Raymond Aron
WITHOUT REGRETS
1 was lucky enough in my youth
to
have three friends whose
superiority 1 could not conceal from myself: Jean-Paul Sartl'e, Eric Weil, and
Alexandre Kojeve. 1 had doubts about the first for a few years; Malraux's
reaction to
La Legende de
La
verite
l
made me fear that the fertility of his
mind and his creative power, obvious by the early 1930s, instead of finding
expression in works of genius, would be lost in the interstices between
philosophy and literature. Our dialogue, nevertheless, was without difficulty.
To be sure, Sartre was right to criticize me for being too afraid of making a
fool of myself. Even in the so-called exact sciences, research cannot be ac–
complished without mistakes, and mistakes are often profitable. He, on the
other hand, particularly in politics, made generous use of his right to be
wrong.
Eric Weil, whose name is known only to a few thousand people, was
exceptionally cultured, almost perfectly so. I argued with him several times
about events rather than philosophy. But when our conversations turned to
philosophy, 1 felt almost physically an intellectual force superior to mine, the
capacity
to
go further, deeper, to set up a system. Even then, he knew the
great philosophers better than I.
Alexandre Kojeve always gave me the feeling that, if I risked ex–
pressing an idea, he had already thought of it. lfhe had not thought of it, he
could have. He, too, impressed me by the breadth and depth of his philo–
sophical culture, and his posthumous books confirm this impression. In 1938,
he too was mistaken about history in the making; a few months before the
invasion of Poland, he did not believe war would come. What did he mean in
1939, when he called himself a strict Stalinist? My familiarity with these
I. A manuscript rejected by Gallimard, which is soon to be published along with other
unpublished works by Sartre.
Editor's Note: This essay is the "Epilogue" in
Memoin:
Fifty
Years oj Political Reflec–
tion
by Raymond Aron, translated by George Holoch, published by Holmes
&
Meier, New York, NY. Copyright
©
1990 Holmes
&
Meier Publishers, Inc.
