The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World Knowledge Trilogy (3) [Paperback]

Daniel J. Boorstin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 26, 1999

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

From the author of The Discoverers and The Creators, an incomparable history of man's essential questions: "Who are we?" and "Why are we here?"

Daniel J. Boorstin, the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Americans, introduces us to some of the great pioneering seekers whose faith and thought have for centuries led man's search for meaning.

Moses sought truth in God above while Sophocles looked to reason. Thomas More and Machiavelli pursued truth through social change. And in the modern age, Marx and Einstein found meaning in the sciences. In this epic intellectual adventure story, Boorstin follows the great seekers from the heroic age of prophets and philosophers to the present age of skepticism as they grapple with the great questions that have always challenged man.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Renowned historian Daniel J. Boorstin completes the trilogy he began with The Discoverers and The Creators. The first volume covered explorers, scientists, and historians in their quest for raw knowledge, while the second book describes writers, painters, and composers in their pursuit of inspiring art; The Seekers describes people searching for an understanding of human existence--"Man is the asking animal," notes Boorstin. It's a big, bold theme, and although The Seekers is the shortest work in the trilogy, it's still vintage Boorstin: incredibly learned, richly anecdotal, and casually profound. It begins with the prophets of the Holy Land and the philosophers of ancient Greece, continues through the Renaissance, and concludes with the modern era of the social sciences. "In this long quest [for understanding], Western culture has turned from seeking the end or purpose to seeking causes--from the Why to the How," writes Boorstin. That's a neat summary of Western intellectual development over several thousand years. What other author could put it so succinctly? Boorstin is generally stronger with material that is more recent and more secular, but this is an accomplished book and a worthy capstone to an outstanding three-volume effort. --John J. Miller --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In The Discoverers (1983), Boorstin introduced readers to scientists, explorers, historians and other pursuers of knowledge. Ten years later, The Creators did the same for innovators in art. "We glory in their discoveries and creations," he writes in the introduction to his latest, "But we are all Seekers. We all want to know why." Starting from that perhaps overbroad premise, Boorstin begins with an examination of Hebrew prophets and Greek philosophers?those who seek from a higher authority and those who seek from within. From this point on there are rather few religious seekers; instead most are philosophers of systems, of systems for discovering truth (the reason of Descartes, the empiricism of Locke, the individual experience of Kierkegaard) or for describing it (the encyclopedia of Diderot, the cultural cycles of Spengler, Hegel's World-Spirit). Certain subjects seem rather out of place, and chapters like that on H.G. Wells and John Reed, another on Oliver Wendell Holmes and E.O. Wilson; and individual chapters on Samuel Beckett, Lord Acton and Andre Malraux, have the feel of an insatiable polymath's chapbook. There are many movements, many people and many big ideas here, all expounded with Boorstin's characteristic enthusiasm and breadth of knowledge. It's perhaps inevitable that in such a broad survey some simplification would slip in?e.g., identifying 13th-century universities as centers for training gentlemen, rather than for offering professional training in theology, law and medicine. But what Boorstin does so well is bring together many ideas that fertilize and cross-fertilize the reader's imagination and curiosity. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 351 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; Vintage Books ed edition (October 26, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375704752
• ISBN-13: 978-0375704758
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #220,001 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vintage Boorstin, October 16, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (Hardcover)

Having read (all of) "The Americans", "The Discoverers", and (part of) "The Creators", I picked up "The Seekers" when and where I first saw it (which happened to be at the Library of Congress, which doesn't seem inappropriate). On a subsequent trip, I took it and several other books to pass the airplane hours. I didn't open the other books, and I finished "The Seekers". Having enjoyed it immensely, I logged on to amazon.com to see what other readers had thought (reading is a social habit, like drinking, and not to be done alone). I was quite surprised to find that not every reader had enjoyed it as much as I. I would agree that its sparse style is different from his longer books, and I would admit that it is Euro-centeric (as advertised). That having been said, I would also say that the careful selection of and brief presentation of the material was masterful. This "brief history of western seeking" will, I believe, provide me with a roadmap that will inform my reading selections for years to come.

