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anxiety throughout this period:
"If
one follows this curve of philo–
sophizing, leading from the rational, critical analyses of Husserl to
the overwrought and dismal speculations of Heidegger and Jaspers, it
seems to me impossible to overlook the analogy with the course that
philosophy once took from Kant to the last phase of Schellings'
development to Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard."
But the basic sense of life probably cannot be characterized as
either pleasure or pain; and probably it is not altogether an ethical
or metaphysical discovery which causes, for example, the poet Auden,
who finds Kierkegaard the most significant of modern thinkers, to
characterize our age as The Age of Anxiety. The cause may be, as
we ordinarily think, mainly in the "condition of society"-a condition
which has not only been described in such largely objective works as
those of Spengler and Toynbee, but symbolically expressed over and
over again in such purely poetical works as Eliot's
The Hollow Men.
And by this time it has become evident on all fronts (even in Sartre's
concept of
((litterature engagee")
that the characteristic modern
anxiety over the cultural condition of society is bound up in such a
puzzlingly intimate fashion with the characteristic death-anxiety of
modern literary thought that one can hardly tell which comes first:
anxiety over one's own death or anxiety over the supposed death of
one's civilization. This confusion, though natural enough, may arrive
at strange judgments; as an old man may imagine that the world
has grown old with him; or as the poet Rilke may permit himself to
fear lest his own death be also, perhaps, in some way, the death of
God: "What will you do, God, when I die? ... What will you do,
God? I am afraid." And this confusing anxiety, as Valery has
observed, spreads, but does it spread from the "condition of society"
to the "common man" to the "poet" or is it the other way round?
Certainly it is in the poet, or man of language, that the anxiety
of social disintegration is most acute; for the poet, whatever his ob–
jective perceptions, must also feel the existence of Society through
his feeling for the relationship between himself and his audience; and
when an easy, substantial relationship between poet and audience can
no longer be assumed, the poet, while obliged to carry on as best he
can, must do so in the conviction that as he speaks he is not more
and more but rather less and less engaged in the reciprocal activity
which is the life of verbal communication. Under these conditions,
