T. S.

Eliot's Concept of Tradition: A Revaluation

Author(s): Jürgen Kramer
Source: New German Critique, No. 6 (Autumn, 1975), pp. 20-30
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/487651
Accessed: 16-05-2020 20:40 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
New German Critique

This content downloaded from 200.14.96.56 on Sat, 16 May 2020 20:40:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 T.S. Eliot's Concept of Tradition:
A Revaluation

byJiirgen Kramer

The influence of Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent"' was
epoch-making in literary criticism. The methodological principle with which
he intended to re-vitalize the (aesthetic and moral) values inherent in great
literary works of by-gone epochs for the present (in order to establish them as
compulsory artistic norms for contemporary criticism and, implicitly, as
moral criteria for social praxis) was that of a potentially dialectical concept of
tradition.

The good innovation is never totally new. Great historical upheavals clear
the view for things that had been blocked. They are - to vary a saying of Karl
Marx - the dance of petrified social circumstances to which their own melody
has been played. It happens-historically seen--not without reason, that the
idea of tradition has to set back its feudal component in favor of its critical
one: "Tradition... cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain
it by great labor."2 This method is a genuinely dialectical one. The active,
i.e., the artistically critical acquisition of a certain tradition means to take
issue with it, to negate the old convention (" 'traditional,' that is, in the bad
sense"),3 but this negation always proceeds "relatively to that tradition,
denying it without being able to get rid of it absolutely."4 I.e., the old
tradition undergoes a metamorphosis by being negated on its own basis - and
thus creates a new one, which is not totally new (because it existed
rudimentarily in the old one), but which had to be brought to light. Thus, the
task of literary criticism should be to bring forth "what stayed unsettled, did
not unfold historically or...only fragmentarily"s by the means of tradi-
tion, tradition as opposed to that which is simply inherited. For, as Eliot
observed, "the difference between the present and the past is that the
conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which
the past's awareness of itself cannot show."6 For the literary and

1. T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London, 1972), pp. 47-59.
2. Ibid., p. 59.
3. F.R. Leavis, For Continuity (Cambridge, 1933), p. 74.
4. Hans Heinz Holz, Vom Kunstwerk zur Ware (Neuwied and Berlin, 1972), p. 78. All
quotations from German sources are my own translation.
5. Theodor W. Adorno, Ohne Leitbild: Parva Aesthetica (Frankfurt, 1968), p. 37.
6. Eliot, loc.cit., p. 52.

This content downloaded from 200.14.96.56 on Sat, 16 May 2020 20:40:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE CONCEPT OF TRADITION IN ELIOT 21

literary-critical intelligentsia of the twenties and thirties of th

lack of function in traditional literature seemed to be a failure of tradition
in general. The crisis in the late liberal consciousness of tradition only
reflected the crisis of traditional consciousness (as a whole). This, however,
was connected...in a world-wide sense with those crises of the bourgeois
society (between 1890 and 1930-J.K.), which...had far-reaching
consequences for the conditions necessary for the existence and reproduction of
contemporary culture."7
The acquiring of tradition means to take issue with it--this act implies
change. "Genuine tradition is a dialectical phenomenon: in it we grasp hold
of what has been as being something else, which while being something else is
at the same time our own and nothing but our own. In tradition we
experience ourselves as something else, i.e., as something which we
emphatically define as not being ourselves."8
Tradition is always acquired for us and by us; by re-creating it we
experience the identity of identity and non-identity. The function of the
literature of the past for the present is irreplaceable. "The standards
maintained in such a tradition.., constitute a surer taste than any individual
can pretend to. And it is not merely a matter of literary taste. The culture in
question, which is not, indeed, identical with literary tradition but which will
hardly survive it, is a sense of relative value and memory-such wisdom as
constitutes the residuum of the general experience."9
Here it is clearly to be seen that the concept of revaluation is meant to
revive blocked values of the spiritual tradition and to introduce them
fruitfully into the present social and artistic problems.
Taking issue with a certain tradition requires "in the first place, the
historical sense, which.. .involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the
past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not
merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole
of... literature... has a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a
sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the
temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional."10o Thus, the historical
sense is not simply a solely historical sense but an historical and structural one
at the same time. "History is the object of a construction, which has its place
not in the homogeneous and empty time, but in that which is filled by

7. Robert Weimann, Literaturgeschichte und Mythologie: Methodologische und historische

Studien (Berlin, 1971), p. 64.
8. Holz, loc.cit., p. 67.
9. Leavis, loc.cit., p. 64.
10. Eliot, loc.cit., p. 49.

