Five More Inspiring Philosophy Books for Your Christmas
Our big Christmas gifts guide, part 2
This time, we discuss the best from Jill Taylor, John Stevens, Bill Porter, Eugen Herrigel and Aldous Huxley — with a heavy focus on Buddhism. Read below for specific recommendations on which kind of person to gift each of these books.
See also the first part of these book recommendations and our list of the very best philosophy introductions!
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This time I want to bring you the second part of my “inspirational books” recommendations list. There is no particular order to the presentation. I just grouped the books loosely by topic. With two exceptions, these are all Buddhism-inspired — but Buddhism today has become the lingua franca, the English of spirituality, so I feel that most of these books will also speak to those of us who don’t identify as Buddhists in the narrow sense.
Let’s go!
1. Jill B. Taylor, My Stroke of Insight
Jill Bolte Taylor’s book would probably not even count as philosophy by most book categorisations. But I’ve always found its philosophical implications striking.
You see, when we talk about how to achieve happiness in life, there is only a limited number of ways we can go about it:
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Enjoying the world. This is the premise behind Epicureanism and Hedonism. Despite their differences in the details, both would agree that what makes us happy is the proper enjoyment of our lives and that we can live optimally happy lives by maximising this enjoyment.
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Taking part in the world as a virtuous person. This is the idea behind Aristotle’s theory and, in extension, Bertrand Russell’s and Richard Taylor’s versions of Eudaimonism. You can read all about it in the Daily Philosophy book “Live Happier with Aristotle” (which I wrote, and which you can also read about below). Get it here on Amazon.
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Embracing the faith. It is known that religious people are, statistically, happier than non-religious people.
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Renouncing one’s self. In different ways, but following a similar principle, this is what both Stoicism and Buddhism advocate as the way to a happier life. If what keeps us from being happy is an undue fixation on our own perceived interest, then letting go of our egotism and perceiving the connection between all living things might be a way out of life’s unhappiness.
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Changing the world to make it better. This is the approach of Marxism, of social psychology and political philosophy, of Erich Fromm and the Critical Theory school of thought. Perhaps what keeps us in misery is society; then, achieving a better, happier life is only possible if we change the way our societies work.
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Finally, changing one’s brain (by mechanical or chemical means) might be another way out of unhappiness. After all, we never perceive the world as it “really is.” The only thing we have access to are our inner mental states, the ways our brains perceive that reality. Taking drugs can alter this perception, as can, quite forcefully, brain injuries. Research on brain patients has shown that some brain injuries can bring about quite extraordinary changes in the character of patients, but also in the way they perceive the world. What if we could use this insight to alter our brains so that we become effectively happier?
This is what Jill Bolte Taylor’s book is really about. Jill Taylor is a brain researcher who, at one point in her life, had a stroke herself. Being a specialist, she was fully equipped to study the phenomenon of having a stroke from the inside, from the patient’s perspective. In addition, luckily for her and for us, her stroke did not damage any vital brain regions. Instead, it temporarily took out these parts of the brain that are responsible for logical thinking and the ego-centred perception of oneself.
Effectively, for the duration of her illness, Jill Taylor had become the ideal Buddhist practitioner: someone who perceived herself as integral part of the whole world, and not as a separate person any more.
This remarkable book is a diary of that experience:
Jill Bolte Taylor recovered and became a public speaker, using her own experience to help other stroke patients who weren’t as fortunate as herself. Her book is not only a diary of her particular illness, or a philosophical book (although it is both these things), but it is also an invaluable aid for us healthy people to understand what a stroke feels from the inside and to be able to connect better with the stroke patients among our friends and relatives. By explaining how she herself perceived others during the time when she was incapacitated, she also gives valuable advice to anyone who might happen to encounter a person having a stroke. If I were ever to become a stroke patient, I certainly would like my carers and relatives to have read Jill Taylor’s book.
