Jacques Barzun: Cultural Ventriloquist

...The artists and philosophers have withdrawn respectively into parody and obscurantism...

...but it also seems to be his, or at least enough his to stand as the only description of the scientist he feels impelled to give us...

...That, I believe, is much clearer than anything you can read in Barzun's book, clearer and wittier...

...Now, it seems to me, science expressed itself positively in these writers...

...The distance traveled since, and the accompanying degeneration, can easily be measured by the astonishment and dismay expressed by nearly all reviewers of Barzun's book...

...He permits the Zeitgeist to use him as a medium, while at the same time he tries to make it clear that his own views are something quite different from the voices which, like some sort of sacrificial figure, he has permitted to pour through him...

...a driving thirst, an ardent and disinterested curiosity, a happy mixture of imagination and rigorous logic, a certain unpessimistic skepticism, an unresigned mysticism . . ." Valéry, however, is discussing science with his peers...

...Valéry had no doubts about science as such, but simply about the uses to which science was being put...

...art is pretty much in the same case—in fact, it has become guilty of treason to its aim because of its frightened dogging of science's footsteps...

...Yet, throughout his book, Barzun does precisely this, not merely in the same chapter but even the same page and paragraph...

...I can't imagine what readers who have not done this will make of Barzun's melange...

...as Wyndham Lewis called science, will not prove to be too exacting and terrible a faith...

...To accuse pure science of the misdeeds of its bastard offspring is not only unfair but also eminently confusing...

...Some of this confusion is perhaps inescapable and can be ascribed to the complex situation which Barzun is attempting to elucidate...

...The serenity is apparent in his style, which is an embodiment of those virtues of the scientific mind that Valéry was intent on preserving...

...They certainly will not put down his book feeling that a difficult subject has been illuminated...

...In contrast, I was reminded of Paul Valéry's description of the scientist...

...Proust and Joyce are charged with what Barzun calls "Ritual Accuracy...

...Unfortunately, in this critical situation, Barzun's book has only deepened the despair and confusion which he, in his strange manner, both despises and quotes exhaustively...

...his skeptical humanism was not a rhetorical hope but a palpable reality, incarnated in his lively, electric person and his impassioned and allusive style...

...Indeed, he believes that mind has been coarsened and degraded, but he blames science in tow for these consequences...

...It was Proust and Joyce who first responded not merely to the sense of fact without which the novelist goes astray, but to Ritual Accuracy, which is the homage art pays to scientific research . . . Readers expect precision or they withhold their assent...

...Meanwhile the layman or simple citizen fearfully watches science's crushing advance and hopes that "the religion of industrialism...

...Valéry had a firm sense of what he was and therefore of what we are...

...There is nothing more embarrassing than getting support for one's views and then being forced to repudiate it...

...The applied scientists, observing man's pitiful efforts to keep up with the surrounding mechanistic landscape, have obviously given him up...

...This is the crux...

...Barzun claims that art has been guilty of "an unconscious imitation of science...

...But that is not all...

...The inclination of mind which abstracts the attention from that in which it can feel sympathy to that in which it cannot seems to arise from a want of sympathy...

...Furthermore, the "readers" Barzun invokes are usually bored by such massed and explicit detail...

...In his mind, science is on the one hand an intrusive, vulgar power—though he never is as explicit in defining the nexus of this power as Valery—and on the other a counterfeit philosophy and way of life which have usurped the place traditionally occupied by art and philosophy...

...He is also quite sure where science belongs, that is, he knows that it should be flanked and strongly qualified by the twin disciplines of art and philosophy...

...I, on the contrary, find his seriousness impeccable...

...science can be put in its place by an elaborate strategy of snubs and jibes, as if all the world were a classroom and science a crude, ungainly student who has to be taught the proper manners...

...Confronted by this intolerably mixed-up situation...

...Kepler and Einstein, simultaneously lived, worked and thought...

...As everyone knows, or should know, science has three main expressions: pure science, applied science, and vulgarized science...

...As he said: "everything we know, which is to say, everything we can do...

