4 comments about Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life.

1. When she was still a teenager, Gillian Rose legally changed her last name from "Stone" to her stepfather's name, "Rose." She would henceforth be a Rose. Yet, at the same time, she would also remain a Stone, regardless of the legal ritual.
   
   For Gillian Rose, dying at a young age from a terrible cancer and trying, as the subtitle of her memoir suggests, to come to a "reckoning with life," the name change becomes a metaphor for what it means to be a human being. Life is a combination of jagged rocks which rip the flesh and weary the feet on the one hand, and the delicate aroma and beauty of roses on the other. It does no good to focus on one at the exclusion of the other. Such exclusivity is a delusion, and delusions always wind up being deflated by real life.
   
   Love's work, for Rose, is the earnest effort to embrace life, both its stones and its roses, in all its joyful and heartbreaking complexity. To be embodied, enfleshed, and at the same time capable of emotions and reason, is to inhabit a space in which one is continuously encountering transcendent moments that quickly get bounded by limitations of existence. But this dance between the two is what makes life so interesting, so worthwhile, and it is love's work to keep in the dance. As Rose writes (p. 105), "To grow in love-ability is to accept the boundaries of oneself and oneself, while remaining vulnerable, woundable, around the boundaries. Acknowledgement of conditionality is the only unconditionality of human love." Growing in love-ability is wondrous, but can also bring agony. And yet, concludes Rose, it's important to embrace both. Otherwise, one "dies deadly" rather than "dying forward into the intensified agon of living" (p. 77). In all this, one is reminded of Nietzsche's amor fati: loving one's life, the painful as well as the joyful, the tragic and the comic, the horrific and the sublime, because all of it IS one's life.
   
   Rose's style mirrors her conviction that live is a continuous interplay of stones and roses, and it can make for some difficulty at times in deciphering her meaning. Her writing is associative, one thought flowing into another, images cascading over themselves without warning. She moves effortlessly, for example, from a discussion of sanitation at Auschwitz to colostomies, from the divorce of her parents to her own dyslexia, from the AIDS that kills her friend Jim to reflections on Plato, Pascal, and Hume. But the patient reader will begin to cotton on to Rose's style. It may still remain difficult, but it will also reveal itself as exactly the right style for what she wants to say.
   
   "Keep your mind in hell, and despair not." This is the epigram Rose chooses for her book, and it's entirely appropriate. Note that the two clauses are connected by "and," not "but." Life isn't so much about "either/or" as it is about "and." Face life for what it is, which can frequently mean that one's mind is in a hellish place of fear, pain, suffering, loneliness (as Rose came to know only too well in her final months). But despair not, because the hell is part of life and in fact accentuates life's joy when it comes. Hell without despair: this is love's work.



2. This is a very special book, one that every sentient adult should read at some point in their lives. It is an adult book - shocking, moving , unsettling, hopeful.
   
   It is in some ways the companion text to Rose's 'Mourning becomes the law'. That was the definitive statement of her philosophy; this is how it applies to her lived life. The concept of 'failing towards' underpins both.
   
   Rose was clever enough to make and occupy a unique position in modern philosophy. It was a position informed by her (sometimes overpowering) erudition, but also by her profound spirituality. She onece described herself as 'too Jewish to be a Christian, and too Christian to be Jewish'. In fact on her deathbed she was received into the Anglican church. The very last stage of her journey was, according to the bishop who baptised her, an acceptance that in the person of Christ 'God was present in healing power'.



3. This extraordinary book explains the powerful life of one woman in a way that impacts us all. The interconnectedness of living, learning and loving are demonstrated through the author's personal experiences which travel through europe, New York City and even Bennington, Vermont. Somehow the improbable happenings of her life find a way of relating closely to our own. I recommend this book.



4. Extremely well written and seeped in verisimilitudes, this book contains a wonderful 'manifesto' of living. Instead of hiding behind comfortable scholarship, Rose uses scholarship to dig deeper into the uglier, messier side of life. We all know how to avoid reality; this books reveals one woman's attempt at facing it squarely. This books is a courageous example of dennoch preisen. Afterwards, I was painfully aware of issues I hadn't thought about in a long time. I thoroughly recommend this book.

4 comments about The Pre-Platonic Philosophers (International Nietzsche Studies (INS)).

