"You will see now. Now, when the intellectual - how many times in history - will disappear or rather dive as deeply as a loon. In its real sense, the depth is silence." (Jose Ortega Y Gasset, The Intellectual and the Other)
THE SPIRITUAL NATURE OF TODAY'S CRISIS
"History is not dialectical. Socialism had not succeeded capitalism." (Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism)
The amazing disintegration of the Soviet bloc has raised a set of critical problems for both ordinary and global politics. The contemporary world faces new and grave difficulties of an economic, political, and national nature; on the threshold of the twenty-first century quite a new culture is being shaped. One of the most critical issues in Eastern Europe today, and in Bulgaria in particular, is the urgent need to adopt new values and radically to change people's totalitarian mentality in a truly democratic, rather than simply a post-totalitarian, fashion. Along with direct theoretical challenges to the traditional understanding of the political and cultural spheres, one faces the specific problem of the role of intellectuals under so called post-totalitarian conditions. This is the problem of the guilt and responsibility which intellectuals in the post-totalitarian age prescribe for themselves, and which society too attributes to them. Under these unprecedented conditions, what could be the fate of the Spirit and of its bearers, the intellectuals?
The collapse of the "World Socialist System" has been linked throughout the world to a revival of the humanist traditions and of the significance of the free individuals. This has been compared by some thinkers and politicians to the glorious Renaissance of post-medieval Europe. By others it is termed a victorious "end of history" (F. Fukujama), in that the ideals of democracy and freedom are realized irrevocably.
But this glorious epoch is described as an age of deep crisis, of dangerous loss of the established world equilibrium, of outbursts of destructive forms of nationalism, economic upheavals, migrations, and inevitably of striving for a new partition of the world. Not only visions of Balkanization and new dictatorships, but the horrible possibility of world omnicide haunt the imagination.
However, a crisis does not necessarily mean implacable tragedy and decline; it may signify growth leading to a new quality of life. The creation of the new always involves crisis, which is not only a setback, but can be also an advance by stirring up burning questions. It thereby requires re-direction and, eventually, re-unification. In this respect, the whole history of humanity can be regarded as a transition from one crisis to another.
This does not mean that one should be masochistic about the present situation, which is marked by inadequacy and growing bewilderment. This is not just an ordinary crisis such as those through which all societies pass periodically and which is of no lasting importance, nor is it in Pitirim Sorokin's earlier description the death agony of Western culture and society in general.
The main issue of our critical time is neither democracy versus totalitarianism, nor liberty versus despotism, nor cosmopolitism versus nationalism, nor pacifism versus militarism, nor, as Sorokin put it, "any of the current popular issues daily proclaimed by statesmen and politicians, professors and ministers, journalists and soapbox orators."1 The essence of the present crisis is rather the end of an old type of culture and transition to another so that, "the tragedy and chaos, the horrors and sorrow of the transition period being over, they will evolve a new creative life, in a new integrated form."2 Thus, the crisis itself is "but the birth pangs of a new form of culture, the travail attending the release of new creative forces,"3--one could add, a sort of spiritual revolution.
But how can one be that optimistic about an allegedly bright future of human culture? Does not culture contain potentialities which are entirely negative and destructive? As Walter Benjamin noted, "there is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." Every cultural form, every type of culture and culture in general can be disintegrative.
It is a commonplace that every revolution destroys traditional value systems, for revolutions are interruptions of the natural social, political, economic and cultural evolution of a society. In noting that the men of the American Revolution thought of themselves as `founders', Hannah Arendt pointed to the deepest grounds of such revolutionary eruptions. In a revolution, what matters is the very act of foundation. The source of revolutionary authority is neither transcendent nor "historical"; what is "absolute" is the very act of beginning. But:
It is in the very nature of a beginning to carry with itself a measure of complete arbitrariness. Not only is it not bound into a reliable chain of cause and effect, a chain in which effect immediately turns into the cause for future development, the beginning has, as it were, nothing whatsoever to hold on to; it is as though it came out of nowhere in either time or space.4
There are, of course, critical differences between the revolutions of the Modern Age. Even if one agrees with Arendt's assertion that violence is not inherent in all revolutions, such as was the case with the "unique lesson" of the American Revolution which "did not break out but was made by men in common deliberation and on the strength of mutual pledges,"5 nevertheless, it would still be incorrect to deny the emergent nature of a revolution: it leads somewhere, but it stems out of nothing. To a great extent, it is senseless to speak of a "revolutionary tradition" inasmuch as the pure act of beginning excludes the very principle of tradition. In this respect, the more than half a century of prolonged Communist experiment clearly proved that slow progress, sacrificing the lives and happiness of millions of human beings in the name of progress, is even more problematic and dubious.
Moreover, over seven decades after those "ten days that shook the world," all post-Communist countries today are facing the problem of transition to a stage already transcended by developed societies. In his vision of a dynamic economic revival of one post-Communist society, Elemer Hankiss put it thus: "The values and ideology necessary for such a revival, those of a `new Protestant ethic' which is based on discipline, responsibility, rationality, efficiency, frugality, and accumulation (and not consumption) orientation, have not yet emerged."6 Though this is said especially about Hungary, it is valid for all post-Communist societies as well. Today, their former system of values has been proven to be totally confused and these societies have painfully disintegrated.
As long as ten years ago, in an analysis of the deliberate destruction of culture and humane education in Czechoslovakia after 1968, the pseudonymous Vaclav Racek7 observed that to substitute free cultural life with a "poor residue of substandard art and literature" (the so called "cultural policy" of the totalitarian rulers) was a major concern and aimed at dominating the "ideological vagueness" of all spheres of life.
