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Descartes; Spinoza (Great Books of the Western World (Vol. 31)

April 14, 2015 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Great Books of the Western World (Vol. 31 - Descartes; Spinoza)Great Books of the Western World by René Descartes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Descartes is the father of modern philosophy. Descartes is the father of modern math. What do they have in common?

He gives us his rules for the mind, his meditation on first philosophy — that is, the very method by which he seeks to find for us the truth. This method, described in part by Irme Lakatos as analysis-synthesis brings to us the very foundation of both math and philosophy. In fact, together, math and science form the same pair bond for analysis-synthesis paralleling each other’s formulation as each provides inflection points to form the other. Descartes’ method is no longer in vogue however, as it relies too much on a hidden conjecture to get to first philosophy but his methodology and its grounding assumptions still stand.

That is to say, with Descartes we get the calibration of a cut. If you read his philosophy or how he formulates his analytic geometry, one piece is used to measure the other. The model is calibrated to itself. The split predicate of “i think” therefore “i am” work in the same way that he uses lines through euclidean angles in order to measure parabolas in order to calibrate them to each other. The description of parabolas through their roots is a way in which we define the “zeros” of the coordinates in a domain. In a way, although Descartes was looking for some absolute referent (in philosophy) he found also in math, the arbitrary referent becomes the absolute referent! This missing link isn’t provided as any given cut can work, if treated with the proper methodology, but rather is raised to a metaphysical level as being an expression of the model of the cut to be made. If you read between the lines in Descartes treatment of the matter, especially in describing his methodology you’ll see how he breaks down the process into a series of chunks (cuts) and then those chunks inform us how to synthesize them back together, so as to be sure that this is in fact the only way to do so. I owe this analysis in part to Irme Lakatos. The analysis gives you the synthesis in part, and that assured nature that is self reflexive is a powerful aphrodisiac. I am sure Descartes sees his eternal truths quite well after experiencing how magically the pieces he made fit back together again.

I did not read Spinoza’s Ethics also contained in his book, as I aim to read Spinozas’ work in a different book.

Still, we owe Descartes much. Reading him verifies the basic root of his method, so that we can then use his thoughts as fodder for calibration of modern thought to itself. With these cuts, we can begin to see the unsupported cut as being arbitrary but also as being absolute, when we continually cut with consistency so that the entire situation comes to be constructed in terms of that arbitration. This is a way for us to recognize the constructed nature of our knowledge, as it has been continually refined, to the point at which knowledge becomes fragmented because each discipline interjects their own cut, following their own scientific truths as each attempst to reify each respective field as an absolute domain of self sufficient a priori presentation.

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The Ugly Americans

April 14, 2015 / posted in reviews / No Comments

The Ugly AmericanThe Ugly American by William J. Lederer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A little sensational, but not a bad book. Fictional with some air of truth. Scandalous. This book shows how badly American foreign policy is surrounding the time of Vietnam. By the end of the book you’ll get a sense of the stereotypes this book outlines in the kinds of characters that populate American foreign policy.

What’s unsurprising is that this book does not question American ingenuity, the brilliance of the American people in production and care and pragmatism although it does heavily criticize our attitude of insularism, superiority and our fear and misunderstanding of foreign cultures. At the root of this book is an unquestioning of American ideology and capitalism — its promotion throughout the book as an undercurrent of how top-down decision making and bureaucratic jockeying for position bungled the gift Americans have to give the world is an understatement, and by the time we read this book in 2010, cliches in themselves.

While entertaining and thrilling to read (a great insight into what the authors think of the fateful decades of the 50s, 60s and 70s for American implemention of the start of American’s downfall as a hegemonic power) this book is missing a deeper analysis as to how groupthink and unwavering faith in American pragmatism and American superiority led to the creation of this bad American foreign policy. In this sense, the book doesn’t go far enough, it doesn’t highlight how our belief in our gift to the world (of capitalism and American pragmatism) goes hand in hand with how the authors highlight we have mismanaged our relationship with other people.

I still like the book however, as it was well written. It aims to be more illustrative than a treatsie and in that sense, it does exactly what it sets out to do. Still, we should read more carefully between the lines. True, foreign people do not have American values. But they are not Americans waiting to be awakened to the brilliance of our engineering and enterprising spirit. The first chapter seems to show this, but it blames everything about this disbelief in how great America is on the communists. In that sense, this book writes about a blind spot by standing in the shadow of the blind spot and being blinded by it.

