Can Democracy Be Cultural?

Lecture delivered at Kenyon College
Gambier, Ohio
February 2, 1977

In 1974 People Magazine appeared, and with it the embourgeoisement of tabloidism. Novelist and art historian André Malraux–himself no innocent in the arts of self-promotion–died two years later, without disclosing what he thought about it, or indeed if he had noticed it at all. We nevertheless do know what he thought of the sort of thing. Near the beginning of his novel disguised as a biography, he writes, “Gossip provides, cheaply, the relief we expect from the irrational, and with the psychology of the unconscious, what men hide–which is often only pitiable–is too complacently confuse with what they don’t know about themselves.” Malraux considered the contemporary taste for secrets a manifestation of “envious baseness”: “In the order of the secret… men are a little to easily equal.”

Readers have come to seek confession in memoirs. Confession is self-gossip. And while for the Christian it voices penitence, which merits forgiveness, for a non-Christian it tends toward self-indulgence–or masochism, a subspecies of the same thing. We read literary confessions–the sort of autobiography invented by Rousseau–because they’re literary, not because they’re confessional. In his Confessions, “the guilty is saved, not because he imposes a lie, but because the domain of art is not that of life. The proud shame of Rousseau does not destroy the pitiable shame of Jean-Jacques, but it brings him a measure of immortality. This metamorphosis, one of the most profound that can be created by man, is that of a destiny submitted to into a destiny dominated.” If Rousseau were not Rousseau, had he written the Confessions badly, compounding his private shame with the public shame of botched art, who would read them? Voyeurs can always find more immediate titillation.

Still, Malraux wants something more from autobiography than artistic triumph, the victory over destiny. He wants the subject of the autobiography to count as much as the expression. He therefore purges his story about “Malraux” of “all that matters only to me.” The anti-memoir will feature almost nothing about parents, brothers, teachers, wives, and children. In this Malraux is the anti-Rousseau.

He opposes Rousseau on another level, too, although he never says so. Rousseau attacks the modern delight in circulating knowledge and art like money though the veins of Leviathan. A ‘civilized’ people, Rousseau believed, loves its own slavery, enticed by governmentally-inflamed “artificial desires” sated only by means of the arts and sciences. “Astronomy was born of superstition,” he writes, “eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride.” In what’s called civilization, “our hatred of other nations diminishes, but patriotism dies with it.” Technology–specifically, the printing press–enabled this corruption to take hold and advance. By rewarding mere talent instead of virtue, for the principles of virtue are “graven in every heart,” whereas real talent is uncommon. ‘Enlightenment,” so called, allows a man who might have made a good clothier to imagine himself a poet or mathematician and to look down on those who don’t possess his self-supposed talent. Widespread cul0ture ruins the virtues that republican self-government requires. And although Nietzsche was no republican, Rousseau may stand behind his famous warning that the Romans “degenerated amid the cosmopolitan carnival of arts, worships, and moralities,” that his contemporaries were “walking encyclopedias” and “restless, dilettante spectators.”

At issue, then, are technology, the moral origin and political purpose of culture. Malraux considered these themes for fifty years. He did not agree with Rousseau. While serving in President Charles de Gaulle’s cabinet as Minister of Culture, at times he seemed to advocate a sort of cultural utilitarianism, going so far as to say that France should put the greatest number of works of art at the service of the greatest number of men.  And when he served in President Charles de Gaulle’s cabinet as Minister of Culture he once went so far as to say that France should put the greatest number of works of art a the service of the greatest number of men. “I was answering some idiot or other in the National Assembly,” he explained. His real answer to Rousseau and other non-idiots was indeed more thoughtful than that.

Can democracy be cultural? To say what democracy and culture can be implies knowledge of what they are; for a practical man, it implies a knowledge of what they are today. Malraux always wanted his ideas enacted, never neglecting to define current circumstances, the givens with which he worked. In the first half of this lecture I’ll discuss Malraux’s diagnosis of twentieth-century culture and politics, reserving his proposed cure for the contemporary human condition for the second half.