By this, the conditions for creative activity independent of the official ideological canon were eliminated. This fitted the bias of people for ideological vagueness, abdicating all personal responsibility for their lives. According to the totalitarian sophistry, since vagueness and all-pervasive relativity constitute the proper meaning of one's life, one is not to blame for being too obedient. But on a broad scale, the most significant result of the cultural policy in question was that totalitarianism embodied and carried to fruition "spiritual uncertainty" on a massive scale. Thence, as noted Racek, there follows a most serious effect, namely, that the modern totalitarianisms express a total "crisis in belief which threatens our entire civilization," and that this is a logical development of the secularized world of modern democracy."
The quest for new paradigms in post-Communist countries is now too frenetic to permit one to be optimistic about democratic processes in Central and East European countries. Neither progress of the formal rationality of classical capitalism, nor the triumphant instrumental reason of post-industrial societies are capable of providing the values to guarantee the motivation needed for any kind of revival. In addition to the general confusion in the field of values in today's post-totalitarian world, there is a psychological obstacle. As Karl Mannheim said: "People who are conditioned to accept values blindly either through obedience, imitation or emotional suggestion will hardly be able to cope with those values that appeal to reason and whose underlying principles can and must be argued." That is why "in order to create a law-abiding citizen whose obedience is not solely based upon blind acceptance and habit, we ought to re-educate the whole man."8
Yet, for a great part of the world, this century is too unstable to believe that some organizational principles could be dominant, or even clearly formulated or re-formulated in the observable future. There is real disintegration for both underdeveloped and highly developed societies. Advanced capitalism and post-capitalism cannot harmonize various organizational principles in order to provide a comparatively stable social configuration. Some components of the required model can be congruent, while others seem incongruent or even entirely incompatible within a given configuration, so that their alleged complementarity is far from self-evident.
A lot of contemporary thinkers have been scrutinizing such discrepancies and incompatibilities between numerous social, economic, political, and cultural sub-systems of developed Western societies. Raymond Aron, one of the de-ideologists, recognized the contradiction between egalitarian ideals and hierarchically organized structures as one of the most long lasting and inevitable contradictions of industrial society.9
From this point of view, the contradictions which are of greatest concern are those which Daniel Bell called the "cultural contradictions of capitalism," such as decay of traditional bourgeois morality and the so-called "Protestant ethic" (Max Weber), the irrationality of the efficiency principle, the collapse of "functional" reason, and so forth. In the long run, these are the most serious challenges to contemporary society as instinct, hedonism, and irrationalism gain the upper hand over the traditional (though now disintegrated) value subsystems of contemporary society.10 To Claus Offe there is deep discord between institutional and symbolic systems in highly developed societies.11 Juergen Habermas' attempts to systematize crises and the methodology of systematic crisis research have convincingly revealed how a crisis arising in motivation in a socio-cultural system can endanger the traditional ideal of the individual.12 Thus, one of the favorite subjects of post-modernist authors has become, as Fred Dallmayr puts it, the "twilight of the subject."13
Despite all the conscious disagreement, Habermas nolens-volens had to follow Adorno-Horkheimer's thesis about the death of the "bourgeois individual" and of the prospect of discovering the road to total, valid human happiness. After the crash of the Enlightenment project, there would be no self-decisive illusions.
This being the case, what ought the intellectual do in order to promote a new humanity and individuality? How should one regard the role of the Spirit in this new world of ours, with all the contradictions in the dramatic tensions between the new integrity and the old hatreds?
In this respect, one must not underestimate the fact that the roots of destructive disintegration originated from the deepest strata of values themselves. Such an approach would overcome some of the shortcomings of the objectivistic (naturalistic, positivistic, Marxist and the like) perspectives which reduce the crisis of the value system to economic, sociological, political, in a word, "measurable" and "calculable" factors. Karl Mannheim, for example, was entirely sure that the urgent need to begin discussion on this topic could be specified on a sociological and functional, as well as on a qualitative, level. To him the two seemed complementary.14
This was a typically positivist illusion, for it would be a contradictio in adjecto for a functionalist perspective to have room for the qualitative, that is the axiological, aspects of culture. Jürgen Habermas has shown cogently that the objectivistic point of view (as, for example, systems theory) is unable to encompass the crisis dimension of a system in collapse. Insofar as it is not systems as such, but only subjects who are involved in the crisis, any effective crisis analysis must be one in which "the connection between normative structures and steering problems becomes palpable."15
The perspective in question should combine two different dimensions of values: that of subjective (free) choice and that of objective, socially imposed norms. Social changes lead either to new limitations or to a release of the activities of individuals in accord with their preferences, predilections, and personal wishes. It is at this level of analysis that an adequate role for intellectuals in the present situation of crisis can be identified.
It seems only natural that, in days of economic and political deficiencies, social and ethnic tensions, and spiritual misery, people would care first and foremost about their physical and social survival, rather than about the spiritual, transcendental, and "philosophical" dimensions of their being. But without exactly judging the contemporary situation sub speciae aeternitatis, one should recall that "man does not live on bread alone" (Lu., 4:4). On the other hand, the process of stocking peoples' minds with new knowledge and attitudes comes up against a stubborn totalitarian mentality and a solid stratum of old prejudices and habits of mind and heart which can be difficult to surmount. Collectivistic communist ideology so fatally eroded the paths which might lead the post-Communist pseudo-subject to the effective fulfillment of the values of a free, independent, and responsible individual that, in the long run, the all-embracing diffusion of values contributes to general confusion.
Hence, there is need for a growing role of such cultural and, to be more specific, spiritual and intellectual factors as religion, the arts, philosophy and the sciences. These can be preserved and further developed by a specific social stratum relatively unattached to the hic and nunc, temporal and limited economic, political, and social interests. This is the group of the intellectuals, who have a unique ability to break through the ideological framework of any society, both totalitarian and, even more, democratic. What role should intellectuals play in such a situation?