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The Only Ones

April 14, 2015 / posted in lyrical-narratives, reviews / No Comments

The Only OnesThe Only Ones by Carola Dibbell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Fairly promising book in the start, in terms of language but it tapers down to be stagnant towards the end. By tackling bioengineering in the way that it does, Dibbell aligns the view of the novel to the medical subject; in this instance, women’s management of bodies, motherhood and disease. There’s a big segue into education here, and Dibbell is careful to show how management of human bodies is also management of children’s minds. What appears at first to be a post-dystopia about the future ends up being a fairly static view that the novel then shoots off with the logical resolution of the conflict between the mother and her daughter and then with how the daughter situation is resolved quickly in order to leave the mother in a different zone, where she is then able to relate to all of us. I find this move a little unconvincing because it seems forced. The ending lacks a climax. The very promising stuttering of language from a very limited medical subjectivity in the beginning eventually pairs out to be a limited social-epidemiological horizon towards the end of the book. The mother doesn’t seem to own her own enlightenment because there doesn’t seem to be an implicit point at which the daughters behavior sparks a realization of some sort.

In that sense, the novel seems to crash under its own weight once the confusing and dense (but exciting) language the novel started with finally becomes normalized once we get a sense of place and time. Maybe I missed the point, and I am not sure that I have, but there doesn’t seem to be a point. The main antagonism of the novel never occurs (the They never materialize) and that conflict seems left by the wayside. Instead, the daughter enters the world on her own in the exact same way that the mother is shown to be in the world in the beginning. In that sense, the 17 or so years never changed the world, and that’s kind of confusing. We don’t need a larger story about how the world got so dystopic, and thank you Dibbell for not giving it to us; but the struggle that the world goes forward with never materializes as being relevant to today, but only a little. We aren’t hit in the face with the mother’s revelation in the way that I think we are supposed to be.

For that reason, I was disappointed. What was the mystery? What should have happened? I don’t know, but instead, we get the mother’s long long long struggle to raise her daughter and then her daughter does what the mother did, and the mother suddenly knows what’s going on, as the voice informs us from a place of knowing, but we never quite share in that moment of knowing. Instead, we see the daughter doing what the mother did. And how is that the only ones?

I’m going to read the ending again, maybe something more will come of it.

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The Universal Exception

March 23, 2015 / posted in dialectics, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

The Universal ExceptionThe Universal Exception by Slavoj Žižek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Having read Zizek for over a decade, this work speaks out much more to me than it would had this been Zizek’s latest book. Here we see many figures of reason, a display of logic some of which did not make it to later works. Others of which show us how some tendencies may be further developed. The heady nature of this subject, an application of the theory of exception to politics can be summarized as the universal exception which must be removed before knowledge is generated.

This applies directly to politics as politics is nothing if not knowledge of others. Our ability to get along with them, to know them, to be able to understand (contain) large masses of people, trends and response to them with the understanding of policies and edicts that will effectively shape how we understand and get along with one another. In a way, Zizek is saying that we can understand our context but we cannot understand ourselves. Or we understand ourselves but not our context. The point of view needs a basis of comparison, even if it is about the point of view itself. This basis becomes invisible, absolute and profound as it is literally understood as its own shadow.

In a way, since this null point is still being shaped; the less interesting parts of this book are the parts where he lapses into his familiar terms, you get a sense that this exception is still new to him, a fragile point of hypnosis which captivates his full attention. As he gets into parallax gap, and then less than nothing, Zizek comes to understand that point has having any and every content possible. Never mind that he generally prefers the same hero worship. This worship, as silly as it may be can only be understood as a repetition of the difference he highlights. It works as both justification for the difference (it has appeared twice, as a repeat) but also as a tool of refinement in which Zizek can calibrate the theory, in this case to itself. A proper dialectical motion would follow in which Zizek insisted that Hegel was the first mistake, a random, chance, pure genius, whereas his repetition was a recognition of pure genius, the first true calibration point, in which a theory can be explicated and the point of split; the cut can be highlighted.

