BOOKS
137
or symptoms (to Kimball), of modern life, and should be treated as spec–
imens of cultural diagnosis, not scholarly analysis. Kimball is an essay–
ist, closer to Dwight McDonald than to a literature professor. He quotes
people's writings selectively, then jumps to broad conclusions. He dis–
penses judgments of taste with surety. He lets a haughty remark do the
job of patient scrutiny. These are the trappings of polemic, directed to a
non-specialist audience.
Sometimes the figures chosen are courageous resisters of cultural
decay. T. E. Hulme decried the "delusive self-infatuation" of Romanti–
cism.
T.
S. Eliot searched for a belief concordant with his "craving for
reality." Wallace Stevens, despite his aestheticism, "increasingly
acknowledged the recalcitrance of reality in the face of the blandish–
ments of the imagination." Austrian novelist Robert Musil recognized
the "moral significance of scientific rationality" without slipping into
anti-science Romanticism or pro-science Prometheanism. Although
"cozy nihilists parrot his ideas and attitudes," Nietzsche predicted the
moral bankruptcy and timid valuelessness of contemporary thinkers.
German neo-Thomist Josef Pieper recalls philosophy's former task-to
inject life with wisdom and insight.
Other figures singled out illustrate for Kimball the spiritual desola–
tion and ironic temper on which totalitarianism feeds. Walter Pater
embodies an aestheticism that "begins by emphasizing form," but "ends
by dissolving form into the 'pleasurable sensations' and 'pulsations.'"
Auden struggled with moral questions, but "his solution always had
something of a performance about it." John Stuart Mill gave to liberal–
ism its "texture of sentiment," a rhetorical overlay that forestalled any
objection to it. Sartre transformed his personal anarchism into a Leftist
commitment, his self-analysis into self-exoneration. Foucault combined
"solemn chatter about 'transgression,' power, and surveillance" with
"an extraordinary obtuseness about the responsible exercise of power in
everyday life." Finally, E. M. Cioran exemplifies the cultural Left's
"wild inconsistency of argument" and "rigid consistency of attitude."
Scholars and specialists will dispute Kimball's characterizations, but
general readers will receive them as parables of modern reality. The
chapters are equipment for intellectual living, pieces of moral instruc–
tion based on the premise that "knowing the truth" is a "moral as well
as a cognitive achievement." The distinctions are more ethical than they
are scholarly. For instance, when a biographer of Foucault asserts "SM
on one level merely makes explicit the sadistic and masochistic fantasies
implicitly at play in ...human relationships," Kimball comments, "even
if it were true that such fantasies were 'implicitly' at play...the differ-
