The Illusion of Technique:
Dupre, Louis
shows that the senseless lashing-out of of disco's Studio 54 and the decadence of sit back. (Who wants to hear that, just a devoted "punks" is not only external, punk's CBGB's tends...
...integral part of the culture on which we world...
...Some have declared our age religious return to nature...
...Keep dancing, got Saturday Night Fever, why worry gesture without motion...
...Their sense of violence is that of pravity before the Hitler years and the ply "offered them something more...
...Has James himself ising hypothesis...
...conception of freedom is detached from understand it as part of the real world, Once the intrinsic bond between the sub- the will to action...
...Heidegger and James provide the inter- thought attained its ultimate consistency Even with his later, pluralistic theory pretative structure, but the message is before breaking down altogether as a of language Wittgenstein was unable to very much the author's own...
...The opulence America...
...From the start, Wittgenstein thought as well as the language of their seems to have been that rare phenomenon generation...
...In the end the lent...
...Father emphasis of the tradition in favor of a Commonweal: 344...
...It is first overcome the age-old schizophrenia of go about our concerns as if mystic and foremost acceptance, grace...
...it is, above all, an act faith must intrinsically verify the most the principal critic of our age and of its of faith, a profession of trust in the uni- vital and attractive life hypothesis...
...In revealing avail than Heidegger's pessimistic mained outside...
...Religious statement 'I believe' can only be uttered Gelassenheit, of surrendering resigna- surrender springs not from a "will to as a prayer...
...it is exclusively a matter of commanded by sheer resolve...
...when he returned, years later, he was a major philosophies...
...Impatient critics,who find no time In his early days with Russell at Oxford, anticipates the future but only speaks in for the distant and often indirect analyses nothing appeared clearer than that logical the present...
...But one who always redestructive subjectivism...
...human sexuality as clearly as it might is simply a witness to Being, and its have...
...he does not even constitutes no project of moral action for posed...
...The done in the light of Being itself...
...The mystic is not a pur- Sexuality, autonomy and God veyor of new information at all...
...Could it be Who cares about political and social empty, passionless aggression vented in that we in the "Happy Seventies" are apathy, corporate corruption, and the dark cafes...
...But does resignation suffice to an believe," but from a Godgiven faith Barrett, as the true believer he is, age that has become trammeled in its own enabling the believer to will...
...When you've Men," they indulge in "paralysed force, of a national crisis...
...Barrett concludes laconically: "His with that mystical world to be able to two evaluations confirm one another...
...Faith has cultural pendulum is bound to swing William James, that buoyant advocate of never found a friendlier observer than from soulless objectivism to vaporous or the moral will, may well be of greater William James...
...However, wager what was real faith...
...To him the only freedom...
...of a logic that could accommodate none happy days when James, Royce, Hock- of the questions that mattered most to ing and Santayana were shaping the Louis Dupr4i him...
...What was missing leading thinkers of our time to their final, controlling the world...
...How can analysis and critique of Wittgenstein...
...The Heidegger...
...We cannot will back a faith cratic tolerance we cannot reject the Plato...
...We ordi- that voluntas had for some medieval with difficulty...
...Yet technological age, couched in a literate, William Barrett soon he lost faith in the meaningfulness highly personal style, harks back to the Doubleday, $12.95, 359 pp...
...tion...
...In his early lift his thinking out of its positivist tracks With an assurance and perceptiveness Tractatus he culminates the attempt ini- and most of his followers continued to acquired by long and thorough acquain- tiated by Galileo and Descartes to con- work stolidly within the narrow confines tance Barrett pursues the ideas of three vert thinking itself...
...once the primary prayer and the ultimate that special world, but out of demo- Augustine and beyond him to the Eros of resolve...
...philosophical world model...
...That objectivist and devoid of inner life...
...The remaining question was: When we reduce the cosmos to a reflect...
...breath...
...the "Roman Catholic tradition on mystery, within which he seeks con- Eugene Fontinell human sexuality is impoverished betinuously to stand...
...not ambience the religious once drew know...
...This our culture and to regain a new sense of and mystic ism never existed...
...Certainly the surrender to cept of will has vanished from contempo- conversion that will liberate modern man rary thought, yet no other will allow us to requires a faith that possesses the passive We think of the mystic as one who escape our cultural predicament...
...It is an outbreak of World War II...
...in a language that remembers the past and pace...
...Wittgenstein has given us his let be by the naked will toy power, we 8 June 1979: 343 deprive human subjectivity of its very Being requires more than an aesthetic- mysticism, Barrett rightly maintains, substance...
...The first require- here...
...to an as well as the moral fiber needed to acreality, and brings us back bulletins older meaning of the will: to the meaning cept the grace of faith actively and often rrf information from there...
...The faith that is needed cannot be know for sure that he believes...
...He does not exactly ing, the will to let Being be...
...Still, since these reports come the will to power, but the will to prayer...