This content downloaded from 200.14.96.56 on Sat, 16 May 2020 20:40:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 22 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

'Jetztzeit' (presence of the now)."'1

Thus, every work of art is, historically speaking, somehow "a permanent
component of the aesthetic-artistic consciousness" which remains "subli-
minally effective,"12 but when and for which reasons a certain individual
work of art becomes the focus of interest and, consequently, re-activated,
re-created--that is decided by the historical circumstances structurally,
erratically. The continuity of history is being shattered. "To articulate past
events historically does not mean to accept them 'as they really happened.' It
means to grasp a memory, as it comes to us in a flash in a moment of danger.
Historical Materialism has the intention of recording a picture of the past as it
comes to the historical subject immediately in the moment of danger. This
danger threatens the existence of tradition as well as its recipients."'3
Thus, tradition represents a necessary, structural relationship to history. 14
The breach of a certain tradition (relative to this same tradition) would not
only be its negation, but also the negation of the negation, inasmuch as the
breach of a tradition-in negating this very tradition--brings forth a new
one.s5 For materialistic aesthetics--as for materialistic historiography, which
is based on "a constructive principle," because "not only the movement of
thoughts but also their fixation"16 belongs to the act of thinking--"tradition

11. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I, 2 (Frankfurt, 1974), p. 701. This
spiritual affinity between Benjamin and Eliot seems to penetrate into the consciousness of
materialist literary critics in the course of the reception of Marxism in Britain, in general, and
more specifically in the reception of Benjamin. "Benjamin... was always avant-garde, but in the
spirit of an Eliot (with whom indeed he shared a great deal: Eliot's recovery of the metaphysical
poets stems from the same roots as Benjamin's interest in German baroque drama), and as a critic
he matched the associative, allegorical powers of Eliot's poetry." (Stanley Mitchell, "Introduction
to Benjamin and Brecht," New Left Review 77 [1973], pp. 41-50, p. 48). Nevertheless, Mitchell
seems not even to have sensed the essentially structural relationship. In this context, inquiry into
the material reasons of such structural affinities becomes inevitably necessary. While it seems that
this theorem of an aesthetic-artistic, constructive concept of tradition is-in Germany-essen-
tially to be found in the writings of philosophers who were, on the one hand, in close contact with
the world of Jewish thought (e.g., Benjamin, Bloch, Lukics), and with Expressionism on the
other (I owe this point to Hans Heinz Holz), there are, in Great Britain, two concrete historical
conditions which might serve as an explanation: Firstly, in the aesthetic sphere, the unsatisfying,
i.e., artistically and critically speaking unproductive attitude of I'art pour l'art; and secondly, in
the concrete political sphere the danger of Britain's "international decline" (Eric J. Hobsbawm,
Industry and Empire [Harmondsworth, 1970], p. 273).
12. Holz, loc.cit., p. 77.
13. Benjamin, loc.cit., p. 695.
14. This definition of tradition (and, for that matter, history) has deeply philosophical and
political implications. Benjamin made that clear in a note saying that "tradition is the
discontinuity of the past in contrast to history as the continuity of events." And he explained that
"the history of the oppressed is a discontinuity. It is the task of history to grasp the tradition of the
oppressed." (Benjamin, loc.cit., Vol. I, 3; p. 1236.)
15. Cf. Holz, loc.cit., p. 85.
16. Benjamin, loc.cit., p. 702.

This content downloaded from 200.14.96.56 on Sat, 16 May 2020 20:40:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE CONCEPT OF TRADITION IN ELIOT 23

