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two categories can be clearly distinguished, only if some systematic
classification of human activities is provided to give sense to the dis–
tinction. The philosophical psychology cannot finally be avoided.
I have some doubt about Morton White's essays, taken as a whole,
because he nowhere seems to acknowledge the inadequacy, for his de–
clared purposes, of mere logical analysis. I do not believe that he can
revive the philosophical discussion of esthetics or of historical knowl–
edge without being led through the forms of language towards some
more general phenomenology of mind, however tentative and provisional
and un-Kantian it may be. But one must wait to see. Meanwhile we
have these civilized, undiscouraged, and responsible essays as some pre–
liminary defense against the counter-attack of the old and unreformed
German metaphysics-a counter-attack that is apparently stronger in
America than in Britain, where the mood is one of waiting for some–
thing new to be suggested, but with a steady assurance that the new
impetus in philosophy will not come from that direction.
Stuart Hampshire
AN HYPOTHETICAL TALE
THE EMPIRE CITY. By Paul Goodman. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.
$6.95.
H]
love you-it's nothing personal_"
The Empire City,
three of whose four parts were published
as separate fictions in the past twenty years, is an abstract autobiography_
In it events that happened to the author and his friends in New York
City during the Depression, the War and the Postwar Years have been
converted into parables of their successive ideas and cults. Goodman's
narrative could have been subtitled, "The Memoirs Of An Ideologist."
Except that, unlike naive conceptualists and joiners, with their faith
in systems and their disillusionments, Goodman takes on ideas in order
to get rid of them. By the end of
The Empire City
he has almost suc–
ceeded. Thus his fable has, finally, the quality of a true novel, in that
through the events a development of character has taken place and
an outcome has been reached: the catharsis of concepts.
In this "education" in reverse, the characters learn (or unlearn)
by teaching. In every episode they scent a lesson to be passed on to
others. Conversations consist of revelations or at least hints; occasionally,
summaries of the points are drawn up; when necessary a mass meeting