The so-called post-totalitarian situation of East European intellectuals proves too ambivalent to be regarded as some final spiritual victory over an obsolete, but not innocuous, totalitarian mentality. Not only are there drastic national, traditional, historical, cultural, political, and social differences between post-Communist countries and their representatives in high office. Czech President Havel differs so greatly from Bulgarian President Zhelev as to make one doubt whether they are comparable even in terms of their former dissent. On the other hand, even greater similarities may be traced between such different types of intellectuals as Vaclav Havel and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Le tombeau de l'intellectuell and Les Differend of the latter, and the plays of the former, both call for a radical pluralism of world views and aversion to any universal projects of emancipation.16
The contemporary post-totalitarian situation is not unique as regards the problematic nature of intellectuals in society. The "crisis of the intellectual" can well be applied also to post-Hitlerist Germany, post-Revolutionary Russia (of 1917 and of 1905-1907), and the Restoration period in nineteenth century France.
According to Bernard-Henry Levy, today's loss of self-confidence, decline of mutual trust, sense of guilt and helplessness, decay of earlier orientations and lack of new ones, all reveal the current spiritual disintegration of the West today.17 How could it cope with the hope and zeal of East and Central Europeans to become "just Europeans," or even "just Westerners" (the West being taken for the ultimate incarnation of the civilization whose traditional values had been uncritically identified with human values in general)?
THE GUILTY INTELLECTUAL
"In short, the intellectual is raw material for a verdict, a sentence, a condemnation, an exclusion. . . . And I catch a glimpse of the radiant city in which the intellectual would be in prison or, if he were also a theoretician, hanged, of course." (Michel Foucault, The Masked Philosopher)
Today, the status of post-totalitarian intellectuals is proving to be rather unclear and problematical. The collapse of the so-called Socialist World System and the bankruptcy of its official ideology has challenged almost all intellectuals in the former Communist countries. On the one hand, they bear the shameful mark of having been a handmaid of a totalitarian party and one of its "engineers of human souls" (Maxim Gorky). To a great extent, it was by virtue of their efforts that the traditionally free Spirit turned into a suspicious form of ideology. On the other hand, a great many new possibilities for pluralistic development and for exchange of ideas have developed. An open, free and creative (rather than the compulsory "fight to final victory") dialogue has begun with those formerly labeled as "bourgeois ideologists". One can witness this fact now in the publishing and teaching policy in post-Communist societies.
This being the case, the next question is to what extent the intellectuals are to be praised for the moments of upsurge of humanity and to what extend are they to blame for its moments of degradation? Even if one considers the latter to be of no importance since there is general progress in history, one cannot avoid the problem of guilt on the part both of intellectuals and of their notorious "Spirit".
One can agree, from this point of view, that there is both shame and glory for modern intellectuals--not only for those from the East, but for those from the West as well--for they were responsible for fighting "Philistine injustice" and for maintaining social and political regimes which generated such injustices. As Peter Viereck put it, "Glory of the intellectuals: the fight against the persecution of Dreyfus and later the fight against fascism. Shame of the intellectuals: the lack of an equal fight against the Moscow trials of the 1930s, where not one Dreyfus but thousands of Dreyfuses, thousands of Saccos and Vanzettis, were persecuted, tortured, slaughtered."18
The problem remains valid, but takes acute forms in transitional periods, especially in, so to say, "post" periods, when the deeds have already been done, the glory distributed and consumed, but the horror of crimes still cries out for revenge.
It is necessary to move in a new direction. It is an inherent feature of the intellectuals' Spirit consistently to go back, aiming at a scrupulous investigation and interrogation of its own foundations. Even the adepts of the so-called post-modern ideology, despite all their noisy strictures against any sort of foundationalism, are inclined to hold forth (negatively) on the deepest grounds of the social and cultural role of the intellectual.
Their jeremiads are a seemingly inevitable ingredient of the cultural life of any society. This phenomenon may be traced back either to the so-called generation gap or to the level of depth psychology. For Freud, two feelings of fear constitute the sense of guilt: on the one hand, "fear of authority" and, on the other hand, "fear of the super-ego". While the former regards an external factor whose love one would hate to lose (hence, the renunciation of instincts), the latter is truly fatal in nature. There is no escape from the fear of interiorized external authority represented by the super-ego. Instinctual renunciation is never enough, "for the will persists and cannot be concealed from the super-ego." The outcome is tragic, because one is doomed always to be haunted by one's unsatisfied wishes. To put it in Freud's own words, "a threatened external unhappiness--loss of love and punishment on the part of the external authority--has been exchanged for a permanent internal unhappiness, for the tension of the sense of guilt."19
This is the more characteristic of intellectuals because it is culture, as interiorized society, that is the cause of such permanent tension. The stronger the identification with culture, the more acute the fear of the super-ego and, consequently, the sense of guilt. Moreover, inasmuch as all cultural creativity transcends a given cultural "reality", the creators of culture are at the same time the ones who negate it: from the point of view of the crystallized culture, cultural creativity can be regarded as cultural nihilism. On the part of the creators themselves, this appears as unforgivable guilt which cries out for severe punishment so that by the very nature of their cultural involvement, intellectuals cannot but be masochistic. In every case of the intellectuals' social and cultural criticism, there is a deep feeling of being constantly self-accused and self-reproached, as if the very existence of the world depended on this comparatively thin, unstable and, at the same time, absolutely indispensable stratum.
But it seems not to be useful either, on the one hand, to take too seriously their declarations that they are "the salt of the earth", or, on the other hand, to ask whether they are to blame for almost all the world's "faults". Instead of dwelling upon such questions, I would suggest another facet of the problem, namely, whether there is any basis for the well-known confidence of intellectuals that they are the privileged instruments or spokespersons of the Spirit and of culture, through which claim they exercise their rule.
