Category: Book Reviews

“To think that knowledge itself is shaped like books is to marvel that a rock fits so well in its hole in the ground”

My mother grew up in a small village in Friesland, a northern province of the Netherlands. Her family farm was near a canal, where she skated with friends. These days, it’s rare to get the freezing temperatures needed for hard ice. My mother often says life was simpler back then. When I asked her if it felt that way at the time, she looked me sharply in the eye and said, “No, no it didn’t.” She lived through the Great Depression and the Nazi occupation during World War II. It’s an illusion to think life is more complex today than it was in the past.

In Too Big to Know, David Weinberger explores how the nature of knowledge has shifted over time. In the past, traditional knowledge was closely tied to print. Academics followed a disciplined scholarly process, researching and writing papers and books—the foundation of what we consider “classic” facts. It may seem like a neat and orderly system, but Weinberger argues that this view is oversimplified, noting “The limitations of paper made facts look far more manageable than they seem now that we see them linked into our unlimited network.” Today, knowledge is no longer confined to books; it’s shaped by networks like the web. No longer written by a single expert toward a fixed conclusion, knowledge is now more of an interactive dialogue, weaving together multiple perspectives with outcomes that are fluid and changeable.

It’s a good thing that our information technology has evolved to handle the inherent messiness of thought. As Weinberger points out, “To think that knowledge itself is shaped like books is to marvel that a rock fits so well in its hole in the ground.” Yet, messiness isn’t a virtue. If print makes knowledge seem too tidy, that tidiness is also its strength. Print tames chaos by filtering out distractions, dismissing unreliable sources, and fixing reference points for evaluation. It distills knowledge from raw data, allowing for periods of consensus and informed action.

Life has always been too big to fully comprehend. I’ve written elsewhere about how Dutch immigration shaped a “people of the book.” For them, reading the Bible provided focus and refuge amidst the uncertainty and hardships of starting a new life in a strange land. While digital technologies enhance our ability to engage with the complexity of life, networks remain leaky buckets. The stability of print remains, in many ways, the gold standard for knowledge.

A brilliant book that provokes deeper thinking about the modern digital world

We often forget what life was like before literacy, when orality was the dominant mode of communication. In Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong explains how the shift to literacy fundamentally restructured human consciousness, altering not only how we communicate but how we think, perceive, and understand the world.

One might assume that an oral culture could not produce complex works, yet the ancient Greek epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, were oral creations. Ong explores the properties of orality that make such feats possible. Oral memory, for example, relies heavily on repetition and cliché to aid in retention and transmission. Phrasing is often aggregative; instead of simply saying “soldier,” one might say “brave soldier” to create a rhythmic and memorable pattern. Ong contrasts these properties with those of written language, illustrating how oral cultures developed sophisticated mechanisms for preserving and transmitting knowledge. This analysis effectively defines the lifeworld of thought before it was shaped by the permanence and fixity of literacy. It reveals an intricate architecture of oral consciousness that remains underappreciated in literate societies.

Writing fundamentally transforms communication by fixing speech in a physical medium, enabling us to remember events and ideas in precise detail. This permanence facilitates the extension of thought into more complex and abstract forms, which are essential to philosophy, literature, science, engineering, and technology. Literacy forms the bedrock of modern civilization, including digital innovations like the internet. It allows for the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge across time and space, creating a vast, interconnected web of information.

Ong explains how writing abstracts communication and removes it from the lifeworld. Writing and reading are slower, more reflective processes compared to the immediacy of speaking and listening in an oral performance. The writer works in isolation, crafting a message for a hypothetical reader who remains a fiction until the text is read. This introduces a degree of alienation; communication becomes less about direct human interaction and more about creating a one-sided dialogue. This shift is evident in the rise of the novel in the 1800s, a form of literature that emphasizes introspection, internal monologue, and the psychological development of characters. Ong suggests that this development may have contributed to a heightened sense of self-awareness in human consciousness. Writing also allows us to transcend time, enabling us to “hear” the voices of those long dead, to engage with thoughts and ideas far removed from our immediate context.

Ong describes orality as “natural” and writing as “technological,” but this dichotomy may oversimplify the relationship between the two. I suggest that orality, too, can be considered technological in a Heideggerian sense. Heidegger understood the lifeworld—the implicit domain of thought—as a mode of being he called Dasein. If we accept that all human activity involves some form of technological engagement, then speech itself can be seen as a technology—a tool for processing symbols embodied in sounds. This perspective challenges the notion that writing is the sole marker of technological advancement, revealing that orality has its own complex, systematic properties that facilitate human cognition and social organization.

