The truth behind these seasonally professed inadequacies of intelligence is the old obscurantist myth which holds that an ideais noxious if it is nor controlled by "common sense and "feeling": Knowledge is Evil, both grow on the same tree: culture is permitted, provided one periodically proclaims the vanity of its purposes and the limits of its power [...]; ideal culture should be nothing but a sweet rhetorical effusion, the art of words to bear witness to a transient moitening of the soul. Yet that old romantic couple, heart and head, has no reality except in an imagery of vaguely Gnostic origin, in those opiated philosophies which have always, ultimately, formed the backbone of strong regimes, the kind that get rid of intellectuals by telling them to run along and busy themselves with emotion and the ineffable. In fact, any reservations about culture is a terrorist position. To be a critic by profession, and to proclaim one doesn't understand a thing about existentialism or Marxism (as a matter of fact it is precisely these two philosophies which are declared incomprehensible), is to erect one's blindness or one's dumbness into a universal rule of perception--it is to reject Marxism and existentialism from the world: "I don't understand, therefore you are idiots."