An occasionally tedious but concise and well-researched overview.
A brief philosophy of irreligion for general readers, with a roll call of notable male atheists since antiquity.
Gray (The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom, 2015, etc.) has had it with what passes for atheism these days. Following his own schema of seven thematic types, each chapter gives an overview of historical trends in godless thinking, focusing on a few famous figures for closer inspection. Gray spoils any chance of a big reveal by admitting that only two of the seven types are worth our time. He does reveal his rhetorical motivation: not persuading others to abandon their bad faith in God but instead urging them to denounce and eradicate the “secular humanism that all evangelical atheists promote today.” He faults this “new atheism” with underestimating the function of religious faith to the human psyche and, more alarmingly, with swapping belief in God for a suspiciously theistic devotion to flawed societal constructs like politics, human progress, and science. Citing the destructive potential of modern "political religions" like Bolshevism, the author remains skeptical that universal liberty is best for the future of humanity, claiming, “like Christianity, liberal values came into the world by chance.” Gray spends some quality time with great literary atheists and intellects including Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Conrad, but he reserves most respect for God-denying, life-affirming thinkers like George Santayana as well as for the strand of “mystical atheism” inspired by the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer. Gray’s favorite type of atheism seeks out silence, meditation, and other rapturous states of being while insisting on the incomprehensibility of anything like a creator-god in control of human destiny. This tradition the author likens to apophatic theology like that practiced by Meister Eckhart, whereby no positive statements can describe the divine because it necessarily surpasses the bounds of human conception. With his openly partisan stance as his caveat emptor, Gray intends his capsule histories and philosophies to provoke dialogue among atheists, people of faith, and everybody else.
An occasionally tedious but concise and well-researched overview.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-26109-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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