It would follow then, that our third effort, would be the chance to break free of the constraints of that cut, the chance to realize it as more than a singularity but a world logic. This would be the finding of a new transcendental model but only because its reflection requires that we jump back one step to justify Hegel, leaving the Byzantine ramblings of Kant. And from there, we can abstract to the method of Descartes and the ancient Greeks themselves, recognizing that the bridge between Descartes unnamed transcendental which affords only differences that self-evident and Kant’s Transcendental logic in which the functioning of that self evidence is made possible by the interstice view of the excess of various faculties’s interactions as these interactions are only visible outside of all these spheres of localized logics. Of course there is Understanding, which is self evident, Reason which extends itself into paradox, and Imagination which is spontaneous to be unpredictable. Each of these paradoxes wraps up the same faculties within their own immanence as to merely describe various anti-nomies themselves. These facial “black holes” that looking into another’s eyes or the unknown orifices in logic always present different realms of incoherence from the point of view of the outside looking in. We never get a full sense of our own arbitrariness without eliminating the possibility of there being strict rules. All topographies are distinguished by their handling of zeros. At first structure, then to texture. The procedure is logical but can be expressed via its own displacement, of which its kind of regularity is its logic. This then, becomes the genius of Descartes, as the first leap into dimensional mapping. To further this trend, we need to proceed into pure multiples.

If Liebniz understood that a curve was where any arbitrary measurement that was much like any other arbitrary measurement it follows that we’d have to reverse our way back out to get back to full points of content, back to ‘pataphysics and immanence. This is a move that Badiou and Deleuze do, but which I think we will find Zizek going to, but only if he is willing to give up the hero worshiping imposition of making a theoretical cut that includes too much of itself. The only point that creates this particular world as being what it is, as a limit to its maximal value (with no limit on its minimal) is the universal exception, the bulwark which we push off from, in order to jumpstart our content.

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Philosophical Papers, Volume 2: Mathematics, Science and Epistemology

March 18, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, reviews, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Philosophical Papers, Volume 2: Mathematics, Science and EpistemologyPhilosophical Papers, Volume 2: Mathematics, Science and Epistemology by Imre Lakatos
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lakatos stands at the edge of a vast tradition, and in his conservative way, decries those who would draw demarcation lines along those of community or traditional ideas of how discovery, math and science should be drawn as they always were. In seeking truth that is independent of human observation or valuation, Lakatos would fall along the same issue that Zizek would bring to many others — the lack of a transcendence. This much is so; Lakatos is as much a former Hegelian as much as it is a decrier of non-useful knowledges (like vulgar Marxists). What I admire most about Lakatos is that he isn’t afraid to approach the former basis of the formulation of math and science — in philosophy, and tackle the Cartesian synthesis as a modality of providing the basis for its own verification. This ties together the many aspects of Lakatos’ careful research work, his scholarly devotion to what others have said, and how they said it, and how they were (un)able to understand and respond to one another.

In other to be able to understand where Lakatos comes from we need to be able to understand that (ir)rationally he would have to disavow himself of those who he was most like in order to be distinguished from them, essentializing them by a singular disavow he found distasteful (or superfluous, thus discarding them as being superfluous). In this manner, his rejection of Marxism appears to be because of the implicit use of their historiographical techniques in order to highlight the logical difference their ideology makes, a technique he often uses to highlight competing and often contemporaneous schools of science. By revealing the shifting of sense making demonstrated by the cuts of history, we will always be able to detect minor unaccountable differences in understanding that question any possible aesthetic validity to the foundation that the use of human reason can be independent of superstition and wholly reliant on the strictest of causation.

Lakatos notes this is the unanswerable question of Hume: Can there be causation that is not mere induction? This is a question whose answer is to show its own impossibility, that human laws seem wholly immanent on itself rather than on principles that are consistent and surjective to the universe itself.

In fact, this lack of assurance is the very project Lakatos wishes to show, marking him as a philosopher of science, an inability to know what real in the naive classical sense is (should we encounter it). Many of his longer essays are devoted to this subject matter — the instability of the acceptedness of a theory despite or even because of its foibles and its refutations as understood from various points from its inception.

One of Lakato’s favorite mentions is that new theories are always immediately refuted before they are accepted. In other words, there is a lag between when a theory is too new to be validated or even understood before it is accepted as unequivocally true. There is a lack of resolution in this issue because we have no real way of measuring what was accepted only what at least a few individuals were saying at various times. So the question becomes even more precarious because what we know of a theory and what we know of a theory differ from each other depending on context. The unaccountableness of this change is where Lakatos organizes his conception of truth and epistemology in response to other’s certainties. In fact, where he is alike with Popper and structuralists, is that Lakatos is formulate an immanent critique of various logics, such as Newtonian, or mathematics, or Quine or Tarski or Toulmin in order to lead us to grasping what is excessive in their ideologies, as the overriding weight/basis for a judgement on verisimilitude. This requires a more rhetorical formalistic reading on Lakato’s part, in order to understand a curve in reason as being local to itself rather than to the material at hand; given the possibility at various points of inflection to determine opposite alternate possibilities. This is perhaps his greatest lesson from (and disagreement with) Karl Popper — that falsification of science can happen alone at a plateau detached from any concordance with induction. (Lakatos wanted at least weak induction, Popper thought that induction was not necessary).

