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'At a moment in cultural history dominated by the shallow, the superficial, the quick fix, Marilynne Robinson is a miraculous anomaly: a writer who thoughtfully, carefully, and tenaciously explores some of the deepest questions confronting the human species.' --Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times Book Review on 'Gilead'
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In this ambitious book, acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought - science, religion, and consciousness. Crafted with the same care and insight as her award-winning novels, 'Absence of Mind' challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. In Robinson's view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers. It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality. By defending the importance of individual reflection, Robinson celebrates the power and variety of human consciousness in the tradition of William James. She explores the nature of subjectivity and considers the culture in which Sigmund Freud was situated and its influence on his model of self and civilization. Through keen interpretations of language, emotion, science, and poetry, 'Absence of Mind' restores human consciousness to its central place in the religion-science debate.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Those who know Marilynne Robinson's sublime fiction will expect a level of description and analysis that gets to the very heart of anything she addresses. She does this brilliantly. Absence of Mind is difficult, the result of deep and wide philosophical and scientific reading, but thrilling in a truly intellectual sense. I have just read it and know I will have to read it again. Taking on what she calls the 'parascience'of popular writers about science as Dawkins, Dennett, Pinker, and E. O. Wilson, by way of Descartes, Nietzsche, Freud and others, Robinson's main contention is that in the reductive, mechanistic, neo-evolutionary world view that has prevailed since Darwin, what has been ignored is humankind's interiority, consciousness of self, in all its terror and beauty. Her rebuttals to what she sees as this current received orthdoxy are intricate and subtle. Her analyis of 'the altruism problem' is masterly.
33 of 44 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
In reading this slim volume of four lectures, I wanted, as an atheist, to see what powerful arguments this award-winning author would bring to bear against the modern movement to use a scientific approach to refute religion. I was somewhat disappointed by the limited scope of her attack on say, Dawkins or Pinker. Behind the grammatically perfect but convoluted sentences, peppered with "hermeneuticization" and "autochthonous", her thesis seems to be that the "objectivity" of science is sterile and rigid in its denial of the aspects of the human mind that one might wish to label "the soul". Also, the very objectivity or "correctness" of science is itself open to question, since e.g. the world of physics is continually challenged and changed.
I agree with her reservations over the wave of "parascientific literature", which I take to be "pop psychology" which increasingly tells us what to think and replaces religion for some people, even affects the world of work, through "management training" and "performance management".
One of the most interesting sections for me is the presentation of Freud as a man whose theories may well have been in a part a reaction to the persecuted status of the Jews in Europe. I do not know what support this theory might find with experts.
Her choice of thinkers on whom to focus - Freud, Darwin, Comte, William James, Dawkins, Dennett, etc. assumes a good level of prior knowledge. In a lecture this may be fair enough. Yet I feel that the book falls between two stools. To make a mark with lay readers, there is a need for more explanation of philosophical ideas. For those already familiar with the ideas cited, her message seems rather slight.
I was left wanting to find out more about philosophy but my response to the author's argument was to say, "Yes, but just because some scientists may be wrong doesn't make right the kind of woolly spirituality one finds in the characters in her novels." She does not address the point that one may choose to be an atheist, because one's observations and experience make it impossible to be otherwise, without losing sight of the "beauty and strangeness of life".
I agree with her reservations over the wave of "parascientific literature", which I take to be "pop psychology" which increasingly tells us what to think and replaces religion for some people, even affects the world of work, through "management training" and "performance management".
One of the most interesting sections for me is the presentation of Freud as a man whose theories may well have been in a part a reaction to the persecuted status of the Jews in Europe. I do not know what support this theory might find with experts.
Her choice of thinkers on whom to focus - Freud, Darwin, Comte, William James, Dawkins, Dennett, etc. assumes a good level of prior knowledge. In a lecture this may be fair enough. Yet I feel that the book falls between two stools. To make a mark with lay readers, there is a need for more explanation of philosophical ideas. For those already familiar with the ideas cited, her message seems rather slight.
I was left wanting to find out more about philosophy but my response to the author's argument was to say, "Yes, but just because some scientists may be wrong doesn't make right the kind of woolly spirituality one finds in the characters in her novels." She does not address the point that one may choose to be an atheist, because one's observations and experience make it impossible to be otherwise, without losing sight of the "beauty and strangeness of life".
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book of four esseys derives from four lectures. Robinson uses rather long convoluted sentences, which probably came over more clearly when lecturing. However I do commend the book if only for its good final chapter! The first three are interesting, but not entirely consequential. What does come over several times is Robinson's antipathy towards any form of parascience. She ends with an acknowledgement of the great mystery that human life presents.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Thought provoking
moving and rational, if the two can go together. Brilliant re-assertion of traditional values in public and private intercourse. Wonderful.
Published 21 months ago by brunty
the mind
Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (Terry Lectures) is a rational critique of the reductionist view of the mind proposed by some... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Janet King
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