The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom

by John Gray

Overview

In his brilliantly enjoyable and freewheeling new book, John Gray draws together the religious, philosophic, and fantastical traditions that question the very idea of human freedom. We flatter ourselves about the nature of free will and yet the most enormous forces—logical, physical, metaphysical—constrain our every action. Many writers and intellectuals have always understood this, but instead of embracing our condition we battle against it, with everyone from world conquerors to modern scientists dreaming of a "human dominion" almost comically at odds with our true state.

Filled with wonderful examples and drawing on the widest possible reading (from the Gnostics to Philip K. Dick), The Soul of the Marionette is a stimulating and engaging meditation on everything from cybernetics to the fairground marionettes of the title.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374536237
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/17/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	8.20(w) x 5.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

John Gray is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including The Silence of Animals, The Immortalization Commission, Black Mass, and Straw Dogs. A regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, he has been a professor of politics at Oxford, a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale, and a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics. He now writes full-time.

Hometown:

San Francisco, California

Date of Birth:

1951

Place of Birth:

Houston, Texas

Education:

B.A., M.A., Maharishi European Research University; Ph.D., Columbia Pacific University, 1982

Website:

http://www.marsvenus.com/

Table of Contents

1 The Faith of Puppets 1

The freedom of the marionette

The faith of puppets

Demiurgy and tailors' dummies

Leopardi and the souls of machines

The return of Ligeia

The golem and the circular ruins

Solaris and our world

The revelation of Philip K. Dick

Entering the Zone

Mr Weston drops a match

2 In the Puppet Theatre 73

Roof gardens, feathers and human sacrifice

Dark mirrors, hidden angels and an algorithmic prayer-wheel

Human redundancy and the cyborg economy

An iron mountain and a shifting spectacle

A universal Panopticon

Puppetry, conspiracy and Ouija boards

When the machine stops

3 Freedom for Über-marionettes 147

What science won't fell you

Ethics for puppets

Gravity and the Fall

Acknowledgements 167

Notes 169

Editorial Reviews

02/09/2015
In this meandering but often insightful look at the human condition, Gray (The Silence of Animals) offers a number of predictions. Among them is the extended syllogism that begins with his major premise that all matter thinks, moves through the minor premise that machines are matter, and concludes that machines (along with plants and jellyfish) are—or someday will be—self-aware. As the march of scientific knowledge leads to thinking machines, the upshot for us carbon-based life forms “might well be human redundancy.” Gray’s thesis is disturbing but hardly groundbreaking, bringing to mind Isaac Asimov’s 1956 story “The Last Question.” Gray’s musings on politics can be equally disturbing and are at times less convincing, such as his pronouncement that “the military-industrial complex no longer has the centrality it once did.” Still, with examples that include ancient Greeks, early Christians, Aztecs, Jeremy Bentham, and Philip K. Dick, to name but a few, this remains an intelligently written, thought-provoking book. Agent: Tracy Bohan, Wylie Agency. (May)

Publishers Weekly

[The Soul of the Marionette] is pervaded by the signature skepticism of its author, a British philosopher. Trapped in bodies, burdened by mortality, and ‘cursed with self-reflective thought,’ we are limited in our freedom. Gray dismisses modern rationalism, with its faith in human progress, as a kind of Gnosticism made from ‘scraps of decayed Christianity,’ whose central myth is that knowledge will set us free. Spirited tours through the lives and work of various artists add texture to his provocative arguments.” —The New Yorker

“Illusion-piercing sobriety.” —Booklist (starred review)

“[A]n intelligently written, thought-provoking book.” —Publishers Weekly

“Gray connects the dots among science fiction (including that of Stanislaw Lem), Borges, the human-sacrificing Aztecs, global warming, and the loss of privacy (and freedom) that the cyberrevolution has wrought, challenging readers to make some leaps of logic and come to counterintuitive conclusions.” —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

02/15/2015
Gray's (The Silence of Animals; The Immortalization Commission) book claims to be an inquiry into human freedom but reads like a collection of anecdotes strung together by a jaded, unreliable narrator. The work describes several conceptions of freedom from philosophy, art, and sf that skirt the more conventional concerns about the topic of freedom of the will, such as freedom from suffering, doubt, and having to make one's own choices. Unfortunately, the text inexplicably glosses over the entirety of the current free will debate. While divided into three sections and further into a number of vignettes, the book seems to have an overarching theme that freedom is an illusion and religion something worse. The author ultimately states but doesn't defend a somewhat nihilistic compatibilist stance. Human beings, Gray declares, are accidents of evolution whose only freedom is the old compatibilist standby—the ability to do as one wants. It's difficult to call this a philosophical text as the author makes wild and unsupported claims about history, religion, and science. VERDICT Although erratic and undefended, there is nothing new here. Others explore these topics with more rigor and intellectual honesty.—William Simkulet, Univ. of Wisconsin-Marshfield/Wood Cty., Marshfield

Library Journal

2015-01-19
Within the debate between Christian and atheist authors, here come the Gnostics.In this brain-twisting meditation on freedom, Gray (The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, 2013), a former professor across disciplines (at Harvard, Yale and Oxford), covers a wide expanse of intellectual territory, from the ancient Greeks to science-fiction futurism. Yet the underpinning theme concerns Gnosticism, which the author describes as "the faith of people who believe themselves to be machines," for whom "the creator was at best a blunderer, negligent or forgetful of the world it had fashioned, and possibly senile, mad or long dead; it was a minor, insubordinate and malevolent demiurge that ruled the world." Gray finds in this ancient belief a visionary illumination of our modern predicament, in which reason has shown itself to be more curse than blessing, progress is an illusion, and the machines man has invented might soon render mankind obsolete. He finds a kindred spirit in Philip K. Dick, "a brilliantly original writer of science fiction who uses the genre to question what it means to be human" and who once wrote, "it is not man who is estranged by God; it is God who is estranged from God. He evidently willed it this way at the beginning, and has never since sought his way home." Gray connects the dots among science fiction (including that of Stanislaw Lem), Borges, the human-sacrificing Aztecs, global warming and the loss of privacy (and freedom) that the cyberrevolution has wrought, challenging readers to make some leaps of logic and come to counterintuitive conclusions. "Human beings may behave like puppets," he writes, "but no one is pulling the strings….We think we have some kind of privileged access to our own motives and intentions. In fact we have no clear insight into what moves us to live as we do." A brief, elliptical inquiry designed to raise more questions than anyone could answer.

Kirkus Review