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The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom Hardcover – 5 Mar 2015

by John Gray (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars 11 customer reviews
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 192 pages
  • Publisher: Allen Lane (5 Mar. 2015)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1846144493
  • ISBN-13: 978-1846144493
  • Product Dimensions: 14.4 x 2.1 x 22.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 305,489 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Review

A generous and energising tumble of ideas...he is inventive and penetrating (Galen Strawson Financial Times)

Like Isaiah Berlin with a thing for sci-fi (Tibor Fischer The Spectator)

We might believe that we are on a voyage towards a future of perfect freedom, but Gray is here to tell us that we are really only going round in circles, repeating ancient heresies, and retelling old myths in modern cant (Stephen Cave Literary Review)

Gray must be one of the best read of contemporary philosophers, trawling insouciantly through high-, middle- and low-brow literature with the sharp-eyed eclecticism of a magpie of genius (John Banville The Guardian)

A brain-twisting meditation on freedom...a brief, elliptical inquiry designed to raise more questions than anyone could answer (Kirkus Reviews)

Perhaps the most brilliant of his originally structured "enquiries", brings home, with infectious learning, the many self-deceptions behind our reverence for freedom (Paul Binding TLS)

About the Author

John Gray is the author of a number of highly regarded and controversial books, including False Dawn, Straw Dogs and, most recently, The Silence of Animals. He has taught at Oxford, Harvard, Yale and the LSE. John Banville described The Silence of Animals as 'a marvellous statement of what it is to be both an animal and a human in the strange, terrifying and exquisite world in which we straw dogs find ourselves'.

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5.0 out of 5 starsYours freely
By Hande Z TOP 500 REVIEWER on 24 April 2015
Format: Hardcover
Can we imagine ourselves as having less freedom than a marionette doll or a puppet? John Gray does. His idea he tells us, is not new but one that has existed since the time of the Gnostics. Gray examines the idea - our human idea - of the freedom of the will. His book is published about the same time as two other equally enthralling books about freedom and free will, James Miles' 'The Free Will delusion', and Julian Baggini's 'Freedom Regained'. Miles' book is detailed, scholarly, and advances his own belief that the world is deterministic, that is, we do not really have free will. Baggini covers the subject in a broader sweep, and written in a style that is more accessible than Miles, and although he largely agrees with Miles that we do not really have free will as most people understand free will to be, he holds the hope that in spite of our condition and circumstances, we can work ourselves into a position from which we might have some form of determination of our own lives. Baggini presents his account by examining the idea of freedom from the perspectives of diverse people including geneticists, artists, addicts, psychopaths, and dissidents.

Gray, like Baggini, examines freedom from a vastly different root source from Miles. He questions the very idea of freedom and the value humans attach to it. He reminds us that we might, upon reflection, more truly wish for freedom from choice instead of having a freedom of choice. After all, thinkers and religious teachers through the ages have postulated that our consciousness stands in the way 'between the mechanical motions of the flesh and the freedom of the spirit'. Hence, transcending consciousness is viewed as a great meditative and religious feat.Read more ›
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4.0 out of 5 starsAn interesting discussion of what we mean by 'freedom'
By Paul Bowes TOP 1000 REVIEWER on 3 April 2015
Format: Kindle Edition
John Gray continues to be an oddity among contemporary intellectuals: a poor fit in a world dominated by materialists and mechanists on the one hand, and true believers in technological progress and human self-improvement on the other. In 'The Soul of the Marionette' he has found evidence in imaginative literature and elsewhere of a continuing struggle between a conception of humanity as the puppet of its materiality and a counter-conception of the human as disembodied – and, with the aid of technology, rehousable – spirit: the endlessly perfectible cyborg, which at the extreme recognises no constraints.

The larger argument is part of Gray's ongoing war against the overconfident rationalism that has replaced religious belief for so many. For Gray, to be human is to be permanently divided and flawed: to be a creature that is palpably at the mercy of its biology and environment and yet is constrained to behave as though it believes itself to be free, to the point of acting perversely if there is no other method of asserting that freedom. Gray believes that all schemes, religious or rational, that aim either at expelling the soul – or spirit, or whatever term you prefer - or at freeing the soul from its materiality, perceived as a trap, purely by the exercise of reason must fail, because each path involves throwing away part of what it is to be human. 'Perfected' man is not human: as Kleist notes in the passage take as epigraph to the book, he must be either a marionette or a god. Gray argues that we must forsake these fantasies and accept our limitations as the price of being what we are.

Gray has assembled in this short text an impressive number of references to this dichotomy in other writings.Read more ›
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4.0 out of 5 starsA Gray Area of Philosophy
By Neutral VINE VOICE on 29 Jan. 2016
Format: Hardcover
It says much about the parlous state of British philosophy that John Gray is so highly regarded as one of its finest exponents. Instead of providing a serious examination of the question of free will Gray wanders around the subject relying on unstated, unproven, incorrect and often contradictory assumptions. Grey uses the work of the little known German writer Heinrich von Kleist who postulated that as a marionette was an inanimate object entirely controlled by a mind outside itself it did not experience a lack of freedom. 'In order to feel a lack of freedom you must be a self-conscious thing'. For Kleist 'freedom is not simply a relationship between human beings: it is...a state of the soul in which conflict has been left behind'. In a vague attempt to create a continuing link between medieval magic and the heavenly city of the eighteenth and successive century philosophers he argues that many people hold to a Gnostic view of things to the extent that, 'the Gnostic faith that knowledge can give humans a freedom no other creature can possess has become the predominant religion'. He goes further claiming that 'Gnosticism is the faith of people who believe themselves to be machines'. Human beings have a desire to understand what they cannot know, notwithstanding an implicit faith in science to provide total knowledge.

The Gnostics believed the world was created by an inferior-god and was inherently evil. The real world was the world of the spirit. In order to be free humans must revolt against the laws that govern earthly things and 'refusing the constraints that go with being a fleshly creature, they must exit from the material world'.Read more ›
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