4 comments about Widening Circles: A Memoir.

1. Joanna writes using all of the senses to 'catch' the reader's interest. I am inspired to say the least by her journey, her response to it and her willingness to share so candidly.



2. I live in the Pacific Northwest. We are experiencing a rather intense conflict over whalehunting by the Makah Indian Nation. Many non-Indian (and some Native) environmentalists and animal lovers oppose the whalehunt, mainly on the grounds that it sets a poor precedent to restart it after a 70-year hiatus, and that it makes a mockery of attempts to preserve the natural environment. Some, in my opinion, have been particularly disrespectful of tribal elders and customs, publicly stating that the whaling traditions of the Makah are long since dead, and that since Indians now live in modern housing and hold down jobs like the rest of us, whaling is no longer relevant to the native culture.

   The Makah insist that whalehunting is part of their treaty rights, and for others to pick and choose which rights they are allowed to exercise is similar to allowing another nation to decide which articles in the Bill of Rights Americans should be allowed to enjoy. They see whalehunting as an important part of their cultural heritage, which they are seeking to preserve. They, too, however, have spoken as if blind to the efforts of environmentalists over the past four decades to preserve and protect whales and their habitats so that whalehunting could even be a question.

   Both groups share something in common: anger and grief. Environmentalists grieve for a time when whales freely roamed the seas, when Pacific Coast forests covered the landscape, when the Puget Sound region was not simply a slash of highways and cheaply built (but high-priced) housing developments, when cities and towns were not choked with garbage. Certainly, global warming and the pollution of the seas - neither of which can be attributed to the Makah - have accounted for more whale deaths than the Makah could ever accomplish. But still, for them, the hunted whale - the single whale that the Makah are likely to catch and kill each year using ancient technology - is a symbol of a world gone awry, of a vanished world (which may or may not have ever existed) in which humankind and the natural environment were locked in harmonious and continuing embrace. And while they are in grief, they haven't learned how to mourn.

   The Makah are angry, too, though many are slow to display it to outsiders. They are angry about having their lives and culture wrenched away by invaders, but perhaps more so by the lure of modernity upon their young people. They seek to recapture a rich and ancient culture, rooted in the earth and sea and sky, but which most of them, like the environmentalists, have never really known. They grieve for a past which they know, deep down, they will never be able to fully recover, a world for which a single, lonely hunted whale has become a symbol.

   Dealing with anger and with grief - for oneself and for the world - is the common thread that runs through Joanna Macy's compelling memoir Widening Circles. Having first met Joanna in 1977 at the protests against the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant (I make a cameo appearance in the book as the kazoo-playing pamphleteer and Sanskrit scholar), and later as her first publisher, I have watched with awe as Joanna has sought ways to transform our anger and grief into power, the personal power that gives our lives meaning even as we are stretched in our personal, political, and ultimately spiritual struggles.

   Joanna's life spans five continents, and she is no stranger to grief and anger on any one of them. It has been an unusual life -- from New York French-speaking schoolgirl raised by an abusive father and long-suffering mother to CIA intelligence officer; from wife of a Peace Corps director in India and Africa to student of Buddhism and systems theory; from motorcycle-driving scholar of community development in Sri Lanka to futurist - Joanna has an uncanny ability to step back from the everyday fray of our frazzled lives and focus on who she - and we - really are, or can be.

   Indeed, one of the things Widening Circles is really about is identity. Joanna's many travels, coupled with untrammeled curiosity about her world, has allowed her the luxury of finding identity, in the present moment as her Buddhist teachers would instruct her, but also in the lives of others, in the past and in the future, and well beyond the limits of her own skin.

   And this is the gift Joanna has given us. Environmental problems are, at their core, human problems, questions of who we really are, and how we organize ourselves as a community and as a society, and ultimately how we see ourselves. When our grief and anger control us, we become prisoners of our little selves, and despair, when unexpressed, constrains us to a narrow focus upon the immediate, the here and now. Joanna's life work is truly an invitation to all of us to widen our circle, or in the words of William Blake, "To see the world in a grain of sand/And heaven in a wild flower,/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/And eternity in an hour."

   Whales, too. Read the book.

