when striking on the New Humanism in his investigations, formulate
his requirements of it and the aims he wished it to satisfy in a
language the contemporary Humanist does not speak. But we who call
ourselves the liberated employ, so it happens, a vocabulary keyed a
note above characteristic Humanist speech. The New Humanist’s favorite
words are: decency, moderation, measure, commonsense, the normal and
representative, the centralized, discipline, standards, humility,
self-control, vital restraint, proportionateness, decorum, stability.
His thoughts circulate around these words: they constitute the magnetic
portion of his vocabulary. The magnetic portion of the liberated
man’s vocabulary runs somewhat as follows, and you will note the
higher keying at once: honesty, daring, curiosity, experiment, zeal
for truth, self-knowledge, disinterestedness, harmony, the free mind,
spiritual freedom, integration of experience, art of life, increased
life, greater consciousness. The respective vocabularies are not
mutually exclusive; there is much overlapping in actual usage. But the
point is sound that the New Humanist is apt to employ the second set
of terms in the second place, whereas the liberated man approaching
the study of Humanism uses the Humanist’s favorite words as secondary
to the magnetic words of freedom, increased consciousness, etc. This
difference in emphasis gives us a clue that may conduct to an important
criticism of the New Humanist’s supreme method, the rule of mediation.
In approaching any subject, it is well to formulate in advance where
one stands at present, what motives impel one toward the new subject,
what one expects to find, and what one wants to discover. The liberated
man (common gender) has, in theory at least, been freed from dogma,
either naturalistic or theological. Dogma to him is any statement
offered which may be true but which is unaccompanied by a means of
verifying it. He has grown clever in distinguishing between what is
verifiable by himself and what is not: the latter he calls “dogma.” In
theory also he is freed from hypocrisy: he strives to be completely
honest with himself. His objection to most conventional modes of
thought is that they have hampered him in getting at the truth about
himself. Today he is discovering that truth, and it is, that he is
completely self-ignorant. Hear him confess his ignorance, as he is
doing in increasing numbers.
“I perceive my own ignorance on all essential matters. Why I exist I
do not know. What I am I do not know. I am ignorant of any purpose
in life. My friends and especially my enemies are more aware of my
weaknesses than I am. My economy of life is bad--I do not make the most
of it, or know how to do so. I am subject to unknown laws. Blind to
the future, forgetful of my past, in the present I exist, because of my
ignorance, as the plaything of chance.”
The discovery of the liberated man is that he is not a fallen Angel but
a feeble son of Man. On the basis of his ignorance, however, he can and
does formulate what he wishes to know and what abilities he wishes to
acquire. One word sums up the first:--Self-Knowledge. “I would like to
know what sort of creature I really am. What are my real wishes? Why do
I live and for what end? What are the conditions of happiness? How may
I live with real advantage to myself? What is the true nature of the
world that impinges on me? In short, I would like to know everything
about myself from my puzzling trivial habits to my relation with the
universe.”
As for Ability, he would, in my view, like to be a Reynard the Fox,
the “animal capable.” He wishes to be active, to become valuable and
therefore valued by men, to be devoid of humbug in the use of his skill
and single-minded in what he undertakes, above all to succeed wherever
he is. The power to do what he wishes to do!
But not one word about character. We have a confession of ignorance
followed by the recognition of a need for self-knowledge and the need
for general ability. Perhaps the intuition of the liberated person
tells him that character is a resultant, the product of his knowledge
and his ability interacting. With his needs uppermost in his mind, he
encounters the New Humanism and this system, as we have learned, puts
character foremost. The juxtaposition gives us another critical clue.
For the Humanist replies first to the very last questions--_the still
unformulated questions_--of the liberated, and the first questions of
the liberated are relegated in humanistic thought to a lesser position.
Which order is correct?
Are we close to the nub at last? Several years ago in an essay on
Irving Babbitt I closed by saying that the crux of the whole matter of
Humanism was in the questions: “To what ends in human character does
the technique of Humanism surely lead? Can it by its route attain to
the victory over circumstance announced by religion or can it only
ameliorate a determined scheme of things by the production of such
relatively minor virtues as moderation, decency and good sense?” These
questions seem to me now as then to touch the central issue. The
technique of Humanism is mediation: the law of measure, Nothing Too
Much, is supreme. The validity of this law I do not question. Whether
it is always and everywhere to be observed, that I question. What I
specifically challenge is the supremacy of the technique based on the
law of measure. Is mediation the prime law of life?