1. The other reviews cover the details. I recommend this book; it is excellent and a bargain for the price and quality. Read this and R J Hollingdale's biography and you will have a strong grounding grounding to start with. Also: Mazzino Montinari's Nietzsche Lesen, also translated by Whitlock.



2. Let me start out by saying that this text is a welcome addition to the serious attempts made to bring Nietzsche's notebooks into publication. Not only, for those of us who are serious Nietzsche schorlars, does The Will To Power have many faults (see my review for it) but we also do not have much if any serious work being done in attempting to translate these 16,000 pages or so of notebook material.

   One will see in this text Nietzsche's extraordinary knowledge of the greeks. Most of us know that Nietzsche started his academic life as a philologist, and found in the Greek culture something which pointed him towards the philosophical inquiry he would come to make in his life. I encourage all to partake in Nietzsche's discussion with the Greeks, for it will provide critical insight into the devlopment of his philosophy.

   This text is the lecutre course that he gave at Basel in 1868. It provides an account of the most important thinkers before the time of Plato, in accordance to Nietzsche's own struggle with their (the thinkers) fragments. If one finds this text interesting, I would recommend looking into the Birth of Tragedy, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, and just to get some background info on the lives and fragments obtained from these thinkers, Kirk, Raven, and Schofield's The Pre-Socratic Philosophers.

   With that said, this text does have its limitiations. At some moments the translation is very good, and at other moments rather poor. There are sections, for example, in the Chapter on Empedocles that are very important that do not make it into the English translation. Moreover, the translation seems to make use of common English expressions when the actual German dictates a more dramatic expression. Like I say in all my reviews of Nietzsche's notebooks, his texts makes one want to learn German, so do that if you can. If one cannot, read it alongside an expert in German and you will be able to see the rather superficial areas of translation.

   So, an important text with some mechanical problems in the translation. Still worth the investment though, and it provides a good intro in NIetzsche's insight into the Greek world.

   Amor fati




3. As always, Nietzsche demonstrates an incredible grasp of theology, and it is merely our own stupidity that someone who is so much smarter than his teachers in this way is in so much trouble in the field of public opinion, which demands a much more comfortable stupidity than any reader of this book is likely to sympathize with. In the midst of this book, the judgment which Nietzsche pursues about very early Greek thinkers is "These religious insights originated from a need to eliminate anthropomorphism, but they still show the primordial Hellenic sensitivity toward the gods." (p. 78) The fragment of Xenophanes, given in Greek in footnote 15 on that page, which preceded his observation, was: "Always he remains in the same place, not moving at all; Nor is it fitting for him to go to different places at different times." As Nietzsche thought Plato and Aristotle understood this, "the entire dichotomy between spirit and matter, deity and world, is absent here. He resolves the identification of God and man in order to equate God and nature." (pp. 78-79). In humor, a high spot is a poem by Planudes about Seven Wise Men, with a line, "But Bias of Priene declared, The majority are the worse." (p. 22). Nietzsche makes the effort to sort them all out. On Anaximander, he said, "Thus he made two great advances over Thales, to wit, a principle of water's warmth and coldness and a principle of the Unlimited, the final unity, the matrix of continuous arising." (p. 33). People who are new to philosophy might think that there is too much which is new here, but it's really very old.



4. This book is remarkable on several levels. As a work of scholarship, it is an awesome achievement, considering that Greg Whitlock was able to produce a coherent text of Nietzche's lecture notes, and performed the most helpful task of looking up every citation, confirming its source, and providing extensive notes to clarify the details of the lectures.

   But even more surprising and satisfying is the section that Whitlock modestly calls a "Translator's Commentary", which is actually a challenging and profound engagement with Nietzsche, the various Greek philosophers under discussion, Nietzsche's near contemporaries in German science, philosophy, and philology, and later thinkers as well. In fact, one of the more exciting parts of the text is where Whitlock challenges various statements by Heidegger and, I think, comes out on top. This is not mere history of philosophy, but a genuine encounter with some very provocative ideas.

   At the end of this book, the reader must be absolutely conviced that the Pre-Platonic philosophers are not just interesting historically, but that each of them was a brilliant thinker with a highly developed intuitive gift for charging ahead into new intellectual territory. Nietzsche's deep passion for these thinkers is irresistible, and the reader cannot help but marvel at his ability to synthesize the Greeks with the science of his day and then use that to begin his own extraordinary philosophical journey.

