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zare_i's review against another edition
4.0
Although I never knowingly avoided philosophical works it takes an author who writes in interesting way without looking down to the rest of us readers, lacking full knowledge of various philosophical and sociological main and side streams, for me to pick up the book. Basics are required I agree but you can differentiate between a good author from any specialized field and the one writing to a specialized community at any time - good writer tries to intrigue you to pick up the basic works and go through them seeking additional information. And this is where this book shines.
Author tries to present ever changing ideal of freedom by going through the [as expected] comments on ancient world (Greeks, Romans, Middle East, early Christianity) but also through popular books through decades of 19th and 20th century. By doing this author tries to give as wide picture of the evolution of what almost everyone might think to be the greatest of ideas - human freedom - how human freedom was perceived through ages and how we look at it in modern times.
Is it not weird that in time and place where no human being ever lived better, had a chance to have a long and productive life did people chose to relinquish their own personal freedom while chasing dreams and trying to emulate and live lives of people that would not think twice if rest of population got thrown into the sun.
As author explains, and I agree with him, is that people mold everything into pre-existing concepts. Basically nothing actually changes, core ideas and approaches remain the same but technology and influence get better and more .... invasive you might say. Every new principle is based on the ones from before. Some parts of old approach might be thrown away, some modified in smaller or greater way but the essence remains the same. In retrospective we are more than capable of figuring what went wrong but in now we are not capable to figure out what is going on. That is why every progressive approach need to be carefully handled because when compared to the past it might look like a wonderful solution but it is rarely critically checked against contemporary conditions.
We can work on technology progress, new inventions, old/new social approaches to achieve our ideal of freedom but while these are progressing in giant steps forward (and may look excellent in theory and paper) main driving force behind it, one to use it and one to run it, human nature, is about couple of hundred years (if not millennia or two) behind it. We want to say that humans are destined for a greater role in the world (or universe) but we constantly forget that we are result of millions of years of evolution, we carry certain instincts and internal (you might even say subconscious) knowledge and view of the world that needs to be first of all acknowledged and then improved before we can leap forward to make the actual use of the latest and best we built or can create. As long as we portray ourselves as better than we actually are no new idea will come to true fruition (which is greatest issue when it comes to social challenges and evolution).
We aim to create artificial life as a way of getting free of biological limitations - but what are we to do with it? If anything this year proved that entire world can be paralyzed to a complete standstill because of a simple virus. We are not capable of handling simple situation that happened hundreds of times in our recorded history in an organized way without panic and falling into complete disarray.
As centuries go by author states it is obvious that ideas of freedom, what it is and what does it mean, change. We have come to the point where we have surrendered almost all of our privacy to external factors (which would be unimaginable even only few decades before). New generations wont even know what privacy means. Freedom from bad interference in everyday relations is now past time for all of us. Everybody will shush down and let the bully walk over them because of fears for ones future, there is no way of fighting the slander without first being dragged through mud in multiple passes (and what was the point then?). Freedom from biological limitations will bring out other questions (if we create artificial life what would be its role except for us to say - look how smart we are!) and maybe doom humanity (because are we sure that we will remain human?). So far it seems that we shed more freedom than we obtain. Which is a paradox, is it not?
Right now we need to build our own inner refuge to be able to say we are free. Inner self (thoughts and emotions) remains so far safely hidden and only place we can remain truly free. I am more skeptic about this than the author because in my opinion people want to be lead [because (again) of the human nature - and let me note that while being lead majority does not want to think] instead of being self governed. But hope always lives. I think that giant mistake was made somewhere in last century or so when majority relinquished the greatest freedom of all - freedom to think - and instead started to rely on external sources to tell us what is right and wrong. Hopefully we will manage to regain this.
