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idealism, a,t least in any of the forms we have known it, to be a poor match for the present tough and hard-nosed generation. He seems to assume that I am an exponent of idealism without reservations. And he also reads into idealism more theism than is actually in the philosophy. If Mr. Holmes is not acquainted with it, I would refer him to my article, "Idealism in Education Toi10 day," chapter 48 in Readings in the Foundations of Education, Commitment to Teaching, Volume II, edited by James Stone and Frederick W. Schneider (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1965). This was first published in a special issue of School and Society devoted to philosophy of education. (Volume LXXXVII, Number 2145, January 17, 1959)
E. The
F.,
KAELIN
Florida
State
University,
EXISTENTIALISM by
VAN
Harper
and
CLEVE
Row,
on
IN
EDUCATION
MORRIS
New
York,
1966
Professor Morris, amateur existentialist and professional educator, has put together this little booklet (168 pp., index included) in the general format dictated by the series of which it is a member, the Harper's Series on Teaching under the general editorship of Ernest E. Bayles. According to the general editor, the purpose of the series is to investigate the possible impaer or impacts of a given philosophical movement on educational practice. Consequently, the brochure has two parts: the first, dedicated to an in4erpretation of the existentialist movement; and the second, to its possible impact upon educational theory. Since theory is a recommendation for practice, ,the editor's general intent and the author's specific performance may be taken as roughly equivalent. I say "roughly equivalent" because the two examples adduced by Professor Morris to exemplify the "existentialist" approach to eduear in practice are in the first instance the antithesis of existentialism, and in the second totally irrelevant to it. TWhat remains, then, is a purely theoretical discussion. SoeraCes, ff w e can believe his evangelists, was a noble and
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wise man; but let's face it: he couldn't hold a job in anybody's department of philosophy today; not because he had a thing against publishing his findings, but because it was true, he didn't know anything. His wisdom and his nobility stemmed from his admission of this fact. The trouble is, no one has ever really believed him; and his characteristic irony was so well known that he was taken to mean just the opposite of what he said. 111 The posing of questions ~o deflate the egos of sophists and to dispel the nimbus of omniscience ~hey pretended to have hovering over their heads was an effective technique, but make no mistake about it: the technique yielded no authentic knowledge, which, in the Platonic accounts of the matter moreover, would have to be of an essential character, whether that knowledge be of the natural world or of the human being who lived, moved and had his being within it. What the oracle meant by 'Know thyself,' I maintain, is quite distinct from what the existentialist means by his moral injunction to become an authentic self. Nietzsche, it will be remembered, scored Socratism for the death ,of Greek tragedy, and for reasons similar to the ones I have just mentioned; but Nietzsehe is one "existentialist" whose influence on the movement goes unnoted by Professor Morris. So much for the antithesis. As for the irrelevancy I may note the Summerhill experiments in non-education cited by the author. Existentialist freedom does not mean freedom from constraints or restraint; it means, rather, ~the ability to project an imagined end on the basis of a real situation, and therefore necessitates some knowledge of real human situations (the facticity ,of the human condition) and some ability to entertain imaginatively a modification of it. What are we to think of an educator whose only explanation for his disapproval of the conduct of a teen-age couple forrtieating in the hushes is that an unexpected pregnancy would bring disrepute .~o his school? Is it teaching responsibility to have the couple refrain for that reason? Freedom becomes responsible when its praetictioners are led to understand reasons for restrair~t; and ff I were in the bushesl Mr. Neill's unpious reproach would have had no effect at all on my behavior, especially since his doctrine of freedom would have taught me that I am free only when I experience no constraint or restraint. If these two examples are evinced to show the possibilities of existentialism in educational practice, it is difficult to understand how any school board will be influenced to give it a try. More serious, of course, since we are talking of theory and not
