Reviews and Comments

The main point of the book should not be alien to those familiar with contemporary thoughts, namely with Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, A. N. Whitehead, embodied cognition and the like. It is an anthropological-socialogical view of, broadly speaking, the phenomenological and processual thesis that all events and objects are inseparable from the (not-necessarily physical) environment that they're situated in, and is a developed form of German historicism and romanticist thoughts. From the most fundamental process of sensual perception to language "acquisition" or rather language-ability generation, there is no "innate ability" that is coded in the genes that would be expressed and actualized.

It's a pity that philosophers, evolutionary biologists and anthropologist do not even try to learn some more "fundamental" science outside of their professional requirements, like physics and information theory, and some mathematics and theoretical computer science, since it is manifest that a same trend is burgeoning in both family of fields. Namely, information retrieval as receiving something directly given v.s. as decoding and internal mathematics v.s. fixing a category (Set); cognitive science v.s. ecological psychology and set-theoretical foundation of mathematics v.s. practical foundations. These, for those familiar with 20th century (actually should be seen as 19th century since I'll let the year 1933 be the watershed) European thoughts, with Schellingianism, Bergsonism, Teilhardian and Whiteheadian thoughts, should, again, not be alien, but it doesn't seem like most people are well-read in philosophy and 20th century thoughts.

There are internal contradictions in Ingold's thoughts, or more precisely in his application of the thoughts in diverse topics. For example, sometimes it is rejected that there are any "ephemeral and meaningless sense data", even "formless, raw data", whereas sometimes the notion of "raw perceptual data" is used freely to describe a learning process. He also vacillates between postulating some innate abilities in human and rejecting others, without a clear schema for the differentiation. This is due to the fact that a corresponding epistemology that renders acquisitions of new information possible without any innate ability, without a program or a computational processing unit that is universal, is not given.

To avoid the notion radically, a new kind of metaphysics that abolishes the very independence of subject from his surrounding should be developed. An option would be A. N. Whitetead's process metaphysics, the other, that might not be separated from process thought, is an anti-realist meaning-theory. The former abolishes the notion of subject-object or even any object but only concerns itself with events and processes, and the latter adopts a constructivist view of reality by denying the reality of the presence/existence of information without a "representation" or "realization", i.e. without being subject to perception.

Ingold's writings are clear and without any muddle, but it might seem repetitive and wordy as the thoughts presented take shape. He cites and quotes tons of writings and is literally a human library, but I doubt that quoting and citing are of any help: though promising and insightful, the logical architecture is incomplete, and can only be supplemented by, but not based upon, enumeration of facts and debates. Also he uses rather political-ideological phrases and concepts like "Western" "teleological" much too often, while indicating that he himself is not ideological. It might have been understandable in 2000, but now it leaves a bad taste.

Nevertheless, an exceedingly good book that summarizes the general constructivist-intuitionist-processual-phenomenological trend in the field of psychology, anthropology and biology, that should come handy for newcomers. It is advisable to read the introduction to each parts and chapters then read individual chapters selectively, than read the book from beginning to end.

It is hard to really tell what the book is about. You'll be able to learn about Eliade's ideas, maybe provided that you have read Eliade's books, from this book than from any other book that gives expositions to Eliade's thoughts. You'll be able to discern the kernel of Jungian psychology without being distracted by the New Age elements in this book, maybe provided that you have read Answer to Job and Late Thoughts. You'll be able to feel deeply about his writings about Mystici Corporis Christi and Simone Weil's thoughts, provided that you have already thought deeply about these. In other words, you won't be able to comprehend what Frye is trying to say, without understanding what he is saying first.

It might be concluded that this is a review book written by an expert for experts, but it is hard to tell in which field the expertise is in, and it is certainly not a review. It is not about culture but about spirit, but highly cultured. It looks like an orthodox, traditional work, but it is filled with Jungian, Teilhard de Chardin-ian and Eliadian highly unorthodox thoughts and is factually extremely imaginative. It looks like a scholarly non-partisan work, but is highly religious.

Reading the book is like listening to a well-educated and eloquent person in a time of leisure. There is nothing new to learn if you have a wide range of interest, e.g. visual art, music, literature, theology, philosophy of history, new-age religions, and are able to form a bird-eye view of the whole amalgamation of Human creative works in the mind, but after listening to his talk you'll be flooded with inspirations and wild thoughts, together with a feeling of finally being understood.

The writing style is also remarkable. It is balanced. The solemness is balanced by imaginativeness, and passion by calmness. The thoughts, while highly intuitive and frank, are expounded in an analytical manner, flavoured with a sense of humor, leaving an impression that the author is extremely learned. Albeit calm and manifestly educated, it never feels paunchy like Harold Bloom's writings, never gives a sense of snobbishness.

