Literature and the Objective Society

Author(s): Everett W. Knight

Source: Chicago Review, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Summer, 1959), pp. 19-26
Published by: Chicago Review
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25293512
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EVERETT W. KNIGHT

LITERATURE AND THE OBJECTIVE SOCIETY

It is the obvious that escapes us. What could be more striking about
Western civilization at the moment than the fact that it is going
nowhere; and yet what could be less frequently remarked upon
with the concern that such a state of affairs demands? We would
not think as we do about many things if Hegel and Marx had
never lived. Whatever we may feel about their philosophies, it is
quite impossible for us to look upon human society as something
static as, in general, men did before the beginning of the last cen
tury. How then, are we to reconcile this fundamental belief in his

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torical evolution with so widespread a refusal to think about how
this relentless movement could be directed? The answer, probably,
is that men frequently have knowledge of which they force them
selves to be unaware. The Western intellectual is in the position
of the eighteenth century clergyman who was a product of the
Enlightenment, but who for obvious reasons had to deny it. I can
say for 'obvious reasons' because thanks to the existence of Marx
we know that systems of thought, like acts, are usually motivated,
in however subtle a way, by extra-philosophical considerations.
Theory and praxis, in other words, form an intelligible whole.
Today, for example, the non-thought of the Objective Society is
an accurate reflection of the non-direction of the culture from
which it springs. The Anglo-Saxon philosopher has nothing to say
because the 'Open Society' of which he is a part has nowhere to go,
all its energies being directed toward conserving, toward protecting.
When ideas cease to be intellectually defensible, they are trans
formed into a 'generally accepted practice,' which it is not alto
gether 'fair' to question. What were the ideas whose degeneration
into unquestioned usage makes it so difficult for us to do anything
about the increasingly dangerous non-existence of Anglo-Saxon
political and philosophical thought?
The word 'scientism,' significantly enough, is one which the
English language has shown no haste to adopt; while in the French,
it has been current for a long time. I doubt that at any moment in
the history of Western philosophy was the British school so radi
cally cut off from the Continent as it is today, and the reason for
this appears to be the fact that, at the turn of the century, Anglo
Saxon philosophy had the misfortune to produce no Boutroux, no
Bergson, no Meyerson, no Henri Poincar?, etc.; no thinker, that is,
to denounce in science a concealed metaphysics (which we call
scientism), and a singularly feeble one at that. Instead of Bergson,
we had Russell. I deplore Bergson's mysticism as much as anyone,
but there is more to his thinking than that. Students of philosophy
in our universities are the victims of a prejudice which takes the
form of depreciating great philosophers (especially Hegel and Marx
of course) by pointing out with amused condescension how absurd
their philosophies are as systems. What the student never learns is
that these systems are full of invaluable insights not a whit less
precious for forming part of a structure that time has not permitted
to stand in its entirety. What, on the other hand, remains when one
has rejected Russell's symbolic logic? Nothing whatever.

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 Scientism is faith in the existence of a comprehensive Truth in
whose creation man had no part. He simply reveals it. What dis
tinguishes Anglo-Saxon empiricism, however, is less its unwavering
(though nowadays seldom explicit) conviction that there is an
underlying Meaning, than the patience with which it waits to
receive the Truth, in the meanwhile denouncing as 'metaphysical'
any attempt to formulate it. The eighteenth century theologians
knew they were wrong, otherwise the rationalists could not have
been so completely successful in undermining the old order. Similar
ly, today, it is unthinkable that any empirical philosopher fail to
admit that his view of the world must take its place in a great
historical sequence of such views, no one of which, in the sense of
being nearer or farther from a Truth detached from time and place,
is any 'truer' than another. Logical positivism was (let us hope) the
last attempt to feign ignorance of the fact that nature does not only
copy art, it copies philosophy. The Greek world was in part the
creation of Greek philosophy, ours is a creation of Renaissance
scientific philosophy, and because we now know this, philosophy
as the discovery of a 'ready-made' Truth can no longer be tolerated.
Hegel's concept of 'alienation' continues to be fruitful; the Truth
that we suppose ourselves to receive from elsewhere, is in fact the
product of a given cultural orientation?which means (though not
in Hegel) that we are in part responsible for it. To refuse this re
sponsibility is to accept an alienation as old as the race; it is to accept
as 'inevitable' the gulf between thinking and existing which we
must make it our mission to bridge.
Stalinism was scientism translated into the language of politics.
It was scientism transformed into a crusading ethic so that condi
tions which had become unendurable might be effectively dealt
with. These conditions did not exist in the West, so that the faceless
God of orthodox rationalism could go on becoming more and more
ill-defined to the point where his devotees could even deny his
existence. This facile iconoclasm has become popular with academics
who, busy condemning the sacrifice of immediate human well-being
to some historical Absolute, fail to see that they are guilty of pre
cisely the same crime and in the name of precisely the same deity.
For how can the academic justify his total abstentionism (euphe
mistically referred to as 'objectivity') which leaves us all a prey to
the appalling dangers of the present world situation unless he posits
some supra-human agency whose obscure but no doubt purposeful
functioning relieves us of the need to make any determined effort

