What’s your personal idea of wisdom and the enlightened life? Are they anywhere near or comparable to those of the 12 of the most notable philosophers through the centuries, namely Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, Seneca, Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Nietzsche?
One good way to find out is to read James Miller’s
Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 432 pages), which elegantly combines short biographies of these renowned philosophers with their respective ideas of wisdom. The book should prove to be pleasant, instructive reading to those who want to learn about the history of philosophy but are intimidated by the wide-ranging, sometimes dense and abstruse writing by these thinkers.
Miller, who teaches politics and liberal studies at the New School for Social Research in New York, explores the lives of the 12 philosophers and shows that they encountered too much trouble and uncertainty in the pursuit of their philosophical ideals, with some of them even turning out to be not all that admirable or convincing. Says Gilbert Taylor in his review of
Examined Lives for Publishers Weekly: “Miller pointedly presents how their mental realms of abstraction, ever buffeted by demands of material or political realities, could agitate contemporaries or provoke posterity to bridle at inconsistencies between words and deeds…”
In “Thinkers in history,” a review of
Examined Lives in its January 27, 2011 issue,
The Economist observes: “If one wanted to compile a charge-sheet against the great philosophers, to show that they were unfit to lead their own lives, let alone inspire others, this book could provide some useful evidence.” It cites, among several other notable inconsistencies between the philosophy they professed and their public behavior, Plato’s disastrous dealings with Dionysius the Younger, the tyrannical ruler of Syracuse; Seneca’s hypocritical fawning over the Roman tyrant Nero; Aristotle’s support for Alexander the Great’s cruel imperialism; and St Augustine’s turning against the spirit of intellectual inquiry once he had found salvation. “Feet of clay, indeed,” the review in
The Economist concludes, “but Mr. Miller does not chide his dozen unduly. Most of them were, after all, aware of their shortcomings, and did not (except for Nietzsche, in some madder moments) present themselves as prophets or saints.”
Read “Thinkers in history,” a review of Examined Lives, in The Economist now!OTHER SUGGESTED READINGS:In “The Perils of Literary Profiling,” an essay he wrote for the January 30, 2011 issue of
The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Geoff Nicholson says that for all its pitfalls, there may be wisdom in judging a man by the books he displays on his bookshelf or keeps on his Kindle. “In which case I pray that no F.B.I. agent, criminal profiler or (worst of all) news pundit ever gets a look at my bookshelves,” Nicholson says. “There, alongside Swift, Plato, Lewis Carroll and Marx, you’d find the Marquis de Sade, Mickey Spillane, Hitler and Ann Coulter. Books are acquired for all kinds of reasons, including curiosity, irony, guilty pleasure and the desire to understand the enemy (not to mention free review copies), but you try telling that to a G-man. It seems perfectly obvious to me that owning a copy of Mein Kampf doesn’t mean you’re a Nazi, but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Read Geoff Nicholson’s “The Perils of Literary Profiling” in The New York Times now! In
The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human (W.W. Norton, 384 pages), V. S. Ramachandran sheds light on the mystery of human uniqueness by presenting baffling and extreme case studies that can teach us about normal brain function and how it evolved. His main thesis is that networks of brain cells known as mirror neurons, discovered in monkeys in the late 1990s, played a uniquely important part in human evolution. These cells appear to become active in a creature’s brain not only when certain actions are performed by the creature itself but also when the creature observes its fellows performing the same actions. Ramachandran believes that mirror neurons somehow enable us to understand the minds of others, to learn by imitation and to feel empathy, and are perhaps involved in self-awareness.
Read Antony Gottlieb’s “A Lion in the Undergrowth,” a review of The Tell-Tale Brain, in The New York Times Sunday Book Review now!
