Our Selves

Our Selves is a collection of some of South African philosopher Martin Versfeld's most interesting essays. This professor of philosophy, who took great pleasure in claiming that he would be disowned by most schools of philosophy, turns a skeptical eye on some of the most revered thinkers in the Western world.

He takes up arms against the increased fragmentation experienced by those who imbibed Descartes' 'I think therefore I am' with their mother's milk, and finds a promise of wholeness in the teachings of St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and the Buddha.

Said Versfeld: 'A viable philosophy for our day must not have Newtonian space and time as a premise, but must realise the primacy of subjective space and time. We place ourselves in the world, but the placing of the world in us is primary. The spirit is the place of the world. When Confucius maintains that man is the measure of reality, he is not proclaiming any cheap relativism, but realising how profoundly anthropomorphic our knowledge must be. If we confine ourselves to measuring man, and measuring the world in terms of Newtonian space and time, we shall lose ourselves. And this quantification of all things has gone very far. By rocketry we have become obsessed by man in space, forgetting that spirit is the place of the world.'