PARTISAN REVIEW
the whole truth our personal individuality is a personage which
is
never completely realized, a stimulating Utopia, a secret legend,
which each of us guards in the bottom of his heart.
It
is thoroughly
comprehensible that Pindar resumed his heroic ethics in the well–
known imperative: "Become what you are."
The condition of man, then, is essential uncertainty. Hence the
cogency of the gracefully mannered mot of a fifteenth century Bur–
gundian gentleman:
HRien ne m'es sure que
La
chose incertaine."
"I am sure of nought save the uncertain."
No human acquisition is stable. Even what appears to us most
completely won and consolidated can disappear in a few genera–
tions. This thing we call " civilization"- all these physical and moral
comforts, all these conveniences, all these shelters, all these virtues
and disciplines which have become habit now, on which we count,
and which in effect constitute a repertory or system of securities
which man made for himself like a raft in the initial shipwreck
which living always is--all these securities are insecure securities
which in the twinkling of an eye, at the least carelessness, escape
from man's hands and vanish like phantoms. History tells us of
innumerable retrogressions, of decadences and degenera tions. But
nothing tells us that there is no possibility of much more basic
retrogressions than any so far known, including the most basic of
them all: the total disappearance of man as man and his silent
return to the animal scale, to complete and definitive absorption in
the
other.
The fate of culture, the destiny of man, depends upon
our maintaining that dramatic consciousness ever alive in our
in–
most being, and upon our feeling, like a murmuring counterpoint
in our entrails, that we are only sure of insecurity.
No small part of the anguish which is today tormenting the
soul of the West derives from the fact that during the past century–
and perhaps for the first time in history-man reached the point
of believing himself secure. Because the truth is that the one and
only thing he succeeded in doing was to feel and create the pharm–
aceutical Monsieur Homais, the net result of progressivism! The
progressivist idea consists in affirming not only that humanity-an
abstract, irresponsible, nonexistent entity invented for the occasion–
that humanity progresses, which is certain, but furthermore that it
progresses necessarily. This idea anaesthetized the European and
