The 5 Most Inspiring Philosophy Books for Your Christmas
Our big Christmas gifts guide, part 1

I started this post with the title “Ten Best Philosophy Books for Christmas” and then I jotted down a list. After I’d reached 63 items within the first ten minutes, it became obvious that I’d have to sort these books into categories and that I’d certainly need more than one post to discuss them.

The selection below will be a very personal one. Any list of books is like a fingerprint of the person making the list. Different people like different things and philosophers are even more picky than the general population. A Nietzsche reader will not enjoy Bertrand Russell. A Vienna Circle devotee will not even count Heidegger among the philosophers. No one will like or enjoy all the books below, so use your knowledge of the person you want to give a gift and let that inform your decision.

I want to start with the category that always has meant most to me personally: inspiring books. Those books that can change your life when you are young (or perhaps even if you’re older) and that one remembers throughout one’s life. In later posts, we will also talk about philosophy introductions and histories of philosophy, individual philosophers, novels and short stories with a philosophical theme or twist, and movies and online content that I have always loved. Not everything in these lists is “classic” philosophy. Some works are quite far from academic philosophy, but I’ve always believed that philosophy is best understood as the “love of wisdom” (which is what “philosophy” literally means) and wisdom can take many forms, some of which may, at first, look quite like foolishness.

I wanted to number the books, but when I tried, I found that I just couldn’t do it. A numbering would emphasise far too much my own perspective, and I’m sure that every one of us would come up with their own, different numbering. So I’ll just list them in alphabetical order, by author.

Let’s dive in!

1. Alexandra David-Neel: Magic and Mystery in Tibet

This is one of those books that are idiosyncratic, to say the least. But it’s also a book that is astonishing in its boldness and beautiful in its evocation of old Tibet, a place that does not exist any more as David-Neel describes it here.

Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) was a Belgian-French explorer, and, as Wikipedia remarks, she was also a “spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist, opera singer, and writer.” And note that she was a woman who lived much of her life in the 19th century!

This amazing person was an independent travel writer and went to Tibet at a time when women were not even going unaccompanied to the horse races. Once there, in 1912, she started studying Buddhism in earnest. In 1914, she and a young Indian, whom she later would adopt as a son, went to live in a remote cave hermitage in India. She met the local kings and princes, the Dalai Lama, practised Tibetan Yoga and learned to control her body heat through the spiritual practices of Tibetan mystics.

Finally, in 1916, she decided to travel to Tibet, which was, at that time, not accessible to foreigners. There she met high officials and was herself given the title of a Lama (the equivalent of a priest or religious leader in Tibetan Buddhism). She travelled around India and Tibet for decades, until she returned to France in 1947, at the age of 79 and retired.

The magic of David-Neel is that one never quite knows whether she is serious about what she reports or not. Her tone of voice is perfectly convincing, she narrates the most unbelievable instances of “magic and mystery in Tibet” with the attitude of someone who is extremely rational and critical, a reliable witness to some ineffable mystery. But she was also, as is well known, a member of multiple secret societies and had always flirted with the paranormal and the magical, so she is not really the critical observer that she purports to be. In her tales, monks levitate, project astral versions of themselves to confuse others and spend nights naked in the icy air of the Himalayas, drying wet sheets with their body heat.

It is the masterful mixture of fact with lore that makes these tales so riveting: one has heard of the body heat feats of Tibetan monks from many sources, and is inclined to believe that these stories are true. Other stories are best known from fiction: when Luke Skywalker projects himself to another place in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” the writers could be directly quoting David-Neel’s reports on what Tibetan monks are able to do. And levitating? After reading a hundred pages of mystery in Tibet, one is inclined to question whether perhaps this might be possible, too.

We live in a world that is mechanised through and through, that has been robbed of all magic, all mystery and all poetry. Reading Alexandra David-Neel, no matter whether one is willing to believe everything she says or not, is an act of rebellion against that loss of imagination and mystery in our lives. If one wants to read her stories as fairy tales, that’s perfectly fine. If another believes some of her tales, that’s okay too. In the end, it’s not so important whether a Tibetan monk in 1926 actually lifted his behind from the floor for a few feet. What really matters is that we keep an open mind to the mystery of life and the poetry of what it means to be human, to the promise of magic to show us the secret sides of things that we never see by the harsh light of the day.