For a humanity as a species to become truly free greater effort is required. We need to acknowledge that we cannot change over night and that we need to first overcome some of our basic instincts in order to be truly free (basically we need to identify that that makes us human in the first place, and lots of people don't want to go that deep because of conflict with existing concepts they built their life on) - we need to accept that we are on living on Earth but we are not special on this very planet from any other form of life. We need to learn first to walk and know ourselves before we try to soar into the sky. Otherwise we will forever be chasing the ideal of freedom while constantly blatantly lying to ourselves that we are actually only an inch from the true freedom [while making whole bunch of potentially catastrophic errors].
Very intriguing book, highly recommended.
Author tries to present ever changing ideal of freedom by going through the [as expected] comments on ancient world (Greeks, Romans, Middle East, early Christianity) but also through popular books through decades of 19th and 20th century. By doing this author tries to give as wide picture of the evolution of what almost everyone might think to be the greatest of ideas - human freedom - how human freedom was perceived through ages and how we look at it in modern times.
Is it not weird that in time and place where no human being ever lived better, had a chance to have a long and productive life did people chose to relinquish their own personal freedom while chasing dreams and trying to emulate and live lives of people that would not think twice if rest of population got thrown into the sun.
As author explains, and I agree with him, is that people mold everything into pre-existing concepts. Basically nothing actually changes, core ideas and approaches remain the same but technology and influence get better and more .... invasive you might say. Every new principle is based on the ones from before. Some parts of old approach might be thrown away, some modified in smaller or greater way but the essence remains the same. In retrospective we are more than capable of figuring what went wrong but in now we are not capable to figure out what is going on. That is why every progressive approach need to be carefully handled because when compared to the past it might look like a wonderful solution but it is rarely critically checked against contemporary conditions.
We can work on technology progress, new inventions, old/new social approaches to achieve our ideal of freedom but while these are progressing in giant steps forward (and may look excellent in theory and paper) main driving force behind it, one to use it and one to run it, human nature, is about couple of hundred years (if not millennia or two) behind it. We want to say that humans are destined for a greater role in the world (or universe) but we constantly forget that we are result of millions of years of evolution, we carry certain instincts and internal (you might even say subconscious) knowledge and view of the world that needs to be first of all acknowledged and then improved before we can leap forward to make the actual use of the latest and best we built or can create. As long as we portray ourselves as better than we actually are no new idea will come to true fruition (which is greatest issue when it comes to social challenges and evolution).
We aim to create artificial life as a way of getting free of biological limitations - but what are we to do with it? If anything this year proved that entire world can be paralyzed to a complete standstill because of a simple virus. We are not capable of handling simple situation that happened hundreds of times in our recorded history in an organized way without panic and falling into complete disarray.
As centuries go by author states it is obvious that ideas of freedom, what it is and what does it mean, change. We have come to the point where we have surrendered almost all of our privacy to external factors (which would be unimaginable even only few decades before). New generations wont even know what privacy means. Freedom from bad interference in everyday relations is now past time for all of us. Everybody will shush down and let the bully walk over them because of fears for ones future, there is no way of fighting the slander without first being dragged through mud in multiple passes (and what was the point then?). Freedom from biological limitations will bring out other questions (if we create artificial life what would be its role except for us to say - look how smart we are!) and maybe doom humanity (because are we sure that we will remain human?). So far it seems that we shed more freedom than we obtain. Which is a paradox, is it not?
Right now we need to build our own inner refuge to be able to say we are free. Inner self (thoughts and emotions) remains so far safely hidden and only place we can remain truly free. I am more skeptic about this than the author because in my opinion people want to be lead [because (again) of the human nature - and let me note that while being lead majority does not want to think] instead of being self governed. But hope always lives. I think that giant mistake was made somewhere in last century or so when majority relinquished the greatest freedom of all - freedom to think - and instead started to rely on external sources to tell us what is right and wrong. Hopefully we will manage to regain this.
For a humanity as a species to become truly free greater effort is required. We need to acknowledge that we cannot change over night and that we need to first overcome some of our basic instincts in order to be truly free (basically we need to identify that that makes us human in the first place, and lots of people don't want to go that deep because of conflict with existing concepts they built their life on) - we need to accept that we are on living on Earth but we are not special on this very planet from any other form of life. We need to learn first to walk and know ourselves before we try to soar into the sky. Otherwise we will forever be chasing the ideal of freedom while constantly blatantly lying to ourselves that we are actually only an inch from the true freedom [while making whole bunch of potentially catastrophic errors].