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practice, is the reader's befuddlement on how such examples could ever be conceived as representative of existentialism in the first place. To that question we now turn. The principal source used by Professor Morris is the early philosophical work of Jean-Paul Sartre, in particular L'Etre et le ndant, sub-titled by Sartre, "An Essay in Phenomenological On112 tology." The author understands the dependency of this text on the philosophical works of Kierkegaard and Heidegger, and does not hesitate to appeal ,to their authority as well as to that of existentialists of the second and third rank, whose authority is less convincing: Briber, Marcel, Tillich; Wild, Barrett, Harper and Olson. Missing from this pantheon, besides Nietzsche already mentioned, are Jaspers and Merleau-Ponty. Inclusion of the latter, at least, might have played down some the author's anti-science phobia and eliminated the necessity of his eating crow in the section called "D6tente and Division of Philosophic Labor," in which we are reminded that rationality, after all, is .one choice a free man may elect. And in some situations- such as the instruction of logic, chemistry or p h y s i c s - there seems to be no real alternative. The philosopher of science elects positivism, perhaps, owing to its claim toward constituting a rational explanation of natural phenomena; then he too is an existentialist unbeknownst to himself. A well man is a sick man ignorant of his condition; so said the famous Dr. Knock. If this is true, it is of no help to be told that philosophies may be recognized by c_heir tendency to "gather around a pole": I am taking the liberty in this chapter of lumping together Positivists, logical empiricists, symbolic logicians, and or&inary language analysts. I am well aware of their intramural differences. Also, not all of them are 'scientific philosopllers,' with whom I associate them. Nevertheless. it seems to me unarguable that 2there is a pole of ~thinking around which .they and the Experimentalists tend to gather; that this pole might be 'thought of as interpretive variations, of admittedly differing intensity and relevance, which are rung on the theme of the 'verifiability principle,' and .that this pole, however nebulous and impossible of exact definition, can be distinguished from the pole around which Existentialist thinkers do their work. (pp. 80-81, note; italics mine)
The word "unarguable" above is an enlightening ambiguity; for in the sense in which it was not intended, the statement is absolutely true. The case is unarguable. And it is unarguable owing specifically to the vaguity of the concept. Since so many things are agglomerated into a single class, it becomes impossible to find a counter-instance to some
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of the aims being made: where Sartre's authority leads us into pedagogical difficulty, we can blandly appeal to that of Marcel and Buber and still have a workable existentialist pedagogical theory. In spite of Professor Morris' statement, "We see, therefore, that there is no incongruity among Sartre, Buber and Marcel.", (p. 71) these three existentialists will have ,to feel as uncomfortable in the same bed as the theorists he refers to as 113 'scientific philosophers.' And the reason for this goes beyond a mere neglect of essential differences in points of view. An avowed enemy of crispness of thought and precieeness of definition, Professor Morris accepts false statements as true. When, for example, he interprets Sartre's statement, that Hell is other people, to mean that another person may objectify me, and thus pose limits to my own transcendence, he states that this is not necessarily the case. In attempting to make Sartre appear more cheerful, he states, But ~this does not mean that a n o t h e r subjectiv}ty always does this to me. It does n o t rule out the possibility t h a t another subjectivity could actually
encounter me as a subject1 (p. 70) But in so doing, he is expounding a psuedo-Sartre, having no relation to what the real Sartre wrote as a necessary relation of conflict be,tween two transcendenees. With respect to the actual other, I am either a transcendence transcending or a transcendence transcended: a subject for whom the other is an object, or an object for the subjectivity of the other. And he forgets to no,te, perhaps because it is injurious to his thesis, that the only way out of this situation is ,the development of the "techniques of language." This material is, however, to be found in a discussion of facticity, under the general head of My Fellow Man. It would nevertheless be useless to stress .one such example as a case against the worth of the book. But multiply this one case by the agonizing number of half-truths and outright howlers in the text, and a convincing argument could be made that the book merits committing to the f l a m e s - or at least that it is not to be required reading for any man, woman, or child. I suspect, at any rate, that no professional philosopher will read beyond the silly remarks made anent t h e dialectical stlbtlety of the Cartesian cogito argument, .on pages 12 and 18 of the text. Sartre himself accepts Koestler's statement that the T is a grammatical fiction: ff anyhing, a transcendent object, and not a subject at all. Were it not an outright misunderstanding of the text, the vagueness of the exposition would be at fault: the central concept accepted by Professor Morris as the definitive pole around
