528
PARTISAN REVIEW
and that we ought not to continue to think of education in "the dark
night of despair." I would think that Trilling might show us that the
emotions of experience precede language, that we think before we speak
and write, that desire and dread have little to do with discourse and its
determinants.
"It
is not words that make our troubles but our wills,"
wrote Trilling in reference to Nietzsche. "Words cannot control us
unless we desire to be controlled by them."
It
is difficult to believe that language could ever replace the deeper
passions of life, love, and labor. Among the
Partisan Review
circle, lan–
guage was a means of communication and not an end in itself. In his
memoirs, William Barrett recalls get-togethers where it was all "talk,
talk, talk," a wonderful mirroring of the state of language philosophy,
defined as "talking about talk." Walking into a party, Barrett remem–
bers, was like walking onto an enclosed battlefield where arguments
exploded everywhere in the room like shells going off. In New York
City, Lionel Abel recalls, the air was full of disputes and controversies.
But "when ideas are in the air, people become more daring, sometimes
to the point of rudeness." Intellectual life can be rough business.
It
seems that everyone wants to be heard and few want to listen. Mary
McCarthy defined an intellectual as "a mouth in search of an ear."
If
truth has dropped out of modern thought, does it have any chance of
returning in conversation? "When we talk in company," observed Niet–
zsche, "we lose our unique tone of voice, and this leads us to make state–
ments which in no way correspond to our real thoughts." The
intellectual can be a talking machine for whom it may be necessary, at
times, to pull the plug.
That healthy, sardonic view may sum up the older attitude of intel–
lectuals toward themselves. Harold Rosenberg described the New York
intellectuals as "a herd of independent minds" and Hook called them
"radical comedians." That was then. Now, with our academic intellec–
tuals, language and conversation are taken with the utmost seriousness.
Today's Academic Left had its origins in the New Left of the sixties, a
generation for whom one might say that the word came before the deed
as the "rap session" would precede the revolution. In his memoir of the
decade, James Miller describes how members of the SOS spent an entire
afternoon debating whether they could take an hour off the next morn–
ing to go for a swim. Now we know why so many of the Academic Left
like to sit on committees and "discourse" about this and that.
The "Port Huron Statement" envisioned the university as the site
where the world would be remade-by activism rather than verbalism.
Yet today the reconstruction of modern society is to be based on the ver-