Malraux’s 1926 epistolary novel, The Temptation of the West presents this diagnosis in its first and simplest form. In it, a young Frenchman, visiting China, exchanges letters with a young Chinese, who is visiting Europe. The Chinese discovers an “act of faith” underlying ancient Greek civilization in particular and the West in general. To express it, he modifies Protagoras’s maxim thus: “measure all things by the duration or intensity of one human life. The West, in the person of Oedipus, confronts the East, its emblem the Sphinx. That is, mind, will, and activity confront sentiment, sensibility, and contemplation. The “soul of Europe” consists of “ceaseless creation renewed by action in a world destined for action”–action against the world, against the other. The Western individualist makes of death a terror because death is the ultimate loss of self. Because death is unavoidable, this individualist, insofar as he conscious of that, lives an anguished life. He may attempt to escape this anguish–the usual routes are patriotism, God, and love–but they’re all futile: “to lose oneself it is first necessary to believe in oneself.” Hence “at the center of European man, dominating the great moments of his existence, there exists an essential absurdity.” “After the death of the Sphinx, Oedipus attacks himself.”

The death of the Sphinx: Malraux sees Eastern civilization as no less arbitrary than his own; moreover, it is being killed by the West. The East’s weakness is its contempt for force. It can’t expel the West because its disdains the forceful means of doing so–specifically, the use of the human mind to master nature instead of contemplating it. Of the two civilizations, the East will die first. In the 1920s, in France, many young people were fascinated by Asian religion and philosophy. So was Malraux. But he never adopted them. He would have regarded any such effort as escapist–a nostalgia that cannot defend itself.

But “the most subtle temptation” is “reserved for the best” Europeans: “it is no longer Europe or the past which invades France at the beginning of this century, it is the world which invades Europe, the world with all its present and all its past, its amassed offerings of forms, living or dead, and of meditations….” This is Nietzsche’s cosmopolitan carnival, but Malraux partly disagrees with Nietzsche on its effect: “There will be in the victory of forms over mind something more profound than the force of pleasure and the exaltation of a slightly vulgar sensibility. Voluptuous pleasure, and that of novelty, easily seduce mediocre spirits, but they will be without force against those prepared to combat them.” Malraux thinks we are now seeing, not philosophical reconstruction, but “the occasionally bitter game of artistic experiments.” This is 1926: he’s thinking of the Cubists and Picasso.

But that occasionally bitter game might entail a sort of prolegomena to philosophic thought, even if Malraux doesn’t call it that. He calls for “voracious lucidity,” which aims at artistic forms as much as ideas or sentiments. But of course voracity suggests eros and lucidity suggests the capacity for making distinctions–elements of the philosophic life as defended by Socrates.

Be this as it may, in his mature writings Malraux elaborates on these early insights and criticisms. His view of the history of Western civilization is fairly simple. Three cultural periods preceded our own. The first was the long epoch when the West oriented itself by an Absolute, of one sort or another. At one time people assumed that the artists in those centuries aspired to realism, that they wanted to paint like Raphael but didn’t know how. “Once we cease to regard such works as clumsy imitations of their models, we realize that the power through which they make their impact on us–what we would now call their creative power–was initially the power of giving form to that which made the human animal become a man and freed him from the chaos of his beginning, from his instincts…. If man had not set up against appearance his successive worlds of [absolute] Truth, he would not have become a rational animal but a kind of ape.” This period was interspersed with a few transient humanisms–classical Greece and the Renaissance being the familiar ones.

A decisive shift occurred in the eighteenth century. As Malraux writes, “For the possession of oneself through accord with God, man substituted the accumulation of knowledges: Europe separated itself from Being, and became master of the world.” Individualism combined with the urge to conquer the Other had always been latent in Europe; now it ruled European souls. Rousseau criticizes the Encyclopedists, but Malraux sees that in one respect he wasn’t so far from them as he thought: “In his attempt to substitute ethics for religion… Rousseau at the same time substitutes it for politics. But in place of the system of values he attacks he has another–that of the individual–and his political system, which is democracy.” One could quibble by observing that Rousseau didn’t advocate democratic government only democratic direction of government. The basic point is sound. Malraux sees that Rousseau’s political philosophy, like that of the Encyclopedists, is for the most part both individualistic and egalitarian. That’s why his celebrated ‘general will’ as it’s usually understood–careful readers of Rousseau will know that the Rousseau I’ve presented here tonight is an oversimplified, even vulgarized Rousseau–isn’t really tyrannical because each individual by nature is orally equal to his fellow-citizens; for that reason, the will of an uncorrupted majority expresses his own, as well as its own, good.

