Malraux and the Individual Will

P HILOSOPHERS, on the one hand, and so-called imaginative writers, on the other, are, to a large extent, trying to do two different kinds of things. What their respective functions are is a question that I shall not attempt to answer here; I shall take it for granted that the two types of activity do not wholly coincide, and that each must be judged by its appropriate standards. But there is also a sphere within which philosopher and novelist may be dominated by similar impulses and pursue common ends. Both are trying, through the medium of language, to give order and value to their experience; both are trying to adjust themselves to a world, human and nonhuman, and, sometimes, to adjust that world to them. In the case of the philosopher this activity may lead to the formulation of an ethics; with the novelist or poet it usually results in a scheme that is imaginatively rather than analytically ordered, and expressed in symbols that are capable of becoming abstract concepts but are presented at the concrete and affective level. There may be, furthermore, an exchange between the two: the poetic ethos of today may become the ethics of tomorrow; or, conversely, the poet may nourish a philosophical idea, as a seed, until it grows into a symbol. One of the functions of the philosophical poet or novelist is to test the abstract ideas of the philosopher by applying them to concrete human situations and showing them at work in the human soul. These situations are, of course, largely imaginary; but they must be in some way equivalent to a reality if they are to be accepted. The asset of the novelist is that he usually brings to the test of these ideas a wider, if not always a deeper,