Representative men
An excellent book about some of the world's greatest men, including Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakspeare, Napoleon and Goethe.Please Note: This book is easy to read in true text, not scanned images that can sometimes be difficult to decipher. The Microsoft eBook has a contents page linked to the chapter headings for easy navigation. The Adobe eBook has bookmarks at chapter headings and is printable up to two full copies per year. Both versions are text searchable.
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What Hacker News says
- Emerson's Essays: First and Second Series
I read in it about a thousand things I'd experienced but I'd thought were impossible to describe. It was written to inspire people, and inspired me daily for many years—nay, eternally! It—and Emerson's other writings, e.g. Representative Men, Conduct of Life, Nature, Addresses and Lectures etc—gave all the drops of my blood eyes that look upwards.
- John Dewey - Art As Experience
I'm a jazz musician & artist who also studied philosophy a lot for a long time. Aged about 30 I was reading a lot of philosophy books about art, and about philosophy of music, both the classics and the latest books. Trying to understand how on earth Rachmaninov's 2nd Symphony could have the effect on me that it did. But it seemed each new book just split the subject into finer pieces, about which they knew less and less. Plus a lot of recent philosophy of music books seemed...stupid, blind, written by people unqualified to write them. Anyway, Lakoff & Johnson in Philosophy in the Flesh mention John Dewey as someone who never fell victim to the Subjectivist/Objectivist split.. So I picked up Art as Experience where it had been on my shelf for years, unappreciated. And..instantly all my problems with understanding music were solved. He talks a lot about things in everyday life—someone poking a fire, or (my favourite) a job interview!—showing how the energies, tensions, patterns are the same as those in art. Maybe sounds obvious, but the philosophy books I'd been reading got further and further from life. So, I stopped reading about philosophy of art. I'm not saying I suddenly understood everything about how art does what it does, but it was no longer a confusing, troubling problem. It just seemed natural. (Dewey doesn't have the most exciting prose style, but what he says more than compensates for that.)
Emerson - Essays
(My first book had Essays, first and second series, Representative Men, and some other stuff) It was hugely inspiring every day for many years, from when I was about 20. He writes precisely to be inspiring. He teaches you to be yourself. But also at first it was as though he'd had written about 10,000 things I'd experienced but thought were impossible to describe. If I don't read him so often now, his themes are part of me; usually it's to look up some lines I partly remember. I've probably spent more time with him than anyone.
Vonnegut - Sirens of Titan
I discovered it aged about 15. The first novel I really loved, that somehow spoke to me, that I could totally relate to. Very funny too. I read it over and over again on the school bus, a 40 minute trip, for 6 months or so. Some years I later enjoyed his Breakfast of Champions a lot too, but nothing was like Sirens. At 15 I had a telescope, was into Carl Sagan, wanted to be an astronomer, so I guess the space aspect appealed. p.s. I was later in a free jazz/rock band called The Ghosts of Saturn. Coincidentally, my brother was once in a rock band called CSI (Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum!)
- Contd: Sorry about length, but I think that's a wonderful rant.
The best writing I know on particular favourite books/writers are Robert Louis Stevenson's essay Books Which Have Influenced Me[0] and Colin Wilson's book The Books In My Life. Also Chesterton's Twelve Types[1] and Emerson's Representative Men.
[0] https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/stevenson/robert_louis/s848...
[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12491/12491-h/12491-h.htm
- A book published in 1946 is "very old"?! hehe. Maybe try Plutarch's Lives (about 100AD), or Xenophon's Memorabilia of Socrates (about 370BC), both of which are extremely readable, gossipy even, and touch on that subject. Marvel at how little's changed.
If I had to name one book, I guess Emerson's Essays: First and Second Series, (that first copy I had also included Representative Men) which I discovered when I was about 20, and read from almost every day for at least 10 years, and still never go more than a few days without....well, it's more myself than I am (to paraphrase Emerson, I think). Trying to track that quote down just now, I realized that Emerson's Uses of Great Men[0] explains the matter far better than I could.
The first time I read it, it was like he'd described 10,000 things I'd experienced, and had thought couldn't possibly be described. That was 27 years ago. I can't imagine at all what difference not coming across him would have made, but I guess "it actually changed my life" would be a huge understatement. Also Russell, Hazlitt, Chesterton, Santayana, Stevenson, William James, Nietzsche etc have been hugely important, but....somehow, in various ways, none are quite such admirable characters, or teachers for all seasons.[1] This:
"It is nothing for any man sitting in his chair to be overcome with the sense of the immediacy of life, to feel the spur of courage, the victory of good over evil, the value, now and forever, of all great-hearted endeavor. Such moments come to us all. But for a man to sit in his chair and write what shall call up these forces in the bosoms of others – that is desert, that is greatness. To do this was the gift of Emerson. The whole earth is enriched by every moment of converse with him. The shows and shams of life become transparent, the lost kingdoms are brought back, the shutters of the spirit are opened, and provinces and realms of our own existence lie gleaming before us." – JJ Chapman
[0]https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Representative_Men/Uses_of_Gr...
[1] I almost added Thoreau, but he seems an extension of Emerson, unimaginable without him. Well, you could say that about Nietzsche too.
"Emerson. – Never have I felt so much at home in a book, and in my home, as – I may not praise it, it is too close to me." – Nietzsche
- Representative Men by Emerson?
- “And if any appear never to assume the chair, but always to stand and serve, it is because we do not see the company in a sufficiently long period for the whole rotation of parts to come about. As to what we call the masses, and common men;—there are no common men. All men are at last of a size; and true art is only possible, on the conviction that every talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair play, and an open field, and freshest laurels to all who have won them! But heaven reserves an equal scope for every creature. Each is uneasy until he has produced his private ray unto the concave sphere, and beheld his talent also in its last nobility and exaltation.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6312/6312-h/6312-h.htm)
It seems to me that no person is in a position to judge whether another has found the thing that they should be shaping their life around. As much as we like to assume they are, humans aren’t rational creatures and activities that appear completely pointless from the outside can be incredibly meaningful to the one doing them.
