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PAR TIS A N R
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V lEW
from present experience. It is not necessary to deny honor to the an–
cient Greeks in order to recognize it among the Poles and Jews and any
other people who live and die bravely.
Confident that none of his readers will remember or care about
the tragedy of Warsaw, Vivas adds:
«And how can we blame anyone
for forgetting it since there was no Herodotus to record it?"
Nothing more devastating than these words, which I have italicized,
has ever been said about the effects of self-righteous absorption with the
"eternal values" which always turn out to be values embodied
in
the
past. They could well serve as an ep;taph for that movement in cul–
ture and education which argued that exclusive concern with the glories
of the past was the best preparation for understanding the great issues,
challenges, and decisions of living experience. There was no Herodotus
to record the events of Munich and Yalta and Potsdam, no Dante to
record the hell of concentration camps, no Gibbon to record the rise and
decline of the Western Empires-how, then, according to Vivas, can
we understand their values and disvalues? This hidebound traditional–
ism would startle even Mr. Hutchins.
According to Mr. Vivas moral values and disvalues have a mode
of being which is independent of human experience. They are neither
dependent upon, nor essentially related to, any need, want, interest, felt
satisfaction or mode of apprehension. They do not arise in the course
of experience nor do they have to justify themselves in experience. On
the contrary human experience has to justify itself in relation to them.
They are not created by men but discovered in the same way as the
laws of logic or the laws of nature. They have an ontological or "ontic"
status, and when not embodied in experience must -be regarded as "part
of the structure that makes spatio-temporal existence possible"-so that
presumably without them there simply would not be any world at all.
Moral personality is constituted by these timeless values which
find a man as much as he finds them and "exercise on him their re–
quiredness." The moral person, then, must have an ontic status, too-–
a short proof to immortality which the author refuses to take. But what–
ever its status, the intrinsic value of the person "is constituted by the
value of the spirit" which is different from the psyche, which in turn
is different from the organism. Only because of the existence of the
spirit which is "real", "immaterial" and "different" from the self and
body, can the person be given primacy. And without the recognition
of that primacy, man's moral career must degenerate into a history of
dog eat dog.
Mr. Vivas bases the validity of
his
entire position upon this meta-
