses of clarity to a man who, I know from experience, is prone to crab-walking away from relevation.
I am happy that such books are being written, are being published, and are being read. It makes me hopeful that my sons may have the opportunity to live a fulfilling life....more
What an absolute joy, what a way to finish this year.
A short-ish autobiography written by Donald Keene, one of the main translators and critics who brWhat an absolute joy, what a way to finish this year.
A short-ish autobiography written by Donald Keene, one of the main translators and critics who brought Japanese literature and arts to a US audience. For most of his life, Keene taught Japanese literature at Columbia University, all the while writing essays and non-fiction for a general audience (in English as well as in Japanese!) as well as translating Japanese art to English. To sound like a cliche, I feel like this describes a more civilized time, when people could spend their lifes translating beauty, from before universities became neoliberal degree machines. Back when a student could walk into a university course, realise he's the only one, and the professor would say, 'One is enough.'. That would be impossible today, units like that get culled quickly.
In many ways I was reminded of the German literature critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki's autobiography Mein Leben - both books feature a parade of who is who of post-war literature. Like Reich-Ranicki, Keene was connected with all of the literary giants of his day - he was good friends with Arthur Waley, Tanizaki Jun'Ichiro, Mishima Yukio, Abe Kobo, Kawabata Yasunari, Kenzaburo Oe, it's ridiculous what names come through here, and how many of these giants were close friends of Keene. (That's the Reich-Ranicki link - Reich-Ranicki did the same but with all the big names of post-WWII German literature). Keene even bumped into a young Yoko Ono at one point, back when she was still working as an interpreter, only connecting the dots decades later.
I loved this book because Keene's life was all about love of knowledge, and arts, and the past, and literature - being interested in everything for the good of everything. A younger Keene could be a bit ignorant, not understanding that one needs a lot of knowledge to appreciate temples; there's a funny story about Keene being annoyed at an unnamed Western visitor who got sick of all the temples in Kyoto, a feeling I shared when I was in Kyoto. Keene knew which temple was built by whom and for what reason and what makes each temple special, a dumbo like me sees only yet another church. There is infinite beauty in this world, but you have to work on yourself to recognise that beauty.
Keene also does not lie; often autobiographies are represented as a straight line. Keene makes it clear again and again how random all these accidents in his life put him into this happy life he lived; he sat next to someone from China as an undergrad, thereby triggering an interest in Chinese literature, from which it was not far to Japanese; WWII broke out so the US government paid for Americans with no Japanese background to become translators, and that work laid the foundation to his reading/writing knowledge; his skillset was always rare, at one point being one of ten foreign students in all of Kyoto; then he always bumped into the right person who introduced him to the next person, all the way up to becoming friends with two Literature Nobel Prize winners.
Another thing that struck me is how self-directed Keene was. Normally, you have some kind of boss or some kind of mentor, some kind of environment in which researchers work, like grants setting up research programs etc., so you have some externally-given thread to follow. Keene describes his decades-spanning work on histories of literature as something he usually came up with himself, and worked on himself, without much external direction. That's so extremely rare.
What's interesting is the complete absence of any girlfriends/wives/boyfriends/husbands, This came out in 2008 - after the large Tohoku earthquake in 2011, Keene moved to Japan and took up Japanese citizenship, leaving his US citizenship behind, living the last eight years of his life in Tokyo. I would've loved to see Keene's reasoning behind this late move; he must've been 89 years old. Later in 2013 Keene adopted Shamisen player Uehara Seiki, why? how? Edit, 2nd January 2022: I've been informed by my wife that adoption is a common approach in homosexual couples in Japan. Marriage still is not legal, so adoption solves issues like inheritance or hospital visits.
Recommended for: people who love knowledge for knowledge's sake....more
I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I worked - and behold, duty was joy.
Three lectures from 1946 on the 'meaning' of
I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was duty. I worked - and behold, duty was joy.
Three lectures from 1946 on the 'meaning' of life. If you've read Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning you will recognise a lot of what you're reading here, but it's compressed, and the main goal is different.
Man's Search focuses on how identifying meaning in life can elevate a person. The question of meaning is here too, but Frankl focuses more on how meaning can be found exactly, rather than focus on the positive outcomes of meaning.
In a nutshell: there is no purpose but the purpose that is given to you. Life is asking you, and you have to answer. Finding that meaning is a burden but one you have power over. You can see the concentration camp influence here - the more difficult life becomes, the more meaningful. Illness is not a lost of meaning, it is something meaningful, illness challenges you, and if you answer the challenge right you'll come out a bigger person. There is joy and happiness in life, but you cannot force these, there's no point in having joy and happiness as goals in itself, that's not possible as joy and happiness are outcomes that arise by themselves. As you create, as you 'open your door outwards', as you work, as you react to the challenges life throws at you, you'll find your meaning.
No talking, no lectures can help us get any further - there is only one thing left for us to do: to act; namely, to act in our everyday lives.
A collection of poems, roughly chronologically sorted around his wife's cancer diagnosis, death, and him trying to live on. Amazingly honest.
How readiA collection of poems, roughly chronologically sorted around his wife's cancer diagnosis, death, and him trying to live on. Amazingly honest.
How reading this went:
1. Try not to cry 2. Cry a lot
Lucencies (2)
You worked covertly, nurturing by stealth. You lifted people up, nudged them to transcend their limitations, in sickness and in health. Those you assisted looked around to thank you, but you'd hide. When your influence began to spread too far, you died. I still hear your whisper in my ear: 'Let's be going.'
