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guyy · 06-03-2006, 09:08 PM

Pierre Bourdieu's la Distinction made me see things differently, especially the middle class bohemian world I usually inhabit. The book is famous for the idea of "cultural capital", but the more general point that cultural judgements are part and parcel of class society made more of an impact on me. We tend to exempt our own judgements from these sorts of observations; we think that our judgements are rational and self-evident in some universal sense. La Distinction made me more self-critical. But you might say that Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet did the same thing.

Aside from that, the eye-openers for me have generally been the classics, especially Hegel, Marx, and Being and Time. Hegel's Phenomenology because it's so audaciously totalising and Marx for showing how the mundane can be immensely important. These are such lame summaries. I think books like these are "eye-openers" precisely because they are too complex and too rich in observations to summarise easily..

What's odd is that philosophy up to Hegel really doesn't cut it for me. I can't say that Plato, Aristotle, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Zhu Xi or even Descartes, Spinoza, or Kant had the same impact on me. Interesting? Of course, and sometimes they have eye-opening observations on each other, but there's not the same wow. The one exception might be Confucius' Analects which presents an atheist, realist morality. Confucius is conservative and authoritarian, but the Analects presents a counterexample to the notion that authority is a prerequisite for civilised behaviour. This is more explicit in Mencius, which is why Mencius was banned even under regimes which claimed to hew to Confucian orthodoxy.

I'd also add Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution because despite the author's orthodox interpretation, his account of the events shows how fluid the situation really was. Trotsky wants to say something else, but his book shows how revolution was exactly that fluidity. Amusing polemics, too.

But really, all books ought to open your eyes to something, even if it's only the author's methodology or the use of a certain word or phrase. Then there's Ulysses, the Crying of lot 49...

06-03-2006, 09:08 PM	#77 (permalink)
guyy Addict Location: Cottage Grove, Wisconsin	Pierre Bourdieu's la Distinction made me see things differently, especially the middle class bohemian world I usually inhabit. The book is famous for the idea of "cultural capital", but the more general point that cultural judgements are part and parcel of class society made more of an impact on me. We tend to exempt our own judgements from these sorts of observations; we think that our judgements are rational and self-evident in some universal sense. La Distinction made me more self-critical. But you might say that Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet did the same thing. Aside from that, the eye-openers for me have generally been the classics, especially Hegel, Marx, and Being and Time. Hegel's Phenomenology because it's so audaciously totalising and Marx for showing how the mundane can be immensely important. These are such lame summaries. I think books like these are "eye-openers" precisely because they are too complex and too rich in observations to summarise easily.. What's odd is that philosophy up to Hegel really doesn't cut it for me. I can't say that Plato, Aristotle, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Zhu Xi or even Descartes, Spinoza, or Kant had the same impact on me. Interesting? Of course, and sometimes they have eye-opening observations on each other, but there's not the same wow. The one exception might be Confucius' Analects which presents an atheist, realist morality. Confucius is conservative and authoritarian, but the Analects presents a counterexample to the notion that authority is a prerequisite for civilised behaviour. This is more explicit in Mencius, which is why Mencius was banned even under regimes which claimed to hew to Confucian orthodoxy. I'd also add Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution because despite the author's orthodox interpretation, his account of the events shows how fluid the situation really was. Trotsky wants to say something else, but his book shows how revolution was exactly that fluidity. Amusing polemics, too. But really, all books ought to open your eyes to something, even if it's only the author's methodology or the use of a certain word or phrase. Then there's Ulysses, the Crying of lot 49...