ABSTRACT
The design of these lectures is to sketch the essential pattern of what has been called the human ‘predicament’, the plight in which we, as rational, concerned beings find ourselves, the sorts of thing that come before us at varying removes and distances, and in varied guises of reality and unreality, as well as all the varied styles of recognition, appraisal, practical manipulation, etc. in which we show our concern for them and are busy about them, together with our own central essence as what holds the picture together, and gives it its equivocal, ever shifting sense and interest. To deal thus with the plight of men is to cover all the main themes of philosophy, for however much we may affect interest in the architecture of nature or its various departments, or in the various detached systems of ideas which proliferate abundantly in their glassed-in compartments, it is plain that we cannot achieve clarity in regard to any of them without achieving clarity as to our own empirical, conceptual and linguistic approaches to them. Without due study of these we are more than likely to see our own thought-and speech-habits and problems merely written large on the cosmos, and there is, in fact, no easier way to fall victim to what is arbitrary and personal than to set out uncritically to be objective and impersonal. If a certain deep criticism is of the essence of philosophy, and if such deep criticism necessarily involves seeing matters in their full context and setting, then it is as much such contexts and settings which give unity to philosophy as the deep criticism in question. If it is a mark of the feebly bitten philosopher to hurry from personal human approaches, to some majestic body of correct dicta or data which he derives from science, authority or some similar source, it is a mark of the deeply bitten philosopher to be as much concerned with what we take to be correct dicta or data as with what really are so, and as much concerned with the tests involved in the use of the label ‘correct’ 20as with the situations as with the situations to which we attach it. The interest of philosophy is not in the objects of our primary interest but in such objects only as they interest or concern us: if the world and reality figure largely in philosophy it is because they are for us such objects of omnipresent and necessary concern. In studying the structure of our plight we do not therefore neglect anything that is of philosophical importance: but we deal with whatever we deal with in the only manner in which its full significance can be clarified and appraised.