Very intriguing book, highly recommended.
_tourist's review against another edition
a very interesting read. far superior to straw dogs. fewer errors, though the same level of assertion. i am sceptical of my own enjoyment; how far does my emphatic agreement go towards truthiness or even usefulness. perhaps this book tells me only what i would like to hear. certainly gray's could never be a popular viewpoint, and that gives me some pleasure. but popularity is besides the point. for those like me, those who share my doubts, there is power in this kind of storytelling, in this way of framing the big questions and the dubious non-answers.
blackoxford's review against another edition
4.0
The Self-Help Delusion
In our era free will inevitably gets tangled up in the libertarian idea of freedom of choice. But of course even the most ardent neo-conservative will append the qualification “within the law,” thus justifying the most overwhelming constraints on that very choice. This is Gray’s opening gambit in what is an intriguing survey of relevant literature about what free will is and what to do with it.
Traditionally, Gray points out, freedom is a spiritual concept referring to the state of the soul, a freedom from internal conflict, a peace within oneself and with the world. This is consistent with Christian thought but had actually been first advanced as a proposition by the Ancient Greek Stoics. So true freedom can be found even in a slave if he is wise. As Gray summarises: “What those who follow these traditions want most is not any kind of freedom of choice. Instead, what they long for is freedom from choice.”
The source of this aversion to choice is not mystical or aberrant but a matter of common sense. Choice implies uncertainty, not about the facts but about what criteria, what values, should be applied in any factual situation. Those values come from elsewhere - families, one’s social circle, etc. - and are subject to judgment about which apply and in what combination. In turn that judgment is inevitably influenced, usually determined, by desires of various sorts. Without desire judgment would be unnecessary. So desire is inherent to choice. And desire comes from elsewhere, either provoked by others to a mimetic envy, or as a primal urge originating in one’s genes, hormones, or random life-experiences.
Consequently the empirical evidence for free will, or even its desirability, is scanty and consists primarily in illusory metaphysical tales. Most of these involve evil as a character actor - the Demiurge of creation in Gnosticism, the Devil as God’s rival in Christianity, the Sitra Ahra, the Other Side, as the realm of ill-meaning demons in Cabalistic Judaism, the Iblis in Islam which exploits human weakness incessantly, and the Karmic force of predestination in Buddhism which directs and demands re-incarnation.
Despite the variations, all these tales agree that evil is irresistible by the individual. Freedom can only be achieved by sacrificing, submitting, or escaping free will itself with the assistance of whatever higher power is available. Thus the possession of free will implies its absence, while its loss makes it present, but paradoxically without choices on which to exercise it. The concept of free will simply evaporates except as a linguistic premise. It is self-contradictory.
These diverse traditions belie the dominant world-views of our time: the Scientific view of the world (that it can be improved by human thought), and the Romanticist view (that it can be improved by strength of human will). Essentially these tales have cherry-picked from ancient wisdom in a manner which turns freedom into a buzzword for violence and exploitation. The issue is not that these tales are illusory but that they claim privilege over other tales and exclude the others from human consciousness.
The Scientific and Romanticist tales can be maintained only by ignoring the overwhelming evidence of human corruption. What the Scientific and Romanticist tales have inherited from those of perennial wisdom is their tendency toward dogmatism and prejudice. Science pretends to be doing good in the world by increasing knowledge, for example. But most of what Science produces is either wrong or dangerous. And Romanticism has generated a plague of idealisms - the political, technological and social ideologies of the large scale; and personal ambitions on the level of the individual. These are causing untold suffering and planetary destruction.
It is obvious that neither Science nor Romanticism can credibly claim to be grounded in freedom. Nor can they claim to increase freedom as personal peace and harmony with the world in any meaningful way. The combination of the two, frequently within the same mind, have created a toxic mix of delusion, that is to say corrupt illusion, which promises to create a new species of humanity - better, smarter, longer-lived, and more socially adapted than at present.
