fellow men keenly with accuracy.
The art of observing men
Is only part of the skill of leading them.
And your job as actors
Should make you prospectors and teachers
Of this larger skill.
By knowing and demonstrating the nature of men
You will teach others to lead their own lives.
You will teach them the great art of living together.
Yet now I hear you asking:
How can we –
Kept down, kept moving, kept ignorant
Kept in uncertainty
Oppressed and dependent –
How can we
Step out like prospectors and pioneers
To conquer a strange country for gain?
Always we have been subject to those
More fortunate than us.
How should we
Who have been till now
Only the trees that bear the fruit
Become overnight
Fruit growers?
Yet, as I see it,
That is the art you must now acquire,
You, my friends, who on the same day are
Actors and workers.
It cannot be impossible
To learn that which is useful.
You are the very ones,
You in your daily occupations,
In whom the art of observing is naturally born.
For you it is of use
To know what the foreman can and cannot do,
To know also the ways of your mates exactly
And their thoughts.
How else save with a knowledge of men
Can you wage the fight of your class?
I see all the finest among you
Impatient for knowledge, making
Observation more keen
Thus adding again to itself.
Already the best of you learn
Those laws which govern
The living together of men,
Already your class makes ready
To overcome all that hindering you
Stands in the way of mankind.
Here is where you
Acting and working,
Learning and teaching,
Can intervene from your stage
In the struggles of our time.
You with the intentness of your studies
And the elation of your knowledge
Can make the experience of struggle
The property of all
And transform justice
Into a passion.
Revolutionary Undoing: On MaxRaphael’s The Demands of Art
SOME FIGHT BECAUSE they hate what confronts them; others because they have taken the measure of their lives and wish to give meaning to their existence. The latter are likely to struggle more persistently. Max Raphael was a very pure example of the second type.
He was born near the Polish–German border in 1889. He studied philosophy, political economy and the history of art in Berlin and Munich. His first work was published in 1913. He died in New York in 1952. In the intervening forty years he thought and wrote incessantly. Only a fraction of his work has been published, and most of that is out of print and unobtainable. He left thousands of pages of manuscript which his widow and friends are ordering and hoping to publish. Their subject-matter ranges from palaeontology to classical architecture, from Gothic sculpture to Flaubert, from modern city planning to epistemology.
For five years I tried to interest European publishers in his work. In vain. A fact which I mention only because in a few decades it will be hard to remember how unknown and unrecognised Max Raphael still was in 1969.
His life was austere. He held no official academic post. He was forced several times to emigrate. He earned very little money. He wrote and noted without cease. As he travelled, small groups of friends and unofficial students collected around him. By the cultural hierarchies he was dismissed as an unintelligible but dangerous Marxist: by the party communists as a Trotskyist. Unlike Spinoza he had no artisanal trade.
To appreciate the possible role of the book under review,1 we must be clear about the present situation of the arts. (Nobody who is not prepared to grapple with fundamentals should approach the book.) It is a situation of extreme crisis. The validity of art itself is in question. There is not a significant artist in the world who is not asking himself whether his art is justified – not on account of the quality of his talent, but on account of the relevance of art to the demands of the time in which he is living.
Raphael quotes a remark of Cézanne’s in the context of a quite different analysis:
I paint my still lifes, these natures mortes, for my coachman who does not want them, I paint them so that children on the knees of their grandfathers may look at them while they eat their soup and chatter. I do not paint them for the pride of the Emperor of Germany or the vanity of the oil merchants of Chicago. I may get ten thousand francs for one of these dirty things, but I’d rather have the wall of a church, a hospital, or a municipal building.
Since 1848 every artist unready to be a mere paid entertainer has tried to resist the bourgeoisation of his finished work, the transformation of the spiritual value of his work into property value. This regardless of his political opinions as such. Cézanne’s attempt, like that of all his contemporaries, was in vain. The resistance of later artists became more active and
