attitude toward life. Every thought is a judgment, every act is a
judgment, the interpretation of every word is a judgment: and judgment
implies a standard. If that standard is not stated, it may function
contrary to the conscious will of its possessor. But it functions
nevertheless. Current literary work is for the most part the expression
of a philosophy and a religion that are not stated at all. The essential
implications never come to light. The student could, of course, go to
the complete works of each writer and discover the traits of his
_Weltanschauung_; but most readers possess neither time nor power for
such research. They are therefore constantly taking in, under cover of a
stream of articles, biographies, poems, novels, plays, an attitude
toward life of which they never become aware. And this hidden attitude
works in them; shapes and nourishes, or corrupts them.
Joseph Wood Krutch is a well-known American critic. He is neither more
able, nor less so, than a dozen others who write in our liberal
magazines. But he has done what all of his fellows should have realized
the need of doing; and what most of them have shamefully neglected to
do. He has written a book, entitled “The Modern Temper,” in which, with
all the clarity and honesty at his command, he has set forth the
philosophy behind his judgments—the _measure_ of life that determines
his specific critical responses. How far he is justified in calling his
mood _the_ modern temper, we shall see. Certainly, his is _a_ modern
temper, widespread and hence significant. His book therefore offers an
occasion, exceptionally concise, to study the philosophy and spirit of
some of the men who write our books and who review them.
In order to take fair advantage of this occasion, I must begin by
setting forth in some detail what Mr. Krutch has said. In my summary I
shall, without criticism, follow the line of the book in its exact
progression, using wherever possible the words of the author.
_Chapter 1._ (a) Freud says that the unborn babe is the happiest of
creatures; into his consciousness has entered no conflict, nor is
there any limitation upon his desires, (b) As the babe grows up and
experience and knowledge make life miserable, he invents myths of all
sorts to recapture or protect his infant bliss. The realm of poetry,
mythology, religion, represents the world as a man would like to have
it, while science represents the world as it is. (c) Connections
between parts of life, explanations of life, reasons for
life—relations between the parts—are supplied by the imagination.
Which means, they are illusions, (d) Only man has rationality; the
universe is not rational, (e) Therefore man is an alien in the
universe. His rationality, being “unnatural,” is hence an illusion,
(f) Our morality and emotional lives are adjusted to a world which no
longer exists—because it has been destroyed by reason (science being
the reasoning from facts).
_Chapter 2._ (a) The social virtues of the humanists—serving one’s
children and posterity, living for society, etc.—are really animal
traits, (b) Don Juan is the real type of human, (c) An individualism
that is antagonistic to and destructive of the social virtues is the
highest human value, (d) Human individualism, the real human value, is
perfect separatism of each soul, (e) Nature reveals no ends only means
for its own self-perpetuation, (f) Man in civilization strives for
ends, and turns means (sex, thought, etc.) into ends. Therefore man is
unnatural, (g) Apotheosis of the ant, as the ideal of nature; since
the ant has no individualistic ends, living entirely for the anthill,
(h) The antithesis between natural means and human ends is
irreconcilable, for when man makes his own thought or sensation or
life an end, he neglects the procreation of the species, (i)
Therefore, all cultures no sooner ripen than they rot. (j) The
alternatives for man are an antlike stable group, or recurrent death
at the top. (k) Humanism is riddled with mutually destructive
contradictions.
_Chapter 3._ (a) The generation of Huxley, Tennyson, etc., was sure
that science was going to disclose a world in which man is perfectly
and regally at home, (b) But science has revealed only a vast
emptiness, in which, lost like Milton’s Satan, we wing our way. (c)
Scientific mastery of the inner life, the soul, leads likewise to no
real mastery of it, but only to more confusion. (d) There is no ethics
or morals. Anthropology and psychology reveal merely a variety of
ethics and morals. (e) Yet man persists in being an ethical, moral
creature. (f) There is no royal reason. (g) The reason in which
Aristotle, Shakespeare, Spinoza, believed is revealed by science to be
mere rationalization. (h) Science itself is doubtful. 2,000 years of
epistemology have made it dubious if man can know any reality outside
himself. (i) Science gives us one table—consisting of nothing but
electrons. Our senses give us another table. The former we know as
truth; but the second only can be of use to us in our experience. (j)
Science gives us the real universe. (k) Huxley, etc., were deluded,
thinking we could make this universe ours. (l) There is no relation
between the outer world of science and the inner world of man’s needs
and emotions.
