Each age is a dream that is dying or one that is coming to birth"
The economic plight of Europe four years after V-E Day is slowly being resolved, thanks in part to the generosity of American aid - but what is one to say of the intellectual dilemma of thinking men and women from Great Britain to the countries behind the Iron Curtain? I have traveled extensively throughout Europe since the end of the war, talking to artists, scholars, celebrities, and bright young men on either side of the Iron Curtain. They are a baffled insecure group, these European intellectuals, divided and torn not only by the diplomatic struggle between Russia and the United States, but also by the war of ideas raging throughout the Continent.
What are the European intellectuals thinking in the spring of 1949? What are they to believe, especially those interested in a genuine exchange of ideas, after reading of the strange goings-on at last March's conferences of opposing intellectuals in New York - the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace and Americans for Intellectual Freedom?
In the spring of 1949 the European intellectuals consider their inherited ideas questionable or irrelevant. So many slogans, once inspiring, now have a hollow ring. The European air reverberates with false credos, contradictory arguments, violent accusations. Many voices are heard in Paris and London, in Prague and Brussels and Copenhagen, but there is no coordinated discussion to give the mass of intellectuals a basis for harmonious belief and action. The extreme leftists shout for the total socialization of the means of production; the fiery nationalists beat their breasts, believing their own countries could save the world if they had the opportunity; the apostles of science point to technical progress as the means of salvation, while the enemies of science oppose it as the archenemy of culture; the ardent Catholics point to Rome and its spiritual leadership as the answer; and the defenders of American doctrines clash with the Stalinist supporters almost daily, solving nothing, adding to the mental confusion which the traveler from America sees in every face on the European streets.
Many frightened and disturbed Europeans look for comfort in the ancient documents of Hinduism, in the writings of Lenin, in the Bible, in the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Others quote the latest pronouncements of the Rumanian Communist leader Ana Pauker, or Einstein or General de Gaulle or that current European phenomenon, the American-born world-citizen Garry Davis. Still others find their solutions in the philosophy of Heidegger or Jung, or they quote with self-pitying satisfaction the great European Paul Valéry, who proclaimed, "L'Europe est finie."
As in America, the Europeans talk at great length about Kafka and sex and war and nuclear chain reactions. But unlike Americans, who have enough to eat and keep busy with their hustling optimism, the Europeans also talk about despair, "the Sickness unto Death," as Kierkegaard has called it.
What if the European intellectuals are too weak and dispirited to meet their ordeal? What if they fail, if they betray their mission ? One of them, the French writer Julien Benda, has accused his own guild of high treason. And the European intellectuals remember Benda's inexorable formula, La Trahison des Clercs.
The French word "clerc," like the archaic English word "clerk," can mean a clergyman as well as a layman charged with minor ecclesiastical duties, or a scholar, or simply a person able to read and write. By his use of the term "les clercs," the French author clearly suggests that the intellectual's position in our modern world may be compared to one formerly held by the priesthood.
In times of undisputed religious authority the intellectual has DO function, no raison d'etre It is only when the priests lose control that the independent, critical minds take over. That is what happened in Hellas and Rome after the dethronement of the Olympian gods (Socrates, the great question-asker and dialectician was an intellectual in the most exacting, most sublime sense of the word). It happened again at the time of the Renaissance following the Dark Ages; and the Humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, consciously and proudly free from clerical tutelage, may be regarded as the founding fathers of our modern intelligentsia.
Today's intellectual, then, is something in the nature of a layman priest inasmuch as he, too, is primarily interested in spiritual values, not in material success. The intellectual, like the priest, is supposed to judge life and society according to certain ideals, rather than from a purely utilitarian or "realistic" point of view. But while the priest may rely on a given ethical and metaphysical system, the intellectual - belonging to a race of explorers and nonconformists - has to discover his own moral code, his own truth and gospel. The real intellectual takes nothing for granted. He questions everything. His main characteristic is an infinite curiosity. He is in love with novel ideas and hazardous experiences. In contrast to the priest who enjoys the guidance and protection of a powerful hierarchy, the intellectual leads a vagrant, uncertain life - every day a new adventure and experiment, a new ordeal.
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