The republic itself, with its democratic form of government, was held in the dominant narrative to be foreign, imported from the histories of the victorious nations of the United States, France, and England... From this point of view the Weimar Constitution was not a gift but...a kind of permanent collateral damage from the outcome of the war.
Each person possessed a point of least resistance, a weakest point, this was the famous Achilles' heel, and it was like the law of the pearl: just as in a mollusk the grain of sand that chafes is neutralized by mother-of-pearl...so all the developmental lines of our psyche will arrange themselves around this weakest spot.... We are shaped not by what is strong in us but by the anomaly, by whatever is weak and not accepted.
Herald of a Restless World is a biography of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. It attempts to explain his key ideas, make sense of his immense popular fame in the years before World War I, and account for his disappearance from our cultural memory.
Bergson's first fundamental insight was the notion of durée, the subjective experience of time. Bergson noted that physical laws treat time as something that can be cut up into measurable units, whereas we experience time as a continuous flow.
What would happen, Bergson asked, if, through some magic spell, the earth completed a rotation on its own axis every twelve hours instead of every twenty-four? What it every other natural phenomenon accelerated proportionally? To the elaborate equations the astrophysicist devises to predict celestial phenomena this major shirt in tempo would make no difference at all.
Bergson builds on the concept of durée to examine mind/body dualism and free will.
Bergson had a compelling style in both his writing and his speaking, rich with metaphor, and his lectures were open to the public. His ideas about the limits of scientific thought spoke to a populace that was feeling uneasy about the positivism of the times.
The same forces that made Bergson so popular in the early 20th century have ensured his lack of subsequent influence. He gave public lectures so he never developed the types of followers he would have as a professor. His views about the shortcomings of rationality got him labeled as anti-intellectual. His large female audience made people take him less seriously. During and after WWI, Bergson stopped lecturing and became part of the establishment, making him less attractive to the modernist movements that previously claimed him as inspiration.
I often found Herald of a Restless World to be superficial. I didn't feel like I got a good understanding of Bergson's philosophy nor a good sense of his reputedly electric speaking style. Notable events, such as Bergson's debate with Einstein and his role in getting the United States involved in WWI, are covered somewhat cursorily. We don't learn much about his lifelong health issues or his family. The author clearly conveys how popular Bergson was in his prime but can't really answer the critics who claim that most of his audience didn't understand his ideas. Nor does she provide compelling counterarguments against critics of his philosophy like Bertrand Russell or Albert Einstein.
My last year at university, one professor of anthropology trained our attention inward at the close of every lecture... She asked us to notice that just life—writing papers, going to parties, applying to jobs—could always be mapped out following the structures we learned about in class.
Asya and Manu are a young couple living in a foreign city, imagining possible futures for themselves as they search for an apartment to buy. They want to fit in with their "native" friends, stay connected with their families, and become a "tribe of our own." While in university, they would spend the day in town watching other people and envisioning themselves living similar lives. "We were only playing out our adulthood rather than committing to them." Do they need to accomplish something to make their lives meaningful, or are the everyday routines enough?
I found Asya's anthropological insights subtle and thought-provoking. I had to read slowly so as not to miss the point of the largely mundane events.
My experience reading The Anthropologists reminded me of my experience with two other books: Elif Batuman's The Idiot and Jenny Offill's Department of Speculation. They are all coming-of-age stories narrated by women with offbeat sensibilities. The (lack of) plot is beside the point. The Anthropologists and Department of Speculation also share an epigrammatic style.
The title, cover map, and introduction make this book something of a Trojan Horse. They conspire to suggest that Richardson will discuss "imagined geographies: understandings of the world...that exist in each of our minds...[and] inform how we both perceive and live in the world." However, only one and a half of Richardson's eight myths relate to physical geography: the myth of seven continents and the myth of Russia's quest for a warm-weather port. Most of the book is about the shortcomings of nationalism and capitalism when it comes to addressing our human needs.
Richardson is a professor of "human geography," and I suppose that our system of national sovereignty counts as a myth of human geography. I agreed with most of Richardson's (liberal) views, but I didn't buy a book called Myths of Geography to hear arguments about the need for universal action to deal with climate change or replacing economic metrics with other means of measuring well-being.
