The Five Joys of the Mind

With Wildiers - his portrait on the front cover shows it - the reader can delight in aspects of the history of ideas in the areas of religion, science, history, philosophy and aesthetics. On each of these he bundles three essays from the years 1981-92. He is a master in simplifying and summarizing complicated problems of thought. They often touch on the progress of thought in time and in connection with this also ethical questions. When he sketches our current thinking, he sets it against that of the past. In our time, the mechanistic worldview and the individualistic ethics of power are making way for an organic worldview and an ethics of freedom and creativity. In his illumination of this, Wildiers positions himself in line with process thinking. In particular what he writes about cosmology and the concept of God, about Whitehead and Teilhard is extremely illuminating. One does not need to be philosophically trained for this excellent book; some interest in e.g. Guido Gezelle, Ruusbroec or the music of the spheres is sufficient entry.