24
PARTISAN REVIEW
the nineteenth century, treated ideas seemed unhistorical: as
when one discussed Plato as a timeless thinker without knowing
anything about Athens, or talked about Spinoza without knowing
anything about life and problems in Holland in the seventeenth
century. But this-we are told-is a systematic distortion: all you
can study is the past-history-and ideas are an intrinsic part of
it; ideas must be studied through history, and not history through
ideas.
I consider this to be both true and false.
It
is obviously true
that we understand ideas best if we understand what kind of world
their authors lived in and what they were trying to say and do.
Men's language was plainly shaped by social and historical fac–
tors. That is a pure truism. Ideas are not impersonal entities.
There is no parthenogenesis of ideas; ideas don't breed ideas;
only human beings do; and since they are social creatures and
subject to physical and social circumstances, one must study the
thinkers as well as the thought; just as, in my view, one should
study the artist as well as his art, when this is possible. T.S. Eliot
clearly did not think that. He tells us that a work of art shines by
its own radiance-that biographical facts, perhaps the social facts
too, are not relevant to it. Well, I don't know.
If
art is communi–
cation, this cannot be so .
On the other hand, to dissolve ideas purely into what was
thought by certain individuals in seeking answers to certain ques–
tions of their own time is also unduly narrowing.
If
that were
true, how could we understand Plato at all? We don't know, or
aren't sure, what exactly the Greek words meant to their users;
we don't know what Athens looked like, whether houses in
Athens were like Zulu kraals or like Aleppo. We can transport
ourselves mentally, or we think we can, to medieval York, or
Renaissance Florence; but Athens? We know where the
agora
was,
we know where the temples were, we can see some pediments, pil–
lars, statues. But the daily life of Athens is extremely difficult for
us to recover; or the daily thoughts of Athenians. We read the
comedy writers and the orators, we do our best, but it isn't easy
with the evidence we have. Yet we think we understand what
Plato is saying, and some are inspired by it, some are made indig–
nant. We may, of course, systematically misunderstand it. That is
a logical possibility: but if so, are our admiration for and delight
in it lucky accidents? This seems improbable.