Orality is not simply “pre-literate” or a lesser form of communication than literacy. It is a domain of knowing unto itself, capable of achieving complex design and cultural sophistication. Even today, oral practices persist and play a vital role in many societies, from oral storytelling traditions to the spoken word in contemporary digital media. Written words are ultimately transformed in the brain back into their original spoken utterances, illustrating that literacy is, in fact, founded on orality. Similarly, whatever comes next will not be simply “post-literate.” Literacy is built on orality, and post-literacy will be built on literacy. Future developments will likely further abstract communication. Programming code, for example, represents a powerful new form of symbolic processing, distilled from the inefficiencies of written speech. Code is a language of precision and utility, free from the ambiguity of natural language, yet it remains rooted in the human need to communicate complex ideas in writing.

Orality and Literacy is a brilliant book that provokes deeper thinking about its relevance in the modern digital world. The properties of orality—such as its emphasis on immediacy, communal participation, and mnemonic devices—could be applied today to analyze unstructured and conversational data in big data projects, such as crawling the open web or training artificial intelligence.

The rise of social media and digital communication tools is, in many ways, a return to an oral culture where immediacy, interactivity, and communal discourse dominate. Yet, these platforms also retain the benefits of written communication, preserving dialogue for future reference and enabling asynchronous interaction. This blending of oral and literate properties suggests a new phase in human consciousness, where the immediacy of oral exchange is paired with the permanence and scalability of written text. As digital communication continues to evolve, it is reshaping how we think, learn, and engage with the world. How this development will again restructure consciousness remains an open and compelling question.

Each Generation Must Go Through the Hard Work of Learning to Read

Early into Reading in the Brain I knew I had found a very good book. It is packed with research and informed insight. As I continued to read it, however, I noticed something odd. I was struggling with the e-book edition I had purchased. I found myself wanting to physically grapple with the device more than the buttons would allow. The book contains diagrams that are useful to consult when reading the text, but I could not easily cross-reference them. The book is lengthy, and I found it difficult to track progress without the thickness of a print book. I had already enjoyed a few novels on my e-reader without this problem. This material was more challenging. I have read many similar scientific books before but always in print. For analytical reading the absence of tangible pages felt like a phantom pain. What was happening? Dehaene’s book was compelling enough, and the digital challenge troublesome enough, to merit a second purchase of the more expensive print edition. The completed reading answered my question.

The Reading Paradox

Dehaene begins with the reading paradox. Our brains evolved over millions of years without writing. How is it that we can read? The hardware of our brains has not evolved in the mere 5000-year history of writing. New studies repeatedly show that the brain is more plastic that we thought but no so plastic as to invent new structures for reading. Dehaene explains that reading became possible for humans because we had the good fortune to inherit cortical areas that could link visual elements to speech sounds and meanings. Our limited plasticity allowed us to recycle existing brain circuitry.

Learning to read still takes years of training. It starts with visual recognition of shapes, e.g., “T” and “L”. The brain learns to detect subtle differences in words, e.g., “eight” vs “sight” while ignoring big ones, e.g., “eight” vs “EIGHT”. We do not scan words letter by letter from left to right like a computer program, but instead encode units of meaning for easy look-up, e.g., the morpheme, “button” in “unbuttoning”. The brain uses two pathways in parallel, sound and meaning, to reconstruct the pronunciation of the word. With sufficient training and practice reading seems virtually effortless.

We are not born to read. The only evolution that occurred was cultural – we optimized reading over the centuries to suit the brain. One more thing is needed. Why are cultural phenomena like reading so uniquely developed in humans? Dehaene attributes it the evolution of our prefrontal cortex. “My proposal is that this evolution results in a large-scale ‘neuronal workspace’ whose main function is to assemble, confront, recombine, and synthesize knowledge.” The workspace allowed us to exploit the cognitive niche made possible by neuronal recycling.

My Brain Needs Re-training for Reflective Reading of E-books

I was struck by the tight coupling of brain structures with their physical counterparts in the world. Learning to read, the brain becomes encoded with the specific shapes and sounds of words. The aim of reading is still to reconstruct the original physical speech utterances. The skills required for processing text should be mostly transferable from print to digital books. After all, the text is still there. Indeed, I find the reading of light or familiar material to be nearly equivalent on an e-reader.

