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PARTISAN REVIEW
turning into a totally evil world, in which the greatest possible hap–
piness of the greatest number would be only a screen and a means
for the cleverest and most unscrupulous of the cold managers of
humanity: a means to their deepest and most evil desire, power.
But we need not look so high and so deep to show the timeli–
ness of the theme. It meets us everywhere, in what is good and in
what is bad. First of
all,
of course, there is sexual enlightenment,
whether on the street, in the shadow of a ruin or of a hayloft, or
in the realm of trust and responsibility- but in this realm too it
does not always tum out well, but often disastrously. The fight
against the nonsense of astrology and every other superstition is
conducted as enlightenment-in most cases too much so. The southern
Italian land reform is in great measure a product of enlightenment,
and so are all possible alleviations of indurated legalized injustice.
All educational work contains an element of enlightenment; but the
destruction of faith and confidence also follow the pattern of that
first enlightenment which the serpent gave to the first men.
As
there is both a well-intentioned and an evil enlightenment, so
in
those who want to keep mankind or themselves in any kind of
ignorance, in darkness, in obscurity, we find now evil intentions,
obscurantist intentions, predatory intentions, now good intentions.
Enlightenment is a part of education, but so is renouncing enlighten–
ment. Enlightenment must be justified.
So far, it would seem that enlightenment is neither unequivo–
cally good nor unequivocally bad; but rather, now ominous, now
necessary-that enlightenment is ambivalent.
Hence our conception of the historical Enlightenment is also
at variance. "Like a frost," some say,
it
fell upon the spring of
western man; it left an empty waste-land behind it, its consequences
were confusion and destruction. A less agitated appraisal shows that
we must not lump all sorts of honest, brilliant, and liberating ser–
vices to truth together with the manufacture and promotion of
rationalistic views of the universe or with the denial of all pro–
fundities and mysteries. The same less agitated appraisal shows how
much enlightenment was already present in the great seventeenth–
century moralists, in Humanism, in the Renaissance. But these
emancipations too seem to many but stages on the road of corruption.
Yet if Thomas Aquinas, for all that he begins each discussion by
