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Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals, by Mark Edmundson
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In a culture that has become progressively more skeptical and materialistic, the desires of the individual self stand supreme, Mark Edmundson says. We spare little thought for the great ideals that once gave life meaning and worth. Self and Soul is an impassioned effort to defend the values of the Soul.
Edmundson guides readers back to the ancient sources of the three great ideals: courage, contemplation, and compassion. Homer’s Iliad presents two contrasting versions of the heroic ideal: Achilles, who risks everything to become the greatest of warriors, and Hector, who sacrifices his life to defend his people. Plato’s quest is for timeless truth: he is the prime example of the authentic thinker, concentrating the ideal of contemplation. The third great ideal, compassion, is embodied by Jesus, the Buddha, and Confucius, who taught loving kindness, forgiveness, and forbearance in a world where such qualities are difficult and sometimes dangerous to espouse.
Shakespeare and Freud are the modern world’s great enemies of these ideals, Edmundson argues. Shakespeare detests chivalry and has little time for faith and philosophy. Freud sees ideals as illusions that will inevitably betray us. But between them, a new ideal arises: imaginative creation, exemplified by Blake and Shelley.
Self and Soul is, as Edmundson provocatively writes, an attempt to resurrect Soul in the modern world.
- Sales Rank: #132008 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x 1.00" w x 5.70" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 304 pages
Review
There are few writers whom I turn to more eagerly than Mark Edmundson, one of our most perceptive voices on the subjects of teaching, learning, the humanities, and the conduct of a meaningful life. Edmundson believes, against the tide of the culture, that there is something more to existence than getting and spending (i.e., living half-awake for as long as possible), and in Self and Soul he shows us what that something might be. He is an idealist in an age of cynicism, a thinker in an age of surfaces. You won't regret a minute that you spend in his company. (William Deresiewicz, author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life)
Self and Soul is a series of secular hymns to the soul-saving idealists who shaped Western literature and spiritual philosophy―from Homer to Shakespeare and Blake, Jesus to Emerson and Freud. Let Mark Edmundson be your guide to these wise ones, and whether you thought you knew them well, or have scarcely made their acquaintance, you will be revivified through his telling of a quest for salvation in classic texts that enshrine a trinity of ideals now under threat: courage, compassion, and contemplation. (Megan Marshall, author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life)
Mark Edmundson’s Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals is in every way a wonderful and highly original book. (J. Hillis Miller, author of Communities in Fiction)
With this book Edmundson takes his place as one of the really remarkable contemporary cultural critics. The book, which is written with Edmundson’s incredible lucidity and incisiveness, is really about its title: about what ideals mean and how they work. Ideals that inspire rather than humiliate; that intrigue rather than persecute. (Adam Phillips, author of On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored)
Edmundson’s essays are smart and to the point, and there are some very good turns, as when he lists all the positive things that come from a life devoted to contemplating the ideal…Edmundson delivers a welcome championing of humanistic ways of thinking and living. (Kirkus Reviews 2015-07-15)
[Edmundson’s] bold and ambitious new book is partly a demonstration of what a ‘real education’ in the humanities, inspired by the goal of ‘human transformation’ and devoted to taking writers seriously, might look like…[It] quietly sets out to challenge many educational pieties, most of the assumptions of recent literary studies--and his own chosen lifestyle. (Mathew Reisz Times Higher Education 2015-09-17)
An impassioned critique of Western society, a relentless assault on contemporary complacency, shallowness, competitiveness and self-regard…Throughout Self and Soul, Edmundson writes with a Thoreau-like incisiveness and fervor…[A] powerful, heartfelt book. (Michael Dirda Washington Post 2015-11-25)
About the Author
Mark Edmundson is University Professor at the University of Virginia.
Most helpful customer reviews
68 of 72 people found the following review helpful.
A Vaccine Against Despair
By David Clemens
Recently, Academic Questions asked me to pick one book that would make a better “common reading” for incoming college freshmen than the texts commonly assigned. Then, I chose William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, but if I were asked today, it would be Mark Edmundson’s Self and Soul. Why?
For one, it’s wildly subversive, ripping off the K-12 straitjacket incoming freshmen still wear. Later, Self and Soul can act as a tonic and antitoxin for numb university students suffering from the curricular mishmash of multiculturalism, anti-colonialism, social justice, sustainability, rampant materialism, and political correctness. Professor Edmundson has written a fierce book, at times an angry book, and most of all, a dangerous book. It threatens all the academic shibboleths. The vocabulary alone will shock most students. "It, like, talks all about having a soul? And being heroic? And Truth? Isn’t `Truth' a violation of the campus speech code?" Probably. All the more enticing for the budding scholar. Edmundson reminds me of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, and the protagonist's conception of Jesus:
“Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.”