If we were to believe that progress was in fact measurable, it would be the in theory detectable since there would be a steady retreat of the amount of uncertainty of the nature of nature as time progressed. We might expect that with the retreat of uncertainty we would find more concordance — but this has been shown to be untrue as the very nature of the universe is still to be questioned, as to what we can expect of it or how we should understand the nature of time or space itself (not to mention quantum mechanics and so on). In a way, Lakatos should have written a book, as his ideas criss-cross in a variety of manners, showing an immanence of understanding and relevance that this nest of ideas’ connectedness is nearly sustaining (Although no one essay really encapsulates the entire range).

What we see here, is the most nihilistic of philosophers, one whose field is technology itself — knowledge which is useful, and we get that not even from the point of view of knowledge can knowledge maintain consistency with itself. Lakatos gets that science is impacted from the outside, as all knowledege is, and because of this, insists that science be accountable to society even though science itself is amoral.

In a strange way, Lakatos nearly refutes himself, as his search for validity on the order of its own logic (and impossibility) becomes negative as he understands the aesthetics of the search to be about more than some academic scholarly immanence. Rather, our understandings become an allegory of itself, tainted with the atmosphere of its origins. In this strange way, we might understand this as a formalism of knowledge, if that expression is Hegelian or otherwise centered on its own difference. Lakatos can never find his own answers to his own questions by looking within just like he can never fully justify the lemmas of hard research programmes that came to be completely acceptable and then suddenly out of favor. Marred with this in-transience between different fields, Lakatos may be ranked with many post-structuralists as being trapped outside or inside a tradition, for if they speak from the outside it is because they, in the mystifications of Lacan, are “Cogito ergo sum,” ubi cogito, ibi sum. I am not, there where I am the plaything of my thought: I think of what I am where I do not think to think. In this same way Fichte was right to point to Antoss as the cogito’s inability to think where it is, but by pointing it out, Zizek demonstrates that Fichte too was not where he could think to think, meaning Antoss was but petit object a. In this same manner, Lakatos finds himself settled in “the third way” in the interstice of what can be nameable, in the (in)articulated depths of Wittgenstein’s language games where its successful performance is autonomous, detached and wholly invaluable/invalidable because they are strict reference points to absolutely itself.

Lakatos then, if we were to fling him from his comfort-zone, would be speaking of various inarticulable truths that appeared as marked events throughout history. Each zone is distinguishable only by itself, and wholly uncapturable by each other. We see zones of interference and resistance, characterized by contingency itself, when it reaches the highest levels of verification only by being repetitious enough to become a thing, a difference unto itself.

We end up with territories of language genres, a truth that perhaps Lakatos wouldn’t have wanted to acknowledge as being the strong version of science’s fallibility, that its champions, its expert-elite should get the acknowledgement they want, for their being individuals rather than for some autonomous process that could be drawn in the sand when in fact, that rockstar elitism can only insist on a community’s shared immanent ideology, a pack of thieves among any other pack of thieves, a distribution system that sustains itself, only this time with the indebtedness of verisimilitude. Lakatos was rather that we were impersonal, cut throat and yet responsible to more than just science when we be a philosopher and a defender of science from its own communal excesses.

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The Impossible

March 18, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, lyrical-narratives, reviews / No Comments

The ImpossibleThe Impossible by Georges Bataille
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

By playing with desires, and people are nodal points, (letters and genders, but not names or identities), Bataille explores areas of desire and loss, sculpting a body of agony. This agony always finds release however, when desire is locked away and pulled apart from itself so as to be inarticulate. He manages to find a way to twist it a bit further, so that each node knows another by dominance, servitude and love. These middling complexities are glimpses of the intimacy each knew another by, so that their absence was in itself a union. It is impossible that we live, as organisms, as differences in consciousness and configuration can recognize each other and become adapted to one another’s presence that without them, we are nothing but less than ourselves. This is also not to say how their relationships can affect us too, so that our sense of self is our sense of another — a very specific other.