When words are less familiar some slowness is to be expected. As Dehaene explains, we perform extra processing to decipher letters for rare or novel words before attempting to access their meaning. When words, sentences and paragraphs combine to express complex ideas much more processing is required. Reduced reading speed can be expected for reading abstract and challenging material regardless of the medium. To be sure, I wrestle with print books, snapping pages when I am unconvinced, wearing the binding from too much turning, attacking the text with a pen. I experienced this with the print edition of Reading in the Brain. I experienced a greater challenge when using the e-reader. How come?

I speculate a connection between reading technology and access to the neuronal workspace. Dehaene argues that literacy changed to suit the structures of the brain. The print book, the codex, is two thousand years old, a design that surpassed the scroll. It is an evolution of technology, finely tuned to our neurons to optimize reading. I can compel its knowledge. We assume the e-reader represents an advance on print because it embodies digital technology. Integrated with the web, it is easier to discover, purchase, search and link to other material. The text is readily ported to an e-reader and I can adjust its font-size for readability or play it aloud for listening. However, the mental struggle with a complex text suggests the e-reader is inferior for global analysis functions, the most obvious differences being parallel access to pages, easy turning and cross-referencing across any two points. These are reflective reading functions that are used to “assemble, confront, recombine, and synthesize knowledge,” the functions served by the neuronal workspace. If you think I am cutting too fine a point, recall the tight coupling between brain structures and the world.

I am certain that my brain is already being reprogrammed to work more efficiently with e-books. It is happening to all readers. This phase of re-training explains some of the fourty-year delay in the popular adoption of e-books. If my speculation is correct, e-reader design must evolve again if it is to compete equally with the print book for complex texts. What would an advanced digital e-reader look like? I offer a suggestion. The print book has facing pages, a feature that serves forward and back-referencing. Attempts have been made at a dual pane e-reader, but the feature could be amplified digitally using multiple tabs like modern browsers, available at once for parallel processing, still bound within the reading device.

Reading is Always at Risk

Dehaene’s book focuses my attention on two serious concerns. First, we are not born to read. The alphabet and literacy are cultural inventions finely tuned to our brains. Each generation must go through the hard work of learning to read. The internet does not offer a shortcut to knowledge. Second, the invention of reading re-purposed existing neural circuitry. Dehaene suggests the mental “letterbox” we use for recognizing letters may have once been used for identifying animal tracks, a skill we have lost. Cortical reorganization is a competition, a zero-sum game. As we re-train our brains for digital technology what skills will be lost? The capacity for long-form reflective reading, perhaps. Reading is always at risk.

Religion is Poetry and We Cannot Live Without It

It took many long thoughts before I was ready to write a response to The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I have tossed a lot of things in my religion closet over the years and was overdue for the cleaning this book provided. I still feel a bit raw.

I will give you my personal context as briefly as possible. I grew up in a fundamentalist church, believing the literal heaven and hell story as a child, rejecting it as a teen, and settling with agnosticism as an adult. I look back at the childhood experience as a positive one. I read the bible multiple times and can speak knowledgeably about it. It fashioned me into a reader and a philosophical thinker. Like any teen I decried hypocrisy. In truth most Christians were better people than their principles. My main contention was the general unwillingness to admit the religious story might be wrong. I still root out the occasional blind spot caused by fundamentalism but today I feel easily clear of its influence. I had settled into a cozy agnosticism when Dawkins’ book came along. I am not a new atheist and will not begin deriding theists. In fact, I am clearer on the role of religion though uncritical theists will not find in me an easy ally.

I am religious, just like Dawkins. In the opening chapter Dawkins describes a feeling, a profound sense of wonder at the vastness of the universe. The same feeling has been shared in religious terms by Sagan, Einstein, Hawking and other scientists. When these scientists talk about God they are doing so in a poetic sense. The God Delusion, says Dawkins, is not an attack on their God. No, his attack is not on the poetic thinkers but on the literalists. Put crudely, those who believe the fairy tale of a guy in the sky, waiting for you with pie when you die. Creation, heaven and hell, Jesus dying to save your immortal soul then coming back to life, miracles, the stuff you learn in Sunday school. Dawkins is using a rhetorical strategy. You can make a bold claim – God is a delusion – if you exclude all good thinking on the subject and only focus on a straw man. Like Dawkins, I reject the fairy tale and instead use religion poetically. Thing is, we are not all eloquent poets. Many theists use the language of religious tradition, but the essence of their belief is the same awe at the grandness of nature. I dusted off my old Psalter Hymnal and its Confession of Faith begins by saying that we know God by the “creation, preservation, and governance of the universe.” Argue if you must, the religion begins with a naturalist testament, just like Dawkins.