My answer must be, No.[9] I cannot set aside the fact that mediation
presupposes two things, the acquisition of self-knowledge and the
acquisition of will. _It is a technique of control._ By trying to
practice it some self-knowledge is picked up incidentally, and a call
is made upon the will to awake. But mediation is primarily concerned
with character, not with knowledge, not with development of will. A
prior method is absolutely required if mediation is to yield any great
results and that prior method is necessarily supreme. To be blunt and
homely, the New Humanist has overlooked the horse which is to pull his
cart: he has overlooked the working out of a trustworthy technique for
learning the exact truth about the individual creature who is to be
disciplined by mediation to a norm of humanity. For me then, and very
possibly for many other liberated men and women, the New Humanism is
too “advanced.” We stand at the beginning: we are pupils who have first
to learn how to attain a better working knowledge of what some day
we may hope to control. We are willing to admit the mediatory method
as one of a group of allied methods, but we cannot isolate it as the
leading and one essential means to self-development.
I have some hopes of making this point clear. It is not a destructive
criticism. I would not myself take the trouble to write a whole
book simply to overthrow something. It is, however, a criticism
of incompleteness and misplaced emphasis, and by no means implies
the discarding of the law of measure. The aim is to advance the
contribution of American Humanism nearer to a _total_ solution of the
modern problem. And I consider that an advance is made by pointing
out the absence in Humanism of a technique for self-knowledge and
will-development that at all compares in precision and plausibility
with its technique for control.
Suppose a man is today converted to the philosophy of Rousseau. He
finds his conversion need not be simply a literary one, so to speak,
for associated with the philosophy there is now a psychological
technique alleged to corroborate the rightness of Rousseauistic
ideas. The new convert can study psycho-analysis, undergo treatment
in an analyst’s office, emerge with a rather elaborate method for
interpreting his own psychology. He has, along with his philosophy, an
apparent means for verifying it, for living up to it. He is possessed
of a technique based on Rousseauistic principles which, it is claimed,
provides a continuous key to self-knowledge. It is hardly necessary for
me to add, however, that psycho-analysis is a discredited technique
for self-knowledge, and that there exists today no advertised, easily
accessible, tested, thoroughly accredited way to carry out the
Pythagorean command, Know Thyself. The illustration serves all the
same to point the fact that the New Humanism is unequipped with a
psychological technique for taking the first step. It has to rely on
introspection which notoriously is unreliable. But it relies too on
traditional knowledge, and this is to a certain degree a corrective
of introspective vagaries. For ancient wisdom--in India, in Egypt, in
Pythagorean Greece, in Palestine--may have been founded on realities
and methods to which we have lost the clue. There are good grounds for
surmising that Pythagoras, for example, was not a fanciful guesser at
all. The New Humanists being in contact with the best knowledge of
the past may therefore be right in their ideas, but we and they need
to remember that the complete technique for validating these ideas in
terms of concrete individual experience is still to find or perhaps
rediscover.
Another difficulty I have always had with the New Humanism arises over
the Will. In theory I concede the Humanists are right, but it is a
question whether in their practice the Will becomes an accomplished
fact. What is the sure test? We make effort--that we know; and
furthermore effort occurs in the prescribed field of working on
oneself. Will is psychological effort distinguished from physical
effort. But is all psychological effort to be called Willing? Remember
that psychological effort appears always to be powerfully motived: by
self-interest, fear, rivalry, desire for fame, intellectual curiosity,
a hundred varying motives. When the motive dies, the effort invariably
dies with it. Now just as I cannot grant that a man with an empty belly
who labors like a Trojan for his next meal is an example of Will, so
I cannot accept the man laboring great hours to satisfy intellectual
hunger as an instance of Willing. Will must occur in the absence of
incentive. Will would persist in working in a given direction _after_
the motive had ceased. Will is that which overcomes indifference.