An inferioriority/superioriority complex is immanently linked to the guilt-complex, and in turn is the existential root of one well-known feature of intellectuals, namely, their restless vacillation between a hyper-responsible Sartre engagement and an allegedly irresponsible Nietzschean-Adornian ressentiment and resignation. Intellectuals appear always to be doomed to answer for something and before someone, as if they were habitual criminals. Here, it is of no great importance whether the intellectuals' posture is defensive or offensive, for their problem of guilt and responsibility is neither a simple metaphor nor a matter of juridical casuistry. It is for them "the latest topic," a complex that is constantly actual. The degree of intensity to which they feel this guilt may be regarded as the degree of their intelligence. In this view society more than once has killed its prophets, but new ones obsessed by a feeling of "sacrifice for humanity" (Thomas Mann) always have taken their places. Thus, it is a stubborn and petrified mankind that is to blame for the intellectual's suffering.
How is such a typical sadomasochistic situation of the intellectual possible; can it somehow be avoided? These are nightmarish questions, related, first and foremost, to certain basic conceptions of guilt, responsibility, tolerance, intelligence, social stratum, and social activity. Each of these can be analyzed in metaphysical, socio-cultural, and socio-historical perspectives. Here, I can only indicate some aspects which I regard as the most significant.
When an ordinary consciousness faces the problem of guilt, it usually means a condition which results from violating or overstepping certain rules and moral norms (and naturalistically-oriented philosophy and ethics try to ground it theoretically).20 In this respect, guilt is a moral relation of a person towards other persons or towards society as a whole. That is why it is not enough to realize this condition in order to overcome it. It is overcome mainly through some "good" redeeming deed and actively stepping back into the "normal circle." In some religions, for example, this redemption or clearing away of one's guilt (sin) is attained through the sacrament of confession and through iiµi, the latter eventually following the former. In society, different sanctions regulate the redeeming deeds on the part of the guilty: judicial (sentences, penalties, etc.), moral (censures, reproaches, etc.), and individual (conscience, remorse, etc).
The concept of responsibility, linked to the above-mentioned understanding of guilt, specifies a person's relation to society as regards specific moral requirements. These are crystallized in a set pattern of moral behavior, which is usually sanctioned by tradition, moral codes, training, education and the language itself. That is why the problem of responsibility is usually situated in its practical dimension, which reduces the problem to how much a person realizes his/her moral duties; how strictly he/she fulfills them; and how adequate, from this point of view, are his/her activities.21 Hence, responsibility is always quite concrete and individual. Guilt differs from responsibility in that, though graded, it also may be collective.
Despite its brevity this introduction to the problem suggests a latent ideological content whose roots can be traced back to the vision formulated by Marx in his famous thesis: "Feuerbach resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations."22 Here the tendency is to reduce the individual entirely to a function of society, which, in turn, is the basis for the value of one's social activity. Precisely because of this, however, the conception becomes entirely inadequate, at the very least because, on a phenomenological level, the individual feels guilty (if at all) without gradation: if there is any sense of guilt, there is guilt in its entirety. That is why the sense of guilt is always dramatic, and sometimes even tragic. On this level, when there is such feeling, different individuals' experiences of being guilty are always identical.
To unveil the "ultimate grounds" of guilt and correspondingly of responsibility, we must remove from this notion any social and even psychological shell, as well as any concrete historical content which generates anxiety and "bad conscience." The very possibility of feelings of guilt lies beyond such horizons; it is free of any close relations between the individual and society. As Heidegger put it, "Being-guilty does not first result from an indebtedness [Verschuldung]; . . . on the contrary, indebtedness becomes possible only 'on the basis' of a primordial Being-guilty."23 In this respect, guilt is a primordial phenomenon [Urphaenomem] which makes possible feelings of duty and responsibility, as well as of human communion itself.
The next question is why intellectuals, who are morbidly inclined to make their sense of guilt a constant "theme," try to impose guilt on society, which at times can undergo a dangerous moral crisis. Savonarola, the late fifteenth century Florentine, is but one typical representative of such an obsessive and risky stance. In a word, who is the intellectual that he/she should judge people and the world and make them (him/herself included) responsible for anything whatsoever? Later I will return to this God-like inclination of intellectuals.
There is need now to distinguish between intellectuals and the so-called intelligentsia, a concept that one often meets in sociology and the history of culture. This will cast more light upon the ambiguous role of intellectuals in society in general, and especially in a post-totalitarian society. Here, we shall proceed from the socio-historical and metaphysical to the socio-cultural dimension of the problem.
INTELLIGENTSIA VS. INTELLECTUALS
"Stop baiting intellectuals." (Peter Viereck, Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals)
Profound ambiguities are rooted, first and foremost, in the indefinite nature of the very notion of the intellectual. Their nature obviously is conditioned by their inherently contradictory socio-cultural genesis and role. This was described cogently by Karl Mannheim in his famous inquiry into the social habitat of intellectuals, whom he calls unattached and/or detached.24 By its historical nature, the "relatively unattached intelligentsia" adopt a way of life that is "in a state of suspense without final certainty." The intelligentsia is fated, so to speak, to endure and even relish "continuing exposure to the alternatives inherent in a culture." "To a large degree, the intellectual process was a by-product of historical decomposition"; freedom of thought was "but an episode between periods of institutional culture." In today's larger, highly institutionalized societies, however, the existence of such "outsiders" becomes ever more precarious and trying.
It is no coincidence that Mannheim prefers to use the Russian term intelligentsia to mark the specifically sociological aspect of a classless aggregation of people who, by their very social origin, can neither establish their social identity (and who are keenly aware of this fact), nor are capable of concerted action. Though in the Western tradition it is more usual to speak about intellectuals, the two categories in question share certain common features. While the term `intellectual' emphasizes the individualistic stance of these people of knowledge, the literati, les savants, les hommes de lettre, or, as Friedrich A. Hayek says, "second-hand dealers in ideas,"25 the term `intelligentsia' draws attention to the social self-awareness of this interstitial stratum. Often, however, the terms are used interchangeably.