   (Published in EarthSpirit Magazine)




3. I read this book because I had already found 'World as Lover, World as Self' to be inspiring. Joanna Macy's combination of Buddhism, general systems theory and deep ecology seems to 'fit' for me, but here it is her sheer humanity that impresses most. In this memoir she is not afraid to lay open her weaknesses as well as her strenghths, her questions as well as her answers. While her story ends in Bodh Gaya, the Indian site of the Buddha's awakening, what struck me most was the distance Macy had travelled to get there - a whole lifetime of journeying, and seventy years of a dramatically changing world to negotiate. A common thread through many of these years is Macy's opposition to the nuclear military/industrial complex, from her two years employment with the CIA and its culture of 'tough-mindedness' (p.65), to her visit to the people of Novozybkov, poisoned by Chernobyl, her insistence on the need to recognise, express and work through grief is constant. Her ability to guide people through despair to empowerment is a highly significant contribution to the world. To read the story of her life is to see how it can be possible to live without cynicism and with hope intact in the nuclear age. Since I had not read 'Coming Back to Life', Macy's nuclear guardianship project was new to me, and I found it extremely brave and moving. Another thread that runs through Macy's life story is the development of an authentic spirituality. Macy says 'the widening circles of my life have not had as their center the Big Papa God of my preacher forebears. I walked out on that belief when I was twenty'. (p. 277) Despite leaving formal Christianity, she tells of how she 'failed as an atheist' and of her many adventures with Buddhism. These range from the intellectual adventure of studying 'dependent co-arising' to the practical adventures of being thrown out of Sri Lanka and, later, trying to smuggle herself into Tibet illegally. Macy seems too much of a free spirit to sign on the dotted line of any religion, and she is able here to critique as well as praise aspects of Buddhism as she has encountered it. A quote on the back cover of the book is worth repeating: 'A gem for all young people seeking to create a life of meaning, passion and purpose'. I would endorse this, and widen it to include the not-so-young. Its interesting that much of what Macy is known for today was achieved only after her fortieth birthday...



4. Joanna Macy is an activist, a Buddhist scholar, and the author of many worthwhile books, including one of my favorites, WORLD AS LOVER, WORLD AS SELF (1991). Her inspiring memoir shows that a life of engaged spirituality is not only possible, but an adventure.

   The title of Macy's autobiography is taken from a Rilke poem: "I have lived my life in widening circles/ that reach out across the world." Joanna was born into a Protestant family on May 2, 1929. Her abusive father was "controlling" (p. 24) and "reclusive" (p. 25). Her mother was oppressed. Joanna's childhood was "lonely" (p. 16). She enjoyed Presbyterian "Quiet Time" (pp. 36-37). After attending a foreign language school, Lycee Francais de New York, she enrolled in Wellesly, and majored in Biblical History (p. 46), before "walking out." Then, at 21, Joanna received a Fulbright scholarship that allowed her to study in France, where she read French existentialists Camus and Sartre. It was on a half-price student trip to Marrakech, however, that Joanna's life took a turn: "I had walked New York and Paris in search of myself," she writes, "but here in Marrakech I was walking inside my own body" (p. 61).

   Upon returning to the U.S., Joanna then worked for the CIA for two and a half years (p. 65) prior to marrying her husband, Fran, in 1953. They had three children, Chris, Jack, and Peggy, before travelling to India in 1964, Tibet in 1965, and Africa in 1966 with the newly-created Peace Corps. At 36, after driving to Dharamsala to meet the Dalai Lama (singing "Hello Dalai" along the way), Macy experienced Buddhism: "I had turned inside out," she recalls, "like a kernel of popcorn over the fire. My interior was now on the outside, inextricably mixed with the rest of the world, and what I had tried to exclude was now at its core" (p. 122). Macy realized then that she was only present about 5 percent of the time, living her life "in absentia" (p. 105). "For this wasting of my life I had only myself to blame" (p. 115).

   "At forty," Macy writes, "my mind was an eager horse" (p. 128), and she enrolled in the graduate religous studies program at Syracuse University, where she studied Buddhism and general systems theory. In her fifties, Macy participated in liberation Buddhism in Sri Lanka, and the entered Tibet illegally at age 58. In more recent years, she has become well known for her anti-nuke activism, and for leading workshops on despair and empowerment, deep ecology, and nuclear guardianship practices.

   Macy's fascinating memoir offers inspiration to anyone, regardless of age, interested in travelling a more meaningful path, or widening the circles of their own life.

   G. Merritt

2 comments about John Stuart Mill: A Biography.

1. Contemporary analytic philosophers tend to present a rather skewed view of Mill, ignoring the larger textual and personal context of his work. Capaldi's book goes a long way to correcting these errors.
   
