Belief and Unbelief : A Philosophy of Self-Knowledge

Transaction Pub, April 1994. Paper Back. Very Good. Best known for his landmark <i>Spirit of Democratic Capitalism<i> and other works on religion and economics, <i>Belief and Unbelief</i>, first published in 1964, reminds us that Novak is primarily a philosopher-though one who engages a diverse range of disciplines, including religion, politics, writing literary fiction, cultural studies, law, even sports. Raised Catholic, educated for twelve years in seminary schools in expectation of the priesthood, Novak instead chose lay life and after attending Harvard, married and devoted himself to writing. The experience of long hours alone in seminary, and the different sort of loneliness in the atmosphere of pervasive disregard of or hostility to faith in academia, led him to compare the similarities between his own religious views and his colleagues' atheistic aridity and desolation, the one a sense of separation and abandonment by God, the other the experience of no God. Novak found that belief and unbelief lie very close to one another. Frustrated with then-contemporary philosophy's identification of the subjective and the emotive, opposing these to objective reason, Novak proposes in this study that reason, emotion, and will operate together inseparably, in what he calls 'intelligent subjectivity.' 'By this,' he wrote much later, 'I have always protected the role of the tacit, the inarticulable, the well-ordered senses and passions and emotions and heart at the very center of our acts of insight and judgment. But I have also tried to show how these are, properly, acts of reason.' <i>Belief and Unbelief</i> is philosophical and theological investigation of the most personal sort, and while always avoiding being merely confessional, journeys to the inmost sanctuary of the human person, to limn an outline of the soul. Clean, solid copy. Light wear to cover and light age-toning to pages.