I hold that we cannot be too skeptical on this topic. Nowhere else does
illusion insinuate itself so much as in regard to responsible choice
and Will. How can we make sure that we are not subtly deluded?
“Freedom is the will to be responsible for oneself”--this is one of
Nietzsche’s profoundest sayings. Certainly we all have a desire to
be responsible for ourselves. But it is equally certain that the
desire is comparatively weak, buried most of the time, intermittent
in appearance, quickly exhausted when it does appear. Clearly, we do
not get very far on our occasional desires for self-responsibility.
Our tendencies flow the other way: we delight in irresponsibility. All
the odds experience demonstrates are against any continuous effort at
being responsible for oneself. My conclusion is that Will is just that
continuous effort carried on against the whole weight of the organism,
an effort that is finally unaided by wishes and unprovoked by external
inducements--nothing less than an _independent_ activity of the psyche.
The practical conclusion I must draw from this is that men are
Will-less. The conclusion that I am not warranted in drawing in the
face of extraordinary past testimony is that men are devoid of the
potentiality of Will. “Thou art not free yet, thou seekest freedom
still”--this is Nietzsche again, and freedom must be sought in human
potentialities and won by the actualization of potentials, since as
we actually are, we are not free. The New Humanist has confused a
potentiality, the Will, with an actuality that can be described as
_conditioned_ psychological effort directed toward self-control. I
attach much weight to that criticism.
It seems to me of great consequence to realize this:--it is “failure
of will” we know, not acts of Will. The testimony of a therapeutist
strikingly confirms what I have just said. Therapeutists often find
that their patients want to get well, know what the trouble is and
what they must do, and yet fail to exert the required will. In an
unusually candid paper read some years ago before the Medical Section
of the British Psychological Society Dr. James Carruthers Young,
formerly a surgeon, now a practitioner of the Jung school of analytic
psychology, made the following remarks which succeed in putting the
problem of the Will on a practical basis. “Every form of occultism
aims at self-development through deepening, or expanding the limits
of, self-consciousness, or however you like to express it. Now it
is obvious that this laudable object cannot be attained merely by
embracing the ideas of a system, however rapturously. The all-important
factor of the exercise and proper application of will must enter, if
anything is to be achieved. If it does not, then the ideas, however
beautiful and intriguing, in the end become merely ‘dope’ ... it seemed
to me that ‘failure of will’ was _the bête noire_ in neuroses. Roughly,
the neurotic symptom from the Freudian standpoint is the disguised
expression of an affect which is too painful to be _faced_. From the
Adlerian standpoint, it is an ‘incomparable arrangement,’ by which
the patient avoids _facing_ a certain aspect of what we call reality.
In the broadest sense in both systems, it is a question of failure to
_face up_ to reality. Now it by no means follows that, when it is made
clear to the patient by analysis what aspects of reality he has been
unconsciously avoiding, that he will at once be able to cope with it.
This is particularly evident in the case of obsessionists, as I have
proved to my own satisfaction again and again. A washing obsessionist,
for example, cheerfully subscribes to the theory of origin of her
washing, but when called upon to make the slightest new adaptation,
always falls back on her washing. In effect she says: ‘I cannot marry,
or do this, that or the other, because, you see, I wash.’ To put
the matter in a nutshell, analytical knowledge is not necessarily
effective knowledge.
“Now I think it will be generally agreed that what I have called
‘failure of will’ is often bound up with an endocrine deficiency or
dyscrasia, sometimes acquired and sometimes apparently so fundamental
as to justify the term ‘primary plasmic insufficiency,’ which
corresponds to Adler’s organic inferiority. Unfortunately, the science
of endocrinology was not, and is not yet, so far advanced as to enable
us to remedy such dyscrasias with anything approaching to certainty
or precision, even granted that our powers of diagnosis may be able
to divine the true nature of such complicated conditions. My problem,
then, was how to overcome the difficulty of ‘failure of will’ by means
of a definite psychological method.”
It seems to me no less important for the Humanists to realize that
_there_ is the problem for the ordinary person as well as for the
pathological, namely, how to reinforce a sound theory of the Will
with a sound method for overcoming ‘failure of will.’ To vanquish the
obstinate difficulties, the theory must become practical.
