I recommend this book review by my favorite aphorist, the British philosopher John Gray, although he is not
aphorizing, as he does in his own books (such as “Straw Dogs:
Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals” or Al Qaeda and
What It Means to Be Modern.”
Gray points to a key question of Peter Watson’s new book “Ideas: From Fire to Freud,” which he calls “an
astonishing overview of human intellectual development,” covering “everything from the
emergence of language to the discovery of the unconscious, including the idea of the factory and
the invention of America, the eclipse of the idea of the soul in 19th-century materialism and the
continuing elusiveness of the self.”
The key question it asks, Gray says, is “whether the very idea of an ‘inner self’ may not be
misconceived,” and answers:
Looking “in”, we have found nothing — nothing stable anyway, nothing
enduring, nothing we can all agree upon, nothing conclusive — because there is nothing to
find.
I couldn’t agree more. To shift context, Dear Leader of these United States — he of the inflated
emptiness — is the most obvious example, a perfect illustration of
“nothing enduring,” the nothing inside.
