The tyrannical human will is responsible for evil in the twentieth century, and thus many advocate its abandonment. And yet that sort of “apocalyptic renovation” does not solve the problem of evil but rather implies becoming a morally ambiguous sort of creature. The only kind of person who could truly will nothing would be either, in Aristotle’s words, a god or a beast. In the former case, one would have to identify so thoroughly with being itself that one really did not care whether human life persisted or not; and in the latter, one would have to be a monster who cared little for the well-being of family, friends, or community. Most people, Trilling thinks, do care about other human beings (or at least themselves): Thus we do not want an “apocalyptic renovation” but rather a “reconstitution” that would lead to the existence of more-just societies where human individuals could flourish.
The cash value of Trilling’s advocacy of a reconstitution of the humanistic will comes out more clearly in his criticism of the “dogmatic realism” of Jean-Paul Sartre. Trilling takes issue with Sartre’s literary creed on multiple levels, but his major point of contention is with the French author’s conception of the “authorless novel,” in which “the novel is to be written as if without an author and without a personal voice.” Trilling’s rejection of this idea goes beyond literary theory and gets right to the heart of his thinking about the dangers of crisis-thought. “The banishment of the author from his books, the stilling of his voice,” he writes, “have but reinforced the faceless hostility of the world and have tended to teach us that we ourselves are not creative agents and that we have no voice, no tone, no style, no significant existence. Surely what we need is the opposite of this, the opportunity to identify ourselves with a mind that willingly admits that it is a mind and does not pretend that it is History or Events or the World but only a mind thinking and planning—possibly planning our escape. In other words, for Trilling, literary theories that advocate the death of the author—much like the “apocalyptic renovation” considered earlier—tempt one to think as if one is not a human being. For Trilling, evil is that which disintegrates the self. And a self willingly rejecting its own selfhood in favor of the boundless identification with impersonal forces is a self that shuts itself off from responsibility and even cooperates with the forces of depersonalization impinging from the outside.
Trilling and Acquiescence
Although Louis Menand once called Trilling “an apostle of acquiescence,” the active resistance to evil through a reconstitution of the human will that Trilling advocates in “Art and Fortune” belies any caricature of Trilling as quietist. Even more challenging to such a reductionist view is Trilling’s much-admired essay “The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters.”