the second sex by simone de beauvoir
“dissatisfied, cold, priapic, nymphomaniac, lesbian, aborted a hundred times, I was everything, even a single mother”, wrote simone de beauvoir about the reaction to the second volume of the second sex. This outpouring of angst, which included the Vatican placing the book on its banned list, was sparked by de Beauvoir’s outspoken discussion of female sexuality, including lesbianism and cross-dressing. But there is so much more to the second sex, which raises the most fundamental question in all of feminism: what does it mean to be a woman?
de beauvoir rejects biological essentialism – a woman is more than a womb – and instead investigates the nebulous quality of femininity, leading to her most famous saying: “one is not born, but becomes one.” woman”. woman, he notes she, is the other, the exception, the oddity, allowing man to become humanity’s unexamined default. De Beauvoir compares the oppression of women to that of Jews, Black America, the proletariat, and colonized nations, but concludes that sexism is a unique force because women live with, and even love, their oppressors.
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From these theoretical foundations, it offers a panoramic journey through the lives of women: work, motherhood, representation in literature, economic independence, sexuality, aging and the boredom of cleaning the dust behind the closet . (Housework “retains death but also denies life,” she observes, which is my new explanation for the dirt on my fridge.) de Beauvoir’s prose is penetrating, aquiline; she makes no apologies for the intellectual demands of her. Her answers are simple, but infinitely elusive: women should be educated like men, paid like men, and have unrestricted access to birth control and divorce. women should be treated as full human beings, just like men.
Unsurprisingly given its scope and strength, The Second Sex was an editorial sensation. It sold 22,000 copies in its first week in Paris in 1949, and its English translation was an immediate best-seller in the United States. It has influenced such divergent feminists as Betty Friedan, Judith Butler, and Audre Lorde. Her reputation has survived better than many of the Second Wave works she inspired, although in a 2010 review of the new translation, Francine du Plessix Gray criticized de Beauvoir’s “paranoid hostility to the institutions of marriage and motherhood”. .. [which] is so extreme as to be occasionally hilarious.” modern feminism is also less critical of any woman who adopts stereotypically feminine mannerisms or clothing, such as “fragile” high heels that “doom her to impotence”. but de beauvoir was well aware of the contradictions and complications of her own position, hence the epigram in the second volume, of her lover jean-paul sartre’s dirty hands game: “half victim, half accomplice, like all others”. helen lewis
the analects of confucius
To understand Chinese, we first have to understand the Analects of Confucius. Written more than 2,400 years ago, the book underpins China’s cultural fabric. Unlike the Bible and the Koran, which focus on spirituality, the analects are a practical account of the human order of things: family loyalty, moral virtue, social and political hierarchy. If you are Chinese, lines from the bible like “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” can only baffle you, as confucius said almost the opposite: “only the truly virtuous man can love and hate others. ” Hate is a necessary moral posture for a Chinese man.
When I grew up in China, I remember in high school having to recite lines from the analects: fu mu zai, bu yuan you, you bi you fang, which means: “the teacher said: ‘as long as your parents are alive , the son cannot venture far abroad. If he goes abroad, he must have a fixed place of residence.'” These slogans have shaped Chinese value systems and cemented a feudal society that has lasted for millennia.
the life of confucius remains dark but tantalizing. Although he was an important politician in the state of Lu around 500 BC, he did not wield any military power. His career was interrupted by a power struggle within Lu, in part caused by the conflicts of the warring kingdoms. Confucius left Lu and went into exile, spending the rest of his days wandering from one kingdom to another, instructing and inspiring his disciples all the time. his view of the world emphasized the strong ties between authority and man’s moral duty. one can understand why Confucianism has been used by all the emperors throughout Chinese history, including the leaders of the communist party. the Chinese autocracy is clothed in the fundamental teachings of the master: “the mind of the superior man is versed in righteousness; the mean man’s mind is versed in profit.” the emperor would speak of himself with such aphorisms to reinforce his right to rule.
