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PARTISAN REVIEW
norms: the world does not owe you a living.
Nor is it enough to train professional specialists to satisfy the short–
term demands of the market or the state: the university should serve as an
antidote to the world.
We are swept along by the norms we learn, by ever more rigid pro–
fessional roles; we find it increasingly difficult to assert the personal ele–
ment. Universities are producing career-oriented professional intellectuals
designed to fit reigning political cliches like off-the-peg jackets.
Wholesale identification with a professional role is crippling. Are you
doing your job or is your job doing you? You are graded and typed
while in school. A role can be an agenda too. A plan, a prescription , a
set of precepts, a strategy.
Art consititues the day-to-day existence of the idealist: idealists do
only what they respect; otherwise they refuse. "I refuse" is a morality in
itself: we are not forced to participate in anything we judge to be
wrong. The time has come for personal responsibility to take the place
of collective responsibility. The twenty-first century will be the century
of carefully considered, consciously espoused and validated personal re–
sponsibi] ity.
The twentieth century was the century of collective crime and col–
lective irresponsibility (or the call for collective responsibility), and all its
lunacy began in books. Yes, intellectuals are responsible for what their
contemporaries do. People are more than active beings, they are moral
beings: they want the propriety of their acts confirmed; they do what
they think right, what they are brought up to do, what enhances their
spiritual profile. They do what they are told.
The social history of the intelligentsia consists entirely of a continu–
ous jockeying for increased autonomy, because true power for the intel–
lectual is the equivalent of freedom. If intellectual endeavor is to thrive,
it must sever all ties with authority external to it. Pluralism provides the
leeway necessary for maneuvering, and intellectuals are by definition the
athletes of understanding. Theirs is a creative understanding, one that ac–
cepts the contradictions of the other and values his or her aesthetic
complexity. No one can understand a person from above; viewing a
person from a position of superiority leads to platitudes, to reductionist
simplifications that make the person boring and have nothing to do with
understanding.
We have turned into a world society: far-off catastrophes and wars
