Tag: book review

Review: The Big Picture

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This is my Amazon review of Sean Carroll’s “The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself”. Although I am a theologian, I read a lot of books by atheist/materialist scientists. In my reviews of these books, I leave religion out if they do. But Dr. Carroll’s book is as much about his scientific theme as it is a book explicitly critical of religion all the way through. In the following review I mention this only briefly, but I have written also a longer piece here in the blog covering this ground more thoroughly. The link will take you to it. Meanwhile here is a link to Carroll’s book on Amazon. Hope you enjoy the review. —

Sean Carroll’s book has two broad themes. The first is to explain to us how it is that everything we observe in the universe, including all of what makes up human experience, emerges from the physics that lies at the heart of the universe, what Carroll calls “the core theory”; quantum field theory and the “standard model” of particle physics. Here he makes the case that what exists is what emerges from very special (low entropy) conditions in the universe’s past. It all comes down to the the second law of thermodynamics, the fundamental forces and the fact that the universe is far from an equilibrium state. In this he does an excellent non-technical job of describing how it is that the universe we find produces so much complexity from but humble beginnings. As he moves up the chain of complexity (emergence and phase changes) he applies the same principles of development to everything from galaxies and stars to life, consciousness, and the complex mentality of human beings. He admits that we have a much better explanation of the emergence of stars and even life from physics and chemistry than we do for the emergence of consciousness from biology. But he is confident his model works all the way to the top.

In his second theme, Carroll is concerned not only with establishing that physics tells the right story, but that it is the only story and no other story is reasonable. Put another way, by his lights, any other story is highly unlikely. By this he doesn’t mean that we don’t use different languages to speak of particles, biology, or feelings, but that nothing besides emergence from purely physical roots is going on as concerns consciousness, moral sensibility, and the seeming appearance of free will. Since the argument that there is more than physics going on here comes mostly from religion, he pointedly and repeatedly criticizes it claiming it has no genuine bearing on anything real. To be sure he doesn’t claim to know that there is no God, only to have established (he believes) that God’s reality is very very unlikely. One wonders why he feels the need to be so forceful about this, but the reason is clear enough in the book’s last section where he attempts to make sense of experiences that (to many) most strongly suggest that there is something besides physics going on; meanings in life, love, moral choices, desires, a sense of self, and what seems to us to be robust free will. To explain these, he applies the same model of emergence and phase change to consciousness and from there to all things mental. He confidently asserts that all of these things are nothing more than “a way of talking” about phenomena that are, in the end, nothing but physics.

What perturbs me about this second theme is certainly not his desire to mention (at least) and critique the competition but that he critiques such a straw man version of it. Time and time again he demonstrates his grasp of the nuances of physics while criticizing grossly superficial and unnuanced notions of what religion is and what it says.

There are other recent mainstream books that cover much of this same ground as concerns cosmic evolution, life, and even consciousness. Dr. Carroll is good here. He writes well, non-technically, and does an good job of stretching the idea of emergence into the human experience. That this is a part of the whole story is undoubtedly true, but it is unwise to declare that it is the whole story, or even likely the whole story, without knowing the whole story (which he admits is not known), or at least appreciating what the competition actually says.

Review: Zizek End Times

I recently posted a review of Zizek’s “Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism” (2013) here in the blog. A book inspiring my “Realism and Antirealism”. Here is my Amazon (October 2016) review of his earlier “Living in the End Times” (2011). When I wrote this one I hadn’t yet keyed in to Zizek’s fundamentally antirealist outlook, something that became obvious in the opening pages of the later book. I was sensitized to the distinction by Maurizio Ferraris, a continental “new realist”, and an excellent book on Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks (The links will take you to their books on Amazon) both read in between the two Zizek books. The review does however capture my intuitive realist rebellion to Zizek’s approach. Now I understand why.