That’s what Edmundson is doing—beckoning, no, daring his readers to join Achilles, Plato, Christ, and other rebels who risk seeking more out of life, who seek the higher satisfactions of the Soul.
We all know Self—immediate satisfaction of our appetites. Today, our culture asks, what else is there? Well, the subtitle of Self and Soul is A Defense of Ideals. Nothing needs defending more than ideals. The temper of our postmodern times doesn’t like ideals. Ideals (Edmundson’s Big Three are heroism, Truth, and compassion) are accused of being irritating or phony. We tread water in a sea of irony. Anyone who aspires to an ideal can expect only derision (picture Jesus as a guest on The Daily Show). History gave us Achilles (the ideal of martial courage and honor), Plato and Socrates (the ideal of examining life to find Truth whatever the cost), and Jesus (the ideal of Selfless compassion). Today, ideals such as these make us uncomfortable. Why now?
Edmundson blames, in part, Shakespeare and Freud. What? An English professor who has a beef with the Bard? Edmundson notes how Shakespeare’s shining mirror of the world reflects more ignoble than noble, more knave than hero, more fool than sage. Shakespeare was not an idealist, and his "invention of the human" is rarely anyone you would want as a neighbor.
For his part, Freud saddled us with a conception of man as nebbish, someone who, at best, can hope only to reconcile with his neuroses and attain a tepid, flickering sense of well-being. This is Modern Man, “a creature of need, not of desire,” as Edmundson says. It’s no wonder students are glum and distracted by shiny things. Is this all there is? One thinks of Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King whose protagonist’s inner voice of spiritual emptiness repeats, “I want, I want, I want.” Edmundson’s formulation: “Stuffed full of pointless information, we can consider ourselves wise. With a sack of minute, ephemeral truths on our backs, we can imagine that we possess the Truth. We feed ourselves incessantly and are still starved—which only makes us more insistent to consume.” For students, this is the way it is—nothing lasts, everything is relative, the game is fixed, no one can keep up. Let’s go get stoned. But still, "I want, I want, I want."
When I first heard Edmundson lecture on the Self and the Soul, I thought, "This is what my students need to hear." His prescription is to dump the postmodern “incredulity toward all metanarratives” and hang out with some pre-modern idealists. Edmundson, like Tennyson's Ulysses, seems to say,
"Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world."
Every page of this important book glitters with insight and wisdom for our unread youth because Self and Soul is really about them. To read it is to face the questions Anthony Kronman propounded in Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life--one must ask not just what is the meaning of life but what is the meaning of my life?
Edmundson does not shy from pointing out the price for truly following an ideal—think of Achilles (and Hector), Socrates, and Jesus. Death, death, death, and death. But what’s the price if you don’t? Edmundson, too, will pay a price. Despite the Harvard University Press imprimatur, most of what he says is taboo or antithetical to the prevailing orthodoxies in higher education where history has become "histories," reality has become "realities," and Truth has become "truths." You can read the whole book without ever being subjected to "race, class, and gender."
Self and Soul belongs on every Freshman bookshelf (make that every bookshelf) as a vaccine against despair. What more stimulating life companions can one have once Edmundson has introduced them: Achilles, Plato, Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, Confucius (and William Blake, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, idealists of creativity). Edmundson argues that where Soul was, Self has come to be. He says, “current popular culture . . . is largely a culture that simulates Soul. What passes for current-day culture is often the fabrication of the Soul States.” As Self presses ever more closely about us, publication of Self and Soul marks a reawakening and starting point for a more enlightening academic journey and a more satisfying life.
(Self and Soul quotations are from pre-publication uncorrected page proofs)
24 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
A work of high ambition
By Michael Pollan
Everything Mark Edmundson writes is worth reading and this latest book, a study of idealism and its critics from ancient times to the present, is in many ways his masterpiece. The two currents Edmundson discerns in world culture between the celebration of the soul and the elevation of the self turns out to be an excellent tool for understanding, and linking, thinkers as disparate as Jesus, Buddha, Shakespeare (this chapter is one of the most provocative essays on Shakespeare I've read), Freud and the Romantics. This is a synthetic work of the sort of breadth and ambition no one writes any more.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Are ideals good or bad
By Nicholas Meyer
In our pragmatic age, where success is all and he who dies with most toys wins, do ideals matter? What are ideals? Do we still have any? Are ideals good or bad? These questions form the heart of Mark Edmundson’s challenging, remarkably even-handed and erudite study of the world in which we live and the worlds which came before it, as exemplified by differing sets of ideals. Achilles, the warrior, Jesus, the compassionate, Plato the contemplative as well as Shakespeare and Freud, the anti-idealists. I normally don’t read books without stories, but this is a story alright and one which I think everyone should read. The book is Self and Soul - a defense of ideals, published by the Harvard press. Read it and think again.
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