The Person And Education MAXINE GREENE Brooklyn College

This book is, from one vantage point, a and stable ideals. Nor could he accept the position paper on a philosophic outlook notion that values could be scientifically called "Empirical Personalism." From defined. And as a committed personalist, he another, it is a call for a democratic school could not give up his belief in his engaged in dialogue, staffed by teachers metaphysic, not as a "logically predictive" who are both empiricists and "witnesses"— premise, but "as a reasoned source of and dedicated, above all things, to the inspiration for pursuing values," an "emergence of persons." overarching and unifying principle which could sanction the centrality of man. But Professor Soderquist has also given us his credo here, his fundamental commitment It is apparently for this reason that he turned as teacher and educational philosopher. His to the writings of certain existentialist book, therefore, becomes a kind of log of an philosophers, particularly Kierkegaard, intellectual—or, perhaps, a sentimental— Jaspers, Heidegger, and Marcel. One journey, concluding with the discovery that suspects, in fact, that his need for modernity one can go home again. made him welcome the growing popularity of existentialism (or what he took to be Home, for Harold Soderquist, is the belief existentialism) in the past few decades. called personalism, with its roots in Living professionally among progressives nineteenth-century romantic idealism, its and empiricists, he could not have found it associations with Protestant theologies, its easy to think of himself as "dated," as focus on metaphysics, values, and "the archaic in some way. human person." Kant and Schiller are evoked as the personalists' inspiration; This is not to say that Professor Soderquist tendencies to personalism are marked in turned to existentialism because it was Josiah Royce, William James, and William fashionable or because it seemed to him a E. Hocking. The author pays tribute to all of "good thing." A considerable part of his book these; but William James is first among is devoted to the "philosophic anthropology" them—James with his optimistic faith, his of the existentialists, to exploration of self- stubborn "will to believe." alienation, dread, anxiety, authenticity, and other core concepts of those who have Soderquist, however, was cast into another expressed the view. He has made every world, the twentieth-century world of effort to treat these ideas honestly and urbanization, technology, disorder, comprehensively, and he has avoided all the ambiguity. As a teacher, as a modern man, cliches of critics who call them he had to expose himself to new currents of "meaningless" or destructive or (in the trivial thought, most particularly to the currents of sense) "absurd." Deweyan Experimentalism as they inundated the classrooms of his world. The The existentialist notions of "subjectivity" experimentalist stress on intelligent controls, and choice have appealed to him most of all; on the proper adaptation of ends to means, and considering his deeply felt commitment on communication and democratic values,— to the person and the person's relation to all seem to have moved Soderquist to what is "outside" (or what transcends), it qualify his traditional personalism and would not be surprising if he was moved to assimilate some aspects of the empirical appropriate what struck him as a related, objectivity characteristic of experimentalism. even a synchronous set of apercus.

He could not, of course, accept the tendency Nor would it be surprising, even in of some of Dewey's followers to emphasize existentialist terms, if he chose to discover in process and flux to the exclusion of order existentialism only those views which could

Teachers College Record Copyright (c) Teachers College, Columbia University be integrated with personalism—or, more choose themselves in action, in which the precisely, "Empirical Personalism." Using only values there are are those men create experimentalist criteria, he seems to fend off as they commit themselves and take certain of the irrationalist aspects of responsibility for what they choose. How can existential thought. He reacts vigorously and this be reconciled with the existence and more than once against the persistence of "the ideal" (even when the recommendation of a "tragic" stance, so ideal is "but an orientation, a yearning, familiar among existentialists. He tends to working through a never finished series of see existential freedom as asocial, even ends-in-view")? How can it be reconciled anarchic, in spite of the persistence of the with "moral intuitions" or the moulding of Other, of "engagement," of what Jaspers selfhood "in creative relationship to the true calls the "situation," in existential writing, and the good..."? especially in recent years. It is as if he is compelled to resist the paradox implicit in a Still, Professor Soderquist has made a noble concern with "inwardness," the paradox effort. He has attempted to do what is associated with the "Look" of which Sartre seldom done today: to act as a hedgehog, to writes, the paradox foundational to the concern himself with a "big thing," to work existential "leap." out an integrated view. Perhaps, when all is done, he should be read as the keeper of a Most significantly of all, he may be log. Logbooks are often more interesting compelled to resist the very image of a world than designs for empiricist-personalist- of open possibilities in which men are free to existentialist-democratic schools.

Teachers College Record Copyright (c) Teachers College, Columbia University