Hard to dismiss on many levels.... - Rated 
John Gray makes - in my opinion - a convincing argument for accepting the improbablity which most of us face: that of ever knowing the "truth". You can bet your life (I don't exaggerate) that the likes of Dawkins et al are way off the mark in their assumed position of authority when it comes to third person verification of the fundamental properties of reality. Equally, philosophy is limited (though it's far more self-conscious of the fact!) in its ability to make any assertion "absolute". Religion/Theology is likewise destined to suffer the fate bestowed upon it by history - namely that of being utterly subjective in its origins.
So, barring a personal revelation of Eckhartian proportions (which is hard to imagine even with unflinching commitment), we, as individuals, are doomed to suffer the speculative and contingent "knowledge" which is offered up by science and philosophy. And this is where Gray's argument comes into its own.
Since we cannot know whether we know it all (or if we ever will - and this is often overlooked by presumptuous and overreaching "experts" like Dawkins), we must assume at best a provisional, contingent view of reality as a whole - including all possible paradigmatic visions (within reason, of course...) and including the acknowledgement that the origin of moral values is fundamentally contentious. So, Gray's assertion that a "spiritual life is a life without meaning" is not nihilistic, pessimistic or even hopeless, but genuinely agnostic and broad-minded. It's no accident that he falls upon Taoism in order to illustrate the futility in speculating about the nature of reality as a whole. Philosophy and science have long since failed to provide the "evidence" so sorely lacking in terms of anything "transcendent" or "spiritual", and yet science cites the advancement of humanity as being the ultimate goal while at the same time telling us that the universe and eveything in it will eventually be annihilated and that there is nothing beyond our limited physical existence and the illusory self which our organic brains create. Wonderful. Fills me with such joy and purpose.
I think, therefore, that John Gray's eventual suggestion that one can only find something approaching peace of mind (for he doesn't even advocate this!) in understanding the arrogance with which we humans view the totality of all that exists - and in admitting that that arrogance is ludicrously misplaced - is deeply sane and, indeed, is the only sensible proposition barring the kind of aforementioned personal revelation. I don't care whether his arguments are backed up with detailed and fastidious logic or not (they would only be proven flawed in time anyway) - the fact of his clear-sightedness remains. For this reason alone (and there are others) I applaud the fact that someone in John Gray's position is writing in such broad terms about such fundamentally unsettling and challenging issues.
A timely reminder that self-consciousness and presumption are endemic to the species as much as they are individual flaws.
* Post script update: In a world beset by hopeless postmodernism, unsettling neuroscientific discoveries and band-aid style spirituality, returning to this book as a source of reassurance that the illusion we call an individual life is not something we need challenge too squarely is deeply pacifying. Even when one finds oneself questioning this seemingly paradoxical and counterintuitive attitude it's genuinely refreshing to fall back on this excellent work as a uniquely human and ingeniously artful way of tempering the perpetual scab-picker which is thought. The search for truth ends here, and with it the need to qualify one's existence. Brilliant - wish I could edit my rating and give it 5 stars.
Very important book - Rated 
This book is brilliant.
His all too true for comfort veiws put humans in their place and his analysis of the world is excellent. Of course it has flaws and errors and i'm not saying he's completely right, but he still gives an incredibly accurate depiction and is a highly important book. Even if just to see another side of the argument you should read it. It will certainly change your mind about something if not everything.
Read this book!!!
Straw dogs or straw men? - Rated 
So much of this book consists of plainly falsifiable bald assertions that I find it staggering that the famous names writing the crits have been prepared to put their names to it, let alone gush over it in the way they have. It's frustrating, because a lot of the substance of what he says, in the sense that the orthodoxy he attacks is actually incoherent, is valuable, if not exactly new; unfortunately, he obscures it with bad argumentation and structure.
Gray states, for example, that we can have no coherent, consistent 'self' because all we are (in consciousness) is a disjointed group of memories, with nothing tying them together except the illusion of continuation, to which we are genetically pre-disposed. Fine, it's a theory, and not an unreasonable one. I'm not saying (and obviously couldn't say) that it's not right, but he tosses out as though it were self-evident, when it's really not; it could quite easily be the case that we do have a continuous consciousness from which our notion of a consistent self derives, but it's our memory which is inadequate and not our perception, meaning we only remember bits of it, rather than that it's actually disjoint. Meaning there is an easy possible counter-argument; meaning his baldness is just a little bit too bald for my liking, and I'm pretty bald.
I also don't like the way he talks about "the humanist view" or "humanism" all the way through the book without really setting up any terms. I don't recognise the viewpoint he attacks as being a consistently argued or known viewpoint; he seems to be tilting at windmills a lot of the time. I suppose the counter to this criticism would be that this is a book of reflections, aimed at the sort of intelligent yet perhaps not entirely considered reader whom Dawkins addresses in The God Delusion; unfortunately this book is classed as "Philosophy" (it says so on the back), and as such I'm afraid it just doesn't stand up.
