Intelligence in Danger of Death (English edition) - by Marcel de Corte (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Well-known in the French-speaking world for his devastating critiques of the decadence of thought in the West since Descartes's Cogito ergo sum, Marcel De Corte published Intelligence in Danger of Death as the final stage of his reflections in 1969. To grasp the profound mutation which man and society have undergone, Marcel De Corte offers a merciless analysis that relies on classical philosophy and insight from Christian Revelation. He outlines the genealogy of contemporary evils and indicates the ways to correct these. What Orwell and Huxley turned into novels, Marcel De Corte predicted through reasoning and analysis in the light of Wisdom. His thesis: man's speculative and practical intelligence has been replaced with his working intelligence, that is, the intelligence that produces new things and can only know the world that it has produced. This is how man has ultimately become detached from reality and how his mind has become apt only to grasp a manufactured world as presented to him by those in command of the production of information: scientists, media, governments.

Review Quotes

De Corte is one of the greatest contemporary Catholic philosophers. It was above all in studying Aristotle that he became convinced that [Aristotle and Aquinas] used identical intellectual processes, and that they were, and are, among the best philosophers in history. This was enough for De Corte to oppose modern ideologies with the perennial relevance of classical philosophy. -Danilo Castellano, author of L'aristotelismo cristiano di Marcel De Corte, 1975

"I have loved justice and hated iniquity; that is why I die in exile." These are said to have been the last words of Pope St. Gregory VII. Those of Marcel de Corte could have been analogous: "I have seen through the grotesque intellectual frauds around me; I have made due distinctions; but I lived in times when the difficult judgments men must make regarding complex issues has been used to block the knowledge of my work; therefore I die unappreciated." This translation will go a long way towards awakening thinking English-speaking Catholics to the recognition he so deserves. -John C. Rao

De Corte's analyses of the way in which a whole society can be made to believe a made-up story useful only to those who govern have been vindicated time and again since 1969; consider recent events such as a man-made virus and its made-up cure(s), made-up sexual categories, made-up universes in electronic media, transhumanism, and so on. De Corte could not have known of these, but the principles he outlines make sense of them, and his reliance on a vast body of philosophical, political, and literary markers from the eighteenth to the twentieth century show the near-irresistible momentum that has led us to this point. This book is an essential read for whoever wishes to understand the road that has led to the current epistemological crisis and its underpinnings; it is a red-pill time capsule. For the solution is precisely to see reality as it is, and to abandon the sophistries and fairy-tales that are imposed upon us. -Peter A. Kwasniewski