If I could scan this planet with X-rays that detect the presence of your timely interventions, I'm sure I'd find them in places you would not expect. You're dead. I know. And it is not for me to show you death is not the end. But you left lucencies of grace secreted in the world, still glowing.
Such an interesting book - in spite of its 80 pages it took me three days to read it, there is a lot to digest and think about. I'm pretty sure I undeSuch an interesting book - in spite of its 80 pages it took me three days to read it, there is a lot to digest and think about. I'm pretty sure I underlined half the book, and what's the point of underlining so much?
Living in 2018 it is hard, if not impossible, to imagine an alternative system to capitalism. This feeling, this sense, is what the term 'capitalist realism' is about. Capitalism engulfs anything and makes it its own ('Witness, for instance, the establishment of settled ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’ cultural zones, which endlessly repeat older gestures of rebellion and contestation as if for the first time. ‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream.'), so how are you supposed to protest this?
Antagonism is not now located externally, in the face-off between class blocs, but internally, in the psychology of the worker, who, as a worker, is interested in old-style class conflict, but, as someone with a pension fund, is also interested in maximizing the yield from his or her investments. There is no longer an identifiable external enemy. The consequence is, Marazzi argues, that post-Fordist workers are like the Old Testament Jews after they left the ‘house of slavery’: liberated from a bondage to which they have no wish to return but also abandoned, stranded in the desert, confused about the way forward.
Fisher learned from Zizek to use items of current pop culture, especially movies, to make his points., which makes this so readable.
He doesn't stop at a 'simple' critique of capitalism, he delves into mental illness (I'm again reminded of Fromm's The Sane Society, which Fisher doesn't cite - was he aware of it? Likely!), Fisher suffered from depression so it makes sense that he looks at late capitalism as a causative agent of mental illness (to him, the chemical and structural changes in the brain are (of course) real and can be 'solved' with medication, but does having to live in an insane system cause these changes? Fromm again!)
Fisher looks at the counter-intuitive proliferation of bureaucracy in organisations and how almost magical it seems. Nobody knows what is required, the directives make no sense, so entirely new structures come into being, there is no final authority to appeal to anymore, workers have to become their own auditors and stress increases manifold, while nobody 'outside' cares about the auditing results.
This thought of a visible system, impossible to understand, with nebulous interests, with no overall controllers or rules, that's what makes this book so interesting to read, the 'centerlessness of global capitalism'. Fisher has this neat example where, during the 2008 bank crisis, people complained about the privatising government but not about the bungling companies, he interprets that as a coping mechanism. It's easier to blame a few politicians than an incredibly complex system nobody has oversight over, and nobody understands, and nobody can map. The disavowal [of the government] happens in part because the centerlessness of global capitalism is radically unthinkable.
Here comes my favorite quote in this context:
The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centerlessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center. As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which the services are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call center? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call centers does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centers weren’t the systemic consequences of a logic of Capital which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can’t actually sell you anything.
At the end Fisher begins to map out how a 'new left' could react to and work with late capitalism. New ascesis could be needed, since unlimited freedom breeds only misery. The bank crisis has discredited neoliberalism so now there is an ideological hole that can be filled. Bring back the idea of the 'general will' and take back the public space from the state. The 'new left' can start by working with the desires that neoliberalism has generated, such as a reduced bureaucracy, by starting a 'new struggle over work and who controls it'. Mental illnesses should be transformed 'outward', into antagonisms against Capital.
Overall extremely interesting, lots of food for thought, highly recommended if you like to think about our entire system of being.
Sadly Fisher never got to develop these ideas into a full framework, he took his own life one year ago.
P.S.:
The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.
Now this book is a little bit older, by now Elon Musk's Tesla has perfected this approach: make a ton of PR, sell very little, miss production targets. His popularity alone somehow makes everyone ignore horrible working conditions as well as firing workers for trying to unionize. Edit 8th Feb 2018: Musk shot a car into space to the great elation of everybody, it was mostly ignored that his company quietly announced its biggest quarterly loss ever a day later.
P.P.S.:
It wouldn’t be surprising if profound social and economic instability resulted in a craving for familiar cultural forms, to which we return in the same way that Bourne reverts to his core reflexes.
Does he predict the rise of the current garbage neo-reactionaries/alt-right? Maybe, but it also goes without saying that uncertain times breed nationalism and xenophobia, we've had that a few times in history now....more
Interesting essay on masculinity and the 'way forward' for men. If you have been watching this space then it's likely you won't find much new, but it'Interesting essay on masculinity and the 'way forward' for men. If you have been watching this space then it's likely you won't find much new, but it's a great introduction for 'beginners' with many personal and humorous observations.
It's interesting that here's one of the few essays looking at 'men's rights activists', I share Perry's strong unease about these people, unlike him I don't think these people are 'blowing off steam online', they actually mean what they say (I think similar mistakes have been made with Trump-fans, or any other alt-right proponents neo-Nazis - these people mean what they say and they will carry out what they are talking about, they are not roleplaying or blowing off steam)
The book ends on a great note on what is needed from men going forward, and for only that it's worth reading:
I can’t emphasize the importance of vulnerability enough. It is central to men’s future happiness. We need to rebrand vulnerability and emotion. A vulnerable man is not some weird anomaly. He is open to being hurt, but also open to love. This is emotional health. A man who does not bottle up anger, fear or sadness also experiences more joy and more intimate relationships.
This reminds me very much of Fromm's The Sane Society, where Fromm criticises the strange need of today's society for everything to be as 'secure' as possible, as shut off as possible. The interesting stuff happens where insecurity reigns, where borders are explored, I guess Fromm and Perry overlap strongly here.