I’ve watched Slavoj Zizek through several YouTube interviews, a very articulate and animated speaker who always seems to have an unusual but common sensical slant on goings on in the world. I bought this book because I thought I might find more of the same between its covers and the title was especially interesting. But how to review this book? The author has a vast background in European social and political philosophy from Marx and Hegel (on whom he particularly rests for the grand picture) to more contemporary figures like psychiatrist/philosopher Jacques Lacan and Alain Badiou (a modern French Marxist) one or the other of whom is mentioned on almost every page!

This book ranges over the entirety of Earth’s present social, political, and economic space. Marx and Hegel updated to the present serve as the backdrop. Of course Freud is in there too along with a few dozen other philosophers and authors both popular and literary. Zizek brings into this business not only thinkers and writing, but film, architecture, modern art, and technological transformations. War and peace, terror, contentment, and sexual mores all fall within his gaze.

Within this scope, with every political, cultural, economic event event, philosophy, and interpretation, nothing is quite as it seems. Freedom is not free, goodness is not entirely good, nor badness all bad. Every “ism” is evil and yet highlights something important about the human condition. You name it, and Zizek will find a viewpoint that stands whatever the “it” is, on its head. Much of this would be laughable, but Zizek’s viewpoints (and he takes many of them, often opposed to one another for the sake of illuminating consequences actually felt by real human beings) are not easily dismissed as fantasy. Each has something to say to us. A few struck me as unfair, perhaps contrived, but that would be reading my own personal political and social biases into what I know of history and psychology. None of his varied perspectives lack force. Perhaps there is an over emphasis here or an under-emphasis there, but who is to say if it is I or he who has the greater insight into the true weight of it? It is clear that he is very well read and deeply thinks about all that he encounters.

Does he ever answer the question? Are we living in the end times? I think, if you mean the end of biological humanity as such the answer would be no (unless someone triggers a global thermonuclear war). But if you mean the end of life as it is presently known and understood, the answer is probably yes. What will it be that gets us? Economic exhaustion? Ecological (and so biological) collapse? Old fashioned war, or a new fashioned loss of the very center of our “selves” to virtual reality; “the Matrix” for real, not imposed by aliens but by our own economic elite and not even the elite as individuals but the system itself! Quite possibly it will be all or much of it together. Nor is he sanguine about what will follow. His view of history is pessimistic. Civilizations and political systems come and they go and when they go what replaces them, while perhaps different from what went before, is no less oppressive to the majority of individuals alive at the time. His is not a view of ever evolving perfection, of goodness eventually triumphing over evil, but rather more of the same, more of the mix of good and bad that makes human beings what they are now and ever will be.

In the end he reverts back to his updated Marx. The governments of Eastern Europe were evil, but what replaced them was also evil and continues to wreck its corrosive influence. Interestingly he discerns, in the political and economic patterns of the world, the further expansion and domination of capitalist-oriented systems regardless of the politics of individual nations. He in fact discerns the emergence of the “market state” from the nation state, but he never gets around to naming it. It is no doubt a mix of adaptation to the totality of the global situation, though he does loudly proclaim that for all that adaptation it is itself a part (if not the main part) of our present problem and about this he is surely correct. Oddly, for a Marxist-Hegelian, he doesn’t seem to recognize its present inevitability.

This is a book of great scope. If you are interested in a dense survey of our age from the viewpoint of an updated Marxist/Hegelian “rolling on” of history written by a scholar of the highest caliber (which doesn’t automatically make him right) then this is a good book for you. If you prefer a simple or unambiguous answer, then perhaps it is not.

Book Review: Less Than Nothing, Zizek 2013

The text of my Amazon review of Slavoj Zizek’s “Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism” Verso Books 2013. I know I could post a link, but Amazon has enough power already! If you are interested in the book, here is a link to it and other reviews of it.  Here is a recent blog post of mine on Antirealism and Realism inspired by  Zizek and other reading like this article on Antirealism from SEP.

