_Homo sum; nihil humani a me alienum puto_, said the Latin playwright.
And I would rather say: _Nullum hominem a me alienum puto_: I am a man;
no other man do I deem a stranger. For to me the adjective _humanus_ is
no less suspect than its abstract substantive _humanitas_, humanity.
Neither the “human” nor “humanity,” neither the simple adjective nor
the substantivized adjective, but the concrete substantive--man. The
man of flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies--above
all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and thinks and
wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.
For there is something else that is also called man, and he is the
subject of many more or less scientific speculations. He is the
legendary featherless biped, the ξῷον πολιτικόυ of Aristotle, the
social contractor of Rousseau, the _homo economicus_ of the Manchester
school, the _homo sapiens_ of Linnæus, or, if you like, the vertical
mammal. A man neither of here nor there, neither of this age nor of
another, who has neither sex nor country, who is, in brief, merely an
idea. That is to say, a no-man.
Our man is the other man, the man of flesh and bone--I and you, my
reader, and the other man over there, all of us who weigh upon the
earth.
And this concrete man, this man of flesh and bone, is at once the
subject and the supreme object of all philosophy, whether certain
self-styled philosophers like it or not.
In most of the histories of philosophy that I know, philosophic systems
are presented to us as if they grew out of one another and their
authors, the philosophers, appear only as mere pretexts. The inward
biography of the philosophers, of the men who philosophized, occupies a
secondary place. And it is this, nevertheless, this inward biography,
that explains most things to us.
It behoves us to say, before all, that philosophy lies closer to poetry
than to science. All philosophic systems that have been constructed as
a supreme concord of the final results of the individual sciences have
in every age possessed much less consistency and less life than those
which have expressed the integral desire of the spirit of their authors.
For the fact is that the sciences, important to us as they are and
indeed indispensable for our life and thought, are in a certain sense
more extraneous to us than philosophy. They fulfil a more objective
end, that is to say, an end more external to ourselves. They are, at
bottom, a matter of economics. A new scientific discovery, of the
kind called theoretical, is like a mechanical discovery--that of the
steam-engine, the telephone, the phonograph, or the aeroplane--a thing
that is useful for something. Thus the telephone may be useful to us in
enabling us to communicate at a distance with the woman we love. But
she, what is she useful to us for? A man takes an electric tram to go
to hear an opera and asks himself: Which is in this case more useful,
the tram or the opera?
Philosophy answers to our need of forming a complete and unitary
conception of the world and of life, and as a result of this
conception, a feeling which gives birth to an inward attitude
and even to an activity. But in fact this feeling, instead of
being a consequence of this conception, is the cause of it. Our
philosophy--that is, our mode of understanding or of not understanding
the world and life--springs from our feeling towards life itself. And
this, like everything affective, has subconscious, perhaps unconscious,
roots.
It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists,
but it is our optimism or our pessimism, of physiological or perhaps
pathological origin, as much the one as the other, that makes our ideas.
Man, they say, is a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not
been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which
differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason.
More often I have seen a cat reason than laugh or weep. Perhaps it
weeps or laughs inwardly--but then perhaps the crab also resolves
equations of the second degree inwardly.
And thus in a philosopher what must most concern us is the man.
* * * * *
Man is an end, not a means. All civilization addresses itself to
man, to each man, to each “I.” What is this idol--call it Humanity
or call it what you will--to which all men and each individual man
must be sacrificed? For I sacrifice myself for my neighbours, for my
fellow-countrymen, for my children, and these sacrifice themselves in
their turn for theirs, and theirs again for those who come after them,
and so on in a never-ending series of generations. And who receives the
fruit of this sacrifice?
Those who talk to us about this fantastic sacrifice, this dedication
without an object, are wont to talk to us also about the right to live.
And what is this right to live? They tell me that I have come into the
world to realize I know not what social end; but I feel that I, like
each one of my fellows, am here to realize myself, to live.
Yes, yes, I see it all--an enormous social activity, a mighty
civilization, an accumulation of science, of art, of industry, of
morality, and afterwards, when we have filled the world with industrial
marvels, with great factories, with roads, with museums, with
libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will
endure--for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?
“Why!”--the reader will exclaim--“we are getting back to what the
Catechism says: ‘Q. For whom did God create the world? A. For man’?”
Precisely--so ought the man who is a man to reply. The ant, if it took
account of these matters and were a person, conscious of itself, would
reply: “For the ant,” and it would reply rightly. The world is made for
consciousness, for each consciousness.
A human soul is worth all the universe, someone has said--I know not
who, but it was excellently well said. A human soul, mind you! Not
a human life. Not this life. And it is a fact that the less a man
believes in the soul, that is to say, in his conscious immortality,
personal and concrete, the more he will exaggerate the worth of this
poor transitory life. Hence arises the effeminate sentimental feeling
against war. True, a man ought not to wish to die, but it is the other,
the eternal death, that he ought not to wish. “Whosoever will save his
life shall lose it,” says the Gospel; but it does not say “whosoever
will save his soul,” the immortal soul--the soul that we believe and
wish to be immortal.
And all those definers of objectism do not realize, or rather do
not wish to realize, that a man, in affirming his “I,” his personal
consciousness, affirms man, man concrete and real, affirms the true
humanism--the humanism of man, not of the things of man--and in
affirming man he affirms consciousness. For the only consciousness of
which we have consciousness is that of man.
The world is for consciousness. Or rather this _for_, this notion of
finality, and feeling rather than notion, this teleological feeling is
born only where there is consciousness. Consciousness and finality are
the same thing fundamentally.