is an aesthetic-artistic (i.e., structural-J.K.) and not an

category." 17 Tradition is not generated by tracing historical
coordinations of styles and epochs but by the quality of authentic
which is founded in their own truth (which is, undeniably, an his
This quality, however, structuralizes in the way described abo
no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His sign
appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poe
You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and c
among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merel
criticism."18
Walter Benjamin said that there was a "secret agreement betw
generations and ours;"19 this has to be kept to. If "art is the socia
of society and not to be deduced from it at first hand,"2
eminently historical, its social components find their express
qualitatively structural way. That means, "that in the (individual)
the (writer's) whole productivity, in the (writer's) productivity th
in the epoch the whole course of history is contained and preserv
it is to be seen, "that dialectics proceed historically and non-histo
same time. Historically inasmuch as it regards recognition and act
as components of a developing whole .... Non-historically, on
hand, namely constructively,... by. . starting from a developed
has a complex structure."22
Nevertheless, it remains to be decided whether Eliot realized
of this implicit power of a dynamic concept of tradition. Rob
conceded, "It is exactly through (the concept of) tradition that
of the present are introduced into the interpretation of literary h
romantic literary criticism.... The new theory of tradition me
to the old practice of tradition. Exactly there, where question
tradition arise, is this very tradition no longer to be taken for gr
request for tradition means, in the first place, not a renewal but
the foundations) of tradition."23
It is, however, still not clear, whether, and if at all, how m
concepts of "present" and "past" really are to be understood hi
structurally at the same time, so that a dynamic conception could
17. Holz, loc.cit., p. 72.
18. Eliot, loc.cit., p. 49 (my italics).
19. Benjamin, loc.cit., p. 694.
20. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetische Theorie (Frankfurt, 1970), p. 19.
21. Benjamin, loc.cit., p. 703.
22. Alfred Schmidt, Geschichte und Struktur: Fragen einer marxistisc
(Manchen, 1971), p. 78.
23. Weimann, loc.cit., p. 66.

This content downloaded from 200.14.96.56 on Sat, 16 May 2020 20:40:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 24 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

from them, or whether he only wanted to replace one 'bad' tradition just once
by a 'good' one. "Originating from the necessary battle of issues with the
apparent objectivity of the romantic, later positivistic, or (in Germany)
humanistic literary history Eliot's, Ortega's, Leavis' and Curtius'
contributions to the problem of tradition culminated in strangely formal,
mostly unhistorical definitions, which basically had only one thing in
common; that is the more or less consistently constructed attempt to read the
literary historical tradition anew in the sense of a revaluation, and to define
the relationship between creation and tradition, originality and mimesis,
individual talent and literary convention beyond the nineteenth century's
aesthetics of experience and expression."24
Now the (more or less obvious) difference between Eliot and Benjamin can
be grasped. While Eliot (and, for that matter, Leavis) transcended history
proceeding structurally towards a merely aesthetic-artistic (and a-historical)
concept of tradition (an 'ideal order'), Benjamin attempted an intensification
of historical consciousness by restructuring the past concentrically around the
present, thus exactly indicating the practical-political perspectives of literary
as well as social criticism. Facing the decay of bourgeois society Benjamin,
instead of returning to images of pre-bourgeois social formations, suggested a
transformation of society which--being 'advised' by crucially related 'key
phases' of the past--is achieved only if human happiness, which once was a
divine promise, is eventually brought about by those whose very existence
incites the initial 'flash' of recognition.
It is when we turn to Eliot's theory of the "dissociation of sensibility" that we
can most clearly observe his limited view of tradition in comparison with
Benjamin's, which we are going to use in order to explain what Eliot could not
interpret.

T.S. Eliot was the first to give shape to the concept of the "dissociation of
sensibility" in a now famous passage of his essay on "The Metaphysical Poets"
(1921). "The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It
is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of
Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and
Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective
poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel
their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was
an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly

24. Ibid., p. 52.

This content downloaded from 200.14.96.56 on Sat, 16 May 2020 20:40:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE CONCEPT OF TRADITION IN ELIO T 25

equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate

the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentar
express the difference by the following theory: The poets of the s
century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, p
mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of expe
the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from wh
never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggrav
influence of the two most powerful poets of the century,
Dryden. ... The language went on and in some respects improv
while the language became more refined, the feeling became m
As early as 1934 Basil Willey reformulated this idea in some
philosophical terms presenting the Cartesian philosophy as the mov
of that process that had seemingly had the greatest influence
creation in the seventeenth century, but "Descartes himself is perh
most conspicuous representative of a way of thought which was
gaining ground as the century proceeded.... The Cartesian spiri
the sharper separation of the spheres of prose and poetry.... T
then began to appear, which has become so troublesomely familiar
between 'values' and 'facts'; between what you felt as a human b
poet, and what you thought as a man of sense, judgement and
enlightenment."25
L.C. Knights associated the concept of the "dissociation of sensibility" with
Francis Bacon and tried to find proof for the part he had played in the
"transition that took place not only in the spheres of practical achievement
and conscious intellect but in those more subtle and more profound modes of
perceiving and feeling that underlie men's conscious philosophies and explicit
attitudes, and that have become so ingrained and habitual that it is only by a
deliberate effort of the intelligence that we can recognize them as not
inevitable, absolute and unchanging, the permanent donnies of 'human
nature'. "26 Knights maintained that Bacon, in fact, sanctioned the "divorce
between imagination and reason, emotion and intelligence," thus
"subordinating the emotional and expressive to the descriptive and
analytic":27 "The whole trend of Bacon's work is to encourage the relegation
of instinctive and emotional life to a sphere separate from and inferior to the
sphere of 'thought' and practical activity."28

