482
PARTISAN REVIEW
philosophy,
a matter of voluntary choice.
If
individuals exist, they
must exist as something. This is an analytic statement. But that they
must continue to exist in the same social and cultural status in which
they are born is a piece of antidemocratic presumption. The demo–
crat wants to give all individuals the right to freely detennine them–
selves as Jews or Gentiles, as citizens of one country or another, as
cultural heirs of Socrates or Aquinas or Dewey. He no more wants
to destroy the individual Jew than the individual Gentile. He wants
only to destroy those individuals and social institutions which seek to
deprive human beings of their power of uncoerced choice. This is what
is perennially valid in the liberating ideas of the French and Anglo–
American Enlightenment which Sartre has renounced for a noisome
mess of Heideggerian anguish and neo-Marxist historicism. He is
a better man than his doctrine because be lacks the courage of
his
confusions.
