It is a clear truth that any of us can be desperately narrow-minded without knowing it. We can be mean-spirited witout being conscious that there is anything wrong with us. This inner disease has been described in their different ways by two"existentialist" thinkers. Kierkegaard speaks of it as a form of despair:a given man adjusts himself so perfectly to business that he becomes no longer a man but a number. Jean Paul Sartre maintains that a man is a neant,a nothingness,so long as he willingly submits himself to passivity,ignorance,and boredom. And centuries before Kierkegaard and Sartre,Socrates said briefly,"The unexamined life is not worth living."