On Kindness [Paperback]

Adam Phillips (Author), Barbara Taylor (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312429746 | ISBN-13: 978-0312429744 | Publication Date: June 22, 2010 | Edition: First Edition

Kindness is the foundation of the world’s great religions and most-enduring philosophies. Why, then, does being kind feel so dangerous? If we crave kindness with such intensity, why is it often the last pleasure we permit ourselves? And why—despite our longing—are we often suspicious when we are on the receiving end of it?

Drawing on intellectual history, literature, psychoanalysis, and contemporary social theory, this brief and essential book will return to its readers what Marcus Aurelius declared was mankind’s “greatest delight”: the intense satisfactions of generosity and compassion.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

To live the successful modern life, we are enjoined to become less kind and more selfish. That is this small but profound volume’s animating premise. Phillips and Taylor argue that in today’s fast-paced, anything-to-get-ahead culture, kindness “has become our forbidden pleasure.” Kindly behavior is perceived as both dangerous and suspicious, nothing less than empty sentiment and simplistic moralizing. Most of all, kindness is taken as a sign of weakness. Though written by a historian and psychoanalyst, On Kindness wears its erudition lightly and with great grace. It looks at attitudes toward kindness from a historical perspective, from the Stoics to Christian thought; to Hobbes, Hume, Adam Smith, and Rousseau; to Freud; and to the current day. For centuries, people thought of themselves as being naturally kind. Phillips and Taylor explore the various ways in which that attitude changed over the centuries and also comment on the often devastating and tragic consequences of that change, of “how in giving up on kindness, we deprive ourselves of a pleasure that is fundamental to our well being.” --June Sawyers --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

“Tightly packed with insights into our riven human heart . . . Seamless and a pleasure to read . . . a rich and provocative book, revealing the complexity of a simple-seeming virtue.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Readable and absorbing . . . a concentrated essay on a limited but deeply important subject is to be highly valued.” —The Guardian (UK)

“Eloquent . . . A profound exploration of [kindness] . . . highly recommended.” —Library Journal

“Employs history, social theory, and psychoanalysis to chart how kindness has become a pejorative word over the years.” —Time.com

“On Kindness wears its erudition lightly and with great grace.” —Booklist

“If we have all become more self-interested and self-serving, Phillips and Taylor suggest a little more altruism as an antidote to angst and alienation . . . Theirs is a true tract for difficult times.” —Iain Finlayson, The Times (London)

“Part of the purpose of this short book is to reinstate [kindness] as something necessary both to our personal happiness and our communal well-being. This seems to me a totally admirable aim . . . A concentrated essay on a limited but deeply important subject is to be highly valued.” —Mary Warnock, The Observer (London)

“[An] elegant meditation on kindness . . . In a competitive, stressed-out, paranoid, cynical, celebrity-obsessed, credit-crunched society, this might seem a barmy philosophy. As Phillips and Taylor show—clearly, coherently and completely unsentimentally—it’s a completely sensible one.” —David Robinson, The Scotsman

Praise for Adam Phillips

“[Phillips is] one of the finest prose stylists at work in the language, an Emerson of our time.” —John Banville

“The curious thing about reading Phillips is that he makes you feel smart and above the daily grind at the same time as he reassures you that you are not alone in your primal anxieties about whether you are lovable or nuts or, perhaps, merely boring.” —Daphne Merkin, The New York Times Magazine

“Phillips is . . . a bit like an Oliver Sacks of psychoanalysis, both affable and unalarmed.” —Gail Caldwell, The Boston Sunday Globe

Praise for Barbara Taylor

“[Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination] will be essential reading for many years to come . . . Superb . . . Well-written.” —Caroline Franklin, The Times Literary Supplement

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Picador; First Edition edition (June 22, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312429746
• ISBN-13: 978-0312429744
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 4.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #701,495 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An important book in anti-reductionist psychology and philosophy, July 12, 2009

By 

Kornilov (Santa Fe, NM USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: On Kindness (Hardcover)

Not a coffee table book. Not a "be nice" sermon from the land of the bodhisattvas.

This book is a rigorous argument, based on the history of European ideas and psychoanalytical doctrine, that we fail to recognize and value intelligently one of life's greatest pleasures: generosity. It goes deep into the the scientific and political sources of our contemporary confusion and unhappiness.

