PREFACE

THE PUBLIC SORROWS discussed in the first part of this collection are recent and yet only repeat the movements of mind developed in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. They offer thereby contemporary illustration of the theses of that great book. But here my interest is not so much in any scholarly question as in tracing dramatically the fates of various gusts of passionate ideology that have swept the popular mind during the last decade and that are destined to sweep it forever. My method is dramatic or dialectical; that is to say, by provisionally adopting the spirit of some movement, I trace out the logical consequences so long as it remains faithful to itself. The sorrows result from the inherent shortcomings of the attitude adopted; they are one and all disastrous, not merely in thought but, more importantly, in life.

My chief effort is to disengage the principle of the attitude, that from which its many consequences flow, some of them comic, some pitiful, others deeply tragic. These consequences, documented daily by the newspapers, are in part determined by fashion, but more centrally by that inherent determining principle; the particular dress the ideological activity wears could be changed and already is changing. And yet those changes are themselves in their meaning strictly determined by the principle of the attitude, its essence. Substantial change would be only a change of principle.

The first essay looks at the radical; what on earth is behind the passion to “dismantle the establishment” in order to reconstruct a new one? What is the dramatic fate of any such desire? Why should anyone have ever supposed that formulas of abstract justice could in their immediate application be just? If the radical is seen as maddened by abstractions, the next essay looks at the sincere man of private conscience. He may be Thoreau or today’s preacher or social scientist; what entitles such a man to overthrow tradition, law, or the public conscience? The Ellsberg case provides an illustration; it has of course been thrown out of the courts; but have the real issues been considered? Closely allied is the passion for pacifism: has this lovely ideology anything whatsoever in its favor beyond a somewhat sentimental desire to live the Kingdom of Heaven on earth?

If public life and thought have deteriorated under these insistences, their possible culture has also deteriorated under a technological passion to bring everything under a special rule or method. Do not all those activities of the spirit that have their only sense in a mutual cooperation, art, religion, and philosophy lose every vestige of their original meaning in professional separation? The death of culture is this spiritual disintegration into expertise.

Culture thus dies into civilization. There are reasons why no serious culture can endure; dialectically it must civilize itself, that is, reflect upon its own intents and pleasures. Civilization is here considered as a necessary moment in the life of the public mind, the inherent desire to blow up the whole of cultural seriousness into examination and amusement. But then the joke lasts too long, and what is the fate of civilization except a final, private recuperation of the spirit altogether beyond civilization?

That recuperation lies in the domain of private pleasures, the pleasures of the weary but transcendental mind. If these pleasures are to address themselves to the most serious interests of the spirit, I will call them “philosophical.” But the name is not important. Art is an ultimate medium of what in another age might be called “philosophy.” That the arts have this seriousness and can in effect present to the mind what philosophy has frequently taken to be a matter of argument is the burden of one essay; the arts can do all, and from one angle do it more perfectly for us than any philosophical argument that separates itself from aesthetic intuition. Surrealism certainly is the apocalypse of the philosophical imagination, and nothing could be more mistaken than to dismiss it as one more “aesthetic” movement of the twenties. It lives in that domain above the aesthetic and the philosophical, which could make both more serious and more available for our purposes the life of philosophical imagination at last!

Two final essays revert to interiority as the final destiny of each person. If the problems of the public have their public importance and if the public in the last analysis is no one, where is that one to whom it must all make a difference if it is to make any at all, and where indeed but in the final interiority of each? That subjectivity, considered as it is for itself that is, in its interiority and singularity, must be the final origin and end of value if there is to be any. And yet, each person most usually is denounced as “merely” himself; the function of the last two essays is to remove the idea of “merely” and return not only the value but the philosophical sense of an otherwise unsurveyable domain of problems to where it should never have left: the transcendental and mystic life of the first-person singular.