NOTE: This is mostly a summary, not a review.. I’m trying to resume reading nonfiction occasionally to keep sharp. *** Major theorists mentioned, besides Kant: John Balliie, a physician who wrote an essay about aesthetics; Alexander Baumgarten; Edmunde Burke; Joseph Addison; Seneca; Longinus. The sublime is a perspective of nature whose contemplation inspires the human mind […]
“Existing meanings are not ours to command. When we use a language, we inherit & reproduce, usually unintentionally, the language’s cultural legacy & moral attitudes… This is the way in which language as it exists necessarily imposes limits on thought.”
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Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat a key book, arguing that advances in communication technology, transportation, supply chain management, & geopolitics – have empowered people across geographical & class boundaries to educate themselves, find or create fulfilling work, run their own businesses, recruit teams & supplies across boundaries, & keep learning new skills.
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I’ve featured Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth here before. I’ll keep featuring it. It changed my life. BM analyses how the pursuit of a standardised, impossible, high-maintenance physical beauty claims women’s time, money, health, sanity, & humanity. It’s a book every man & woman should read: it’s incisive about the ways in which advertising, industry, commerce, popular culture (inc. films & women’s magazines & porn), & even the healthcare industry collude to create a reality where health & happiness become almost impossible for millions of educated, sane citizens. (This is also why I repeatedly feature works on the Third Reich, inc. on & by Nazi leaders.)
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One of my favourite sonnets provides, near the end of the cycle, a respite from the intense emotions. Here, the poet ceases his pleading, & attempts a bargain. His Dark Lady, weary of her Will, is pursuing other romantic/sexual conquests. But her Will wants her back at any cost. If she’d only come back & soothe him – him, whom she’s already conquered – then he’d give her his blessing to stride forth & make other conquests:
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Read Cratylus for an entertaining attack on postmodernism, for insightful analyses of the relationship b/w language and reality, b/w linguistics & natural history – & for Soc’s usual pragmatic axioms: “Everyone should expend his chief thought and attention on the consideration his *first principles* – are they rightly laid down? And when he has duly sifted them, the rest will follow.”
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Amita Basu 