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on our own behalf? In Anglo-Saxon thought the realization that
there might not after all be an Answer comes with Wittgenstein
and the analytical philosophers. It is here that we can appreciate
to the full Marx's contention that the evolution of philosophy
cannot be satisfactorily explained on the basis of preceding thought,
but only by an examination of the praxis with which it is in associa
tion. Thus, in the present case, to renounce the pursuit of total
intelligibility is to bring about a revolution in philosophy. But so
profound is the conservatism of Anglo-Saxon society, that this
revolution has been effected in such a way as to leave untouched
philosophical practices and values which, logically, should have
been destroyed, and which in fact have been destroyed by what is
best in Continental philosophy. Chief among these values is ob
jectivity which, during the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth
century, was a valid ideal because its purpose was to permit the
untrammelled functioning of universal natural laws in whose exist
ence almost everyone believed. Remove faith in the law, however,
and objectivity ceases to be a means of access to the Truth and
becomes a conduct, the ultimate effect of which is to bring about
cultural and political stagnation; linguistic philosophy on the one
hand, and on the other, the substitution in the 'free world' of men
for ideas?Eisenhower, Macmillan, De Gaulle, Nhruhma, Nasser,
Nehru, etc. The author of an essay contained in the volume entitled
The Revolution in Philosophy (Macmillan, 1956, p. 116) writes with
startling honesty that the systematic study of language (to which
he and most of his colleagues devote their energies) "serves no prac
tical purpose." This declaration, which any philosopher worthy of
the name, long dead or still living, would find incomprehensible, is
the equivalent in our part of the world of that sacrifice of existence
to essence which is the leitmotif of Dr. Zhivago.
This almost universal refusal to deal with the problems of daily
life makes it urgent for us to destroy scientism whether it be that
of the academic monk or that of the political messiah. Scientism is
the decaying corpse of classical rationalism, and unless it is replaced
by a new rationalism (which is in part already to hand in the
philosophy of Sartre) we shall continue to turn with our tormenting
perplexities to the purveyors of salvation and spiritual comfort?at
the moment, Billy Graham for the masses, Zen for the cultivated.