25. Basil Willey, The SeventeeZith-Century Background (Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 83-84.
26. L.C. Knights, "Bacon and the seventeenth-century dissociation of sensibility," Scrutiny
XI (1942-3), pp. 268-85; p. 269.
27. Ibid., p. 280.
28. Ibid., p. 281.

This content downloaded from 200.14.96.56 on Sat, 16 May 2020 20:40:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
26 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

More than 25 years after his first pronouncement on the matter, Eliot mad
what appeared to be his final remarks on the subject in his British Academy
lecture on Milton (1947). "I believe that the general affirmation represent
by the phrase 'dissociation of sensibility'.. .retains some validity; but.. .t
lay the burden on the shoulders of Milton and Dryden was a mistake. If such
dissociation did take place, I suspect that the causes are too complex and
profound to justify our accounting for the change in terms of literary
criticism. All we can say is, that something like this did happen; that it h
something to do with the Civil War; that it would be unwise to say it w
caused by the Civil War, but that it is a consequence of the same cause which
brought about the Civil War; that we must seek the causes in Europe, not in
England alone; and for what these causes were, we may dig and dig until w
get to a depth at which words and concepts fail us." Eliot did not know that i
the same year as he made this statement a book was published which provided
just that theory which was necessary to give a valid explanation of the
"dissociation of sensibility"-- the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Ma
Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. But that is to anticipate.
Frank Kermode maintained that "the theory of the dissociation o
sensibility is, in fact, the most successful version of a Symbolist attempt to
explain why the modern world resists works of art that testify to the poet's
special, anti-intellectual way of knowing truth. And this attempt obvious
involves the hypothesis of an age which was different, an age in which th
Image was more readily accessible and acceptable."29 Moreover, he felt qui
safe in refuting Eliot's theory by arguing that there was "little historic
propriety in treating it as a seventeenth century event" because Hulme a
Yeats moved "the date of the crisis.., .on to 1650."30 But instead of taking thi
argument as the basis for a (say) more definitely theoretical reformulatio
Kermode simply regarded it as a good reason for dismissing the whole ide
This was, to say the least, careless and seems, in full view of the consequences
hardly justifiable. Kermode, in actual fact, only ratified Eliot's resignati
attitude towards history by explaining the concept of the "dissociation o
sensibility" merely in terms of literary criticism. Benjamin's attitude wa
generally speaking, radically different; he virtually understood the act o
interpretation as social praxis,31 because in this very act the promesses d
bonheur of great works of art are revitalized as a counterforce to our
immediate social experience, which, instead of being humane, i.e., made b

29. Frank Kermode, " 'Dissociation of Sensibility': Modern Symbolist Readings of Literar
History," in John Hollander, ed., Modern Poetry: Essays in Criticism (London, 1968), pp.
318-39; p. 322.
30. Ibid., p. 323.
31. In this he resembles Leavis very closely.

This content downloaded from 200.14.96.56 on Sat, 16 May 2020 20:40:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE CONCEPT OF TRADITION IN ELIOT 27

man to provide human happiness, has slipped out of man

rendered independent, thus forming a kind of 'second nature'
only master by constantly referring to those "semantic poten
"for the interpretation of the world in the light of our nee
Habermas). "What is at issue is that we do not (merely) relate
works of art to the historical context of their origin, but that we
time of interpretation (i.e., our time) in their time of genesis. Th
becomes an organon of history, and it is the task of literary histor
such and not merely as a field furnishing matter for historica
This will be the implicit working hypothesis for the ensuing reva
concept of the "dissociation of sensibility."

