EDWARD W. SAID
A SOCIOLOGY OF MIND
THE HIDDEN GOD: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensees of Pascal
and the Tragedies of Racine. By Lucien Goldmann. Translated
by
Philip Thody. Humanities Press. $12.50.
Lucien Goldmann is a Rumanian now living in France where
his critical and philosophical writings enjoy a considerable, if special,
eminence among intellectuals. Goldmann has a very marked interest in
the rationale of his enterprise; this, among other things, is what makes
The Hidden God,
his first book to be translated into English, a virtuoso
performance by an energetic critic. Goldmann is not a gifted stylist–
Philip Thody's translation makes no secret of this-and so the book
seems at first to be a somewhat scrappy affair. It
is
nevertheless a sub–
stantial, complex achievement, because Goldmann knows what he is
doing, does it thoroughly and tells us why he did it. Every 'step along
the way is carefully and perhaps laboriously reasoned, so that if one
accepts the terms of his argument one stands in the center of a highly
challenging and flowing pattern, a "dialectic" whose every detail sustains
and is sustained by every other detail. Precisely this sort of pattern is
what Goldmann discovers in the "tragic" vision of Pascal and Racine,
except that in the tragic vision it is implicit, whereas in the dialectical
vision--Goldmann's own-it is overt. This economy serves him doubly:
it shows his readers that the tragic vision of Pascal and Racine and the
dialectical vision (of Marx, Engels, Lukacs and Goldmann himself) are
profoundly similar because of their total inner coherence; and it dif–
ferentiates the tragic from the dialectical by showing the tragic to be
a radically static vision of reality and the dialectical totally dynamic.
The book proposes a theory of coherence, or a theory of the way
in which individual parts can be said to make up a whole greater than
a mere sum of its parts: this, as we shall see, has a direct bearing on
the
P.ensees,
which is ostensibly a collection of units. Coherence is the
result of a working partnership between two modes of apprehending
reality, the scientific and rational on the one hand and the humanistic
and synthesizing on the other. Goldmann contends that the former is
individualistic: the monadic consciousness; and the latter social, or at
least relational: the group consciousness. Goldmann's point is that, left
to itself, the first produces blind, fact-gathering positivism, while the
second, freed from the discipline of individual example, becomes empty
generality. The first reifies, the second hypothesizes; together, the two
lead one to a sense of the totality of human experience, to a "world
