His childhood was a mixture of "bizarre limits" – none of the household allowed to speak to the lad in anything but Latin – and "almost unlimited freedom". The 20 answers to the title question are drawn from the Essays, and act as a prism for aspects of Montaigne's life and thought. Like recent books on Proust, Joyce and Austen, How to Live skilfully plucks a life-guide from the incessant flux of Montaigne's prose. By relaxing on that issue, and letting it all roll, he allows the reader to watch him think. But his originality is also rooted in a debate as old as philosophy itself: the struggle between thought and language (which comes first?), and their mutual interdependency. Famously, his cat had a vital part in this its gaze prompted him to recognise the idiosyncracy of perspective, as seeing a hare did for Virginia Woolf four centuries later – one of the many illuminating parallels Sarah Bakewell makes in How to Live. A 16th-century nobleman as the father of all bloggers, and his Essays as the mother of all blogs? Certainly Montaigne's idea of the "essay" (from essai, meaning "trial") is far closer to the rambling, highly personal, internet-spawned version than the type remembered from school, where to stray hors sujet is the quickest way to lose marks.Īs Montaigne himself recognised, his idea was indeed a new one: "This is the only book in the world of its kind, and its plan is both wild and extravagant." And this is because his subject, albeit "vain and worthless", was himself. The result is an engaging story about a group of passionate thinkers, and a reminder of their continued relevance.A ccording to this latest biography the idea of writing about oneself was "invented" by Michel de Montaigne. And de Beauvoir emerges as very much the hero: humanistic, prescient, and fearless. Sartre is portrayed sympathetically, his erratic late-career work and controversial politics accepted as part of an imperfect life lived in pursuit of noble ideals Heidegger, with his questionable postwar rehabilitation and inward-turned gloominess, less so. With coverage of friendship, travel, argument, tragedy, drugs, Paris, and, of course, lots of sex, Bakewell’s biographical approach pays off, in part because certain abstractions, like Sartre’s enigmatic notion of freedom, seem to make more sense when one knows something about the man’s mess of anxieties and personal entanglements. Avoiding such potholes, Bakewell focuses upon key individuals-Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Martin Heidegger-and on their interactions with each other and with the historical circumstances of the harsh twentieth century. This is no easy task: some argue that existentialism is more of a mood or an aesthetic than a philosophy, and even those who agree that it is a philosophy often end up in fisticuffs over how to define it. Bakewell follows her celebrated study of Montaigne ( How to Live, 2010) with a lively appraisal of existentialism and its leading thinkers.
0 kommentar(er)
