How to Be
Life Lessons from the Early Greeks
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- $279.00
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- $279.00
Descripción editorial
Nicolson crafts a geography of the ancient world and a brilliant exploration of our connections to the past.
What is the nature of things?
What is justice? How can I be myself?
How should we treat each other?
Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and their priests. Twenty-five hundred years ago, in a succession of small eastern Mediterranean harbor cities, a few heroic men and women decided to cast off mental subservience and apply their own thinking minds to the conundrums of life.
These great innovators shaped the beginnings of western philosophy. Through the questioning voyager Odysseus, Homer explored how we might navigate our way through the world. Heraclitus, in Ephesus, was the first to consider the interrelatedness of things. Xenophanes of Colophon was the first champion of civility. On the Aegean island of Lesbos, the early lyric poets Sappho and Alcaeus asked themselves, “How can I be true to myself?” On Samos, Pythagoras imagined an everlasting soul and took his ideas to Italy, where they flowered again in surprising and radical forms.
The award-winning writer Adam Nicolson travels with us through this transforming world and asks what light these ancient thinkers can throw on our deepest preconceptions. Enhanced with maps, photographs, and artwork, How to Be is an expedition into early ideas. Nicolson takes us to the dawn of investigative thought and makes the fundamental questions of the ancient philosophers new again. What are the principles of the physical world? How can we be good in it? And why do we continue to ask these questions? It is an enthralling, exhilarating journey.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Nicolson (The Life Between the Tides) illuminates in this meditative account the vital influence geography had on the evolution of Greek philosophy from the 11th to the 5th centuries BCE, arguing that places gave rise to frames of mind that served as wellsprings of new ideas. Drawing on archaeology, literary accounts, and his own travels, Nicolson contends that Greek philosophers' focus on fluidity, exchange, and connectedness derived from the growth of Iron Age port cities across the Aegean. In support of this idea, he recounts a well-worn parable of the philosopher Thales, who lived in the port city of Miletus in the 6th century BCE; Thales tripped into a well while examining the stars and was laughed at by an enslaved girl who chided him for not being able to see what was directly in front of him. According to Nicolson, this story illustrates how the tensions of the slave trade, the basis of Miletus's coastal prosperity, led to the origins of philosophy's self-conscious divide between the study of an ideal cosmos and an unideal reality. Elsewhere, Nicolson posits that the poet Sappho was inspired by the long absences of a maritime world to develop the idea of a distinct, isolated self that longs for connection. ("And her light/ stretches equally/ over salt sea...// But she goes back and forth remembering.") Lyrical and insightful, this graceful analysis is an alluring must-read.