The authors explain brilliantly how misunderstanding the paradoxical relation between kindness and hatred contributes to our chronic ambivalence toward other people and hence our inability to choose our actions well.

Beautifully written and succinct: the sort of book you finish in an afternoon and will definitely read again.

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Back to Kindness, July 9, 2009

By 

Rae A. Francoeur "Rae Francoeur" (Manhattan/Rockport MA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: On Kindness (Hardcover)

It's not easy being human. We're complex creatures, possessed of intellect, driven by instinct, bedeviled by emotions. We're necessarily interdependent in a competitive culture that extols self-sufficiency. Extending kindness makes us genuinely happy; being seen extending kindness makes us look self-serving or, worse, weak. We are suspicious of kind acts and the people who commit them. If you were to seek Freud's counsel on all this, he'd say we hate that we love so we idolize what we desire to help rationalize our needs. What a mess.

If only Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, authors of a small, elegant book, "On Kindness," could do more than delineate the trouble and track its origins. If only they could point the way to a kinder life for all of us. If only somebody universally respected -- Oprah? -- made this book required reading now, before, say, the next episode of "Survivor." If only capitalism and Goldman Sachs and third-party health insurance administrators and the classroom bully could take a lesson from Marcus Aurelius, Rousseau or even Dickens, as set out so clearly in "On Kindness." If only...

But Phillips and Taylor, while clearly proponents of a kind society, do not lobby for change as much as they detail the decline of kind behavior in societies made up of people who find one of the sincerest forms pleasure scorned. They write, "An image of the self has been created that is utterly lacking in natural generosity." This image, they say, shows us "deeply and fundamentally antagonistic to each other." This image we have of ourselves shows our motives to be "utterly self-seeking" and our sympathies suspicious "forms of self-protection."

"On Kindness" describes who we are with regard to our generosity of spirit, it explores the gravity of our psychological conflicts and it tracks how we arrived at this uncomfortable, conflicted juncture. The British authors, a psychoanalyst (Phillips) and a historian with expertise in feminism (Taylor), maintain that the kind life is natural. It's a life lived "in instinctive sympathetic identification with the vulnerabilities and attractions of others." This behavior lacks cultural support -- even a common language, it is fraught with negative sanctions and yet it makes us feel good. Kindness has become "our forbidden pleasure."

There's a lot to this small book and yet it is highly readable and infinitely fascinating: "Capitalism is no system for the kindhearted." "Parenting in particular is seen by most people today as an island of kindness in a sea of cruelty." "A competitive society, one that divides people into winners and losers, breeds unkindness." "The most long-standing suspicion about kindness is that it is just narcissism in disguise." "Our sweetest existence is relative and collective, and our true self is not entirely within us." (Rousseau) "To what shifts is poor Society reduced in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to man!" (Thomas Carlyle)

Our identification with other people's pleasures and sufferings is among our most immediate experiences, write the authors. It's akin to reflex or instinct. To identify with suffering is, of course, frightening. We feel vulnerable and yet we crave safety. As children we nurture and love our parents so they will care for us. As we grow and mature, we realize such efforts are not productive at the same time we train our vision on a broader world to which we naturally seek attachments. No man is an island, wrote John Donne. Our attachments to others fulfill our humanity. The authors leave us here, to ponder our secrets and question a society that closets the best parts of us.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not what I expected, June 25, 2010

By 

Gwen - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: On Kindness (Paperback)

I should have learned more about the book before I bought it. I was intrigued by the title and thought that it would focus on why it seems so difficult, in today's society, for people to be open, warm and kind to one another, and so much more socially acceptable to "rag on" (or be "teasingly" aggressive towards) others. Instead, it was mostly on Freud and (hence) sex. I found it difficult to read - dense and unclear, rather than direct and straightforward. (And I do have a Ph.D., so it's not that I have no experience reading challenging texts.)

That's not to say that it doesn't address the topic of kindness at all, or that I didn't get a single interesting idea out of it. But, for me, it wasn't worth it.

If you find Freud and philosophical history interesting, then you may very well enjoy this book. But if those things don't really appeal, then you probably want to skip it - it is not, in my opinion, a clearly written, insightful analysis of the role of kindness in today's social climate.