The Last Page
Coser, Lewis & Howe, Irving
"GOD" SAID TOLSTOY "is the name of my desire." This remarkable sentence could haunt one a lifetime, it reverberates in so many directions. Tolstoy may have intended partial assent to the idea...
...But this can be done meaningfully only if it is an image of social striving, tension, conflict...
...That God should be seen as the symbolic objectification of his desire thus became both a glorification of God and a strengthening of man, a stake in the future and a radical criticism of the present...
...Tolstoy may have intended partial assent to the idea that, life being insupportable without some straining toward "transcendence," a belief in God is a psychological necessity...
...Is the idea of utopia itself still a tolerable one...
...It is the name of our desire because the desire arises from a conflict with, and an extension from, the world that is...
...The ethical world is never given...
...Now, when we live in the shadow of defeat, to retain, to will the image of socialism is a constant struggle for definition, almost an act of pain...
...But he must also have wanted to turn this rationalist criticism into a definition of his faith...
...Today, in an age of curdled realism, it is necessary to assert the utopian image...
...But it is the kind of pain that makes creation possible...
...In his "Essay on Man" Ernst Cassirer has written almost all that remains to be said: A Utopia is not a portrait of the real world, or of the actual political or social order...
...Some time ago one could understandably make of Socialism a consoling day-dream...
...It exists at no moment of time and at no point in space...
...But just such a conception of a nowhere has stood the test and proved its strength in the development of the modern world...
...And not merely in the sense that it is a vision which, for many people throughout the world, provides moral sustenance, but also in the sense that it is a vision which objectifies and gives urgency to their criticism of the human condition in our time...
...nor could the desire survive in any meaningful way were it not for this complex relationship to the world that is...
...an image of a problem-creating and problem-solving society...
...it is a "nowhere...
...He must have meant that precisely because his holiest desires met in the vision of God he was enabled to cope with the quite unholy realities of human existence...
...It follows from the nature and character of ethical thought that it can never condescend to accept the "given...
...Without sanctioning the facile identification that is frequently made between religion and socialist politics, we should like to twist Tolstoy's remark to our own ends: socialism is the name of our desire...
...At so late and unhappy a moment, however, can one still specify what the vision of socialism means or should mean...
...Dissent, Spring 1954 160 n DISSENT / Winter 2004...
...it is forever in the making...
Vol. 51 • January 2004 • No. 1