The eradication of evil and the creation of inner peace through a dedicated technological commitment to an improvement in the species is the order of the day. But there’s a glitch: “Eradicating evil may produce a new species, but not the one its innocent creators had in mind.” Transcending oneself is a risky venture. We don’t know how to do that either through machines, therapies, or genetics. Some might suggest that it is an act of hubris fuelled by that very common evil of human pride masquerading under the banner of freedom.
Like all metaphysical presumptions, free will is a self-confirming hypothesis. Affirming it makes it so because we act as if it were real and attribute the consequences to judgment rather than to the desire which dominates judgment, or better yet to the desire which determines what we find necessary to judge at all. Any such presumption becomes harmful when it is treated as more than an illusion. It’s also awfully hard to overcome.
Illusions, like the language in which they must be expressed, are necessary for the self-reflexive consciousness of human existence. Our ability with language means that we are compelled to live within it and the illusions it facilitates. We have no choice in the matter. In any case we would likely end our lives if we didn’t have them to buffer our suffering, the suffering we cause, and existential dread we cannot confront.
So the issue of free will is really a red herring according to Gray: “What seems to be singularly human is not consciousness or free will but inner conflict – the contending impulses that divide us from ourselves.” Free will distracts us from the ethical and psychological lessons contained in ancient wisdom about the limitations of human ability. Perhaps our greatest step toward resolving that inner conflict is an ‘unknowing’ of many of our most precious illusions.
Postscript 19Dec21: For more on Free Will see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2871357033
In our era free will inevitably gets tangled up in the libertarian idea of freedom of choice. But of course even the most ardent neo-conservative will append the qualification “within the law,” thus justifying the most overwhelming constraints on that very choice. This is Gray’s opening gambit in what is an intriguing survey of relevant literature about what free will is and what to do with it.
Traditionally, Gray points out, freedom is a spiritual concept referring to the state of the soul, a freedom from internal conflict, a peace within oneself and with the world. This is consistent with Christian thought but had actually been first advanced as a proposition by the Ancient Greek Stoics. So true freedom can be found even in a slave if he is wise. As Gray summarises: “What those who follow these traditions want most is not any kind of freedom of choice. Instead, what they long for is freedom from choice.”
The source of this aversion to choice is not mystical or aberrant but a matter of common sense. Choice implies uncertainty, not about the facts but about what criteria, what values, should be applied in any factual situation. Those values come from elsewhere - families, one’s social circle, etc. - and are subject to judgment about which apply and in what combination. In turn that judgment is inevitably influenced, usually determined, by desires of various sorts. Without desire judgment would be unnecessary. So desire is inherent to choice. And desire comes from elsewhere, either provoked by others to a mimetic envy, or as a primal urge originating in one’s genes, hormones, or random life-experiences.
Consequently the empirical evidence for free will, or even its desirability, is scanty and consists primarily in illusory metaphysical tales. Most of these involve evil as a character actor - the Demiurge of creation in Gnosticism, the Devil as God’s rival in Christianity, the Sitra Ahra, the Other Side, as the realm of ill-meaning demons in Cabalistic Judaism, the Iblis in Islam which exploits human weakness incessantly, and the Karmic force of predestination in Buddhism which directs and demands re-incarnation.
Despite the variations, all these tales agree that evil is irresistible by the individual. Freedom can only be achieved by sacrificing, submitting, or escaping free will itself with the assistance of whatever higher power is available. Thus the possession of free will implies its absence, while its loss makes it present, but paradoxically without choices on which to exercise it. The concept of free will simply evaporates except as a linguistic premise. It is self-contradictory.
These diverse traditions belie the dominant world-views of our time: the Scientific view of the world (that it can be improved by human thought), and the Romanticist view (that it can be improved by strength of human will). Essentially these tales have cherry-picked from ancient wisdom in a manner which turns freedom into a buzzword for violence and exploitation. The issue is not that these tales are illusory but that they claim privilege over other tales and exclude the others from human consciousness.
