ABSTRACT
In education today students encounter a doubly schizoid experience. Much in 'liberal studies' has gone empty and corrupt even as it still seems a serious approach to human problems. Nihilism has held a distorting mirror with a distorted image in front of their eyes, according to which they seemed to be either an automaton of reflexes, a bundle of drives, a psychic mechanism, a plaything of external circumstances or internal conditions, or simply a product of economic environment. The predominance of Sartre's nihilism in European philosophical thought has delayed urgently needed attention to the psychology of ethics and knowledge of a positive kind. The nihilistic consequences of our natural sciences from its pursuits there follow ultimately a self-decomposition. Polanyi links the fervour of the moral scepticism of the naturalist tradition with that homunculism of which Viktor Frankl complains as a threat to our need to cherish a sense of human dignity and potentialities.