Men’s rights: The right to be vulnerable The right to be weak The right to be wrong The right to be intuitive The right not to know The right to be uncertain The right to be flexible The right not to be ashamed of any of these
How can a book like this exist since 1955? I've been hearing all these arguments my entire life, who knew they started even earlier then that (well teHow can a book like this exist since 1955? I've been hearing all these arguments my entire life, who knew they started even earlier then that (well technically they started around Marx).
Fromm's central premise is that an entire society can have lost its sanity, and as an example for that kind of insane society he uses 1950s capitalism with a few side-excursions into Soviet-style Communism (I wonder what he would think of neoliberalism - probably the same things, but even more disgust). In capitalism, you are alienated from everything. You are alienated from political decision making: you can vote but that has very little influence on what is happening on the state level. Why should you keep informed then? Why would you vote in the first place?
Similar for labor - he often echos and quotes Marx while expanding greatly on what Marx said by not focusing on capital alone, but also on the world of the worker's psychology and society. The majority of workers is alienated from work since they have no input on what's being done or made, they have no influence on company decisions, they have (Marx!) only access to a tiny portion of the product.
The use of man by man is expressive of the system of values underlying the capitalistic system. Capital, the dead past, employs labor— the living vitality and power of the present. In the capitalistic hierarchy of values, capital stands higher than labor, amassed things higher than the manifestations of life. Capital employs labor, and not labor capital. The person who owns capital commands the person who “only” owns his life, human skill, vitality and creative productivity. “Things” are higher than man. The conflict between capital and labor is much more than the conflict between two classes, more than their fight for a greater share of the social product. It is the conflict between two principles of value: that between the world of things, and their amassment, and the world of life and its productivity.
Alienation has also crept into interpersonal relationships. People are not interested in each other as people, but as commodities. You don't work on yourself to improve yourself, but to increase your employability. (I'm reminded on the main arguments against taking up more asylum seekers - the usual argument in Australia is that they cost tax-money, completely ignoring that these people are humans).
His sense of value depends on his success: on whether he can sell himself favorably, whether he can make more of himself than he started out with, whether he is a success. His body, his mind and his soul are his capital, and his task in life is to invest it favorably, to make a profit of himself. Human qualities like friendliness, courtesy, kindness, are transformed into commodities, into assets of the “personality package,” conducive to a higher price on the personality market.
Where to go from here? I've read many of those criticisms before (but then again, the majority I read were from the 80s, not from 30 years before that), how to transform into a sane society? Tony Judt recently wrote a book called Ill Fares the Land with many similar criticisms and concludes that a return to full social democracy (think Europe) would fix most things. To Fromm that is not enough - we need to change things in several spheres, in the social sphere, in the sphere of work, in the sphere of democracy, all at once, patching things up in one corner won't help man. It doesn't matter whether a factory is run by The People or by a capitalist if the workers are still alienated from the labor.
What I loved specifically is that Fromm never tries to go 'back' to some imagined state, like so many other critics of capitalisms are proposing (examples: Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit, The One-Straw Revolution, or whatever Pentti Linkola is on about). These imagined returns are to me the ultimate in laziness - if we all just go back to 'that one past state I imagined and was not a part of' (usually a pre-industrial society), then all of the problems will fix themselves. To me that often implies that a lot of people will starve. To him Communism is also not a solution, to him that's just robotism with the same levels of alienation. Since Fromm is all about alienation he wants to involve people in all kinds of spheres - he calls this system Humanistic Communitarian Socialism.
In this system the state is reasonably strong but many local groups of citizens come together for discussions, and their discussions and suggestions are sent to the next level, which in turn sends it up to the next level etc., and the state's actions are based on all of those small committees (this is actually more reasonably now with the Internet, the Pirate Party has experimented with basic democracy like that). The same goes for work, industrialism is retained but decision making is not. Many small discussion groups get together and their discussions and suggestions are collated into the company's strategy. It is the state's task to not only educate the children, but keep a lifelong interest in the education and growth of its citizens. Art needs to be revived and put back into the hands of everyday people.
What's also interesting is that he proposes a 'universal subsistence guarantee', a variant of the currently highly discussed universal basic income (his variant is closer to regular unemployment money as it expires after a few years so people don't just sit around and do nothing). To him (and I highly agree!) such a guarantee is the first step towards human self-development. You cannot work on your self and take risks if your income has you stuck in a specific situation. If the state guarantees a certain income you can risk more - you can switch life directions, you can switch jobs, you can go back to educate yourself.
Anyway, I could write more, but this is highly, highly recommended.
Here are some more quotes:
On modern politics, perhaps (remember again - this is from 1955):
They use television to build up political personalities as they use it to build up a soap; what matters is the effect, in sales or votes, not the rationality or usefulness of what is presented. This phenomenon found a remarkably frank expression in recent statements about the future of the Republican Party. They are to the effect that since one cannot hope the majority of voters will vote for the Republican Party, one must find a personality who wants to represent the Party—then he will get the votes. In principle this is not different from the endorsement of a cigarette by a famous sportsman or movie actor.
On current discussion practices (think modern liberals), applicable towards the current discussion on whether you should discuss with the new Nazis in the first place:
What matters is to transform value judgment into matters of opinion, whether it is listening to “The Magic Flute” as against diaper talk, or whether it is being a Republican as against being a Democrat. All that matters is that nothing is too serious, that one exchanges views, and that one is ready to accept any opinion or conviction (if there is such a thing) as being as good as the other. On the market of opinions everybody is supposed to have a commodity of the same value, and it is indecent and not fair to doubt it.
Can you rebel against this society?