And this is where David-Neel really delivers.

For whom is this a good present?

David-Neel is a treat for people who are interested in Tibetan spiritualism with a bit of magic mixed in. Not a good present for your engineer uncle who thinks that all meditation is “humbug”.

2. Jane Dobisz: One Hundred Days of Solitude

We talked about this book before.

Jane Dobisz, a young American woman, decides to see whether she’s made for the hermit life and challenges herself to spend 100 days in a remote hut in a forest. She combines this with a lot of spiritual exercise, bowing and the recitation of a mantra, with frugal food and lots of exercise through having to chop wood and carry water up to her hut in the deep winter snow.

The book is a diary of these 100 days. What makes it different from hundreds of other such books is the freshness with which Dobisz looks at the world of her hut, her all-too-human fights against sleepiness in the morning, laziness, or the lust for sweets. Dobisz is a more relatable hermit than the levitating saints of Alexandra David-Neel. She won’t dry any bedsheets with her body heat, but we can all relate to her panic when the jar of treats runs empty after only a few weeks of hermit life.

Jane Dobisz, in the end, manages to go through with her retreat, she is able to overcome her weaknesses and to find the strength and focus that she sought when she took on that challenge. And the reader comes out of this experience strangely comforted: If Jane can do that, so perhaps could I.

This relatability is the greatest strength of the book. It greatest weakness is Dobisz’ compulsion to shoehorn one different Zen teaching into every one of the book’s chapters, whether it fits there or not. Often, one can see the author straining to hammer together a transition from the authentic, natural diary of the young person to the memorable epigrammatic teaching that has to conclude the chapter. It is there where the book disappoints, breaks the contact with the reader and feels forced and contrived.

But this is a minor point. After a few chapters one gets used to the (mercifully brief) teaching epigrams and can still enjoy the story of a hundred days of exploring a life lived out of one’s comfort zone.

And perhaps wonder how one would cope in this situation oneself, which, after all, is the point of this book.

For whom is this a good present?

Dobisz’ book is a good present for everyone who is on the way to discover their own spiritual side, especially in the Buddhist tradition, but also for anyone interested in the hermit life. Not for the hardcore Buddhist scholar, but for young people who might want to try something like that themselves one day.

3. Erich Fromm: To Have or To Be and The Art of Loving

Erich Fromm has been the focus of many articles on Daily Philosophy, and the next book in our series of “Guides to Happiness” will also be mainly about him.

Fromm created his very own, characteristic mixture of sociology, philosophy and psychology, based on ideas from Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis. His approach was hugely successful throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties, and Fromm was, for a time, a household name, the least controversial and most commercially successful of the philosophers of the so-called Frankfurt School.

After the end of the flower-power era and the disillusionment of the global left in the 80s, Fromm’s vision of a Marxist utopia lost much of its wide appeal. Other problems seemed more imminent: the depletion of natural resources, already highlighted by the Club of Rome in 1972; the dangers of the civil use of nuclear power and the Three Mile Island accident in 1979; the collapse of Soviet socialism at the end of the 80s and in the 1990s; and global warming, microplastics and the horrors of AI, social media and pervasive surveillance today.

But truth is not a matter of taste. Even if Fromm is not as widely read today as he used to be 40 or 50 years ago, his analyses are as valid as ever and one can see his predictions materialising in our societies right now. The alienation that Fromm described, the stance of “having” rather than “being,” our focus on possessions and our neglect of love and concentration are more evident now than they were in Fromm’s time. The Internet, social media and contemporary global capitalism have exposed many flaws in the mental and psychological fabric of our societies that Fromm had already written about with exceptional clarity and insight in his books.

The most relevant books, in my opinion, those that have aged the least, are “To Have or To Be?” (1976) and “The Art of Loving” (1976).

For whom is this a good present?

