I've just been watching this conversation between Howard Gardner and Steven Pinker and was reminded of Erik Erikson. His book, Childhood and Society was very important for me. It made Freudian ideas more intelligible than Freud himself had done. Anyhow, that's why I'm once again bumping this post to the top of the queue.
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The "10 Influential Books" meme seems to be making the rounds again. I originally published this back in March of 2010. Here it is again, without revisions.
Urged on by a reader, Tyler Cowen seems to have started a books meme: What 10 books have influenced you the most? This sort of thing is something of a crap-shoot, yadda yadda, but why not? I’ve limited my list to non-fiction.
My Teacher
David Hays, Cognitive Structures (HRAF Press 1981). Hays was my teacher, and most of what I learned from him I learned directly from him. His aim in this book was to integrate the analog and servomechanical model of William Powers (see below) with the propositional and digital style of his own earlier work in computational linguistics. It is embodied cognition before the term was coined and gained currency. I believe this is the most profound such attempt to date (Hays wrote the book in the Spring of 1976), but, of course, I am biased. It is also, alas, rather obscure in points, no bias.
Some Others
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked. I’ve read a good deal of Lévi-Strauss, and this wasn’t the first. But it has had the most lasting effect on my thinking, which I’ve already discussed. Lévi-Strauss sees that there is a rigorous, but hidden, logic to a body of South American myths. He evokes this hidden logic by careful comparisons between myths, while discussing them in their larger socio-cultural context.
John Bowlby, Attachment. I read this in typescript under the tutelage of the late Mary Ainsworth when I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. Bowlby set out to reconstruct psychoanalytic object relations theory using systems models (TOTE from Miller, Gallanter, and Pribram, Plans and the Structure of Behavior) and evidence from ethology, especially of primates. This became my model of biologically-based psychology.
Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. I’ve read a good deal of Piaget, and this wasn’t the first (most likely that was The Origins of Intelligence in Children.) Though now somewhat eclipsed, his concept of developmental stages was enormously useful and, I believe, still holds water. But be careful. (Given its subjects, this book connects nicely with an interest in literature.)
Lev Vygotsky, Language and Thought. Vygotsky argued that children acquire language by completely internalizing that started as interaction with another. First the parent uses language to direct the child’s attention and behavior. Over time the child becomes able, first to use his own speech for those tasks, and then becomes able to dispense with external speech entirely.
Karl Pribram, Languages of the Brain. Pribram was a champion of the notion that the brain processes and stores information holographically. You’ll find that idea here, plus much more besides. Pribram was, and remains, one of our most comprehensive thinkers about the brain and its mind. But this book’s a tough read.
Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood. Medievals and Early Moderns didn’t think about children as we do, which Ariès argued from paintings, diaries, and other sources. The basic idea is that people way back when didn’t think and act about something very basic in the way we do. Children are children, no? Well, biologically, yes. Culturally, no.
William Powers, Behavior: The Control of Perception. Powers has two ideas, both from control theory (& one of them is more or less given in his title), and both quite elegant. This is how to go about theorizing, be as clear as you can and use elegant examples. FWIW, Powers was an engineer and very much concerned with building real things.
Philosophers
Except for the Powers, all of the above books came to me within a minute or two. Then I drew a blank for a couple of minutes. “But you know,” says I to myself, “I was quite influenced by some philosophers early on, even if I no longer read philosophy. Oo why not mention them.” So I will. That I had to kick Merleau-Ponty into the omissions pile, rather than one of these, is somewhat arbitrary.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Two things got me, the rigorous order of the whole affair, each proposition numbered in outline form. And the mysticism.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. Read a lot of Nietzsche too. But his account of the birth of tragedy linked up with other things in a powerful (including two of the books in the omissions pile.) And, of course, the Apollonian and Dionysian.
Omissions
Since the exercise limited us to ten I didn’t list The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn) The Phenomenology of Perception (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), The Four Ages of Music (Walter Wiora, Has anyone else ever heard of this one, much less read it?) or Art and Illusion (Ernst Gombrich). The more I think about this, the longer this list will get.
EDIT: Jeeze, how did Freud not make the list? I only thought of him when I read someone else’s list just minutes ago (and 2 hours after I first posted this). & Gregory Bateson, Bertrand Russell. Well, I know why Russell didn’t make the list. I read a lot of his stuff in my mid-teens, but not after. I hadn’t started “serious” thinking when I left off reading him. And then there's Charlie Keil's Urban Blues (1966).
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These are comments I made to responses back at The Valve (now defunct):
I find it interesting that you list a number of books from high school & earlier, Luther. I didn't list any from my high school years, which is when I read most of the Bertrand Russell, his popular stuff, not the technical philosophy and logic. Love your comment about Norman Brown. & perhaps I should have listed Suzanne Langer among my philosophers; Feeling and Form was a key work for me. I used both her and Nietzsche in my music book (Beethoven's Anvil, 2001).Interesting, Rohan, what we take "influence" to mean. Without so much as a thought otherwise I took it to mean "influential in my research." If I'd construed the term more broadly, as you did, I'd have a somewhat different list. That list might have included, for example, Peter Pan (the Golden Books version via Disney), Oliver La Farge, Laughing Boy, and Holling Clancy Holling, Lucille Webster Holling, Pagoo (just look at those illustrations).
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