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PARTISAN REVI&W
this sense, the activity of understanding is necessary; while it can
never directly
inspire
the fight or provide otherwise missing objec–
tives, it alone
can
make it meaningful and prepare a new resource–
fulness of the human mind and heart which perhaps
will
come into
free play only after the battle
is
won.
Knowledge and understanding are not the same, but they are
interrelated. Understanding is based on knowledge and knowledge
cannot proceed without a preliminary, inarticulate understanding.
Preliminary understanding denounces totalitarianism as tyranny and
has decided that our fight against it is a fight for freedom. It is true
that whoever cannot be mobilized on these grounds will probably
not be mobilized at
all.
But many other forms of govenunent have
denied freedom, albeit never so radically as the totalitarian regimes,
so that this denial is not the primary key to understanding it. Pre–
liminary understanding, however, no matter how rudimentary and
even irrelevant
it
may ultimately prove to be, will certainly more
ef–
fectively prevent people from joining a totalitarian movement than
the most reliable information, the most perceptive political analysis,
or the most comprehensive accumulated knowledge.
Understanding precedes and succeeds knowledge. Preliminary
understanding, which is at the basis of all knowledge, and true under–
standing, which transcends it, have this in common: they make
knowledge meaningful. Historical description and political analysis
can never prove that there is such a thing as the
nature
or the
essence
of totalitarian government, simply because there is a
nature
to monarchical, republican, tyrannical or despotic govenunent.
This
specific nature is taken for granted by the preliminary understanding
on which the sciences base themselves, and this preliminary under–
standing permeates as a matter of course, but not with critical in–
sight, their whole terminology and vocabulary. True understanding
always returns to the judgments and prejudices which preceded and
guided the strictly scientific inquiry. The sciences can only illuminate,
but neither prove nor disprove, the uncritical preliminary under–
standing from which they start.
If
the scientist, misguided by the very
labor of his inquiry, begins to pose as an expert in politics and to
despise the popular understanding from which he started, he loses
immediately the Ariadne thread of common sense which alone will
guide him securely through the labyrinth of his own results.
If,
on
