THE S ELF
AND TIH E
0 THE R
40S
From which it would follow that human life, our pure existence,
was, in itself, a mean and worthless thing.
This way of reversing the relation between life and culture,
between action and contemplation, brought it about that, during
the last century- for a comparatively short period, then-there has
been an overproduction of ideas, of books and works of art, a real
cultural inflation. We have arrived at what-jokingly, because I
distrust "-isms"- we might call a "capitalism of culture," a modern
reflection of Byzantinism. There has been production for produc–
tion's sake, instead of production in view of consumption, in view
of the necessary ideas which the man of today needs and can
absorb. And, as occurs in capitalism, the market became saturated
and crisis ensued. Let no one tell me- at least in this place-that
the greater part of the immense changes which have recently occur–
red have taken us by surprise. For twenty years I have been an–
nouncing them and denouncing them. To mention no other sub–
ject than the one we are now treating, reference may be made to
my essay, formally and programmatically entitled "The Reform
of Intelligence."
But the most momentous thing about the intellectual aberration
which this "bigotry of culture" signifies does not lie here; it lies in
presenting culture, contemplation, thought, as a grace or jewel
which man is to add to his life-hence as something which lies out–
side of his life and as if there were life without culture and thought,
as if it were possible to live without contemplation. Men were set,
as it were, before a jeweler's window- were given the choice of
acquiring culture or doing without it. And it is clear that, faced
with such a dilemma, during the years we are now living men
have not hesitated, but have resolved to explore the second alterna–
tive to its limits and seek to flee from all taking a stand within the
self and to give themselves up to the opposite extreme. That is why
Europe is in extremities today.
The intellectualist aberration which isolates contemplation from
action was followed by the opposite aberration-the voluntarist
aberration, which rejects contemplation and deifies pure action.
This is the other way of wrongly interpreting the foregoing thesis,
that man is primarily and fundamentally
action.
Undoubtedly every
idea, even the truest, is susceptible of misinterpretation; undoubtedly
