Volume 31, Number 18 · November 22, 1984
Design for Living
By Charles Taylor
The Thread of Life
by Richard Wollheim
Harvard University Press, 288 pp., $20.00
Richard Wollheim has written a highly original book, which addresses the most basic questions about ethics and the ends of life. He deals with fundamental issues about what it means to be a person. But he takes up these issues from an unusual angle: what does it mean to 'lead the life' of a person? The 'simplest way' of expressing the scope of his inquiry, Wollheim says, is that 'there are persons, they exist; persons lead lives, they live; and as a result, in consequence—in consequence, that is, of the way they do it—there are lives, of which those who lead them may, for instance, be proud, or feel ashamed. So there is a thing, and there is a process, and there is a product.' And he adds: 'The central claim of these lectures is the fundamental status of the process. In order to understand the thing that is the person, or in order to understand the product that is the person's life, we need to understand the process that is the person's leading his life.'
Review, 5716 words
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