God is not a empirical question. Either he exists or he doesn’t, says Dawkins. Who is being simple-minded? Tackling the origins of the universe Dawkins considers the two hypotheses of creation and evolution. Intelligence, he argues, occurs at the end of a process, i.e., evolution, not at the start, i.e., creation. In fact, that is only true in a local context. According to physics, the universe was highly ordered matter, a singularity, and history has been the unfolding of the big bang. This is entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. The order or intelligence is found at the start of the process. My point is that big questions do not have simple true or false answers. There is the middle value, “mu”, often excluded, which rejects the context of the question as too small. Agnosticism seems a sensible response, but like the religion of the scientists, Dawkins argues away the agnosticism of great thinkers like Huxley.

Religion is poetry and we cannot live without it. Whenever one talks about God and the singularity the inevitable retort is that we are placing God in the “gaps”, the unknown things science hasn’t figured out yet. Yes, I say. That’s right. God is a poetic or mythological concept for mystery, the things we do not understand. Religion is false in the same way that Shakespeare is false. The events of his stories probably did not happen, but this does not stop us from retelling the stories, enacting them for audiences again and again. We quote his lines. It affects our decisions and changes our lives. Poetry, mythology, fiction, we constantly underestimate the vital role of these things in our lives. Genuine religious belief is not consoling. New atheists explain religion as a comfort factor.

Genuine religious belief is not consoling. Believers are challenged to reflect carefully on their thoughts and actions, live up to a rigorous moral code, and sacrifice their wants for the needs of others. It is a wonder that anyone would want to be religious. Dawkins provides a better explanation. A meme functions like a gene but causing ideas to reproduce instead of DNA. Religious ideas are memetic because they require acceptance without question. It is a brilliant explanation. Modern theists accept the value of doubt but only as a step to greater faith. Not good enough. Genuine faith must be subject to constant critical examination. Not comfortable at all.

Atheism abets the ascendant religion of consumerism. I sometimes forget how powerful the pro-religious, anti-science lobby is in the United States. It explains some of the militance of the new atheist movement. Even in Canada, the pro-religious lobby is currently rising along with conservative politics, and I oppose it. Still, on a larger scale, I observe the waning of Christianity and other religions as consumerism rises to replace them as the new religion. Atheism abets consumerism by overstating its rejection of religion. Dawkins, like me, is religious in a poetic sense, but unfortunately, he reserves it as a special case. Without some poetry or mythology to imagine the unknown, we are reduced to creatures of physical matter alone, admitting only the things we can touch and taste, serving the economics of our want.

The Paths of Meditation and Action Reach the Same End

A hundred years ago a wise old professor recommended that I read The Bhagavad Gita. I put it on my list but only just read it. The reading was prompted by another, The Razor’s Edge, in which a pilgrim finds his way through books to enlightenment. Among them was the Upanishads, of which the Gita is considered a beautiful and accessible work.

The Gita is the story of Arjuna, an Indian prince the night before battle. A powerful army has gathered to deny his rightful claim to the throne. He does not want to fight because the army contains members of his family. He receives counsel from Krishna, an apparent charioteer but in fact Lord Vishu, greatest of the Indian gods. The battle is a metaphor for the spiritual struggle, and Krishna provides personal guidance on the paths to enlightenment.

Krishna explains that there are two main paths, one of knowledge and meditation for the few who prefer a life of solitude and contemplation. The other path is that of love and service, the path of action suited to most of us who prefer to live among others in the world. The two paths reach the same end.

A core theme of Eastern philosophy is the impermanence of the ego. “The ego’s job is to go on incessantly spinning the wheel of the mind and making new karma-pots: new ideas to act on, fresh desires to pursue.” Meditation teaches insight into egolessness while action exhausts the ego, yielding the same result. It is this path of action that Krisha recommends to Arjuna, faced with his difficult situation. Conditionality is our existence and Arjuna cannot escape the battle that is before him.

