History of an Unhistorical Mind
WILLIAM BARRETT
D ESPITE WHAT
look like several great examples from the past,
the intellectual autobiography
is
really a modem literary genre. Its
possibilities as a
major
form emerge only from a complicated sense
of history and an equally complicated sense of the dependency of
human personality upon obscure and very complex factors of causa–
tion. A lost autobiography of a Plato or a Spinoza would be a sen–
sational scholarly discovery; but our daydreams of the richness of
self-revelation in such unwritten works are self-defeating, depending
upon an anachroni<>tically modem sense of history that our imagina–
tions are surreptitiously imputing to the ancient authors.
Rousseau was in fact justified in hi<> triumphant proclamation,
at the beginning of his
Confessions,
of the revolutionary character
of his book. And if at first reading of this brag we think sceptically
that the ancient world gave us a greater human document under the
same title, St. Augustine's
Confessions,
we recollect quickly that the
latter is, properly speaking, not an autobiography at all, that ob–
viously the word "Confessions" means something different for the
two men. But where Rousseau is writing to express a personality, not
to analyze or to understand it, even the most irresponsibly hysterical
of modern writers could not, on the same subjects, escape an un–
easy suspicion of the causes that might explain the hysteria. Thus the
gap between Rousseau and Henry Adams, writing a century and a
quarter later, is as profound at that between Rousseau and St. Augus–
tine. And Adams himself, had he written a generation later, when
Freud had joined Marx as a dominant figure, would have experienced
an even more troubled and richer sense of the degree to which his
personal fate had been produced for him and not willed.
The sciences of man are only at their beginning, but our anticipa–
tion of the regions within which human personality is circumscribed
and conditioned outstrips the degree of our positive knowledge; as
the seventeenth century's philosophic vision of mechanism had al–
ready outstripped its positive physical knowledge. But the fact which
almost dialectically complements the foregoing
is
that our sense of
