pressure for alliance with the most active partisans. Malraux ended up going
with de Gaulle; Camus, for all his claims to represent the heritage of rebellion,
stood paralyzed on the sidelines by the rebellion in his Algerian homeland, and
formulated a stance of political philosophy that became an archetype for cold
war anticommunism. On the other side, Sartre, deeply committed to the
autonomy of a third force, ineluctably shifted into the camp of Marxism.
Merleau-Ponty, who originated the quarrel with Camus in 1946 over their
attitude toward the communists, eventually split with Sartre during 1952–1955
because now he too found Stalin’s communism insupportable, while Sartre
came to its defense.^27
Such pressures belong to the external political environment. A central theme
of this sociological analysis is that the distinctive contents of intellectual crea-
tivity are no mere reflection of what everyone believes, but derive from the
inner struggle for attention in the intellectual space. The split between the two
stars of the existentialist movement was fated by the dynamics of creative
energy in a necessarily enclosed space. Politics provided the occasion for the
break; but the break itself, and its intellectual form, came from the oppositional
structure of creativity.Envoi: Into the Fog of the Present
Here the manuscript breaks off... as it says in copies of old texts. In fact,
we could trace the networks further, on into our own day. Some of the links
are easy enough: in America, from Quine and Reichenbach to Putnam, Carnap
to Rorty, Popper to Feyerabend; in France, Merleau-Ponty to Foucault to
Derrida, Aron to Bourdieu; in Germany, from Heidegger via Oscar Becker to
Habermas. The trouble is that we don’t know where to focus; there are many
pupils and seminar interlocutors proceeding down from the main chains of the
past, and perhaps new chains of eminence starting up. But we have no way of
knowing who if anyone will be remembered as a major or secondary figure;
even the names which stir the center of controversy for a decade may do well
if they fade only to a minor mention in the intellectual histories written in the
future. Such is the nature of the intellectual attention space. It is intrinsically
shaped by the flow of conflicts and realignment across the generations, and
our significance as puny human nodes in this long-term network is given not
by ourselves, but by the resonances that make some names into emblems for
what has happened at memorable turning points in the flow.
In this chapter we have already been drifting dangerously into the fogs of
the near-present. The generation before us is enveloped in a fog which we might
better call the steam of polemics too close for us to penetrate; that is why in
the 1990s we have just been beginning to get some scholarly perspective on782 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths