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PETER GAY
of facts - facts that Lichtheim thinks pertinent to his judgments. He
subtitled the book
An Historical and Critical Study,
suggesting that this
was the only way he could think. He was both historian and critic, and
thought the separation of these intellectual functions a betrayal of mind.
Sympathetic as he was to humanist Socialism, and saddened as he was
by its failure, his principal loyalty was to the truth he could tease out
from the verbiage of politicians and the obfuscations of philosophers.
His "standpoint," he told his readers at the beginning of his
Marxism,
represented "no commitment to anything save the critical method in–
herent in the exercise of rational thinking."
It was the decay of rational thinking that probably dismayed him
most. While, as a historian, he left the future to itself, as a critic he had
little faith in it. "The 'end of ideology,' " he once noted, "so often pro–
claimed as a fact by contemporary writers, has never in practice signi–
fied anything but the end of socialist ideology." And this end was, for
Lichtheim, yet another symptom of the prospective death of humanist
culture. In the concluding paragraph of his
Europe in the Twentieth
Century,
he soberly warned that this demise was now in sight; mind–
less technological civilization was almost sure to triumph. This depress–
ing conclusion was in large part the consequence of a great treason of
the clerks. Far too few intellectuals were willing to range themselves
with the critical philosophy of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, with the critical
philosophy of the nineteenth century which proudly asserted that "theo–
retical reason carries its own practical, normative implications." Licht·
heim was quick to concede that modern positivists regarded this phil–
osophy as "sheer romanticism, a return to metaphysics," but he was
happy to be called a romantic, even a metaphysician, by such opponents
as these. For him, whatever the right name might be, it was all-impor–
tant to persist in the belief that "it is the business of philosophy to bring
reason into the world, including the world of the sciences." The greatest
triumph that a science emancipated from philosophy had scored in our
time was "in the nuclear domain," a triumph which only underscored
its inherent limitations.
"If
practical reason is to come into its own, this
trend will have to be reversed."
One need not wholly agree with Lichtheim's diagnosis, one need
not fully share - as I do not - his aversion to positivism, to recog–
nize the grandeur of his convictions and the depth of his despondency.
Lichtheim, in the only way he knew how, by writing, did his utmost to
reverse the trend he saw as so pernicious. It seems plain that in the
end he came to believe that neither he, nor anyone else, could succeed
in this vital and desperate task.
Peter Gay
