The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0374536236
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In his brilliantly enjoyable and freewheeling new book, John Gray draws together the religious, philosophic, and fantastical traditions that question the very idea of human freedom. We flatter ourselves about the nature of free will and yet the most enormous forces--logical, physical, metaphysical--constrain our every action. Many writers and intellectuals have always understood this, but instead of embracing our condition we battle against it, with everyone from world conquerors to modern scientists dreaming of a "human dominion" almost comically at odds with our true state.
Filled with wonderful examples and drawing on the widest possible reading (from the Gnostics to Philip K. Dick), The Soul of the Marionette is a stimulating and engaging meditation on everything from cybernetics to the fairground marionettes of the title.
things are necessary and others impossible. In truth we cannot know: ‘We may affirm, that things are thus and thus, according to the Principles we have espoused: But we strangely forget ourselves, when we plead a necessity of their being so in Nature, and an Impossibility of their being otherwise.’ Like the eighteenth-century Scottish sceptic David Hume, Glanvill denied that the human mind can know the causes of the events it observes. Unlike Hume, who used his sceptical philosophy to attack
western opinion belong in that category. Again, if great powers have avoided direct armed conflict since the end of the Second World War they have at the same time pursued their rivalries in many proxy wars. Colonial and neo-colonial conflicts in South-East Asia, the Korean War and the Chinese invasion of Tibet, British counter-insurgency warfare in Malaya and Kenya, the abortive Franco-British invasion of Suez, the Angolan civil war, the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and
always be separated from moral judgements. There are many kinds of lethal force that do not lead to immediate death. Are those who die from hunger or disease during a war or in its aftermath counted among the casualties? Do refugees whose lives are shortened by their sufferings appear in the count? Do victims of torture figure in the calculus if they succumb years later from the physical or mental damage that has been inflicted on them? Do infants who are born to brief and painful lives as a
quotes an unnamed secret service officer in an interview with La Repubblica newspaper two days after the kidnapping describing the operation as ‘so perfect as to seem almost artistic’. Executed by people who ‘have undergone lengthy commando training in specialized bases’ and directed by an organization that was extremely competent ‘both in its genuinely ideologically motivated members and in the sectors that are controlled by other directors, for other purposes, which paradoxically coincide’, the
K. Dick, London, Gollancz, 2006, 14. ‘it was God’: Ibid., 127. ‘in the sky’: Ibid., 128. ‘full-blown paranoia’: For a detailed account of Dick’s breakdown, see ibid., 210. ‘a Linda Ronstadt obsession’: The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, ed. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, London, Gollancz, 2011, 895. ‘benign proto-entity’: Dick, Shifting Realities, 284. ‘our own view’: Ibid., 214. ‘creation is visible’: Quoted in Sutin, Divine Invasions, 229. ‘was never written’: Ibid., 266.