The third cultural period has consisted of the substitution of “political exaltation” and History–that’s History with a capital ‘H’–for the killed religion. Malraux regards these substitutions, exemplified by nationalism and the historicist internationalism of Marx, as fake Absolutes which had to fail.

They did, quickly. The artists were among the first to sense the problem, and Malraux points out that the nineteenth century was the first in which the best artists as a group opposed the prevailing beliefs and customs. Soon there were two claimants to that honorific title, Art: such painters as Manet, Cézanne, and Van Gogh; and the painters who appealed the tastes of most art buyers–members of the so-called academic school.

In philosophy, at the end of the century, that great destroyer, Nietzsche, emerged,  a figure Malraux usually cites only to refute. But Nietzsche’s writings influence Malraux more than those of any other, as we’ll see.

Malraux calls what we see today “machine-civilization.” It retains the forms of eighteenth and nineteenth-century scientific rationalism while having lost–thanks to the efforts of the artists and Nietzsche–much of its faith in that rationalism. Insofar as science has a supreme value, it is Truth; this “new god,” as Malraux calls him, produces more objects for us right before our eyes than the other gods did, and he can destroy them just as easily. “But he is a mute god,” even to those who believe in him. Unbelievers doubt him without restoring an orderly irrationalism, either. Western values, in Malraux’s words, “preserve life more and more, and govern it less and less.”

Indeed, Western values are hardly values at all, only objects of desire such as power and happiness. Among all its inventions, Malraux notices, machine-civilization has invented neither a temple nor a tomb. It has failed to do so because it thinks of the human soul as a mental faculty. “It is an imaginary faulty,” Malraux contends. “The soul does not exist independently of transcendence, or of the supreme value which is reflected in it. A mirror which reflects nothing is simply a pane of glass.” Men only devote temples to something or someone that transcends them; they only invent tombs when they believe they have souls.

This metaphysical blindness distorts the modern understanding of human nature, which in turn distort our understanding of education, politics, and culture. In Malraux’s opinion, “the capital psychological problem of our time” is, “How do we become what we are?” He thinks that “Man only builds himself in pursuing what surpasses him.” Modern science’s principal contribution to the study of human nature is contemporary psychology, which is an internalized fatality, a historical determinism of the emotions. As such, it believes genuine elf-overcoming to be futile; one can only learn to understand and be reconciled with oneself, doing so by looking inward and backward–to childhood trauma, for example. For all their differences, both Rousseau and Freud look almost exclusively to origins when they search for wisdom; the state of nature or early childhood, the moral sentiments or the unconscious. What they find differs as do their methods, but the direction of the search is the same. With it, the self isn’t something one overcomes.

This leads to the problem of education: with such an understanding of human nature, education can’t form a man. It merely provides him with information about things of secondary importance. Metaphysics need not apply. Further, “Science, insofar as it is belief and not insofar as it is science, is belief in a future explication of the world.” Therefore, “Western man is unformed because he waits.” Finally, to form a man, examples are necessary, whether they are saints or Bolsheviks. “Exemplariness belongs to fiction.” And science-fiction has yet to achieve the exemplary.

Politically, machines pose the ancient problem of means and ends in an extreme form. Machines pose the ancient problem of ends and means in an extreme form. Machines are the means of power in Malraux’s century, as he confirms in conversations with prominent statesmen–the ones who should know. The Senegalese statesman Léopold Senghor, who intends to found an African civilization on the idea of reuniting man and nature, nonetheless admits: “I want Africa, but I will not struggle against the machine because it alone will vanquish poverty.” The founder of Indian republicanism, Jawaharlal Nehru concurs. De Gaulle, who subordinated the abolition of poverty to the re-founding of French republicanism and the reestablishment of France in the world, agreed with some of Malraux’s criticisms of machine-civilization. But he also pushed to modernize French society, to build atomic weapons, and to add applied science to the curriculum in the schools. Without power, no independent France, and a France without independence must subordinate itself to Russia or America–to modernity. How to serve ends other than those of modernity when modernity imposes its means? You will recognize in this the political equivalent of the cultural dilemma depicted in The Temptation of the West: the modern West leaves no alternative to itself as it prepares its own suicide.

