216
PARTISAN REVIEW
You who claim to be rationalists, you who have cloistered reason
and
closed
rationalism, open your eyes a little on the world we live
in, tum round a moment to see the trail you have left. Full of disdain,
you have allowed the magi and the mystics to drift away from you.
You have thought yourselves the only atheists, and you have never
noticed that among mystics and visionaries there were atheists more
genuine than you. You thought to confound religions, but they have
known so well how to take the same road as you on the way to
rationalization that they continue to prosper with the help of the
weapons you have given them. Not only do they beat you on your
own grounds, but ultimately you are nearer to religion than are certain
mystics.
You thought to imprison science in an ice-bound causalism and
determinism. De Vries had only to provoke a biological mutation and
Heisenberg to state the uncertainty relation, for fideism to raise its
head again and introduce through the window the finger of God on
which you thought you had slammed the door. Your
closed
rationalism
imperils rationalism itself, it is no longer capable of embracing the
rational of today, you have surrounded it with customs barriers to
protect it from what, irrational at this instant, will be rational the
next minute. I demand the re-establishment of free trade
in
all the
domains of thought.
Understand that though I address myself generally to those who
call or think themselves rationalists, my words are not aimed at the
bourgeois rationalist for whom human reason, at the end of her
adventure, has finally run aground
em
a neatly ruled strand, where
signs, which one would be greatly mistaken in thinking cabalistic, are
traced in roundhand. The ferocious and comfortable rationalism of
Debit and Credit has for long been fit only for the guillotine and
not for discussion. No, I want those whose whole reason is on fire
with a passion for justice to hear these words, in which I have tried
to put all the rigour, all the brutality and all the stringency that I
owe to my friends.
You have thought it decorous not to allow Reason to gad about,
and for fear she should get a child by a mesmerist or a Swedenborgian
you have preferred to set up house for her with profiteers and par–
venus so that she will the more inevitably become bourgeoise. And
after all you have: set her up in fine style. This upper-class Reason is
received everywhere, in the drawing-rooms and alcoves, in the banks
and champagne brothels of the rationalist bourgeoisie. She even keeps
a little bag of valuables round her neck under her chemise.
But you have forgotten that people do not like marriages of