If the sun possessed consciousness it would think, no doubt, that it
lived in order to give light to the worlds; but it would also and above
all think that the worlds existed in order that it might give them
light and joy in giving them light and so live. And it would think well.
And all this tragic fight of man to save himself, this immortal
craving for immortality which caused the man Kant to make that
immortal leap[7] of which I have spoken, all this is simply a fight for
consciousness. If consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said,
nothing more than a flash of light between two eternities of darkness,
then there is nothing more execrable than existence.
It is possible that someone will discover that everything that I
am saying rests upon a contradiction, since sometimes I express a
longing for immortality and at other times I say that this life does
not possess the value that is attributed to it. Contradiction? To be
sure! The contradiction of my heart that says Yes and of my head that
says No. Of course there is contradiction. Who does not recollect
those words of the Gospel: “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief”?
Contradiction? Of course! For we only live upon contradictions and by
them; life is tragedy, and the tragedy is perpetual struggle, without
victory or the hope of victory; life is contradiction.
It is a question, as you see, of an affective value, and against
affective values reasons do not avail. For reasons are nothing more
than reasons, that is to say, they are not even truths. There are
definition-mongers--pedants by nature and by grace--who produce an
effect upon me like that of a man who consoles a father for the loss of
a son, dead in the prime of his life, by saying: “Patience, friend, we
all must die.” Would you think it strange if this father were irritated
by such an ineptitude? For it is an ineptitude. How often may it not
be said--
_para penser cual tú, sólo es preciso_
_no tener nada más que inteligencia?_[8]
There are, in fact, people who appear to think only with the brain or
with whatever other organ may be the specific organ for thinking; while
others think with the whole body and with the whole soul, with the
blood, with the marrow of the bones, with the heart, with the lungs,
with the belly, with the life. And the people who think only with the
brain become definition-mongers; they become the professionals of
thought. And you know what a professional is....
If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything rather than a
philosopher; he is, above all, a pedant, that is to say, a caricature
of a man. The cultivation of any science--of chemistry, of physics, of
geometry, of philology--may be, though within very narrow limits and
restrictions, a work of differentiated specialization; but philosophy,
like poetry, is either a work of integration and harmony or else it is
mere philosophism, pseudo-philosophical erudition.
All knowledge has an ultimate object. Knowing for the sake of knowing
is, say what you will, nothing but a solemn begging of the question.
We learn a thing either for an immediate practical end, or in order to
complete the rest of our knowledge. Even the ideas that appear to us
most theoretical--that is to say, of least immediate application to
the non-intellectual necessities of life--answer to an intellectual
necessity, which is also a real necessity, to a principle of unity and
continuity of consciousness. But just as scientific knowledge has its
finality in the rest of our knowledge, the philosophy which we may
be forced to choose has another extrinsic finality--it refers to our
whole destiny, to our attitude towards life and the universe. And the
most tragic problem of philosophy is that of reconciling intellectual
necessities of the heart and the will. For it is just here that every
philosophy that claims to resolve the eternal and tragic contradiction
that is the very basis of our existence breaks down. But do all men
confront this contradiction?
Little can be hoped for from a ruler, for example, who has not been
preoccupied at some time or other, even if only in some dim way, with
the first beginning and ultimate end of all things, and, above all, of
men, with their first “why” and their ultimate “wherefore.”
And this supreme preoccupation cannot be purely rational, it must be
affective. It is not enough to think about our destiny, it must be
felt. And the would-be leader of men who says and proclaims that he
pays no heed to the things of the spirit, does not deserve to lead
them. Which does not mean, of course, that any determinate solution is
to be required of him. Solution? Is there, indeed, any?
For my part, I will never willingly yield myself, nor entrust my
confidence, to any popular leader who has not a real conviction that
the leader of a people is a leader of men--men of flesh and bone; men
who are born, suffer, and, although they may not wish to die, die;
men who are ends in themselves, not merely means; men who have to be
themselves and not others; men, in short, who seek that which we call
happiness. It is inhuman, for example, to sacrifice one generation of
men to the generation following when there is no regard for the destiny
of those sacrificed--not merely for their memory, for their names, but
for themselves.
All this idea that a man lives in his children, or in his works, or
in the universe, is but vague verbiage which satisfies only those who
suffer from affective stupidity and who may, for the rest, be persons
of a certain cerebral distinction. For it is possible to possess a
great talent or what we call great talent, and yet to be stupid as far
as the feelings are concerned, and even morally imbecile. There have
been instances.
Those who are mentally talented and affectively stupid usually say
that it is useless to seek to delve into the unknowable or to kick
against the pricks. It is as if one should say to a man whose leg has
been amputated that it is useless to think about it. And we all lack
something; only some of us feel it and others do not. Or they pretend
not to feel it, and then they are hypocrites.
There is something which, for want of a better name, we will call
the tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception
of life itself and of the universe, a whole philosophy, more or less
formulated, more or less conscious. And this sense may be possessed,
and is possessed, not only by individual men but by whole peoples.
And this sense does not flow from ideas but rather determines them,
although afterwards, of course, these ideas react upon the sense
and confirm it. Sometimes this sense may proceed from a casual
illness--from dyspepsia, for example--but at other times it is
constitutional. And it is useless to speak of men who are healthy and
men who are unhealthy. Apart from there being no normal standard of
health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by nature.
And, further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing
consciousness, is, when compared with the ass or the crab, already a
diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease.
Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those
who possess the tragic sense of life. I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St.
Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, _René_, _Obermann_, Thomson,[9] Leopardi,
Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard--men laden with
wisdom rather than with knowledge.
And there are, I believe, also peoples who possess this tragic sense of
life.