Being condemned (or chosen?) to be “the missing link” on its way to perfectibility (or redemption?) - half animal/half human - we always need in some way or another the transcendence of a Utopian Vision. It therefore comes as no surprise that most of the essays in this issue, reflecting a vision of the world today, are openly or covertly concerned with Utopian expectations. Hence, it might be worthwhile to trace the origins and reflect in flashbacks - following the pioneering technique of the French film-maker Alain Resnais - a story of the Utopian Vision.

It has been commonplace to maintain of the phenomenon that occurred during classical times, the change from relying on myth to trusting in reason: (1) that the emergence of philosophy from myth was marked by an abrupt discontinuity; (2) that mythical thinking was left behind once philosophy was invented or discovered; and (3) that the ancient Greeks were the agents of this miracle. This paper suggests that the so-called “Greek miracle” was, in fact, a miracle manqué and, more importantly, that close examination of this failed miracle offers valuable insight into the philosophical crisis facing the world today.

In 1934 the Belgian artist René Magritte painted a room with a view. On an easel in front of the window stands a painting depicting the very piece of landscape blocked from sight. Magritte named his painting La Condition Humaine (“The Human Condition”), which is quite apt, for the life of everyone is determined by windows, doors, mirrors and many other frames. Indeed, to avert anxiety, one actually cultivates social behavior born of the fear of being “outside the frame.” Because of this apprehension, we organize all reality into a series of preestablished frames.

All things by immortal power,
Near or far,
Hiddenly,
To each other linked are
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star.
Francis Thompson (1859-1907)

Picture a rainbow: under ideal conditions, you will not only see the primary and the (fainter) secondary rainbow, but you will also realize there is a zone between the two which is considerably darker than the surrounding sky, and you will see the series of very faint and narrow bands of colors, usually pink and green alternately, at the inner side of the primary bow. For centuries these narrow bands, called “supernumerary arcs,” have been a riddle to those who set out to explain the rainbow phenomenon scientifically.

European intellectuals diagnosed the end of the nineteenth century as “the sickness of an age.” Schopenhauer's pessimistic books suddenly became popular; Nietzsche announced the “death of god”; and Max Nordeau's Degeneration was an international best seller. To be sure, this mood of despair was initially limited to a handful of poets and philosophers. But once the outbreak of World War I revealed what “the treacherous years were all the while making for and meaning,” the sense that the West had somehow been betrayed by its own most fundamental accomplishments and beliefs was globalized. Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain captured the idea neatly by describing Europe as a tuberculosis sanatorium behind whose walls splendid accomplishment rapidly rotted toward calamity. Spengler's Decay of the West and the early volumes of Toynbee's Study of History argued that decline was inevitable. As Europeans lost faith in their ability to erect The Heavenly City Of The Eighteenth Century Philosophers [Becker, 1932], the era of “enlightenment optimism” gave way to Auden's “Age of Anxiety.” If, as T.S. Eliot put it in East Coker, “the quiet-voiced elders” bequeathed us “merely a receipt for deceit,” then, to cite again W.B. Yeats’ famous poem, it became increasingly obvious that “things fall apart, the center cannot hold.” “[F]ollowing some rough beast” that “slouches toward Bethlehem to be born,” modern civilization began a desperate search for new values that could orient society in an unexpected world.