386
PARTISAN REVIEW
The very framewo.:-k within which understanding and judging couM
arise is gone.
However, Montesquieu's fears go even further, and therefore
come even closer to our present perplexity, than the above quoted
passage would indicate. His main fear, which he puts at the head
of his whole work, concerns more than the welfare of the European
nations and the continued existence of political freedom; it concerns
human nature itself: "Man, this flexible being, who bends himself
in society to the thoughts and expressions of others, is equally
as
capable of knowing his own nature when it is shown to him as he
is of losing it to the point where he has no sentiment of it any more
(d)en perdre jusqu)au sentiment)
if he is being robbed of it." To
us, who are confronted with the very realistic totalitarian attempt
to rob man of his nature under the pretext of changing it, the
courage of these words is like the boldness of youth which may risk
everything in imagination because nothing has yet happened to give
to the imagined dangers their horrible concreteness. What is en–
visaged here is more than loss of the capacity for political action,
which is the central condition of tyranny, and more than growth
of meaninglessness and loss of common sense (and common sense
is only that part of our mind and that portion of inherited wisdom
which all men have in common in any given civilization); it is the
loss of the quest for meaning and need for understanding. 'vVe know
how very close the people under totalitarian domination have been
brought to this condition of meaninglessness, by means of terror
combined with training in ideological thinking, although they no
longer experience it as such.
In
our context, the peculiar and ingenious replacement of
common sense with stringent logicality which is characteristic of
totalitarian thinking is particularly noteworthy. Logicality is not
identical with ideological reasoning, but indicates the totalitarian
transformation of the respective ideologies.
If
it was the peculiarity
of the ideologies to treat a scientific hypothesis, like the survival of the
fittest in biology or the survival of the most progressive class in
history, as an "idea" which could be applied to the whole course
of events, then it is the peculiarity of their totalitarian transformation
to pervert the "idea" into a premise in the logical sense, that
is
into some self-evident statement from which everything else can be
