Human Existence: Contradiction and Hope by Walter Strolz (review)

590 BOOK REVIEWS "primitive" for Kierkegaard and Heidegger, and suggests that their philosophical insights may be helpful to anthropologists, even if the term is not. Aquinas Institute of Philosophy River Forest, IUinois BENEDICT M. AsHLEY, o. P. Human Existence: Contradiction and Hope. By WALTER STROLZ. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967. Pp. 171. $5.95. For more and more people today human existence seems either partly or wholly meaningless. The endeavor to overthrow traditional sexual and moral values; the attempt to make men assume sole responsibility for their actions and their destiny in a world which has witnessed the " death of God "; the " hippy " withdrawal from the "establishment "; all such phenomena are manifestations of this growing attitude. In part it is due to the discoveries of science and to the emergence of modern technology. Both have made men reject the myth-pictures of the past and replace them with a modern scientific or pseudo-scientific one. Man, seen in this new way, seems an entirely different creature. The meaning which his life had in the past is gone. That is the present meaninglessness of his existence for so many of our contemporaries. Strolz's collection of existential essays is a reflection upon this. Without being technical and without entering into any problem in depth, it manages to convey a good sense of what one form of existential thinking makes of the situation. The author has little to say which is original. But he comes at the problem from many sides, and this gives his work a certain breadth and trueness to life which highly technical and penetrating treatises often lack. He sees the problem in the light of science, philosophy, religion, art and music. And each of these is an important dimension for the contemporary understanding of human existence. In a brief essay on Pascal he tries to show how empirical science modified man's view of himself and history. But, he points out, it made the mistake of thinking that it could take a purely objective view of both. Pascal offered the corrective to this by showing that science, for all its pretended objectivity, is still the operation of man, the subject. There is no escape from this. Whatever else it may see, thought must also always see its own subjectivity. From this some modern thinkers have concluded that there is nothing beyond the subject; others, that this world is the only real one. Both convictions lead to a special view of the human situation. Ernest Bloch, a Marxist, shares this view, he can preach a doctrine of hope. Hope, a subjective attitude of man, is not only a part of the human condition but BOOK REVIEWS 591 the most important and most crucial part. It gives man whatever promise and comfort he can have. This is all the salvation for which he can look. The atheism of this position repeats the theme of many thinkers of the modern period. From Descartes to Kafka, it continually recurs. The " God is Dead " movement is only its most recent manifestation. In every such appearance it asks man again to assess his situation without recourse to the world-transcending God of the ancients. Whatever salvation is possible, it repeats, must be found without His intervention. Where Bloch develops this theme in the context of hope as the crucial subjective attitude, Heidegger stresses fear. Man, he asserts, is the subject of fear, particularly the fear of death. But he should not shrink from this emotion. Rather he should use it as a means to articulate the question of being. Fear reveals to him what being is. And this elucidates his human condition and human existence. Bultmann, Strolz goes on to say, took this as a point of departure to develop categories of being and existence into which the biblical message could be translated so as to make sense to modern man. To do this, he thought, he had to eliminate its " myth " content. When this disappears and the genuine metaphysics of human existence replaces it, the true message comes across. But, for Heidegger's more developed thought this is unacceptable. " Myth " is not simply an expendable phenomenon of human reason. Rather...