_Chapter 4._ (a) Love is defined as the sexuality of the individual
separate ego. It is a discontinuous, physical phenomenon with no
implications in reality beyond its naked self. (b) Since science and
modern freedom have freed love of the old taboos and of the religious
and poetic myths, love, as more than naked sexuality, turns out to be
illusion. (c) Sex is a mere physical need, and hence has no values
whatsoever. Man is simply cursed with this need and must make his
peace with it, as he can. (d) We shall have to get used to a loveless
as well as to a godless world.
_Chapter 5._ (a) Tragedy is based on noble action, and noble action is
based on the belief (as Sophocles and Shakespeare had it) in the
dignity of man’s soul. (b) This dignity is an illusion; for it derives
from the notion that man is the center of the universe, or at least
that he belongs to the universe, and that his deeds have some
universal import. (c) With the going of this illusion has gone man’s
dignity, his possibility of noble action—and Tragedy. (d) The art of
the present can only distrust its own thoughts, despise its own
passions, realize man’s impotent unimportance in the universe, and
tell no story except such as makes it more acutely aware of its
trivial miseries. (e) Yet with the passing of Tragedy, our need of
Tragedy (i.e., of dignity, noble actions, etc.) has not passed.
_Chapter 6._ (a) To medievalism, life was an exact science. The laws,
rules, etc., of that science have broken. (b) Life regarded as a
science is now and forevermore intellectually indefensible. (c) The
modern mind, realizing that there is no Peace unless each life is made
into some self-sufficient pattern or order or whole of its own,
strives to achieve this. Strives, that is, to make life an art. (d)
For in science, there is only one Truth; but in art, there may be many
truths. Many men have striven to make their lives an art: e.g.,
Cellini, St. Francis, the heroes of Henry James’s novels, Anatole
France. (e) In art, there is no standard except the artistic
perfection of the individual work, according to its own rules. As an
artistic creation, Othello is no better than Iago. (f) In art, there
is no ethics. (g) To conceive of life as a group of works of art
means, therefore, anarchy. (h) No society can five by such a scheme.
Life lived as an art is pragmatically impossible, from the standpoint
of mankind.
_Chapter 7._ (a) What progress did philosophy or religion ever make?
None. It was only when the thinker discovered how small are the things
he can do, that he did anything at all: only when he renounced looking
for the key to heaven, that he was able to keep chimneys from smoking.
(b) The world grows more comfortable, as man ceases to strive for
anything beyond comfort. (c) But now, despite this progress, behold
metaphysics is reborn! (d) It is typified by the neo-Catholicism of
France, and the neo-Anglicanism of England. (e) Its essence is
expressed by T. E. Hulme, who wrote: “One of the main achievements of
the nineteenth century was ... the principle of _continuity_. The
destruction of this conception is, on the contrary, an urgent
necessity of the present.” The premise of the new metaphysicians is
therefore _dualism_, or discontinuity. It says: “There are two worlds:
one, the empty spaces of materialism and science, and two, the world
of man—spirit, faith, ethic, value, emotion, God. And there is
discontinuity between them.” (f) But there is nothing of which we are
so sure as of the _continuity_ taught by science. To earlier, naïve
men, the important thing about _living matter_ was that it _lived_:
but science can only be sure that it is _matter_. (g) We believe in
matter, accepting _its_ continuity, wiping out the merely hypothetic
world of spirit, value, etc.—the world of the modern metaphysicians.
(h) Metaphysics is but another petty effort to make life an art: it is
a confession of its own despair and failure.
