The Planetary Man by Wilfrid Desan (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 249 Throughout the whole process of man becoming aware there is always another ego that plays an essential role in one's world becoming delineated both materially and formally. First, there is the mother who provides pleasure, security, and the capacity to overcome powerlessness. Here there is emotional empathy. The emotional state of the child is dependent upon the emotional state of the mother. The child is an awareness which is on the way to becoming an ego awareness; the process cannot come to be without the mother. There is an awareness of being in the world together with mother. From this first intentional horizon one proceeds to share a world with father, with teacher, etc. Each encounter of a "you" is always an encounter of a " you " who is older that I, one who opens one's intentional perspective and gives a different determination to one's world. In this context a child who is born must be viewed as an animal to be freed. The child grows in freedom as a result of the opening up of his horizons by the others he encounters. These relationships are rendered meaningful because one finds that faith in the " you " is always an accompanying datum in these cooperative acts of world consciousness. In this process it appears that I am always seeking a "YOU " which transcends all other " yous " that will render my understanding of the world complete. The question is "If the ' YOU ' does not exist, why do I continue to seek it "? The author accurately portrays the problem of intersubjectivity in the phenomenology movement and within that movement points to an interesting direction. However, whether he successfully solves the problem depends upon whether his parallel structures, etc., attain to an adequation of the mind to reality. St. John's University Jamaica, New York JosEPH J. CALIFANO The Planetary Man. By WILFRID DESAN. New York: MacMillan, 197Q. Pp. 880. $9.95. By author's admission this study is tentative, introducing a mode of conceptualizing man as participant or individualized humanity; this would be one way, at least, to phrase a notion that is rich and quite original, especially in its ethical implication. If theological thought of the season revolves around method as propaedeutic to further thought, it is refreshing to realize that method need not be developed solely from a critique of mind. Desan's work is a first effort at evolving a new dimension for Western thinking, one avoiding hurdles set up by traditional ontological, 250 BOOK REVIEWS ethical, and epistemological requirements. It is good to be reminded in this way that there are alternative approaches to reality, or advents to philosophy of man which do not consider-because they need not respectthe knowledge problem so obsessing thought in our tradition after Descartes and still, in phenomenological and neo-Thomistic circles, hampering new perspectives for our new problems. The author has been at his task for several years now, and half the present book, the part corresponding to an epistemology, has appeared previously. We must await still a third "volume" to complement the two triptych panels now available for viewing. As a search for a new definition of man, as individual existing consciously with others, Desan's thought proceeds from a very ancient idea: the one and the many, the part and the whole, or as he has it, the fragment and the totum genus humanU'rn. For the present reviewer, Desan's is a thought in search of a metaphor equal to it: he has not yet hit upon a language vehicle capable of covering the expanse of this thinking. As a consequence, it is the reality of the terrain he moves across that needs justification before his conception of man as fragment will be seriously considered as mobile for the journey. Somehow the term " fragment " comes across with a mosaic-like physicality and inertia one does not recognize, or more rhetoricaly important, wish to recognize as himself. This is unfortunate, since Desan in warring against this notion of isolated conscious beings inhabiting what is indeed a very small planet. The reviewer is willing to accept the value of his alternative conception but is uneasy with...