452
PARTISAN REVIEW
sampling of source material;
in
fact, it is miscellaneous even for an
anthology.
In one of the essays, Gunther Anders argues, among much else, "Be.
cause the receiving sets speak
in
our place, they gradually . . . (trans–
form) us into passive dependents.... Since the world comes to us
only as an image, it is phantom-like; and we too are like phantoms."
Henry Rabassiere replies, "... (knowing) our environment is being
manufactured for us, TV-experienced people may tend to believe noth–
ing, just as they have become immune to propaganda of other llortS."
He is impatient with the "metaphysics" of Anders' position and with
German intellectualism. (He might have added that this capacity of
the German mind-or is it the bourgeois mind?-for unconscious self–
parody is no doubt an aspect of its peculiar role in modern history.)
Yet it is the inherent form of discourse, not only of moralizing but of
thought. Industrialism, or materialism, accentuates, in
thi~
sense, for
what it is worth, the idea of thought as a discipline.
Anders of course is right. Although Rabassiere's fear-"Far from
living in a world of phantoms, we are facing the danger of complete
disillusionment"-is mild compared with the metaphysics
1
of alienation,
the two opinions are the same. Television is as good an expression as
could be contrived for the unreality that symbolizes the separation of
life from the principles that liustain and control it: a symbol such as
no art form has attained or dare contemplate of the. thing it conveys.
But the disparity of power and belief is more than a potent symbol
of our dependence and frustration: it is anxiety itself, or remorse, the
difference between catharsis and escape. It is the hysterical, semi–
conscious world of Kafka.
The theme of art as individualism, or of romanticism as culture,
is doubtful not merely on doctrinal grounds, such as they may be; it is
a breach of taste, like the distinction between culture and civilization
2
(older than Nietzsche, for the maturity of society is precisely its nos–
talgia, its taste for poetry, fantasy, irony, science: the pathos of utopia
is that it is destitute not only of irony but of virtually everything else) :
the history of art suggests the opposite.
Martin Lebowitz
1 Compare this with the English view of "metaphysics" in poetry as a hu–
morous , breach of sense and judgment. Yet insight is inescapably a conceit,
for conflict and meaning are identical. One is tempted to say that science is
known as a discipline precisely because, in its dogmatic form, it is arbitrary and
unrealistic, not to say incoherent: it is the academic or institutional miscon–
ception of knowledge.
2 White, in his discussion of the remarkable quality of German culture
preceding the enfranchisement of Hitler, might have mentioned the prophetic
irony of this distinction.
