What Kind of Creatures Are We? By Noam Chomsky

It's a trip; a trip in the mind of the most acclaimed thinkers, from the oldest to the most recents one: from Descartes to Mill, from Newton to Russell, for naming some of them.

Divided in four chapters What is Language? What can we Understand? What is Common Good? The Mysteries of Nature: How deeply hidden?  you can use this book reading the chapters more inviting for you, certain that each of them will present you a lot of originality and an approach that politically, scientifically, will let you think and elaborate a lot. Mentally.

I confess I hadn't never read a book written by Chomsky 

and I was a bit intimidated. I found this latest short but dense and erudite book What Kind of Creatures Are We? interesting, captivating; Chomsky tries to define us using science, passing through philosophy, language, policy, social problems.

This work starts to focus the attention on the importance of language and what it means in terms of difference the development of languages for the human being. The development of sounds is historically old, but recent at the same time, and it meant for man something precious: an immensity of thoughts, a never-ending possibility of mental expansion in the most diversified dimensions and directions using an organ defined, with a born and a conclusion, but exceptionally flexible under many aspects: the brain. The brain is like a computer, and its immense power starting with the possibility for every individual of elaborate, with erudition or less erudition thoughts, is a demonstration of it.

Chomsky won't avoid to spend some pages writing something about the second brain of our body: the intestine. The intestine is important because the base of our emotions, our main worries. An intestine kept well means a healthy state for the entire body.

Why language is so important for men?

Because it permits us to make the difference. In goodness and badness.

Let's, for example, as also writes mr.Chomsky, use an example by Mill.  On Liberty Mill writes that the first leading principle of that book was this one: "The absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity." All that situations, all that governments that can't permit it, are not good realities.

Every good society should in fact develop the diversity found in its social tissue, starting from social policies, work etc.

Of course, the egoism of few people can make the difference; it happened in the past as in the present, as you will read. Problems and debates didn't start, ethically just now but  2-300 years ago.

Chomsky analyzes the various situations and social possible policies, including anarchism, an utopistic shape of state born during the Enlightment. This kind of government refused every kind of authority.

At any possible level.

For politicians having public opinion's consensus means best negotiations for obtain what necessary for the weakest part of population.

John Dewey understood something incredibly modern to my point of you: "Power today, he wrote, resides in control of the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Whoever owns them rules the life of the country" and we speak of interactions in progress in a democratic state.

Sure, workers to Dewey hadn't to be tools, considering also absolutely scandalous the use of children for work: "Illiberal and immoral."

The consideration of Dewey regarding industry after all wasn't great at all if he compared it at a feudalistic system wishing a democratic order in grade to make the difference.  

Men who create sometimes societies that can be better are also beautiful minds and genius. In this sense Chomsky focuses the attention on Isaac Newton, the one in grade to give more precise answers respect to his eminent italian colleague, Galileo.

Newton, inspired by new-platonics and alchemical traditions presented to science a different aspect: not to seek ultimate explanations but to find the best theoretical explanations of experience and experiment.

This thing was possible because the world started to be seen as an elaborate machine.

What Newton demonstrated was, according to Koyré "that a purely materialistic pattern of nature is utterly impossible."

That men are magical creatures if I can use this expression is true and the complexity of our brain say all.

Man is never satisfied and for this reason search for religion, myth, philosophy in the perennial research of explanations or as mr.Chomsky puts it, in "The deeper understanding of the phenomena of experience."

If you search for a book in grade of opening your horizons, this one is for you! for sure.

I love the cover, warm, encouraging and inviting.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori