This is a time, as Herman Hesse puts it, “when a whole generation is caught . . . between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it l… - Rollo May

so many people judge the value of their actions not on the basis of the action itself, but on the basis of how the action is accepted. It is as though one had always to postpone his judgment until he looked at his audience. The person who is passive, to whom or for whom the act is done, has the power to make the act effective or ineffective, rather than the one who is doing it. Thus we tend to be performers in life rather than persons who live and act as selves.

In the following decades “Kierkegaard remained completely unknown, Schelling’s work was contemptuously buried, and Marx and Feuerbach were interpreted as dogmatic materialists. Then a new impetus came in the 1880’s with the work of Dilthey, and particularly with Freidrich Nietzsche, the “philosophy of life” movement, and the work of Berson. The third phase came after the shock of WWI – “Kierkegaard and the early Marxists were rediscovered and the serious challenges to the spiritual and psychological basis of Western society given by Nietzsche could no longer be covered over by Victorian self-satisfied placidity. The specific form of the third phase owes much to the phenomenology of Edmond Husserl, which gave to Heidegger, Jaspers, and the others the tool they needed to undercut the subject object cleavage which had been such a stumbling block to science as well as philosophy.

The function of the rebel is to shake the fixated mores of the rigid order of civilization; and this shaking, though painful, is necessary if the society is to be saved from boredom and apathy. Obviously I do not refer to everyone who calls himself a rebel, but only to the authentic rebel. Civilization gets its first flower from the rebel.