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that the future is something on which one cannot wager. This is per–
haps Goldmann's way of telling Existentialism that it has no future, only
a present. His interest in the future, therefore, helps to make Goldmann
both a Marxist and a practitioner of what in France is known as
les
sciences humaines,
human as opposed to natural science, Dilthey's
Geisteswiss,enschaften,
Vico's
nuova scienza.
Erich Auerbach, a philo–
logist who did his remarkable work in the spirit, if not the manner, of
Dilthey's philosophy, had some of the same ideas about Pascal and the
seventeenth-century milieu. Characteristically, Goldmann does not notice
this coincidence (and, as has been noted elsewhere, neither does he
acknowledge the priority of Franz Borkenau's work on the seven teenth
century) .
Goldmann's own work, which began in 1948 with a study of Kant
and "the human community," moved in 1952 to a brilliant theoretical
document,
Sciences Humaines et Philosophie,
and since
Le Dieu Cache
( 1955), to
R echerches Dialectiques
( 1959 ), and
Pour une Sociologie du
R()man
( 1964), a somewhat less interesting volume; in addition he has
edited Barcos' correspondence, translated two of Lukacs' works into
French, and written a monograph on Racine. For the most part he
appears to be uninterested in or unaware of literary or philosophical
work done in either England or America. Apart from Marx, the guaran–
tors, so to speak, of his work are Lukacs (whose transition from the
tragic vision of
Die Seele und die Formen
to the dialectical vision of
Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein
exemplifies for Goldmann the differ–
ences between Pascal and Marx in
The Hidden God)
and Jean Piaget,
who for reasons which are not possible to describe is for him also a
dialectician. Thus two strands unite in Goldmann; the Gallic tradition
of precise observation; and the Germanic tradition of intuitionism,
Weberian ideal typology and metaphysical speculation. Thus, particu–
larity and generality, or as Goldmann puts it in
R echerches Dialectiques,
"dialectical materialism" is a "privileged" discipline, like philosophy
itself.
The reason Goldmann will seem novel to English-speaking readers
is that we have no one who does what he does. Although he writes about
literature he is not really a literary critic; the jacket blurb describes his
field .as "midway between sociology and literature." H e is, I suppose, a
sociologist of mind, which is
to
say that he is concerned with studying
the historica l appearances or incarnations of certain structures of mind;
he says in
The Hidden God
that he aims to construct a typology of
"world visions." This strangely resembles Northrop Frye's concern in
The Anatomy ()f Criticism,
although Goldmann's historical and social
committments are so urgent as to make his work antithetical to Frye'S.
