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Intelligence in Danger of Death

by Marcel De Corte | Translated by Brian Welter | Introduction by Miguel Ayuso, Ph.D.

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•   Description
•   Table of Contents
•   About the Author
•   Endorsements

• ✦ ✦ ✦

  Intelligence in Danger of Death

  by Marcel De Corte · Translated by Brian Welter · Introduction by Miguel Ayuso, Ph.D.

   

  A prophetic Thomistic analysis of modern man, propaganda, utopia, false information, and the crisis of intelligence in a world increasingly cut off from reality.

  First English translation. Originally published in 1969 and subsequent editions in 1987 & 2017. Originally published in French in 1969, Intelligence in Danger of Death by the Belgian Catholic philosopher Marcel De Corte demonstrates that his analysis, prophetic in many respects, has lost nothing of its attraction because what it describes corresponds so closely to our contemporary society.

  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.

   

  A Book for the Present Crisis

   

  ✒

  Thomistic Realism

  De Corte judges modernity in light of the real, not in light of ideology, image, or abstraction.

  ☞

  The Rule of Images

  The modern mind is trained to live by appearance, propaganda, spectacle, and manufactured opinion.

  ⚖

  The Crisis of Man

  The book examines a civilizational mutation in which man becomes uprooted from nature, truth, and God.

  ✦ ✦ ✦

  “Intelligence is in danger of dying.”

   

  Inside the Book

   

  Chapter 1

  Intellectuals and Utopia

  Chapter 2

  The Romanticism of Science

  Chapter 3

  Information that Deforms

   

  With a translator’s foreword, an introduction by Miguel Ayuso, the author’s original 1969 preface, and his 1987 preface, this edition presents De Corte’s analysis in its full intellectual and historical force.

   

  Key Themes

   

  Reality

  The submission of intelligence to what is.

  Utopia

  The dream-world built when intelligence rejects reality.

  Information

  Not neutral data, but a force that can form—or deform—the soul.

  Modernity

  A revolt against nature, order, tradition, and the Principle of reality.

  Dissociety

  The unraveling of organic human bonds into collective abstraction.

  Wisdom

  The return to classical philosophy and Christian Revelation.

  Why This Book Matters

  De Corte’s argument is not merely political, sociological, or cultural. It is metaphysical. He asks what happens when intelligence no longer receives reality, when images replace things, when information becomes formation, and when modern man begins to live inside a manufactured world.

  This is a demanding book, but also an urgent one: a work for readers who want to understand not only the crisis around them, but the deeper intellectual wound beneath it.

  ✦ ✦ ✦

  Review

  Read Stuart Chessman’s review of Intelligence in Danger of Death at the Society of St. Hugh of Cluny.

  Read the Review by Stuart Chessman

• ✦ ✦ ✦

  Contents

  A guide through Marcel De Corte’s profound diagnosis of the modern crisis of intelligence: from utopian intellectuals, to the romanticism of science, to information that deforms.

   

  Front Matter

   

  vii

  Publisher’s Note

  xi

  Translator’s Foreword

  xix

  Introduction
  Miguel Ayuso, Ph.D.

  xxxv

  Preface for the First Edition
  1969

  xlvi

  Preface for the Second Edition
  1987

   

  Main Text

   

  Chapter 1

  Intellectuals and Utopia

  page 3

  Chapter 2

  The Romanticism of Science

  page 67

  Chapter 3

  Information that Deforms

  page 146

  ✦ ✦ ✦

  Three great movements of deformation: the intellectual cut off from reality, science romanticized into salvation, and information transformed into manipulation.

   

  Back Matter

   

  216

  Conclusion

  245

  Index of Names

  249

  About the Author

• Marcel De Corte was born in Belgium in 1905 and died in 1994. Philosopher, heir to the great Aristotelian tradition, contemporary of Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Gabriel Marcel, and Gustave Thibon, he taught at the University of Liège until 1975. Author of more than twenty works on philosophical reflection, he is notably interested in social evolutions that stem from the French and Industrial Revolutions, principally regarding the moral and social disintegration of modern man.

• ✦ ✦ ✦

  Praise for Intelligence in Danger of Death

   

  A profound and prophetic work by Marcel De Corte, praised by leading Catholic thinkers for its perennial philosophical insight, its critique of modern ideologies, and its astonishing relevance to the present crisis.

  “

  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

  “

  “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

  ✦ ✦ ✦

  A work of philosophical realism for readers seeking to understand propaganda, modern ideology, the crisis of intelligence, and the urgent need to recover reality.

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