A few years back, I got a book from my sister Kristen for Christmas. The book is called "The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today" and it is by Martin Seymour-Smith (MSS from now on); copyright 1998. While pretending to love the gift for the sake of decorum, I silently dismissed the book, at the time, as a banal supermarket volume that would have valueless and cute summaries of things I'd already been force-fed in high school. I didn't touch it for several years. Now, about 3 years after the initial gift-giving, I am realizing that I could not have been further from the mark (sorry Kristen). MSS provides 2 - 4 page descriptions of varying important texts, focusing on the contexts of the works as well as the lives and thoughts of the writers themselves. It reads like a kind of print Wikipedia. MSS ingulges in frequent tangents wherein he lambastes modern-day beurocracy, lazy academics and basically all orthodox religions as they are now practiced - as his points here seem sound, this is more amusing than distracting. He never shies away from passing strong judgment on the authors he describes or on certain of their contemporaries. Despite this extra, perhaps unnecessary flair, the meat and potatoes of the book is well in place and I am very grateful for the wide-ranging scope of information that MSS has put together for this volume. Here are some snippets of the text for those of you interested:
*on the I Ching (c. 1500 B.C.E.)
it's pronounced "Yee Jing" and it's usually translated as "Book of Changes". The book contains number combinations which are read and said to "contain the answers for everything". It's a kind of divination tool which has held influence in China from the time of its writing to the present day.
- "The importance - and influence - of the I Ching, whose true origins remain shrouded in mystery, stems from its being one of the earlist efforts of the human mind to find its place in the universe ... it was preceded - and generated - in China by the very early theory of "yang" and "yin". Yang originally meant sunshine, whereas yin implied the absence of heat and light. The two antithetical principles came to be regarded as cosmic forces: masculinity/femininity, heat/cold, brightness/darkness, dryness/wetness, hardness/softness, and so forth. The Chinese saw the tension set up by two phenomena as having brought forth the universe itself. The legendary Fu Hsi, emperor of China, is supposed to have invented the eight basic trigrams - sets of three lines, broken and unbroken-which form the basis of the I Ching. Any two of these trigrams will combine into sixty-four hexagrams. The original text of the I Ching consisted of accounts of the symbolic meanings of each of these hexagrams. Even as we know them they are still cryptic and laconic."
*on The Old Testament (c. 1500 B.C.E.)
"Jesus Christ was ... in all probability a gnostic ..." [The early Christian Church set itself up against gnosticism and] "drew, ruthlessly, upon the monotheism of the Jewish religion as expressed in The Old Testament, and ....on astralist tendencies in the very Greek world which it sought to convert"
(i.e. the Christian Church quickly became very scary, and very unlike Christ, from about 200 C.E. onwards!)
******
here's an example of an enjoyable tangent appearing in an entry on Homer and his Illiad / Odyssey: "Politics (wonderfully ingenuous and, like most human enterprises at their inception, such as money, a good idea - but now at their last gasp, and practiced only by polite psychopaths and their too willing victims) ..."
******
* on The Avesta (c. 500 B.C.E.)
The Avesta is the volume which lays out the thinking of the religion Zarathustrianism which would turn into Zoroastrianism, "the oldest of the monotheistic religions". Zoroaster, "legendarily the only infant ever to have laughted at birth," was a "priest, poet, seer and prophet of the steppes of eastern Iran [and a] reformer of the polytheistic religion into which he was brought up." His thought is the basis of The Avesta.
- "Zoroaster's theology is ... thus: The god Ahura Mazda ("Lord Wisdom") is an eternal uncreated (i.e. has always been in existence) ... being of the utmost good, who created the universe, which is also good. Opposing him, and also uncreated and original - in other words, until then and indeed now in human time, co-eternal - is the unequivocally evil Angra Mainyu ...The duty of humanity, but a duty which each person must choose in heart - not by rote - is to aid Ahura Mazda against Angra Mainyu."
- "Zoroaster ... claimed to have received his teaching directly from Ahura Mazda, his personal friend ... and optimistically preached that time would end with the victory of good. He thus first contributed the notion of eschatology - last things, the end of the world - to religious thought."
