Why a Idea Leader Turned to Philosophy While in Prison

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Malcolm X, the 1960s American Black Rights activist, was born in the ghetto and barely went to school. Even so his views were sought by earth leaders and his book. The Autobiography of Malcolm 10, is deservedly a archetype work of political literature. Oh, and it has sold over six million copies. over a million in the starting time 18 months...

How he got from insignificance to earth fame in a few fast-paced years is an amazing story, but at the heart of it is a small-scale collection of books that he came across in a prison library while serving a sentence for larceny.

Because Norfolk Prison Colony, a progressive-minded facility in Massachusetts, had a remarkable feature: a very substantial library, hundreds of erstwhile volumes, donated by a millionaire named Parkhurst. History and faith had been his special interests and the library'southward books reflected that.

All the same, when Malcolm X arrived at the prison, he could barely read. So he taught himself, very slowly, by looking up about very word in a kind of illustrated encyclopedia. He says that he would spend days just reading the lexicon, and that he had never imagined that so many words existed! The word aardvark particularly stuck in his mind: a long tailed, long-eared burrowing African mammal' that eats insects.

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"...the books made the prison bars melt away."

Malcolm says the books fabricated the prison confined melt away. He had never been so free as he was at that place in that prison. In fact, he would read so much that the prison routine of "lights out" began to enrage him. But he discovered he could read secretly by the light of the corridor. He slept no more than 3 or iv hours a night from so on.

The start books and the ones that impressed him most were collections of scientific and historical facts, called Wonders of the World, equally well as Will Durant's The Story of Culture, and H.G. Wells' monumental Outline of History. Black culture came with W.E.B du Bois' Souls of Black Folk, and Carter G. Woodson's Negro History. He also read nearly Gandhi's campaign to push the British out of India, and of the history of China and the opium wars, and the signs put upwards by the "savage, arrogant white man: Chinese and dogs not allowed." And he read Uncle Tom's Cabin, simply that was most the only novel that he did read.

Because above all, Malcolm explored philosophy.

From Nietzsche, Malcolm took the thought, key to his politics, that Christianity is a slave ideology, a organized religion fit but for slaves. Nonetheless, completely unlike Nietzsche, he and so presents Islam, instead, every bit a liberation theology.

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He says that of Western and Eastern philosophies he came to adopt the latter, seeing Western philosophy as essentially unacknowledged borrowings from the East—a view I have argued myself, to an equally deaf audience!—just his attempt to "Africanize" philosophy'southward history is forced: "Socrates, for example, traveled to Egypt," he said.

He recalls, rather randomly, the German philosophers Schopenhauer, Kant and Nietzsche simply chop-chop dismisses them, saying that they spent their time arguing over useless things, and probably laid the ground for the ascension of Hitler too. Spinoza impressed him though, all the more because he was black—a black Jew. But ultimately, he says, the whole of Western philosophy "...wound up in a cul-de-sac." A racist cul-de-sac adamant to hide the black man'due south greatness.

This view itself, though, draws on his prison house reading of those 2 historical surveys which came with a grand, philosophical sweep. H. G. Well'due south A Short History of the Earth includes a very subversive account of "the existent Jesus" while Will and Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization is a monumental, permit u.s. not say hubristic, enterprise to offer a "philosopher'south perspective" on the world and everything in it.

"...Malcolm 10 had a 'thirst for truth' and that he...constitute satisfaction in philosophical writing more than in any other kind of texts."

What we can depict from all this is that Malcolm X had a 'thirst for truth' and that he seems to accept, at least to start with, found satisfaction in philosophical writing more than in whatever other kind of texts. It is remarkable to see that he sought to bring some of the driest, most abstract ideas into modern political debates.

And, every bit his ghostwriter, Alex Haley, makes subtly clear, Malcolm Ten always retained something of a philosopher'southward mindset. If in public he was non prepared to admit whatever doubts, in private he best-selling gaps in his theories and uncertainty equally to their foundations.

In his own personal epilogue for the autobiography' Alex Haley writes that any interesting book that Malcolm X read could get him going about his love for books. "People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book," he writes, and returned again and once more to the books he had first come beyond while in prison. Books like the newly published The Loom of Language by Frederick Bodmer, which explains where words originate and come from.

Actually, speaking of Alex Haley, he loved stories, especially moral tales course the Bible and adventure ones. His grandparents house, where he lived as a young child, "was the only one in Henning with a library, and it was well stocked. A blackness traveling bookseller would come around, particularly in the Fall, when people had money from the cotton fiber harvest," notes Robert Norell in his biography of Haley, calculation that books usually cost one dollar, except if they were bibles. Bibles were more than expensive.

Martin Cohen is a full-fourth dimension writer specializing in explaining complex topics in a direct and lively fashion. His latest projection, I Call up Therefore I Eat: the Word's Greatest Minds Tackle the Food Question, represented by literary agent Mark Gottlieb, is a book about nutrient and why no one—governments, doctors or fifty-fifty celebrities—actually seem to know even the truth near it.