Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Volume 18 Issue 2 1957 [Doi 10.2307%2F2104404] Review by-...

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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

ReviewAuthor(s): Van Meter AmesReview by: Van Meter AmesSource: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Dec., 1957), pp. 281-282Published by: International Phenomenological SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2104404Accessed: 05-12-2015 03:19 UTC

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REVIEWS 281

it deserves as a very

individual

expression

of

contemporary existentialism,

antedating, I believe,

both

Jaspers

and Heidegger. Besides, here is one

existentialist who

took

his philosophy seriously. When

he was still

a

very

young man he killed himself, taking into his grave the finest hope of

Italian philosophy.

There would be purpose and justice

in

adding pages

of

his book to this intelligent

and

balanced

collection

of variations

on

existen-

tialist themes.

WALTER CERF.

BROOKLYN COLLEGE.

Studies

in Human

Time.

GEORGES

POULET.

Baltimore:

The Johns

Hopkins

Press, 1956. Pp.

363.

This book,

which

quickly became

celebrated

in the

French

original,

deserves continued

success

in an excellent translation.

It

deals

with the

attitude

toward time

in the

literature of

successive

epochs,

represented

by

Montaigne, Descartes,

Pascal, Moliere,

Corneille, Racine,

Madame

de la

Fayette,

Fontenelle, L'Abbe Prevost, Rousseau,

Benjamin

Constant,

Vigny, Flaubert,

Baudelaire,

Valery,

Proust. There

is a

rich and fresh study

of each,

especially

of

Proust.

He

is presented

as recapitulating

every

notion of time in preceding French thought, ringing all the changes on time

and

the timeless. Likewise,

in the appendix

added for the

translated

edition,

on "Time and

American Writers,"

T.

S. Eliot is credited

with

rediscovering

and reliving

"all the stages

of the

experience

of time"

in

Emerson,

Hawthorne,

Poe,

Thoreau, Melville,

Whitman,

Emily

Dickinson,

and Henry

James.

When

the

reader

has

enjoyed

the

imaginative

reaches

deployed here,

and

admired

the scholarship

with

which the generalizations

are supported

by specific

passages,

with

chapter

and verse

in columns

of

references,

he may begin to wonder why, when so much has been included, so much

has

been left out.

Then

he realizes that

the

title was intended

to rule out a

great deal

that the subject

of

time would

call for

in our time.

The adjective

"human"

in the title

is ambiguous.

It suggests

that what is

taken

up

re-

garding

time is all

that matters

to human beings,

with

the traditional

"humanist" assumption

that scientific

conceptions

of

time

need not be

considered seriously.

The ideas

of time in this

book are mostly

theological,

or

pseudo-theological

(even

when ostensibly

non- or

anti-theological),

contrasting

or

relating

time to

eternity,

the moment to

the

permanent,

and discontinuous

to continuous

creation, with "human creation" consi-

dered as "endlessly aborted,"

and

marked down

in italics as

"Human,

all

too human"

(p.

37).

Time

as treated

by science,

philosophy,

and

the philosophy

of science,

does not appear

in this

book, with

some

significant exceptions.

Descartes

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3/3

282

PHILOSOPHY

AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL

ESEARCH

is taken up, but

his scientific work is

quickly

passed

over for the

inter-

pretation of nightmares

he

had

which

taught

him

"the

fear of

being lost"

and "the terror of

being on the

point of falling at every step." The

author

comments, "And the domain of time is veritably that of terror " (p. 57).

Having

excluded

time from his consciousness Descartes

encountered

it

where

it could not be

avoided,

in "the affective

part."

This turned

him,

"as

by

a celestial

inspiration,"

toward

God

who

alone could

"save

him

from

the

chasms of time."

The

God

toward whom he turned

is asserted

not

to be

"the

God

of

theology,"

but seems to be none other

(pp.

58-59).

And

this,

we are

told, kept

Descartes'

philosophy

from

being purely

intellectual.

He

is

made into another

Pascal,

whose

dualism is stressed.

The affective side of Rousseau

makes

him

welcome

too,

and

Diderot is

saved from

the

company

of

"the

other

sensualists"

by

a

subconscious

capacity

for "a state of

complete

unity." Strangely,

there is

no

chapter

on

Bergson,

though

there

are

more

references to

him in

the index

than

to

anyone

but Rousseau and Proust. If France has had

any

philosophers

out

of

sympathy

with intuitionalism

they

are

forgotten

here, along

with

the

novelists

whose

sense of time

was not at all Proustian.

An

author is

free

to include or omit

whom

he

wishes

in

his studies.

But

how can

Poulet say that

"the

work of

Proust

appears

as a

retrospective

view of all French thought on time" (p. 321) and barely mention Sartre,

who

exemplifies a

most

un-Proustian sense

of time

in his

novels and

ex-

plains

it in

his "What Is Literature?"

Nor could it

be thought that Eliot

"rediscovers and

relives all the stages of the

experience of

time"

in

Ameri-

can

literature

if

writers

after

Henry James were considered.

His brother

William's

conception

of time is

mentioned,

but

not that of

the

novelists,

Hemingway,

Dos

Passos,

and

Faulkner, to whom

Sartre

feels

indebted for

their

capacity to

plunge

the

reader into the

midst of a present

situation

which

presses into the

future with

the uncertainty and

suspense of the

actual, without benefit of the past tense, "affective memory" or "volun-

tary

memory,"

because what will happen

depends upon

what has not yet

been

done

or decided. It

would be difficult to

include such writers without

noting the real

contribution of

Bergson, and that of Einstein

and White-

head, Mead

and Dewey, toward

taking time

seriously

-

instead of "redeem-

ing" or "conquering"

it with

circularity, a return to

the eternal,

as

Poulet

would like to

do

in

making

Proust the last word on

time

in

French

thought, Eliot

in

American

literature. The author is

charming. His book

is

brilliant.

But he

might

have called it Studies

in

Theological Time.

He

is

not

satisfied with the experience of time when it is toohuman.

VAN

METER

AMES.

UNIVERSITY OF

CINCINNATI.

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