394
PARTISAN REVIEW
to
build their theories out beyond the past, ahead of history, they will
build like wasps with paper. And for this reason: their laws come
after, not before, the act of human wishing, and the human wish
to
live in and make true. For what is lacking in the crises of our times is
only this: the image. Its absence is the crisis.
It
is the act of the spirit
which fails in us. With no means or with very few, men who could
imagine a common good have created great civilizations. With every
means, with every wealth, men who are incapable of imagining a
common good create ruin . This failure of the spirit is a failure from
which only poetry can deliver us.
Beyond being a craftsman who makes the furniture of our senses
and our minds, the artist also comprehends the inner life. It is in this
realm that those who construct "as if" fantasies are so lacking. Even
Plato, who in the
Republic
fails to understand the inner life except as
an area of wishes to be repressed, is aware that the poet-artist achieves a
public expression of the inner life.
The artist begins by asserting that truth is within us and beyond
social systems. Art serves to express myths which are not time-bound
but which repeat themselves in many guises in the history of man's
culture, and through myth the basic existential truths about reality are
revealed. On the other hand, modern love of calculative thinking has
meant that we are not clear about what is real. As I have suggested,
calculative thinking translates the qualities and substance of the world
into numerical representations. But such representations serve as
shields against understanding the things and processes themselves.
Richard McKeon, in praising Thomas Mann, has claimed that it is the
artist who comprehends the nature of those myths and truths which
exist beneath numbers and calculations:
... we have lost our sense with profundities of truth because we have
confused.truths with facts that we can see and test by their utility, and
we have come
to
suspect the myth, because we suppose literal
mindedly that , unlike history, the myth did not happen and therefore
is not true.
We would be wrong to think of scenarios conjured at think tanks
as myths which teach fundamental truths. While they usually deal with
how leaders will act, scenarios do not set forth invariable principles of
human nature. In contrast to artistic expressions, the planner's scen–
ario is ripped out of time, place, tradition and psychology. It is
deformed structuralism which assumes that-like money and
numbers-countries and people are interchangeable.
If
a particular
scenario prediction does not apply to France, it might apply to Italy. As
