George F. Kennan - Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy

GEORGE F. KENNAN

Copyright 1993 by George F. Kennan

All rights reserved

First published as a Norton paperback 1994

The text of this book is composed in 11.5 Bembo with the display set in Bernhard Modern Roman and Bernhard Tango. Composition and Manufacturing by the Haddon Craftsmen, Inc. Book design by Jo Anne Metsch

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Kennan, George Frost, 1904

Around the cragged hill: a personal and political philosophy / by George F. Kennan.

p. cm.

Includes index.

1. State, The. 2. Political sciencePhilosophy.

3. International relations. I. Title.

JC251.K46 1993

320.01dc20 929936

ISBN 978-1-324-02094-3

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

On a huge hill,

Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will

Reach her, about must, and about must goe;

And what the hills suddennes resists, winne so;

Yet strive so, that before age, deaths twilight,

Thy Soule rest, for none can worke in that night.

John Donne

... sad cure, for who would loose,

Though full of pain, this intellectual being,

Those thoughts that wander through Eternity,

To perish rather, swallowed up and lost

In the wide womb of uncreated night,

Devoid of sense and motion?

John Milton, Paradise Lost

I approached the writing of this book with much hesitation. I could not have any certainty as to what would come out of it. The undertaking appeared to requireto some extent, at leastabstraction, which has never been my dish. It threatened also to lead me to theory, which to me, as to Goethe, has always been gray, in contrast to the green quality of what he called the golden tree of life. It had always seemed to me safer, less pretentious, and, perhaps, more useful to illustrate general beliefs through the medium of specific examples, leaving it to the reader to draw his own picture of their implications.

I was far from being alone, I suspect, in entertaining such reservations. I seemed to recall that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said something to the effect that he had never been able to state his own philosophy of the law in any pure formonly through the corpus of his dissenting opinions. And I was reminded of Anton Chekhov, the playwright, who, when asked to explain at a rehearsal in the Moscow Art Theater his interpretation of the way one of his characters should be played, could only say, Dont you see? He wears checkered trousers.

But I was pressed to recognize that this, in my case, was not enough. A number of recent writers had given themselves the trouble of trying to extract from the welter of my past writingsfrom lectures on international affairs, from books on diplomatic history, or from cryptic sentences in commencement speeches or other oratorical effortssomething resembling a coherent personal and political philosophy. They professed to have come away frustrated, or at least bewildered. The pickings, they said, were slim, and sometimes even added to their confusion.

What weight there was behind these complaints I could not judge. But I was moved by their effort. It implied a belief, or at least a suspicion on their part, that behind all these suggestive specific examples there must have been something to be said by way of generalization that I had not said but that would be worth my saying.

This foreword, like most forewords, is being written after the completion of the book. (How else could one know to what a foreword should be applicable?) I see, on looking it over, that this work, like all the others I have written, ended up, whatever the original intent, as essentially a collection of critical observations. The difference is only that in this instance I have attempted to take the high ground, avoiding all detailed preoccupation with current problems and trying to stick to the broader dimensions of thingsthe ones that might still be expected to be visible and significant in future decades as well as years.

Whether the result, bearing this character, represents a betrayal of the original intent to put forward something resembling a personal and political philosophy, I cannot say. But I find myself, at this point, wondering whether any work of personal philosophy, however impressively abstract and theoretical, has not in essence been, or could be, anything other than just such a product of observation and of critical appraisal.

I find sustenance for this questioning in two passages, widely separated in time, among things I have recently read. The first, a passage from Edmund Burkes Reflections on the Revolution in France, reads as follows:

... I cannot stand forward and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions and human concerns on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances... give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect.

The second of the passages, this one from a recent book review by my good and esteemed friend Stuart Hampshire (a real philosopher, as I am not):

We know what we are doing when we actively devise experiments, actively verify and test our beliefs, actively direct our interests and inquiries toward useful and concrete questions.... A sequence of abstract thought, and also the stream of our passive impressions together form a sea of ignorance, in which we shall drown, if thought and feeling are cut off from our active interest.... Unless we purposefully turn our eyes to look at something that interests us as individuals, we shall literally see nothing in the world, and we shall understand nothing in the real world unless we remember that we freely choose the direction in which to look.