The dilemma invites escapism. If some Europeans practice Eastern religions, others–the ones who think in political terms, adopt what Malraux calls “the lyrical illusion.” There is a certain type of would-be revolutionary (Americans by now know him well) who specializes in “exemplary revolts.” The fact that they are exemplary shows that he’s not entirely a creature of modernity. But he achieves nothing; his revolts have no chance of success. Politics, for him, is a matter of audacity and character alone, because he’ll never need to worry about the problems of ruling, discipline, or technology (except to oppose such things, Quixotically). He is an apocalyptic who doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care, that the apocalypse, arresting while it lasts, doesn’t last long and, without God to guide it, seldom ends well.

Another way to attempt escape from the modern dilemma is to force your way out. Thinking of the postwar Stalinists, Malraux once said that “the fatal flaw of man Europeans intellectuals is masochism, a smug resigning of intelligence to the benefit of stupidity in the guise of strength.” The modern tyrants may raise a more important problem than the lyrical illusionists. They celebrate technology and attempt to deploy it to address precisely the problem of human formation Malraux finds in modernity itself. When crude methods of forming ‘Soviet Man’ or ‘the Aryan race’ fail disastrously, these tyrants or their successors are left with the use of force to prop up regimes that have lost their purpose. This problem of formation if the problem of education for the individual; for the community it’s the problem of political and cultural founding. Can one found and maintain a regime in this century without tyranny?

In the domain of culture, machine-civilization brings mass-art, as opposed to popular art. “There is no longer a popular art,” Malraux writes, “because there is no longer a people” The artisans and peasants of earlier periods had saints, heroes embodying values held in common. “Every collective virtue is born of a communion” and “no profound communion is limited to sentiment” But modernity does so limit men; the emotions that “modern crowds” seek in art are usually “superficial and puerile”: “The pleasures of the romantic do not unite men, they isolate them.” Although Malraux is thinking of the sentimental stories Hollywood produced in the 1930s and 1940s, the best example of this isolating effect is contemporary pornography, which presupposes the viewer’s isolation and maintains it.

The fiction that should serve values instead serves instincts., sentiments, and desires. One makes mass culture with what Malraux calls “the arts of satiation.” Technology mass-produces artifacts in two senses: it produces them in huge quantities and does so for the masses. Hollywood movies of are harmless as long as no one takes them seriously. Malraux knew that many people did, and said, “If States, one after the other, create Ministries of Cultural Affairs, it is because every civilization is threatened by the proliferation of it fantasy-life, if that fantasy-life is not oriented by values.”

Given this diagnosis of modernity can democracy be cultural? Can culture and politics in the twentieth century be redirected? Toward what end?

Malraux defines culture as “the incarnation of a system of values”–not the values themselves–and “a coincidence of sensibilities”–not the sensibilities themselves. The incarnation of one of the few remaining systems of values in modernity, and the place where sensibilities, not instincts or sentiments, coincide is the Imaginary Museum.

In 1965 Malraux visited a museum in Delhi, India. Having viewed a display of artifacts produced by village craftsmen, artifacts which seemed to be deteriorating along with the popular faith of India, he moved to some of the great stone sculptures. Confronted by the West, they appeared to Malraux to be undergoing what he calls an “inverse transmigration.” Instead of the souls exchanging bodies, as in Hinduism, the bodies, the sculptures, “have changed souls.”

Souls? Malraux has said that modernity doesn’t recognize or understand the soul. What is it about the best art that makes it one domain in which souls still exist?