It needs to be said that the book is written in an unnecessarily elaborate manner that complicates the process of comprehension. Summarizing, it merely saids that the meaning of "equivalence" between two theories A and B should be that A and B have "equivalent" models, that is, they have "equivalent" theories, or that their syntactic categories are Morita equivalent. The tools utilized were set theory and first order logic that logicians and philosophers more or less have some familiarity, so in order to define Morita equivalence between theories a whole two hundred of pages are used to develop the theory, along with some rather ugly definitions. I estimate that if a fully category-theoretic language is utilized 20-40 pages would be enough.

For someone who knows what Morita equivalence is in this sense what is important is the last chapter. Halvorson's point is, roughly speaking, pragmatic in the sense of American pragmatism and moderate anti-realist, saying that the opposition between realists and anti-realists is merely that of difference between the criteria for two theories to be equivalent. Some need stronger one, while others need weaker, depending on what's one's purpose and what's in the range of one's accpeptance. Morita equivalence is the middle point that is neither too conservative in the sense of metaphysical realist, nor too liberal in the sense of extreme anti-realist. However it doesn't really make sense since Morita equivalence is really just an equivalence between 2-categories, and the categories that are chosen are nearly arbitrary. For instance, here Halvorson simply used classical first-order language, from which the theories built would definitely have syntactic categories that are different from those built from intuitionistic first-order language. The controversy between realists and anti-realists after 90s is about what language (e.g. classical or intuitionistic or even linear) science should utilize, or what mathematics (classical or intuitionistic, a mathematics with God-given real numbers or with reals continuously being constructed) science should choose, not on in what sense a scientific theory is equivalent to another.

While it is evident that anyone with some passing knowledge of Curry-Howard-Lambek correspondence and philosophy of science, together with some knowledge of 2-category, should have had a similar idea for sorting out the relations between language-theory, it is Halvorson et al. who have done the actual work and pointed out a good direction. It is possible that various string dualities and even quantum mechanics, when viewed from the point of quantization or asymptotic Bohrification, is a consequence of realizing that the classical theories are logically redundant (have "gauge symmetry") in their description and their language, that is, "laws of Nature" that one discovers when probing the so-called Nature are in essence that of logic - put it in a catchword, the mind, or the unconsciouss, "knows" quantum mechanics, while the consciousness doesn't, and the consciousness creates the Nature in its unfolding in the second cosmogony of universe.

My problem with modern Aristotelianism and neo-Thomism is that they explain everything, and they don't explain anything at all. By this I mean that these philosophies are shallow and superficial, they are designed to explain things away in a fiercely dogmatic and outrageously dull manner; these are theories of everything that explain nothing. If you write polemics, it would be better to ensure that you are trying to convey something deep and original, rather than explain things away in a manner similar to "that's that".

It's impossible for me to give a detailed critique of Feser's positions here since they are actually too funny that I don't even know what I should say, but I can expect that physicists, mathematicians and biologists would be profoundly bored by Feser's arguments: what's he trying to do here? I mean, you have the point, your explanations make sense, but so what? By this I mean, Feser does not understand why some scientists are trying to develop a brand new metaphysics at all (I suspect that he doesn't even know that this is the case; it seems that for him all scientists are subscribers to scientism). No one really wants an Aristotelian interpretation of quantum mechanics since the so-called interpretation is devoid of mathematical consequences and any connection to other disciplines and any explanatory power that leads to deeper and novel discoveries and speculations like those made by Connes, Landsman, etc. For instance, the Aristotelian solution to Zeno's paradox - if it can be classified as a solution at all - doesn't lead to anything similar to constructive analysis or intuitionistic continuum. Aristotelian continuum is basically a bunch of garbage that explains everything - let's pretent that it really provides a solution to Zeno's paradox - but does nothing, similar to some "hylomorphic" account of life. Yes, an animal is a composite of matter and form, the form is such and such, e.g. the form dictates that it eats, shits, etc. and so what? I sense with my sensory perception, namely, with the perceptive power of sight, that a girl is pretty, and I ask modern Aristotelians why she's so pretty, then philosophers like Feser - totally devoid of depth but good at manufacturing working systems that explain everything - might, might, answer that because in the essence or the form or whatever of the girl there's prettiness, and pedantically try to correct me in that it is not the sensory perception that renders the girl pretty and so on. Of course scientists' possible answer to the same problem should be equally hilarious, but you get the point.

At least for me, terms and phrases in philosophy are usually convenient constructs, tools to unravel deeper mysteries and structure the world and a standing ground. If the phrases and definitions one uses lead to barren lands, then it is the phrases and the definitions that should be altered, rather than the intuitions of working scientists and mathematicians. Of course rational inquiry corrects and refines the intuitions with philosophical concepts, but when the intuitions are outside of the expressive power of a philosophical vocabulary, then there's no reason that natural science and mathematics should reshape themselves in order to fit into the narrow coffin of old metaphysics. Metaphysics in its older form pertains more to theology, and should concern itself with something deeper and try to discern something meaningful in the abstract world, rather than giving obvious explanations and pretending that it is useful - in its very form that is legitimate to be called ancient - to science or even omnipotent in some sense.

