308
PARTISAN REVIEW
our real, mortal eyes. We do not wish to win our case by appeal, and
we have no use for a posthumous rehabilitation: it is here and in our
lifetime that cases are won or lost.
Yet we do not seek to establish a literary relativism. We have little
liking for pure history. And besides, does pure history exist outside
the manual of M. Seignobos? Every epoch discovers an aspect of the
condition of humanity, in every epoch man chooses for himself with
regard to others, to love, to death, to the world; and when a contro–
versy arises on the subject of the disarmament of the F.F.I. or of the
aid to be given to the Spanish Republicans, it is that metaphysical
choice, that personal and absolute decision which is in question.
Thus, by becoming a part of the uniqueness of our time, we finally
merge with the eternal, and it is our task as writers to cast light on the
eternal values which are involved in these social and political disputes.
Yet we are not concerned with seeking these values in an intelligible
paradise: for they are only interesting in their immediate form. Far
from being relativists, we assert emphatically that man is absolute.
But he is absolute in his own time, in his own environment, on his
own earth. The absolute which a thousand years of history cannot
destroy is
this
irreplaceable, incomparable decision, which he makes
at
this
moment, in
these
circumstances; the absolute is Descartes,
the man who escapes
m;
because he is dead, who lived in
his
time,
who thought in his time from day to day, with limited data, who
formed his doctrine in accordance with a certain stage reached in
science, who knew Gassendi, Caterus and Mersenne, who in his child–
hood loved a shady young woman, who was a soldier and got a ser–
vant girl with a child, who attacked not the principle of authority in
general but the authority of Aristotle in particular, and who rises
out of his time, disarmed but unconquered, like a landmark; and
the relative is cartesianism, that caster's barrow philosophy, which is
trotted out century after century, in which everyone finds whatever
he has put in. It is not by chasing after immortality that we will make
ourselve.c; eternal: we will not make ourselves absolute by reflecting
in our works desiccated principles which are sufficiently empty and
negative to pass from one century to another, but by fighting pas–
sionately in our time, by loving it passionately, and by consenting to
perish entirely with it.
Translated
by
NATALIA GALITZINE
(Reprinted from
Horizon
with the kind permission of the
Editor.)