...this judgment on the modern condition was handed down from the high place where he, together with Leonardo...

...Barzun has resorted to what might be called "cultural ventriloquism...

...Man, as we can see, is a failed machine...

...I am with him emotionally, I am a fan, but I really wish he had written a clearer book...

...1 could give a hundred examples of this peculiar kind of rhetoric, but one will do...

...Barzun's relations to science are murky and troubled, whereas those of Valéry, a poet who spent many years studying physics and mathematics, were serene but skeptical...

...A few decades ago almost any intellectual worth his keep would have applauded this aim, and would have immediately grasped his intent...

...Yet the overall effect of his style and thought is far from clarifying...

...he is not reflecting somebody else's views or acting as a cultural ventriloquist...

...But in the process, Barzun has woefully confused science in its three most important modern manifestations...

...There is a coldness in their fame.' " This, Barzun hurries to explain, is the common man's view of the scientist...

...Here is Barzun describing the scientist, using for this purpose Bagchot's rather haughty, denigrating words: "What made a scientist, Bagchot thought, was 'a negative cause—the absence of an intense interest and vivid nature...

...That is the position I am in with Barzun's book...

...Part of the trouble can be attributed to the simple circumstance that 30 years have passed and Barzun, like all the rest of us, stands chin-deep in the resultant rubble of common sense...

...In this place, sensibility was the prime motive force in both art and science in their best and greatest manifestations, and it was precisely the finer aspects of sensibility that the modern technological world was, in his view, coarsening and degrading...

...In the classical novel from Scott and Balzac to James and Zola," Barzun says, "fact was sought for its suggestiveness...

...Reviewed by RAYMOND ROSENTHAL Contributor, "Commentary" Jacques Barzun has written an important book, if only because he has given himself a high and laudable aim: he wants to put science in its proper place, intellectually and socially...

...As a confirmation of this, we see that even in the greatest case, scientific men have been calm men...

...One continually has the embarrassing sense that Barzun imagines tha...

...has finally been turned against what we are...

...indeed his book rises on its very ruins...

...Certainly one cannot blame Barzun for preferring his own wit to Valéry's, but since his entire book can be regarded as a gloss on Valéry's observation, it might be worth considering why Barzun's effort to describe, and at times even to define, rarely achieves the same clarity and incisiveness...

...Now nothing which I have quoted from Valéry, simply to set matters straight, would be objectionable to Barzun...

...It is complex because it embraces both the depressed, frazzled mood created by science*s triumphs and the reaction to it, and is further complicated by the fact that the people who are frightened, stupified and harassed by science's effects are rarely the people who do science's work...

...A mere review can hardly disentangle the confusion which Barzun has contrived to erect on the basis of so simple and clear an analysis —an analysis, I must hasten to say, with which I agree in its chief direction and outlines...

...in fact, the "Ritual Accuracy" which arouses Barzun's scorn seems precisely the peculiar workings of that general sensibility which Valery found so entrancing and exciting...

...A great deal of art and a great many artists are spilled into this commodious pot...

...Thus, for the sake of a debater's point, and a hopelessly confused one, Barzun disposes of the two artists who, though surely affected by science, could be used as touchstones against which to measure the true betrayal of art at the hands of so many other, really culpable artists...

...it is, I must confess, his wit that leaves me cold...

...Take the matter of art...

...True, they praised his wit, but this proved to be only an underhanded way of depreciating his seriousness since every good American knows that wit and seriousness are inevitable opposites...

...in any case, they form a shadowy figure and certainly do not resemble, to my eyes, the average somnambulistic consumer of movies and best-sellers...

...Of course on occasion Barzun can be acute and neat...

...The bourgeois," Valéry said, speaking about science some years ago, "is investing his money in phantoms and speculating on the downfall of common sense...

...Philosophy is pitifully wallowing in the wake of science, smothered and overawed...

...But of course I have done my homework in preparing for reading Barzun by reading Paul Valéry and Wyndham Lewis and Ortega y Gassct...

...When he said that machines were "reacting on their creators, making them like themselves...