26
PARTISAN REVIEW
men, fascinated by the new possibilities of manufacturing, thought
of everything in terms of means and ends, i.e., categories whose
validity has its source and justification in the experience of producing
use-objects. The trouble lies in the nature of the categorical frame–
work of ends and means which changes every attained end imme–
diately into the means to a new end, thereby, as it were, destroying
meaning wherever it is applied, until in the midst of the seemingly
unending utilitarian questioning: What is the use of ...?, in the midst
of the seemingly unending progress where the aim of today becomes
the means of a better tomorrow, the one question arises which no
utilitarian thinking can ever answer: "And what is the use of use?"
as Lessing once succinctly put it.
This meaninglessness of all truly utilitarian philosophies could
escape Marx's awareness because he thought that after Hegel in
his dialectics had discovered the law of all movements, natural and
historical, he himself had found the spring and content of this law
in the historical realm and thereby the concrete meaning of the story
history has to tell. Class struggle-to Marx this formula seemed to
unlock all the secrets of history, just as the law of gravity had ap–
peared to unlock all the secrets of nature. Today, after being treated
to one such history-construction after another, to one such formula
after .another, the question for us is no longer whether this or that
particular formula is correct. In all such attempts what is considered
to be a meaning is in fact no more than a pattern, and within the
limitations of utilitarian thought, nothing but patterns can make
sense because only patterns can be "made" whereas meanings cannot
be, but, like truth, will only disclose or reveal themselves. Marx was
only the first-but still the greatest, among historians-to mistake
a pattern for a meaning, and he certainly could hardly have been
expected to realize that there was almost no pattern into which the
events of the past would not have fitted as neatly and consistently as
they did into his own. Marx's pattern at least was based on one im–
portant historical insight; since then we have seen historians freely
imposing upon the maze of past facts almost any pattern they wish,
with the result that the ruin of the factual and particular through
the seemingly higher validity of general "meanings" has even un–
dermined the basic factual structure of all historical process, that
is, chronology.