The content of the notions has been shaped from the dawn of the modern age in the formation of a specific new stratum, that of paid professional state-officers or the bureaucracy. This has a wide range including paid state-officers, writers, artists, actors, lawyers, educators, engineers, professional military men, physicians, scholars, professional politicians, and the like. Besides the specifically sociological reasons, there are ideological and world-view considerations as well. The new bureaucrats were supposed to fulfill functions requiring high education, namely: to compose reports and decrees, to count and balance, and to make relevant decisions. This role fitted best the modern "enlightened" intelligentsia. Hannah Arendt was correct in identifying the career of the bureaucrat as that which was "discovered by and first attracted the best, and sometimes even the most clear-sighted, intelligentsia."26 Perhaps from this origin of the intelligentsia come their specific and ambivalent interrelations with the powers that be.
The word `intellectual' was coined as a badge of honor in France in the "manifesto of the intellectuals" by Emile Zola and others in their fight against the unfair military and legal system, specifically, in direct connection with the notorious Dreyfus Affair. In America William James introduced the word intellectuals in this perspective.
On the other hand, direct political activity did not appear to them to be entirely substantial, especially in terms of their differentia specifica. Even if it was not regarded as a sort of "betrayal of the vocation of the creative and cultured personality" (as was the case with Mann, Hesse, Zweig, and the like), being "without a political mandate", such work could never turn into a profession, as was noted by Max Weber.27 Indeed, for Weber such a transformation would be a real disaster because then "sterile excitation", which is not a genuine passion, but only a "romanticism of the intellectually interesting" which was peculiar to, e. g., a certain type of Russian intellectual, would replace matter-of-factness, or the "feeling of objective responsibility."28 Here I will try to delineate only two aspects of this.
The sociological genesis of the intelligentsia and their lack of cohesion shapes their mental attitude. From the socio-cultural point of view, "intelligentsia" can be regarded as a generic notion, and "intellectuals as a specific one. Both share certain features: predominantly mental work, usually higher education, lack of social homogeneity, classlessness, lack of mutual political and economic interests, inability to form a party, informal or club-like types of inter-communication (or, as Max Scheller called it, "intimate groups of unique individuals"), pluralistic openness and mental dynamism, and higher empathic abilities.
Intellectuals share these features with the intelligentsia, but at the same time play a highly creative role in culture. Intellectuals not only make use of values, but also create new meaning. In Oswald Spengler's terms, the intelligentsia corresponds to the realm of Spirit, while intellectuals represent the realm of Soul; the latter belong to Culture, while the former belong to Civilization.
What deeply involves intellectuals with culture is that, unlike the intelligentsia in general, they are not only potentially, but actually "beyond." They cannot comprehend themselves as bearers and spokesmen of given social interests, social programs, and the like. They feel at home not with realities, but with ideals. In a sense, intellectuals belong neither to their time, nor to their nation: they do not belong at all.
In a word, intellectuals form that part of the intelligentsia which Nikolai Berdyaev associated with the "all-human" or those who do not belong to any "circle." He distinguished intellectuals from the so-called intelligentsia, or, as he put it, the "intelligentsia in quotation marks" or the "intelligent masses" which is always devoted to particular class interests and profess as social change. To Berdyaev, this formed a kind of intelligentsia engaged in a false "circle" of activities (kruzhkovaja intelligentsia) which finally deviated from its own original spiritual roots. At the turn of the century it was constituted of half-educated, incohesive and "strange" groups of people.29 This type of literati was described by Hayek as that judging "new ideas not by their specific merits, but by the readiness with which they fit into his general conceptions, into the picture of the world which he regards as modern or advanced."30 The intellectual would have nothing to do with such "intelligent" dogmatism.
Bearing in mind this distinction, let us turn to a feature of the intelligentsia which K. Mannheim termed schizothymia. The intellectuals' capacity for introversion puts them in critical tension with this world; in extreme cases it impairs their capacity to maintain "normal" social contacts. Mannheim reaffirms for today Max Weber's position that whenever a stratum of literati emerged it has shown "an inclination towards private intellectual ecstasies, as contrasted with the communal rapture of peasants". This is connected with their "estrangement from the public realm of reality."31
Only those not concerned with the unresolved tension between their existential isolation and their inability to resolve it would deliberately "plunge" into professional (or quasi-professional) political activities. Only those who feel socially engaged and are inclined to act accordingly, could be labeled intelligentsia in a socially meaningful way.
This does not at all mean that intellectuals live a sectarian life. Living tête-à-tête not just with truth, but with its meaning, the intellectual strives after a universal, all-human consciousness. It is precisely the latter that is connected by Berdyaev with human dignity and the growth of human culture, since knowledge itself is assessed by the intellectual not by its social and practical applicability and usefulness, but by its own value alone. In this respect, namely, with regard to "the absolute meaning of man," truth can be posed above interest, and not vice versa. Later, in the 1930s, Berdyaev developed this perspective in a definite sacred direction. Maintaining that the prophetic is not characteristic of religious life alone, for Berdyaev a true intellectual would represent freedom, meaning, value and quality, rather than state, class, social interests, or quantity. To Berdyaev, the substantial, rather than merely formal, connection of the intellectual with the outer world is God.32 The "inner voice" of the intellectual should be dedicated basically to this divine direction. Though solitary, the prophet is sensitive to the destinies of people and humankind precisely because he has given up listening to the voice of society; the intellectual is devoted fundamentally not to voce populi, but rather to voce Dei. But is not God also an Absolute? . . .
In any case, the intellectual is engaged with ideals and values, not in an organized social and political manner or formally, but substantially. That is why his/her responsibility is conditioned neither from outside (socially), nor from inside (psychologically), but existentially.
