62
PARTISAN REVI EW
Their greatness lay in the fact that they perceived their world as one
invaded by new problems and perplexities which our tradition of
thought was unable to cope with. In this sense their own departure
from tradition, no matter how emphatically they proclaimed it (like
children whistling louder and louder because they are lost in the
dark), was no deliberate act of their own choosing either. What
frightened them about the dark was its silence, not the break in
tradition. This break, when it actually occurred, dispelled the dark–
ness, so that we can hardly listen any longer to the overloud, "pa–
thetic" style of their writing. But the thunder of the eventual explosion
has also drowned the preceding ominous silence that still answers us
whenever we dare to ask, not, "what are we fighting
against"
but
"what are we fighting
forr
Neither the silence of the tradition nor the reaction of thinkers
against it in the nineteenth century can ever explain what actually
happened. The non-deliberate character of the break gives it an irre–
vocability which only events, never thoughts, can have. The rebellion
against tradition in the nineteenth century remained strictly within a
traditional framework; and on the level of mere thought, which could
hardly be concerned then with more than the essentially negative
experiences of foreboding, apprehension, and ominous silence, only
radicalization, not a new beginning and reconsideration of the past,
was possible.
Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche stand at the end of the tradi–
tion just before the break came. Their immediate predecessor was
Hegel. He it was who for the first time saw the whole of world history
as one continuous development, and this tremendous achievement
implied that he himself stood outside all authority-claiming systems
and beliefs of the past, that he was held only by the thread of con–
tinuity in history itself. The thread of historical continuity was the
first substitute for tradition; by means of it, the overwhelming mass of
the most divergent values, the most contradictory thoughts and con–
flicting authorities, all of which had somehow been able to function to–
gether, were reduced to a unilinear dialectically consistent develop–
ment actually designed to repudiate not tradition as such, but the
.authority of all traditions. Kierkcgaard, Marx, and Nietzsche re–
mained Hegelians insofar as they saw the history of past philosophy
as one dialectically developed whole; their great merit was that they