3
Er nennt 's Vernunft und braucht 's allein,
Nur tierischer alsjedes Tier zu sein. (Goethe, Faust I)

If we want to trace the history of the "dissociation of sensibility" to its origin

we have to analyze the impact of the Reformation and the Enlightenment on
the complex relationship of mankind's social and cultural ideas. We need not
repeat Max Weber's and R.H. Tawney's arguments concerning the
relationship between religion and the rise of capitalism, but it should be
remembered that "Luther's doctrine of the 'priesthood of all believers' had
denied the need for a mediator between man and God"33 be he saint or priest.
The "Protestant appeal to the individual conscience" ruled. "Economic
individualism in society...combined with individualism in religion to
produce a quite new authority, that contained within each man's breast."34
This has to be specified: The Reformation initiated the abolition of either
saint or priest as mediator between God and man. This meant, on the one
hand, democratization (and intensification) of the structure of belief (and of
man's "whole way of life"); and, on the other hand, the weak subject ('ego'),
which was still in the process of developing something like an individual
(social) identity, had to identify itself with the aggressor;35 i.e., the
(potentially) punishing and terrible God. If the individual was to survive
without the help of mediators it could not but identify with the institution
that actually threatened its existence. This identification led to a decisive
'revaluation of values,' the result was a re-interpretation of the Fall:

32. Benjamin, loc.cit., Vol. III (Frankfurt, 1972), p. 290.

33. Christopher Hill, The Century of Rev6lution 1603-1714 (London, 1969), p. 80.
34. Ibid., p. 88.
35. Cf. Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (London, 1937).

This content downloaded from 200.14.96.56 on Sat, 16 May 2020 20:40:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 28 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

"Calvinism in particular tended to make its adherents forget the idea th

labour was God's punishment for Adam's disobedience, by emphasizing th
very different idea that untiring stewardship of the material gifts of God was
paramount religious and ethical obligation."36 Consequently, Baco
"envisaged getting back behind the Fall by pushing forward the frontiers of
learning," and he regarded "the Fall of Man retrievable on earth by man
efforts to master his fate."37
On the other hand, the idea of man mastering his fate in an untiring
stewardship of the material gifts of God - and thus, natura parendo vincitur,
transcending the original 'harmony' of man, nature and society - was only the
theological formulation of what was intended by the Enlightenment's secular
program of nature's domination by man.
At the same time, the idea of historical progress came into (conscious)
existence. It has to be related to the fact that the (then) revolutionary
bourgeoisie developed a mode of production which depended increasingly on
a constant development of the means of production. This development again
was impossible if man did not increase his domination of nature (by means of
the natural sciences and technology).
But the Enlightenment domination of nature together with the economic
and spiritual (bourgeois) individualism (from which it actually sprang) was to
have a disastrous effect on the forms of men's interactions. "The exchange
principle underlying the Enlightenment notion of nature as fungible atoms
was paralleled in the increaseing atomization of modern man, a process that
culminated in the repressive equality of totalitarianism. The instrumental
manipulation of nature by man led inevitably to the concomitant relationship
among men. The unbridgeable distance between subject and object in the
Enlightenment world view corresponded to the relative status of rulers and
ruled in the modern authoritarian states. The objectification of the world had
produced a similar effect in human relations."38
Thus, man by re-interpreting the (first) Fall caused a second one; because
of the first he had lost paradise, the second was to threaten his very
existence.39 "In class history, the enmity of the self to sacrifice implied a

36. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 81.
37. Hill, loc.cit., pp. 88, 152.
38. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (London, 1973), p. 261.
39. How much Horkheimer's and Adorno's ideas coincided with Benjamin's so that they can
justly be called their extension becomes clear if we compare the central issue of the Dialectic of
Enlightenment with Benjamin's IXth thesis on the concept of history: "The angel of history has
his face turned towards the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees a single
catastrophe which piles up a mountain of ruins before his feet. He would like to stay in place,
resurrect the dead and reconstruct the wreckage; but his wings are forced back by a
storm... which irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile