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The journey is the reward, July 3, 2003

By 

Mark Mills (Glen Rose, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World Knowledge Trilogy (3) (Paperback)

Boorstin is a master story teller. I felt like I was sitting with a friend by a comfortable fire, being challenged to think, but regularly regaled with irony, satire and laughter. The motto of the book might be "The road is always better than the end." Another theme is that seeking brings us together, that fulfills us. The people who think they have found the final answer are the menace to our humanity, because there is no answer to find. Of course, this is the puzzle. How can one maintain their interest in 'seeking' if they realize the danger of 'finding'? Boorstin doesn't provide simple answers.

Boorstin starts with the Biblical conversations with God recorded by the Jewish tradition. To summarize these discussion, Boorstin spends a fair amount of time with the story of Job and the omnipresent fact that bad things happen to innocent people. He concludes that the ancient Hebrews taught their children that no one knows what God knows, so the innocent must push on, must keep the faith.

With this said, he poses the same question (do you know what God knows?) to the Greek tradition, starting with Socrates. Socrates became famous for demonstrating much the same point, interviewing those who claim to know truth, then proving their knowledge was an illusion. Plato, Socrates admirer and evangelist, tried to answer Socrates with his utopian Republic. In Plato's view, no one but philosophers knew the 'truth.' Showing no respect for his elders, Aristotle, a student of Socrates and Plato, chose something of a middle road: scientists know a few things that are true. In this triad of forceful personalities, the rest of the book finds it's structure.

Following Gibbon's outline of history, Boorstin then builds a bridge (Part II) between the ancient and modern world, quickly reviewing 1000 years of dialog between empiricists (the scientists who know at least one thing) and fundamentalists (those that know what God knows). This bridge involves Greek, then Christian evangelists, scholars and reformers until about 1500, when Hobbes, St. Thomas More and Descartes renew the Socratic debate.

Boorstin makes a case for the pivotal role Descartes plays, bridging the intuition and empiricist in his famous 'I think therefore I [know I] exist'. Descartes is followed by the evangelists of this synthesis: Voltaire (the civilized know) and Rousseau (the uncivilized know). The section on Rousseau is hilarious and well worth the price of the book (The section on Kirkegaard is equally funny.)

Avoiding the temptation to side with any particular advocate, Part III describes a variety of utopian enthusiasts. For a while, I thought the title should have been the 'utopians'. In these utopias, the old question about "God allowing bad thing to happen to innocent people" is solved by banishing suffering. In Utopia, society is so perfected that nothing can upset the universal joy. The luminaries for this post 1800 era include Marx (historians know how to accomplish this), Kierkegaard (we will regret knowing), Lord Acton (joy through revolutionary discontinuities) and William James (knowledge is a river, impossible to divide). The last three personalities Boorstin mentions, Malraux, Bergson and Einstein seem to be Boorstin's personal favorites. They were all active during and after World War I & II and probably had an impact on his life. Only Voltaire gets similar approval.

Boorstin's favorable review of materialists like Voltaire, Marx and Malraux was a bit hard to swallow.. . He ignores the Scottish Enlightenment and Hume, where his hero Voltaire got the ideas which made him famous. Additionally, he tersely dismisses the contributions of Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist and Confucian philosophers, all of whom greatly enriched Europe. It would have been better to ignore the subject. But, the story telling is wonderful. Maybe a logical 'whole' isn't all that important.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Seeking the Elusive Makes A Grand Hunt, January 18, 2004

By 

Book Mark (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World Knowledge Trilogy (3) (Paperback)

Boorstin's third book of his trilogy follows a chronological format on man's search for the reasons of life. "We are all seekers," he writes. "We all want to know why."

The book follows three grand epics of seeking. The first begins with Hebrew prophets and Greek philosophers. The former seeking from a higher authority, and the latter seeking from within. He moves on to the formation of communal experiences of the early church and the Reformation. The last epic is the age of the social sciences. Many stories of many exceptional men are told: their complexities, their understanding of past seekers, and their mistakes made mostly due to being ruled by history.

From the prophets and matchless Grecian trilogy seeking understanding of man's place; to Thomas Moore and Machiavelli pursuing the civil, liberal spirit; to Marx, Spengler, Emerson and Einstein who hone in on their own specialized areas of seeking, The Seekers captures the meaning of its namesake: the ever-elusive definition of life.

If the book has a short-coming, it would be Boorstin's inability to retrieve and contain the many more Seekers of modern thought. However, to include modern-day theorists, philosophers and other seekers would add chapters, getting us nowhere closer to our most coveted definition.