The Feet of Clay
FITCH, ROBERT E.
The Feet of Clay The Achilles Heel. By Manes Sperber. Doubleday. 224 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch Professor of Christian Ethics, Pacific School of Religion "Only the soil is...
...We imagine that this ideal is invulnerable and that its triumph is inevitable, but the ideal has a frailty in its lowest part, as does Achilles in his heel...
...Psycho-analysis is a mythology of the evil conscience far more than a psychology of the unconscious...
...For instance we are told that history is a kind of theatrical performance, viewed jointly by a blind man and by a deaf man, who later confide their defective memory and understanding of the play to a third party, who then writes it up into a logically coherent story...
...Only the soil is victorious, entombing with indifference the victors and their unfortunate victims alike...
...But there was no need for him to confound it with the universe...
...There is the brave show put on for others and there is the pathetic incompetence which underlies it...
...The truth shows up the contradictions, while the myth conceals them after having first reconciled them...
...Some men embraced Communism precisely when it became Stalinist, because they thought to find in it a church...
...The two separate essays, on Freud and on T. E. Lawrence, might well be brought together under the rubric which is used only for the second— "False Situations...
...Love is garrulous, forever proclaiming its existence, flaunting itself in song poems, novels, films, on every Hertzian wavelength...
...Yet Sperber himself shows no such indifference, but writes with fervor and a wry irony of the human spectacle...
...The central argument, developed with superb irony, is that hatred rests on reason while love simply springs from impulse...
...Now you are back, you have driven your horses to death, but the skies are still not empty...
...But while all this is pleasantly provocative, the reader begins to wonder about Sperber's basic perspective on life...
...The essay "On Hatred" is a historical account and a psychological analysis of anti-Semitism...
...Indeed, Sperber leaves us frusstrated for a philosophy—"More often than not philosophy is a labour of Penelope"—and shows his peculiar brilliance at its best in the isolated aphorism: "Successful treason is an act of loyalty all the more courageous because it is loyalty by foresight...
...But if, in this struggle and search, "only the soil is victorious" at last, why should we strive so mightily to play our parts in a drama which is intrinsically without meaning...
...Here again, for both parties, we treat of the discrepancy between the ideal and the actuality...
...and here we pass beyond the Greek original for our symbolism...
...Victory...
...If the reader should wonder what can hold together this curious miscellany of essays, the answer lies in the title of the book and in the introductory essay...
...If it is not always clear just how this central theme runs through all phases of this writing, it is still the case that Sperber writes with brilliance of particular matters...
...So the disillusioned old professor chides his still ardent and idealistic pupil: "I saw you setting off early one morning astride the horses of the apocalypse, riding towards the skies to clear them forever of the gods and of God Himself...
...Achilles is the heroic ideal to which we give an absolute devotion...
...It wishes to be regarded not as a feeling, but as a conviction founded upon an undeniable experience...
...As for the adequacy of the sexual interpretation of human motives, Sperber declares: "It is beyond doubt that by 1885 it was high time the psychologist should make his way into the bedroom...
...Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch Professor of Christian Ethics, Pacific School of Religion "Only the soil is victorious," says Manes Sperber of the battles of men...
...Out of the deep disillusionment of this mind comes a cunning discernment of the frailty of mankind that will not ever be able to see Achilles for his heel...
...For the archaeologist, that which separates victors from vanquished is a thin layer of earth in the vertical cut...
...the remnants of the cities of the conquerors are uncovered a few days, sometimes only a few hours, before the cities of those whom they conquered...
...In the same essay in which we get this word on history, we are told that the "true Left" is in eternal enmity with the absolute, and that it has "nothing to promise but the struggle, nothing to offer but the search...
...For him the crucial difference between the Sacco and Vanzetti case and the Rosenberg case is that, in the first instance, the victims attempted for seven years to give to the trial its true political significance, while in the second instance the victims and their defenders undertook systematically to remove all political meaning...
...There it will be mortally wounded...
...They only left it in order to join some other church...
...These bits of insight are the product of a shrewd and penetrating intelligence, the vitality of which is unimpaired by a perspective of benign cynicism and skepticism...
...But Achilles is followed by other "heroes...
...As for hatred, it only admits its existence in a flood of argument...
...Myth is never so fragmentary as truth...
...The Rosenberg affair was governed by the "rule of depersonalization and of depolitization...
...You transformed them into billets for the Hitlers, the Stalins...
...This helps us to understand the "methodical insincerity," or the "sincere hypocrisy," to be found in the Rosenberg letters...
Vol. 43 • September 1960 • No. 34