The book offers rich discourses on the qualities of a noble man and the rules of a functional society that have undoubtedly aided autocratic rule, but also provide the modern reader, even in the West, with food for thought on how to live. to take a Confucian kernel: “a man should say: ‘I don’t care if it doesn’t take place.’ he worries me how I can fit into one. he doesn’t worry me that they don’t know me. I seek to be worthy of being known. xiaolu guo
the origin of species by charles darwin
darwin was not the first to propose that species have mutated over time; The idea of evolution has been around in one form or another since the ancient Greeks. But it was Darwin – and, simultaneously, Alfred Russel Wallace – who discovered that natural selection was the mechanism by which evolution operated.
the origin of the species put the cats among the doves and shook the cages of the clerics. Darwin knew that he would; that’s why the book is so calm, constant and reasonable, that’s why it is built incrementally. This is “just a long argument,” made up of ordinary things designed to appeal to the good sense of his readers: Darwin asks us to consider bees, pigeons, worms, and hedgerows, to look around us and judge with our own eyes. “There is greatness in this view of life,” he wrote, “from so simple a beginning infinitely more beautiful and wonderful forms have been and are being developed.”
It is not only zoologists and biologists who have explored and developed Darwin’s propositions. The work of political theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, and philosophers has been plagued by Darwinian ideas, in particular the notion of competition for survival. “The history of all existing society up to now”, opens the communist manifesto, “is the history of class struggles”. Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland explored the comedy of the relationship between humans and their animal relatives. By the end of the century, authors such as HG Wells were exploring the darkest aspects of the Darwinian view: the bestial underbelly of human nature.
The book changed the way we think about the world. he showed that the diversity of the natural world could be explained without recourse to supernatural agents and proposed instead that it had been shaped by chance collisions and incremental changes over billions of years. he also showed us that the earth is not preprogrammed to progress. species that outperform themselves are at risk of extinction, not because they are being punished for their arrogance, but because they are becoming incapable, destroying the means of their own survival. “We are all connected,” Darwin wrote. As we face the daunting challenges of the coming decades, this may be his most important lesson. rebeca stott
Euclid’s elements
Written in Alexandria around 300 BC, Elements is a 13-book treatise whose 465 theorems establish what the Greeks knew about geometry at the time. highlights include a proof of the Pythagorean theorem and a proof that there are an infinite number of prime numbers.
hot, huh? Okay, yes. Elements is the most important math book of all time not because of the subject, but because of its revolutionary method. the book invented how mathematicians do math. elements begins with a list: 23 definitions, five postulates and five common notions. The definitions describe the geometric objects that Euclid will write about, such as points and lines. postulates tell us what procedures are allowed, for example, that given any two points a line can be drawn between them. (euclid allows us only what we can draw with a ruler and compass). and common notions clarify basic concepts, for example, that if object a is the same as object x, and if object b is the same as object x , then object a is the same as object b. /p>
from that moment, euclid assumes nothing more. he builds from these simple basics to build a remarkable edifice of mathematical knowledge. all theorems in elements follow logically from their small set of assumed truths. the beauty of the elements is in their rigor and ingenuity. it sets a standard for mathematical proof to which all subsequent mathematical work aspires. Unlike other sciences, where new models and theories replace old ones, the Element Theorems remain as true now as they were in ancient Greece. in fact, some of them, like the pythagorean theorem, are taught at gcse.
The book was translated from Greek into Latin and also into Arabic, where it initially had a much greater influence on Islamic culture and science. Mathematical historian Carl Boyer, writing in the 1960s, estimated that, since its first printing in 1482, more than a thousand editions had been published: “Perhaps no other book than the Bible can boast so many editions, and, indeed, mathematical work has had a comparable influence.”
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not all were fans. Arthur Schopenhauer complained that Euclid’s proofs were too complicated: “a brilliant piece of wickedness.” if you were to dive into it now, you might not find it an easy read. Euclid wasn’t interested in being pretty or approachable; he was interested in building a system that was airtight. and there has hardly been a leak in 2,500 years. Euclid is the only great mathematician not credited with discovering an important theorem. his reputation is not based on what he did, but on how he did it in elements. alex bellos
the interpretation of dreams by sigmund freud
When young law student hanns sachs first opened up dream interpretation, his life changed. it was a “moment of destiny”, wrote the future analyst, like meeting a “femme fatale”. Many of Freud’s early circles describe a similar epiphany, but today this 800-page book tends to have a less dramatic impact. the long series of prefaces and the lengthy and rather dry first chapter on the history of dream interpretation put many readers off. however, freud was right in feeling that he had written something momentous (he even imagined a plaque to remember where the “secret of dreams” had been discovered).