Authority in the middle of the twentieth century has changed its character; it is not overt authority, but anonymous, invisible, alienated authority. Nobody makes a demand, neither a person, nor an idea, nor a moral law. Yet we all conform as much or more than people in an intensely authoritarian society would. Indeed, nobody is an authority except “It.” What is It? Profit, economic necessities, the market, common sense, public opinion, what “one” does, thinks, feels. The laws of anonymous authority are as invisible as the laws of the market—and just as unassailable. Who can attack the invisible? Who can rebel against Nobody?
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Free man is by necessity insecure; thinking man by necessity uncertain.
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The majority of us believe in God, take it for granted that God exists. The rest, who do not believe, take it for granted that God does not exist. Either way, God is taken for granted. Neither belief nor disbelief cause any sleepless nights, nor any serious concern.
And to summarise:
The aim of life is to live it intensely, to be fully born, to be fully awake. To emerge from the ideas of infantile grandiosity into the conviction of one’s real though limited strength; to be able to accept the paradox that every one of us is the most important thing there is in the universe—and at the same time not more important than a fly or a blade of grass. To be able to love life, and yet to accept death without terror; to tolerate uncertainty about the most important questions with which life confronts us—and yet to have faith in our thought and feeling, inasmuch as they are truly ours. To be able to be alone, and at the same time one with a loved person, with every brother on this earth, with all that is alive; to follow the voice of our conscience, the voice that calls us to ourselves, yet not to indulge in self hate when the voice of conscience was not loud enough to be heard and followed. The mentally healthy person is the person who lives by love, reason and faith, who respects life, his own and that of his fellow man.
I highly recommend to read The Art of Loving first, even though it came out a year later. In it Fromm develops his concept of love in much more detail, the few mentions of 'love' in The Sane Society could get confusing without knowing about Fromm's wider concept of love.
P.S.: There's a fun thing happening in Fromm's use of English, since he seems to have written this first in English, then translated to German. Fromm often uses English's duplicity for the word 'man', as it can mean 'male human' and 'human in general on a higher scale' in English. In his original German no such duplicity exists, one is Mann, the other is Menschheit. It's interesting that he incorporated this English peculiarity in his writing....more
Part autobiography, part lots of life advice, very American as you may expect from the title and the cover and basically everything
The good: - There isPart autobiography, part lots of life advice, very American as you may expect from the title and the cover and basically everything
The good: - There is some seriously good life advice here that is useful to read in your 20s and 30s. You have to start somewhere which is usually small (here called 'putting the weed in the bag', after the movie Belly), it's better to have a foot in the door than having nothing. Lots of good stuff on procrastination and how you should always keep on pursuing your goals, perhaps even dropping your dreams if they turn out to actually be someone else's dreams. Nothing happens overnight, opportunity comes to those willing to put in the work etc. pp. - Read books - always keep on reading, read books that are outside of what you normally read, read books with unfamiliar perspectives, read anything you can get your hands on, I fully agree! - There is a lot of talk about God and how he believes that God has a plan specifically for him, I found this quote very interesting: 'I have to believe that. Otherwise, I’d never have transcended the circumstances I was born into.' That must be an exhausting kind of belief, one where you constantly have to fight off doubts.
The ugly: - lots of life detail more for people who are into Charlamagne, I wasn't particularly interested in all of his exploits, more for his fans - there's something that annoys me with all this 'you got to be an entrepreneur' stuff, something that's also common in science and medicine - a complete ignorance of one's own mental health. Charlamagne writes about how sleep is the most important thing, but then goes into how you technically have 168 hours per week to pursue your passions, you just have to cut back on a lot of stuff, where he describes how most of the time he gets up at 3:45am to work on the morning radio, then has various meetings and other tapings, and goes to sleep at 23:00. That's 4:45 hours of sleep, bit more than half of what I need, I can't see how that's healthy. Scientists and doctors have a similar thing going where they think that they have to pull the most out of the hours allotted to them per week, which never goes well (why do you think burnout is so common in medicine?). Charlamagne does not mention burnout or mental health which I personally think is dangerous to ignore.
The fun: - It made me realise a parallel between 'nerd culture' and 'hip hop culture' - the dumb, edgy, misspelled 'name' you give yourself when you're 14 have to stick with you for the rest of your life, how else would people recognise who you are? Changing your name would be like replacing your entire body with a different one. Signed: your reviewer, drsnuggles....more
Personal, uniquely structured biography of Baruch Spinoza, with a strong focus on the history and situation of
Reality is ontologically enriched logic.
Personal, uniquely structured biography of Baruch Spinoza, with a strong focus on the history and situation of Jewish life around Baruch at the time of his birth, and how that unique culture influenced his thought. It doesn't directly work as an introduction to Spinoza's thought (even though the later quarter of the book tries to make up for that), but I don't think that's the focus, a lot of the book looks at the author's own experiences with Spinoza, what her conservative Jewish school teacher was (mis-)teaching, and so on.
There's a lot in Spinoza's thought that speaks to me, look at this:
because, having stood beside oneself and viewed the world as it is, unwarped by one’s identity within it, one will understand that there is nothing of special significance about one’s own endeavor to persist and flourish that doesn’t pertain to others’ same endeavors. One will therefore, simply as a matter of reason, want for others precisely what one wants for oneself. “The good which everyman, who follows after virtue, desires for himself he will also desire for other men, and so much the more, in proportion as he has a greater knowledge of God.”
or this one:
But it is the responsibility of each person to increase his own understanding. It is the most profound responsibility that we have, as even the rabbis, in their confused way, had perceived, equating a man’s moral progress with his intellectual progress.
