hans magnus enzensberger
THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF THE MIND
All of us, no matter how irresolute we are, like to think that
we reign supreme in our own awareness, that we are masters of what
our minds accept or reject. Since the Soul is not much mentioned any
more, except by priests, poets and pop musicians, the last refuge a
man can take from the catastrophic world at large seems to be his
own mind. Where else can he expect to withstand the daily siege, if
not within himself? Even under the conditions of totalitarian rule,
where no one can fancy any more that
his
home is
his
castle, the mind
of the individual is considered a kind of last citadel and hotly de–
fended, though this imaginary fortress may have been long since taken
over by an ingenious enemy.1
No illusion is more stubbornly upheld than the sovereignty of the
mind. It is a good example of the impact of philosophy on people who
ignore it; for the idea that men can "make up their minds" individually
and by themselves is essentially derived from the tenets of bourgeois
philosophy: secondhand Descartes, run-down Husserl, armchair ideal–
ism; and all it amounts to is a sort of metaphysical do-it-yourself.
We might do worse, I think, than dust off the admirably laconic
statement which one of our classics has made more than a century
ago: "What is going on in our minds has always been, and will always
be, a product of society."2 This is a comparatively recent insight. Though
1.
This delusion became painfully apparent during the Nazi regime in
Germany, when many intellectuals thought
it
sufficient to retreat into
"inner emigration," a posture which turned out to mean giving in to the
Nazis. There have been similar tendencies in Communist countries during
the reign of Stalinism. See Czeslaw Milosz's excellent study,
The Captiv,
Mind
(London, 1953).
2. Karl Marx,
Die deutsche Ideologie,
I (Teil, 1845-46).