 

This is a sweeping review of Hegel’s “dialectical method”, its application in his history and phenomenology, and then its outworking in the thought of Hegel’s contemporaries and successors. All of this is Zizek applying Hegel (beginning with the genesis of Hegelian-ism in Kant) to [mostly] continental philosophers influenced by Hegel, which comes out to just about everybody in the European antirealist tradition that Kant began. Besides Hegel Lacan takes up the most consideration but beyond him there are many many others to numerous to name.

Philosophers never declare themselves for “realism” or “antirealism”, a division always reflected in their thought. Zizek is an acknowledged heavyweight in the antirealist domain and his dominant interests, psychology, and political history, reveal themselves in all the threads of this book. He covers these and many more subjects (and philosophers) as he interprets them through Hegel. Sometimes he notes where he thinks their thought “goes wrong” (relative to Hegel) but more often he uses their material to illustrate the added insights they bring to the subject matter via their Hegelian influence.

It is impossible to cover this book in detail, but I can describe its broad structure. Imagine a wheel with a hub and spokes, perhaps a bicycle wheel. Zizek begins at the hub with a theme “truth has the structure of fiction”, almost his opening line. His writing spirals around the hub in tight circles outward toward the rim. On the way, he crosses the same spokes which in this analogy stand for both discrete subjects within the universe of his interests (and they are broad) and the philosophers whose thought he uses to illustrate his point. Round and round he goes touching the same spokes again and again each time adding more or new context with which to understand the particular subject and philosopher involved. Throughout the book, Zizek weaves together his own commentary with extensive quotes from dozens of philosophers from Kant to Meillassoux. As he crosses each spoke over again their thought is re-illustrated, re-applied to the subject matter at hand whether it be language, sex, politics, economics, history, or quantum mechanics.

I am a realist philosopher and it has been a long time since I’ve read Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Freud, Nietzsche, or Marx. I’ve not read Lacan, or any of the many other continental antirealists of the later 20th century Zizek uses here. Zizek’s vocabulary, evolved over two centuries of antirealism, is dense, obscure, and difficult for me. But as the many subjects are touched on again and again his meaning became clearer. Thanks to the enhancing repetition, retouching each spoke, his central arguments became clearer. Was Zizek’s repetition solidifying my impressions, or was I just getting used to the lingo? Probably some of both.

There is probably more than one legitimate way to interpret Hegel, Lacan, and the rest. Zizek’s authoritative grasp of this material certainly makes his interpretation one of them, an approach to be taken seriously. He runs into trouble only when he crosses into the subject of science, represented by the association between quantum mechanics and cosmology, where he seems a bit out of his depth. His description of the relation between the Higgs field and the “true and false vacuum” (the next-to-last chapter) quotes Paul Steinhardt and is clear enough, but then Zizek goes back and casts this phenomenon in Hegelian, Lacanian, and even Freudian terms! None of this could be more than poetic metaphor, but Zizek doesn’t seem to take it that way. To me (and I opine here because I’ve read so much physics and cosmology) quantum physics as described by modern physicists, can only be understood in realist terms. If I understand antirealism properly nothing in the corpus of antirealist thought can possibly be about (signify) the quantum world which is washed out long before the point where the external horizon appears to phenomenal experience.

Although I am not an antirealist, I enjoy reading Zizek. This book is long and dense, but his enthusiasm and humor reveal themselves throughout. I enjoy reading philosophers who are passionate about their work and at the same time refuse to take themselves too seriously. It’s hard to tell if Zizek takes himself too seriously. I don’t think so, but this ambiguity coupled with a little self-deprecating humor (where do you see that otherwise in philosophy these days) is all a part of the book’s charm.

To finish this review, I do want to give kudos to the publisher (Verso Books)! I recently read a 125 page Kindle book priced at $40 (greedy publisher who shall remain unnamed). This book is 1000 pages long and only $11! Very reasonable! Highly recommended for Zizek fans and anyone interested in a forcefully argued interpretation of Hegel and much of antirealist thought from Kant to Meillassoux.