(I should add that Spinoza's concept of God is different from a bearded guy in the sky, it's more like an unknowable entity of which all of reality is a subset, a bit similar to Fromm's highest form of religion described in The Art of LovingThe Art of Loving). It's a wonderful concept; reality is always explainable, only your rationality can bring you closer to happiness and, in a way, God....more
The first time I read this book I was doing my undergrad - about ten years ago, given to me by a girlfriend at that time. I should've read this closerThe first time I read this book I was doing my undergrad - about ten years ago, given to me by a girlfriend at that time. I should've read this closer.
Anyway, the central thesis is that love is something very different from what popular/current culture tells you it is. It's not infatuation with a person (even thought his definition encompasses this), it's an attitude, the way a person relates to the world. It's a far cry from the weird American cover which makes it look like a self-help book, it's not really that - it's interpretative psychoanalysis in same vein as Freud, very little data, lots of art (a similar and also great book is The Denial of Death). Some things I would like to stuff into a time machine to younger me ('Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.'), some other stuff is clearly a product of the 50s (to him, homosexuals are incapable of true love - transsexuals don't even exist - gender roles are pretty strict, with maternal love (a caring love) and paternal love (a teaching and directing love) being different and being only available to their respective gender).
As it was popular back then it's closer to philosophy than to psychology - he often uses Freud's teachings about love and sexuality as starting points for his own philosophy on love. I wouldn't say it's required, but it's definitely recommended reading - some points fall too short and are underdiscussed, I'm hoping The Sane Society will be more in-depth.
P.S.: Bonus quote:
I should add here that just as it is important to avoid trivial conversation, it is important to avoid bad company. By bad company I do not refer only to people who are vicious and destructive; one should avoid their company because their orbit is poisonous and depressing. I mean also the company of zombies, of people whose soul is dead, although their body is alive; of people whose thoughts and conversation are trivial; who chatter instead of talk, and who assert cliche opinions instead of thinking.
I used to have this mid-2000s Peugeot 308 and before that I had a Ford Festiva which was an absolute lemon, I paid $1300 for it and it pretty much immI used to have this mid-2000s Peugeot 308 and before that I had a Ford Festiva which was an absolute lemon, I paid $1300 for it and it pretty much immediately broke down. I had a mobile mechanic who I deeply admired who worked on both of these things: the Festiva was a joy to fix even though it was an absolute lemon, the Peugeot was just a nightmare. The glue from the headliner dissolved and the whole lining came down (pro-tip: Spotlight has twist pins for 8 dollars a pack). To just switch a burned-out front light you had to practically break your hand to get to the bulb. To quote my mechanic: 'designed on the computer, not in the workshop.'
That's the space where Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft sits: a treatise on the value of manual work.
You'd think I would love this book, and there's much to love: there's a great discussion of how we ignore tacit knowledge, knowledge we cannot easily communicate to others. The specific vibe of a car engine that you can only get from experience. Feyerabend mentions this problem in The Tyranny of Science, too. And Feyerabend was always right. The discussion on learning and understanding through physical manipulation raises great points, too; thus my hatred for the Peugeot. The designer did not physically manipulate an engine in a while. Or the discussion on stochastic arts, arts/crafts where you did not design the system you're trying to manipulate, so outcomes are hard to predict and often random.
But what is it with motorcycles and confusing philosophical tractates? Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values is also about motorcycle repairing, and is also all over the shop. Crawford has a long negative but imho cliched discussion of company culture that goes nowhere. The attitudes to manual labor becomes mythologising? aggrandising? mythical? It's just manual labour! I've done it too! yes there's fulfilment but it's not a special thing! The discussion on male rituals is weirdly bro-y. I can understand why software engineers like this book as it evaluates their exclusionary idea of 'craft' - "we're the craft guys, locals only". Judgmental.
Or is it because I live in Australia? Every tradie here far out-earns me, and your sparkies, brickies, chippies, plumbers etc. are staples of society. There's no need to sing the praise of tradies as they already have all the nice utes.
Two things I'd recommend reading instead: Start with C. S. Lewis' The Inner Ring. It's life-advice on people who spent their lives on trying to get into the in-crowd but there's a great point in there on craft.
Then read Cat Hick's On Craft, who makes my above point far better: 'craft as communication and collaboration and creation, versus craft as weapon. Craft as fixing a table for everyone who will sit at it later versus craft as judging whose work gets to be seen as authentic and skilled.' (and I guess that's why negative IT people like this book so much: 'craft as judging') ...more
Alternative alternative title: How to be a functioning adult, for programmers
This has very little to do with "sAlternative title: How I got where I am
Alternative alternative title: How to be a functioning adult, for programmers
This has very little to do with "soft skills" the way I'm used to the term. In my head, soft skills means social skills, and I thought I'd get something like Emotional Intelligence. What this actually is is a collection of ~70 blog-post length articles on practically everything the author did to become a successful programmer:
The reality of the situation, though, is that everything that’s worthwhile comes as a result of hard work. In life, and especially in your software development career, you have to learn how to sit down and do the work you don’t want to do—and do it consistently—if you really want to see results.
The chapters are very uneven, there's useful stuff on how to plan work, which techniques to use, how to make long-term plans for your programming career, then less interesting chapters - for example, how to handle your finances is a bit too US-specific - he focuses on real estate investment, I can't even buy a house in Australia; or chapters on fitness, etc. - still, sometimes there's some valuable advice for younger people (like the above quote, "fake it till you make it" etc.).
I'm aware I'm not the target audience (I earn less than the average US programmer, and when I look at house prices I laughcry), but I think young programmers just towards the end of their studies would benefit greatly from some of the advice here.
