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Today our point of view is so remote from that of Rabelais that it requires a special effort of will to even know what he is talking about. Our science of the mind is founded on the study of the behavior of the mentally ill; our Public Health on epidemiology; our practical sociology on a kind of social worker’s criminology; our economics on Marx. It has been said of America that its philosophy of life, like that of the ancient Greeks, is medically oriented. The ethics or the politics or the psychology of Aristotle or Plato is founded on the clear concept of the fully healthy man. Our parallel disciplines begin with pathology. Psychiatrists say we are all neurotics. Rabelais would not have known what they are talking about.
Kenneth Rexroth’s Classics Revisited
