The nuclear threat is both cause and effect of the hiding of the human image. The revealing of the hidden human image can take place in response to the challenge of the nuclear threat and is perhaps the only way in which we can hope to overcome that threat. The debate between Hobbes and Rousseau as to whether "man in nature" is evil or good had a modern counterpart in the debate between Freud and Einstein as to whether war is inevitable and the still more contemporary dialogue between Martin Buber and Car Rogers (1957) and the interchange on evil between Rogers and Rollo May in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology (1982) in which both Rogers and May were centrally concerned about the nuclear threat. Philosophical anthropology goes beyond "human nature" to the wholeness and uniqueness of the human, and the image of the human, as Maurice Friedman has unfolded it in his books Problematic Rebel, To Deny Our Nothingness and The Hidden Human Image, has gone beyond that to two typical responses to the "problematic of modern man"-that of the "Modern Promethean" and the "Modern Job." The Modern Promethean attitude is one of either/or, destroy or be destroyed. It can only lead to the destruction of all in the face of the nuclear threat. Only the attitude of the Modern Job, trusting and contending within the dialogue, can lead to that confirmation of otherness which is the sole hope of humankind to avert the nuclear threat and build together a community of communities in its place.
