Page:The War and the Future.djvu/4

 the opposite can also be defended, and I must not only take into account that I will meet with external contradiction to my one-sided position but I also have the contradiction in myself internally, and, in denying this when committing myself to one point of view, I renounce my freedom."

That is true, and yet there are moments, historical condi tionsconditions [sic], in which it would prove to be weak, egoistic and wholly untimely to insist upon one's freedom of criticism and to shy away from a confession of faith. I mean those moments and those historical conditions in which Freedom itself, by which the freedom of the artist also exists, is endangered. It is reactionary, unscrupulous, and suicidal, and the intellectual undermines his own existence, if through his need for freedom, he plays into the hands of the enemies and assassins of freedom. These enemies are only too happy if mind considers nothing but the ironical attitude worthy of itself, if it despises the distinction between good and evil, and considers the preoccupation with ideas such as freedom, truth, justice as "bourgeois." In certain conditions it is the duty of the intellectual to renounce his freedom—for the sake of freedom. It is his duty to find the courage to affirm ideas over which the intellectual snob thinks that he can shrug his shoulders. I have had the experience in America when speaking on democracy and my belief in it, that some high-brow journalist who wanted to earn his critical spurs, would say that I had expressed "middle-class ideas." He was expressing a false and reactionary concept of the banal, a misconception with which I had already become all too well acquainted in Europe. I am thinking of Paris at a time when I was discussing Briand and his liberal European struggle to maintain the peace, with members of the "bourgeoisie" who were already strongly infected with fascism. "But, my dear friend" they would say, "Que voulez-vous avec votre Briand? That is the worst banality, d'une triviality insupportable." What the high-brow journalist was characterizing with "middle class-ideas" is actually nothing else than the liberal tradition. It is the complex of ideas of freedom and progress, of humanitarianism, of civilization—in short, the claim of reason to dominate the dynamics 4