Still, even if just a set of reflections, presumably if presented bound in one volume apparently presenting a particular view, they should be consistent? At one early point he claims that the idea of human progress is a myth, plain and simple, because due to the ever-shifting sands of DNA "humanity" doesn't really exist; later on, he takes for granted a reading of "progress" under which individual humans enjoy the benefits of flush toilets and medicines by virtue of the increasing pool of human knowledge. OK, obviously we can work out interpretations of these phrases in which they're not mutually exclusive - by watering down the strong, headline-grabbing claims, of course - but if it's a set of thought-provoking reflections, should we have to go to such lengths even to work out exactly what he's saying? And if it's a book of philosophy, isn't it supposed to be clear?
Something else that bugs me is that he doesn't put any references to the bibliography (e.g. "[12]") in the text under any of the many quotations peppering the text. All are listed in the bibliography, but I reckon he knows that those remain largely unconsulted anyway, and if he doesn't put references in then it's even less likely anyone will bother as they'd have to trace through the whole bibliography in order to do so. Of course he's covered himself, because he has put the bibliography in (right?), but even under a charitable interpretation it's extremely odd.
The first time round, I gave up after a couple of (I felt) inadequately argued passages; this time, I persevered and finished reading it because despite the many problems, there are some interesting thoughts in there. I'm glad I did, because the second half contains some interesting discussion about human ecology, but even there he seems simply to have found a couple of views which suit him and which he therefore repeatedly champions (in a remarkably similar manner to the way he claims the "humanists" champion what he challenges), holding up the authors he quotes as gospel, and because he attacks so often with assertion rather than argument, the overall impression is of rhetoric, even sophistry - or some pretty darn specious arguments, anyway.
Worth a read, if only to get you thinking clearly about how muddled Gray has managed to make his own moments of clarity.
Philosophy for a dark age - Rated
Reading this reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut's work.Straplines and short chapters. It would be easy to dismiss it as philosophy for the generation brought up for short attention spans, and needing ideas in "bite size" chunks.
But maybe this misses the point. Each aphorism is like a window opening, through which shocking light floods the dark room of consciousness, illuminating, and revealing things for what they really are.
The cumulation of his apparent common sense left me wondering if I was still the same creature which had opened the book at the start. Some of the views hit me so hard that I was forced to put the book down and take a breath.
Gray's sources are interesting; he quotes Conrad, Dostoyevsky, and Schopenhauer at length, and takes modernism to its extreme but logical point. At the same time he taps into the environmental catastrophe which seems to be moving away from our thoughts once again, citing Jeffers and Lovelock to show us that whilst we are but animals, the responsibility for ecological bankruptcy lies squarely with our species.
Against the backdrops of 9/11, the Iraq War,climate chaos, and (probable) Western financial ruin, this book is very much of its time. Gray captures the Zeitgiest masterfully.
A good splash. - Rated 
Like a few of the other reviewers here, I found myself for a while in the 'either or' camp with this book; loving it passionately or finding it a non-starter. In the end, it left me feeling indifferent. I kept waiting for the big revelation that is claimed elsewhere (or at least a modest one), but it never came. Instead, there was a lot of recycled material - good in this day and age, I suppose; but nothing that seemed to stack up against anything like close examination. For all his apparent rigour, Gray is free and easy in his use of big terms that just cry out for a bit of definition. Consciousness and unconsciousness. Language. Understanding. Christianity - which form? There's no attempt to qualify any of these or a hundred others.
How seriously can you take a book whose project is analysis, but which won't analyse its own terms of reference? This book has been billed as an essential companion to modern living, and an indispensable guide to modern thought. Accidentally spot on, if modernity consists in lazy thinking and polemic on the basis of half-understood source material. Given Gray's CV, he's obviously not poorly read; but that only makes it worse. It's down to length, I suppose, and commercial viability. Who reads The Republic on the bus? On the other hand, everyone can have a stab at 200 pages of rowdy, edited highlights, and can come away with some dinner party apercus and a handful of quotes to throw around. But this book is not the coherent, devastating thesis that is being claimed by apparently serious thinkers - would that it were. It's a rant, with about as much intellectual rigour as Naomi Klein exhibited in No Logo. Entertaining and provocative, as a good rant should be, but ultimately reminds you that it's not really doing anything much beyond drawing attention to its author.
As to answering the big questions, it doesn't. Which is a shame, as I get the feeling he could have a good go at at least one, had he not spread himself so thinly. Maybe, after a lifetime in the trade, he just wants a few quid and a bit of media attention, and is (understandably) bored with academic nitpicking, or scholarship; as you prefer.
So we are as unthinking or as thinking as animals (and certain organisms) - depending on which chapter you're on - part of the cycle of nature and just biding our time until we're wiped off the face of the planet. That's all taken as read, and no great revelation (cf. Book of Revelations, et al). But we do also - as well as eat, sleep, reproduce, covet each other's oxen and kill each other - demonstrably create things of beauty, fall in love, behave greatly, have meaning - in the sense that people love us, enjoy our company, remember us when we're dead. Albeit obviously edited by memory, however you define that.
If anything, my dead father is more meaningfully alive now than he was when he drew breath. But that's me doing what? Reacting to a subconscious trigger, responding to my social conditioning, or constructing meaning from snapshot fragments of things I never understood in the first place? I'm fine with all that. And I'm more than unconscious, reactive food for worms as well. Not vanity or an attempt to create meaning for myself - just the same mass of philosophically frustrating contradictions as everyone else. But hey, it was a good read.
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