   For instance, Capaldi provides strong reasons to think that Utilitarianism should be read in light of On Liberty, not vice versa, as contemporary textbooks tend to present Mill. In addition, Capaldi provides an in-depth examination of Mill's intellectual growth. He starts with Mill's early education and exposure to the philosophical radicalism of his father and Jeremy Bentham, and describes how Mill spent a large part of his life struggling to keep what he believed was good about their hedonistic utilitarianism while rejecting its inadequacies. Capaldi shows us how the style of education Mill received permanently influences Mill's manner of thinking. Capaldi demonstrates how Mill is essentially a dialectical thinker attempting to synthesize Romantic deontology with its emphasis on autonomous self-development, with empiricist ethical methodology with its emphasis on pleasure and associationist human psychology. At the same time, Capaldi illuminates the precise ways that figures like Carlyle, Hegel, Comte, Coleridge, and of course Harriot Taylor influenced Mill. Capaldi helps us learn how to read Mill, based on who Mill's audience was and the purpose of his various texts. One's view of Utilitarianism, for instance, will be radically changed in light of Capaldi's biography. This text, taken as the definitive statement of Mill's theory by most contemporary philosophers, emerges as a rather restrained attempt to defend a general class of philosophies, will Mill's own beliefs quite hidden under the surface.
   
   The picture of Mill that emerges is that of a powerful mind with continually evolving ideas. For the typical philosopher who has read at most a few of Mill's works, this book is very valuable indeed.
   
   As an aside, by way of illustrating what the reputation of Capaldi's intellectual biography is, let me relate the following. I recently had a paper defending a thesis of Mill's accepted for publication in a major philosophy journal. The reviewer asked me to make some revisions in light of this work. This book is quickly becoming the authoritative source on John Stuart Mill. In comparing Capaldi's work with that of others who have written on Mill, one gets the feeling that Capaldi is the only one taking Mill--and intellectual history--seriously.
   
   As such, I highly recommend that any philosopher interested in ethics or the history of philosophy read this.



2. From the view of philosophy departments, Mill is frequently read as as figure in the line of traditional empiricists stretching from Locke to Russell. In that context, some of his teachings, such as the quality of pleasure and the primacy of social good seem like, well, mistakes. In fact, that's how it was presented to me in school and I'm afraid I may have passed that view on. I always wondered how a guy so smart could be so dumb. By bringing in the French connection (and Mill's intellectual environment in general), Capaldi presents the complete thinker. That's a service. Of course, given their format, no title in this series from Cambridge can be either a full scale biography or a full scale commentary.

No comments about On Heidegger (Wadsworth Philosophers Series).

4 comments about A Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren.

1. To correct the reader from Brookline, this book is exactly the same as "Beloved Chicago Man"- it's the same book with different titles in the US and the UK. As the reviewers below state, this is a great window into the relationship between Algren & de Beauvoir, and shows the truth feelings of de Beauvoir.



2. Having read all of De Beauvoir's autobiographies, this book was disappointing. The content can only be described as a mere extension of 'Beloved Chicago Man' (again relating to her relationship with Nelson Algren). In the latter, the letters to Algren are immediatly captivating, but quickly become repetitive rather than developed and by the end seem embarrassingly girlish and naive leaving a strong feeling of voyeuristic intrusion. This latest publication is an unnecessary extension of Beloved Chicago Man.



3. This tome unites fascinating, ethereal elements of time and place with the more mundane features of long-distance love.

   First, the unique bits of which only Simone de Beauvoir can honestly write: The intellectual scene of post-WWII Paris, firsthand knowledge of Camus and Sartre, a complex network of friendships mixing the communities of European intelligentsia, fascists, existentialists, writers, and actors. Then, of course, there is the head-over-heels love in which she found herself with Nelson Algren, noted American author, immediately upon making his acquaintance. All of these interesting facets add spice to this book.

   Surprisingly, what truly makes this book unforgettable, impossible to put down, at times embarrassing in its candor and recognizable to the reader are its themes of commonality to everyone else on the planet. Anyone who has ever fallen in love, suffered instant infatuation for another, missed the touch of a far-away lover, or slogged through a long-distance relationship will relate/commiserate/understand/anticipate both the words and the feelings behind them.

   Simone de Beauvoir wrote all of these letters to Nelson Algren in English (not her native French); happily, the misspellings and grammatical errors are preserved without correction. The reader will note progressive improvement in her English abilities as the correspondence lengthens and her relationship matures.