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which the Existentialists group themselves is "subjectivity." This was true of Kierkegaard, but not of Sartre and Heidegger: the central concepts for the one are conscience and transcendance, and for the other Dasein, Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit. Both these men were devising a method of analyzing human conduct which avoided the epistemological dualism .of subject and object 114 which was historically the cause of the poor state of existential analysis in the first place. Moreover, both Sartre and Heidegger, for their interest in method, would appear to have as much reason to be associated with the "scientific" philosophies as the Experimentalists, whose only inadequacy, we are told, was to have accepted the a priori of the method of science. What Professor Morris calls "the Experimentalist's quiet, unobtrusive 'escape from freedom'" could equally well be applied to the work of Sartre and Heidegger, since each was applying the phenomenological method to the questions of ontology. Once more, the analysis fails for the lack of a clear distinction to be drawn. What is one to think of a book which equates '~eing" with "existence" and "reason" with "rationality" and intelligence. Certainly, if one is led by such quixotic association of terms to accept the following as a valid piece of reasoning, . . . if m a n is a rational animal, it m u s t follow that h e inhabits a ratioiaalizable world; the existence of a reasonable being in a reasonless universe is a contradiction in terms. (p. 34)
one is sure to be misled. How is one, to react to Professor Morris' belief that existentialists, as a group or individuals speaking for themselves, hold that "existence" is a predicate? It may come as a surprise to him that at least Sartre and Heidegger agree with Mr. Hook, who most assuredly knows why it cannot be so. considered. The counter-examples adduced by Professor Ebersole are simply not examples of (the non-existent) existential predicate; oranges exist; letters exist; copies exist; people e x i s t - all are legitimate uses of the word "exist," but in none of the uses is existence a "predicate" which in any way qualifies the conception of the subject. This is Kant's argument against Anselm, and it is still valid. To claim otherwise is to misunderstand the notions os either "existence" or "qualifying predicate." Interpretations and refutations of Anselm's argument can be made to make sense only in the epistemologica] framework in which it was cast. If we destroy the substantive character of subjects and the "perfections" of predication, neither the argument nor its refutations succeed in their specious claims. For the existentialist, whenever
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the subject of a sentence is personal, it cannot be adequately fixed by any essential determination, and therefore presents no conceptions which could be modified by any qualifying predicate. It is for this reason Sartre uses the verb "exist" transitively, as when he says, "I exist my pain" or "I exist my body." Let Professor Morris contemplate Heidegger's "Das Wesen des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz," and he will find three 115 nouns substantive roughly equivalent to a word like our 'being' and yet not for that reason the same. Sartre contemplated the expression seriously; and, ff we can believe Heidegger, came up with the misleading paraphrase: "Existence precedes essence." Not because Sartre misunderstood the concept of human existence - h e borrowed that from H e i d e g g e r - but for misinterpreting the notion of essence in the standard scholastic sense. Whom are we to believe? Both, if we are looking for an interpretation of the meaning of human existence from a uniquely defined point of view; and neither, if each is to be considered a spokesman f o r what Professor Morris, using his method of association of ideas, calls "the Existentialists." It is tempting to go .on indefinitely, but readers do have a limited span of attention. Allow me therefore a last philosophical criticism. It is Professor Morris' belief that the "verifiability principle" of the scientific philosophers is violation of itself. He fails to realize that there exists a logical "fifth amendment" against selfincrimination. Bertrand Russell pointed out that paradox (of a strictly logical nature) results if we allow the claims of statements to be applied to themselves, and he developed the theory of types to try to avoid such paradoxes. This is one reply to the charge that the verifiability principle is itself not verifiable (in the sense specified by the principle). Another reply would have given Professor Morris a more reasoned decision for announcing that the principle itself is adopted only on faith. It consists in pointing out that principles are not verified in the same manner as statements: to use a Kantianism once more, they are verified pragmatically, according to the success with which they regulate .our reasoning: so our faith in the principle is not the blind faith of a baseless choice; it is, however, a pragmatic decision to regulate our meanings in one way rather than another. And the point of the existentialist revolt against "rationality" is the claim that this decision does not work when the object of our inquiry is the human being. Sartre developed his psychanalyse existentielle and Heideg-
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get his Daseinsanalytik to establish a methodical handling of this deficiency; and the following is a grotesque caricature of their intent:
116
Freedom cannot be possessed. At rlais point Existentialism rests its case. Why? Because nothing rational can be said beyond this point. Reason is no longer relevant. For, even though love is impossible, it exists in the world! It is the wizardry of subjectivity in the world to be capable ~f possessing other subjectivity. Subjects do possess and belong to other subjects. And reason cannot account for it. Reason is neither adequate nor inadequate. It is totally irrelevant. (p. 76, first italics mine.)
