| |
 |
|
|
Hobby Forum Index » Arts - Books - Reviews » Book Review: Everyday Ecstasy (Marghanita Laski)
Page 1 of 1
|
| Author |
Message |
| Anthony Campbell |
 Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2003 9:30 am |
|
|
|
Guest
|
An HTML version of this review is available at:
http://www.acampbell.org.uk/bookreviews/
Over 200 other reviews of books on acupuncture, biography, biology,
brain and mind, cosmology, cycling, death and dying, evolution, fiction,
history, history of science, medicine, parapsychology, palaeontology,
philology, philosophy, philosophy of science, psychology, religion,
science, and travel may be found at this site.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Marghanita Laski
EVERYDAY ECSTASY
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Book review by Anthony Campbell. Copyright © Anthony Campbell (2003).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This book is a sequel to Laski's major study Ecstasy, published almost 20 years
earlier. In that book she put forward a secular explanation for those types of
experience commonly called mystical. Such experiences, she found, could occur
in a non-religious context and could be explained in secular psychological
terms. She also found that they often had profound effects on those who had
them, and in this book she looks at some of these effects and also at the
stimuli ("triggers") that give rise to them. Although full-blown ecstasies are
fairly uncommon (few people have more than one or two in a lifetime), minor
degrees of them are much more widespread and these came to interest Laski
considerably in her later years.
She starts by looking at what she calls "adamics", meaning people who wish to
return to an earlier, idealized, way of life. In extreme forms the adamic
experience leads to the attempt to set up communities designed to put the
perceived ideals into practice; such communities always fail. Laski discusses
the reasons for this failure, which she take to be inevitable. But adamic
notions have influenced many social movements, particularly those inspired by
left-wing ideals.
Perhaps the most important part of the book comes in the chapter on falling in
love, which Laski considers not just in the romantic or sexual sense but in the
wider context of being taken over by an idea or an ideal. It is notoriously
impossible to argue lovers out of their obsessions, but the same is true in art
and also in science, where researchers occasionally have falsified their
results, not for personal gain, but in order to bolster up a favourite theory.
Laski, presumably influenced here by Karl Popper's view of verification,
insists that all scientific theories are provisional and "can never be accorded
more than a pro-tem validity".
Not surprisingly given her atheism, she applies this argument even more
strongly to religious faith. "To the believer faith is a virtue, to me a vice,
and a vice because it nullifies what is to me the greatest human potential, the
exercise of reason." And even though, as she acknowledges, some obsessions are
useful, for without them we would have no creativity, they are best avoided.
"If I were to be asked ... what next change in sensibility would most benefit
us all, my answer would be to distrust all fallings in love."
Another chapter looks at triggers to ecstasy, and at the lamentable modern
tendency to misuse and debase them. This trend has, inevitably, accelerated in
the quarter-century since she wrote: the ghastly epidemic of piped music she
complains about, for example, has spread ever wider and become more
inescapable. And as she also points out, continued exposure even to good music
and good art is not an unalloyed blessing, for even the most effective triggers
lose their impact when they become over-familiar.
This book is no substitute for her earlier study on the same theme, which I
take to be a work of the first importance. She was in her late sixties when she
wrote this sequel and, as she herself remarks, one's responses to life almost
always become less intense as one gets older. This is a relatively low-key
piece of writing, reflective and perhaps rather elegiac (she died some eight
years later). But it is not to be missed by any admirers of her writing, among
whom I would certainly include myself.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
%T Ecstasy
%A Marghanita Laski
%I Thames and Hudson
%C London
%D 1980
%P 160 pp
%K psychology
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Using Linux GNU/Debian - Windows-free zone
http://www.acampbell.org.uk (book reviews and articles)
Email: replace "www." with "ac@" |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
| |
|
Page 1 of 1
All times are GMT - 5 Hours
The time now is Mon Dec 01, 2008 1:06 pm
|
|