In the footsteps of fellow virtuecrats such as William Bennett and Michael Lewis, another ringing defense of the obvious. Few will dispute Carter's (The Culture of Disbelief, 1993, etc.) passionate assertion that integrity is a good thing. He is also in favor of honesty, civility, and democracy (and by extension, Mom and apple pie). Integrity, in his conception of it, is a kind of Åber-virtue, for it involves, ``discerning what is right and what is wrong [and] acting on what you have discerned, even at personal cost.'' To make sure everyone knows that you have integrity, you should also announce ``that you are acting on your understanding of right from wrong.'' Carter is aware of all the traditional problems with integrity (doesn't a fanatical Nazi have integrity?), and in his legalistic way, the Yale law professor enunciates a series of carefully couched codicils designed to close off such immoral loopholes. But as is the case with many legal arguments, these are not so much convincing as they are clever. Carter's understanding of integrity is also both too wide and too shallow. Trying to fluff his simple thesis to book length, he covers in excessive detail such trivialities as sportsmanship and college recommendations. He is also, for a moralist, startlingly parochial. His eight-principle program for improving democracy (apart from ranging far beyond integrity) has limited application. Most of his examples are narrowly American-focused, and some are so current as to be meaningless. His thoughts on American involvement in Bosnia, for example, are already out of date. While he gives obeisance to Aristotle and Locke, he also avoids much of the major philosophical work on integrity. Carter has a supple mind and readable style, but these are overwhelmed by the overinflated and underrealized material. ($50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: March 13, 1996
ISBN: 0-465-03466-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
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
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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