These are soft-scholarly books, in the sense that Fromm was very well read, both in psychoanalysis and Marxism, but also in the spiritual traditions of Christianity and Judaism. This background is always there, giving richness and texture to his analysis and making the readers feel like they are themselves on a journey of intellectual discovery. Right-wing uncles, Trump voters and alt-right figures will not enjoy these books, but anyone with an open mind and an interest in the humanities and the history of culture will find them exciting without being overwhelmed. If one is reasonably educated in matters of culture and agrees with Fromm on the basic political premise (a kind of gentlemanly spiritual left), one can read and enjoy these books without being an actual academic.

Especially “The Art of Loving” is a good present for everyone who might have ever wondered about the rationality of our mating rituals — and who hasn’t?

4. Douglas Hofstadter: Goedel, Escher, Bach

Hofstadter’s “Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” is a one-of-a-kind book. I know nothing that can be compared with it, except perhaps its sequel from the same author.

It’s certainly not a book for everyone. It is a hacker’s book in the original, best sense of the word: a “hacker” being someone who likes to tweak things in ways that they were not meant to be tweaked; someone who is not content repeating some received wisdom, but who, with an inquisitive mind and a good dose of humour, will try to take apart a problem and understand how its components really work deep inside.

This is the original meaning of the term “hacker.” In fact, the first “hacks” didn’t have anything to do with computers. The first hackers were model railroad enthusiasts at MIT. A common pastime of the MIT hacker community was breaking into locked rooms by analysing how locks worked and finding ways to trick them. According to the old hacker ethic, it was not allowed to actually take anything out of the room one managed to get into, or to get any tangible benefit for oneself from a hack. It was a pure sport, the sole reward of the hack being the intellectual enjoyment of having found a new way to do things, a better, more interesting solution to a problem. Like every wonderful idea mankind ever produced (communism and charity come to mind), this too was soon perverted by those who didn’t understand or cared for the beauty of a principle and were more fixated on abusing the system to benefit themselves.

But back to Hofstadter. Immersing oneself into this book is like being a child again, free to play in the green fields of the mind. It is an endlessly amusing book, in which the paradoxical drawings of MC Escher meet the self-referential structures in Bach’s compositions, and all that strangeness is tackled with a children’s building blocks version of Goedel’s incompleteness theorem. This book is enormous fun to read, but it is only for those who really enjoy a wild and demanding intellectual ride. It has always appealed more to the mathematically minded: computer programmers, linguists, engineers: the crowd who would be fascinated by a computer program that zooms into Mandelbrot sets, or those who’d read Zeno of Elea for the enjoyment of his paradoxes.

For whom is this a good present?

Give this to your aunt who was always fond of chaos theory and who, in her younger years, tried her hand at deciphering the writing on the disk of Phaistos. Your teenage son who communicates with his friends exclusively with Egyptian hieroglyphs and who recently programmed a recipe book for your kitchen in an obscure dialect of Lisp is another ideal reader of this book. People who start their day by reading xkcd and Wait But Why, or who use their lunch break to fold hexaflexagons will also be delighted.

Don’t give this to anyone who would enjoy Erich Fromm (see above). The two are as far as they can get from each other and still be within the same discipline (philosophy, broadly construed, as the philosopher says).

PS: By the way, if you don’t know what a hexaflexagon is, watch this. Seriously.

PS/2: As I wrote the description of the ideal reader above, I realised that I personally tick every one of these boxes. I don’t know if this is something that one should admit in public.

Your ad-blocker ate the form? Just click here to subscribe!

5. Pico Iyer: The Man Within My Head and The Art of Stillness

Pico Iyer is not your typical philosopher. In fact, he may not see himself as a philosopher at all. Wikipedia casts him as an essayist and travel writer, but I have always thought of him as a philosopher in the true sense of the word: someone who is in love with wisdom and who spends his life searching for it.

In “The Man Within My Head” he describes his life-long enchantment by and attachment to another great philosopher of the 20th century: the novelist Graham Greene. Perhaps in order to truly relate to this book, one must have a passion for the haunted soulscapes of Greene’s novels (which I do), and it wouldn’t hurt to have read Iyer’s Kyoto book “The Lady and the Monk,” which provides a better introduction to Iyer as a human being.

“The Man Within My Head” is about how we can feel like being related to people we have never met, how we can, in a kind of mystical union, adopt someone from the past as a spiritual parent. The book tries to understand how we can live our lives in the shadow of the sometimes benign, sometimes smothering influence of another, someone we love and still long to get away from — sometimes in a much deeper way than we do with our biological parents.

