Most serious thought in our time struggles with the feeling of homelessness. The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo. And the only way to cure this spiritual nausea seems to be, at least initially, to exacerbate it. Modern thought is pledged to a kind of applied Hegelianism: seeking its Self in its Other. Europe seeks itself in the exotic-in Asia, in the Middle East, among pre-literate peoples, in a mythic America; a fatigued rationality seeks itself in the impersonal energies of sexual ecstasy or drugs; consciousness seeks its meaning in unconsciousness; humanistic problems seek their oblivion in scientific "value neutrality" and quantification. The "other" is experienced as a harsh purification of "self." But at the same time the "self" is busily colonizing all strange domains of experience. Modern sensibility moves between two seemingly contradictory but actually related impulses: surrender to the exotic, chiefly through science.
Although philosophers have contributed to the statement and understanding of this intellectual homelessness--and, in my opinion, only those modern philosophers who do so have an urgent claim on our interest--it is mainly poets, novelists, a few painters who have lived this tortured spiritual impulse, in willed derangement and in self-imposed exile and in compulsive travel. But there are other professions whose conditions of life have been made to bear witness to this vertiginous modern attraction to the alien. Conrad in his fiction, and T.E. Lawrence, Saint-Exupery, Montherlant among others in their lives as well as their writing, created the metier of the adventurer as a spiritual vocation. Thirty-five years ago, Malraux chose the profession of the archaeologist, and went to Asia. and more recently, Claude Levi-Stauss has invented the profession of the anthropologist as a total occupation, one involving a spiritual commitment like that of the creative artist or the adventurer or the psychoanalyst.
SS (1963)
