ren’s Reviews > Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy > Status Update

"The notion of the immortality of the soul as an intellectual substance (and that that immortality might even be demonstrated rationally) had not dawned upon the mind of Biblical man. If he hoped at all to escape mortality it was on the basis of personal trust that his Creator might raise him once again from the dust."

Psalm 22, "I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou art my God from my mother's belly...
I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels."

"The sinfulness that man experiences in the Bible--as in the Psalms or the Book of Job--cannot be confined to a supposed compartment of the individual's being that has to do with his moral acts. This sinfulness pervades the whole being of man: it is indeed man's being, insofar as his feebleness and finiteness as a creature he stands naked in the presence of God."

"Deep within Biblical man lurks a certain uneasiness, which is not found in the conceptions of man given to us by the great Greek philosophers. This uneasiness point toward another, and more central, region of human existence than the contrast between doing and knowing, morality and reason."

"The Hebrew is concerned with practice, the Greek with knowledge. Right conduct is the ultimate concern of the Hebrew, right thinking that of the Greek. Duty and strictness of conscience are the paramount things in life for the Hebrew; for the Greek, the spontaneous and luminous play of intelligence."

"This violent contrast is frightening, for it represents a dangerous lagging of man behind his own works; and in this lag lies the terror of the atomic bomb which hangs over us like impending night. Here surely the ordinary man begins to catch a fleeting glimpse of that Nothingness which both artist and philosopher have begun to take seriously. The bomb reveals the dreadful and total contingency of human existence."

"Man has greater power now than Prometheus or Icarus or any of those daring mythical heroes who were later to succumb to the disaster of pride. But if an observer from Mars were to turn his attention to the shape of man as revealed in our novels, plays, painting, and sculpture, he would find there a creature full of holes and gaps, faceless, riddled with doubts and negations, starkly finite."

"Our time, said Max Scheler, is the first in which man has become thoroughly and completely problematic to himself. Hence the themes that obsess both modern art and existential philosophy are the alienation and strangeness of man into his world; the contradictoriness, feebleness, and contingency of human existence; the central and overwhelming reality of time for man who has lost his anchorage in the eternal."

"Every age projects its own image of man into its art. The whole history of art confirms this proposition, indeed this history is itself but a succession of images of man."

"The mind of the West has always been hierarchical: the cosmos has been understood as a great chain of Being, from highest to lowest, which has at the same time operated as a scale of values, from lowest to highest."