“The Art of Stillness. Adventures in Going Nowhere” is more accessible to a wider audience than “The Man Within My Head.” It is a short book, only some 60 pages, and one could say that it doesn’t really say anything very new. But what it does say, it says beautifully, with the exquisitely precise poetry of Iyer’s writing. This book revolves around another of Iyer’s (any my) heroes, Leonard Cohen. The singer who spent a part of his early life on the island of Hydra in Greece, incidentally the same place that Daniel Klein visited in his wonderfully meditative book “Travels With Epicurus,” which is also on my list of recommended books.

What is perhaps less known is that Cohen, despite living a life on stage, was also a seeker of silence and meaning who again and again went back to a Buddhist monastery in search of himself. And it is this side of the singer’s character that Iyer takes as a starting point to explore the meaning of stillness in our lives. The little book is itself a wonderful meditation on what it means to be still and to find one’s balance within oneself. As I said, there is nothing surprising in there, but it a rewarding little read that one can return to again and again in times of stress and anxiety to find a moment of peace within its pages and the lucid, unhurried prose of its author.

By the way, if you don’t know Leonard Cohen the man, here is a beautiful and thoughtful interview he gave in Montreal to Norwegian broadcaster NRK. It comes in three parts, search Youtube for “Cohen Montreal Interview NRK” for the other two parts:

For whom is this a good present?

The Iyer books are quite different in their potential audiences. “The Lady and the Monk” is a tender story of love and friendship set within a Kyoto travel book. It will appeal to everyone who loves Japanese culture, not so much today’s reality of it, but the idealised vision of it that exists within the Western mind. Iyer’s treatment of Japan is the description of a dream, as are all the best travel books, but it is a dream that has its own truth, its own logic and authenticity. Iyer is a quiet and respectful reporter of what he sees, rather like a painter, and the book reads like looking at a sequence of vignettes that describe life in Kyoto through the seasons. It’s a good present for armchair travellers and those in love with the ghosts of Japan past, but it’s also a romantic book that explores the challenges of communication across cultures, and it will resonate with those who have loved across oceans and timezones.

“The Man Within My Head” is a more esoteric book that requires at least some basic familiarity both with Greene’s work and with Pico Iyer to be really enjoyable. If you know your Major Jones from your Henry Scobie, if you have walked through rainy London streets in pursuit of elusive Sarah Miles, then you will have a wonderful time with this book, if only because the circle of Graham Greene aficionados is so small nowadays. You will feel like you have found a brother in spirit in the writer of this book. If you have never heard of the Quiet American or Charles Fortnum, the Honorary Consul, then probably you won’t enjoy this book.

Finally, “The Art of Stillness” is the most accessible of the three books. Its audience is everyone who’d enjoy a good introductory book about meditation, Zen and the beauty of stillness, a book that one can actually read while sitting on a sofa without necessarily having to sit cross-legged on cold floorboards. It is an easily, perhaps a bit too easily, consumable book that casts the longing for meaning into beautiful, honed phrases without making too many demands of its audience. But it delivers what it promises, and if you are interested in the idea of meditation and life balance and the more spiritual side of Yoga, then this might be the book for you. Don’t gift this to your uncle who has just come back from a strict ten-week silence retreat in a remote monastery in Nepal. If there’s such a thing as an armchair meditator (I certainly am one of those) then this is the right present for them.

The book is based on a TED talk by Pico Iyer, which you can watch here to get an idea:

So, that’s all for today! I hope that you found something interesting in the above and stay tuned for the future instalments of Daily Philosophy’s big Christmas shopping list!

The second part of this article, with another five great book recommendations, is right here.

Related

Five More Inspiring Philosophy Books for Your Christmas

December 20, 2021

Robert Rodriguez: The Book of Hermits

September 27, 2021

Novalis and the Romantic View of the World

December 15, 2020

One Hundred Days in a Hermit’s Hut

August 21, 2021

Introductions to Philosophy

March 3, 2021

One Year, Six Ways: A Philosophical Experiment

December 29, 2020