PARTISAN R'EVIEW
was the most sublime thing in the world and the most sublime thing
which a being could do. Hence they believed that man's destiny
was solely to exercise his intellect, that man had come into the
world to meditate, or, in our terminology, to take a stand within
himself
(ensimismarse) .
This doctrine has been give the name "intellectualism" ; it is an
idolatry of the intelligence which isolates thought from its setting,
from its function in the general economy of human life. As if man
thinks because he thinks, and not because, whether he will or no,
he has to think in order to maintain himself among things!
As
if
thought could awaken and function of its own motion, as if it be–
gan and ended in itself, and were not-as is the true state of the
case-engendered by action and having its roots and its end in
action! We owe innumerable things of the highest value to the
Greeks, but they have put chains on us too. The man of the West
still lives, to no small degree, enslaved by the preferences of the
men of Greece-preferences which, operating in the subsoil of our
culture, have for eight centuries turned us from our proper and
authentic Occidental vocation. The heaviest of these chains is "in–
tellectualism"; and now, when it is imperative that we change our
course and take a new road-in short, get on the right track-it is
of
the greatest importance that we resolutely rid ourselves of this
archaic attitude, which has been carried to its extreme during these
last two centuries.
Under the name first of Reason, then of Enlightenment, and
finally of Culture, the most radical equivocation of terms and the
most indiscreet deification of the intelligence were effected. Among
the majority of the thinkers of the period, especially among the
Germans--for example, among those who were my masters at the
beginning of the century-culture, thought, came to fill the vacant
office of a God who had been put to flight. All my work, from its
first stutterings, has been a fight against this attitude which many
years ago, I called the "bigotry of culture." The
BIGOTRY OF CUL–
TURE
because it presented us with culture, with thought, as some–
thing justified by itself, that is, which requires no justification but
is valid by its own essence, whatever its concrete employment and
its content may be. Human life was to put itself at the service of
culture because only thus would it become charged with value.