Arjuna must face his fears, but that is not the last word. A recurring theme in the Gita is to renounce attachment to the outcomes of our actions. We choose only our actions, and should make each act with care, an act of worship, an offering, but the results are beyond our control and should not engage us.

Spiritual Enlightenment is Post-Literate

The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham is the story of Laurence “Larry” Darrell, a young man who returned from war existentially troubled by the death of a comrade. Larry leaves his fiancé, Claire, for a year in Paris where he believes he can think through his troubled thoughts to their end. On his small veteran’s pension, he rents a quiet room and studies, learning Greek to read classics in their original tongue, living a life of the spirit. Originally published in 1944, I have a 1946 hard cover with double-spaced sentences. I reveled in every yellowed page of this monastic fantasy.

When Claire comes to Paris to fetch Larry after his year away, he declares his intention to continue. “’But Larry’, she smiled. ’People have been asking those questions for thousands of years. If they could be answered, surely they’d have been answered by now’”. Larry thinks she has said something shrewd. “But on the other hand you might say that if men has been asking them for thousands of years it proves that they can’t help asking them and have to go on asking them.” Larry goes on travelling, ultimately finding his way to a monastery in India.

There is a movie adaptation by John Byram in 1984, starring Bill Murray in a rare serious role. The movie added a defining moment for me. It is not the moment of Larry’s enlightenment, not the shuddering of his head as he awakens, and not the mountain vista as he fathoms the interconnectedness of all things. It was his action just after his enlightenment that stuck with me, the moment when Larry burns his spiritual books.

I think often about books and their role in enlightenment. I think traditional literacy is essential in learning and scientific enlightenment. I also feel that spiritual enlightenment is post-literate. I wanted to read more on this matter, but it was not in the novel. Byrum might have added the burning scene for its visual effect on the screen, but I think there is more to it.
The road to enlightenment has traditionally been a literary one. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian begins his journey after being troubled by “the book in his hand”. Chris McCandless’ pilgrimage to Alaska had its start and finish in literature.

The print version of The Razor’s Edge is narrated by the author, Maugham, serving as a messenger between the different worlds of Larry and Claire, and providing a more mature frame of reference. In the movie, Maugham’s character is absent. The powerful functions of Maugham, including the final dreadful confrontation with Claire, are assumed by Larry himself. This shift in focus away from the literary figure underscores my view that spiritual enlightenment is post-literate.

(There is also a 1946 movie adaptation by Edmund Goulding that I could barely finish watching. While both movies did a disservice to the sexuality of Claire, and to the implied homosexuality of the character Elliott, the 1946 movie did a worse job of it. It also cleansed Sophie, and in so doing killed her character more tragically than the story.)

Is there a difference between knowing time in your head and from a watch?

Say the word, “cyborg,” and people imagine the fictional Borg from Star Trek, beings implanted with technology, penetrating their skulls to enhance their brains. Frightening. We consider it perfectly acceptable, however, to extend our intelligence and abilities by using technology outside our bodies, everything from speech to pen and paper to computers. Is there a difference? Andy Clark, author of Natural-Born Cyborgs does not think so. “We are, in short, in the grip of a seductive but quite untenable illusion: the illusion that the mechanisms of mind and self can ultimately unfold only on some privileged stage marked out by the good old-fashioned skin-bag. My goal is to dispel this illusion, and to show how a complex matrix of brain, body, and technology can actually constitute the problem-solving machine that we should properly identify as ourselves.”

Clark knows his Heidegger – humans are technological to the core. We readily project feeling and sensation beyond the shell of our bodies, e.g., the cane of a blind person. In a neat demonstration of visual memory, he shows how we only store outlines and make errors when pressed for details. We store metadata but interpolate baseline data. It demonstrates our dependence on external storage devices. We are born to do this, argues Clark. Our brains are plastic, adjusting to our tools. As our tools become more intelligent, we can make more intelligent tools, bootstrap style.

Phantom pain shows that the body is a transitory construct. If mind does not stop at the skin, what exactly is a self? I agree with Clark’s alignment of self with our narrative, our story, projects and intentions. If we wear special goggles and gloves that allow us to see and operate mechanical arms elsewhere, our sense of self is carried along. Clark poses a “soft self”. I compare it with the Buddhist teaching that there is no permanent self. I wonder though if technological augmentation will compound the illusion of self?