The Scientific and Romanticist tales can be maintained only by ignoring the overwhelming evidence of human corruption. What the Scientific and Romanticist tales have inherited from those of perennial wisdom is their tendency toward dogmatism and prejudice. Science pretends to be doing good in the world by increasing knowledge, for example. But most of what Science produces is either wrong or dangerous. And Romanticism has generated a plague of idealisms - the political, technological and social ideologies of the large scale; and personal ambitions on the level of the individual. These are causing untold suffering and planetary destruction.
It is obvious that neither Science nor Romanticism can credibly claim to be grounded in freedom. Nor can they claim to increase freedom as personal peace and harmony with the world in any meaningful way. The combination of the two, frequently within the same mind, have created a toxic mix of delusion, that is to say corrupt illusion, which promises to create a new species of humanity - better, smarter, longer-lived, and more socially adapted than at present.
The eradication of evil and the creation of inner peace through a dedicated technological commitment to an improvement in the species is the order of the day. But there’s a glitch: “Eradicating evil may produce a new species, but not the one its innocent creators had in mind.” Transcending oneself is a risky venture. We don’t know how to do that either through machines, therapies, or genetics. Some might suggest that it is an act of hubris fuelled by that very common evil of human pride masquerading under the banner of freedom.
Like all metaphysical presumptions, free will is a self-confirming hypothesis. Affirming it makes it so because we act as if it were real and attribute the consequences to judgment rather than to the desire which dominates judgment, or better yet to the desire which determines what we find necessary to judge at all. Any such presumption becomes harmful when it is treated as more than an illusion. It’s also awfully hard to overcome.
Illusions, like the language in which they must be expressed, are necessary for the self-reflexive consciousness of human existence. Our ability with language means that we are compelled to live within it and the illusions it facilitates. We have no choice in the matter. In any case we would likely end our lives if we didn’t have them to buffer our suffering, the suffering we cause, and existential dread we cannot confront.
So the issue of free will is really a red herring according to Gray: “What seems to be singularly human is not consciousness or free will but inner conflict – the contending impulses that divide us from ourselves.” Free will distracts us from the ethical and psychological lessons contained in ancient wisdom about the limitations of human ability. Perhaps our greatest step toward resolving that inner conflict is an ‘unknowing’ of many of our most precious illusions.
Postscript 19Dec21: For more on Free Will see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2871357033
torgeiraamboe's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
icywaterfall's review against another edition
3.0
He begins with a story by Heinrich Kleist, in which he states that a puppet inhabits a world of enviable freedom. It is precisely the lack of self-awareness that makes the puppet free; throughout history, freedom has meant an inner condition in which normal consciousness has been transcended. Freedom is, for Kleist, a state of the soul in which conflict has been left behind. What Kleist wants is freedom from choice, not freedom of choice. Kleist goes on to give a Gnostic reading of the chapter of Genesis. A gnostic reading would regard the eating of the apple as the fall of man; but not a fall into sin. It was a fall into the dim world of everyday consciousness. After becoming conscious, humankind can then rise into a state of conscious innocence and when this happens, it will be the final chapter in the history of the world.
- Gnostics viewed the experience of choosing as confirming that humans are flawed. Real freedom would be a condition in which humans no longer laboured under the burden of choice - a condition attainable only upon death. Throughout the world, particularly in western countries, the Gnostic faith that knowledge can give humans a freedom no other creature can possess has become the predominant religion. Gnosticism turns on two articles of faith: humans are sparks of consciousness confined in a material world (they saw that the order was a manifestation of evil to which they refused to submit) AND humans can escape this slavery by acquiring a special kind of knowledge.
