Word: rubinoff
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...PORNOGRAPHY OF POWER by Lionel Rubinoff. 239 pages. Quadrangle...
...trying to help is Lionel Rubinoff, an associate professor of philosophy at Toronto's York University. For Rubinoff, the image of evil has never been farther away than the nearest mirror. That individual man is both the creator and perpetrator of evil is hardly a new idea, and Rubinoff acknowledges his indebtedness to thinkers from Plato to Sartre. It is, however, in the analysis of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that the assumption underlying The Pornography of Power is most readily grasped. Of Stevenson's portrayal of the ambivalence of human nature, Rubinoff...
...hope of salvation through the exercise of a semblance of free will in the worldly fight with the Devil's forces. What is an increasingly secular age to do with its knowledge that evil is an inextricable part of man's nature? Face it, says Rubinoff. Bring it out into the open...
Predictably, the process is not easy. Besides the individual's own natural shiftiness, Rubinoff argues, one of the great intellectual stumbling blocks to such self-knowledge is liberal humanism, a near-religion that obscures the truth about human nature by assuming that evil is to be found not in man but in social and political institutions, and preaching that they, and indeed man himself, are perfectible through the application of discipline and reason. With the aid of this and other rationalizations, modern man tends to repress the natural knowledge of evil and of his own demonic urges. The result...