_Chapter 8._ (a) It is not by thought that men live. The less they
think, the better they live. The more they think, the more willing
they are to die. (b) The very need of thought proves that man’s
vitality is ebbing. An animal, a barbarian, has no such need. (c)
Civilizations, constructed on thought, reach death; then the naïve
barbarians rush in, the man begins anew. (d) The fresh hordes of
barbarians destined to renew us are perhaps the Russians. (e)
Communism, despite its sophisticated phraseology, is a new barbarism.
In communism the individual does not count, only the anthill counts.
No religious speculation is allowed. Life is perpetuated,
unquestioningly, for its own blind sake. (f) But the inevitable
despair of the modern man who, having learned to think, has learned
the hopeless abyss between himself and nature, is not so bad after
all: since he has physical comfort. Philosophical pessimism is not so
hard to bear as cold or hunger. Ours is a lost cause, but we should
rather die (in comfort) as men, than live as animals.
b.
Our next step is to examine the various elements of Mr. Krutch’s
philosophy of life: to test their quality, their typicality, and to
compare them; to measure their cogency as the cause of such desperate
conclusions. The references are to the divisions of his argument, as
catalogued, omitting repetitions and minor points.
_Chapter 1._ (a) states with apparent sympathy that a prenatal,
vegetable life, bereft of struggle or aspiration, is a possible
desideratum. (b) asserts that there is a dualistic conflict between art,
which is an illusory world, and science, which is the real world. Here
is the author’s doctrine: the relation between the unborn babe and the
womb in which it lives is real; but the relation between the born man
and the world in which he lives is illusion. Therefore, since life in
any individual consists of the relation between it and its environment,
and since no man could live an instant without some relation with the
air and the world, what Mr. Krutch is really saying is: the life of the
unborn babe is real; the life of the born man is an illusion. (c)
implies that relations and connections between man and the universe,
such as imagination supplies, are necessary for his welfare. But they
are illusory, since the imagination is delusion. Yet Mr. Krutch has not
even attempted to prove that imagination is delusion. This is his
premise, so that, of course, this must be his conclusion. (d) and (e)
invalidate man’s reason, since the universe has no reason. Yet the
author employs his reason to prove his alienness in the universe.
Virtually, he says: “My reason is invalid, since the universe is not
rational. Yet my reason is, miraculously, valid enough to _prove_ that
no relation between me and the universe exists.” What he should have
said, logically, from the premises, is this: “I declare my reason to be
exclusively mine. Therefore it is not a cogent measure to determine any
relation outside myself. To discover if I belong in the universe, I must
employ some measure common to both me and it: some measure that I can
move from myself to the universe.” Of course, if he had relied on some
such measure—a measure of mass, for instance, or of causation—he would
have found _continuity_ between man and the universe. Conclusion: the
chapter assumes that continuity between man and the universe is
desirable, but that absolute discontinuity exists. The assumptions are
sustained by means of indefensible logic.
_Chapter 2._ (a) states that since man’s social virtues are found also
in animals, they cannot be human. This is tantamount to asserting
absolute discontinuity between animal and man. Darwin, evolution, modern
biology, are therefore flouted. The author unconsciously assumes an
attitude more close to the early ascetic Christian and neo-Platonic
concept of an abyss between man and brute. (b) and (c) lift up an old
Spanish myth as the real human type. Don Juan was a “man” who could make
love to countless women without ever becoming tired, without ever
becoming attached, without ever changing, without ever feeling.
Psychologists class him as the archetype of “fixated adolescent” and
agree that he never existed, outside the realms of pathology. This
insulate human “atom,” the “perfect individualist,” with no social
relations or connections, this abstract fiction of infantile will, is
the human ideal of our author. (e) and (f) carry on the thesis of
discontinuity. Nature has no ends and is not moral: man has ends and is
persistently a moral creature. The traits of nature are determined by
studying the ant, etc.: they are by no means to be determined by
studying man. For the ant, by some inscrutable right, belongs to nature,
whereas man does not. This is really the premise of the argument: Mr.