He predicts “new waves of almost invisible, user-sensitive, semi-intelligent, knowledge-based electronics and software … perfectly posed to merge seamlessly with individual biological brains.” He foresees a future of ubiquitous invisible computing, allowing us to pluck answers on demand from the ether. Published in 2003, his vision seems close at hand with wearable tech and augmented reality.

The vision is compelling for efficiency but notice a shift in the locus of intelligence. Technology externalizes our minds, making people smarter, but not the person. Clark says there is no difference between knowing the time in your head and being able to retrieve it quickly from a watch. There is a difference, I say, regarding personal control but it is less obvious with a watch than, say, a sandwich board where the information is entirely public. Information in our heads has a private personal perspective, if only a soft self. The personal perspective is needed observe and evaluate ideas.

Clark prefers transparent or invisible technologies, ones that are always on and do not make the user think. He contrasts these with tangible technologies with a noticeable edge, an off button. If technology is going to do more thinking for us, it will become more difficult to critically evaluate it. Perhaps all technologies should be scheduled for occasional shutdown and evaluation.

It Feels Good to Think

“I’m not an introvert. I like people.” It is a common misconception. We are all social beings, but introverts process information differently. It can be a challenge. Introverts are typically outnumbered by three times as many extroverts. It is no wonder if introverts feel out of place. It can also be an advantage, as shown by Marti Laney in her book, The Introvert Advantage.

Introverts have increased blood flow in the brain, and it follows a different pathway, engaging memory, problem solving, and planning. The pathway is long and complex, activated by the neurotransmitter, acetylcholine, which stimulates a good feeling when thinking. The extrovert path is activated by dopamine, fired by adrenaline – they need external stimulation to feel good. Extroverts like to experience a lot, and introverts like to know a lot about what they experience. Introverts find that outside activity raises their intensity quickly. It is like being tickled – the sensation goes from feeling good and fun to ’too much’ and uncomfortable in a split second. Their brain may shut down – brain freeze, ‘vapour lock’. Social encounters are rich in stimulation and introverts process them deeply, sometimes needing to limit the encounter, “It’s time to go now.”

The introvert and the extrovert are the tortoise and the hare. Introverts tend to be slower and steadier, while extroverts are faster and take bigger risks. The tortoise strategy tends to work better in the long run. Introverts can focus deeply, and to understand how a change will affect everyone. They have a propensity for thinking outside the box, and the strength to make unpopular decisions. They help slow down the world a notch.

A hundred light bulbs went on when I read Laney’s book. At the time of the reading, I identified myself as an introvert off the scale, but I have since met people who are much more introverted. Laney’s book recommends several excellent coping strategies. Wake early and gently to let the brain engage. The introvert’s nervous system causes food to metabolize quickly, so graze through the day. Avoid rewinding and replaying words after social encounters (I do this). Speak to extroverts in short, clear sentences (hilarious but true). Introverts tend to have fewer, deeper relationships, which is great, but the best of advice I received from this book was to accept that relationships can be light as well as deep. It makes the world a friendlier place.

The Most Important Book Never Finished

Being and Time by Martin Heidegger is a pillar of post-modernist thought, an essential reference for understanding the philosophy of mind and technology. Reading it is no small undertaking. Ontology is an abstract subject, requiring prior reading in the philosophy of mind, and familiarization with the new language introduced by Heidegger. On the first day of my existentialism class in 1990, the prof wagged her wise old head over the reading list, intoning, “it’s a tough slog,” debating whether to inflict the book on us. She did.

Reading Being and Time was my initiation into the art of slow reading. I pored over the book page by page, making careful notes as I read. I made good progress, but I confess I stopped after two hundred pages, less than halfway through the book. I did not finish the book, but then neither did Heidegger. A third part and a second book were supposed to follow but instead Heidegger retired to the Black Woods. Ontology does that to people.

Understanding Heidegger is essential as technology plays an increasing role in our lives. I rounded out my understanding of Heidegger in later years. Some excellent essays may be found in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, edited by Charles Guignon. If you want to read a small introduction, I recommend Heidegger, an excellent 56-page summary by Jonathan Ree. What follows is my own summary of the main concepts.

Ready-to-hand. Before we can inquire about the being of things, we must look at the inquirer – people, you and me, who ask about these things. Prior to any kind of inquiry about anything, people are just going about doing what they are doing, busy using the things of the world, carrying on their business, like reading this article. You are immersed in a stream of experience. Heidegger calls this state, “ready-to-hand.”

