Synopsis "Life of the Mind According to Aimé Forest "
When I was preparing to become a priest and missionary fifty-two years ago – I was then 23 years old and living in Ottawa – I wrote two memoirs for my master’s degree in philosophy. The first memoir was on the American psychotherapist Carl Rogers and the second one on the French philosopher Aimé Forest. Today, with the hindsight that half a century allows me to have, I am very impressed by the fact that the worldviews underlying Aimé Forest’s philosophical approach and Carl Rogers’ person-centered therapy remain not only very relevant in 2018, but also, in my opinion, urgently so. In this book I first briefly point out why I consider that the worldview underlying Aimé Forest’s philosophy has much in common with that of Carl Rogers’ person-centered therapy, that of the indigenous, that of Gregory Baum, and that of Gandhi; I explain why I consider it extremely important to continue advocating these common worldviews in 2018; and I argue that these worldviews, to which I was exposed in my youth, have proven to be a blessing for me as an educator. Second, I reproduce the memoir that I wrote on Aimé Forest in which I present his conception of the nature of being, his views on the meaning and spirit of idealism and realism and the reasons for which he opts for realism. Finally I reproduce a long personal reflection that I wrote in less than one week in January 1966, a reflection that represents my effort to put down on paper and clarify what then appeared to me as some of the most fundamental issues in philosophy: what it means to know, the difference between sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge, and the contributions of some of the world’s greatest philosophers to the search for the unity and meaning of being. This latter reflection, which is meditative and thus contains considerable repetition, was part of my diary and was not written in order to be published. Its value and interest originate, I believe, from the fact that it is very personal, very sincere and passionate, and reflects the kind of education many of us were receiving as future priests back in the 1960s. This reflection also sheds light on the philosophical implications of the worldviews referred to above – that of Carl Rogers, Aimé Forest, Gandhi, Gregory Baum, and the indigenous – and, more fundamentally, on what remains for each and every one of us a forever unfinished task: the quest for the meaning of life and the universe.
