Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality [Paperback]

Crispin Sartwell (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: State University of New York Press; First Edition edition (July 31, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791429083
• ISBN-13: 978-0791429082
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,744,392 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars crushingly awesome read, December 19, 2009

By 

Bracken Makepeace - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality (Paperback)

This book is an account of the places we go when we can no longer stand our own existence, and what it means to take a flight from the self into oblivion, lies, and the pretend. It accounts for our experience of: hate, love, truth, power, death but most of all the reality in which these concepts move about, turn on us, hurt and teach us about the world.

We are taught to be conscious of the ways we dissemble reality, negate it, and therefore are denying the reality of something. We do this as we construct programs of reform, program our future, program our very existence with correspondant facts that live on only in our minds inner world. Places filled with lies we tell ourselves to get through the day.

If we weren't cowards we could accept even learn to embrace the cold corners of reality, yet our unhealthy persistence to cut them leads us into self-annihilation, demonstrations of our hatred for being vulnerable to natures incredible force. At last an uncontrollable hatred for the world stems from itself; as the hater hides himself from the restrictions placed on his own embodiment so the world suffers for it. The world dies without courageous people willing to take a shot at affirmation of what is. I guess this book is part acknowledgment, part treatment, a text devoted to our own rehabilitation. It's powerful, funny, but incredibly serious, to the point and quite a necessary book. This one, from the cover y'know, stands out and alone and for one basic reason, for you, and how it will crush the falsehood out of you.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great work, January 22, 2004

By 

John Smeltzer (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality (Paperback)

It is difficult to write about what Sartwell wants to communicate. It's like the Tao te Ching, in the beginning of the book the author writes that you can't really talk about the Tao, but then proceeds to write a book about it anyway. Sartwell acknowledges the paradox of telling people they shouldn't moralize.

This book hit me hard because he's dealing with some very specific philosophical problems that are poignant to me lately. I want to live an authentic life, and I do a lot of thinking of how to go about it. Sartwell points out that the impulse to create philsophical systems is a way of escaping from reality. He views ontological systems with suspicion. If you read this with an openess to what he's trying to convey, it will be well worth the time. I have a feeling this will be one of those special books that I'll read from time to time and gain even more insight from as the years go by.

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful, genuine, spirited, sane, April 24, 2011

By 

G. Stark (Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality (Paperback)

A rare gem of sincerity.
It is a book scattered with brilliant observations and phenomenology. Basically, the author attempts to include and integrate the obscene, "unacceptable" elements - like the loss of will, addiction, the situation of grief - into nothing short of an affirmation of being in the world, basing upon honoured traditions and thinkers. For me, he helped clarify much confusion regarding what actually is "harm" and "will".
He presents the most original explanation as to why people train in a gym, for example.
If you want to step out of the conventional, banal, politically correct, "morality"-straight-jacketed performance and in the process actually turn more authentic rather than more hating this is the book for you.

Sartwell may be slightly romantic about traditions he quotes- native Americans, tantric Buddhism - but that is forgiveable in my opinion.