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PARTISAN REVIEW
has shed the cloak of his geometrical-mathematical formulae and
stands before us as lyrical poet." Heine himself has triumphed over
Hitler and Goebbels. The other revolutionaries of this line will
also
survive and sooner or later triumph over those who have worked
hard to efface their memory.
I am afraid I have said very little about Freud. But it is ob–
vious why he belongs to the same intellectual line. In his teach–
ings, whatever their merits and demerits, he transcends the limita–
tions of earlier psychological schools. The man whom he analyzes
is
not a German or an Englishman, a Russian or a Jew-it is the uni–
versal man in whom the subconscious and the conscious struggle, the
man who is part of nature and part of society, the man whose desires
and cravings, scruples and inhibitions, anxieties and predicaments are
essentially the same no matter to what race, religion or nation he
belongs. From their viewpoint the Nazis were right when they coupled
Freud's name with Marx's and burned the books of both.
III
All these thinkers and revolutionaries have had certain philo–
sophical principles in common, although their philosophies vary, of
course, from century to century and from generation to generation.
They are all, from Spinoza to Freud, determinists. They all hold
that the universe is ruled by laws inherent in it and governed
by
Gesetzmiissigkeiten.
They do not see reality as a jumble of accidents
or history as an assemblage of caprices and whims of rulers. There
is
nothing fortuitous, so Freud tells us, in our dreams, follies, and even
in our slips of the tongue. The laws of development, Trotsky says,
"refract" themselves through accidents; and in saying this he is very
close to Spinoza.
They are determinists all because, having watched many
s0-
cieties and studied many "ways of life" at close quarters, they
grasp
the basic regularities of life. Their manner of thinking is dialectical,
because, living on borderlines of nations and religions, they see
s0-
ciety in a state of flux. They conceive reality as being dynamic, not
static. Those who are shut in within one society, one nation, or one
religion, tend to imagine that their way of life and their way
of
thought have absolute and unchangeable validity and that
all
that