It has to do with something I mentioned earlier: the schism between the better nineteenth-century painters and the cultural period in which they worked. I said that the artists sensed the problem of modernity; Malraux says that the value with which they replaced the desires of modern science was the value of art itself. Malraux doesn’t say that the artists learned something from technology, but perhaps they did; he dos say that the artists decided to stop submitting themselves and their art to the forms of life and to start submitting the forms of life to their art. This amounts to the artistic conquest of nature. Modern art thus “revealed the presence [of this conquest] beneath all the history of art.” For the first time in centuries intelligent Europeans could see that (for example) the sculptors of Chartres Cathedral were not trying to imitate the forms of nature but rather to metamorphose everyday reality, to make of it a spiritual universe. Modern artists, often without any religious universe, instead metamorphose everyday reality, the forms of life, into the “particular universe” of the artist himself. In a sense, then, modern art is not only a conquest, but the most individualistic of conquests. It is ultra-Western and ultra-modern. In another sense, however, it is a new transcendent domain, and therefore something beneath which souls exist.

Malraux sees the paradox. He writes that Raphael might ask, ‘Granted that this conquest would be of interest to  Van Gogh himself, why would anyone else care?’ And we do care; we look at Van Goghs.

Van Goghs reside in museums. Why visit them? The museum, Malraux reminds us, “has never existed where the civilization of modern Europe was or was unknown,” and “it has existed among us for less than two centuries.” With the modern artists, the museum has contributed to delivering from their function the works of art which [it]bring[s] together; to metamorphose into pictures what were portraits.” And, I might add, to metamorphose what were idols into statues, what were Biblical scenes into mosaics, what were commemorations of dead heroes into tapestries. Of his visits to Egypt, Malraux writes, “I am as ignorant of ancient Egypt as radically as a man would be of love had he not experienced it; as radically as each one is ignorant of death. What I know are these figures which I contemplate in passing.” Metamorphosis is the museum’s work: an “inverse transmigration” where renewed souls inhabit old clay.

The Imaginary Museum is the metamorphosis of the ordinary museum. With the improvement of the techniques of color reproduction , the domain of art we can see has enlarged That collection of paintings and sculptures each of us carries in his head encompasses a dozen civilizations, many centuries. Simultaneously, the effect of reproduction itself, the paintings and sculptures metamorphose; they become color plates, and, in a book, the Parthenon and a Greek coin may be of the same size. “What have they lost?” Malraux asks. “Their quality of being objects. What have they gained? The greatest signification of style that they can assume.” The art-book magnifies style because it alone can juxtapose a pyramid and a cathedral, both isolated from their original fuction. As we look at those two structures, we can say only as much as we know or imagine about the civilizations in which they were built–which is limited. What we can discuss as thoroughly as we wish is the contrast in style. The very fact that we speak of the ‘history of art’ reveals that we group things as art, including things whose makers thought of as gods, demons, talismans, shield–as anything but art: a word that may have had no equivalent in their language. Hence the Imaginary Museum is not an eclecticism. It is a humanism, and quite unlike the sentimental egalitarianisms that go by that name in contemporary political debate.

Modern art and the museums, ordinary and Imaginary, contribute to the exaltation of art itself, permitting Malraux to define art as “that by which forms become style.” Style is signification–that is, a selection of parts of the universe oriented “toward an essential part of man”– towards the distinctively human in man . If modern artist subordinate everything to art alone, if they  orient their selection of phenomena toward the ‘artistic’ part of man, what then, is an artist? Non-artists often assume that artists express sentiments and portray objects, with a lot of sensitivity. But when he spoke to painters and sculptor, Malraux found that they wanted not so much to express sentiments and portray objects as to metamorphose them into works of art. A great artist, Malraux remarks, doesn’t become an artist because he experienced a sentimental upsurge while viewing a sunset and then murmured to himself, “I, too, will become an painter!’ No, he usually traces it to his ambition to an emotion felt while viewing a painting or a sculpture. His life’s work reflects not childhood struggles with parents but adult struggles with other artists’ work. It begins with imitation but ends with overcoming: a direct overcoming of other paintings and sculptures, and thereby an overcoming of the forms of the world, including death. This artistic overcoming is the artist’s ‘conquest’: unlike the conquest of an army or a technology, artistic conquest  doesn’t necessarily destroy the adversary. Our Imaginary Museum contains Picasso’s Las Meninas alongside that of Velázquez.