The project of a possessive love is always possible, but must end in jealousy or in a final fit of frustration; for no subjectivity can be possessed by another; nor, if it could, should we call this "love." If existentialism has anything to say to contemporary educators, it will stem from its clearly delineated philosophical anthropology. We need not worry that no 'ought' follows from an 'is'; for what an adequate philosophical anthropology tells educators is not what ought to be done, but what might fruitfully be done: and on the basis of its knowledge claims, not of "the wizardry of subjectivity." Having reduced the import of existentialist philosophy to an analysis of "subjectivity," Professor Morris' account of the relevance of existentialism Co. education suffers all the weaknesses of an idealist approach to the subject. First of all, he gives no account or justification of physical education; nor is it apparent how he could. Like that of Deweyan experimentalism, the true educational value of (plienomenological) existentialism is its refusal to '%ifurcate" the universe of nature into the subjective and the objective. Consciousness, without a relation to a body or to the objects of nature intended by the body, simply does not exist; it would be, at best, a spook. A well-thought out existentialist philosophy of educatiton will not make this error of omission, and physical educators in this country have already begun adopting the phenomenological point of view. 1 For them, subjectivity can only be a delusion and a sn,are. A careful consideration of Morris' existentialist curriculum will make this point more apparent still. The sciences, natural and social, as well as mathematics and logic, he delivers over to 1See Maxlne Sheets, THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF DANCE (Madison, Wis.: U~niversity of Wisconsin Press, 1966.)
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"the scientific philosophers." He seems to think that there is no creativity in these fields, and that the only function of the educator in them is to pass along the facts. This is perhaps his greatest error, and suggests that he has been victimized by the snow-job of the two culture theory. He is likewise victimized by the assumption that, for an existentialist, a value has no relation to the facts of nature or life. It may, after all, be true that I 117 create a value by positing an end, and that this positing of an end makes clear both the obstacles and the means to realize that value; and it is precisely this last fact which indicates that a value must be considered as a future fact, one to be realized by my physical or intellectual activity, and one which must be reckoned with by my fellow man as soon as that future is surpassed toward the present. Creation, whether it be "scientific" or "artistic," is a phenomenon capable of existentialist treatment, and presupposes some knowledge of ends and of obstaclesmeans. When he does perceive that human freedom works itself out in such creative activity, Professor Morris fails to expolit the fact. He gives no description of the pedagogical manner in which the creative teacher is to draw out the creativity of the student. Socratic questioning alone will not suffice. Professor Morris merely states that this area of human education, dedicated to the realization of values, is of prime importance for existentialists. But then he stopped thinking. One would suppose from his remarks that there are no statable crfferia by which the teacher can lead the student to appreciate the actual value of his own artistic endeavors, and that this field is therefore open to the most utter form of permissiveness: an evident consequence of his assumption that values are somehow, for existentialists, only "subjective." For the phenomenologieal existentialist, values are neither subjective, nor objective; the distinction is inapplicable. A value unrealized can only be ,thought, that is true; but surely the business of education is to teach how a given value may be realized, and hence, be transformed into a fact. Freedom cannot be separated from faeticity and be anything but a solipsistic dream. Professor Morris has gone aground on the "reef of solipsism." The same remarks apply to the other areas of the curriculum Professor Morris takes to be a fruitful field of existentialist education. He mentions literature, especially drama or the theater, and all other "normative" areas of experience, where judgements of "good" and "bad" are implicit in the human appropriation of