We need philosophers that do not accept easy and superficial solutions and instead ask deep questions and try to unravel deeper mysteries, like Dummett and Wittgenstein and Frege, or philosophers who provide brand new points of view, like Whitehead and Schelling. But Feser, while a great scholastic philosopher, doesn't even have a sense of what is deep and what the present age needs.

It's a despair that Catholics are buying into this old, barren, boring neo-scholasticism and willingly keep themselves ignorant and dumb.

Proust got a high-end taste that suits his convoluted and wreathed impressionist prose style well. The way the sentences linger and leisurely unfold reflects the milieu - the Fin-de-Siecle France - better than the content of Proust's thoughts, and hence, at times, the sentences might seem overworked, not suitable for expressing certain moods, conveying certain atmosphere, that are rather crude and don't fit well with the elegant milleu immersed in the fragile paintings of Renoir, pre-Raphaelites and the symbolist irrationalism of art noveau and Gustav Moreau, the ethereal and artistic thoughts of Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin, the music of Debussy and (early) Ravel.

After reading four hundred pages of flowery and misty proses, it would become clear what Satie and Cocteau were opposing to and why, and that the geometricism of Bauhaus and the pristine simplicity of Eric Gill's font design and sculptures will soon revolt against the rather suffocating climate, to be followed by the uncompromising masculinity and the hyper-rational coldness and abstractness advocated by futurists and vorticists.

I doubt that Marcel Proust really understood the arts of Chardin and Rembrandt. His taste is way too delicate to really appreciate these painters, and sometimes he fails to note the darkness and tragedy behind some seemingly beautiful scenes. It might be that what is seen by Proust is itself something worth studying. Surely when Chardin painted his celebrated La raie there wasn't anything related to death and decay in his mind, but the tradition of vanitas painting and the Mozartian spirit of the age is obviously present in the disgusting - while beautifully and calmly rendered - appearance of the gutted ray. It might also be that Proust lived inside the tradition that was perpetuated from Chardin's time but already exhausted and depleted of its essence, the rationality and the life force intrinsic to which forgotten.

Nevertheless it is a pleasure to read criticisms and reviews by someone who captures Tolstoy so accurately,

[…] humanity is judged […] in Tolstoi, by a serene god. […] This is not the work of an observing eye but of a thinking mind. Every so-called stroke of observation is simply the clothing, the proof, the instance, of a law, a law of reason or of unreason, which the novelist has laid bare.

Also Proust obviously will, if a comparison is required, prefer Tolstoy over Doestoevsky, who is, in my opinion, far too overrated by sentimentalists and those who equate religiousity with hysteria.

This is an authoritative introductory survey to the field of history and phenomenology of religion as a whole, with sincere methodological discussions, informative and at the same time concise introduction to the literature. It might also be the best of Mircea Eliade's oeuvre except for his monumental A History of Religious Ideas and perhaps Patterns in Comparative Religion. His shorter monographs, such as The Myth of the Eternal Return, are written in a rather sloppy manner, leading the readers to doubt that Eliade is not really a thinker with a clear mind, which is thoroughly disproven in the writing of this book.

While the book is factually a survey, even an introductory survey, it is still extremely relevant for those who have more-or-less gotten into the field. Even those who have already read all the major works of Eliade, Frazer, Levy-Bruhl, Levi-Strauss, Durkheim, Freud, Jung, Malinkowski, Dumezil, etc. will find the book helpful in organizing the amorphous thoughts that are still to be given a definite form. I myself was surprised to find out that Eliade himself was also seriously concerned with the impact of the studies of religions on philosophical anthropology. It is evident that Eliade's thoughts on the discipline, expounded as far as I know only in this book, is not at all old-fashioned even half a century has passed, and is unequalled in its broadness of perspective. What I'd like to add to his perspective, after half a century has passed, are, first, that of human evolution and hominization, that religion is older, primordial and 'close to the essence' than the human seen as a specie, which was at best only hinted by Eliade, and second, that of Cosmogony, that the phenomenological world and hence also material world are generated by observers that are in turn generated by the sacred, the center of religion.

Students of the disciplines of phenomenology/history/psychology of religion are commonly not aware of the implications these disciplines can have on the human spirit in general. They often relapse into collecting facts about fancy rituals and mythologies without trying to decipher and understand or even try to feel their meanings, turning disciplines of unfathomable depths into chit-chats. To understand religions is to pursue sciences of human, of the phenomenon of man, to manufacture essential components for the construction of a road to self-knowledge. For the students and enthusiasts that want to get into the field but cannot find a proper way, gazing into the mysterious landscape painted with precious gems adumbrated by the words like 'religion' and 'myth' and 'ritual', this little book of Eliade's would serve as a guide to the most magnificent universe of human spirit and religion.