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PARTISAN REVIEW
affectation of perverseness, and its Barresian cult of the "I"-of
shoddy vulgarity par excellence. In every period there are ideas
which I would call "fishing" ideas, ideas which are expressed and
proclaimed precisely because it is known that they will not come
to pass; which are thought of only as a game, as foolishness-some
years ago, for example, there was a rage in England for wolf
stories, because England is a country where the last wolf was killed
in 1663 and hence has no authentic experience of wolves. In a
period which has no strong experience of insecurity, like the
fin de
siecle
period, they play at the dangerous life.
Enough of all this--thought is not a gift to man but a labor–
ious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
With this idea
in
mind, you will understand that I see an
element of absurdity
in
the definition of man put forth by Lin–
naeus and the eighteenth century:
homo sapiens.
Because if we
take this expression in good faith, it can mean only that man, in
effect, knows--in other words, that he knows all that he needs to
know. Now nothing is further from the reality. Man has never
known what he needed to know. But if we understand
homo
sapiens
in the sense that man knows some things, a very few things,
but does not know the remainder, it would seem to me more appro–
priate
to
define him as
homo insciens, insipiens,
as man the un–
knowing. And certainly, if we were not now in such a hurry, we
could see the good judgment with which Plato defines man precisely
by his ignorance. Ignorance is, in f,act, man's privilege. Neither
God nor beast is ignorant-the former because he possesses all
knowledge, the latter because he needs none.
It
is clear, then, that man does not exercise his thought be–
cause he finds it amusing, but because, obliged as he is to live sub–
merged
in
the world and to force his way among things, he finds
himself under the necessity of organizing his psychic activities, which
are not very different from those of the anthropoid,
in the form
of thought-which is what the animal does not do.
Man, then, rather than by what he
is,
than by what he
has,
escapes from the zoological scale by what he
does,
by his conduct.
Hence it is that he must always be watchful of himself.
This is something of what I should like to suggest in the
phrase (which appears to be but a phrase) that
we do no-t live in