Krutch makes it the conclusion. His syllogism in its pure form is this:
“Man is not part of nature: man has certain traits: hence these traits
are not part of nature. Therefore man, possessing these (unnatural)
traits, is not part of nature.” However, let us grant the premises that
the ant is in nature, man is not. The conclusion must be that man is
different from the ant. From this, our author is inspired to conclude
that man, to _succeed as man_, must behave like an ant! Man, to succeed
like a man, must build anthills and—nothing else. Conclusion: the
chapter declares, in the face of anthropology, biology, sociology,
psychology, that man is utterly apart from nature and from animals, and
that (even as the old ascetics and transcendentalists insisted) he is a
separate creation. Here is the syllogism, transposed for clarity: “A
tree is made of wood. Apples are not wood. Therefore, apples cannot
belong on trees.” But despite the organic difference between man and
“natural creatures,” he must behave—if he would succeed—just like the
creatures whom he in no way resembles! (Here, the ascetics were more
logical. Having posited man as different from the brute, they mapped out
for him a totally separate course.) Assuming the organic difference, our
author insists that the two relationless entities must go the same way.
He builds up the definitions of his humanism upon illogical
contradictions; and then dismisses “humanism” as full of the
contradictions of his own bad thinking.
_Chapter 3._ (a) and (b) are repetitions. (c) looks for science to
“master” the soul—and looks in vain. Pure science attempts merely to
measure, from the outside. For instance, it weighs the sun and names its
elements. It has no mastery of the sun, in the sense of controlling the
sun. To a slight degree, science has similarly tried to “measure” the
soul: i.e., to analyze its components. Pure science has never attempted
more, leaving the application of its discoveries to education and
religion. The modern effort in these fields is unknown to our author.
(d) comes down to this: science has found that _noses_ are not alike, in
any two parts of the world. Negro, Eskimo, Malay, Nordic, have decidedly
different noses. Ergo, science has discovered that _noses do not
exist_!... To prove that morals and ethics do not exist, it would be
necessary to prove that the sense of right does not exist or is at least
very rare. But anthropology shows that this sense is universal. Its
diversity of ethical and moral forms, of course, is due to the fact that
morals are a product of the interplay between men and their environment.
To say that morals vary is simply to say that men vary. To say that
morals do not exist, because they do not agree, is to say that men do
not exist because men do not agree. Chapter 1 revealed the genesis of
the author’s mood as the result of an exorbitant faith in reason. Now
(f) and (g) call reason a bad name, and dismiss it. Chapter 1
illogically employed human reason to establish the preponderance of an
external, irrational universe over man. Now the evidence of the mind is
declared to be poor: the universe itself may be but the projection of
that poor human’s reason which (in another part) has no existence within
the universe. Mr. Krutch has said: the table of science is real. The
table of his senses, like the neo-Platonist dwelling in Tyre or Batanaea
in the year 300, he rejects as unreal. But the old Tyrian was logical.
He lived where his faith was: he utterly declined to follow his senses.
This is too athletic for our modern. With one breath, he gives credence
to the table of electrons; with the next, he confesses that the false
table is the only one he ever hopes to live with! But the lack here is
greater than merely one of logic. Mr. Krutch has the most childish
notion of what science _means_, when it states that the table is a
congeries of electrons.... The language of science is mathematics; and
mathematics is a logic of _forms_. Everything that cannot be expressed
in symbols of mass and motion is nonexistent within the realm of
mathematics. Now, pictured in so far as it exists within the domain of
science, i.e., in so far as it is a congeries of mass in motion, a
table, of course, can be nothing but a congeries of mass in motion: a
chart of electrons. In the precise same way a living body, pictured in
terms of anatomy, can be nothing but an anatomical structure. But there
are other domains; for instance, human behavior, which has qualities
that the language of mathematics does not cover. In this domain, the
description of the chair as a group of electrons will not work: but the
notion of the child who has never heard of electrons, but who wants to
sit down in the chair, works very well, indeed. To say that science is
the _whole_ truth, because it prophesies an event like an eclipse, is
just as reasonable as to say that the ideas of the child are the _whole_
truth, because the child prophesies that it is going to sit in that
chair, and straightway does so. The eclipse takes place in a realm where
human quality is largely extracted: so we are right to deal with
eclipses in the logic of science. But man’s experience of beauty, for
instance, before that eclipse is largely in the realm of human value.
