Читать книгу Admirable Evasions - Theodore Dalrymple - Страница 8

PREFACE

In the misfortunes of our friends, wrote the duc de La Rochefoucauld nearly three and a half centuries ago, there is something not entirely unpleasing. When we read this for the first time we experience both a shock and a sense of recognition. Something discreditable about us has been put into words that, if we had reflected a little harder or more honestly upon ourselves, we should have known all along: and henceforth we shall never be able to pretend that we are other than complex and contradictory beings.

La Rochefoucauld was able to put into words what anyone could have known by “attending to the motions of his own mind,” as Doctor Johnson put it. Have human beings progressed beyond this in their self-understanding? It is my contention that they have not, and that our vaunted or pretended progress, amazing though it may be from a technological point of view, is actually a retrogression in honesty and sophistication. Psychology is not a key to self-understanding, but a cultural barrier to such understanding as we can achieve; but it is my belief that we shall never be able entirely to pluck out the heart of our mystery. Of this I am glad rather than sorry.