Read this a long time ago, and was kind of impressed at the time. Can't remember too much about it except the author's rejection of a Cartesian world view. Might be interesting to look at it again and see what I think 20 years later. ( )

With its talk of gurus, cults, and psychoanalysis, this book is clearly situated in the malaise of the failure of the Sixties. And while Berman for the most part dismisses the woo and authoritarianism, he still falls for the trap of individual solutions for collective problems that were rampant at the time. More concisely, we're alienated because the material conditions of our lives are alienating. Outside of dropping out and actually changing daily life (maybe), no amount of individual readjustment is going to fundamentally alter that.

What's confusing is that Berman seems to know this. He cites the rise of capitalism in the 1500s as the beginning of the Cartesian worldview, which the whole book is an attempt to overthrow/negate. So far, so good. But if that's the case, then how does he think anything we do individually within this society will get us out of that? While he occasionally pays lip service to changing society, it's clearly not his focus, and I think he forgets the connection between an exploitative society and its objectifying/alienating worldview.

While I appreciate his critiques of science, they seem off. For one, he is confused by the double-slit experiment in quantum mechanics. No, our presence does not cause any change in particles. Probability, and not our presence in the experiment, is what determines where particles will be in this experiment. But hey, many people make that mistake.

Feyerabend's Against Method covers much of the same ground as this book, and does so within science itself. I recommend it over this one. ( )

I read Berman's Coming to Our Senses about thirty years ago and remember it having a large effect on my thinking. I finally got around to reading this earlier book. It really resonated with my thinking! Not too surprising!

This book really sketches out the dilemma of our time. I worked with a bunch of high tech folks a while back. These folks liked NASA and the whole idea of space travel. Their thinking was that our destiny was to populate the galaxy, and that was a good thing because we are well along the way to destroying earth. We need a new place to live!

This is exactly the thinking that Berman describes and characterizes as pathological, as the pathology of our time. I couldn't really tolerate working with people who took for granted the destruction of the planet and instead of working to stop it, they were counting on escaping the consequences. This to me is pretty much the ultimate in irresponsibility. But this irresponsibility is rampant.

This book dates from 1981 and its age shows. Berman talks about DDT as a growing problem. I don't know the details but I think DDT is far less a problem today, at least in the USA. The eagles are back! But of course there are any number of other growing environmental hazards. We've made progress on a number of fronts, but the overall situation looks rather bleak. Berman doesn't discuss climate change, that I can recall. But his comments translate seamlessly. I think a lot about what our great grandchildren will think of us as they look back at our behavior and the consequences we left them to experience.

Berman devotes a couple chapters to Gregory Bateson's ideas, as one road out of the Cartesian dualism that our modern industrial civilization is trapped in. He follows up with an analysis of such a cybernetic philosophy as a two-edged sword. This was really quite prescient: look at folks like Steve Jobs or Stewart Brand. These folks were idealistic revolutionary types in their younger days. But Brand ends up promoting MIT and now Apple has become the evil monster.

The situation that Berman sketches is still very much where we find ourselves. It's a bit odd that we are still stuck here thirty five years later! Berman didn't expect that! Unfortunately it seems all too likely that by postponing the reckoning we will only make it more painful. I think we do have some more resource, beyond Bateson, to help us move forward. I think Buddhism, for example, has a lot more to offer than Berman was ready to admit with his critique of guru devotion. I would also point to Bruno Latour's Actor Network theory.

Anyway, this is an excellent book and very relevant despite its age. ( )

The book was read in the hopes that one might find it a plea for the treatment of the world as an integrated system, but I didn't find it that engaging, or particularly focused. ( )

Read this a long time ago, and was kind of impressed at the time. Can't remember too much about it except the author's rejection of a Cartesian world view. Might be interesting to look at it again and see what I think 20 years later. ( )