Book Overview

The book records the author’s personal and intellectual maturation over a period of nine decades. This maturation was never purely self-propelled, but always occurred in response to teachings and experiences. Situated as a being-in-the-world, the author’s experiences reach from World War II via the Cold War to recent “terror wars”.

Intellectual Perspectives

Intellectually, he participated in and reacted to a number of major perspectives: from phenomenology, existentialism, and critical theory to hermeneutics, postmodernism, and post-secularism. Exchanges with multiple interlocutors helped to shape his distinctive outlook or profile; which privileges self-other contacts over the ego, dialogue over monologue, and dialogical cosmopolitanism over chauvinistic power politics.

Profile and Philosophy

Implicit in this emerging profile is a preference for potentiality over actuality and of relationality over static identity. Shunning doctrinal formulas or finished “systems”, the author’s life thus is shown to be simply a journey, an adventure to what comes, an itinerary (mentis in Deum).