The Great Paradox [by Lionel Trilling]

"Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the object of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion."

-- Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination

Who can explain it, who can tell you why?
Fools give you reasons; wise men never try.

-- Oscar Hammerstein, "Some Enchanted Evening"

But Oscar was writing of love. Is the tendency Trilling describes as inevitable and as beyond reason?

Trilling also wrote, prophetically, "We are at heart so profoundly anarchistic that the only form of state we can imagine living in is Utopian; and so cynical that the only Utopia we can believe in is authoritarian."

I would like to read an essay that takes us link by link from "enlightened interest" to pity, then to wisdom, and finally to the dictatorial will of the arrogant intellect. The esay should note that the writer includes himself in the liberal community he criticizes; his use of "we," "us," and "our" are not projections of a self that would speak for all; on the contrary, Trilling implicates himself in the tendency he addresses. It is possible that no one could be less in fashion than Trilling, but I turn to him now, as to very few others, in my effort to grapple with seemingly incomprehensible events. I find his essays go far to elucidate, ahead of time it seems, some of the crises that have dealt our culture blows that feel fatal. 

The picture on the top right is the cover of Saturday Review, February 12, 1955.-- DL

Comments

[Ken Lauter]

David,

I love Trilling too, in spite of any valid shortcomings in his thought pointed out by later commentators (for instance, Helen Vendler's critique of his treatment of Wordsworth's Immortality Ode").

He was at the center of my grad school lit/crit training and the depth & breadth of his scholarship still seems damned impressive to me. A clutch of his books occupies a space on my shelves marked MASTER.

Ken

[David Lehman]

Thank you for weighing in, Ken. I prefer Trilling's reading of Wordsworth -- it is a beautiful use of one poem ("Resoilution and Independence") to help explain another ("the Immortality ode"). Lionel was so steeped in Wordsworth's life and worg that I trust his literary instinct here. He seldom wrote practical criticsm, so this essay is an excepiton, and revealing one. Vendler's readings of poets are sometimes very good and sometimes disappointing.
I was Lionel's second to last research assistant - in 1973-74, a year before he died.