It is the intellectual who has direct access to the so-called ultimate grounds which make human life meaningful. In a certain way, the intellectual is constantly living a frontier life; he is, so to say, in a permanent Grenzsituation (Jaspers). That is why he is exposed constantly to the highest type of guilt, which Karl Jaspers has labeled "metaphysical." In Berdyaev's terms, one may say that this kind of guilt springs from the solidarity or "mutual responsibility" of human beings as human beings. This has nothing to do with "irresponsible equality," or with a "slavish dependence of the person on his [social] environment", for where there is "victory of quantity over quality" one can hardly speak of real responsibility.
Joining a side means exactly the tendency towards quantity. The intellectual then no longer remains alone with his truth; its meaning is no longer substantially his and for him. In his analysis of the case of Heinrich Heine, Juergen Habermas observed that both intellectual "mandarins" (such as Hesse, Mann and Jaspers) and theoreticians oriented to Realpolitik (like Max Weber and Heuss) opposed the "politicization of the mind." From both sides there is constant "fear of the intellectual's mixing categories [mind and power] which would better remain separate. . . ."33
It is tragic to live on the borderline. The individual is incapable of envisaging all the consequences of his own activities. Yet he ought to know them since otherwise he could not act at all. Awareness on the part of the intellectual of this tension between pure activity and responsibility for its effects makes him/her feel primordial guilt from which there is no escape. Jaspers revealed the horrible fact that neither a court sentence, nor political ostracism, nor economic expropriation could plead innocence for the intellectual.34 In this perspective, all social activism turns false and perhaps even harmful insofar as it draws us far away from the authentic roots of guilt. It is suspicious also in that it generates an inadequate feeling of redemption, which is essentially foreign to the outsider. There is no indulgence for the intellectual; for him the fact that "the very thinking turns to be a guilt" (J. F. Mora) is in the end his ultimate ground.
On the other hand, being socially associated with the intelligentsia, intellectuals cannot avoid thinking; it would be absurd to hold them responsible for their thinking. Not only Bolsheviks and National-Socialists who can hardly be suspected of being much in favor of the thought process, but even Sartre and many other intellectuals have appealed often to concrete social, political and, in a word, external engagement and thoughtless activism. If I may invert a wellknown imperative by Karl Marx into an interrogative, the question here is: must ideas always be turned into reality?
This raises the problem of the responsibility of intellectuals. Here this can be formulated not as a question concerning the intellectual's responsibility before his/her own nation, nor even before mankind as a whole. Rather, it how he/she is responsible not as a functionary of society, but as a bearer and creator of human meaningfulness, as the one who makes sense of le condition humaine?
RESPONSIBILITY AND TOLERANCE
FOR POST-TOTALITARIAN INTELLECTUALS
"Growing deaf from the cries, from the earsplitting roar of the politics, the ears of men become senseless to a tenderness of the undertones, to a quiet and penetrating irony. . . . This is the dictatorship of the intolerance." (Stefan Zweig, Erasmus of Rotterdam)
The cultural dimension of the problem of the intellectuals becomes crucial in a situation of qualitative social transition and radical change in its value attitudes and normative systems. This is even more valid for our epoch, which has been called, not very helpfully, post-totalitarian. If we think of totalitarianism not as an "ideal type" of social, economical, political, and cultural order, but as a hellish reality we have to accept also that the respective mentality of people living under totalitarianism could be nothing other than totalitarian. In a truly totalitarian society, even the intellectuals under totalitarian rule cannot save the intelligentsia from the totalitarian mentality. Totalitarianism made it clear that Alfred Weber's and Karl Mannheim's "free-floating intelligentsia" is but another liberal dream that would never come true.
Mannheim himself felt forced to define further the concept in question. His use of the term "relatively uncommitted intelligentsia" does not even hint at "an entirely unattached group free of class liaisons." What he had in mind was that though "intellectuals do not form an exalted stratum above the classes and are in no way better endowed with a capacity to overcome their own class attachments than other groups, certain types of intellectuals have maximum opportunity to test and employ socially available vistas and to experience their inconsistencies."35
This is quite important in itself, especially in comparison with professional politicians, unscrupulous partisans, and noisy spokesmen of so-called class interests--those who have been in the professional service of the Agitprop.36 Objectively speaking, however, the intelligentsia seems doomed to be "in the service" of society, even when certain representatives of that stratum deliberately give up (at least at the level of their own self-awareness) any kind of active participation in the power structures.
It would be an even worse idea to put the "people of Spirit" at the top and make them rule society. Here, I refer to the ambiguity of the Spirit itself. Plato's Republic is a classical example in placing philosophers at the top of his Utopian social pyramid. Promising as it might sound, this dream would be fatal if it were ever to come true. Read closely, this Utopia turns into a terror, due not merely to the military support which Plato ascribed to the Philosophers Kings of the Republic, but also to the way his Laws present a typically totalitarian description of man as just a "doll". I have in mind also the special cruelties of judicial penalties and the absurdity of the rules of daily life, the obligatory marches and apologetics by which only the "ideal citizens" are supposed to express their high spirits, aspirations, and happiness with the existing order. And, last but not least, I mean the initial inclination of Plato, being himself a genuine true-believer in Ideas as general plans, to a quite dogmatic belief in the possibility of organizing and exercising their power. Thus, it is not enough to hate tyrants in order to be against any sort of tyranny whatsoever.
This is very far from casting a stigma upon Plato for all his (anti) Utopian bloodshed and cruelties. As the late eminent Russian philosopher, Alexei Lossev, put it, Plato was a most tragic figure in Ancient Greek philosophy, as was his great philosophy.37 Indeed, Plato qualified his own best and most beautiful dream as a tragedy.38 But if the Utopian role of intellectuals turns out to be tragedy, what is left for real life? . . .
The intellectuals always had something to do with power, as constantly and latently inclined to leadership of the "masses". They have been inherently subversive of mass movements, especially as the latter were by-products of (and perhaps a reaction to) the progressive atomization of the individual in highly institutionalized and organized societies. Hannah Arendt39 demystified the alleged paradox of the inner affinity of the individualistic intellectuals, on the one hand, and the mass man, on the other. Here, and not only in a nebulous and perverse "self-hatred of the spirit" (Arendt), lie the roots of the attraction which totalitarian movements exert on the intellectual elite.