What is the significance of this domain? Again, why would we care about Van Gogh’s style, or visit museums? The answer comes from looking at an obvious problem: if people become artists after looking art, where did the first artist come from? Malraux doesn’t believe in any representational instinct. It’s precisely the non-instinctive which gives rise to art: the conscious and creative power that freely attacks destiny, whether destiny takes the form of History, oppression, the natural world, death, the instincts, or sorrow. We care about the creative act because that which is in us that is against destiny is with the artist. It is our distinctively human part which expresses forms in terms of values–religious in other times, artistic in ours. The first artist was implicit in the first conscious human, the first one who began to act according to that consciousness, to oppose destiny both outside of himself and within himself. The impulse behind modern technology attempts to master outer destiny, but it usually does so at the service of inner destiny: instincts, sentiments, desires, those impulses in us which ally themselves with outer destiny, “the world’s indifference” to human things.

Thus this will-to-creation has an ethical quality. Malraux says that “a torture-victim by Goya no longer belongs to torture-victims, but to painting.” Or, as he writes in the passage I quoted at the beginning of this lecture, Rousseau’s Confessions “save” the confessor “because the domain of art is not that of life”; a “destiny submitted to” becomes, through art, “destiny dominated.” Almost alone in modernity, artists retain this sense of formation, of overcoming not only the world but themselves. “It took [Goya] forty years to become Goya.” Moreover, because our most human part comes out in the artist, art is really a shared defense against destiny. This lonely effort at self-formation, of overcoming, yields a painting, a sculpture–or a poem or a symphony, for that matter–which is a human voice, not obliterating but holding its own against the inhuman voices around it, and around us. It is a presence, for us.

Each of you knows this. Each of you has some lines from a poem, memories of paintings, books, songs–especially songs–which unite you with some artist who’s probably dead by now. These works of art have changed since they were made; you’re not the one who made them. But each one survives its maker’s death because insofar as it is artful it evidences his, and your, distinctively human part, which is not destiny. And the very technology  desires also brings us those things which oppose mere desires. Technology brings the Imaginary Museum. Not all power in modernity serves what one correspondent in Temptation of the West calls “the systematic allegory of itself.”

Hence the importance of Picasso. You may have noticed reviews of the latest of Malraux’s books to appear in this country, translated under the title, Picasso’s Mask. Re-written, it forms a section of the second volume of Malraux’s anti-autobiography. Picasso’s importance to Malraux inheres in the purity of his modernism. Malraux defends Picasso against critics who say he never probed deeply into any one style but shifted restlessly from one style to another; they overlook that Picasso’s art is about metamorphosis. And metamorphosis, the result of creation, is modern art. True, Picasso’s art, in Malraux’s words, “is that of human limits…. That of our civilization which sneeringly expresses the spiritual void, as the Romanesque style expressed plenitude of soul.” Yet when Malraux visits Picasso’s burial-place at Vauvenargues he calls it a “mausoleum of creation” and a “temple beyond time, even if the centuries imprison Picasso in [our own time].” Both temple and tomb, then, for the civilization which had previously failed to invent them. With Picasso’s tomb, modernity has found its domain of transcendence, setting it against time and death–destiny.

Malraux asserts that “the art of a living religion is… that of a defense against destiny by an immense communion.” Communion entails presence, in two senses: the presence of one’s fellows; and the presence of some value or purpose that acts on people as community, as a common unity. So Malraux says that “No civilization… ever began with the warrior. It began when the legislator or priest set out to civilize the warrior, it began when argument asserted its supremacy over brute fact. Every civilization implies the awareness of and respect for the other.” And the domain of art, where the voices of dead artists speak to us, make themselves present, embodies at least part of that necessary commonly-held system of values which can act on the modern community. Rousseau tells us that the Spartans didn’t merely observe the laws but loved them, and that this unified Sparta; the laws were present in the mind of each Spartan, as was the civil religion those law embodied. I mention this to suggest that Malraux’s Imaginary museum, modernity’s domain of transcendence, has a political aspect.  He writes that the  “attitude of man in the face of the universe,” basic to art, is also “what founds kingdoms  and constructs cities.”  I think Malraux wants to reconnect the artists and society, to end the schism that modernity provoked, by making art one aspect of political legitimacy in a way that would affirm artistic liberty. This can occur because the self-overcoming of the artist and the art-lover isn’t purely individualistic. “Enriching one’s fellowship with others nourishes…what makes a man human, which enables him to create, invent, or realize himself.” If this is Nietzscheism, it s a social and political Nietzscheism. Man’s artistic part is the foundation of politics because both art and politics are communal defenses against destiny.