Long before it became essentially a morality, religion was an

explanation of the universe; and that is what Catholicism still pur

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ports to be. Thomism, however, is no more 'religious' a philosophy
than is that of Aristotle, Descartes, Comte, or Russell. In each case,
we have a quest after the ultimate nature of things, after that great
Answer which will put an end to our questions, and such a pre
occupation is, in the deepest sense of the word, a religious one. For
if the Truth which is finally revealed is not God himself, the fact
that it is intelligible to us indicates that he cannot be far off. If we
insist upon the clock, then we shall always be plagued by the
clock-maker, despite the subtleties of a Hume. It was because all
great philosophy had been religion in another form that the ques
tion of its 'practical purpose' never arose; it was perfectly justified
in neglecting existence, since it was after those principles from
which existence derived. But when eighteenth century ideology,
reinforced by the American and French revolutions, converted, at
least in theory, all men into human beings, neither art nor philos
ophy could continue to ignore life as the masses of the people were
obliged to live it. The penalty for doing so was the stultifying in
sipidity of an art and thought upon which the bourgeoisie could
look with favor. Also, there was the work of that most inconvenient
of thinkers, Marx, with his version of the now since famous asser
tion: 'existence precedes essence'?truth is neither received nor
discovered, it is the response of a given social class to a given his
torical situation. Although scientism was to prolong the life of
classical rationalism until quite recently, Marx (if properly read)
had put an end to philosophy as pure contemplation (or as dogma)
and the Anglo-Saxons, as we have seen, have been able to persevere
in the ancient tradition only at the cost of accepting that their
discipline should serve no practical purpose. With what terrible
regularity throughout history do men prefer suicide to reform.
That philosophy should have so removed itself in this way from
the levels upon which most of us are compelled to conduct our
lives, offers perhaps a good explanation for one of the most remark
able aspects of nineteenth and twentieth century culture?the re
placing of the philosopher by the writer. This is the problem of
the novelist: to take up the burden which the philosophers have laid
down, and at the same time remain an artist. Complete success is
rare. It is perhaps indubitable only in the case of Stendhal and
Dostoevsky. But however that may be, the strange fact remains
that, for the past 150 years, the true thinkers (with the exception
of Marx, and to a lesser extent, of Hegel and Nietzsche) have been
Goethe, Tolstoy, George Eliot, Ruskin, Mann, Gide, Lawrence,

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and a host of others in no way connected with the noble practice
of orthodox philosophy. A vital distinction, however, must be
drawn between those authors whose work simply embodied a more
or less widely disseminated philosophy, and those who found them
selves compelled to reject most of the accepted ideas of the day
because they could not be confirmed by any subjective evidence.
Of this last group (the first need not concern us), which was very
poorly represented in the nineteenth century and always by men
well in advance of their time, we shall consider only Stendhal. In
Stendhal, we shall be able to examine perhaps the first great example
of a practice which has since become much more common?the
linking of philosophy and literature which results from a reconsid
eration of the relationship between subjectivity and truth.
Stendhal brought to the novel two innovations for which none of
his contemporaries was prepared and from which has grown the
novel of today?'immoralism' and the resultant destruction of char
acterization. By immoralism, I mean simply Stendhal's refusal to be
lieve in the existence of moral absolutes, which is one aspect of the
'absurd' universe of modern literature. The classical novel of Balzac
and Dickens is, on the contrary, one which reflects an Order, a
scheme of things which makes possible the creation of the types of
humanity so characteristic of these novels. For a type is essentially a
person upon whom we can pass a moral judgement, and to destroy
the imperatives upon which these judgements are based (which is to
come far closer to the conditions of real life) is to destroy type.
Consequently, the heroes of Stendhal do not have a ready-made
identity. Their acts, to an extent unique in the literature of the pe
riod, are unpredictable because they spring not from some inner es
sence (as in the classical novel and in the popular culture of today)
but from the requirements of the situation. Their identity is one
which they invent as they move through life and not one which
they receive depending upon their position in relation to some 'high
est good.' The truth, for Stendhal, is not what one learns so that it
may be observed (this is the procedure of the petty, the fearful, the
mediocre), it is that of which one is immediately, that is subjec
tively, aware. It is an evidence to which one reacts or to which, out
of hypocrisy or cowardice, one fails to react.
Limited space makes it impossible for me to carry this analysis
any further here, to discuss other authors, or to examine the way in
which phenomenology and existentialism have converted subjectiv
ity into a philosophical tool. Rather, in conclusion, I want to try to

