Creative critique and anthropo-philosophy

able to see it in its own true setting, experience again the problems of thought which produced a philosophical system, or the emotions which produced a great work of art, or the context in which a historical event was enacted.

This is not a work only for the few. The whole wealth of our human inheritance must be inherited by all. Culture should no longer be the preserve of specialists. Even concepts which are the result of great intellectual labour should now be presented to persons incapable of such labour, so that they can grasp by imagination knowledge which they would not be Ce of receiving in any other way. Knowledge should be presented as living experience.

This requires real personal communication between those who specialise in the different aspects of culture so that they may seriously try to relate them to one another not as mere abstract system but as part of the whole life of man. It is the responsibility of those who know the joyous experience of any art or study to make it alive to others by sharing their personal experience of their own subjects and not merely explaining the objective content in popular language. Thus one aspect of culture could be interpreted in relation to another and one art expressed through the medium of another so that the ordinary man might himself experience what was previously only possible to genius.

In the light of our modern critical consciousness, there is need for a wholly new approach to truth and knowledge. The change must be as radical as when Socrates taught his hearers the notion of a concept or when Francis Bacon established the independence of science from religion, while maintaining the validity of both, and thus enabled science to become the foundation of the modern technological era.

We shall henceforward take nothing for granted and allow no unstated assumption to be made. Nothing can be accepted which actual human beings cannot experience. And equally nothing can be rejected just because it is not seen at once or is difficult to believe. Uncritical rejection is as naive and unscientific as uncritical acceptance.

Io