- Free will is stressed in Zarathustrianism and the thinking in this religion - ideas of Heaven and Hell, death and resurrection and doctrines on the nature of evil especially - heavily influenced the Jews, Christians and Muslims
* on Desiderius Erasmus and his In Praise of Folly (1509)
Erasmus was a contemporary of Martin Luther and is said to have paved the way for the Reformation. He was a priest, though he had little interest in organized religion. He turned to writing satires on ignorance and against war and, though he never left the church, was highly critical of it. "He was essentially an imaginative writer...a writer who wanted, by his works, to make the world into a kinder and gentler place."
- "Erasmus was popular in his own time. He wrote, essentially, for enlightened men like himself who felt themselves powerless to prevent the folly perpetrated by those with more direct influence upon events ...[he has been called] "overintellectual when a form of intellectuality, superior learning, was his only weapon in a world which not only banned (all Erasmus's works were several times banned by the Church he refused to leave) but burned his work. The spirit of the age was that of Luther and Calvin rather than of humane letters, and he wrote to bring into focus what resistance there was to their violent dogmatism. There was much of this resistance, but it had little effect at the time."
- Erasmus's In Praise of Folly focuses on "human diversity and vitality". "It is a tribute to vitality, to honest and natural feeling, to instinct, to energy, to simplicity, to - above all - Christ as Fool. It is even a tribute to irresponsibility ... As Erasmus writes in it, 'This much is certain: without a little folly, no party is any fun.'"
* on Miguel Cervantes and his Don Quixote (part I, 1605; part II, 1615)
Cervantes "joined the Spanish legion in Italy; in 1571 he found himself at the Battle of Lepanto ... [where he] was twice wounded in the chest - and permanently lost the use of his left hand." In 1575 he was returning back to Spain from Naples, having completed his service, when he was captured by pirates. He was imprisoned until 1580, though he tried to escape several times in the interim. "He started to write during those dreary five years of imprisonment, mainly plays to entertain his fellow captives. A couple of these, out of many he wrote, have survived and were published long after his death. They are quite unremarkable - as unremarkable as the poetry he tried but always failed to write throughout his life. Perhaps it was his lack of capacity to write great poetry, his frustrated yearning to discover the magical language in which to do so ... that contributed to the astonishing universality - indeed, to the undeniable poetry - of Don Quixote. Most of those who feel rejected by poetry but do not try to manufacture it, become the most invaluable readers of it; Cervantes took a different course."
* on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and his Works (1663-1716)
- "He was the first writer to introduce the notion of the unconscious"
- "The ordinary educated man or woman is perhaps less likely to be able to say anything much about him ... than about any other figure of a similar degree of eminence"
- "Leibniz was perhaps the last "universal man" of the Renaissance type. A supreme polymath, he was a mathematician, scientist, lawyer, diplomat, engineer, historian, courtier, librarian, and inventor (of the first calculation machine that could extract roots, a great improvement on that of Pascal) He was also a poet, but a bad and exceptionally conventional one ... He was a very public figure, described by George I of England as a 'walking encyclopedia'. He was a prodigy who attended college at fourteen. In 1669 he entered into the service of the elector of Mainz, then, in 1672, always devoted ... to the notion of international peace, he traveled to Paris to try to persuade Lous XIV to expel the Turks from Egypt in order to distract his attention from marching on Holland (this ploy did not work) ..."
- "Leibniz's definition of reality - that it consists of a number of nonmaterial monads (this meant to him: the smallest possible entity that is a unity, the simplest possible unit of energy), absolutely independent of one another - is one of the three important accounts of reality of the seventeenth century; that it is by far the oddest should not deter us from acknowledging this ..."
- "When Leibniz died, feeling miserable and unfulfilled, plagued with gout, and under secret surveillance, not a single person from the court of Hanover was present at his funeral. He had been avaricious, multifariously active, accessible, power-loving and the greatest intellect of his time with the exception of Newton. He never married ... and it is said that after he proposed at the age of fifty he withdrew his proposal 'before it was too late'. He was not 'smooth,' charming, or 'nice,' but relied on his eminence and indeed on his 'greatness' to get by socially. Had it not been for his irresistible influence he would hardly have atttrracted the attention of posterity ... He died lonely, and he is neglected as a person even today. Biographies of him are grim affairs."
No comments:
Post a Comment