Here, the language of poetry is more adequate than that of mathematics.
To deny one of these measures in absolute favor of the other is as
reasonable as it would be to say that the architect’s blueprint is more
real than the house. Mathematicians of high order, of course, are aware
of the limitations of their language and therefore of the realm which
their language expresses. It is only the weakling, desperately in need
of an absolute Word, who speaks like Mr. Krutch, of the “certitudes of
science.” Not Poincaré, not Einstein. Not the typical Eddington who
says: “There is a constant unknowable in science.... Scientific laws are
merely truistic measurements of a single physical condition.... So long
as the electron is not reacting with the rest of the universe, we cannot
be aware of it.... A particle may have position or it may have velocity,
but it cannot in any exact sense have both. An association of exact
position with exact momentum can never be discovered by us, because
there is no such thing in nature.”... All of which is tantamount to
saying, that the mathematical electron is an abstraction, that it is a
mere plausible symbol; and that certitude can never exist in a field
which is built up on the assumption of discrete, separate parts; since
these parts do not exist—cannot exist in a continuum; and could not be
observed by man, even if they existed.
_Chapter 4._ A display of the same dualism and an assumption of the same
discontinuity between the various functions of man, and between man and
his world. The author’s attitude toward sex is worthy of the hermit in
the Egyptian desert. Sex, as an energy expressing the whole man and
woman, linking them in a full human relation, mobilizing their creative
as well as their possessive nature, is unreal for the author. But unlike
the antique gymnosophist whose rejection of sex he shares (while
ignoring his science of self-control and despising his God), Mr. Krutch
has not the courage or the will to carry out his own convictions. He
considers himself superior to his sex; but he is quite willing to
capitulate before it.
_Chapter 5._ The finest writing of the book is here. Mr. Krutch
discourses on Tragedy “as it once was” with discernment and fervor. It
is plain that he is attached to Tragedy, “dead child of fallacy and
illusion”; he can write with loving observation about the body of a
“fraud.” (a) and (b) assume discontinuity, once more. (c) and (d)
misread the modern status of literary art. Human dignity still exists,
noble action and noble lives still persevere. The disappearance of the
anthropocentric cosmos and of the personal heaven have enhanced man’s
sense of dignity within himself. He is responsible now, not as the child
of a mythic Father, but as the father of himself. Yet more is needed
than dignity and noble action for the production of Tragedy. Tragedy is
a social form. It must enact man’s dignity in communicable, common
terms. These terms are wanting. The modern conscience of the world has
not yet bridged from private into public symbols. There is nothing
discouraging in this. There were ages of social preparation, also,
before Sophocles and before Shakespeare: ages in which individual men
had dignity, in which men lived nobly, and yet in which no great Tragedy
was written.
_Chapter 6._ (a) begins with a dubious statement. The medieval science
of life was inexact; it was, indeed, founded upon self-contradictory
laws, and the dualism of these laws, which were supposed to conform to
life but did not, eventually disrupted medieval science. In “The
Re-Discovery of America,” I have gone into this question at some length.
Here it is not centrally cogent, so we let it pass. (d) and (e) again
imply discontinuity and discreteness not alone between man and the
universe, but between man and man. Men, says the author, have so little
relation among themselves that (f) if each man lived his truth according
to his essence, these multiple truths would sum to anarchy! If men are
essentially related, if the reality or truth of each is a focus of the
interplay of the whole (as philosophy, psychology and social sciences
agree), then their living by the light of their individual reality and
truth would bring them into active relation with one another, and would
result in harmony. These premises are denied by Mr. Krutch. The rest of
the chapter is less essential. It is interesting to note, however, that
it implies the impossibility of man’s ever achieving any inner principle
of order or control, whereby he might integrate his life within the
vicissitudes of the world. The chapter is the final admission of man’s
impotence. The artist is the creator of a kind of order. Man can be an
artist, says the author, when he deals with words or pigment or marble.
When he deals with life, man can be only an amoeba.
c.