With the Naked Eye

With the Naked Eye
Karel Sloane
PublishAmerica
ISBN: 1592862209
Non-Fiction, Spirituality, Philosophy
By Matt Rosencrance

The title of Karel Sloane’s With the Naked Eye sheds great insight into the book’s content. The naked eye of course is aided neither by any quantitative standards nor is it restrained or supported by any tested knowledge. Being purported as a philosophical treatise of some sort, this unconventional approach is rife with parallax.
Sloane takes the reader through a series of thought processes that marvel at facts presumably remembered from a sophomore biology class or tidbits harvested from an internet search engine. The strategy of nearly every essay is to offer a journey in which the narrator reacts to her environment with varying and sometimes inexplicable combinations of awe, woe, satisfaction and trepidation. The aforementioned facts are then strewn amongst these emotional musings not so much as to support them, but simply for the sake of inclusion.
Despite the claims to metaphysical interpretation on the back cover, the text offers a very physical examination of the modern world delivered in a style more like the flighty and largely disconnected memoir of a would-be New Age guru. For there to be a ‘meta’ attached to her physical survey, there’d have to be some kind of explanation beyond nature. The closest her text comes to actually doing so is a chapter with recurrent ponderings into the languages of animals and inanimate objects. Understanding these New Age leanings, the active reader is left to discern whether she’s speaking metaphorically or if the author might be putting forth a real hypothesis into actual phenomenon, for which strangely no thought is invested into supporting why the reader should accept that mountains speak to each other or anything else.
These qualitative thought processes are worked out ad absurdum before and long after she poses the question on page 29, “Just how much respect do I have for a carton of milk?” In conclusion, this book reads as if one of Rousseau’s less cognitively rigorous hangers-on had awoken in the 21st century to revel in untested New Age solipsism.