This content downloaded from 200.14.96.56 on Sat, 16 May 2020 20:40:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE CONCEPT OF TRADITION IN ELIOT 29

sacrifice of the self, inasmuch as it was paid for by a denial of n

for the sake of domination over non-human nature and over other men. This
very denial, the nucleus of all civilizing rationality, is the germ cell of a
proliferating mythic irrationality: with the denial of nature in man not
merely the telos of the outward control of nature but the telos of man's own
life is distorted and befogged. As soon as man discards his awareness that he
himself is nature, all the aims for which he keeps himself alive... are
nullified, and the enthronement of the means as an end, which under late
capitalism is tantamount to open insanity, is already perceptible in the
prehistory of subjectivity. Man's domination over himself, which grounds his
selfhood, is almost always the destruction of the subject in whose service it is
undertaken; for the substance which is dominated, suppressed, and dissolved
by virtue of self-preservation is none other than that very life as functions of
which the achievements of self-preservation find their sole definition and
determination: it is, in fact, what is to be preserved. The irrationalism of
totalitarian capitalism...has its prototype in the hero who escapes from
sacrifice by sacrificing himself. The history of civilization is the history of the
introversion of sacrifice. In other words: the history of renunciation.
Everyone who practices renunciation gives away more of his life than is given
back to him: and more than the life that he vindicates."40
This is, then, what the theoretician of the "dissociation of sensibility" had
sensed when they noted the "derogation of instinct and emotion" by reas
which had resulted in the fact that "man had ceased to feel 'the filial bond'
binding him to all that is not human, and assumed without question that his
part was simply to observe, to understand and to dominate the world of
'matter'. "41
Thus, "the conclusion that terror and civilizaton are inseparable.., is well-
founded."'42 To understand clearly how the "dissociation of sensibility" wa
brought about within the general development of our European societies we
have to think two things together. Firstly, that culture, at least from the
Enlightenment onwards, "defines the body as a thing which can be possessed;
in culture a distinction is made between the body and the spirit, the concept of
power and command, as the object, the dead thing, the 'corupus. 'In man's de-
nigration of his own body, nature takes revenge for the fact that man has re-

of ruins mounts up before him heavenward. This storm is what we call progress." (Benjamin
loc.cit., Vol. I, 2; pp. 697-8.)
40. Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic ofEnlightenment (London, 1973), pp.
54-55.
41. Knights, loc.cit., pp. 281, 276.
42. Horkheimer and Adorno, loc.cit., p. 217.

This content downloaded from 200.14.96.56 on Sat, 16 May 2020 20:40:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
30 NEW GERMAN CRITIQUE

duced nature to an object for domination, a raw material.,,43 Secondly, "the

subject...divided and compelled to use force against the nature within as
against that without, 'punishes' the heart by forcing it to be patient and,
looking ahead, by denying it the immediate present. Striking one's breast
became... a gesture of triumph: the victor shows thus that his victory is
always won against his own nature. The achievement is attributed to the ratio
of self-preservation."44
All these changes were reflected in the most basic of cultural creations,
language. And, of course, in the most creatively conceived products of
language, i.e., in literature, these two histories of Europe: the "well-known,
written history" and the "underground history" which consists in "the fate of
the human instincts and passions which are displaced and distorted by
civilization,"45 can be read simultaneously. Moreover, as Adorno pointed
out, "to organize works of art rationally means to develop them consistently to
perfection. Thus, they stand in contrast to that which is outside of them-
which is where scientific (i.e., nature-dominating) reason reigns, from which
aesthetic reason stems -and become works of art pour-soi. The opposition of
works of art to this domination is actually achieved by a mimesis of it. They
have to adjust themselves to that dominating manner in order to produce
something qualitatively different from the world of domination. Even the
immanently polemical attitude of works of art against 'what is' encloses the
principle to which 'what is' submits, and which disqualifies 'what is' as
something that merely is; aesthetic reason intends to make good what the
nature-dominating one has damaged."46
The phenomenon of the "dissociation of sensibility" has to be read as part
of the Dialectic of Enlightenment; the Enlightenment, however, "must
examine itself, if men are not to be wholly betrayed."47
Literature, as one of man's pre-eminent means of self-reflexion, has to play
an important part in this self-examination.

43. Ibid., pp. 232-3 (my italics).

44. Ibid., p. 48, note 5.
45. Ibid., p. 231.
46. Adorno, loc.cit., p. 430. Eliot may have had something of this kind in mind when he
described the ideal poet's mind as being "perfectly equipped for its work" if it is capable of
"constantly amalgamating disparate experience."
47. Horkheimer and Adorno, loc.cit., p. xv.

This content downloaded from 200.14.96.56 on Sat, 16 May 2020 20:40:06 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms