360
PARTISAN REVIEW
which the self is nourished. The outside is vaguely threatening but also sim·
ply vague, a reality of necessities, constraints upon the self, bonds to
be
broken.
It
is this intimate imagination which destroys the idea of self·crans·
cendence; and when that idea is destroyed, the moral life of a society has
be·
come fully secularized.
Transcendence of the self is so deeply a part of the Catholic and
Protestant traditions that it is easy to imagine that this ideal is possible only
in an overtly and strongly religious culture. But that need not be so; any
society believes in transcendence when people imagine that their impulse
life may
be
destructive as well as constructive, and therefore create social
rituals or conventions which served to control the impulsive destructiveness
of the people in the society. Two of the least religious thinkers of modern
times, Rousseau and Freud, believed in their very different ways in a society
where such transcendence becomes a moral goal.
It
is true that ideals of
transcendence do involve a certain kind of faith, if not in collective progress
or the moral regeneration of man, at least in the possibility of people col·
lectively lifting some of their own psychological burdens.
It
is this faith which a society destroys when it sees only personality
im·
manent in any genuine human relationship. The immanent is opposed to
the transcendent, the intimate to the social; an anxious expectation of self·
gratification is opposed to a faith in mankind despite itself. I believe that
this secular vision of ours is a blindness. If a society believes in the un·
qualified liberation of the self, how can it take into account the simple fact
that human beings have destructive impulses which should be hidden from
others? This is why a society like ours, celebrating the sheer existence of hu·
man feeling, cannot be called privatized. There is no understanding of what
it means to harbor an impulse in private. There is no understanding of what
disguise to be only a further proof of the authoritarian injustices of present
social arrangements; we are prone to convert discretion and tact into signs of
domination. Surely the word liberation is itself misleading as a description
of the present situation if it connotes a state of progress. A hundred years
ago, personality was socialized only by ideas of repression; today it is not
socialized at all. These are opposite and equal evils.
Today there is community without society: this pure
Gemeinschaft
is a
self-destructive ideal which reifies the family and makes us blind to the evil
in
ourselves. We might
try
to end this destructive
Gemeinschaft
from within
or from without. The best element of the women's movement has tried the
first course; people start with their own immediate feelings and through
group transactions and common action
try
to socialize these feelings,
to
move from a language of intimate injuries to a shared political commitment.