There is, however, no full symmetry in the perverse relations between intellectuals and totalitarian regimes. As far as the latter is concerned, its perfidiousness consists precisely in that not only mediocre and otherwise harmless people, but sometimes really talented ones find themselves participants in totalitarian barbarism. Gyorgy Lukacs was right in his statement that, but for totalitarian "social instruction", Auschwitz would hardly have been possible.40 Indeed, by a bad irony of fate, Lukacs himself could not overcome the temptation to join in such teaching. Leszek Kolakowski's apt metaphor, qualifying Lukacs as "reason in the service of dogma",41 is an excellent expression of the situation of intellectuals in a totalitarian society. What would Lukacs' own answer be if one were to ascribe to him the argument he used in his fight against irrationalism, namely: "There is no irresponsible philosophy"?
But this coin has two sides. While the intellectual finds some compensation with the "masses", the latter and its political spokesmen, the totalitarian ruling class in general, always looks down upon the intellectual as deeply suspicious. This is the more valid for those intellectuals who happen to be truly talented and refuse to play the fool for the regime or to collaborate with its banal frauds. Moreover, in their morbid inclination to grand narratives, the intellectuals and the totalitarian rulers somehow have been rivals. The case of Napoleon, the usurper, versus his former friends and supporters, les ideologues, is rather indicative of the complicated links between the intellectuals and tyranny. This is manifest in the permanent purges amongst the intelligentsia itself so typical of the bolsheviks, national-socialists, and the like. Usually, as Hannah Arendt points out, courtships between totalitarianism and truly talented intellectual elite are more than sporadic. Besides Lukacs, the examples of Oswald Spengler, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Walter Frank and many others are quite significant.42
This is far from making fun of thinkers like Lukacs, Heidegger, and the like, whose fate was too dramatic not to be taken seriously. It would be equally meaningless to appeal to certain "objective" political and social conditions, to the "historical situation," or to biographical and/or psychological factors. Any "objectivism" here would promote irresponsibility, voluntarism and totalitarianism; no matter how horrific history be its pages cannot be closed without being read: indeed, its pages must not be altogether closed. "What has happened - has happened; there is nothing to do about it" means that it will stay with us forever. It is worth paying more attention to the words of a former Wehrmacht officer who later become President of Germany, Richard von Weizsaecker, in a speech dedicated to the fortieth anniversary of the victory over fascism: "Those who refuse to remember inhumanity, become susceptible to new contamination; a vigilant memory is of utmost importance. A Jewish proverb runs, `those who strive to forget just prolong their own banishment.' The key to salvation is called memory."43
In this context, it is the vocation of the intellectual to stare the truth in the face, however horrible it be, as if he were staring at the face of Medusa. Even if innocent with regard to the world of horrors, the intellectual is responsible for keeping this horror ever alive before the face of the mankind. But how could one stay with horror without turning himself into horror, without becoming a dead stone; how could one preserve one's primordial guilt without paralyzing one's own responsibility?
The intellectual, inasmuch he/she is an intellectual, ought to find the answer by him or herself; in the situation of crisis, it is his/her duty to answer: no prescriptions are valid for everyone. W. Lipman said, "If an epoch takes the wrong path, some would storm barricades, others would join a monastery." But there is at least one lesson of history which people should never forget: regardless of how much one dislikes the modern critics of modernity, one could not deny them at least the one contribution of drawing our attention to the problem of the future responsibility of intellectuals. This is of great importance, especially for post-totalitarian intellectuals.
After realizing the striking failure of the so-called Project of the Enlightenment, intellectuals are inclined radically to give up their traditional pretensions to hold the absolute truth, to be a spokesman of the "totalizing unity," or to speak on behalf of the "Universal Subject" (Foucault). On the other hand, is not Bernard-Henry Levy, in his criticism of structuralism, existentialism and Marxism, correct in saying that "if intellectuals are still necessary in any way, it is only in order to express this [absolute] truth" that losing an all encompassing perspective is the road to destruction of thought and of all the abstract principles of justice and humanism; this is a road to the decay of culture itself. If he is right, how could the post-modern intellectual fulfil the "unfinished project of the Enlightenment" (Habermas), if any social and political activity, according to Levy, is but a "vanity fair," a trap, and a source of permanent blackmail for the intellectual since no one can guarantee that humanity will never be caught again and again by some new horror?44
If post-totalitarian discourse is only a variety of the grand narratives of totalitarianism is there no way out--if not an Exodus, at least a touch of one?
Such a hint seems encoded in the memorial which, according to Lyotard, the intellectual has raised above his own grave. From his grave the crushed intellectual is pointing out that there is no sole, one and only road to truth; that there is more than one sole narrative; more than but one project, more than one and only one "famille de phrases"; in a word, that the only real tolerance consists in toning down one's own voice in order to hear different voices.
In the realm of the new politics, this would lead to a situation where "East and West may learn from each other's families of phrases," while "they will also have to use different ruses for warding off crushing homogeneity, for sharing silenced voices."45 It is senseless to discuss who had the upper hand in history, whose civilization won final victory-- who, whom. There is neither better nor worse history. Even if one try to imagine an ideal social and human order, a sort of a new Golden Age, the horrors and victims of history on both sides would bar one from unblemished happiness: the burden of the victims of all the great projects which constituted the intellectuals' "substantial contributions" through human history weighs upon the conscience of humanity. In this respect, going beyond Adorno's Negative Dialectics and Minima Moralia, Herbert Marcuse sharply pointed to the simple fact that "even the ultimate advent of freedom cannot redeem those who died in pain. Their remembrance and the accumulated guilt of mankind against its victims darken the prospect of a civilization without repression."46
There is nothing, nowhere and no-one, to boast about. The intellectuals of the post-totalitarian age, both East and West, North and South, should repent once and for all the crimes in which they have participated, directly or, in most cases, even indirectly and unawares--and even for those crimes with which they had nothing to do, nor even heard of. Let them never forget that the first and primordial sin is hubris, the supreme superciliousness that caused Satan to think himself equal to God. To paraphrase Freud, their danger is that the pride of individuals and nations in their own exclusiveness will fuse with that of being as great as God.47
This is the way to let the different voices of the victims win their right to cry out. To accept this radically pluralist ethic of post-modernity is the highest responsibility of the post-totalitarian intellectual of today, East and West: resistance against superiority is his only policy.
