Philosophy for Passengers
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A philosophical guide to passengerhood, with reflections on time, space, existence, boredom, our sense of self, and our sense of the senses.
While there are entire bookstore sections—and even entire bookstores—devoted to travel, there have been few books on the universal experience of being a passenger. With this book, philosopher Michael Marder fills the gap, offering a philosophical guide to passengerhood. He takes readers from ticketing and preboarding (preface and introduction) through a series of stops and detours (reflections on topics including time, space, existence, boredom, our sense of self, and our sense of the senses) to destination and disembarking (conclusion).
Marder finds that the experience of passengers in the twenty-first century is experience itself, stretching well beyond railroad tracks and airplane flight patterns. On his journey through passengerhood, he considers, among many other things, passenger togetherness, which goes hand in hand with passenger loneliness; flyover country and the idea of placeness; and Descartes in an airplane seat. He tells us that the word metaphor means transport in Greek and discusses the gray area between literalness and metaphoricity; explains the connection between reading and riding; and ponders the difference between destination and destiny. Finally, a Beckettian disembarking: you might not be able to disembark, yet you must disembark. After the voyage in the world ends, the journey of understanding begins.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Marder (Green Mass), a philosophy professor at University of the Basque Country, Spain, whisks readers away in this heady meditation on what it means to be a passenger. The author remarks that "in the twenty-first century, the experience of passengers is experience itself, well beyond the sphere of public and semipublic means of transport." Marder elaborates elliptically on this idea ("The train of existence does not run on time, because time does not run on time"), reaching peak obliqueness with musings on metaphor as a, well, metaphor for transportation. He posits: "We draw the entire world into the vortex of passengerhood" through travel, as human movement through a landscape physically changes it, setting it on its own trajectory. This process has social, mental, moral, and ecological implications, Marder claims: treating travel as a nonentity, one objectifies oneself and instrumentalizes nature. Saraceno's images of fractal-like spiderwebs accentuate Marder's attention to how living things create networks and relate to their environment. Marder's loopy but perceptive prose and mind-bending observations test the limits of language and abstraction, making for an intellectually rich reconsideration of being in transit ("Passages are peculiar transfer stations between architectural structures and reading activities"). This is an excellent metaphysical guide, as applicable to traveling through the Great Plains as the astral plane.
