Modern experience forces philosophy and social thought to confront
the basic problems of value. Is this life worth caring about? How
can we find a way between the deceit of fanatical belief and
despair? In the view of Lancelot Law Whyte, the essential challenge
to mankind today is an underlying nihilism promoting violence and
frustrating sane policies on major social issues. Avoiding the
seductive trap of utopianism, Whyte approaches this challenge by
defining the terms of a potentially worldwide consensus of heart,
mind, and will.
In this volume, Whyte addresses the problems of despair and
fanatical religious or political reactions that arise from despair.
He begins with the basic problem of nihilism, or the tendency
toward pessimism and self/other destruction that faces us at this
point in human development. Rejecting all forms of religious
sectarianism as separating God from the individual and people from
each other, he discerns, as well, a fundamental disunity and
incompleteness among the sciences that render them incapable of
supplying a guide to social order. Whyte sees the universe as an
arena of conflict between tendencies toward order and disorder with
the former dominating and containing the latter. In place of
science and traditional religion, Whyte draws upon what he sees as
the unconscious tradition, a genius of the community, shared in
degrees by all its members, that points mankind toward a better way
of living.
Whyte does not posit a state of perfection, nor does he suggest
the end of human suffering. Instead he suggests that an integrated
state of being, freed from the old mind-body dualism will be a new
starting point in human evolution. Accessibly written andfirmly
rooted in science, philosophy, and history, The Universe of
Experience will be of interest to sociologists, psychologists, and
philosophers.
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