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PARTISAN REVIEW
Beyond Culture
Trilling turns to biological instinct, which as Freud
has taught him "proposes to us that culture is not all powerful.
It
suggests that there is a residue of human quality beyond the reach of
cultural control." Whether Trilling is right in his reading of Freud
(Chace thinks not), whether biology actually provides the kind of
resistance that Trilling wishes to attribute to it I am not prepared to
say. What interests me is the strategy of dramatizing the inadequacy of
the usual resort to cultural values.
Like any political absolutism, culture itself can become an expres–
sion of the aggressive will. Trilling characteristically recoils from every
imperializing manifestation of the will, whether it takes the form of
politics or intellect or creative imagination. What attracts him
to
"biological instinct" (be it myth or actuality) is its resistance to the will
to dominate. It is important to keep this aspect of Trilling's thought in
mind, because it provides a qualification, if not a corrective to the
persuasive view (first put forward by Joseph Frank in his brilliant
review of
The Opposing Self)
that his long-standing antipathy to the
will leads Trilling
"to
endow social passivity and quietism
as such
with the halo of aesthetic transcendence." There are moments in
Trilling's work which invite this kind of judgment, but I believe with
Chace that they betray his best intention . Chace aptly cites a passage
from Trilling's essay on Edith Wharton. "The morality of inertia, of
the dull, unthinking round of duties, may, and often does, yield the
immorality of inertia.... No: the morality of inertia is not to be
praised, but it must be recognized."
The distinction needs development. The morality of inertia is not
in its acquiescence in things, but in its resistance to system, coercion,
all the life-destructive violent assertions of the will.
It
is precisely the
work of the mind in modulation to discover at any given moment the
strongest source of resistance to the destructive exercises of the will.
Such a mind can never come to rest in a system or a position, it must
even question its own assurances from time to time. It may be rnistaken
in its particular judgments, it may take myth for fact, but it is protected
from scandal by its conservative conscientiousness about the hubris of
the will. Trilling's criticism never shares the righteous indignation of
the oppressed not because he is out of sympathy with those who are
oppressed, but because he has a special sensitivity
to
the resentful will
that is often masked by righteous indignation.
It
is the "conservative"
or "aristocratic" bias of his criticism. We may understand the "senti–
ment of being" (a phrase Trilling derived from Wordsworth) in this
context. Trilling does not advocate a mindless acquiescence in the