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give some impression of the way in which Stendhal can be useful in
helping us to interpret our own times. Literature which cannot serve
to guide us is a waste of time, for the surest way to take all the joy
out of great literature is to make esthetic pleasure the goal of one's
reading. There is a third goal, the manufacture of an 'individual,' of
an 'opposing self; and this brings us to our subject?the all-impor
tant distinction to be drawn between individualism and subjectivity.
The difference between medieval and Renaissance philosophy is
that in the former, the Order of the universe was embodied in ob
jects, it could be perceived there; whereas in the latter, objects are
no longer considered to 'contain' anything; they are merely related,
and not hierarchically, but mathematically. Order is not perceived,
it is thought. The astonishing thing about our modern scientific phi
losophy which has spawned a great army of Bounderbys, interested
only in fact, is that it split the very tangible world of pre-Renais
sance philosophy into two, neither one of which can be seen, heard
or touched?the outer world of 'natural Law,' and the inner world
of epistemology. To prevent the exterior world from becoming ut
terly alien, parts of it had to be incorporated into the mind. This
occurs in its most elaborate form in Kant; but also in the Protestant
conscience, which replaces the 'signs' upon which medieval man
could rely. It occurs in the Renaissance ideal of honor, an even more
infallible guide than conscience in a world no longer graced by the
immediate, the perceptual presence of the divine. Of these rich and
severe conceptions of man's inner nature or equipment (of which
the last of any importance was perhaps the romantic ego), all that
remains is what we refer to as our 'respect for the individual,' our
contempt for the values of the herd. If modern individualism origi
nates in this way, then it clearly has nothing to do with subjectivity
which, as we have learned from Stendhal, is not some inner struc
ture, but the reverse. It is an autonomous response. Individualism is
the freedom to develop the self as one sees fit. But this is precisely
the difficulty?there is no self considered as a sort of 'thing'; it is an
intention, a direction, an orientation. Consequently individualism, in
the great majority of cases, amounts to an attempt at self-identifica
tion, an attempt to elude the inner nothingness from which we all
suffer. It is a flight from the anonymity of a Self which is an act and
not a substance. There is no more common error than to suppose
that such phenomena as fascism indicate a longing in modern man
"to forget his self as a separate entity" and to find a "new and frag
ile security at the expense of sacrificing the integrity of his individ

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ual self" (Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, p. 221). The goal is not to
forget the self, but to establish it. What fascism holds out to its par
tisans is an identity, hence the fascist liking for uniforms and insig
nia which will make the identity perfectly clear. Again, the organ
ization man, for example, does not seek to 'lose himself in the
organization; on the contrary, what he is after is a 'consciousness of
self (to use Hegel's phrase), which he finds it convenient to derive
from his organization rather than from, for instance, some religious
sect. On another level, the humanities scholar engaged in the writing
of a thesis avoids the expression of any intense personal feeling (his
loathing for the stupid futility of the subject, a leftist political bias,
etc.) for by so doing he would deprive himself of an identity?that
of the doctor of philosophy. In brief, our much vaunted Western in
dividualism is, in reality, a type of conformism differing from oth
ers only in that it is somewhat more difficult of access. We do not
hesitate to place academics among those we look upon as individu
alists; and yet no one is in a poorer position to respond to events
with subjective enthusiasms and hatreds (as a hero of Stendhal will
respond with complete ie/f-forgetfulness to an act of oppression or
to a beautiful woman) than is the academic who, by so doing, would
violate objectivity, his very raison d'?tre. We have here the maxi
mum individualism combined with the maximum conformism, since
failure to conform (at least in what one does, and that, unfortu
nately, is what counts) is to prove oneself unworthy.
Anglo-Saxon intellectuals have transformed the refusal to act
(which is an act) into a duty, and all that remains, consequently, is
the cultivation of the Self. We have seen how the Renaissance
brought into being an 'inner world,' the function of which was to
enable man to remain in contact with a Reality no longer accessible
to perception. The Self of the modern individual is that 'interiority'
which corresponds to the shadowy Absolute of scientism, an Abso
lute whose existence the objective intellectual will often deny, and
yet to which in his refusal to think constructively he pays homage.
For Stendhal, subjectivity is the suppression of inner identity made
practicable by the disappearance of moral and scientific 'law.' If the
truth is no longer situated beyond time and place, then we are free
to envisage it as being immediate, as evident; and subjectivity is
therefore not a Self, it is simply a response to the evident. If this
honesty is rare, it is because in a reactionary society (as was that of
Stendhal) or in a conservative society (as is our own), what is evi
dent is also that which it is not tactful to insist upon.

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