Reducing this secret to the ubiquitous “a dream is the fulfillment of a wish” formula does this complex book little justice. Freud distinguished between a desire and a desire. a dream can be organized around a wish, for example to pass an exam, and the unconscious wish will act as a hitchhiker, using the wish to sneak into the dream. we can pass or fail the exam, but the clues to desire are found in the details of the room we are in, the tie the examiner is wearing, the sounds in the background. these seemingly unimportant items allow us to trace unconscious material.
freud shows the central place of sexuality and violence in our mental life. writers and poets have always been attentive to the problematic and darkest aspects of the psyche, but it was the dream book that showed so carefully how exactly these currents are forged and encrypted, how they are distorted and censored and how they are formed and shaped by language. the detail in the famous chapter 7 on the psychology of dream processes is unparalleled, and its discussion of the relationships between perception and consciousness puts much of today’s neuroscience to shame.
freud quickly understood the danger of the book. just as a femme fatale can lead you astray, the book could lead readers on an unsuccessful search for occult symbolism. all of her later work on dreams was an effort to correct this. the search for the hidden meaning is ultimately futile and, as she wrote in 1899, there is a navel in the dream, a point that cannot be interpreted and where the meaning fails. the dream book opened both worlds to future generations: that of meaning, so exciting to early analysts, and that of nonsense, crucial to the entire intellectual landscape of the twentieth century and beyond. darian leader
an almanac of sand county by aldo leopold
“there are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot,” wrote aldo leopold in the foreword to an arena county almanac. “Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to kill them… For us, the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the opportunity to find a poinsettia is a right as inalienable as freedom of expression.”
A Sand County Almanac, first published in 1949, a year after its author’s death, is one of the most influential books ever published on the natural world. it helped transform what had been an essentially conservative and utilitarian conservation movement into the first hints of an ecology-focused green movement in the West.
leopold was a lifelong conservationist who lived much of his life on a farm in the “sand counties” of wisconsin. A lifetime of watching land in the United States undergo a “violent conversion” from wilderness to human use had convinced him that conservation was no longer enough: humanity needed a new ethical relationship to land and non-human things. who lived in it.
Leopold’s great achievement was the development of what he called this “land ethic.” “A thing is right,” he wrote in the almanac, “when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. it is wrong when it tends to the opposite.” those two words, “biotic community,” were what made this perspective so radical, then as it is now. Humans, Leopold said, whatever they wanted to think, were not above nature: they were part of it. they could understand that and act accordingly, or they could continue to destroy, and probably perish themselves.
In 1948, even conservationists saw it as their job to open up wilderness for hunters. Leopold himself had been part of this work when he was young. in the almanac, he tells the story of the day he shot a she-wolf and saw the “green fire” die in his eyes. “He was young then and full of itches,” he writes. “I thought that since fewer wolves meant more deer, no wolves would mean a hunter’s paradise. but after seeing the green fire die, I felt that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a vision.”
the chapter in which leopold tells this story is called “thinking like a mountain”. Leopold believed that humans should relearn how to think like mountains; that we must change our image of ourselves “from a conqueror of the earthly community to a simple member and citizen of it”, and that we can only do this by paying close attention. Leopold’s “nature” was not a concept or a point of debate. nature was the green fire in the wolf’s eyes, the skeins of geese across the county’s sandy lakes, the blossoming of the arizona juniper, or the bark of the young white pine. you had to go out to see it, and you had to remain humble. it’s a lesson we still have to learn.
paul kingsnorth
the communist manifesto of freedrich engels and karl marx
“a fearsome hobgoblin stalks europe…” thus began the first failed attempt to translate the communist manifesto into English. in the authorized version it reads “a specter haunts europe”. And, under a different guise, the same specter has haunted Europe in times of crisis ever since Marx and Engels wrote it.