- Giacomo Leopardi believed that everything that exists is a type of matter; “that matter thinks is a fact. It is a fact because we ourselves think; and we do not know, we are not aware of being, we are not capable of knowing, of perceiving anything but matter.” It is usually thought that a materialist must reject religion, but this was not his view. Certainly religion was an illusion, but he knew that humans cannot live without illusions. For Leopardi, the human animal was a thinking machine. This is the true lesson of materialism. Aware that they are trapped in the material world, they cannot escape from this confinement except in death. The good life begins when they accept this fact. Mind was not something (as it was for the Gnostics) injected into matter from somewhere beyond the physical world. Matter was intelligent, constantly mutating, producing new forms, some of them self-aware. For Leopardi evil is integral to the way the world works; but when he talks of evil eh does not mean any kind of malign agency of the sort that Gnostics imagined. Evil is the suffering that is built into the scheme of things. Nature is neither malign not benevolent, but simply indifferent. Humans are machines that through a succession of random chances have become self-aware. Inner freedom - the only kind possible, he believed - is achieved by accepting this situation.
- It would be foolish to question the increase of scientific knowledge that enables us to imagine machines that can become conscious as we humans are. Will we accept them as similar to us? Like Kleist, modern thinkers have imagined that humans can achieve a state of freedom by eating further of the Tree of Knowledge so that they can become fully conscious beings. Once this has occurred, humans will be truly free, they say. But a fully conscious marionette would not be a human anymore - it would be a God. Taking for granted that self-awareness is the definite attribute of humans that set us apart from the rest of the animals, they pass over the fact that many of the parts of human life that are most distinctiely human have very little to do with conscious thought. Science, art, and human relationships emerge from processes of which we can be only dimly aware. ““When thinking machines first arrive in the world they will be the work of flawed, intermittently lucid animals whose minds are stuffed with nonsense and delusion. Mutating under the pressure of entropy, the machines humans have invented will develop faults and flaws of their own. Soon they will no longer be aware of parts of their own minds; repression, denial and fantasy will cloud the empty sky of consciousness. Emerging from an inner world they cannot fathom, antagonist impulses will govern their behaviour. Eventually these half-broken machines will have the impression that they are choosing their path through life. As in humans, this may be an illusion; but as the sensation takes hold, it will engender what in humans used to be called a soul.”
- How is the puppet to live? You might think a puppet can have no choice in the matter. But the uber-marionette - a puppet-like creature that as a result of the accidents of evolution has become self-aware - is bound to live as if it decides what it does. But when the puppet acts, it cannot help feeling that it is free. The belief that humans fail to lead the good life because of ignorance, first thought up by Socrates, reappears in modern thinking. Socrates thought, and people now think, that with an increase in scientific knowledge there will be an increase in human goodness. The Greek tragedians expressed a more truthful version of human experience: no amount of virtue or reasoning can ensure that human beings live a worthwhile life. Judaism contains something akin to the Greek sense of tragedy: despite the fact that he ended by accepting God’s will, Job’s questioning of divine justice posed a challenge to any belief in ultimate moral harmony. These older moralities are superior to modern moralities in that they understand that humankind can never overcome its inherent limitations. It is only in recent times that human beings have come to see themselves as potentially godlike. Ancient thinkers were more intelligent as well as more honest. (Rose-tinted glasses?) They knew that human action can change the world, sometimes for the good. They also knew that civilisations rise and fall; what has been gained will be lost, regained and then lost again in a cycle as natural as the seasons. Living before the triumph of Christianity, Augustus and Aurelius did not imagine that history had any overall meaning. There was no hidden thread of redemption or improvement in the passage of events. Reared on a curdled brew of Socratism and scraps of decayed Christianity, modern thinkers condemn this is a counsel of despair. In the ancient world it expressed health and clarity of mind. If you want to reject any idea of God, you must accept that ‘humanity’ - the universal subject that finds redemption in history - also does not exist.