Getting rid of the traditionally elitist complex of superiority may open new perspectives for the intellectuals. It would be much more instructive to consider their significance from a different perspective, one that is horizontal rather than vertical in angle. Cultural creativity is first and foremost intimately personal and therefore communicative, rather than subordinative. It is an insurpassable and unique component of man's life-world.
From this point of view, a truly intellectual community would not be some type of social institution, but rather a kind of invisible college--something too far away from any idola fori to be "real". This is the right way for the Spirit to survive, especially in a time of crisis. Perhaps it is the right way for intellectuals to continue (if I may use Hegel's expression about philosophy) to paint with gray paint over gray background, completely aloof from the bright projects of the mundane evolutionary and/or revolutionary world.
Aloof thinking, hidden niches, silent voices. The intellectuals. . .
1. P. Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age. The Social and Cultural Outlook. (New York: Dutton, 1957), p. 23.
2. Ibid., pp. 25-26.
3. W. Benjamin, "Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian", A. Atrato and E. Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Urizen, 1978), p. 233.
4. H. Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Pelican Books, 1987), p. 206.
5. Ibid., p. 213.
6. E. Hankiss, In Search of a Paradigm B, Daedalus (Winter, 1990), p. 209.
7. V. Racek, "Totalitarianism in 1983", The Salisbury Review (Spring, 1983), pp. 30-32.
8. K. Mannaheim, Diagnosis Of Our Time. Wartime Essays of a Sociologies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 166.
9. R. Aron, Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society (London: Weidenfeld, 1967).
10. Cf. D. Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
11. Cl. Offe, Contradictions of the Wellfare State (London: Hutchinson, 1984).
12. Cf. J. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), pp. 1-8.
13. Fr. R. Dallmayr, Twilight of Subjectivity: Contributions to a Post-Individualist Theory of Politics (Amherst: University of Massachusets Press, 1981).
14. Cf. K. Mannheim, op. cit., p. 23.
15. Cf. J. Habermas, op. cit., pp. 117-130.
16. C. Bayard, "The Intellectual in the Post Modern Age: East/West Contrasts", Philosophy Today, (1990).
17. B.-H. Levy, Eloge des intellectuels (Paris: Grasset, 1987).
18. P. Viereck, Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals. Babbit Jr. vs. the Rediscovery of Values (New York: Capricorn, 1965), xx.
19. S. Freud, Culture and Its Discontents, Standart Edition, Vol. 21 (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 83.
20. In some Slavic languages (e.g. in Russian, Bulgarian, etc.) the very term "crime" (prestuplenie) originates etymologically from "stepping over something" (pere-stupat, re-stapvam).
21. Obviously, it is not a sheer coincidence that in the modern European philosophical tradition shaping the modern individual went hand in hand with an identification of the practical with the moral. Kant's Critique of Practical Reason is certainly most representative in this respect.
22. K. Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach" in Marx-Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), p. 616.
23. M. Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 329.
24. K. Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), pp. 91-170.
25. F. A. Hayek, The Intellectuals and Socialism (Fairfax, Va: Institute for Humane Studies, George Mason University, 1990), p. 3.
26. H. Arendt, The Origin of Totalitarianism (New York: A Harvest Book, 1973), p. 186.
27. Cf. J. Habermas, The New Conservatism, Cultural Criticism and the Historians' Debate (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), pp. 72, 77-79; P. Viereck, op. cit., xix-xxi.
28. M. Weber, "Politics as a Vocation", in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 115, 127.
29. N. Berdyaev, The Spiritual Crisis of the Intelligentsia (St. Peterbirg: Obshtestvennaja Polza, 1910), p. 61 (in Russian).
30. F. A. Hayek, op. cit., p. 13.
31. Cf. K. Mannheim, Essays in Sociology of Culture, pp. 162-163.
32. N. Berdyaev, "The Crisis of the Intellect", Kultura (Sofia: No.19, 1991), p. 3 (in Bulgarian).
33. J. Habermas, The New Conservatism, p. 78.
34. Cf. K. Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage (Heidelberg, 1946); Philosophie, Bd. II (Berlin: 1956), p. 264.
35. K. Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Culture, pp. 105-106.
36. A Russian abbreviation for the Communist Party committees and its members who were specialized to work as ideological agitators and political propagandists.
37. A.F. Lossev, Philosophy, Mythology, Culture (Moscow: Political Literature, 1991), pp. 336-373 (in Russian).
38. Laivs., VII 817 b.
39. Cf. H. Arendt, The Origin of Totalitarianism, pp. 316-317.
40. G. Lukacs, Die Zerstoerung der vernunft. Der Weg des Irrationalismus von Schelling zu Hitler (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1955), p. 264.
41. L. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism. Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution. Vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 253f.
42. H. Arendt, The Origin of Totalitarianism, p. 339.
43. R. von Wezsaecker, Novoe Vremja (Moscow: No. 40, 1990) (in Russian).
44. B.-H. Levy, op. cit., pp. 41f, 135.
45. C. Bayard, op. cit., p. 299.
46. H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (London: Sphere Books, 1969), p. 188.
47. Cf. S. Freud, "Moses and Monotheism", Standart Edition. Vol. 23 (London-New York), 139.