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The Fractal Geometry of Nature

March 18, 2015 / posted in agential realism, life as we know it, love, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Fractal Geometry of NatureThe Fractal Geometry of Nature by Benoît B. Mandelbrot
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This beautiful book is about Mandelbrot’s love of science, mathematics and all forms of knowing. He is humorous at times, dense, and waxing on about fractals and changes that are self similar. It is through the figure of a difference that something is known. Fractals are unique in that they are that difference regardless of scale, that is, as Mandelbrot said of Leibniz, that Leibniz first recognized a straight line as being a curve whose arbitrary measure was universally applicable by itself by any other arbitrary measure.

Fractals are thus, a balance of form and measure and thus perfectly applicable to describing self similiarities that occur throughout various scales. By necessity these fractals are thus found in areas of maximal distribution where it be biological, informational, materially, socially or otherwise. Each bit of aggregate from each context can be traced through out some of the other contexts so that a distribution of their differences can be expressed mathematically as a formalization of unithood — difference — itself. Fractals can thus be understood as the limit of scaleless models of difference. Mandelbrot goes over a variety of contexts in which we can understand their expressedly different dimensions, differing topographies, as structured rules through time, or a static interface that modifies itself as scale is adjusted.

At times, Mandelbrot can become overwhelming as he notices as particular “cut” in an equation, be it a variable or an expressed tendency, and in vocalizing it, circulates around that textual point to arrange chapters, whorls on whorls, in which sections and sections of sections let us know when one thing was described and another thing began.

And so, as this is a book about the fractal geometry of nature, Mandelbrot shows us his love by talking admiringly of other mathematicians, many not celebrated, or fully acknowledged in their time. These technicians and their stories become the backdrop of those who developed this metric enough to let us see, and explore these subtle differences and their odd refinements. Indeed, it is really to those quiet, anonymous men, who established the halls of science that Mandelbrot writes this book to, for he would have liked for them to experience the joy he feels at being able to explore these monsters, while many of them did not, due to the contemporaneous level of mathematical understanding not yet understanding how to recognize (and thus, explore) the fractal nature of geometry in all its glories.

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Anxious Pleasures: A Novel after Kafka

March 18, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, lyrical-narratives, reviews / No Comments

Anxious Pleasures: A Novel after KafkaAnxious Pleasures: A Novel after Kafka by Lance Olsen
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am not quite a fan of kafka, because he takes such a load to read, still, Olsen builds a baroque text that espouses a core of a family drama, that breaks itself apart into different narratives. I suppose each voice should be an “anxious pleasure” and that seems too inbred as most of the voices are of the love and exploration of young girls in a familial setting. Yet perhaps this is only the nest that Olsen is able to best hang together, as each story fragment bespeaks of a forgotten whisper of Kafka. Kafka’s interior pose, for Olsen, becomes the expressed structure, not the literal plot, but half-thought, interluded feelings of anxious rhapsody that meditate on themselves and release to intersect and push each other as an aggregate onwards. Each tendril expresses together as one plot hinged on half spoken feelings, although of course, there is the understood learning, the reading of text by Margaret, another kind of interior monologue of Kafka as so many theorists like to draw out of him, through their wild filters and their linguistic tropes that structure their immanent truths. Of course this one text read by a girl would center on one who reads this text, enchanted by new narratives and theological theories that would read on each other as much as their metaphors read on one another truths the kind that theory likes kafka for speaking about.

They come together as Kafka’s metamorphosis, a sacrifice of all the hard working boys for the burgeoning sexuality of a young girl, as their parents bask in her sunshine. So shall Olsen parrot this gesture as a tribute to kafka, and as an opportunity to weave new feelings from us, from the edges of our awareness, with the right inspecificity (he speaks of almost no names) and therefore the right specifcity. Truly a marvel, a working about nothing, saying nothing and therefore being about everything and saying it all.

