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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost I must speak of my debt to Gabriel Marcel. It pervades the pages of this work. The many explicit references to his thought, where time and again things he has said slipped into place, only partially convey the nature and extent of my debt to him. My intense interest in Marcel's writings was the natural consequence of the fact that he spoke to my condition. So much that I had felt began to take on clearer meaning in encounter with his thought. Not only did I find much of his Vocabulary of reflection' most apt, but still more the spirit and the style of philosophy which had been growing on me found affinity, impetus, and substantiation in interplay with the firm and flexible sinews of his thought. Reading his works assumed the character of reciprocal communication. And Marcel helped me to find my own voice, to form thoughts as I had to form them. He instilled in me courage and patience to go ahead on my own. At the same time, the more the themes of my thought underwent independent development, the more they led me back to his work with fresh interest and understanding. It was a decisive episode of my life to be able to join M. Marcel in August of 1955 and to confirm with him in detail the mutuality of our work. Since that meeting he has accomplished what I had been unable to approach myself in repeated efforts: a clear and accurate summation of the basic themes of these pages, as set forth in the Introduction. For this, and for the deeply generous and faithful friendship of which it is but one expression, I feel a gratitude continuous with that sense of life with which these pages culminate. A particularly substantial debt to three other men is also embedded in this work. The wilderness theme and its human significance represent an orientation which I have shared with John M. Anderson since those acknowledgments days in the late Thirties when we began to walk and talk it out together in the Berkeley Hills. He has continually caught the drift of my thought over the intervening years, brought it out with penetrating criticism, and unerringly suggested things of which I have needed to take account. His help and his own thought were of major consequence to me in carrying out this exploration. Since 1934, when I became a pupil of T. M. Greene's, his advice and backing have been a boon to me at turning points of my life and work. To Ted Greene, and to W. V. Quine, I owe much of the courage of that conviction upon which I set out in 1953 to follow up the initial stage of this exploration, instead of taking another teaching position, which would have been the surer thing to do. Each of these men in a different way caught the necessity of a venture in which I was then relatively far from clear, and confirmed my belief in it. And they were behind me right through it. To Van Quine, as Chairman of the Harvard JPhilosophy Department at the time, to my other former colleagues in the department, and to the appointing members of the Harvard Corporation, I owe the appointment to the George Santayana Fellowship for 1953-54, on which the bulk of these pages were written. Among former Radcliffe and Harvard students to whom I owe so much, I should like to mention my specific indebtedness to three: to Cynthia Green, for bringing to my attention the significance of Proust's "involuntary recall;" to Richard Gotshalk for quickening the appreciation of Spinoza which spurred these reflections; and to Robert Langston, for key insight in approaching the philosophic import of tragedy. For reading and discussion of the manuscript of which I have tried to take account in editing it, I would like to thank Professors George Burch, W. E. Hocking, N. A. Nikam, and D. T. Suzuki, as well as three readers whose names are not known to me. I am grateful to Chatham College for a subsidy which enabled me to confer with M. Marcel prior to his writing of the Introduction, and to Melle. Daniele Baule-Vastel for her patient collaboration in translating the Introduction. Finally, there were three persons who uniquely shared the life with me from which these pages come: Daphne, my wife, and her 14 [3.149.234.141] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 18:25...

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