PARTISAN REVIEW
the outside, he contemplated the great with the eyes of the bour–
geois and the bourgeois with the eyes of the nobility, and he re–
tained enough complicity with both to understand them equally
from within. Hence, literature, which up to then had been only a
conservative and purifying function of an integrated society, became
conscious in
him
and by
him
of its autonomy. Placed by an extreme
chance between confused aspirations and an ideology in ruins-like
the writer between the bourgeoisie, the Court, and the Church–
literature suddenly affirmed its independence. It was no longer to
reflect the commonplaces of the collectivity; it identified itself with
Mind, that is, with the permanent power of forming and criticizing
ideas.
Of course, this taking over of literature by itself was abstract
and almost purely formal, since the literary works were not the con–
crete expression of any class; and as the writers began by rejecting
any deep solidarity with the milieu from which they came as well
as the one which adopted them, literature became confused with
Negativity, that is, with doubt, refusal, criticism, and contesta–
tion. But as a result of this very fact, it led to the setting up, against
the ossified spirituality of the Church, the rights of a new spirituality,
one in movement, which was no longer identified with any ideology
and which manifested itself as the power of continually surpassing
the given, whatever it might be. When, in the shelter of the struc–
ture of the very Christian monarchy, it was imitating marvelous
. models, it hardly fussed about truth because truth was only a very
crude and very concrete quality of the ideology which had been nour–
ishing it; for the dogmas of the Church, to be true or, quite sim–
ply, to be, was all one, and truth could not be conceived apart from the
system. But now that spirituality had become this abstract movement
which cut through all ideologies and then left them along the wayside
like empty shells, truth, in its turn, was disengaged from all concrete
and particular philosophy; it was revealed in its abstract independ–
ence; it became the regulating idea of literature and the distant
limit of the critical movement.
Spirituality, literature, and truth: these notions were bound up
in that abstract and negative moment of becoming self-conscious.
Their instrument was analysis, a negative and critical method which
perpetually dissolves concrete data into abstract elements and the
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