- As Kleist portrays them, marionettes have an advantage over humans; they can defy gravity. In the story, human beings become free when they become fully conscious. For these godlike creatures, there can be nothing that is mysterious. This is a very old faith; Gnostics, Socrates, Modern rationalism, evangelists for evolution, trans-humanists, techno-futurists all promote the project of expelling mystery from the mind. Gnosticism has conquered the world. Belief in the liberating power of knowledge has become the ruling illusion of modern humankind. Most want to believe that some kind of explanation or understanding will deliver them of their conflicts. Yet being divided from yourself goes with being self-aware. This is the truth at the Genesis myth: the fall is not an event at the beginning of history but the intrinsic condition of self-conscious beings. Only creatures that are as flawed and ignorant as humans can be free in the way humans are free. We do not know how matter came to dream our world into being; we do not know what, if anything, comes when the dream ends for us and we die. We yearn for a type of knowledge that would make us other than we are, though what we cannot say. Accepting the fact of unknowing makes possible an inner freedom very different from that pursued by Gnostics. If you have this negative capability (the belief that you cannot really know why you do what you do) you will not want a higher form of consciousness; your ordinary mind will give you all you need. Rather than trying to impose sense on your life, you will be content to let meaning come and go. Instead of becoming an unfaltering puppet, you will make your way in the stumbling human world. Uber-marionettes do not have to wait until they can fly before they are free. Not looking to ascend into the heavens, they can find freedom in falling to earth.
- Gnostics viewed the experience of choosing as confirming that humans are flawed. Real freedom would be a condition in which humans no longer laboured under the burden of choice - a condition attainable only upon death. Throughout the world, particularly in western countries, the Gnostic faith that knowledge can give humans a freedom no other creature can possess has become the predominant religion. Gnosticism turns on two articles of faith: humans are sparks of consciousness confined in a material world (they saw that the order was a manifestation of evil to which they refused to submit) AND humans can escape this slavery by acquiring a special kind of knowledge.
- Giacomo Leopardi believed that everything that exists is a type of matter; “that matter thinks is a fact. It is a fact because we ourselves think; and we do not know, we are not aware of being, we are not capable of knowing, of perceiving anything but matter.” It is usually thought that a materialist must reject religion, but this was not his view. Certainly religion was an illusion, but he knew that humans cannot live without illusions. For Leopardi, the human animal was a thinking machine. This is the true lesson of materialism. Aware that they are trapped in the material world, they cannot escape from this confinement except in death. The good life begins when they accept this fact. Mind was not something (as it was for the Gnostics) injected into matter from somewhere beyond the physical world. Matter was intelligent, constantly mutating, producing new forms, some of them self-aware. For Leopardi evil is integral to the way the world works; but when he talks of evil eh does not mean any kind of malign agency of the sort that Gnostics imagined. Evil is the suffering that is built into the scheme of things. Nature is neither malign not benevolent, but simply indifferent. Humans are machines that through a succession of random chances have become self-aware. Inner freedom - the only kind possible, he believed - is achieved by accepting this situation.
- It would be foolish to question the increase of scientific knowledge that enables us to imagine machines that can become conscious as we humans are. Will we accept them as similar to us? Like Kleist, modern thinkers have imagined that humans can achieve a state of freedom by eating further of the Tree of Knowledge so that they can become fully conscious beings. Once this has occurred, humans will be truly free, they say. But a fully conscious marionette would not be a human anymore - it would be a God. Taking for granted that self-awareness is the definite attribute of humans that set us apart from the rest of the animals, they pass over the fact that many of the parts of human life that are most distinctiely human have very little to do with conscious thought. Science, art, and human relationships emerge from processes of which we can be only dimly aware. ““When thinking machines first arrive in the world they will be the work of flawed, intermittently lucid animals whose minds are stuffed with nonsense and delusion. Mutating under the pressure of entropy, the machines humans have invented will develop faults and flaws of their own. Soon they will no longer be aware of parts of their own minds; repression, denial and fantasy will cloud the empty sky of consciousness. Emerging from an inner world they cannot fathom, antagonist impulses will govern their behaviour. Eventually these half-broken machines will have the impression that they are choosing their path through life. As in humans, this may be an illusion; but as the sensation takes hold, it will engender what in humans used to be called a soul.”
