OCR Text |
Show You Who Have 'Dirty Hands, "Don i Touch Nobel Prize By ROBERT JUNG Colleqiat PrM Servic Jean-Paul Sartre rightly refused the Nobel Prize. Such an honor is an official offi-cial stamp of approval. IT IS A TOKEN of respectability and a ticket of admission into polite and venerable company. There is a certain terrible finality about such a prize, almost like death. A PHIILOSOPHER as moralist and critic ought never be proper. When a philosopher can be discussed comfortably at a P-TA meeting or quibbled quib-bled over at professional colloquies he has failed. The philosopher must always be the ultimate subversive. SARTRE WAS CITED for "imaginative "imagina-tive writing, which by reason of its spirit of freedom and striving for truth has exercised a far-reaching influence on our age." The citation also said, "deliberately controversial and ready to give battle, he carries on the great French historical tradition, that of moralists who criticize society." THIS GREAT tradition is not limited to the French. Moral criticism of society is one of the essential tasks of the philosopher. phil-osopher. Sartre's genius is such that he is able to use literary media as vehicles for the transmission of philosophical and moral ideas on the visceral level. As a moralist who is critical of society he plays the role of subversive subver-sive and iconoclast. He is an example of his own ethical doctrine of engagement. Sartre is passionately pas-sionately involved in the social and political po-litical movements of his time. He is the engaged philosopher, immersed in the intellectual dialogue of his day and in the quest for whatever meaning there may be. SARTRE HAS SHOWN us that man brings values and goals into the world. Since dialogue concerning values and creation of them is of vital importance to the world, it is appropriate that Sartre Sar-tre should be honored by his fellow intellectuals, in-tellectuals, even though he must refuse the official accolade. Sartre himself has "dirty hands." By accepting the Nobel Prize, he would be putting gloves on. It is a pity that he is a prophet without with-out honor among his fellow philosophers in this country. SARTRE IS better known and understood under-stood by intellectuals who are interested in literature, psychology, or theology than by professional philosophers. He, along with John Dewey, is almost al-most totally unknown and untaught in too many departments of philosophy. SARTRE'S NEGLECT at the hands of his colleagues suggests that perhaps philosophy has abandoned its traditional role as a source of great ideas and intellectual intel-lectual challenges worthy of man's intellectual in-tellectual dignity. Perhaps philosophy has become an esoteric but proper discipline of no relevance rele-vance to the outside world, a discipline which analyzes and classifies icons but leaves them intact. The neglect of Sartre is an index of abdication. There is little interchange between "The Partisan Review" and "The Philosophical Philo-sophical Review," to the detriment of the latter and the benefit of the former. We have nothing comparable to "Les Temps M o d e r n e s," the journal of opinion founded by Sartre. Ideas seem to breed endoga-mously endoga-mously In this country. Narrow professionals speak only to each other and the world rarely bothers to listen. THE TRADITION of Sartre, Ortega y Gasset and Dewey is the grand tradition tradi-tion of philosophy which holds that a philosopher must be engaged in the cru cial problems and issues of his time. This tradition is in danger of being poisoned by an anti-intellectual tendency, tend-ency, the passion of which is to analyze the trivial and to inhibit the production of general synthetic ideas, especially in the realm of values. THE MAINSTREAM of intellectual creativity is damned at its source. If philosophers do not give us new ideas, bold new ways of structuring and assuming the world, the job will be done by amateurs and ad men. If philosophy leaves a vacuum in the dialogue concerning values, its place will be taken by followers of some defunct de-funct dogma, by fanatical cultists, by self-appointed moralists on the make, or by dream peddlers trying to sell us a better world on easy time payments. THE UNIVERSITY of Illinois' Professor Pro-fessor Gotschalk said that "something basically wrong has lurked in our culture, cul-ture, deep-down in its institutional fabric, fab-ric, leading to mounting disaster. We must try with all the means in our power, pow-er, by science and philosophy, to find a better way." Finding this "better way" remains an essential task of the philosopher. If Sartre has not found this way it is not because he has not looked. |