A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice [Paperback]

Raimond Gaita (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 10, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0415241146 | ISBN-13: 978-0415241144 | Edition: New edition

The Holocaust and attempts to deny it, racism, murder, the case of Mary Bell. How can we include these and countless other examples of evil within our vision of a common humanity? These painful human incongruities are precisely what Raimond Gaita boldly harmonizes in his powerful new book, A Common Humanity.
Hatred with forgiveness, evil with love, suffering with compassion, and the mundane with the precious. Gaita asserts that our conception of humanity cannot be based upon the empty language of individual rights when it is our shared feelings of grief, hope, love, guilt, shame and remorse that offer a more potent foundation for common understanding. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, Simon Weil, Primo Levi, George Orwell, Iris Murdoch and Sigmund Freud, Gaita creates a beautifully written and provocative new picture of our common humanity.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'an absorbing read from beginning to end, its discussions are memorable and in many places moving. A quite exceptional work.' - Tim Crane, University College London 'A wise and beautifully written book. It is a wonderful example of how philosophy can still speak without any condescension to the educated reader.' - Professor Simon Critchley, University of Essex 'A wonderful piece of writing. The disciplined individuality of Gaita's voice shows how a humanly serious practice of philosophy might make a decisive contribution to our public culture.' - Stephen Mulhall, New College Oxford 'Clear, passionate, subtle and profound.' - Christopher Cordner, University of Melbourne 'A book for anyone who is prepared to think seriously. It is also moving in a way that is rare in philosophy.' - Anthony Duff, University of Stirling 'Challenging and disturbing' - Sydney Herald 'An exploration of how people make moral and ethical judgments by a controversial Autralian moral philosopher. Raimond Gaita's insights are original and his prose is as eloquent as it is affecting.' - The Economist, Books of the Year, 2000- 'Gaita's genius... is his ability to weigh the soul on a scale, and to show how goodness and justice might yet prevail.' - The Scotsman-

About the Author

Raimond Gaita is Professor of Philosophy at Kings College London. He is the author of the acclaimed biography of his father, Romulus: My Father, winner of the Victoria Prize for Literatre and Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception.

Product Details

• Paperback: 328 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; New edition edition (February 10, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415241146
• ISBN-13: 978-0415241144
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #629,639 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars thoughtful and compassionate, May 4, 2001

By 

Willem Noe "scorpio-1" (Berlin) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (Hardcover)

I read this book on basis of positive book reviews and I can only agree with those recommendations. Prof. Gaita as a professional philosopher deals with profound yet everyday occurrences and issues of human life, as the title also suggests: 'thinking about love and truth and justice'. This book deals with morality, concepts of good and evil and what occurs in human lives with intelligence, subtlety and compassion. He discusses, inter alia, the Holocaust, racism, and Australian Aboriginals. He points out that other people are treated as sub-humans only when there is a denial of the common humanity with the other. And these are issues on what occurs in human lives that every generation has to face and think about anew. I particularly liked his explanation of our relation to other, the notion that our sense of reality of others is partly conditioned by our vulnerability to them, the realisation of what it means to wrong them. Remorse is that realisation, and it is interdependent with a definite (and innate?) concept of evil. Grief, when it is not self-indulgent, is a heightened form of the awareness of another, a pained realisation of the independent reality of those we have lost. According to Gaita, it is astonishing that there could be such a state as guilt and suffering as remorse, with as a counterpart the wonder that other human beings could matter so much to us.

It is challenging, moving, and certainly not an easy book to read, and i do not pretend I always fully could follow the reasoning. But then, i did not expect it to be easy. In fact, I would have been suspicious if that would have been the case. The approach is different from e.g. the American philosopher R. Rorty and i found it as enlightening. Recommended!

0 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Very Confused Author, January 9, 2009

By 

Proofessor "Proofessor" (TN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (Paperback)

The writer is confused. He takes opposites and tries to mix them, murder and love, truth and falsehood, religion and atheism. He actually thinks that homicide can be love. He is a very "religious" philosopher who wants to use the language of Christianity, which he claims to be powerful yet untrue. He thinks public servants have to lie to us. My impression is that he confuses students.

4 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars illiterate, June 21, 2006

By 

Susan Norton (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (Hardcover)

Despite having the title and presumably the tax-payer funded salary of a professor, this person cannot write English. When an intelligible sentence occasionally emerges, it turns out upon examination to be a cliche or a tautology. A disgraceful waste of trees and time.