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the passing scene. He isn't sure whether history is "normative" in essence or not; but that field, too, affords an example of how an individual reaction to a past event is capable of changing the "meaning" or that event, which, as an in-ffself, is only what it is. Let's begin with history. There are good reasons for not taking sides on this issue, since the voices of historians them118 selves do not rise in a consensus on the nature of their endeavor. Some claim scientific status, others humanistic or artistie. But no matter which, all are agreed that they are interested in the past as fact, that past values are embedded in this fact system, that this system may be described, and that, perhaps for any moment of time - that in which they are writing - the meaning of history can be determined. This does not mean, obviously, that the historian determines the meaning of history by his own personal evaluation. The patterning of historical events do that. What Sartre had in mind by saying that the "meaning" of the past event is not fixed is that man is an historical animal whose particular points of view taken on the past may motivate one human reaction rather than another, but that, whichever reaction is undertaken, the human subject reveals his own personal motivation by the ends which he chooses to pursue. If this were not the case, the Marxists would be entirely right: history would be ineluctably uni-directional, and there would be no need to be going through the elaborate system of Marxist "revisionism" Sartre has already engaged in. 2 Thus, the existentialist must point out that "the meaning" of even the past is an ambiguous concept. As the past, it is what it is (and this would have to be appropriated in the same way any other set of facts are to be appropriated); but as self-conscious and free moral agents of the present, men are in a position to continually re-evaluate the significance of the past for present behavior. And this latter is the only aspect of history Professor Morris is interested in. Once again, he is mute on how the student is to be taught- how this re-evaluation of the past is to be made. The problem is the same as with the teaching of the creative arts. As for literature and the drama, Professor Morris' comment on how Hamlet might be taught is in itself sufficient criticism of the theory he is expounding: Shakespeare's Hamlet, a perennial figure, comes immediately to mind. It is a work in which the agonies of personal defiinition make a persistent whisper to the student: "What would you have done?" Wherever ethical questions are 2 See Jean Paul Sartre, CRITIQUE DE LA RAISON: DIALECTIQUE. Vol. I, (Paris: Galllmard, 1960).
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raised for v~hich convenient precedents in present-day experience are not available - - t h e r e one will find the kinds of literature capable of arousing the existential awareness of the learner. (pp. 126-27)
Of course, while the student is busy trying to decide what he would have done in Hamlet's predieament he fails to perceive precisely what Hamlet did do. And this fact is necessary for an understanding of the play. Using literature in this sleazy moral- 119 istic way is not to teach literature existentialistieally; it is not teaching literature at all: it's using it for a nonaesthetic purpose. Literature can be and sometimes is taught aesthetically. We come at last to the basic mis-interpretation of Professor Morris' whole project. It is the business of education to produce an authentic person in an authentic society. This might very well be the ease; but ff so, all teaching is the teaching of morality, and there are exister~fialistie and non-existentialistic ways of achieving this end. And ignoring all f a c t s - of the sciences and of the h u m a n i t i e s - and redu.eing all values to empty thoughts is certainly the most non-existentialist manner of achieving the existentialist end I can conceive ,of. Dewey was right: a project of a value becomes meaningful (or effective) when the obstacles to the achievement of that end are transformed by activity into a means or medium for its realization. Whoever reads this book, be he existentialist or "scientist," will reject the reduction of the entire edueational process to the single minded purpose of moral edueation. The virtual destruction of literature, history, the sciences and logic is too much to pay for so questionable an end. And how does one teach a foreign language existentialistieally? Certainly not by allowing students to associate any meanings to any words. Educational theory is Babel enough already. In sum, it is hard to imagine who will execrate the book more, scientific philosophers or existentialists.