Autobiographical book by a guy who's trained and studied all his life, nearly became a writer, then chosealternative title: "How the upper class dies"
Autobiographical book by a guy who's trained and studied all his life, nearly became a writer, then chose to become a doctor instead (that's what happens when you come from a family of medical doctors), and is diagnosed with cancer at the end of his training. Torschlusspanik [1] sets in and he has to write that one book he always wanted to write. It's partially an autobiography of his training, a hymn to his wife, and a bit on patient-doctor relationship.
Sometimes it's way too pretentious for its own good, lots of classical lit, lots of poetry quotes, lots of namedropping - who on earth reads Wittgenstein to a newborn?? - and sometimes it's too sentimental and just straight-up walks into Tuesdays with Morrie territory. It is not an ugly death - for that the family is too well-trained in medicine to "fight" ultimately senseless fights, too well-acquainted with death to cause a fuss, too rich to die in a dump, too well-connected to suffer bad doctors.
The last chapter written by the wife after his death is probably the best - still, I wouldn't recommend it, not much new, not that interesting [2]. Would make a good book for Oprah's Book Club.
I can guarantee you that yours and my death will be much worse than what is described here. Here there is no constant vomiting, no blood, no mucus, no week-long screaming from the pain. Death is too clean, like the book itself.
[1] One of the best words we have in German - literally "gate closing panic", it usually denotes a woman who starts to behave unusual once she realises that her child-bearing age window is closing, but it can be used to describe everyone who starts to behave unusual once time starts to run out
[2] It feels extremely mean to write that about a guy's work who has just died...more
A large collection of more than a thousand aphorisms (and a few poems and dialogues) split up into two books. The first book is split up by theme (morA large collection of more than a thousand aphorisms (and a few poems and dialogues) split up into two books. The first book is split up by theme (morality, religion, the state, women etc.) - the second book is more loosely structured. You get a ton of thoughts ranging from a few sentences to a few pages; the best part being that you can see how cleanly Nietzsche develops a thought over a few inter-connected aphorism (and then comes back to it later, only to refute it). It's like reading through Nietzsche's process of thought.
You can see that there's almost ten years between both books; the second half is more mature, has less jokes, but is sometimes more cryptic and harder to interpret, but still, much more enjoyable.
There are some recurring themes that are worth going through -
1) The dream of Europe. Quite often he praises the European idea, of having many nations come together as "cantons" into one network of states. To him Europe has a specific goal and task:
Desshalb muss jetzt ein Jeder, der gut europäisch gesinnt ist, gut und immer besser schreiben lernen: es hilft Nichts, und wenn er selbst in Deutschland geboren ist, wo man das schlecht-Schreiben als nationales Vorrecht behandelt. Besser schreiben aber heisst zugleich auch besser denken; immer Mittheilenswertheres erfinden und es wirklich mittheilen können; übersetzbar werden für die Sprachen der Nachbarn; zugänglich sich dem Verständnisse jener Ausländer machen, welche unsere Sprache lernen; dahin wirken, dass alles Gute Gemeingut werde und den Freien Alles frei stehe; endlich, jenen jetzt noch so fernen Zustand der Dinge vorbereiten, wo den guten Europäern ihre grosse Aufgabe in die Hände fällt: die Leitung und Ueberwachung der gesammten Erdcultur.
Translation:
That's why anybody who's European-minded has to learn to write well and always better - it doesn't help when he's born in Germany, where "bad-writing" is treated as national privilege. To write better means to think better; to come up with things worthy of communication, and to communicate them; to become translatable for the languages of the neighbors; to become accessible to those foreigners who learn our language; work towards that all good becomes common good and that the free are free to everything; finally, to prepare this now so distant state of affairs, where the good Europeans have their grand task at hand: the management and supervision of earth's culture.
You'd like to see that in the EU, wouldn't you? So far all we've done is to misinterpret "supervision of earth's culture" as "let's start Five Eyes, build Echelon and spy on everybody"
2) Critical thought - you should change your opinions, you shouldn't trust anyone, you should be critical towards every thought. You change your clothes regularly, so why don't you do the same with your opinions?
3) There's a very smart part about how much of a self-defeating thing it is that countries are keeping armies "solely for defense purposes", as that implies that only the neighbors are the "bad" guys and oneself has nothing but "good" thoughts, culminating in:
Lieber zu Grunde gehen, als hassen und fürchten, und zweimal lieber zu Grunde gehen, als sich hassen und fürchten machen, — diess muss einmal auch die oberste Maxime jeder einzelnen staatlichen Gesellschaft werden!
Rough translation:
It's better to collapse than to hate and fear, and it's better to collapse twice than to make yourself hated and feared - some day this has to be the topmost maxim of every society!
I'm reminded of the recent reactions to Daesh.
4) On e-mails:
Der Brief ist ein unangemeldeter Besuch, der Briefbote der Vermittler unhöflicher Ueberfälle. Man sollte alle acht Tage eine Stunde zum Briefempfangen haben und darnach ein Bad nehmen.
Transl.
The letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of a rude invasion. Every 8 days you should have an hour to receive letters and then you should take a bath.
5) On gender there's quite a lot of outdated thought but at least he "saves himself" by stating that this is due to the state of society and not due to some inherent difference:
Man kann in den drei oder vier civilisirten Ländern Europa’s aus den Frauen durch einige Jahrhunderte von Erziehung Alles machen, was man will, selbst Männer, freilich nicht in geschlechtlichem Sinne, aber doch in jedem anderen Sinne.