The Imaginary Museum is more inclusive than a civil religion; art, Malraux writes, is “not a religion but a Faith.” This civil faith invites self-overcoming by fusing liberty and responsibility. If culture is “the incarnation of a system of values,” “the coinciding of sensibilities,” and “the ensemble of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought which have permitted man to be less enslaved,” then it prepares him for citizenship as well as for manhood. Liberty involves, among other things, the liberty to discover. For the community, this implies the protection of artists from the kind of censorship (and worse) exercised under the regimes of modern tyranny (called totalitarianism). The totalitarians sup[pose they know what Truth is–or at least how to get to it–whereas Malraux’s civil faith knows itself to be faith, not knowledge. The danger, Malraux sees, is that under conditions of liberty the arts of satiation have their chance, too. “In the battle for the human imagination, a civilization unwilling to impose its dreams on all its members must give each its opportunity.”

This is why Malraux calls his humanism a tragic humanism. Liberty, today, means facing an unknown, facing it while struggling with destiny in the form of the arts of satiation and in the form of the nature of political action itself. As a character in one of his novels says, “Action is action and justice is justice”; they are seldom perfectly aligned. Unlike the Marxists, Malraux doesn’t unify value and act; as he acknowledged in The Temptation of the West, the Western inclination to act can destroy an admirable civilization. Fortunately, it can also build one, although on the level of politics it won’t be an incarnated ideal. To Malraux, human life is tragic because we can resist, but not obliterate destiny. Political life reflects that underlying human condition.

At one point in the Anti-Memoirs Malraux has someone ask him, “In fact, what were you, politically,” in 1930–just before a modern tyranny took power in the country next to France. “Nothing. Say: liberal.” Malraux abandoned the political liberalism of his youth for what he came to call “cultural liberalism.” Unlike political liberalism, which he identifies with parliamentarianism, cultural liberalism “does not exclude strength of will but is founded on it.” Political liberalism admires but fails to defend liberty; French parliamentarianism failed to defend France against Hitler. Malraux told the democratic socialist parliamentarian Léon Blum that “Politics for me implies the creation, then the action of a state. Without the state, all politics is in the future.” The state defends the nation. Years later, in 1967, Malraux said, “I am subordinating social justice to the nation because I think that if one does not gain the support of the nation one will not have social justice, one will simply make speeches.” I’ve said that Malraux thinks the artist is both at liberty and responsible, both against destiny and for human-ness. “Cultural liberalism” expresses that thought politically. The statesman, the man of the state, not the parliamentarian, has the authority to insist on it. If what is in us that is against destiny is with the artist, what is in us that is against destiny is also with the statesman.

Malraux advanced cultural liberalism in two ways: by institution and by myth-making. As Charles de Gaulle’s Minister of Cultural Affairs, he attempted to make technology serve human ends. He did indeed seek to put the greatest number of works at the service of he greatest number of men but this was not, he insisted, a “culture for all”–doled out, as by American television, or imposed, as by totalitarians–but “culture for each one.” By this he meant each person may actively obtain it; culture, in Malraux’s words, “is not a heritage but a conquest” for artists and non-artists alike. Those who want it can try to achieve it. Those who don’t, don’t get force-fed. Malraux sought to decentralize culture in France by founding what he called “Houses of Culture.” For centuries Paris had been France’s political and artistic center; the provinces, on the other hand, inspired the word ‘provincial.’ Built in provincial cities, the Houses of Culture supplanted the bad ‘academic’ paintings in local museums with reproductions of great ones; Malraux added phonograph records, books, films, and facilities for staging plays and holding art exhibits and concerts: “a facility which invites use by anyone who cares to take advantage of it but does not force the masses through another political rolling mill.” That machine-image is no accident. Here again, Malraux associates totalitarianism with the wrong use of technology; both are agents of destiny, and both can be resisted by using similar though not identical means, namely, republican state power against totalitarian state power and technology in the service of values against technology in the service of instincts, sentiments, and desires.

