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PARTISAN REVIEW
schauung is this passage in my leaflet arguing the necessity of war on
Hitler:
"The discoverers of the historic law according to which democracy
turns into fascism in the very act of fighting it have not found knowledge
but lost faith. They have lost faith in democracy. They do not think
themselves in it and of it, making it survive, making it expand after the
victory."
Democracy here is not a Weltanschauung but an existing thing, a
political system and system of social habits, in whose survival and expan·
sion, by one means or another, as I said, all socialists have always
be–
lieved. You grab the word "faith" out of this context, and pretend I have
turned against my own life-attitude, which, as you well know, is one of
scientific scepticism.
3. "They are looking for some soul-saving hope which will not
require them to meet problems patiently, with discipline and with courage.
They want a faith that will save them the onerous difficulties of thinking.
Honestly, Jim ... if you have been doing more thinking in recent
years than the rest of us, what have you done with your thoughts? Where
are they? And what are they? A dribble of book reviews and letters of
protest to Stalinoid editors, an occasional comment on other people's
opinions published in PARTISAN REVIEW. Is that the evidence of disci·
plined thinking?
4. "I observe for instance, that when Eastman criticizes dialectical
materialism, he seems to be more disturbed because it seems to him to be
a fi ghting faith, than he is because it is an inadequate statement of scientific
method, and an unwarranted description of nature."
Just where and when did you make this observation, and what is there
in my books and writings to support it? In Part VII of
Marxism, Is It
Science?
I expounded six merits possessed by the scientific as against the
religious or metaphysical attitude, the attitude of the
Weltanschauung,
all
of them from the point of view of getting on with the struggle towards
working class liberation and a more free and equal society. While you
were meeting so courageously and patiently and with so much discipline,
the onerous difficulties of thinking, wouldn't it have been appropriate to
think a little about that chapter before pontificating about my motives in
opposing the dialectical buncombe?
5. "What these men are really trying to do is to create a metaphysics
of the war."
My statement on the war published as a letter to the New York
Times,
and then a leaflet by the Rand Bookshop, is only thirteen pages long. It
would not take a vast patience or an egregious amount of discipline to
read it through. It is all I have written on that subject. There is not a
glimmer of metaphysics, or of effort to create a metaphysics, in it. My
reasons for thinking radicals must fi ght Hitler are entirely matter-of-fact
and practical, and they are extremely serious. Why not meet them with
facts and logic, if you do not agree with them?