On a more philosophical note, this book extends the discussion that Aldous Huxley and others started in the 1960s, about the possibility of altering our consciousness through the use of drugs. A stroke is a random, mechanical event, of course, and only a tiny percentage of stroke patients will have this particular kind of stroke that enlarges their consciousness without permanently damaging their bodies.
But still, the question is always there: if we could surgically replicate Jill Taylor’s experience, if there was a surgical intervention that switched our perception into a permanent “Zen” mode without otherwise harming us, would we even want this? Is a life without an ego, as pleasant as it may look from the inside, really appropriate for a human being? And is there a significant moral or philosophical difference between zoning out on drugs or alcohol and having half of one’s brain switched off?
Jill Bolte Taylor:
Read this book.
Jill Bolte Taylor: My Stroke of Insight. A stroke triggers a remarkable journey into a totally different mental universe. A brain scientist’s diary of losing one’s brain for a while and becoming something *else.* But is this something *better?*
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For whom is this a good present?
Jill Bolte Taylor’s book should certainly be required reading for everyone who has ever had to care for a stroke patient. It is also hugely fascinating for those who are curious about how brains work and how we can, through meditation, drugs or other means, alter our consciousness. It is a diary, not an academic book, so it might not appeal to those who are looking for a more scholarly or systematic treatment of the matter. If you enjoyed Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception,” then you will probably also love this book.
2. John Stevens, Extraordinary Zen Masters
This is a beautiful little book by John Stevens, professor of Buddhist studies, translator, Buddhist priest, Zen arts and Asian calligraphy expert, providing biographical sketches of Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481), Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1768) and Ryokan Taigu (1758-1831).
With his superior knowledge of all things Japanese and Buddhist, Stevens is just the right person to introduce us to three of the greatest Zen masters of the Japanese tradition. This book is neither tedious biography nor Zen Buddhist manual. Instead, it is a very enjoyable and easy-to-read synopsis of three very different lives and personalities spent in the service of Buddhist exploration and wisdom. The three biographical sketches together take up only about 150 pages, but there is an enormous wealth of insight packed into this book. With rich anecdotes from the lives of the three masters, and interspersed poems written by them, one soon gets the impression that one knows these people. They step out of the mists of history and cultural distance and become acquaintances, still slightly wonky, of course (these are still Zen masters), but much more understandable as real human beings:
Ryokan was famed for not wasting a crumb of food. If anything was left over, he put it into a clay pot. Naturally, the accumulated food fermented and rotted, becoming full of maggots. A visitor once saw Ryokan eat from the pot.
“Don’t eat that,” the visitor exclaimed, “it’s spoiled and has grubworms in it.”
“No, no, it’s all right,” Ryokan reassured him. “I let the maggots escape before I eat it and it tastes just fine!”
John Stevens, Extraordinary Zen Masters. A Maverick, a Master of Masters, and a Wandering Poet. A beautifully written little book that brings three great ancient Zen masters back to life without ever being scholarly or tedious.
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For whom is this a good present?
If you enjoy stories of ancient Japan and its Zen traditions, then this is the book for you. One can get more enjoyment from it if one has a little bit of background in Japanese Buddhism and its history, but one can also read this book as a first introduction and learn about Buddhism from the lives of these three masters. Since the book focuses on the biographies of the three Zen teachers, rather than on Buddhist theory, it is also a good present for those who do have extensive knowledge of Buddhism but have not studied the biographies of these three masters. It is short, refreshing, funny, intensely human and eminently readable.
3. Bill Porter, Road to Heaven. Encounters with Chinese Hermits
Bill Porter (Wikipedia link), translator and sinologist, also well-known under his pen-name Red Pine, has been a huge influence in popularising Chinese hermits, monks, Buddhism, Daoism and ancient poetry for decades. In 1989, he went to China on a discovery trip: to find and speak to hermits living in the famously remote Zhongnan Mountains. This book is the story of that expedition.
