To the Editor:
Mr. Golffing in his article (“The American and European Minds Compared”) in December’s COMMENTARY attempts to illustrate his major thesis, a critique of American thought, by choosing as a contemporary illustration one small review of mine which appeared in the June issue. Surely such a broad thesis calls for a more extensive repertoire of illustration. It is a pity that a small sampling of mine should be forced to bear the burden of such a weighty construction.
I do not know whether Mr. Golffing classes himself as an American or a European writer, but in his attack upon me he resorts to the international exercise of diverting attention from the words and arguments to the motives of the writer. It is for this reason that I am obliged to reply.
If, unlike Mr. Golffing, you read the words of my review and avoid the hypothetical motives ascribed to me, you will see that I did NOT:
- Say that Miss Arendt derived from Hegel.
- “Suggest strongly,” or for that matter, weakly, or in any other way, “that every attempt at synthesizing what the individual disciplines have discovered about our society is not only foolish but fraudulent.”
- Say or suggest that the workings and activities of a thing are opposed to its nature, nor say or imply that society either has or hasn’t a nature. (How can he possibly tell from my review as it appeared in COMMENTARY what I think on the subject?)
- “Drag in Hegel as the archetypal whipping boy of enlightened empiricism.” And his later statement is impossible; it never happened. A resemblance in style is not a responsibility in fact.
- Begrudge Miss Arendt the right to worry about the future of the human race; nor did I say a concern for the future of mankind is either “cultural pessimism” or “Spenglerian.”
I said Miss Arendt’s manner of treatment was at fault only after I had proved many of its weaknesses. Mr. Golffing distorts by taking some final conclusions out of the earlier context of my proof and completely misinterpreting them. I cannot possibly answer misrepresentations of points I never made.
As a matter of fact, Mr. Golffing asserts rather too much without any proof at all. He says Miss Arendt’s triad, “Labor,” “Work,” and “Action” is perfectly acceptable. Why and by what criteria? And perfectly acceptable to whom? Others beside myself did not find them so. And they are far from self-evident truths.
He seems to think—and this is one mark of a cultist—that if one dislikes Miss Arendt’s book, one dislikes all greatness since the world began. It may be a bit of “feudal” deductive logic, coming from an American, but this does not follow. I do not dislike Goethe, Gide, the New Statesman, Shakespeare, Plato and Aristotle, Leibniz and Hobbes, John Osborne and Kingsley Amis nor am I insensible to the plural meanings in Dante.
My review simply subjected Miss Arendt’s book to one of the traditional European disciplines—Logic. And may I suggest that one of the great intellectual beauties of so many European treatises was the exquisite precision of the detail from which the whole took shape.
In his final paragraph where Mr. Golffing, to use his own language of motive, works himself up into a fury of insinuating denunciation of me, he says, “I should be very much mistaken if his [Reis’s] real business were not to kill . . . that hydra-headed lust for speculative analysis, etc.”
The conclusion is simple. Mr. Golffing is very much mistaken both in method and subject matter.
Lincoln Reis
New York City
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Mr. Golffing writes:
My references to Mr. Reis’s review occupy but a small space in my article and are in a sense extrinsic to it; as illustration is, in a sense, extrinsic to argument. I do not believe that my argument stands or falls by the weight of that illustration. This does not mean that I did not weigh my words, or his. Certainly I attended as much to the drift of Mr. Reis’s rhetoric—and as far as specific statements are concerned, to their vocabulary and overtones—as to what he has stated overtly.
Mr. Reis seems to forget that all illustration other than direct quotation is representation, and all representation, from the point of view of the purist, misrepresentation—forever and inevitably.
Put in another way, I have taken the license, commonly granted to all writers, of interpreting a text according to my lights. If I misinterpreted Mr. Reis’s language, which seemed then—and still seems—intemperate and invidious to me, I obviously committed a blunder. Of course I am as convinced of the correctness of my characterization as Mr. Reis is of the objective tenor of his own remarks.
I did not impute to Mr. Reis a chauvinistic rejection of all things European. As for his charge of “cultism,” this is so patently absurd that it hardly deserves to be refuted. I made it abundantly clear in my essay that I consider Miss Arendt’s book faulty in many ways and nowhere did I say that it—or its author—achieves greatness.
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