BOOK REVIEW: QUEST: The Search for a Soul for Modernkind, by Vincent Coppola


Reviewed by Steve Goldman

With great passion, yet without a scintilla of mawkish sentimentality, Coppola here makes the strongly compelling case for love as the direct and primary implication of human consciousness.


That would be laudable by itself, but these are not merely the pleasant musings of a decent well-intentioned person. This is (and it is astounding) tightly reasoned philosophy, based on acute, astute observation and profound and powerful argument. Building on Descartes (whom he explicitly reverses on the fundamental matter of “proof” of personal existence) and Kant, who seems indispensable to all who came after, Coppola emerges with a distinctive and compassionate American existentialism that is unlike anything heretofore. With strongly grounded links to modern cosmology, evolutionary theory and the sheer phenomenology of consciousness in space/time, Coppola delivers a ringing statement of free will, so sorely needed in this era of burgeoning biological reductionist determinism.

This in turn yields a ringing adduction of the ontological primacy of self, with commensurately devastating attacks on any variety of teeny-bopping reductionism, chemical, biological, physical or psychological: and as well on any religio-philosophical tradition (usually Asian), which explicitly denies or tries to ”eradicate” the self. “I myself exist, and I can love” is the rigorously derived, powerfully demonstrated theorem, which is the “first principal” here. What is more, the revolutionary “optional” theology “Quest” proposes, seems to at last settle that huge and perennial question for contemporary times. Additionally and astonishingly, and with philosophical deftness and gracious style,

Coppola’s secularized Christology evinces sacred humanitarian values, again so needed in this era.

Coppola is a highly trained professional philosopher, a prodigiously well-read and deeply thoughtful theorist and analyst, whose similarity to the preponderant mentality in his field is only superficial. That is because Vincent is a philosopher in the all but abandoned grand tradition, a professor who actually professes, a professor who operates from a stance of engagement and compassion, so unlike his horde of reductionist, detached, time-serving technician faculty colleagues of the professorate; a man who actually strives to influence his student’s lives for the sake of liberation through philosophic method, this, let’s say it, in the tradition of the Platonic Socrates. Philosophy is no idle pastime, dealing with jejune abstractions for Coppola, it is a matter of life and death, a tradition he shares with only a few of the greats, the likes of Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, who, apart from particular doctrinal identity or particular slant or area of concern, were in it for “blood.”

And most importantly in that connection, Coppola herein posits suffering as an object of philosophical scrutiny, i.e. being worthy of philosophical address. This is unknown in western philosophy to my knowledge: evil yes, even cruelty, but not suffering. While at pains to refute the Buddhist account, he does not of course solve the matter of suffering, how could he? Short of a thoroughgoing and slavish deism, (“the ways of the Lord are unknown to us, but He has His reason blah, blah”) - how could anybody? Remember we are returning here to the root meaning of philosophy: philo+sophy = love of wisdom, not love of word games.

The written style of this book is commensurately unique to its conceptual output. It is by turns funny, personal, engaged, warm, redolent with true and moving pathos (in the best sense) - derived from the author’s own sometime anguished personal experience: the death of those he loved, and as well, (brace yourselves) his love for his Old English Sheepdog, and cockatiel. The book is startlingly and refreshingly entertaining. Stylistically, there has, I hazard, never been a book of “serious” philosophy remotely like this.

The schema expressed herein is in no way explicitly political, as indeed neither is Vincent’s classroom teaching. Remember, we are doing philosophy here, not proselytizing. But never have human affairs so greatly needed such an incredible book as this: remember, we are about to embark on another horrible, horrible war. Read this book, it will change your life. It changed mine and i was already a pretty loving guy, going in.

Posted: Tue - June 1, 2004 at 08:47 PM          

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