   I believe all readers will find these pages touching, satisfying, and intriguing. Those of you who have experienced long-distance passion will enjoy the letters as well, but with the distinct pain of knowing the inevitable conclusion in advance.




4. This book gives a real insight into de Beauvoir's character- after reading these letters, one will never again look upon her as a cold intellectual. If anything, they show that the passion she felt with Algren could not compare to whatever sort of relationship she had with Sartre. Reveals de Beauvoir's true self more than any of her autobiographies.

5 comments about Tete-a-Tete: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

1. This well-researched and detailed portrait of a remarkable and unique relationship between two remarkable and unique people is never less than engaging. It is well worth reading for anyone who has even a passing interest in the intellectual climate in France just preceding, during and after WWII, a period that produced an amazing list of artists and philosophers: Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, Lanzmann (all of whom figure in this narrative), the nouvelle vague in cinema, and many more. For that matter, it is well worth reading for anyone who is interested in life, and the details of these lives are intrinsically fascinating (which is not always to say admirable). Rowley had an almost unprecedented access to historical materials, and to many of the people involved, and put together a sensitive and coherent picture of Sartre and Beauvoir from roughly the time they met to their deaths. That she is able to paint such an intimate and compassionate portrait that does not shy away from depicting faults and inconsistencies in their lives and thought is a testament to Rowley's skills as a writer and as a historian.
   
   The major weakness of the book is that her talent with philosophy is not equally on display here. In the course of telling her story, Rowley mentions the philosophical works of Sartre and Beauvoir, but says very little to illuminate the connection between their thinking and their lives. Even where she does discuss such connections, the links are fairly superficial. (Or, the connections are of the sort that can be made at the level of pop psychology between an artist and his or her work.) Existentialism comes across in her book in its fairly popular form: that there is no essence of human being and that we define ourselves through our actions. The connection between Sartre's existentialism and phenomenology gets summarized in the claim that Sartre learned from phenomenology that philosophy could be about everyday life. What she doesn't note is that beyond the fact Sartre learned from phenomenology to focus on everyday life, he also engaged in a systematic effort to redescribe life -- to show that our ordinary ways of conceiving everyday life are deeply flawed. Beauvoir's own significant and original philosophical work (apart from "The Second Sex") is hardly discussed -- her "Ethics of Ambiguity," for example, is never even mentioned. What she doesn't note is that Beauvoir had developed a powerful typology of ways in which one might respond to and realize freedom in one's life, in her "Ethics of Ambiguity" -- and it would be interesting to consider where she must have fit on that continuum. Perhaps most egregiously, she fails to emphasize that for both Sartre and Beauvoir, existentialist freedom is not primarily about the rejection of traditional bonds but about the recognition of the ways in which we bind ourselves to others through our projects and commitments -- so that "authenticity" is not just about being oneself but about the discovery that one cannot avoid belonging to others and to deny one's commitments to others is bad faith. If Sartre painted this inevitibility as a kind of hell in "No Exit," Beauvoir especially in the "Ethics of Ambiguity" depicts an acceptance of the ambiguous commitments that emerge from our being with others as the only genuine freedom and the only possible salvation. (In spite of her desire to depict Beauvoir as independent of Sartre, and her emphasis of Sartre's unwavering respect for her as a thinker, Rowley doesn't really give a sense of the independence of Beauvoir as a thinker -- and what comes across for the most part here is the popular but I think misleading picture of Sartre as the philosopher and Beauvoir as the memoirist who occasionally also applied philosophy to subjects like women and aging.) On this reading, then Sartre and Beauvoir come across primarily as writers whose ideas and commitments evolved over time to become more political, who rejected standard morality including and especially the moral prescriptions that reinforce the family, and who shared a unique form of relationship (that involved fidelity to each other in the sense that they would always tell each other the truth, even where they were willing to lie to others with whom they had secondary relationships). One might have wished for a more detailed account of their thinking if only because such an account would help to pose the question how their life must have been conceived by themselves, in accordance with their own thinking. Otherwise, and in spite of the book's other merits as a piece of history and biography that can complement a study of their work (or of the period), the book ends up reading like a soap opera for intellectuals. While I think this point deserves emphasis I don't want to overemphasize this. One of the merits of Rowley's book is that she takes as her model of biography the autobiographical works of Beauvoir -- and to that extent she does employ a similar approach to reflection on their lives that Beauvoir employs in her published works. I just would have liked to see a bit more reflection in the book about the relation between their lives and their more focused philosophical reflections. First and foremost, Sartre and Beavoir are engaged thinkers and a biography that rarely engages with their deepest thinking except at the superficial level of brief summary, seems to me to be lacking. Having said that, I should reiterate that apart from such misgivings I found the book to be very well written and thoroughly enjoyable and could hardly put it down.