VAN
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HEPLY
MORRIS'
TO
E.
F.
KAELIN
Yes, I am an amateur Existentialist and my profession is education. I am an amateur in the literal s e n s e - a lover of Existentialist ideas. May I never become a "professional" Existentialist, whatever that might be.
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The foregoing review has made some interesting and valuable points, especially those relating to the concept of transcendence, the problem of epistemological dualism, and the difficulties I encountered in drawing the .contrast between scientific and Existentialist thinking. It would have been rewarding to ,diseuss these ideas at some depth for honest exchange always 120 helps understanding. However, the review taken in its entirety is written in a manner which discourages any efforts at dialogue:, by which I specifically mean the following: 1. The review blatantly misrepresents the arguments in the book. I t e m - The review implies that I have erroneously equated Socrates' "Know Thyself" with the Existentialist's concern for the authentic self. On page 185 of the book, I specifically caution the reader against such an equation, and my discussion of Socrates as a pedagogical paradigm on pages 136 and 187 is developed around a different feature of his method. I t e m - The review claims that I have offered Summerhill as a supporting illustration because I am under the misapprehension that Existentialist freedom means freedom of constraints or restraint. On pages 149 and 150, I specifically state that it is not the freedom from authority but the freedom to develop personal responsibility :at Summerhill which suggests its appropriateness as an example. I t e m - The review implies that my statement that "there is no incongruity among Sartre, Buber, and Marcel" refers to their entire thought. On page 71, I specifically apply this summary only to .the three men's conception of "the other," and in this context it is correct. I t e m - T h e review implies that by the phrase "baseless choice" I mean 'q)lind faith." On pages 41 to 45, I specifically explain that a baseless choice is not blind; it is merely a choice for which no further reasons can be adduced. It is the point in our thinking where the giving of reasons necessarily must come to an end. For a scientist to choose rationality .or for a Kantian to "verify" the verifiability criterion by pragmatically seeing how successfully it regulates our reasoning is not to have done anything blindly, but merely to have reached this point in his thinkhag, namely, that there are no further reasons to justify the desire to be rational. I t e m - The review spends nearly a page objecting to a footnote in which I ask the reader to forgive an unavoidable
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oversimplification in treating the scientific philosophers and the Existential philosophers as polarized around two different sets of interests, the complaint being that this oversimplification agglomerates the individuals at either pole. The passages that follow the footnote (pp. 80-95) are intended to explore the different sets of interests and not the intramural differences within each camp. The review intentionally misunderstands the appro- 121 priateness of the cautionary footnote for this purpose. I t e m - Objection to the footnote mentioned above is made by citing a passage nine pages earlier (p. 71) to which the footnote obviously did not refer. I t e m - The review charges me with assuming that, for an Existentialist, a value has no relation to the facts of nature or life and that values can be reduced to empty thoughts. The passages in the book specifically devoted to values (pp. 86-45 and 117-20) and the remainder of the general thesis argue: precisely the opposite, namely, that values are generated out of a lived life of some historical person, that they arise out of a situational involvement with the real, factual world, and, that they, far from being empty, constitute a person's individual project, the very "density" of his selfhood. 2. The review determinedly refuses to understand the author's purposes: I t e m - The review condescendingly asserts that no professional philosopher will read the book. This comes as no surprise to the author; the book was not intended for professional philosophers. I t e m - The review expresses doubt that any school board would give Existentialism a try. The book was not intended for school boards and was not written as a manifesto for school reform. I t e m - The review recommends that the book not be considered required reading. The book was not intended to be required reading for anyone. I t e m - The review expresses surprise that the book contains no discussion of physical education. The sketch of curricular ideas on pages 128 to 129 was not intended to be an exhaustive summary of every subject taught in the present-day school. I t e m - The review entire, considering the technical niceties of its points, appears to be dissatisfied that the book (a) did not include everybody, (b) did not quote from all of the big chiefs, (c) ,did not delineate every Existentialist idea, (d) did not make carefully nice distinctions between every position taken
