Doctor Faustus

  Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism by Gershom Scholem This book, while follows the history of a theme, namely, Jewish mysticism, it is in fact divided to lectures each focusing on a specific movement or writer. Therefore I'll instead comment on some of the theoretical foundations of this work. To begin with, Scholem conceptualizes religious belief as having historical stages. According to him, belief begins as direct and animistic - the natural world is conceived as living and natural phenomena as the manifestations of divine forces. In this stage, the relationship to that which is holy is direct, as it exists literally around us. The second stage according to him was the development of monotheism and "naive religion" which he seems to have a most favorable view - this religion has a fundamental gap between humans and the divine, and rules that must be followed. The third stage is the collapse of the naive religion as the believers search for hidden meanings behind the l...

  Transgender History by Susan Stryker (Note: I use the term "trans people" for trans people in general, though noteworthy to mention, this post mostly discussed trans women, and "transsexual" to describe specifically the group historically described as such, that pursued medical intervention of hormone therapy and surgeries in an attempt to fully transition to the other gender) I found myself very much enjoying this short history. And also found, to my (it seems vain) surprise how little sophistication my previous knowledge about the history of trans people and LGBT people in general involved. I must note that this book perhaps should be better termed "American Transgender History" since it focuses on the United States almost exclusively (except a short section in the beginning about Magnus Hirschfeld and the Institut fuer Sexualwissenschaft , even this is later "revealed" to be included because of the impact it had on Harry Benjamin , an acqua...

  Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson In this book there is an attempt, one that I'd characterize as McLuhanist , to bring into intelligibility how material conditions brought about the consciousness of nationalism - inventing a form of membership that until recently did not exist and also made no sense. The root Anderson locates as, in his opinion, that most substantial is the advent of print. He observes the consequences of print and how it yielded a national consciousness. First he starts, in indeed a manner that I wouldn't be surprised to find written by McLuhan - by expressing a different attitude towards simultaneity that developed due to print culture. The mass produced books and newspapers allowed for a new consciousness in which many people, most of whom one isn't familiar with, all participate in reading the very same words, and in the exact same fashion as countless nameless others. This, Anderson believe...

The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness  by R. D. Laing This work represents a criticism of psychiatry. It fundamentally questions some basic premises that psychiatry has about itself and its role, as well as the "mentally disordered". Laing starts the book first by examining different angles by which one can view a human being - a human being can be a person, and a human being can be an organism. Therefore - when a human being speaks, you can either look at the content of what they express, or you may look at it as a mechanical/biological process that manifests. According to Laing, one fundamental problem in psychiatry is that it's devoted to the latter (as a biological organism) even though the discipline itself is a study and therapy relating to personhood, something that on the surface at least does appear rather absurd. In this work he brings the example of " hebephrenic " and " catatonic " individuals to make his point - whic...

  Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil At my previous post (about After Virtue ) I have concluded with the unnerving sensation of being lost - morality has been thoroughly undermined by MacIntyre's analysis and yet while I did find myself sympathetic or willing to give some credibility to the idea of Virtue Ethics I was still broadly left unconvinced by its totality, only conceding it could be useful in specific contexts. Thankfully, the very next book I've now finished, Gravity and Grace, brought to my attention an alternative path.  Considering the modest length of this book, it has taken me quite a while to finish since its ideas are compiled rather densely. Also, additionally, the amount of ideas present is overwhelming and therefore I'll only mention here a couple I found of most interest. In regards to the ethical question raised prior, Weil has compiled a wholly different way of thinking about goodness compared with more secular philosophy - goodness as a manifestation o...

  After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by Alasdair MacIntyre I'll start by saying I found this book truly valuable and illuminating. I'll divide my observations about it to two sections, the first about its criticisms of dominant ethical stances as well as the social sciences. The second about the solution it proposes, its version of virtue ethics. In the beginning of the book MacIntyre essentially compares the state of ethics in modern society to the premise of A Canticle for Leibowitz. The idea is that there was a catastrophic cataclysm of a sort that rendered ideas that were once intelligible, comprehensible, logical null. A weird state like the premise of A Canticle for Leibowitz ( which I wrote a blog post on ), in which we possess fragments of knowledge about the past, but we are also in a state of semiotic confusion about the meaning of the terms and why they are there in the first place (like how a scholar in the aforementioned novel believed Capek's R.U.R is in f...

  A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch "A History of Christianity" is a massive historical overview. A thousand pages depicting the long history of Christianity from its cultural roots in ancient Judaism and classical civilizations all the way to our day and age. For this reason whatever thoughts I can compose here cannot summarize it, the vast multitude of subjects and ideas would render that task futile. Rather, I'll discuss a couple of observations, ones I found among the most interesting and enlightening. One such observation that I found fascinating was the relationship between Christianity and earthly political power. Christianity's very conception of theological orthodoxy was molded by its partnership with Roman imperial authority, the Emperor present in ecumenical councils and subsequently lending his violent military power to the enforcement of the resulting conclusion of the council. When Julian attempted to under...

  Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O'Neill " The evidence I’d amassed against the official version of the Manson murders was so voluminous, from so many angles, that it was overdetermined. I could poke a thousand holes in the story, but I couldn’t say what really happened. In fact, the major arms of my research were often in contradiction with one another. It couldn’t be the case that the truth involved a drug burn gone wrong, orgies with Hollywood elite, a counterinsurgency-trained CIA infiltrator in the Family, a series of unusually lax sheriff’s deputies and district attorneys and judges and parole officers, an FBI plot to smear leftists and Black Panthers, an effort to see if research on drugged mice applied to hippies, and LSD mind-control experiments tested in the field… could it? There was no way. " This quote from the final chapter of "Chaos" summarizes the results of the effort that was made to dispel the lies...

  The Concept of the Political by Carl Schmitt I would like to divide my thoughts here to two categories. The first category - looking at Schmitt's critiques of Liberalism and even an aside to Marxism . The second category - an examination of Schmitt's own argument and conception of the political. One main observation that Schmitt lays down, in regards to the foundations upon which Liberalism stands upon, is that it ultimately has a mythical view of The State. Although seen as dispelling antiquated myths, in reality Liberalism has embraced a vision of The State that seems to find its origin in the old conception of divine mandate, as if the apparatus stands tall above, and dominates, the rest of the social forces. He demonstrates how that may be self-delusion by stating that as long as the state itself isn't a political entity, that is, one with a clear sense of goal predicated upon the friend/enemy distinction, it is more than anything a tool to be used by truly political...

  The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans In the popular imagination, the rise of Nazism was a spectacular, incomprehensible, sudden event. Yet in reality it was hardly an anomaly, considering the circumstances. The Weimar Republic , situated upon, from the beginning, uncomfortable grounds, slowly (rather than suddenly) descended onto a tyranny well before the Nazis, through the process of Gleichschaltung , established a totalitarian one-party society. Now, it must be noted that Evans clearly does not condone the idea that it was foretold in the stars. He makes it clear that chance has lead Germany to become a Nazi dictatorship, but chance wasn't alone in this regard - the foundation was already laid, in many regards. It could have gone differently - it would not be entirely unwise, in my opinion, to compare the conditions that Germany dealt with after WWI with the conditions France dealt with after the Franco-German war of 1870-1871 - both were established after a hum...

  Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? by Mark Fisher " It is easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to capitalism. "  That's the key sentence that sums up, very broadly, the idea of what "capitalist realism" really is. If, at the past, certain political and economic orders needed to employ vast amounts of propaganda to justify themselves (Liberal Capitalism, too, did so quite until fairly recently, " The American Dream " and the like) nowadays Capitalism requires no such thing. Paradoxically, it employs a certain cynicism and anti-utopian sentiments to maintain its entrenchment. The reason it can do that is because, instead of competing for our sympathy, Capitalism, and in particular Neoliberal Capitalism (characterized by a totalizing market that pervades all spaces, including in the private sphere, or what Fisher himself termed "Business Ontology") simply occupies everything that the eye can see, stretching from one hor...

  Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler It is quite extraordinary how relevant this book remained today though it was originally published 30 years ago. Of course, discussions about gender and sex in the general ( cishet ) public is probably doomed to remain infantile as always, but also in feminist circles, it appears there are still very vocal remnants of an antiquated, essentialist sort of 'feminism' that still occupies influential positions in the media, in particular those of the Anglosphere , frequently abusing this power more in the service of harming trans people than helping cis women. But even beyond that, even transgender people frequently tend to fall onto essentialist fallacies, and not just of the " transmedicalist " variety. Mind you, I'm not referring to the "born in the wrong body" cliché, as I doubt there's a single trans person that doesn't express that idea only to make gender dysphoria remo...

  Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics by Tim Marshall "Prisoners of Geography" is a very valuable book to read, not necessarily as an ultimate treatise (if you'd call it that) about a supposed deterministic nature of global politics but rather, more than anything, what it implies about the mindsets governing our governments. First and foremost, I believe I'll start with the chronological starting-point - the past. Marshall doesn't merely illustrate the conflicts of interest, energy needs, and geographic obstacles as they are today and their contemporary impact but also retroactively uses this political logic handling these aspects in their modern form as the motivators behind past political policies as well as the nature of diplomacy throughout the ages. I'll only note that as a historical hypothesis I don't believe it holds up to scrutiny because it implies the same values and even cosmological ...