Art and the Human Economy

The two preceding papers were furnished independently, and there is some editorial presumption in having collated them, and now in commenting them together. Special disservice is done to Mr. Southard, whose essay in the first place is a literary appreciation of Robert Penn Warren’s poetry, and of a quality permitting us to think the poet is lucky in having found his exegete so soon. But Mr. Southard in the course of his exegesis, and Mr. Adorno immediately, embark upon the same topic, and it is one that has a great urgency for us: the unhappy human condition that has risen under the modern economy, and the question of whether religion and art can do anything about it. It is true that the writers do not have quite the same diagnosis of this condition, but it will be noticed that they make cross-references to each other unknowingly.

Mr. Adorno is evidently for collectivism in politics, but not with all the potential ferocity of a partisan, i. e., fanatically. His social ideal has no room for religion yet provides a special asylum for art. But art is curiously close to religion in his very original and engaging description of it, as a concrete monad representing the universal concretion itself; that is to say, as a construction from which the experient receives cosmic or ontological vision. What else is it for? It is not attached to the practical life which falls under the over-all survey of the political economy. It is not attached, it is free, and Mr. Adorno awards to it an imperium in imperio. That is a handsome concession which many collectivists have not made.