This remarkably wide-ranging volume was penned by three Roberto Ungers: a poet-preacher, a philosopher, and a political theorist. The first Unger, an ardent Romantic, expounds a Promethean gospel which portrays humans as godlike rebels impatient of constraint. The second Unger, a pragmatist foe of the philosophia perennis, ponders abstruse topics in epistemology and metaphysics. The third Unger, a democratic experimentalist committed to transforming society, fulminates against the idea that our political structures are natural or necessary. A striking triumvirate, to be sure—but ambition and internecine strife threaten to tear it apart.

Billed as a “work of general philosophy,” The Self Awakened falls into two roughly equal parts. The first part (chapters 1–7) is the work of Ungers 1 and 2. The philosopher gets the first word in chapter 1, wherein a taxonomy of philosophical systems is set forth. Chapter 2 describes the so-called perennial philosophy as the product of parallel dichotomies: appearance and reality, sense and reason, time and eternity, action and contemplation, the many and the one. Chapter 3 hails pragmatism as a promising alternative, while proclaiming all extant versions untenable. Hence, we need a radicalized pragmatism, in which four themes—agency, contingency, futurity, and experimentalism—are given their due. After the Romantic conception of humanity as striving demigods is articulated in chapter 4—here Unger 1 takes center stage— Unger 2 returns in chapter 5 to wrestle with the riddles of epistemology and metaphysics. His main thesis is that our knowledge of nature is less perfect than our knowledge of culture. More philosophical speculations await the reader in chapters 6 and 7, which explore, respectively, time and the self. The focus of the book then shifts, as Unger 3 discusses how society might be different if it were inspired by the conception of humanity expounded by Ungers 1 and 2. Though shorter than what preceded it, this political portion (chapters 8–13) is singularly difficult to summarize. Imaginative but highly abstract and nuanced, Unger's radical program of social reconstruction cannot be described accurately except at length. Suffice it to say that many of his complex proposals subvert dichotomies enshrined in mainstream political discourse (e.g., between revolution and reform).

As this synopsis suggests, The Self Awakened is ambitious in a Shakespearean sense. The book overreaches hugely: in a mere 256 pages (no bibliography, no notes, no quotations), Unger tells us what he thinks about metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, religion, science, economics, art, mathematics, society, education, politics, consciousness, nature, human nature, genetic engineering, life, and love. In comparison, Plato's dialogues, Aquinas's summae, and Kant's Critiques all seem narrow in scope. Given the jaw-dropping breadth of Unger's brief book, it is hardly surprising that it contains little sustained and closely reasoned argument; after all, one does not star-gaze with a microscope. (Even the book's most elaborate philosophical set piece—the “antinomies” of time and objectivity [74–80]—seems more like an exhibition of rhetorical legerdemain than a rigorous demonstration.) The paucity of careful argumentation can also be seen as a consequence of Unger's failure to take alternative points of view seriously enough to want to refute them. Indeed, his lack of engagement with opponents real or imagined gives the volume an oddly solipsistic, self-enclosed feel—ironic, given its title.

All this points to a deeper problem: the tension between Ungers 1 and 2. Any philosopher who plays the poet-preacher runs the risk of sounding oracular, and Unger is no exception. Too often his prose is perfervid, bombastic, and melodramatic. It is also exasperatingly repetitive: key themes and claims are reiterated time and again, as if the incantatory power of emphasis somehow renders argument unnecessary and criticism impertinent. A striking example of this is Unger's insistence that we can become “more godlike” (44, 79, 109, 128, 130, 134, 143, 149, 150, 163, 181, 191, 206, 223, 226, 227, 229, 234, 236, 241, 246, 253, 256). Faced with this claim, any reflective reader— even a sympathetic one—will have questions. First, what can talk of our “divinization” mean in the context of Unger's philosophical framework? Not what it meant for perennialists such as Plato, Augustine, Sankara or Channing, since Unger asserts—again, repeatedly—that there is no other world than this (25, 65, 102). Are we to understand talk of our divinization as metaphorical, then? That may seem the most promising interpretation; but it is hard to reconcile with the idea that knowledge of ourselves, unlike knowledge of the world, is not “contaminated” or “tainted” by metaphor (72, 110). Second, why does Unger think we should understand ourselves as “godlike?” Is his proposal to be vindicated in purely pragmatic terms, that is, by its fruits or the practical consequences of its adoption? If so, he faces two obvious objections. First, why endorse this account of justification? Second, why suppose this self-image is the most fruitful available? As far as I can see, Unger does not give any of these questions the attention they deserve.

Another problem is Unger's curious relation to the tradition of pragmatism (2, 26, 28). The ideas of Peirce, James, and Dewey are reviewed cursorily, in a mere half-dozen pages (31–36). No mention is made of any post-Deweyan pragmatist—nor, astonishingly, of any living philosopher. The omission of Richard Rorty is particularly unfortunate: Rorty's range of concerns overlaps significantly with Unger's, so it would be worth knowing exactly where and why Unger thinks they differ. Furthermore, Unger's decision to keep his distance from the pragmatist tradition means that he fails to use some of the sharper dialectical weapons that tradition has forged. For example, when Unger concedes that we can only know the way the world appears to us (77), many pragmatists will complain that he has failed to extirpate the root of epistemological evil—namely, the wholesale contrast between the realms of appearance and reality. There is, moreover, an additional irony in this, since that time-honored bifurcation is a vestige of the very sort of philosophy—the philosophia perennis—which Unger repudiates. As this suggests, Unger may be nowhere near as philosophically emancipated as he supposes. In practice, his radicalized pragmatism may not prove quite radical—or quite pragmatic—enough.

Unger's decision to pose as a pragmatist strikes me as regrettable partly because it does him a disservice. In my opinion, it would be much more useful and illuminating to see him as a moralist in the tradition of Emerson. Both Emerson and Unger are buoyant optimists who preach the doctrine of “the infinitude of the private man;” both stress the epiphanic character of ordinary experience; both wage eloquent war against the tyranny of custom; both depict life as ceaseless process, as change without limit or end; and both shine when they eschew dialectic and simply speak their “latent conviction”—often in the form of memorable and arresting apothegms. In short, the best parts of The Self Awakened—the work of Unger 1—are, like the best of Emerson, simultaneously edifying and provocative, perceptive and hopeful.