Volume 3, Number 1 · August 20, 1964
Right-wing Existentialists
By Henry David Aiken
Creative Fidelity
by Gabriel Marcel, translated, with an Introduction, by Robert Rosthal
Farrar, Straus, 61 pp., $1.95 (paper)
The Existential Background of Human Dignity
by Gabriel Marcel
Harvard, 188 pp., $4.50
Daniel: Dialogues on Realization
by Martin Buber, translated, with an Introduction by Maurice Friedman
Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 144 pp., $4.00
In our tradition, philosophy is commonly regarded as an attempt, however fatuous, to 'explain' the nature of things. Such a view is illusory. Every great historical philosophy, at its inception, has been first of all a protest against the way things are. And the deeper, the more 'metaphysical,' a philosophy, the more radical its protest and the more sweeping, if also paradoxical, its demand for change. Nor is this generalization any the less true because some philosophers, such as Plato, have believed that the only effectual change which men can make is a transformation of their way of looking at the world. The situation is no different now; only the perspectives of legitimacy—or 'common sense'—and hence the direction of philosophical alienation, have shifted. For two and a half millenia, the controlling popular culture remained overwhelmingly sacerdotal, at once authoritarian and sentimental, incurably prone to allegory, myth, and supernaturalism. Throughout this period, accordingly, philosophy constantly served as a stalking-horse for 'reason' and 'enlightenment' and as broodmare to the sciences, preening itself at the same time as a foundational super-science in its own right. Now, however, that it has become evident even to generals of the army that the controlling activity of the human mind is positive science and science itself the paragon of reason, not only the philosophical defense—or 'explication'—of science, but even its advocacy of the autonomous intellectual authority of reason, have become works of purest supererogation. On the contrary, the primary human problem for the once incurably autistic animal is to persuade himself that he is more than a datum, an object of inquiry, a material for technological manipulation.
Review, 4581 words
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