2. This book is a factual chronology of the relationship between Beauvoir and Sartre, particularly as it relates to their extracurricular sexual relations. It is not an in-depth commentary or analysis on how they influenced each other's thinking and writings. I found this aspect of the book disappointing.
   
   Attention should have been paid to how Sartre's way of life runs counter to his existential philosophy- freedom in action is paramount to JPS's existential man and yet he succumbs to addictions to drugs and alcohol in his mid-to-later life. Why does Beauvoir give Sartre her uncritical approval to his meaningless, manipulative and lecherous courtships? And how does such compliance reflect on her nascent feminism?
   
   I expect biographies of two seminal philosophers to raise such questions and provide some level of explication. Despite these reservations, I recommend this book as it is well-researched and well-written.



3. I felt part of that tangled and emotionally complex world that Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sarte wove around themselves while reading this book. It balanced the passion of their creativity with the very calculating anti-passion of their emotional lives. Never judging, just describing how one phase played into the next and the work that was born out of all that was inspiring enough. All the people who were caught up or made certain to be caught up in those two lives never really made a difference in the final out come. Their work was all that really mattered.



4. 
   De Beauvoir and Sartre, without any doubt, are among the most talented writers of the twentieth century. I have enjoyed de Beauvoir's novels over the years, even when I could never quite get connected with the turgid texts of Sartre; and Sartre could be a perfect idiot on matters political, while de Beauvoir always retained more than her share of good sense. But no matter. Both of these "intellectuals," as they are called in this book, wrote thoughtful books that deeply affected the thinking of the last century.
   
   Now comes a book that conclusively shows one of this duo to have been, well, a sick character. A technical term might be erotomania, the insatiable drive for sexual gratification. Even when Sartre was close to death, blind, incontinent, suffering from dementia, his friends would provide him with young women that he would then proceed to grope. It was the culmination of a lifetime's obsession.
   
   Hazel Rowley, in this scrupulously documented study, has shown us a deeply flawed human being achieve success, despite these considerable odds, at being outstandingly creative.



5. This book vividly sets genuis in a human perspective. It is a sad story. Genine love requires fidelity and the human heart knows this even if philosophical genius doesn't. Certainly worth reading as an insight for any time. Besides, it provides a magnificent and totally unexpected view of Simone's marvelous behind.

5 comments about The Only Woman in the Room.

1. In Oct. 2007 I had the privilege of hearing Ms.Gordon speak at a renowned women's college in Tokyo. Now in her 80s, Ms. Gordon traveled from her home in the US to visit again the country of her youth, Japan. She spoke in Japanese for over an hour, giving a summary of her life, but most importantly, stressing the importance of the Equal Rights Clause of Japan's consititution, which by quirk of fate she had written.
   
   The Only Woman in the Room, a brief memoir, which includes her contribution to the history of post-war Japan, is refreshingly modest. For some 50 years after the Pacific War, the details of the drafting of Japan's constitution by the 'allied powers' (General MacArthur) had been kept quiet, much of it classified secret documents. To the world, appearances were kept as if the Japanese had drafted their own constitution, but in reality it was strictly managed by MacArthur.
   
   Given the prevailing gender chauvinism of Japan (and even the west) at that time, if Ms. Gordon and another woman (economist Eleanor Hadley) had not been present, articulate, and assertive, there would possibly have been no 'equal rights clause' set forth in Japan's constitution. Had Ms. Gordon not had experience growing up in Japan, fluency in the language and knowlege of the plight of women, equal rights in Japan might have taken many more years to arrive.
   
   Speaking before a group of future women leaders of Japan, Ms. Gordon was living testimony to the fact that today's Japanese women have rights of marriage, divorce, voting, owning property, etc., which was not true prior to 1946.
   
