Letters from Exile: Observations on a Culture in Decline [Hardcover]

'What this aggressive, stimulating book does is to make us face up to some of the polite fictions we have come to accept.' --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

'Refreshing ... so much sparkle.' Philip Toynbee --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

'A brilliant exposition of the human predicament.'
--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Celia Green has been at various times Senior Open Scholar at Somerville College, Oxford, holder of a Perrott Warrick Studentship from Trinity College, Cambridge, and Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Liverpool University. She was awarded her doctorate by Oxford University for work on causation and the mind-body problem. She is the author of eight other books, among them The Human Evasion, The Decline and Fall of Science, and Advice to Clever Children.

`The starting point is that one is interested in the universe, one observes that one is finite and that this is intolerable. One has a limited time and apparently limited capacity with which to find anything out. Therefore it is possible to despair. There are many orders of despair, and none of them are known to normal psychology...

Existential psychology, at least to a certain point, consists of exploiting the recoil from the despair of finiteness. The recoil is a drive with at least the instinctive immediacy of the survival instinct. There is no point in saying, 'What is there to do? What could such a drive possibly tend towards?'. The survival instinct tends to prolong life. The fundamental drive tends to inform itself about the universe.' --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.