No comments about Georges Bataille (Critical Lives).

No comments about Rousseau as Author: Consecrating One's Life to the Truth.

2 comments about The Time of My Life: An Autobiography.

1. This autobiography is only `a factual account of external things'.
   It is a summing up of the author's travel experiences and symposia reminiscences.
   It contains only very superficial sketches of his family life and professional career and nearly nothing about his philosophical work or about discussions with colleagues.
   There are no emotions, no comments on political or social events, on war or peace. Nothing.
   
   I cannot recommend this book.
   
   For an introduction to the work of Quine, I recommend an interview with Bryan Magee published in `Talking Philosophy: dialogues with Fifteen Leading Philosophers.'



2. An interesting book, a bit too long, and a very bad text-formatting job. One would expect much better from MIT press.

1 comments about Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (Stages).

1. This is a slim volume from a French philosopher writing of her childhood as a Jew in France during World War II. She writes from the perspective of an adult who clearly still is ill-at-ease with her history, specifically her choosing of a Christian woman who help hide her over her mother; her violation of Jewish law taught her by her rabbi father. This volume does not speak to common experience, not even French Jewish experience; rather it is the experience of Sarah Kofman as seen in retrospect. What is most evident is the lack of resolution regarding her past - the reader appreciates the difficulty with which she apparently tells her story.

1 comments about Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (New York Review Books Classics).

1. This is the story of a friendship between two of the most remarkable intellectual figures of the twentieth century , Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin. It begins in Berlin in 1914 and continues through their separation until Benjamin's tragic death twenty -five years later. Both of them were greatly interested in the historical processes of their times, in philology , in the meaning of signs and symbols, in Socialism, in Zionism. Scholem left Germany for the Jerusalem of pre- state Israel and became a central figure there in the development of the Hebrew University. He became too the great scholar who opened a new field that of Jewish Mysticism. Benjamin hesitated and seemed to always find the way to misfortune. But their conversation and their friendship illuminates fundamental issues of life and thought. This book should be read by everyone for whom the life of the mind is important.

5 comments about Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life : The Companion Book.

1. I had never heard of Ayn Rand till I spotted the DVD "A Sense of Life" in the local library the other day!!! I am a fan of documentary bios.,so wanted to take a look...film opened a new world to me...I had seen "The Fountainhead" with Cooper in the past..kind of a "soaper"...but this DVD brought a whole new perspective to me about a very interesting woman!!! I produce an access TV show where I live....I'm into film productions...found this a delight!!!



2. This book is a fascinating portrait of Ayn Rand. It shows in engrossing detail the depth of her thinking and brilliance of her philosophy, Objectivism.

   As a companion to the Oscar-nominated movie this book is a great coffee table reminder of one of the greatest accomplishments of the 20th century; Ayn Rand's creation of a fully integrated, non-contradictory code of morality.




3. The story of a woman who said she would stop the motor of the world - and didn't.



4. A Child's Golden Book of Ayn Rand... Why in the world would someone take the time and trouble to publish a book without acquainting himself with the facts of his subject's life? This book is a superficial, riddled with errors and worthwhile only for the photos.



5. Many in this review section argue about whether this book is biased as it doesn't show Rand's flaws, about whether objectivism is a cult, etc.

   All of this misses the point. Whether or not she was a perfect person (of course she wasn't), whether or not this book is biased (it probably is), Ayn Rand was right. Her basic philosophy was pretty much the only moral, consistent, and life affirming one ever produced (whether or not she herself applied it perfectly). This book celebrates the only person ever to figure it out, and express it eloquently. Whatever her flaws or the books flaws, the world certainly needs (not deserves!) this book more than the countless other pieces of garbage out there.

1 comments about Living Biographies of Great Philosophers.

1. One of the best introductions to Western Philosophy that I have come across.

1 comments about Paul Ricoeur: His Life and His Work.

1. The work of Paul Ricoeur, while brilliant, is often difficult to penetrate. Reagan's book helps the newcomer to Ricoeur's writing get through those difficulties to an understanding of the importance of his philosophy. Reagan is uniquely qualified to do this. He was Ricoeur's student and has remained his lifelong friend. Reagan's book offers highly readable summaries of some of Ricoeur's major works complemented with biographical details that put those works into the context of Ricoeur's life. If you are only going to buy one book about Ricoeur, this should be it