* * * * *
The dilemma turns out to be like this:--pursue your natural desires
and you find they do not lead to that signal of well-being we call
happiness but reveal instead the need for a re-education of desire,
so that you may train yourself to desire the kind of happiness that
is possible for men; choose Humanism as a system of re-education of
desire and you must wonder if it has the strength to perform the task.
One alternative deceives you by its bright appeal, the other seems
inferior in its call to the imagination, to the hidden latent powers of
psychology. But inferior to what? Inferior to religion at its purest.
Religion says it is a superhuman task to overcome one’s naturalism.
If it is a superhuman undertaking, then one may ask, what chance is
there of effecting a real mastery by anything less than a science for
divinizing man?
For here is man, the prey of innumerable illusions, stunted in
psychological growth, spiritually inert, bewildered by himself,
discordant in behavior, perhaps incurably paralyzed in will--will
anything but the most tremendous means metamorphose him into a falconer
of reality, an experiencer of bliss and ecstasy, a doer of deeds on
the fighting edge of the cosmos? The New Humanism is a morality not
untouched by dignified emotion. But I say that on the whole it is
morals not sufficiently touched with poetry, not endowed with the
tremendous shaking appeal to our whole being that religion has been
known to exercise. Religion is more than Arnold defined it, it includes
morality touched by emotion, but it includes art, science, philosophy
as well. It is insatiable for perfection and so must quicken and
recharge every side of our consciousness. It is, I think, properly
impatient of all half-measures everywhere, impatient of such a reason
as Babbitt gives, the fear of self-delusion, for choosing a more
moderate attack on life’s riddles, impatient of short aims--_because
it realizes the almost hopeless condition of man_. For psychological
freedom everything must be risked. That is what we learn when we study
the religious spirit. By its fiery light, we liberated ones perceive
that we are in truth only pseudo-liberated. We have put the weight
on being free from something, but the real question is, free for
what? I have been writing, quite knowingly, about the dilemma of the
_pseudo-liberated_. If we realize our pseudo-state, then as we approach
the New Humanism, our question becomes a searching one, will it truly
liberate? My suggestion has been to hold this system up against the
blazing background of the religious spirit, and against that background
it seems certain to me two major defects appear in Humanism: the lack
of a science of self-study and a not sufficiently stringent conception
of the Will.
Might we not say that twentieth century Humanism is a system of right
conjectures? “Do you not perceive,” the prophetess Diotima says to
Socrates in _The Banquet_, “that there is something between ignorance
and wisdom?” “What is that?” asked Socrates. “To have a right opinion
or conjecture. Observe, that this kind of opinion, for which no reason
can be rendered, cannot be called knowledge; for how can that be called
knowledge, which is without evidence or reason? Nor ignorance, on the
other hand; for how can that be called ignorance which arrives at the
persuasion of that which it really is? A right opinion is something
between understanding and ignorance.” Humanism to me has the value, and
it is a high value, of wise conjecture about the way to lead a human
life. For undoubtedly it is better, in default of wisdom, to be guided
by true opinions than by demonstrably false ones. But we must not lose
sight of the conjectural basis of Humanism. We must throw ourselves
into the task of validating to the point of indisputability the right
opinions involved. The New Humanist draws upon the Sages: his business
is to become a Sage, to achieve in his own person the sensation of
absolute knowledge, to go beyond the intermediate stage to wisdom.
Can he do so without hitching his wagon to a more remote star? I think
not. There is the effort to be superman, not to be solely identified of
course with the peculiar effort of one man, Nietzsche, and this effort
while failing to reach its end does leave as a by-product a growth in
human-ness. But the less ambitious effort to be human--does it hit the
mark? Superhumanism gives birth to the human, or humanism with the
small h. It is claimed that Humanism gives birth to the human, too, but
must we not qualify that somewhat in our final chapter?
XII
THE END OF THE TETHER
_“It is time for man to mark out his goal, to plant the germ
of his highest hopes. His soil is still rich enough for that
purpose.”_--Friedrich Nietzsche.
