398
PARTISAN REVIEW
fact that individualism necessarily involves an element of imprudence.
Yet it
is
to
individualism that I cling, in individualism that I see a
hope of salvation. For though I am greatly embarrassed to say de–
finitely toward what I am heading and what I want, at least I can
declare with certainty what I cannot submit to accepting and what
I protest against: and that
is
falsehood. I believe that we run the
risk
of dying stifled by falsehood, whether it come from the right
or from the left, whether it
be
political in nature or religious, and
I add: whether one use it toward others or toward oneself, and in
the latter case often almost unconsciously. I believe that hatred of
falsehood offers us a solid foundation, a sort of rampart or platform on
which we must be able to meet and come to agreement. What I am
saying probably seems simple but it appears to me of great im–
portance, as it appeared to Descartes. I see in this an entire program
and a possibility of salvation. In any country whatever, and under any
regime whatever, the free man (even were he in chains), the man I
am, the man I mean to be-and worthy of understanding you-is
the one who does not take things at face value and who accepts as
certain only what he has been able to verify.
ANDRE GIDE
The second appeal came from Venice under the letterhead of the
Societa Europea di Cultura and was signed by Umberto Campagnolo,
general secretary of the society. In it Mr. Campagnolo asked Andre
Gide to contribute to the third number of the society's review
Com–
prendre,
of which he outlined the theme in these terms: "While social
and political tension
is
constantly increasing, there is a tendency on
both sides to oppose, in a spirit of reciprocal refusal and condemnation,
Western Europe and Eastern Europe, capitalism and collectivism,
Christianity and Marxism, "idealistic" philosophy and the philosophy
of "praxis," as
if
two civilizations, two worlds, were confronting one
another, one of which supposes the disappearance of the other. The
basis for this opinion which, without suspecting the complexity and
seriousness of all it implies, tends to spread as
if
it were an accepted
fact, has never been solidly established. Without excluding the existence
of certain reasons which might explain that attitude, we think this
is
a problem which-not only for theoretical considerations but also
be–
cause of the danger it involves-requires all our attention. It seems to us
possible to assert that, far from being faced with irreCiOncilable anti-
