The latest paperback release from Koichiro Kokubun, author of the half-million-copy bestseller The Ethics of Boredom!
A philosophy for a new era, seeking true freedom through the clue of the "middle voice" — neither active nor passive.
Falling for someone. Is that active or passive? You didn't decide to fall in love, nor were you forced into it. A language that recognizes only "doing" and "being done to" cannot even account for such an everyday occurrence. To explore what lies beyond that langua...
More readable pop philosophy
This book is a popular philosophy exploration of the idea that the loss of the grammatical "middle voice" present in Proto-Indo-European and down as far as classical Greek has resulted in our having an "active versus passive" paradigm that affects how we think about ideas like free will and responsibility.
A lot of the early part of the book is devoted to what the middle voice actually is as a piece of grammar and how it disappeared. I think this is important: as the author says, if you treat "middle voice" as a mystical lost concept without engaging with the linguistic history then your argument is built on very shaky foundations. But if you don't enjoy reading about language (including discussion of example sentences in Greek and Latin) then you might not like this book.
Overall I enjoyed this but I think I would suggest the author's other book 暇と退屈の倫理学 as the better place to start.