Philosophy for Our Times by C. E. M. Joad (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 667 Fundamentally, the error of this book is a combination of the modem naively complete confidence in governmental action and the world-wide drift to totalitarianism. " Humanity " has been substituted for " Aryan Race" or "Communist Party," the scope is a little wider, but all else is unchanged; the individual is sunk in the mass, the single citizen's life is stripped of meaning, government is made a divinity with its own political religion whose opponents are heretics-criminals or maniacs to be dealt with accordingly; the mastery of truth, .of action, of life and death is in the hands of the human super-legislator. This book represents one of the earliest and most concrete conquests of Hitlerism in America. Dominican House of Studiea, Wa8hington, D. a. WALTER FARRELL, O.P. Philosophy for Our Times. By C. E. M. JoAD. London-New York: Th. Nelson & Sons, 1940. Pp. 367, with index. Written in an impressive and mostly non-technical language this book emphasizes the need of philosophical reflection in these our days. Mankind has a mastery of means and is ignorant of ends. Religion and, morals are falling into decay.· Psychoanalysis and other factors destroy understanding of the difference between good and evil, and preach the dangerous doctrine of the harmfulness of suppressing impulses. "Foreheads are defiantly low." The snobbery of culture has been replaced by the snobbery of anti-culture. It is a time which more than any is in need of philosophy. Philosophy has to provide a counterweight against the dreariness and essential indifference in regard to values characteristic of the scientific view. Dr. Joad then proceeds to analyze the world of commonsense and to point out the difficulties this view implies. The corrections and enlargement by science are neither ultimately nor exhaustively true. Science deals with only one kind of reality; it leaves out other aspects. Chap. IV states " that science tells us a little about some things and that there are no things about which it tells us everything." Also, science not less than commonsense presupposes the activity of the mind. This activity has to supply the principles for the interpretation of the behavior .of the things we experience. Since the materialistic cosmogony is demonstrably defective and science is unable to give a satisfactory account of mind, the world as envisioned by physics is essentially an abstraction leaving out everything of which science cannot· render a.Ccount. As mind, so value is excluded from the scientific world-picture. Nor does science ever explain that of which it renders account. The teleological viewpoint is forced on the observant mind by the facts themselves, but it is outside the scope of science. 668 BOOK. REVIEWS The reality grasped by science being incomplete, defective, and unsatisfactory , one has to look out for another view truer to reality and more satisfying to the !needs of the mind. Part IT, "Constructive,'' defends the notion of the reality of values. Contrary to the prevailing subjectivistic view, the author holds that values are objective and real. Truth and beauty are objective. The statement that truth is subjective must be given up as self-contradictory. If truth has no objectivity, this statement too, and all other statements become subjective and relative. That is, there is no truth at all. Appreciation of beauty and moral judgments lean never be exhaustively analyzed into statements about individual feelings of approval. There are ultimate values, namely Goodness and Truth and Beauty. Although salutary, health is no ultimate good, and much less ultimate are harmful false goods like money and power. In a long chapter of 20 pages the author attempts to show that there is an immediate and specific apprehension of values. His arguments are too long to be reproduced, but they deserve serious consideration. Once the objectivity of values is recognized, the position of hedonism in ethics becomes untenable, and a system of objective rules for the right conduct of life a necessity. One has to distinguish between pleasures, to make reason the judge of the goodness of appetition. Goodness and happiness cannot be achieved unless behavior. be controlled by reason. Politics refers to the same set of problems as does ethics. Politics has to determine the...