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PARTISAN REVIEW
the most effective orientation for the modern man. The life of these
men shows the confusion in which our world lives, the superficiality,
mystification, dishonesty in most of what is said today, and in most
of what is advanced as reason and justification for action.
Few men have so elucidated their own life as Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche (unlike Marx), few men have so thoroughly analyzed its
meanings and potential meanings. At every moment they reflected
on themselves, and we cannot see them except as throughout their
lives they saw themselves, in many mirrors, yet with an astonishing
unity of vision.
They stand at the gate of modern thought. They do not show the
way, but they cast an incomparable light.
All three were publicly active at some time in their lives; Marx
in working for the world revolution and dictatorship of the prole–
tariat; Kierkegaard toward the end of his life in radically attacking
the Church; Nietzsche (at the beginning of his illness, with his mad
telegrams: Kaiser Wilhelm arrested, all anti-Semites shot, etc.) in
attacking the German Empire. Life in the grip of their vision of what
was happening in this age, drove them from thought and in–
quiry to action. At that time their action w,as bound to seem totally
unrealistic, and in terms of possible constructive realization in
the world, it was sheer folly. But for all three truth was contained
in this folly by virtue of their ethical will, and in all three the folly
was a horrible anticipation of what later came to pass, partly in
forms and with effects contrary to their own purpose.
Anyone who interprets the three great modern thinkers as
we have here suggested will be accused of being unmodern, of being
enmeshed in the Enlightenment, in an irrevocable past. It will be
said that he has failed to see the truly crucial, the significant factor:
that he is watering down, evading the authentic truth, attempting to
exchange it for an old-fashioned liberalism designed to take the
sting from anything which he regards as a danger to him-a hope–
less endeavor.
Here various opposing forces are at work, and to clarify them is
an arduous task. I shall briefly summarize them:
There is the sophist's striving for actuality as opposed to the
search for the eternal truth that survives all catastrophes.