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Dark Force Rising

March 18, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

Dark Force Rising (Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy, #2)Dark Force Rising by Timothy Zahn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Zahn is able to present to us a grand tour of the Star Wars Universe. What seemed skeletal in the first volume now seems much more than introductory as we are able to see his reversals in plot as objects left by one group of characters is found and used in another. We see a “classical” bad guy, Grand Admiral anticipate each others moves, and read one another with such focus as to be nearly psychic. One of the great joys of such political and military intrigue is the sheer consideration of characters who are able to apprehend each other clearly enough to demonstrate a separate vested ruthless self interest. Zahn is able to present to us characters almost robotic in how rationally they assess one another. Their understanding of systems and the amount of agency involved is fantastic. Such as when Mara James and Luke go sneaking into a Star Destroyer in order to rescue someone. (As a testament to how incredible Zahn’s walk through the universe is, Zahn’s character Mara James apparently is now one of the favorite of the Star Wars cannon not expressed in Lucas’s movies…at least not yet).

Of course, in many ways this book suffers from many of the structural defects of volume 2 books of a trilogy. Here, we have neither the exposition nor the finale, but a development. And what better way is there to develop characters by presenting them in novel and contrary light? Of course with limited characters, such as ten or twelve, it is imperative that Zahn be able to show their relation to each other. As each tone of a character alights another, we get an increasingly dazzling display of surjective development in which their appraisal of one another becomes the topography of the book itself. In other words, we have plenty of mix’um ups in the process of merely getting the plot from this point of a small success in the beginning to the start of the final conflict, in which the true identities of all is told.

Zahn follows this process quite well, and manages to keep the story interesting as the characters we are most interested in (Leia and herself, Chewie and the aliens, Luke and Mara, Lando and Han) are able to reflectively dive deeper into showing us not only who they are but also the nature of the force, and trying to do what is right at all times. The bravery of these heros crawling in the myst of intergalactic machinery and Zahn’s grasp on right and wrong (as showing C’boath’s slide into the dark side) as well as the political mechanizations of people in power truly matches the epic setting of Star Wars which captivated so many like myself at such a young age.

In a way, what makes this book 4 stars is that the build up of the conflict is so little, that only when you are almost done do you realize what the conflict-resolution that is supposed to the end of this volume. Karade is made out to be a sympathetic character and will begin to see that perhaps his ban with the New Republic can only be the “logical” move he makes even as a disinterested smuggler. In a way, this book is as much about the coming of the New Republic and the development of the characters we so love through the eyes of Karade and Mara James, as the underbelly of those who would survive, as the most fitting judges of what is truly good and what is truly evil. Here the policies and care of the “good guys” speak out for themselves against established possibilities of tyranny, villiany and mis-application of justice.

The ending of the third volume is all but certain now, still, the beautifully austere mechanizations of the author do not bore, but only push harder what is at stake in human relations. Despite being sci-fi and fantasy-escapism, Zahn has still managed to touch upon the very heart of what it means, in this universe, to be human by talking about humans who strive for care, value and justice in a fictional universe, all the while fitting the form of a second (but very interesting) volume of a trilogy.

Zahn has not disappointed in this middle volume!

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Eldest

March 6, 2015 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Eldest (The Inheritance Cycle, #2)Eldest by Christopher Paolini
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As the first book was obviously the boyhood tale of coming of age, this second book is obviously the “empire strikes back” of the group, so far (although there are 4 books). In this one, we get the hero and his dragon mostly learning about what they need to do, being recognized (in status) by their allies, as well as the coming union between him and his cousin.

Paolini writes simply. This is easy to read and a joy to dig through. His world is rich, and lush although his narrator is still merely a vehicle for explicating the world. (Eragon doesn’t really have a personality in much the same way that Luke Skywalker doesn’t have a personality.) In many ways though, this book is really a coming of age of a boy told in a fantasy setting but with a contemporary internet twist. Much of the magic serves many internet-like functions, such as Instant messaging. The concept of the use of energy here, as derived from one’s life or the lives of others as much as our own draining of life-resources on Earth. Moreover I found that Eragon’s teacher, Oromis’s belief system is a kind of secular tech. Belief in material reality not in spiritual God-nonsense. This is a little surprising but not all that unexpected. As technology plays a greater role in our lives more than ever, it makes sense that we would look up to those who master it… not only as a purely logical function but also as an application to life, a way of life, like the Vulcans and Mr. Spock. Of course Eragon brings more of a human element to things, but that’s something we need to be able to relate to him.

And of course, as a transition text, it ends on a strangely inconclusive note. The main conflict is over, but questions are left as being even more pressing. Good job with the basics of writing, Paolini, you’ve done what you set out to do.

Perhaps a simple characterization is necessary if the widest audience is to relate to Eragon.

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