The Web of Meaning

I wanted to read this book after I read some excerpts online, although I was a bit concerned that it might be "new age pablum" ... lofty musings about how everything is all connected that are ultimately inconsequential.

I found a little bit of that, but mostly I found a lucid new synthesis of ideas in a way I hadn't considered before, as well as an introduction to some non-Western philosophical traditions I hadn't yet encountered. Lent is particularly excited by the concept of li in the Neo-Confucian school originating in the Tang Dynasty. (In fact, he has a website called liology.org devoted to this).

I did almost set the book down when I got into Chapter 8, the first chapter of Part 4 ("How Should Live My Life?"). He opens with what seemed to me to be an interminable laundry list of non-Western approaches to health that I had pretty much heard of and personally don't put much stock in. I slogged thru that bit and finally he talks about how these ideas have been co-opted by our materialist society and "Just as a single cell can't flourish in a diseased organism, so the well-being of an individual human requires a healthy society".

At that point, the text picks up and becomes worthwhile again. Just bear with it -- or skim that part.

Other than that, I only have minor nits to pick

• He uses the term "negative entropy" to refer to increasing order in a system, even though that requires energy and so does not relate to the actual concept of entropy in thermodynamics.

• He also uses Wade-Giles romanization of Chinese text: this is probably reasonable since the forms of words like "Tao" and "I Ching" would be familiar to the sort of people I imagine reading this book, but it's a bit of a stumbling block if you want to look for Chinese sources. Sure the character 理 (li) might not mean much to most readers, but it tells me something.