Bill Porter, with his vast knowledge of all things Chinese, Buddhist and Daoist, and his ability to speak the language of the hermits he visits, is the ideal tour guide on this trip. The book never becomes boring. It is not only a travelogue into a remote region of China, but also an exploration of the history of hermits (find all the Daily Philosophy articles on hermits here) and the region, which has been for centuries a favourite destination for recluses and anchorites. It is also, inevitably, a history of modern China and how Chinese communism interacted with, and in many cases almost brought to extinction, these traditional forms of religious life.
There is a wonderful movie, that for me has always been the companion film to this book (although it is an independent work): Edward Burger’s “Amongst White Clouds,” which you should really buy to support the creators, but which you can also preview here:
Bill Porter, Road to Heaven.
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For whom is this a good present?
This book is at once a modern China history book, a discussion of hermits and their lives, and a travel book into some of the most remote parts of East Asia. Anyone with an interest in Daoist and Buddhist hermits will love this book, as will armchair travellers who enjoy a knowledgeable guided tour to places they will likely never visit. If you are looking for an introduction to Buddhist or Daoist ideas instead, then this is not the book for you. As travel books go, this one is heavily text-based with only a handful of low-quality, grey-scale photographs, so it’s more something for the brain rather than the heart. If you are looking for stunning pictures of the Zhongnan mountains, this is not the book for you.
4. Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery
One of the more persistent problems with Zen theory is that the traditional way of “explaining” it consists in uttering paradoxical riddles, so-called koans, that the unsuspecting student cannot make any sense of. For some, this might sound like the right way to go about teaching Zen. For others, for example more analytically-minded philosophy students, it might seem like a waste of time. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” Wittgenstein famously said. But staying silent about Zen would also not help the struggling student understand its basic nature better.
Eugen Herrigel, a German philosophy professor working in Japan from 1924-1929, occupies a space in the middle between the Western and the Eastern way of teaching things. He can, like Bill Porter, John Stevens and other great mediators, explain the Eastern approaches to wisdom in a systematic and clear way that is more accessible to the mind trained in Western patterns of thought and analysis.
“Zen in the Art of Archery” is a wonderfully lucid and very short book, in which Herrigel describes how he practised Zen archery under the instruction of a genuine Japanese master. Herrigel describes his own struggles to understand what was asked of him, and the reader can slowly, together with the author, begin to make some sense of the specifically “Zen” elements of instruction in the Buddhist arts. I myself found the book immensely helpful when I was first trying to understand what Zen is all about.
There has been some controversy since whether Herrigel’s understanding of Zen was correct and sufficiently orthodox, and it seems that he also became a Nazi supporter later on, which drew even more criticism. But, despicable as the Nazi ideology is, it does not always preclude the writing of great books. Heidegger was a Nazi sympathiser and still is one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. And Herrigel has a similar status as a translator of Zen ideas for a Western audience, despite his own political errors of judgement.
For me, Herrigel’s book is one of the best “first books” on Zen that someone should read who wishes to understand what the fuss is all about.
Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery. One of the classics, this 1951 book introduced the West to the basic ideas underlying Zen practice.
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For whom is this a good present?
This book is for those who are new to Eastern thought, particularly Japanese Zen Buddhism, and who are wondering why it all sounds so strange and why Zen masters cannot speak more clearly in order to be understood better. It is an old book, and it does not have the modern stylishness of a Pico Iyer travelogue, but it is an exceptionally clear book of someone who really tries to explain what is happening when one practices the Zen arts, and who largely succeeds in this task. Gift it to the perplexed, perhaps in addition to a Pico Iyer book (see the previous article in this series for that).
5. Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Island
These two wonderful books from visionary, novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) are only part of his work, and perhaps not even what one would consider his “most philosophical” books. But for me, these two books are a lot more eye-opening, interesting and vivid than his more academic work “The Perennial Philosophy.”
