The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World

This books completes the excellent trilogy by Boorstin on the adventure of knowledge. "The Creators" tells us the saga of imagination and creativity. "The Discoverers" tells the story of curiosity and the thirst for adventure, the eagerness to know. And "The Seekers" talks about Man's permanent struggle to understand his world. Religion and philosophy have tried to find definitive answers to basic questions. As in his other books, this one is written with the easiness and amenity characteristic of Boorstin, mixing explanation of the thinkers' philosophy with brief recounts of their lives and temperaments. The anechdotical matters, since the book's subject is not so much theories as persons. The cast of characters is fascinating. It begins with myth, with the Biblical Moses, Isaiah, and Job. In talking about the latter, he addresses the fundamental question: why do bad things happen to good people? Then he makes a brief stop to explain the fundamental difference between "Western" and "Eastern" religions: the former separate Good from Evil, while the latter incorporate both as essential components of the world. Necessarily, the monotheist goes crazy trying to explain Evil. Polytheists do something else. Then come the three great Greeks, possibly the first truly free men. Another reviewer here is right when he says that the most dangerous people are those who claim to have find final answers, the fanatics. Socrates fought them, Plato tried to join with them (and produced enormous harm with his theories, from where even Marxism comes), and Aristotle returned to common sense with his Realistic philosophy. Then comes Christianism, with its intellectual contributions, like monastery and university, but also with its chains around freedom of thought (not to talk about freedom of expression). The Reformation and its heroes. The discovery of History by Herodotus and Thucydides. The Utopians; Bacon; Descartes and the discovery of the Self as the unity of the world. Machiavelli, Locke, Voltaire, Jefferson, and Rousseau (the most harmful and repellent thinker in history), side by side with Hegel and Marx. Culture above Nation: Spengler and Toynbee. Carlyle and the Heroes. Kierkegaard's Existentialism. William James's Stream of Consciousness, and finally Acton, Malraux, Bergson and Einstein. This book is a delight in learning.

Despite Boorstin's obvious admiration of and preference for the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, the book maintains a neutral position in presenting ideas. Information about the background and lives of the various thinkers is presented in a way which adds to the exposition of the ideas rather than detracting via the all-too-common habit of using such information to try to explain the ideas away as only products of the situation of their conception. All in all, this is a good and very accessible introduction to a score of Western philosophers.

It's not really all THAT difficult to come up with an original theory, however strained, that "explains" something (or, for that matter, everything)--whether the "original thinking" in question be as widely accepted as that of Darwin, as fiercely argued over as those of Marx and Freud, as discredited as the tenets of Theosophy and Alchemy, as questionable as the paradigm shift of Kuhn, or as downright obvious as the birth-order theory of Sulloway.But it's much, much harder, I should think, to resist this impulse, not to mention the intellectual hubris, for showy originality, and be content to seek, instead, to study and understand things and the world around us (pace Kant) as they really are. To me, Daniel J. Boorstin epitomizes the latter--the tireless scholar who plods through countless tomes (many of them as forgotten today as the very "original" monadology of Leibniz) to present to us, in prose that is always clear and elegant, the distillation of a life time's learning (and what a life time's learning). If there is no radically new interpretations (or "original" thoughts) to be found in Boorstin's great trilogy, consider how much more educated the average reader, as well as specialists of all fields, will become simply by dipping into THE DISCOVERERS, THE CREATORS, and THE SEEKERS.All this is another way of saying that I endorse this book heartily. Let those others--the aspiring disco critics who think themselves too hip to be seen in the library--chase after the latest original thinkers: the would-be system-builders and the hopeful Grand Theorists. --- Jonathan Lee