Read the whole review.Book Review: The Philosopher And The Wolf - Lessons in Love, Death, and Happiness by Mark Rowlands
Written by Dan Schneider
Published December 16, 2008Philosopher Mark Rowlands is not what one would classically think of as a great writer, in that his prose is not supernally poetic like Loren Eiseley’s, he does not use easily understood but well-targeted metaphors like Stephen Jay Gould, nor does he have the raw power that Friedrich Nietszche did. But he manages to convey highly nuanced and deep concepts in remarkably simple sentences and constructs as he grounds each seemingly pedestrian sentence with its neighbor in ways that crescendo.
Such was my conclusion in reading his latest book, The Philosopher And The Wolf, put out by Granta books. I’d first encountered Rowlands whilst reading his delightful trip through pop culture, called The Philosopher At The End Of The Universe, a book that melded big budget sci fi film ideas with old time big questions. Later, I interviewed Rowlands, and first found out a bit about his relationship with wolves, or one wolf in particular. Now, I’ve read the book, and can report that it is a great book, indeed. And anyone who has read my reviews of books, poetry, films, and pop culturata, knows I do not toss about the G word lightly.
Here is another review of the same book, just for a little perspective.
John GrayRead the whole review. YES! This sounds like an amazing book, one that is now on my Amazon wish list. Too bad it won't be published until April.
THE NATURE OF THE BEAST
The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness
By Mark Rowlands (Granta Books 246pp £15.99)
Exclusive from the Literary Review print edition. Subscribe now!
The idea that when humans are at their worst they behave like wolves has been around a long time. Hobbes used the Latin tag homo homini lupus - man is a wolf to man - to illustrate his belief that unless they are restrained by government, people prey upon one another ruthlessly, while descriptions of rapacious or amoral behaviour as wolfish can be found throughout literature. The notion that evil is the expression of bestial instincts is deeply ingrained, and for the average philosopher as for the average person there is nothing more bestial than the wolf. More generally, a belief in the innate superiority of humans over other animals is part of the Western tradition. Christians tell us that only humans have souls, and though they speak in a different language secular thinkers mostly believe much the same. There are innumerable secular rationalists who, while congratulating themselves on their scepticism, never doubt that the universe is improved by the presence in it of humans like themselves.
The Philosopher and the Wolf is a powerfully subversive critique of the unexamined assumptions that shape the way most philosophers - along with most people - think about animals and themselves. When Rowlands bought a wolf cub for $500, and lived with it for eleven years, he ended up writing: 'Much of what I learned, about how to live and how to conduct myself, I learned during those eleven years. Much of what I know about life and its meaning I learned from him. What it is to be human: I learned this from a wolf.' A part of Rowlands's life with Brenin was sheer delight: 'The wolf is art of the highest form and you cannot be in its presence without this lifting your spirits.' Beyond its beauty, though, the wolf taught the philosopher something about the meaning of happiness. Humans tend to think of their lives as progressing towards some kind of eventual fulfilment; when this is not forthcoming they seek satisfaction or distraction in anything that is new or different. This human search for happiness is 'regressive and futile', for each valuable moment slips away in the pursuit of others and they are all swallowed up by death. In contrast, living without the sense of time as a line pointing to an end-point, wolves find happiness in the repetition of fulfilling moments, each complete and self-contained. As a result, as Rowlands shows in a moving account of his last year with Brenin, they can flourish in the face of painful illness and encroaching death.
Read the whole review.AMERICAN THERAPY:
The Rise of Psychotherapy in the United States.
By Jonathan Engel. Gotham. 352 pp. $27.50
Psychotherapy has been a series of generally well-intentioned attempts to throw mud against a wall to see what sticks. Over the past century, that method has told us this: Psychotherapy works. Two-thirds of patients improve within six months of starting treatment (longer treatment yields few further results). The therapist’s training and the school or philosophy of therapy in use make little difference. What does matter is the empathy level the patient perceives in the therapist, the patient’s willingness to engage in therapy, the severity of the patient’s illness to begin with, and the appropriateness of match, or treatment alliance, between patient and practitioner.
The pursuit of therapy—if not happiness—is a largely American phenomenon, Jonathan Engel tells us in American Therapy. By the 1960s, the United States had more clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychiatric social workers than the rest of the world combined. “The history of psychotherapy in the United States . . . is a classic American tale of discovery, entrepreneurship, and self-promotion,” writes Engel, a professor of health care policy and management at Baruch College.
For it was in America, in the early 1900s, that Freudianism and psychoanalysis took hold as nowhere else (despite Sigmund Freud’s personal antipathy toward the United States). A therapeutic parade has followed: behaviorism (which views human beings as stimulus-response machines in which only observable, measurable behavior matters); humanistic approaches (which focus on social relationships as the key to wellness); cognitive therapy (which posits that thinking and beliefs drive our behavior and emotions); populist self-help programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous; the largely 1960s-vintage therapies such as electroshock, transcendental meditation, and primal scream (the latter favored, briefly, by John Lennon and Yoko Ono); and so on.
Engel writes, but does not write enough, about the characters who invented these various approaches. These doctors and visionaries were typically brilliant—and many were famously troubled.