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by every Existentialist thinker. This dissatisfaction would have been justified if the book were written as a recondite dissertation, a precious piece of academic esoterica to 'be published as a dreary monograph by some university press and consigned immediately to the second basement of the university library stacks. The book, alas, was written to be read. 3. The review is obsessed by the compulsion to find petty 122 and petulant fault: I t e m - Instead of dealing with their arguments, the review tries to brush off some of the book's sources as "second and third rank." I t e m - A lengthy footnote is quoted in order that a single word within it can be singled out, twisted in meaning, and turned into a debater's pun. I t e m - The review solemnly alleges that a significant distinction is to be drawn between the phrases "what ought to be done" and "what might fruitfully be done." I t e m - The review deliberately misses the point of page 94 so that it can make a "wisecrack" about Dr. Knock. 4. The review is repeatedly mistaken on points of substance which it employs as putative supports for its criticisms: I t e m - The review states that Nietzsche scored Soeratism for the death of Greek tragedy "for reasons similar to the ones I have just mentioned" (e.g., that Socrates really didn't know anything). Nietzsche's reasons for blaming the death of Greek tragedy on Socrates had little to do with the Athenian's knowledge or lack thereof; they were based on the claim that Socrates' m a x i m s - "Virtue is knowledge; all sins arise from ignorance; only the virtuous are h a p p y " - a r e fundamentally optimistic and that .optimism is the undoing of the tragic element. (see The Birth of Tragedy, XIV) I t e m - The review states that the verifiability principle is rendered safe from itself by the logical "fifth ammendment" provided by Russell's theory of types. The theory of types does not render any proposition safe; all it does is to refer the verification of a statement in one language to statements of a higher class in an as yet undiscovered recta-language, and they in turn to statements in a recta-recta-language, thus leading to the familiar frustrations of infinite regress and leaving the verifiability principle still vulnerable. Russell himself admitted this. Item - The review asserts that the central concept for Sartre was not "subjectivity" but conscience and transcendence. As a m a t t e r of fact Sartre had virtually nothing to s a y about "con-
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science." His ontological case was built around the concept of consciousness; I have employed the notion of subjectivity to help the non-specialist student to recognize the appearance of intentional, i.e., phenomenological, consciousness in his own life. As an introductory concept, subjectivity may be considered the beginning existential awareness, i.e., a being's awareness of his own being, in other words, the primitive instance of personal con- 123 sciousness. I have deliberately used this term because I consider it important to have the reader awaken to this awareness immediately, so that he may better participate in the book's subsequent discussion, not as a mind soaking up subject matter but as a personal participant in the learning process. I t e m - The review rejects the argument that scientific philosophers and Existential philosophers are concerned with different sets of interests and address themselves to different kinds of problems. This is an astonishing claim. Virtually the entire history of Anglo-American vis-a-vis Continental philosophy since World War II has been influenced by this growing separation. I t e m - The review states that the book's de-emphasis of the sciences in the curriculum must be due to a C.P. Snow-job. As a matter of fact, this argument has nothing whatsoever to do with Snow and the two-culture theory. Rather it is based on Sartre's well-known concept of "the serious attitude," that is, the ~endency to attribute more reality to the world than to oneself. Science is the epitome of the "serious attitude." I t e m - The review implies that there are statable criteria by which teachers can lead students to certain appreciations. In Existentialism, there are no such criteria. The only criteria available are those which the student appropriates for himself. Given the above, I feel that there would be little point in further dialogue.
