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PARTISAN REVIEW
incompatible with vigorous criticism of its many deficiencies and with
determined efforts to enhance both its chances of survival and the
quality of its cultural experience by more enlightened domestic and
foreign policies. And if there are any seers or prophets among us, let
them make their visions known.
The political and moral issues of our time are no different for
the intellectual classes, the writers, artists and scholars, than they are
for the working classes who recognize that even under the disloca–
tions of our mixed economy, they enjoy more bread and freedom
than the working classes anywhere else in the world.
If
anything,
one expects the intellectuals to see even more clearly that the relative
autonomy of their craft is threatened by Soviet totalitarianism more
completely than by any other social system
in
history.
I must also confess to some perplexity in understanding laments
about the "alienation" of the creative artist
in
American culture if
this means that he faces more obstacles to doing significant work or
finding an appreciative audience than was the case fifty or a hundred
years ago. Surely, compared with his forebears, he can have no com–
plaint on the score of creature comforts, which he certainly deserves
no less than other human beings. The notion circulated in some
quarters that university life is the Golgotha of the intellectual spirit
is absurd. It seems to me that the creative life in America suffers
more from mediocrity than from frustration. Equally bewildering is
the view that mass culture or the popular arts constitute a profound
menace to the position of American intellectuals. Certainly those who
love cream more than their work may drown in it. The only sense
I can find in the violent garrulities of Ortega y Gasset is that the
mass "kind of man" who threatens the individual, is the man who
lurks inside of anyone who fears to be himself. That mass "kind of
man" in one form or another has always existed. And he sometimes
is present in the man who strives and strains to be different as distinct
from one who genuinely feels and thinks differently from
his
fellows.
There are all kinds of alienations in the world and one can get
startling effects by confusing them. Hegel understood by self-alien–
ation the process of dialectical development by which the individual
consciousness progresses from innocence to maturity, from the sim–
plicity of bare perception to the richly funded comprehension of a
complexly interrelated system. Remove the mystification about the
Absolute Self, drop the consolatory, religious overtone., about the
