Man’s Freedom by Paul Weiss (review)

586 BOOK REVIEWS ganization of the book gives the impression that the author took a huge amount of research material and rather too quickly compressed it into the form of a book. On the other hand, .the method he used in approaching the subject made the organization difficult. And the subject matter itself, irrespective of how organized, would not be easy to handle. Despite such defects, however, this is an outstanding book. !VAN LANOMEN Washington, D. 0. Man's Freedom. By PAUL W:E1ss. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950. Pp. 334 with index $5.00. Paul Weiss, Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and founder and _editor of the Review of Metaphysi.cs, is also the author of Rea/,ity and Nature and Man. The present work builds on the foundations of Nature a,nd Man, but can be read independently of it. "Its primary objective is to make evident how man through a series of free efforts can become more complete and thereby more human." (p. v) Together with the earlier book it attempts " to pro~ide a single study of a world which has-room both for the simplest of meaningless acts and for the radical transformative decisions of a creative will, for the rights of things and animals as well as of man, private, political, and social." (ibid.) In the :first of three parts Professor Weiss treats " Society and the Freedom of Preference." Here he explains his philosophy of the individual and society. For a Thomist, perhaps the most intriguing doctrines in this section are that man is not essentially social (pp. 37 ff.) and that "human freedom, though different in scope and quality, is continuous with that of all other beings." (p. 87) In Part II, Weiss considers "Absolute Morality, Choice, and Law." Here· he extends · his realism to morality and argues in defense of the objectivity of the natural law. In Part· ill, "The Creative Will," Professor Weiss holds that the summum bonum is the universe perfected; that the primary ethical principle is " It is absolutely wrong to reduce values "; that evil and guilt are inevitable in everything man does, but· should be reduced to a minimum by sacrifice, love, and creativity. A six-page "Recapitulation;, summarizes his teachings in ninety-nine propositions. Few readers will fail to be impressed by the earnestness and effort this book reveals. It is obviously the product of long study and' extensive .reading, though regrettably there is no bibliography and only one complete reference (p. 139). It is evident also that Professor Weiss's critical eclecticism has helped him to see through and spurn many of the more popular ethical errors. But the reviewer must hasten'to add that on the whole it BOOK REVIEWS is a sad, depressing book. The only good things here are Professor Weiss's negations. His rejection of various features of pragmatism, Freudianism, existentialism, relativism, nihilism, and scepticism is certainly to his credit. Especially noteworthy is his consistent opposition to idealism. It is easy to agree with many of Professor Weiss's denials. But when he affirms, even when he affirms such ethical fundamentals as freedom of the will, natural law, the objectivity of morality, the reader will do well to hesitate. For he does not always mean by these expressions what one might think. "No one ... is reasonable all the time. All allow their imaginations to run away with them to some degree, and all have a superstition or two." So says Professor Weiss (p. 85) . He, at least, is no exception to test his rule. There are so many here that it is very hard to single out his dominant superstitions. Basically, perhaps, they are the evolutionism that warps his psychology and the' agnosticism that undermines his ethics. But the most explicit superstition is an all-embracing " anthropomorphism," an " anthropomorphism in reverse" which attributes human characteristics not to God but to the sub-human world. Many of Professor Weiss's philosophical aberrations, including the one just mentioned, are partially traceable to fundamental errors in logic. More specifically, his use of words introduces into these pages a kind of dialectical nightmare. Consequently, it will repay us, before investigating his doctrines further, to...