22
PARTISAN REVIEW
such, and it is this world, this total world, which he must somehow
salvage. The scientist has his appointed place in the community of
researchers, he confronts carefully delimited fragments of experience,
the data from which he proceeds are publicly recognizable, and his
whole being is to be, as it were, an incarnate outward public mind.
But the writer is alone-potentially twenty-four hours a day, the
luminol pill and the writing pad beside his bed for whatever welcome
or unwelcome presence comes that night. On the other hand, it might
seem that the philosopher, since he confronts in his own way the
totality of experience might also show some fatal tendency toward
aberration. But the philosopher deals with concepts and out of these
he may construct some kind of "meaning" for the world: when specu–
lative systems were still believed, he had only to be agile enough to
design one of these towering arks of salvation, and what if it leaked
a little, he was a professor and he had something to do the rest of
his professorial life plugging its gaps; now when the pretense to specu–
lative theories is no longer even taken seriously the philosopher can
construct an equally elaborate theory showing that the question itself
has no meaning, and so philosophy continues to be possible. Whatever
the impasse of insoluble antinomies at which his thought finally
arrives, he can continue to arrange these in neat parallel columns,
chip away at their edges and perpetually recast their statement as if
preparing bit by bit for a solution which in fact never arrives; and
so continues in business, he has something to say, he "gets published";
and after the initial shocks and disturbance mankind has shown itself
capable of settling down peacefully into positivism, and few people
are more intellectually adjusted than the positivists. But it is not at
the level of concepts that the appalling face of the world is seen, and
it is another kind of "meaning" that the writer must construct. Out
of the ravages of his experience,
his
desperate loneliness, he must put
forth those works which look back into his gaze with conviction and
authenticity and wear about them the gleams of interest--cathectic
charges, in the technical term-which have fled from the vast bare
blank face of the world as seen in the extreme situations of
his
truth:
in sleeplessness, the nervous darkness, against death and against the
inexorable and dragging vista of time which is his being.
