PARTISAN REVIEW
v.
To M. 0. Gershenzon:
My dear friend, we live in the same cultural milieu, we share
one room where each of us has his corner, but there is only one wide
window and one door. At the same time each of us also has
his
permanent quarters, which you, just like myself, would gladly ex–
change for another dwelling under a different sky. Life in the same
milieu is not identical for .all of its inhabitants and guests. A single
element contains soluble substance and liquid oil; aquatic plants,
corals, and pearls grow in it, fish move in it, and whales, and flying
fish, dolphins, and amphibians, and hunters of pearls-divers. It seems
to me-or, making reservations in my turn, it is the "fault of my
eyes"-that you cannot conceive of living in a culture without
es–
sentially merging with it.
However, I think that consciousness can be entirely immanent
to culture, and that it
also
can be only partly immanent to it, and
partly transcendent-and incidentally this can be easily shown by
a particularly important example relevant to our dialogue. A man
who believes in God will not for anything in the world agree that
his faith is part of culture; but .a man shackled by culture will in–
evitably consider such belief a cultural phenomenon, however he may
define its nature-as an inherited idea and a historically conditioned
psychological reaction, or as metaphysics and poetry, or as a socio–
morphological motive-force and moral value. He will see in this
faith anything you want, but will invariably incorporate it into the
sphere of cultural phenomena, which for him encompasses
all
the
life of the spirit, never agreeing with the believer that his faith is
something extraneous to culture, independent, simple and primordial,
which
directly
links his individuality with the Absolute Being. For
in the eyes of the believer his faith is by nature separate from culture,
just as nature is, and love.
What follows from this?
It follows that upon our belief in the absolute, which is not
culture, depends inner freedom-and this freedom is life itself–
or our inner submission to culture, which has long since been es–
sentially godless because it locked man up (as Kant definitively
proved) in himself. Only by faith-i.e., by the basic disav-owal of
the original sin of culture-can its "temptation," of which you are so
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