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PARTISAN REVIEW
and the reservoirs of strange, unknown cultures are gradually failing
too-those cultures to which one could flee when Western Europe
seemed too enlightened. We cannot forget or pass over what the
psychoanalysts have disclosed: we can test it, check it (in other words,
apply enlightenment to it), and perhaps, indeed presumably, correct
it-that is, by the facts; perhaps then the result will be "innocuous,"
or at least not so dangerous as before. But perhaps we shall have to
undergo the danger. We do not know the result, the road leads on–
and only truth will make us free.
Much is gained if the anti-mythical will of enlightenment turns
against itself: against the myth of enlightenment, that is. Both the
classical bourgeois Enlightenment and Marxism as proletarian en–
lightenment have turned themselves into myths as process and result.
People "believed" in this process and its result as in salvation. An
enlightened enlightenment must criticize precisely this belief. It must
comprehend itself as a concrete movement which has no other aim
but to bring light into certain dark corners. To proceed thus is to use
enlightenment as an aquafortis which can dissolve illusions but not
the gold of the true mystery.
Humanity, if things go reasonably well, has a period of such
enlightenment before it. All the difficulties in which we live demand
not only an unusual expenditure of trust and selflessness and much
thought on the subject of inheritance and tradition, but also a great
deal of enlightenment: knowledge, propagation of knowledge, or–
ganization, technique, reason, optimism-an immense exertion of the
energies of enlightenment, of the will to truth and the will to happi–
ness.
In this situation we can permit neither an uncritical belief in
and practice of enlightenment, nor, especially, a discrediting of en–
lightenment. Our fate depends upon the unfinished business of
enlightenment being continued-critically, with clear recognition of
all the dangers which may go with false enlightenment, but ener–
getically and affirmatively.
III
An undertaking which has as much to do with truth as
enlightenment does must have as much to do with Christianity.
