476
PARTISAN REVIEW
the illness-schizoidism as the reduction of the world to the totality of
fixed appearances and as a suspension of expressive values-because
the illness ceases then to be an absurd fact and a fate, in order to
become a general possibility of human existence when it affronts with
consequence one of its paradoxes-the phenomenon of expression; and
because, finally, it is the same thing, in this sense, to be Cezanne and
to be schizoid.
We do not know, then, how to separate creative freedom from
the least deliberaJte forms of behavior which reveal themselves already
in the first acts of Cezanne the child and in the way things affect
him. The meaning which Cezanne will give to things and faces in his
pictures is suggested to him by the very world which is apparent to
him. Cezanne has only set it free, these are the same things and same
faces, just as he sees them, which demanded to be painted in this way
and Cezanne has only said what they
wanted
to say.... But where
is freedom? We can see only in front of us and under the aspect of
ends what we ourselves are, so that our life has always the form of a
project or a choice and appears to us therefore as spontaneous. But
to say that we are from the outset the design of a future, is to say
also that our project has already stopped with our first modes of
being, that the choice is already made when we draw our first breath.
If
nothing constrains us from the outside it is because we are 8ur
entire exterior. This eternal Cezanne as we see him first arising, attract–
ing to the man Cezanne the events and the influences which we believe
exterior to him, and who designed
all
that befell him-this attitude
toward men and the world which has not been deliberated, free with
regard to external causes, is it free with regard to itself? Is not the
choice pushed back prior to the life, and is there choice where there
is not yet a clearly articulated field of possibilities but only one prob–
able; choice, like a single temptation?
If
I am from birth a project, it
is impossible then to distinguish in me between the given and the
created, impossible then not only to plan a single movement which
would not be simply hereditary or innate and non-spontaneous, but
also a single movement which would be absolutely new with regard to
tllis way of being in the world which is me from the beginning. It is
the same thing to say that our life is all constructed or that it i:J all
given.
If
there is a true freedom, it can only be in the current of life,
by going beyond our point of departure, and without our ceasing
meanwhile to be the same--such is the problem. Two things ar:e
certain with regard to freedom: that we are never detem1ined and
that we never change; that, retrospectively, we will always be able to