In the three or four civilized countries Europe's you can use education to make anything out of women in a few centuries, even men, of course not in the biological/bodily sense, but in any other sense.
6) The Greeks, Goethe, and arts - Nietzsche has some very strong opinions on art, and sees the Greeks as the biggest humans who ever lived, with only Goethe having come close to their genius ("Goethe was above the Germans and still is above them - he will never belong to them")
Of course you don't have to agree with anything he states (and a lot of it is outdated and sometimes weird) but it's still a wealth of information to learn, and I assume a good starting point to Nietzsche's thought in general, or as a manual on "how to structure your thoughts"....more
Nothing much happens - an old couple and their adult daughter live together in some kind of counter-protecting dependency in a small village in HungarNothing much happens - an old couple and their adult daughter live together in some kind of counter-protecting dependency in a small village in Hungary in the year 1899. Each side is trying to protect the other from realizing that their lives never really started. The daughter, for the first time ever, visits distant relatives, and in that one week the stalemate evaporates.
What happens here in so little story is psychologically so well-drawn, and so finely structured - if you've ever walked past a house with the lights on and voices coming from inside and you've felt nothing but sadness and thought "is this it?", then this book is for you....more
Sometimes to procrastinate, I browse Hacker News - a news community designed by Y Combinator, one of the big US startup hubs. As such, the community hSometimes to procrastinate, I browse Hacker News - a news community designed by Y Combinator, one of the big US startup hubs. As such, the community has developed into an almost religious cult-like thing around the "start-up life": "why don't you work 22 hours a day, why don't you sleep under your desk, you have to pivot/disrupt/boot-strap/pitch/iterate/, why don't you follow our hero Zuckerberg/pg/Thiel, you have to become great now" and more boring platitudes. The religious nature comes out in often-used terms like "angel investor" ( = someone who wastes their rich parents' money on an overvalued team, i.e., fantasy football with programmers).
Often a extreme fear of death comes out in these interviews and texts, now culminating in money not being focused on useless mobile apps, but on medical companies that treat death as a disease in the hopes of reversing or postponing your eventual demise (see for example here).
This is where The Denial of Death comes in. Becker summarizes Otto Rank's life work into a straightforward chain of argument, which goes a little bit like this:
1. Man has a natural urge to heroism, someone who needs to justify their own existence as an object of value - this is due to his "evolutionary and organismic constitution" (nice hand-waving there).
2. Man is also the only animal that knows he is nothing but "food for worms", one slip in the shower and you're done for.
3. This creates an inner conflict as you have the "God-like" inner heroism and the outer shell of a sickly creature, and both these points collide in your existence.
4. The job of a child is to come to terms with this conflict by more or less learning to repress, and all adults have more or less repressed this conflict. This repression is in everyone, is healthy and expected. Only when you can't handle the repression or when it becomes too extreme do you run into problems with your existence - Becker/Rank discuss this with the example of artists and "great", but problematic men like Freud.
5. Along with the fear of death comes the fear of "too much life", when you know so much about your condition that it becomes too hard to bear:
Once you accept the truly desperate situation that man is in, you come to see not only that neurosis is normal, but that even psychotic failure represents only a little additional push in the routine stumbling along life's way. If repression makes an untenable life liveable, self-knowledge can entirely destroy it for some people.
6. Can we escape this dilemma? No. One solution to handle it better is to become a Kierkegaard-ian "knight of faith", someone who has given the meaning of his/her life over to the creator (whoever/whatever that may be), someone who accepts death and life by becoming part of a bigger system. Unlike the "gurus" of psychotherapy, of religion etc. (there's a nice, negative discussion of the overlap of 70s psychotherapy and religious movements), there is nothing you can do to fix or to transcend the conflict in your existence. "Men are doomed to live in an overwhelmingly tragic and demonic world."
He does make a fun case that Christianity (the idealized Christianity, not the power-structure with its own mountain of problems) has found a nice way to "sidestep" these problems:
This is the most remarkable achievement of the Christian world picture: that it could take slaves, cripples, imbeciles, the simple and the mighty, and make them all secure heroes, simply by taking a step back from the world into another dimension of things, the dimension called heaven. Or we might better say that Christianity took creature consciousness - the thing man most wanted to deny - and made it the very condition for his cosmic heroism.
All of these arguments are straight out of the tradition of psycho-analysis; lots of interpretation, little supporting data. When Becker/Rank try to "update" Freud's ideas on transference by saying it's not the oedipal conflict of the child, but the fear of either death or of too much living, then you can't help but wonder if they're just trying to replace "unprovable, logically sounding chain of arguments nr. 1" with "unprovable, logically sounding chain of arguments nr. 2".
The problems of pure interpretation become apparent in the last chapter when Becker tries to apply the above points on many mental diseases, and here scientific knowledge has long surpassed his points, and he (as he acknowledges) extremely oversimplifies. He says that depression is "just" a inability to cope with their fear of life and death, but by now we know that depression is caused by a whole spectrum of causes, from genetic predisposition, prolonged substance abuse, broken neuro-transmitters, vulnerability factors, social isolation etc. pp. Please, don't go up to people with mental illness and try to explain their illness with these 40 years old ideas.
My above points on "start up culture" can be interpreted from this chain of arguments - you have people who are aware of their death, but instead of repressing it or becoming part of something bigger than them, they fight death, something that's (according to Becker/Rank) not fight-able. Their example: If you live to 900 years instead of 90, then each accident becomes so much more grave, the fear of life becomes more extreme. Let's say you're supposed to die at 900, but you have a car accident and die at 80 - that means you "lost" 820 years. If you're supposed to die at 90 and you die at 80, you've lost "only" 10 years. What will happen is that people will worship security too much as each accident's impact will become extreme.