It’s not just the specter of working class revolt: factory workers in Manchester had been rioting for 30 years before the manifesto came out. the threat was political: that working-class unrest would disassociate itself from the spontaneous ideology of the early nineteenth century, republican socialism, and instead embrace communism. Communism, for Marx’s generation of German leftists, meant a classless society based on abundance. Marx and Engels had inherited the goal of the atheist left-wing intelligentsia of the 1830s, but after Engels arrived in Manchester in 1842, they came to understand the industrial proletariat as the only social force capable of achieving it.
but the manifesto is not about the proletariat. Its entire first section is a praise of capitalism, which has played a revolutionary role in replacing all partial and informal attempts at a market economy with a pure economy. not only that, it is a praise to the bourgeoisie. if you only read a paragraph of the paper itself, it should be this:
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“the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and with it the relations of production, and with them all the relations of society… all that is solid vanishes into air, all that is sacred is profaned, and man is finally forced to face with sober sense his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.”
The entrepreneurial class of the early industrial age, then, had created not only the conditions for constant technological improvement, but also the demise of religious obscurantism and the rise of sociological realism. From now on, Marx and Engels thought -observing the acute social war that devastated cities like Lille and Manchester- the only problem would be to provide the proletariat with the political maturity to exercise power.
The manifesto was published a few weeks before the 1848 revolution in France and was sent via Paris to Germany, where a full-scale revolutionary war soon broke out. here the tiny communist sects, made up of skilled workers and radical students, were forced to side with the radical democrats against, first, the overthrown monarchy and then the bourgeoisie, which, at first sight of the armed workers, clearly turned anti-revolutionary.
from then on, all revolutions became dirty business for the communists, involving the complex interplay of radical social goals and radical democratic goals, around which the alliance of class forces was often unstable . but the manifesto has shone, largely because its prose shines with immaculate logical clarity. capitalism produces its own gravediggers and gives them the means to free themselves and humanity from economic necessity. as an idea, it was powerful enough to sustain generations of people through the experience of exile, torture, imprisonment, and concentration camps. pablo mason
loved by toni morrison
“124 was spiteful. filled with the poison of a baby. the women of the house knew it and the children too”. When beloved was published in 1987, and I saw these first few lines, plunging the reader into a house haunted by a murdered girl, I knew I wasn’t ready to read it. It may seem surprising when I confess that, despite being an African-American writer, and this being the book that has best and most famously captured the female African-American experience, I didn’t actually read it until two years ago. why?
In part, I was not prepared to face what the novel had to tell me. I instinctively felt that Toni Morrison had opened hell like no one, not even great writers like Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Alice Walker, had done before. she accomplished with amado what her previous four books had only hinted at: she put you there. reading it is living in the ohio haunted house of sethe, the runaway slave who had decided to kill her child rather than let her return to slavery. it is entering the mind of denver, her daughter, trying to find some kind of balance in a nation that hates her very being; and meet paul d, a man who has survived the horrors of slavery and who hopes that stability can be a path to reconciliation.
but there was another reason why it scared me too: morrison’s voice was so powerful and intuitive that reading his work was risking being sucked into his influence. A later generation of artists, from darryl pinckney to eryka badhu, from henry louis gates to zadie smith and chimamanda ngozi adichie, are in her debt, whether they realize it or not. I am not saying that they are imitating a loved one; is that this novel opened a way of seeing, a way of accessing the world that is now everywhere.
I finally read the book because I was writing a memoir and wanted to understand how my mother and grandmother saw the world. Indeed, I discovered that the novel articulates the deep rage that many black women feel: the rage of helplessness, the impossibility of protecting her son and herself. beloved makes the ghost of the dead child a heartfelt cry for all lost children. no writer who ventures into this field can do so without “knowing” this novel. has left the realm of fiction and has become a force of nature. bonnie greer
comedies, stories & tragedies of william shakespeare
imagine the world of literature without “all the world is a stage”, without “beware the ides of march” and brutus stabbing caesar; without the yellow stockings and crossed malvolio garters; without Cleopatra in her infinite variety and Lady Macbeth in her dark charisma; without a voice for caliban and the thought that “we are the same stuff that dreams are made of”. that would be the world without the comedies, stories and plays of mr. William Shakespeare. tragedies, published in large-scale double-column folio format in 1623.
half of the works of the best writer in the world survive thanks to this book. if it weren’t for the folio, several others would only be known in mangled partial texts. seven years earlier, in the year shakespeare died, his friend and rival ben jonson became the first english playwright to collect his works, but since he was a great comedian and a great poet, he Johnson’s reach was limited. As the title of the first folio indicates, Shakespeare excelled at all kinds of drama: comedies to make you laugh, historical plays to make you think, tragedies to make you cry.
