Volume 1, Number 12 · February 6, 1964
Working Up The Absurd
By Henry David Aiken
Problematic Rebel
by Maurice Friedman
Random House, 480 pp., $7.95
Sooner or later, in our excessively redactive age, it was bound to happen. Unfortunately it is this long book which, like a shadow in a hall of mirrors, marks the final disappearance of a great subject. The subject itself is the 'image of man' to be found (to readapt a convenient phrase) in 'the crisis literature' of the modern age from Dostoevsky and Melville to Kafka and Camus and in the crisis theology and philosophy from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Martin Buber. Out of these, particularly as they appear in the fictional works of the first four, Professor Friedman (who, among other things, has done extensive translations of Buber's works, as well as a book on Buber's thought) hopes to fashion a master 'depth-image,' as he calls it, in which modern man may find, at last, his full reflection. In a mixed mode all his own which runs together the extreme individualism of existentialist 'anthropology' with the holism of much traditional ethics and the artistic ideal of imagist criticism and aesthetics, Mr. Friedman wishes to make 'a decisive break with the universal 'human nature' of earlier philosophy and attain a picture of man in his uniqueness and his wholeness…' In order to do this, so he alleges, 'one must move from concepts about [sic] man, no matter how profound, to the image of man.' How the philosopher-critic is to do this he does not explain; in fact what he says on this score suggests that it is impossible. 'Our primary source of understanding man,' so he says, 'is not (for example) Berdyaev's systematic presentation of Dostoevsky's thought on man, but Dostoevsky's novels themselves with their completely unsystematic, paradoxical, contrary, but infinitely rich presentation of individual men.'
Review, 1575 words
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