Presence-at-hand. It is only when something is askew that we reflectively notice a thing and begin the activity of inquiry. You’re reading this article, and you notice a word misspelled or a concept you disagree with. Your focus then moves in on the thing, and you begin to analyze it. You regard the object of your attention as a “thing” that can be objectified and theorized about. Heidegger calls this state, “presence-at-hand.”

Inauthenticity. There is a natural tendency to apply this same kind of theoretical approach to ourselves and others. Descartes took this tendency to the extreme, depicting people as entities isolated from the world, looking out upon it. By extension, others are entities, distinctly separated from our viewpoint. Heidegger calls this perspective the “they-self,” a distortion of ourselves and our relations with others and the world, leading to a preoccupation with gossip, entertainment, and other triviality that reinforces or advances our status relative to others, trying to substantiate our fragile selves. Heidegger calls this state, “inauthenticity.”

Dasein. Heidegger argues that we are not isolated entities, distinct from others and the world. He introduces the concept of “Dasein.” We are first existences in the world, doing our business, involved in activities. We have “being in the world” before we do any kind of theoretical inquiry. In contrast to Cartesian solipsism, he coins the word, “Dasein.” We are openings to the world, having access to phenomena. We are fundamentally linked to the stream of experience. We must have this link, or it makes no sense to inquire into the nature of phenomena. It would be impossible to say anything sensible at all about phenomena without first having some kind of qualitative relationship. We are Dasein, windows to others and the world. Dasein is always “thrown” into some circumstance. Where it is thrown, it cares about what is going on, and it projects into the future its plans for dealing with its circumstances. Dasein is first a window to its experience, and then a theorizer, planning a way to handle its experience.

Time. The main cause of inauthenticity is our tendency to regard time as a series of “now-points.” We tend to regard birth and death as distant facts. We consider out lives a finite resource of discrete units of time which we must fill. Hence, we fashion an “I-point” (the Cartesian self) which is a certain quantity of “now-points.” We intend to fill our life with a certain quantity of experiences that will define who we are. In fact, death is an ever-present reality. This fact causes us anxiety, but authentically, we cannot pretend that our self is defined apart from birth and death. Our being is not measured by the now-points we fill. Our authentic being is a constant incompleteness, at any time to be ended by death.

What does all this have to do with modern technology? Heidegger introduced the famous example of the broken hammer that stops a worker and causes reflection. It applies to all tools and technologies. What is to be done when the hammer or information technology breaks? We become unnerved as our 24/7 electric blanket of technology cools off. Without vigilance, our analyses become inauthentic, self-serving spirals of falsity, having nothing to do with the original need to hammer. We invent mighty technologies that seem cool but belie our original purpose. Reflection must be grounded in Dasein’s open view on the stream of experience.

“Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue” ~ Meister Eckhart

In The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley offers a comparative study of Eastern and Western mysticism, articulating universal themes about the Divine. I summarize the themes here with personal reflections.

Monotheism. God is a divine unity, the ground of the human condition. The concept of God being a united ground is quite different than the traditional notion of an omnipotent being. I personally prefer polytheism. When the knower is poly-psychic the universe they know by immediate experience is polytheistic. The plural form of the pronoun has a new and suitable meaning here.

The human condition is multiplicity. The self has no substance and must be in a state of discontent of suffering, always desiring other, and idolatrous. Political monism is idolatry, causing suffering and obstructing spirituality. The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific. It is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dreams, who do the persecuting and make the wars. Very Buddhist, especially if one extends monism and idolatry beyond politics to rigid narrowness of thought in general.

Morality, worship and spiritual exercises. Morality is selflessness, loving others, and vigilance to do good. Rituals can facilitate insight, or they can be idolatry. Spiritual exercises include contemplative prayer, meditation and silence. Miracles are not important; it is important to perform common tasks with love.

Trinity. God is immanent, a personal inner light; god is transcendent, beyond time and the human condition, a rule-maker; and god is incarnate, in the world. Huxley might agree with my rejection of the Christian concept of a fall from which humans need to be redeemed through intervention. I prefer the Gnostic notion that we can become Christ.

Unitive knowledge. The soul is identical with the Divine Ground, so we may have a direct experience of God. The experience transcends self, words, truth, even faith. Again, this fits with Gnosticism.

Two excellent quotes praising the virtue of silence: “Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire — we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder, for the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence.” Huxley said that in 1945. One of my all-time favourite quotes from Meister Eckhart, “Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue.”