The Dreams of Interpretation: A Century down the Royal RoadRead the whole review.
by Catherine Liu, John Mowitt, Thomas Pepper and Jakki Spicer (Editor)
University of Minnesota Press, 2007
Review by Kevin M. PurdayThis is a collection of essays written by psychoanalysts but also by theorists in the areas of culture, film and literature. It is trumpeted as a major re-examination of the legacy of Sigmund Freud. Several of the essays also attempt to combine psychoanalytical and hermeneutic insights and the book as a whole adds up to an attempt to reinforce the notion that Freud -- and especially his The Interpretation of Dreams -- has radically altered the way in which we understand ourselves and express ourselves in our culture.
There is an introduction: "What Are You Doing Tonight?" by Catherine Liu, John Mowitt, Thomas Pepper, and Jakki Spicer and then the essays are grouped under seven headings....
The Watkins Dictionary of SymbolsRead the whole review.
by Jack Tresidder
Watkins, 2008
Review by Rob Harle
Jack Tresidder has undertaken a huge amount of research to compile this comprehensive dictionary of symbols. There are over one thousand entries, in alphabetical order, starting with Acacia (a symbol of immortality) and finishing with Zodiac (a celestial power path).
It is fully cross referenced, so that within the textual explanation of a symbol, words emboldened refer to other symbol entries in the dictionary. In addition to the main dictionary there is an Index of Supplementary Words. These cover real or mythological people, places, events and symbolic themes that are discussed in the main dictionary but do not appear as separate entries.
Symbols are not signs, a sign points to a location for example, whereas a symbol leads beyond itself to different layers of meaning, quite often metaphorical. "Traditional symbols form a visual shorthand for ideas – and yet their functions and meanings extend to much more than that. For thousands of years they have enabled sculptors, painters and craftsmen to embody and reinforce deep thoughts and beliefs about human life in single, immediate and powerful images" (p. x)
Read the whole review.The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy
Brian Leiter and Michael Rosen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2007, 812pp., $155.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199234097.
Reviewed by Pol Vandevelde, Marquette University
This voluminous handbook is a very welcome tool that brings out many fundamental aspects of continental philosophy and puts them in a new light in order to show their importance and relevance. By "continental philosophy" the editors mean primarily the philosophy in France and Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries. The handbook is intended for people who have been trained in the conceptual framework typical of Anglophone departments. This means that the contributors have undertaken to translate into another framework what they take to be the crucial and original points of the continental trends or philosophers they treat. Consequently, contributors have eliminated most jargon specific to authors, have chosen to focus on the aspects they deemed most important, instead of trying to be exhaustive, and have offered a critical account, instead of a general overview.
The contributors were able to do this given the editors’ decision not to present topics like "intentionality" or "phenomenological reduction," but rather themes or theses like "phenomenology as rigorous science" or "the humanism debate." The advantage of this hermeneutic decision is that all these contributions are scholarly essays in the full sense, not surveys, reviews, or general presentations. In addition, these essays are relatively long for a handbook: from 20 to 51 pages. The contributors thus have the space and the freedom to present theses, however controversial some of them may be.
The Book of My Enemy: Collected Verse 1958-2003Read the whole review.
by Clive James (Picador, £8.99)
Angels Over Elsinore: Collected Verse 2003-2008
by Clive James (Picador, £14.99)
I've been reading Clive James since I was in short pants and he was in flares. Back then, it was impossible to predict where he would end up, because he was shooting off in all directions at once like a burning box of fireworks. What couldn't he do?
From 1972 to 1976, James's Observer television columns used riveting language to nail down the ephemera of an entire culture as it moved into a democratic age. It was only after the tapes were wiped that people realised it had been these ephemera that showed you what was happening. He twigged it first. In 1979, his Unreliable Memoirs did to its genre what Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint had just done to the novel. James admitted to flaws and inadequacies that nobody who wrote that well had ever owned up to before: the minor ones; the embarrassing ones. Liberating, brave, Unreliable Memoirs was also hugely influential; Russell Brand's My Booky Wook is its charming but undisciplined bastard child. Then, from 1982, his ITV show Clive James on Television invented the reality TV aesthetic: a celebrity chuckling while ordinary people ate ants to get on television. The ordinary people were Japanese, from imported gameshow clips; but the British, shown it was possible, soon evolved into anteaters.
After the show, he'd go home (reading Tacitus on the tube, in the original), and write a poem about Egon Friedell. James was the barbarian who had travelled to the capital of the old empire and, casually mastering its every art, become more civilised than its natives. He was, and is, an inspiration to younger writers worldwide, whose backwaters lack role models.
In the later volumes of the memoirs, James constantly attacks himself for his selfishness, his ego. But I always used to think that—especially in the novels and poems—he wasn't selfish enough. In looking up to so many writers and thinkers, he put himself down, and thus risked failing to reach the heights of his true potential. I now realise that what I saw as a flaw was in fact his greatest virtue as a poet and essayist.
All through these early and middle years, the essays and poems quietly punctuated the bigger stuff. Now, though, something unexpected is happening. The small stuff is starting to acquire a shape: it turns out to have been a grand, unified project after all. And it is noble; and it is successful. Here, he has achieved greatness. While our attention has been on the big fish—the novels, memoirs, television—the essays and poems have accumulated, year by year, like polyps making coral; until you realise that the most important thing isn't the fish, it's the reef, which makes all else possible.
No comments:
Post a Comment