Abstract

For philosophers interested in the concept of person, Mervyn Sprung's, After Truth, can be very intriguing. Sprung grew up in a Methodist community in Winnipeg during the twenties and early thirties. His was the context in which love of God as person and love of neighbours as persons was of utmost significance. But he seems to have become offended by the dogmas and dangers of Christianity. He studied Plato and decided to become a philosopher. He went to Berlin and from 1936 to 1939 did phenomenology with Nicolai Hartmann. Already, he began his lifelong affair with Nietzsche. From 1939 to 1963 he rose through the ranks of the Canadian Army to Colonel and while in hospital read a book on the Buddha. He went to India, learned Sanskrit, studied with T. R. V. Murti and as a founding member of the Brock Philosophy Department became a Buddhist scholar. In his book, The Magic of Unknowing, he remained primarily a Nietzschean Buddhist, that is, he held to theories and practices that for the sake of loving all of existence were anti-personal. The Buddhist Anatman presumption emphasizes the emptiness of anything personal. Nietzsche's conception of life as will to power would equate the personal with the realm of the little reason, and stress that what is of most importance is in the realm of the great reason which is not personal.