DOES IT MATTER,ESSAYS ON MAN'S RELATION TO MATERIALITY DOES IT MATTER,ESSAYS ON MAN'S RELATION TO MATERIALITY

Does It Matter? presents Alan Watts’ thoughts on the problem of humankind’s relationship to its environment. Here he argues that contemporary people confuse symbols with reality, preferring money to wealth and “eating the menu instead of the dinner.” Focusing on numbers, concepts, and technology, he says, makes us increasingly unconscious of nature and of our total dependence on air, water, plants, animals, insects, and bacteria. We have hallucinated the notion that the "external" world is a cluster of "objects" separate from ourselves, that we "encounter" it rather than come out of it. Consequently, he claims, humanity is fouling its own nest and is in imminent danger of self-obliteration. In one of his most provocative books, a philosopher known for his writings and teachings about mysticism and Eastern philosophy confronts the nitty-gritty problems of economics, technology, clothing, cooking, housing, and the rest of the world around us. First published in 1971, the book is especially timely today.

Alan Watts was one of the most famous and insightful writers and speakers of the twentieth century on the subjects of Eastern thought and meditation. He was born in England in 1915 and lived in the United States, where he was an Episcopalian priest at Northwestern University until 1950. Soon after, he devoted himself to the study of Eastern philosophy and meditation at the Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, and became one of the most famous and enduring writers on Asian philosophy. He died in his home in northern California in 1973. His books include The Way of Zen, Psychotherapy East and West, The Joyous Cosmology, and The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.