Actually, the title of the folio is misleading. each one of the works is multiple, not singular in kind. there is comedy in tragedies, tragedy in comedies, and history everywhere. all human life is there: kings and clowns, women up and brothers in arms, rogue and bad politicians, best friends who fight because they both fell in love with the same girl, parents infuriated by old age and difficult children, men and young women struggling to come to terms with their sexuality, people becoming depressed and going insane, friends showing undying loyalty, and envious schemers reveling in malice. not to mention ghosts, fairies, ethereal spirits, and Olympian divinities.
And then there are the words: the memorable phrases, the coinages and combinations, the battles of wits of Beatrice and Benedict, the deep musings of Hamlet, the giddy poetry of Othello and Cleopatra, the hilariously inventive prose of Sir John Falstaff. . no book has done more with the resources of human language.
the folio was the first edition of shakespeare’s complete plays. Nearly every great thinker and many great doers in the last 400 years have had a Shakespeare collection on hand and have been shaped by it in some way. Freud said that psychoanalysis was simply the scientific redescription of the things he had learned from Shakespeare’s characters. Marx learned as much about the power of money from the Helm of Athens as he did from the world around him. Abraham Lincoln would read Shakespeare aloud for hours at a time with only one secretary for the audience, Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates kept a copy of the complete works hidden away on Robben Island. as ben jonson wrote in a wonderfully generous poem included in the preamble, this is a book “not of an age, but of all times”. jonathan bat
writing
Originally, bible meant “books”. Greek-speaking Jews and Christians used the word as shorthand for their scriptures: a vast treasury of texts written at various times, in various places, and in various styles. Jews naturally had no patience with the four accounts of the life of Jesus, the history of the early church, and the corpus of letters attributed to various apostles who, some four centuries after Jesus’ life, had become canonized. by Christians as a new testament. There was little disagreement, however, as to what constituted the great core of scripture known to Jews as the Tanakh and to Christians, not surprisingly, as the Old Testament. a collection of laws believed to have been written by the god himself; a history of the world from its creation to the rise and fall of various empires in the near east; books of prophecies, poetry and proverbs: bible indeed.
However, both Jews and Christians, in their different forms, identified in these multiple scriptures a deep and internal coherence. in the middle ages, the greek plural bible was transfigured into a latin singular: no longer “books” but the book. The change was due to the reflection of the centrality of the Bible in medieval culture. the reform, which saw it translated into numerous vernacular languages, only increased its impact on the way of thinking, imagining and speaking of European Christians. The expansion of Western power throughout the world took the Bible to lands unimaginable by its various authors. Today, its status as the world’s all-time bestseller is undisputed. no book in history can rival it for influence.
There is, however, a close second. The Koran, like the New Testament, bears the recognizable stamp of the Jewish scriptures. moses is mentioned in his verses more than any other person, and his doctrine of prophecy is ultimately derived from the hebrew bible, but his precepts are much more forceful and powerful than the biblical ones. muslims do not believe that muhammad was the author of the koran. rather, he was her passive receiver. The Koranic text, as Islam teaches, is timeless and uncreated, and this is what explains the echoes it contains within its verses from both the Old and New Testaments: the Koran came first. As the pure and immediate word of God, Muslims believe that it is immune from all error. everything in it is considered true. As a result, the Koran has been even more central to Islamic civilization than the Bible has been to Christianity. “We have sent it, blessed one. follow her and take care of yourselves, so that you can receive compassion.” without a god’s book, so the koran teaches, there can be no knowledge of right or wrong, nor of what it means to be human properly. it is in Islam that the book has reached its highest apotheosis. tom holland
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