There was the young Marx and the old Marx. There was the young Freud and the old Freud. There was Marxism and Marxisms, Freudianism and Freudianisms. There has even been a Freudo-Marxism. One speaks of Freudo-Marxism because it is after a certain level of understanding of Freud that one comes to Marx, in order to bring the two together in an articulated whole which admits of mediations between the two geniuses of reductive analysis of social man and of human society. Hunger and social effort to satisfy it, on one hand, love and desire aimed at satisfaction, related in an unfathomable way with death, on the other, are established as the constituents of the historic and social nature of Man and of humanity in general coming to grips with the great cosmic whole. (Both Marx and Freud seem to have overlooked the Will: the will to power, indeed the will to possess a will. But another, falling between them, included it: Nietzsche.)

Our reflections on the objectivity of historical truth will quite naturally begin with the historical fact. It may perhaps be only because we are thinking in a general way—and with justification in a sense—that the divergences amongst historians appear only from the moment when they approach the interpretation of facts; for their structure—if one allows a certain level of knowledge and technique in research—is identical. This being established, it is not necessary to go as far as Ranke's school and ask that the task of the historian limit itself to the presentation of pure facts, without interpretation or commentary; it will be sufficient to state that when we use the term fact in a scientific or historical context, we are expressing ourselves in an unequivocal manner; and that consequently, when someone has established, in a competent way, a historical fact, he has established it for all who are concerned; historical facts as products as well as the work of research carried out to establish them are not, then, influenced by subjective factor in the process of acquiring knowledge, taken in the particular as well as in the social sense.

It is often said that religious disaffection is largely the result, not so much of intellectual doubts, as of the experiential sense of the world's suffering and injustice. Much of the Enlightenment polemic revolved around the problem of the theodicy and, according to a survey of the attitudes of German proletarians in 1906, the majority's religious disbelief appeared to stem from the failure of religious systems to cope adequately with the “‘injustice’ of the order of the world.”

In the same essay, however, Weber distinguishes three radical attempts to answer the problems posed by the world's imperfections. These, he claimed, “...give rationally satisfying answers for the basis of the incongruity between destiny and merit, the Indian doctrine of Kharma, Zoroastrian dualism, the predestination decree of the deus absconditus. These solutions are rationally closed; in pure form, they are found only as exceptions.”

Since the late middle ages man, in the “West,” has spent himself in one or both of two opposing activities. His life has been spun out either filling or killing time. The former we have come to call, commonly, work; the latter idleness. By whichever of these morally conflicting or complementary ways he has shaped his life, occidental man has made a single affirmation which unites both extremes: he has tacitly or explicitly affirmed that time is the framework of existence. The point of my paper is to attempt to show that this is no longer so. Evidence will be adduced to demonstrate that dimensions of existence, “categories,” more meaningful than time are now competing to displace it as the mould or form in which life is filled out with meaning. These currents of understanding, now increasingly evident, must necessarily be thought of as substitutionary and oppositional to that in which time was preeminent, because they place the emphasis on a perspective which greatly reduces the significance of time, indeed one which tends to eliminate it altogether, inasmuch as this is possible in a world still largely governed by sunrise and sunset, the process of aging, and so on. Time gained its ascendency in an epoch characterized by man's imperial conquest of nature, or his externalization, effected substantially, through reason and work. The shadow of time's eclipse can be made out where interiorization and assimilation of the objective world have become the predominant preoccupations. In three steps we shall attempt to look at 1) the characteristics of the epoch in which existence was circumscribed by time; 2) the revolt against time and its conditions as typified in the writings of J.-J. Rousseau; 3) some signs of the current growth of this trend in the West, or should I say more precisely, in the technical societies.

In an age when the interactions between East and West are multiplying and the once-dominant characteristics of Western life appear to be disintegrating, the search for some “principle of coherence” which characterizes a given civilization assumes special significance. None of the many explanations of the distinctive character of Western civilization which have been advanced by generations of scholars seem fully convincing when the latter is seen in both its structural and chronological aspects. Indeed, neither its devotion to technological innovation nor its Christian messianism can account for the kaleidoscopic elements in Western culture. It is also fruitless to attempt to find the underlying principle of unity in some unique world-view that would ostensibly be applicable at all times and in all social and geographical contexts—unless one would arbitrarily reduce the concept of civilization to the outlook or behavior of an educated elite, drawn from one or two relatively small social classes.

Industrial societies are seeking a civilization for which they have not as yet found a firm framework of moral and social values, nor definite forms of social life. That is why traditional peasant values and ways of life, and social institutions in rural communities, still appeal so strongly to emotion and remain so strikingly evocative in our urbanized, industrialized world. Village society is still seen as an ideal—and often idealized—social model; industrial societies would like to have something comparable in their vast cities.

The problem of knowing how to define art, and how to divide it into categories, has always been a serious one for theoreticians and aestheticians. In his major work entitled The Concept of Art in the Past and in the Present, Professor Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, a distinguished Polish aesthetician, studies the origins of the concept of art and the successive modifications which it has undergone from antiquity to today.

In Greece, Rome and the whole of the West in the Middle Ages, art was considered either as a profession or as a science. Together with grammar, rhetoric or geometry, the second category, known as “artes liberales,” also included music, which thus became what we call today musicology, or the science of music. The other category-that of “artes vulgares”-had a more practical character and included among other subjects agriculture, medicine and architecture. In the 12th century, the philosopher Hugh of St. Victor counted among the seven “artes vulgares” a discipline to which he gave the name “theatrica” and which, Professor Tatarkiewicz tells us, comprised not only the theatre but in a general way the art of amusing the people in public, in fact all stadium games, races and circus entertainment. Poetry came under the heading of philosophy.

In the last fifteen years, biology has made such considerable progress that it arouses the highest hopes. But despite the importance of the discoveries, particularly in the field of molecular genetics, one must admit that much still remains to be done if life is to be appreciated as a whole, including superior organisms. However, research is facing the complexity of the problem with ever-increasing success, moving in a completely new direction, not simply on a cellular level, but on a molecular and atomic scale. It is this radical change in thinking methods that might perhaps enable the scientist of today to study hitherto out-of-the-way fields, albeit still from a highly speculative point of view, by giving him scope for new ways of thinking. This is particularly true of psychology which, it seems, has not as yet been the subject of reasoning on a molecular scale.

I term a group of texts “African philosophy”: to be precise, the group of texts written by Africans and defined as “philosophic” by the authors themselves.

This definition, let us note, involves no “petitio principii.” The sense of the adjective “philosophic” need not be reckoned with here, and even less the cogency of the adjective. All that matters is the fact of the adjective itself, the deliberate recourse to the word “philosophy” whatever, by the way, the sense or meaninglessness of the word may be. In other words, all that concerns us is the philosophic intention of the authors, not the extent (hard to evaluate) of its effective realisation.