In “The Doors of Perception,” Huxley relates the story of an afternoon in 1953, in which he took a dose of Mescaline, a hallucinogenic drug. Using all the means of a world-class novelist at the height of his powers, Huxley tries to convey to the reader all the wonder and the strangeness of this experience. As someone who has never taken hallucinogenic drugs, I have always been grateful to Huxley for showing me what lies behind the curtain that everyday perception places around our minds.
The Doors of Perception is Huxley’s recollection of a mescaline drug experience. It is a rare and precious document, the true, minute-by-minute protocol of how a drug can change our perception, written by one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
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“Island” is Huxley’s vision of a social utopia: a land that is built to support the mental development and health of its inhabitants, rather than to treat them as slaves to the system. Drugs, of course, play a role in this utopia too. Here, Huxley puts ideas that he had developed in different books together to one integrated vision of what life in an ideal (for him) society might look like. There is a lot to agree with, and also a lot to disagree with. But the value of utopias is not that we must follow them to the letter and implement what they propose; instead, I feel that their values in the fact that they allow us to clarify what is really important to ourselves. By engaging with Huxley’s “Island,” even where we reject its ideas, we become more aware and more conscious of our own priorities and choices, and that is, after all, one of the goals of philosophy.
Find a longer discussion of the two books in our separate review of “Island”:
The last book of visionary writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Island, is a bold attempt to envision a utopian society that provides its members with everything they need to achieve happiness in life.
For whom is this a good present?
“The Doors of Perception” is a good gift for those who have always wondered how the brain works under the influence of drugs. There are other books discussing drugs and drug politics, but I have never found another description of the actual subjective experience that was as lucid and detailed as the one given in this book. “Island” will appeal to all who are interested in social utopias and in the question how we could build a better society. Although Huxley’s book is not a very sophisticated or practical utopia, it does provide a dreamy, sometimes lyrical, sometimes fairy-tale-like look at a few points about alternative societies that are worth considering.
“Island” is Aldous Huxley’s vision of a better world, a society that is sane and conducive to human happiness. It is an unforgettable trip to a place that never existed.
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Bonus: Andreas Matthias, Live Happier With Aristotle
Finally, here’s also my own book that came out recently.
“Live Happier With Aristotle” is a collection of essays, examining how we can apply Aristotle’s view of what a good life is to today’s world and to our own lives. I have been teaching a university course on the philosophy of happiness for many years, and this book is part of what I learned during that time about human happiness — from Aristotle and from my students.
Some of the articles in this book can be found in their original form on the Daily Philosophy website; but some are available only in this book and all articles have been professionally edited before they were included.
The book is available both as a Kindle ebook and paperback here:
Live Happier with Aristotle: Inspiration and Workbook (Daily Philosophy Guides to Happiness).
In this book, philosophy professor, founder and editor of the Daily Philosophy web magazine, Dr Andreas Matthias takes us all the way back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in the search for wisdom and guidance on how we can live better, happier and more satisfying lives today.
Get it now on Amazon! Click here!
For whom is this a good present?
This is not a scholarly book, although it does discuss (and occasionally quotes) Aristotle’s works. But it is also not a cheap “lifestyle” or “self-help” book. It does not attempt to teach anything that its author has made up, but it goes back to the timeless wisdom of Aristotle for advice and guidance on how we can live better lives today.
Those who look for life advice based on solid philosophical insights are the target readers of this book. Also, everyone with an interest in Aristotle’s ethics, who might not yet be ready to read a scholarly treatment, but might want to begin with a lighter, more applied introduction first.
This book is part of a series that will explore five different ways how we can utilise philosophy in order to improve our lives. Find all the books together on this page. By buying these books, you also support Daily Philosophy and our mission to bring the light of philosophy into as many lives as possible!
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That’s all for today! Thank you for reading and I hope that you found something interesting in the above! Stay tuned for future articles about books or look what book reviews and recommendations we have already published!
Cover image by Andreea Radu on Unsplash.
