Other high modernists issued similar warnings about the domineering tendencies of the ego. In a 1952 lecture, “The Man of Letters in the Modern World,” given at the International Exposition of the Arts in Paris, which was sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Allen Tate presented “the man of letters” with the formidable task of recreating “the image of man” in an age of “mass control.”37 Tate traced the recent enslavement of mankind by the forces of terror to Descartes’s philosophical separation of mind from body and rationality from desire, an intellectual revolution that isolated man from his true nature. Echoing Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the Enlightenment, Tate argued that the historical era of the Cartesian ego had culminated with the specter of totalitarianism. The violent dissection of the realm of nature in the name of rationality had morphed into the violent dissection of mankind in the name of social betterment and expert planning. With a naïve belief in the rational mind’s infallibility, the so-called enlightened subject had separated “means from ends, action from sensibility, matter from mind, society from the individual, religion from moral agency, love from lust, poetry from thought, communion from experience, and mankind in the community from men in the crowd” (13). According to Tate, too many individuals in the modern age refused to temper their own intellects with a sense of humility and were unwilling to accept a life lived with contradiction.
This of course was the basis for the high modernist critique of fellow travelers, Progressives, and party members, those who had tied “the liberal imagination” to the demands of political movements. Lionel Trilling’s vitriolic attack on the ideological posturing of Communists, for instance, was in response to his larger fear that the individual, in the name of moral righteousness, was trying to impose upon his fellow men “a similarity which would be himself” and was trying to negate “their differences from one another” as a cure for his own confusions.38 As a literary example, Trilling pointed to Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima as an “incomparable representation of the spiritual circumstances of our civilization” (176). James’s novel tells the tale of Hyacinth Robinson, the poor illegitimate son of a French seamstress and an English nobleman, who becomes involved in a number of revolutionary anarchist groups but who begins, through his relationship with an Italian aristocrat, Princess Casamassima, to question the usefulness of violent action. According to Trilling, Hyacinth learns that revolutionary passion is by its very nature “guilty,” arising not from some empathetic “response to human misery” but from a need for “certainty” (171). Conversely, the Princess, because of her guilt over her privileged position, befriends Paul Muniment, a working-class companion of Hyacinth, and commits herself to revolutionary activity. The Princess, for Trilling, is “the very embodiment of the modern will,” one that clings to its own sense of virtue but that “hates itself” and hates the complexity of the world in which it lives, a will that “longs for an absolute humanity” (176) without differences. Political action wrapped in ideology was, for Trilling, nothing more than a veneer for “the impulses to revenge and to dominance” (171).
In this sense, high modernists established a nearly impossible project for themselves—safeguarding the highly unstable autonomy of the ego from the domineering force of the drives and from the repressive authority of the superego while simultaneously muting the narcissistic tendencies of the ego itself. The fact that the latent aggressiveness inherent within each psychic component had apparently been so easily captured by the nihilistic philosophies of the twentieth century testified to the intractability of the problem. In his 1951 essay “The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters,” Trilling referenced the “mature masculinity” of John Keats as a model for a life in which such psychic tensions were held in delicate balance.39 Keats was a man and a hero before he was a poet, “the last image of health” before the “sickness of Europe began to be apparent” (258). Keats balanced the conflicting forces, internal and external, that threatened to overpower him, matching his passion for friendship and community with his enjoyment of solitude, taking pleasure in “the sensory, the sensuous, and the sensual” but exhibiting “probity” in the face of life’s complications. Moreover, Keats had tempered the sadistic impulses of the death instinct not by ignoring “the problem of evil” but by confronting it in all its manifestations. Keats recognized the tragic consequences of “passivity” and “melancholy,” those impulses seeking to return the individual to a state of inertia, or worse, a state of nothingness. Keats’s countered this drive to “surrender to the passive, unconscious life” with an affirmation of “the active principle,” but he also remained keenly aware that any such “masculine energy” needed to be assuaged by a “diligent indolence” (243). The mature self, as Trilling explained, was endowed with Keats’s “negative capability,” the intellectual power to find answers not in “a formula of any kind, not a piece of rationality” but rather in “a way of being and of acting” (251). This “negative capability,” according to Trilling, was dependent upon a certain personal strength, found in a self that was “certain of its existence” and that could do “without the armor of systematic certainties” (249).
Other high modernists found similar intellectual heroes. In his portrait of Thomas Mann, with whom he had collaborated when the two were in exile in southern California during the early 1940s, Theodor Adorno described a man living “in a world of high-handed and self-centered people” who knew that “the only better alternative” was to “loosen the bonds of identity and not become rigid,” an artist with “two extremely different handwritings,” one of “heaviness” and one of “involuntary starts,” and a man whose rhythm of life was “not continuity but rather an oscillation” between the extremes of “rigidity and illumination.”40 The modernist hero of Dwight Macdonald’s The Root Is Man was a slightly more distant figure—the American modernist Henry James, who possessed the maturity to recognize the “imperfections” of “present knowledge.”41 Willing to accept the “tragic limitations of human existence,” James, according to Macdonald, taught the importance of moderation, exhibiting a life lived “with contradictions” and “skepticism” (145). Similarly, Clement Greenberg, years after Jackson Pollock’s death, claimed that the artist had possessed “what Keats called Negative Capability: he could be doubtful and uncertain without becoming bewildered—that is, in what concerned his art.”42 Of course, since Pollock was not able to maintain such a temperament in his personal life and since he was, much to the chagrin of Greenberg, an acknowledged Stalinist for most of his life, high modernists like Greenberg had difficulty in translating this negative capability to the general public as an antidote to antidemocratic sentiments.
Modernist Aesthetics and the Tempering of the Self
Some Cold War intellectuals, most notably Sidney Hook, placed considerable faith in progressive education to reinforce liberal tolerance. Even Max Horkheimer, in one of his more optimistic moments, argued that irrational politics stemmed from a “lack of enlightenment.”43 In his contribution to a United Nations–supported investigation into the “tensions that cause war,” Horkheimer observed that “the task of those engaged in education on all levels, from the high school history class to the mass media of communication, was to see to it that the experiences of the last war of aggression, which came very close to success, become deeply engraved in the minds of all people” (241). This was also the conclusion of Life magazine’s 1948 “Round Table on the Pursuit of Happiness,” featuring “eighteen prominent Americans” including Edmund Walsh, Sidney Hook, and Erich Fromm, all of whom concluded that “editors, educators, the clergy and various individuals and institutions immediately concerned with the