10 PARTISAN REVIEW
tural phenomena but is not identical to them; unlike them, it is not an
object of historical experience or a collection of facts, but a metaphysi–
cal entity (discovered by Hegel and the Romantics) with explanatory
powers similar to those of the
res cogitans.
Like the
res cogitans,
it is a
substance which is not reducible to the sum of its thought-acts, but is an
essential condition for their occurrence. While the idea of the
Volksgeist,
like the idea of substance, is not empirical, and hence easily disposed of
by empiricist philosophers, the other elements of collective identity are
less problematic.
No long proofs are needed to establish the obvious fact that national
identity requires historical memory. It does not matter, for this purpose,
how much of the content of that memory is true and how much half–
true or altogether fictitious. What matters is the consciousness of a past:
no nation can survive without the awareness that its present existence is
the continuation of a past one-and the further awareness that the older
those (real or imaginary) memories are, the deeper they reach back into
the past, the more firmly its national identity is established. The past is
preserved not only in historical knowledge but also in such things as
symbols, idioms and other particularities of the language, old buildings,
temples, tombs, and so on.
These observations are all platitudes, so obvious that they hardly
need saying. It is worth adding that what decides whether a nation is the
same nation now as it was at any other point in its past is that nation's
present collective consciousness.
If
contemporary Greeks, Italians, Indi–
ans, Copts, or Chinese genuinely feel that they belong to the same con–
tinuous ethnic community as their ancient forbears, then one cannot
convince them otherwise. Some emerging nations have simply invented
a past for themselves,
ad hoc
and without any genuine or verifiable his–
torical reality. Such inventions are tolerated because they are necessary.
National cultures change imperceptibly; we cannot pinpoint the exact
moment of their metamorphosis. They evolve like languages and, like
languages, eventually do evolve into what is clearly a different entity. We
have no doubt, for instance, that the language of Montaigne is the same
language as modern French, despite all the changes that have occurred
since the sixteenth century, and we know that Latin is a different lan–
guage. But a nation can lose its original language without losing the con–
sciousness of its identity. (Ireland might be an example of this sad fate.)
Anticipation is as essential to national identity as it is to personal
identity. A nation, like an individual, thinks in terms of its future inter–
ests . It worries about what might happen, tries to assure its survival, and
takes measures to protect itself against possible adversity. There is, how-
