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PARTISAN REVIEW
initially generous project could only lead to tragic results. Which of these two
hypotheses is correct? Or should we search for yet a third?
I was led to think over these questions in the course of reading for a
project to which I have devoted the past several years-an inquiry into
French attitudes towards the recognition of others. I use this phrase as
shorthand to designate the different types of problems raised by the rela–
tionships between members of different cultures (and countries). My goal was
to determine what responses had been advanced to the crucial question of
how to reconcile human unity with cultural diversity. How is this double ap–
purtenance experienced and expressed? To clarify my thinking on this sub–
ject, I undertook to read the major French authors who have dealt with it in
their writings over the past three centuries. Today, in order to cast some
light on the "enigma" I mentioned at the outset, I shall evoke the examples of
three of the most influential thinkers of the nineteenth century: Renan,
Michelet, and Chateaubriand.
Let us first take the case of Renan, who has been qualified as the offi–
cial thinker of the Third Republic: professor at the College de France, mem–
ber of the Academie Francaise, and a universally admired writer. At first
glance, Renan seems to have been a faithful disciple ofRousseau; in actuality,
he was instrumental in transforming the humanism of the Enlightenment into
a quite different philosophical position-namely, scientism. The first difference
between humanism and scientism involves the antinomy between freedom
and determinism. Montesquieu and Rousseau recognized the causal effects of
both the physical conditions peculiar to a given country (whether it was an
island or a continent, mountainous or flat, whether its climate was hot or cold)
and its historical and cultural conditions (traditions, customs, religion). How–
ever, above and beyond these givens, they considered the very ability to
overcome them to be the distinctive trait of the human species; thus, freedom
was more powerful than determinism.
It
is no accident that this concept
paved the way for revolutions-that is, historical moments in which people
attempt to take their destinies into their own hands.
Renan seems to be defending the same point of view when, in his fa–
mous lecture entitled "What Is a Nation?" he defines the latter entity by the
desire of individuals to belong to it-a nation, according to his expression, is "a
daily-renewed plebiscite." That, at least, is what is usually remembered of
this speech. On rereading it, however, one notices that, to this first "criterion"
for deciding who belongs to a nation, Renan adds a second, whose effect is to
annul the first-namely, the existence of a past history common to all
members of the nation. Whereas the desire to build a future together de–
pends on will and therefore on human freedom, the past is a phenomenon
over which individuals have no control: rather than acting, they are acted