   It seems she has always been the type of person so involved in living life that to stop and record all of it in detail would have gotten in the way of living it. Certainly her biography would be a sweeping epic, from her parents' roots in Russia, her father's respected talent as a musician and teacher, through the chaos of the war in Europe, loss of family in Hitler's halocaust, her parents' surviving the war as "non-persons" in Japan, her US college education, her linguistic contributions to the war effort, and so on. Despite all this, I believe perhaps Ms. Gordon does not view herself as being that different from thousands of others who lived through those years, but she did have extraordinary talent and the luck to be in the right place at the right time.



2. I first learned of Beate Sirota Gordon from a Japanese woman friend who told me she was well loved by the women of Japan. They know she is responsible for insisting that they have a voice in their democracy. Unlike the previous writer, I found her straight forward prose to be very readable. She may not have a fancy literary style, but its her story and I appreciate the way she told it.



3. Ms. Sirota Gordon has a facinating tale to tell but, ultimately, its telling has little depth and skims the surface of events in her life. Her story deserves another author.



4. I found this book to be inspiring. A book not to be missed!



5. A concise, elegant autobiography by Beate Sirota Gordon, an Austrian who grew up in pre-war Japan as a child and later returned to what she very much considered her home to find her parents (music teachers who refused to abandon their Japanese students as pre war tensions mounted and were held prisoner). It chronicles not only her battle with the entrenched Japanese male authority but battles with the entrenched American male authority, who weren't necessarily any less sexist than the Japanese. She took a job with the American army as a translator and ended up helping draft Japan's post war constitution. And she did all this at the age of 22!

   Gordon escaped the war by going to an all girls school in California. There she encountered the feminist movement and learned a lot about women's rights issues. Upon returning to Japan, she was asked by the American government to help with the constitution. The Americans wanted the constitution written and adopted quickly, fearing the Soviets last minute entry into the war would give them influence. She went to town, drafting about a dozen articles for the Japanese constitution guaranteeing women rights in the work place, politics, health care, child custody, etc. Many were stripped out but two key articles she drafted remained. What's more amazing is Gordon takes so little credit for her accomplishments and instead agonizes more about what was left on the cutting room floor.

   For several decades after, the creation of the Japanese constitution was not well publicized. The Americans feared the haste with which it was written and the fact that the job was basically given to a group of found amateurs would cause the Japanese people to reject it. It's only now that her story has been able to come out.

   All in all a fascinating account and hard to put down. If there's a downside it's that Gordon doesn't pump up her autobiography with more fascinating and telling anecdotes.

1 comments about Plato's Republic: A Biography (Books That Changed the World).

1. This book is NOT a copy of Plato's Republic, but a commentary on the Greek text. The title of this book leads us to believe it contains Plato's Republic as well as biographical information. This is NOT the case. Blackburn's work is, as always, insightful and worth reading, but it is NOT a copy of the Republic.

No comments about Walter Benjamin (Reaktion Books - Critical Lives).

1 comments about The Point of View : Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol 22.

1. The greatest challenge for any newcomer to Kierkegaard is finding the best place to gain an overview. In my opinion, this is the finest place to start. In the main work in this collection, THE POINT OF VIEW (the book also contains some smaller pieces on his Authorship), Kierkegaard sets out to explain his purposes and strategy in writing the books constituting what he calls his Authorship. Students of Kierkegaard generally refer to these books as his Pseudonymous Authorship, because in all of these he writes none of them under his own name, but employs a variety of fictionalized authors, who represent a particular point of view that is not that of Kierkegaard himself. The Pseudonymous works are contrasted with what has become to be known as Kierkegaard's Second Literature (a descriptions attributed to Kierkegaard scholar Robert L. Perkins), which comprises his edifying works and his later religious works, most of which were published under Kierkegaard's own name, though with a couple of his greatest later works published under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus.

   Some of these works, such as EITHER/OR I, contain writings on a variety of aesthetic topics. Many of the books deal with either ethical or religious topics, though the latter never from within a religious perspective. Kierkegaard's main argument in the POINT OF VIEW is that from first to last he was, even when writing on aesthetic topics, a religious author. The Pseudonymous works all presuppose a theory of stages, which Kierkegaard describes as moving from the aesthetic to the ethical and into the religious (the precise prepositions, according to SK, being of the utmost importance).

   It is not clear that Kierkegaard had a precise understanding of all this at the moment he was writing the first of his Pseudonymous works, but it is unquestionable that he moved to this point of view fairly early on. This little volume is, therefore, a wonderful introduction to Kierkegaard's most famous works, and remains one of the most fascinating reflections by a great writer on the nature of his own work ever written.

No comments about Xenophon: Memorabilia (Agora Editions).