PARTISAN REVIEW
both. Furthermore, in his recreation of myth Mann is heavily indebted
to the Freudian psychology; and psychology is inherently anti-mythic.
The Freudian method is a special adaptation of the historical method
in general. Freud's early efforts to fit his theory into a biological
framework were of no avail; and now it is clear, as W. H. Auden
has so well put it, that Freud, "towers up as the genius who per–
ceived that psychological events are not natural events but historical
and that, therefore, psychology, as distinct from neurology, must
be
based on the presuppositions . . . not of the biologist but of the
historian."
Not a few characteristics of "mythicism" are brought into TlI–
lich's exposition under the heading of the "mystical" approach to
history, against which he argues in the name of historical realism.
This is a perspective that he evaluates as a creation of the West,
especially in so far as it stands under Protestant influence. "For
his–
torical realism the really real appears in the structures created by the
historical process," he writes. "History is open to interpretation only
through active participation. We can grasp the power of historical
being only if we are grasped by it in our historical experience."12
His
analysis, combining certain Marxist concepts with the religious variant
of existential thought, repudiates ,all attempts to escape the present
for the sake of the unreal past of archaism or the equally unreal future
of utopianism.
It
is a view resistant to attitudes of religious pessimism
toward the historical world and even more so to the mythic dissolu–
tion of it in the eternal past of ritual.
The fear of history is at bottom the fear of the hazards of free–
dom. In so far as man can be said to be capable of self-determination,
history is the sole sphere in which he can conceivably attain it. But
though history, as Tillich affirms, is above
all
the sphere of freedom,
it is also the sphere in which "man
is determined
by fate against
his
freedom. Very often the creations of his freedom are the tools used
by fate against him; as, for instance, today the technical powers
created by him tum against him with irresistible force. There are
periods in history in which the element of freedom predominates, and
there are periods in which fate and necessity prevail. The latter
is
true of our day...." 13
An
analysis of this type, largely coinciding
with the Hegelian-Marxist idea of historical tension and crisis, suffi–
ciently accounts for the retreat from history toward myth. In our
