The Betrayal Of Wisdom by R. J. Kreyche (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 388 of the logic of belief and unbelief requires a further inquiry into religious subjectivity (including its expressions), i.e., is it philosophic argument that leads one to believe, or something else? And what is that " something else " ? And, what is it about the reasonable people who do not think it reasonable to believe in God that makes them think that it is unreasonable to believe in God? Or, what after all is wrong with "fides quaerens intellectum," (p. 184) and why is it incompatible with the suffering of '.t person seeking to understand what he does not understand but believes? (3) Does a tentatively held theism, for all its praiseworthy regard for tolerance and its disaffection for certainty and dogmatism, really cover what religious people do and the ways they talk? They often enough sound dogmatic to me, even when they can be numbered among the tolerant. Pope John is a good example of this. We need a logic of religious conversion to ground and complement a logic of religious expression and belief. A clearly worked out cognitional theory and explanatory metaphysics is required if one is to erect a philosophic world in which religious language and expression can be adequately thematized. I fear that these tasks will not be accomplished on the analytic turf. The turf needs the kind of plowing so expertly administered by the authors of this volume. But it needs its fences moved back as well. The Catholic University of America Washington, D. C. WILLIAM SHEA The Betrayal Of Wisdom. By R. J. Kreyche. New York: Alba House, 197~. Pp. ~37. $3.95 (Paper). One need not be a philosopher to observe that the times seem out of joint; that Western society is suffering from a deepseated malaise; that the promises of Enlightenment progress by the application of scientific method are illusions uglier than sheer academic rubbish, for they have cheated and maimed the spirit of Western man. But it is the function of the philosopher, largely ignored or stifled in our day, to diagnose the philosophical sources of contemporary illness and to discover some remedies that will restore mental and spiritual balance; so Robert Kreyche movingly and ardently (but without ever raising his voice) argues in this popularized call for a rededication to the philosopher's vocation to wisdom. Prof. Kreyche's style, like the man himself, is invariably gentle and civil, but his distress at the enormity of our civilization's sickness forces him at times to resort to strong language to describe the current disorder. The modern world is experiencing a " sickness unto death," many of the old 384 BOOK REVIEWS structures lie in ruins; the modern psyche is a:ffiicted with an " existential neurosis " ; and contemporary society has brought on itself a " mild neurosis." In this period of stress it is idle to appeal to the usual run of philosophers for direction and relief. Echoing the sober opinion of Abraham Kaplan (a recognized philosopher-teacher of our day), Kreyche finds contemporary philosophy plagued with "intellectual bankruptcy." It is overacademicized , imperiously indifferent to (where it has not abdicated :t sense of) social responsibility, cold to, if not contemptuous of, the pursuit of wisdom, and topheavily analytical perhaps in the way that the logicchopping of the so-called decadent scholastics supposedly immured them from the insistent realities of nature and the life of man. The roots of this depression and decline range through much of modern thinking. Subjectivism , in breaking man's direct noetic bond with nature, led to psychologism and set the stage for Kant's assault on metaphysics. Positivism reduced objects to mere phenomena and, applied to the social scene, emptied social relations of absolute moral content. Pragmatism, while commendable for its concern for human problems, has offered a stone to a human spirit hungry for metaphysical bread. Linguistic analysis has swelled into hyperanalysis, a late stage in a narrow methodolatry amounting to an " obsessional neurosis." Into natural realism itself has crept a sort of rationalism that overtheoreticizes reason, gives short shrift to appetitive (the line of" higher emotions") and personal components, and has little or no time for philosophy of society and culture. As a measure of a...