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PARTISAN REVIEW
Popular language, as it expresses preliminary understanding,
thus starts the process of true understanding. Its discovery must
always remain the content of true understanding if it is not to lose
itself
in the clouds of mere speculation,-a danger always present.
It was the common uncritical understanding on the part of the
people more than anything else that induced a whole generation of
historians, economists and political scientists to devote their best
efforts to the investigation of the causes and consequences of
im–
perialism, and, at the same time, to misrepresent it as "empire-build–
ing" in the Assyrian or Egyptian or Roman fashion and misunder–
stand its underlying motives as "lust for conquest," describing
Cecil
Rhodes as a second Napoleon and Napoleon as a second Julius
Caesar. Totalitarianism, similarly, has become a current topic of
study only since preliminary understanding recognized it as the
central issue and the most significant danger of the time. Again,
the current interpretations even on the highest scholarly level let
themselves be guided further by the design of preliminary under–
standing: they equate totalitarian domination with tyranny or one–
party dictatorship, when they do not explain the whole thing away
by reducing it to historical, social or psychological causes relevant
only for one country, Germany or Russia. It is evident that such
methods do not advance efforts to understand because they sub–
merge whatever is unfamiliar and needs to be understood in a welter
of familiarities and plausibilities. It lies, as Nietzsche once remarked,
in the province of the development of science to "dissolve the 'known'
into the unknown:-but science
wants
to do the
opposite
and is in–
spired by the instinct to reduce the unknown to something which
is
known."
Yet, has not the task of understanding become hopeless if it is
true that we are confronted with something which has destroyed our
categories of thought and standards of judgment? How can we
measure length if we do not have a yardstick, how could we count
things without the notion of numbers? Maybe it is preposterous even
to think that anything can ever happen which our categories are
not equipped to understand. Maybe we should resign ourselves to the
preliminary understanding, which at once ranges the new among the
old, and with the scientific approach, which follows it and deduces