Bonus-quote:
Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism's comfort and expansiveness.
Recommended for: People who like to think about their lives.
Not recommended for: People who can't read critically, or who immediately model their lives after everything they read. These ideas are fun to entertain, but it would be unwise to immediately accept them....more
Easily one of the more unique books I've read in my life. It could easily have been a shorter, drier treatise of a philosophy on how to live, approachEasily one of the more unique books I've read in my life. It could easily have been a shorter, drier treatise of a philosophy on how to live, approaching many "solutions" only to reject them - but Lindsay buried that in a strange, meandering, sometimes boring story of a man from earth traveling a distant and strange planet in five days, losing his bodily shape, gaining limbs, interacting with people of various countries and dispositions, absorbing people, killing people, being mind-controlled, meeting various gods or demiurges, etc. pp.
It's certainly not an easy book - not easy to read, not easy to interpret - but I think you owe it to yourself to give this a chance....more
James (who I'd never heard of before) summarizes a lifetime of reading, and note-taking, and it's essay-sized fireworks for 800+ pagesOh, what a book.
James (who I'd never heard of before) summarizes a lifetime of reading, and note-taking, and it's essay-sized fireworks for 800+ pages. He usually starts off with a mini-biography of the essay's namesake, only then to go wherever the links take him - reading these essays feels like talking to someone who's in love with his work. 'This guy wrote some of the greatest essays ever, oh by the way if you like him there's this half-forgotten contemporary artist whose arias you should listen to, did I tell you I once met his cousin and we had the most wonderful discussion of Aristotle?' - this breathless love is how most of the essays are structured.
The essays are ordered alphabetically, James writes that this order is arbitrary, yet I can't help but think that it's no coincidence that the book ends with the essay on Stefan Zweig. The Austrian Kaffeehaus-culture of liberal humanism under the roof of the arts is one of the major themes of all essays. The destruction of the Austrian culture by the Austria's Anschluß (the word Anschluß appears at least 50 times) and the scattering of Paris' intellectuals during the German invasion, is heavily implied to be the worst thing to have happened to the European intellectual life in the last 100 years, and most of the essays focus on that particular group of people. It's a joy to read his takedown of Sartre, and his love for such greats as Polar, Camus, Chamfort, Croce, Kafka, Friedell, Reich-Ranicki (as a German, that made me happy) is gigantic and jumps off the pages, infecting you. I've underlined so many books, it's going to be a minor chore to add them to my to-read shelf.
Luckily, James is also a funny writer:
Lysenko preached the kind of biological theories that Stalin could understand: i.e., they were poppycock.
Some of the essays are rather strange, in these, James just goes off the track too far. The essay on Sophie Scholl quickly morphs into one about Natalie Portman (and Portman gets way more pages, weirdly enough), the essay on Charlie Chaplin immediately turns into a lacklustre discussion of art vs. science (and I've read better things about that particular 'conflict'), one essay is a bit about how the 'degeneration' of English is bad: as a biologist, I firmly believe that people who hold beliefs like that would have stood on shore while the first reptile crawled on land, telling the reptile to 'stop degenerating'. The essay on Heinrich Heine is just an overlong negative rant about autograph seekers.
The worst essay is also the most Australian one, in which he rants for pages on pages on how the Afghani asylum seekers on board the Tampa bound to Australia in 2001 are just 'illegal immigrants' and 'queue jumpers', who should have just stayed in their home country until their application would have been accepted. It's especially worse because James, at that point, has spent 400 pages being in love with WW2-era intellectuals who've done nothing but 'jump queues' when they've escaped their home-country - can you imagine Einstein just sitting in Germany while the Gestapo is kicking down doors, waiting for his letter of invitation? Thomas Mann, too, was allowed into the USA without any papers, and Czechoslovakia even offered him citizenship so that he could formally immigrate.
Sometimes, his own character comes through too much, I think this is best exemplified by this sentence:
When filming in Rome, I had a jacket made by the celebrated tailor Littrico, and found out that I had the same measurements as Gorbachev: they were on file in Littrico's office.
To which I can only say: so what?
But these Rohrkrepierer-essays are in the tiny minority. I'd love to see a book like this on the life and work of scientists (if I remember correctly, only one of the 'good' essays has to do with science).
Recommended for: People who can't get enough stuff into their brain.
Not recommended for: People who, if they go on travelling to a beautiful country, get angry if there's a detour. ...more
tl;dr: Classic philosophy, mixed with old-people-opinions
This is really good if you want to have a primer into Stoicism - the writing in these letterstl;dr: Classic philosophy, mixed with old-people-opinions
This is really good if you want to have a primer into Stoicism - the writing in these letters is straightforward, each letter handles two or three themes and is usually only a couple of pages long.
The annoying parts are Seneca's old-people-opinions, some of which are:
1. People who stay up all night are terrible 2. 'For it is silly [.] to spend one's time exercising the biceps' 3. Popular styles are terrible: 'It's object is to sway a mass audience' 4. Everything was better in the past and the present is bad ('The earth herself, untilled, was more productive, her yields being more than ample for the needs of peoples who did not raid each other.' etc. pp. - the same arguments 2000 years later repeated in the terrible Ishmael)
But, to quote the man,
We should hunt out the helpful pieces of teaching, and the spirited and noble-minded sayings which are capable of immediate practical application [..] and learn them so well that words become works.
And of these 'helpful pieces of teaching' the letters are chock-full.
Bonus best quote:
Lucius Piso was drunk from the very moment of his appointment as Warden of the City of Rome.
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