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PART.ISAN REVIEW
the philosophy of our day; who have not yet been fully assimilated;
and without whom we could not understand the thought and speech
of our time: Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche.
I do not speak of the other broad stream of modem thought,
which flows from the natural sciences, the sciences in general, from
mathematics and logic. This stream brought an entirely new material,
technological, sociological situation, and also a new, sober scientific
attitude, based on an ethos of radical integrity.
For the present these two streams flow independently as though
unaware of one another. We pass from one world to another as into
a totally alien climate of thought, a different mode of questioning, a
different consciousness of purpose, and a different mood. Whether
these two streams will meet and how they will meet, and whether
they will flow into an all-embracing whole, in which they will join
to form the true, authentic philosophy, is still open to question.
Although they spring from humanistic origins and are full of
the tradition, the three thinkers I have named no longer belong to
traditional philosophy- in this they are analogous to the modem
science which has been developing since the seventeenth century
and which has proved to be something radically new.
The three did not know one another. Those who have chosen
them as guides for their life consider it a sacrilege to group them
together-so very different is their language, their "doctrine," their
seeming choice of aims.
But all three have this in common: each had a vision of the
age, an insight, at which no modem reader can fail to
be
amazed,
into what is, and what no one else in their day seemed to notice. They
were filled with the excitement of a historical moment in the develop–
ment of humanity, they were conscious of this moment from the
broadest point of view and of the need for completely new criteria.
They were able to foresee and foretell what would come, because they
saw its germs in their own present. By their activity and their
thinking they anticipated what was to become the world's reality.
They have in common their unlimited reflection, their self–
liberation from custom and convention, the radicalism with which
they moved persistently and undogmatically forward, their agitation
in the face of what was coming, the penetration of their thinking, the
fascination of their language, the passion with which they sought to
awaken others.
