Does It Matter?: Essays on Man s Relation to Materiality - Softcover

Watts, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1577315855 ISBN 13: 9781577315858

Publisher: New World Library, 2007

Synopsis

Rare Book

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

ries of essays representing philosopher Alan Watts's most recent thinking on the astonishing problems of man's relations to his material environment. The basic theme is that civilized man confuses symbol with reality, his ways of describing and measuring the world with the world itself, and thus puts himself into the absurd situation of preferring money to wealth and eating the menu instead of the dinner.

Thus, with his attention locked upon numbers and concepts, man is increasingly unconscious of nature and of his total dependence upon air, water, plants, animals, insects, and bacteria. He has been hallucinated into the notion that the so-called "external" world is a cluster of "objects" separate from himself, that he "encounters" it, that he comes into it instead of out of it. Consequently, our species is fouling its own nest and is in imminent danger of self-obliteration.

Here, a philosopher whose works have been mainly concerned with mysticis

From the Back Cover:

"A fascinating entry into the deepest ways of knowing."
-- Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

About this edition

• Publisher: New World Library
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1577315855
• ISBN 13: 9781577315858
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 140