It is not only in politics that the advice to use large scale maps is
excellent. If one refers daily “crises” to a big map, one is far less
likely to fly into political hysteria over trifling remote events: one
thinks politically in terms commensurate with the planet, not of one
corner of it distant only a few inches on the small map from the other
side of the world. But one requires also, and even more, a large scale
map of life as a preventive of petty thoughts. We need to refer such
questions as closed the preceding chapter to a map of life that will
enlarge our mental activities in trying to reply to them. The main
trouble with the cult of contemporaneity is that it has lost the sense
of greatness and spaciousness. Its map is a crude child’s drawing--a
large out-of-proportion area across which is scrawled, “Here Be the
Moderns,” and outlying this are indeterminate shadowy regions peopled
by lesser beings, dwarfs, and cavemen--our forerunners. History to the
one-sided enthusiasts for the contemporaneous is really Aunt Polly’s
Story of Mankind which I sometimes think Donald Ogden Stewart has
immortalized: it is a series of steps forward from ancient Egypt to the
great and glorious present, a progress culminating in Darwin, Freud,
Joyce and Proust, Ford and Lenin, Stravinsky and Bertrand Russell, and
a host of other recently elected candidates for the New Olympus. It
will not do to use so disproportioned and confined a map in measuring
the work of Babbitt and More who have plotted out their intellectual
campaign on a larger scale than we are accustomed to. We must relate
their work to very extensive perspectives: we must find some scale for
the greatness of the ages. How else can we measure the truly human
and the superhuman? For the superhuman covers all that man may be the
bridge to: the truly human covers the bridge, the whole transition
itself. The American Humanist makes the bridge the end. But can he
build it unless the struggle is to reach the other shore, to cross the
discontinuity, the gulf between Man and the Absolute? The superhumanist
treats the bridge as means for prospective travel. An unsuccessful
traveller, he yet may go further in completing the bridge than the
Humanist who thinks only of bridge-building.
The map of life I shall avail myself of was drawn by a genius at the
age of twenty-eight, a genius of whom the leading New Humanists do not
share my high opinion. But that discrepancy I choose to think arises
from the defect of orthodoxy. To Paul Elmer More, for example, _The
Birth of Tragedy_ by Friedrich Nietzsche merely makes a distinction in
the classical world that “takes the form of a harsh and unreal contrast
between the Dionysian principle of unrest and growth and creation for
which he expresses the highest regard and the Apollonian principle of
rest and renunciation and contraction for which, as Platonism, he has
the deepest aversion.” But for me _The Birth of Tragedy_ is a profound
and terrific document by which we may get the most vivid impression
of the deterioration of modern life, classify the New Humanists as
socratic or theoretical men, and learn what we must try to do with the
new situation in American culture created by the advent of Humanism.
The book had extravagances of judgment and a fatuous hopefulness
for German music which Nietzsche corrected in _Ecce Homo_ but the
central thesis he left unimpaired--and the modern world has left it
uncomprehended.
The interpretation of Greek tragedy has been a field of bitter
contention between romanticists and classicists. The romanticists
see chiefly in Greek tragedy the violence, the melodrama, great
horrors, headlong actions, titanic personages. The classicists see
ethical imports, a background of order, superb control, religious
values. From the standpoint of a student of Nietzsche both parties
are right--and wrong; for Nietzsche divined a third interpretation,
a paradox of understanding, whereby the romantic and the classicist
views are held in solution, but the solution itself is a new conception
of tragedy. Nietzsche saw in Greek tragedy the ever-renewed conflict
and reconciliation of two principles, the Dionysian to which alone
the romanticist is susceptible and the Apollonian which alone wins
the classicist. The tragic view perceives the necessity for the
mutual agonistic struggle: it is based on the realization that Apollo
and Dionysus must war with each other, must continue forever in
that strange paradox, a synthesis founded on struggle. There must
ever exist, if life is to ascend, a turbulent frenzied uprush of
Formability, and there must coexist a constant reduction to Form.
On the one side of the world-stage you have Dionysus with his wildest
music, his ecstasy and poetry, his drunkenness, his sheer states of
Being. On the other side there is Apollo, the soothsayer, the god of
plastic energies, the cool and comely, olympian in his dream-states.
The Formable and the Formed!