- How is the puppet to live? You might think a puppet can have no choice in the matter. But the uber-marionette - a puppet-like creature that as a result of the accidents of evolution has become self-aware - is bound to live as if it decides what it does. But when the puppet acts, it cannot help feeling that it is free. The belief that humans fail to lead the good life because of ignorance, first thought up by Socrates, reappears in modern thinking. Socrates thought, and people now think, that with an increase in scientific knowledge there will be an increase in human goodness. The Greek tragedians expressed a more truthful version of human experience: no amount of virtue or reasoning can ensure that human beings live a worthwhile life. Judaism contains something akin to the Greek sense of tragedy: despite the fact that he ended by accepting God’s will, Job’s questioning of divine justice posed a challenge to any belief in ultimate moral harmony. These older moralities are superior to modern moralities in that they understand that humankind can never overcome its inherent limitations. It is only in recent times that human beings have come to see themselves as potentially godlike. Ancient thinkers were more intelligent as well as more honest. (Rose-tinted glasses?) They knew that human action can change the world, sometimes for the good. They also knew that civilisations rise and fall; what has been gained will be lost, regained and then lost again in a cycle as natural as the seasons. Living before the triumph of Christianity, Augustus and Aurelius did not imagine that history had any overall meaning. There was no hidden thread of redemption or improvement in the passage of events. Reared on a curdled brew of Socratism and scraps of decayed Christianity, modern thinkers condemn this is a counsel of despair. In the ancient world it expressed health and clarity of mind. If you want to reject any idea of God, you must accept that ‘humanity’ - the universal subject that finds redemption in history - also does not exist.
- As Kleist portrays them, marionettes have an advantage over humans; they can defy gravity. In the story, human beings become free when they become fully conscious. For these godlike creatures, there can be nothing that is mysterious. This is a very old faith; Gnostics, Socrates, Modern rationalism, evangelists for evolution, trans-humanists, techno-futurists all promote the project of expelling mystery from the mind. Gnosticism has conquered the world. Belief in the liberating power of knowledge has become the ruling illusion of modern humankind. Most want to believe that some kind of explanation or understanding will deliver them of their conflicts. Yet being divided from yourself goes with being self-aware. This is the truth at the Genesis myth: the fall is not an event at the beginning of history but the intrinsic condition of self-conscious beings. Only creatures that are as flawed and ignorant as humans can be free in the way humans are free. We do not know how matter came to dream our world into being; we do not know what, if anything, comes when the dream ends for us and we die. We yearn for a type of knowledge that would make us other than we are, though what we cannot say. Accepting the fact of unknowing makes possible an inner freedom very different from that pursued by Gnostics. If you have this negative capability (the belief that you cannot really know why you do what you do) you will not want a higher form of consciousness; your ordinary mind will give you all you need. Rather than trying to impose sense on your life, you will be content to let meaning come and go. Instead of becoming an unfaltering puppet, you will make your way in the stumbling human world. Uber-marionettes do not have to wait until they can fly before they are free. Not looking to ascend into the heavens, they can find freedom in falling to earth.
daaan's review against another edition
5.0
Not a recent read, there are two versions of this in the database and I had the wrong one, it claimed to be written by the author of Men are from mars... (now that would be a rude awakening if you went in unprepared). It reads exactly like a John N Gray book should, not so much an attempt to puncture the balloon of western liberal hubris, but an attempt to turn it into perforated paper. The target here is free will, and whilst I disagree to an extent on the assessment (I don't believe in a binary Free vs. Not Free and I think the argument flounders a little if you start talking about people having 40% Free will), I think the direction is correct. Even if you disagree with everything written, it's still valuable as an opportunity to challenge your assumptions.
lisgoe's review against another edition
4.0
Took me a couple of attempts to read the first 10 pages. But once I got going, it became really interesting!
glaiza_echo's review against another edition
https://paperwanderer.wordpress.com/2015/04/23/the-soul-of-the-marionette-a-short-enquiry-into-human-freedom-by-john-nicholas-gray/
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