...there may be no more ion- I MUST confess that I approached this We are going to be shown, however, that portant task for our culture than to book with minimal expectations and this tradition is "a living tradition, ever rediscover the sense of the mystics...
...Indeed...
...a universal, strictly logical language for Being be permanent and yet be revealed But the result justifies the deliberate all that man can legitimately talk about...
...After all, true constitutes the core of all religion...
...Only through the adoption of an from such a different world, they do The voluntas obedientialis uniquely actively passive attitude can we hope to nor affect our life here, and we can balances activity and passivity...
...Like T.S...
...very similar historical phenomenon, zens took their own lives in the jungles of Most punks, however, are only namely the rise of German cabaret de- Guyana, all for one individual who simposeurs...
...This con- knows the difference...
...the cornered, frightened animal...
...Yet truth "by conquest and rape...
...Such a method takes time and then to subject it to logical proce- such a justification, in the end, must be and the reader has completed nearly one- dures of analysis and new syntheses...
...What Barrett modestly an- among human beings-a genuinely relinounces as "a sketch toward a history of gins of the modern concept of science gious personality...
...He does not...
...James reduced oped through Western history Heideg- James's moral will is far more than ethi- faith to a real wager...
...We shall have to live mystic's reports of it out of hand: He does not connote self-assertion and dom- back into that way of'being in whose may be telling the truth, for all we inance, but love and acquiescence...
...This is particularly true on the How must we conceive of the world in purely objective realm open to technical subject of technology...
...With characteristic philosophy in our century" presents, in and of its philosophical revisions the honesty he withdrew from the fact, a critical interpretation of the cul- critique remains almost inevitably within philosophical enterprise altogether and tural drift of our age in the light of its the perimeters of technological thought...
...Hut clearly appears in the mystical life, but Being...
...Such a faith constitutes at nary mortals do nor have access to philosophers, which goes back to St...
...William A SEARCH FOR MEANING Mathematicus=a book as notorious for Barrett's thoughtful reflection upon our IN A TECHNOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION what it omits as for what it includes...
...But prephilosophical intuitions, and then realm from all subjective involvement that fact itself needs to be justified and moves beyond...
...central teachings to the goodness of particular occult matters ref facr...
...into a technique for of his early program...
...empathy ity, or of the cult of power...
...Perhaps the will, at its deepest, that has been lost...
...verse that can be completed only in reli- the believer does not bank on some promNeeded is a return of freedom to Be- gious surrender...
...cause of certain historical distortions...
...Such a return grasped the full extent of what he pro- know what he believes...
...casts some reflection upon his underject and its world has been severed, the In a time of urgent need the message of standing of religion as a whole...
...Pascal presented as a this process of detachment as it devel- critique of our present culture...
...Wittgenstein, With Wittgenstein technological changed man...
...That all explication must take place unproven assumptions, their ultimate ment had been to isolate an objective within language brooks no doubt...
...Eliot's "Hollow gliding merrily and blindly into the jaws dissolution of family life...
...Further, -The Illusion of Technique ing pages did little to raise my expecta- while Keane will reject the physicalist tions or challenge my prejudices...
...Keane would, of course, concede past of the Many fur a people who have SEXUAL MORALITY: church peccadillos: the Christian tradilost sight of the One...
...Without a solid order to make it accessible to this logical manipulation and we replace the will to understanding of the philosophical ori- apparatus...
...Reflection also has meanings into simple, unrelated units, to answer them in terms of a technique of a history, and that history has become an held the key to the understanding of the thinking must miss their point altogether...
...this mentality is precisely what is likely to miss the whole point about mysticism...
...A CATHOLIC PERSPECTIVE tion had not always "argued from its bring forward any new beliefs about Philip S. Keane, S.S...
...Turn the volume up to ten and about the Sunday Morning Migraine...
...How third of the book before he realizes that young Wittgenstein experienced no must Being be understood to allow comhe is dealing with more than yet another doubt about the possibility of discovering munication within language...
...To him the act of ger, the philosopher of Being, became cal determination...
...The open- open to better expression...
...Why should he seek to multiply the items...
...Who wants to hear that, just a devoted "punks" is not only external, punk's CBGB's tends to remind one of a few months back, 911 United States citibut self-destructive as well...
...Clearly, those are not quesof their great predecessors usually end up atomism, the divisibility of complex tions of logical method and any attempt paying for their haste...
...undoubtedly a few prejudices...
...surrender is itself the fruit of the moral James, despite his life-long, serious Others speak of the triumph of subjectiv- will-but of this Heidegger remains si- interest, could not feel enough...
...Books: BEING & THE WILL 70 PRAYER A WELL-WRITTEN book in philosophy TEE ILLUSION OF TECIUIIUE: answer in the Tractatus Logicohas become a rare surprise...
...surrender of Heidegger's Gelassenheit, has entry to some special sphere of "Perhaps we have to reach back...
...He Paulist Press, 58.50, 236 pp...
Vol. 106 • June 1979 • No. 11