Speaking of which: institutions alone can hardly resist such forces; most people choose TV over Tolstoy. “For a very small number of men, passionate for history, [the past] is the object of an interrogation; its elucidation is a conquest, unceasingly pursued, over chaos For all the others, it comes alive only in becoming a vast, legendary fiction”–a myth, without which institutions stand lifeless. A myth isn’t true in the historian’s sense of the word but it’s the version of events by which “humanity is nourished.” As the European in The Temptation of the West puts it, “Our brothers are those whose childhood was ruled in accordance with the rhythm of the epics and legends which dominated ours.” Myth yields communion, and Malraux’s civil faith in art, which serves a system of values–tragic humanism–needs its legendary fictions. The Imaginary Museum helps but does not suffice: “Modern art no longer knows what can be an exemplary idea of man,” although “it often suggests to us an exemplary idea of the artist.”

Fortunately, the domain of politics consists of more than institutions. “Every great form of politics which surpasses the politics of the politicians creates its particular human type.” In the France after World War Two, Malraux contended that “it is only among the Gaullists that there can develop the human attitude of which the liberal hero”–the exemplary figure of cultural liberalism–“would be the symbol.” Two such symbols did “develop,” and both of them appear in the Anti-Memoirs. One of them is the narrator and the other is de Gaulle. Tonight, there’s no time to discuss this “vast, legendary fiction” in detail; it must suffice to tell you that it presents tragic humanism in several domains, including art and politics. In politics, the virtues it upholds are austerity, unity, and national independence–all components of de Gaulle’s constellation-word, grandeur.

Such a book won’t reach a mass audience, though some sections, published separately, were best-sellers in France. For a wider audience, political rhetoric is necessary, and both de Gaulle and Malraux spoke many times in defense of the Fifth Republic, often with electoral success. Thinking of art, Malraux observes, “The masses are far from invariably preferring what I best for them; still, on occasion they are drawn to it.” In politics, too: and when they are, they respond to that in themselves which is neither of the mass nor of the isolated individual: they respond to liberty–which is also responsibility–and to fraternity. They become a people, not a mass.

Malraux scholar Janine Mossuz identified what she called the “Malraux triptyque“: liberty, authority, fraternity. I follow her in omitting equality from the famous French revolutionary slogan, not because Malraux denies equal natural or civil rights to his fellow citizens but because he has another point to make. Granted that technology, if it doesn’t imply a specific metaphysics, at least inclines toward one that denies Eastern contemplativeness. Granted, also, that technology and politics operate in the realm of action. Still, within those limits, technological and political power can serve the instincts or values. Malraux’s real opponent, especially in the last twenty-five years of his life, wasn’t so much technology as egalitarianism, the feeling that the instincts are the same as values, or ‘just as good’ as values–or even, as some of the students in the 1960s decided, better than values. At the beginning of this lecture I suggested Malraux’s reply to the mass-magazine called People: “In the order of the secret, men are a little too easily equal.” In publicizing the private, gossip insists that everyone is ‘really the same,’ while isolating each one in his envy of those famous folks who more prominent than he.

A character in Malraux’s Spanish Civil War novel, Man’s Hope, a trade unionist, disdains what he implies is the bourgeois notion of egalitarianism. The contrary of humiliation isn’t equality, he insists, but fraternity. While it is true that fraternity implies some degree of equality–one doesn’t exactly fraternize with dogs, although one may like them–fraternity, unlike equality doesn’t preclude deference. Fraternity leaves room for military leadership and political governance.

Consider the possibility that this century has been what it’s been because men have preferred to serve what Malraux calls destiny. They often do so by trying to conquer one aspect of destiny in order to gratify another–conquering the world at the service of History, or at the service of the instincts, or at the service of the State. I came here to ask you to look at something else.

Can democracy be cultural? Insofar as it’s based on egalitarianism, no.