This has been, and still to a very great extent remains, most
specifically true of philosophy. The environment with which philosophy
concerns itself is nothing less than the whole universe; its content is,
within the history of its dominant tradition, absolutely general and
abstract; it is, of all great human enterprises, even religion, least
constrained by the direction and march of events or the mandate of
circumstance. Like music, it expresses most truly the immediate and
intrinsic interests of the mind, its native bias and its inward goal. It
has been constituted, for this reason, of the so-called "normative"
sciences, envisaging the non-existent as real, forcing upon nature pure
values, forms of the spirit incident to the total life of this world,
unmixed with baser matter. To formulate ultimate standards, to be
completely and utterly lyrical has been the prerogative of philosophy
alone. Since these standards reappear in all other reconstructions of
the environment and most clearly in art and in religion, it is pertinent
to enumerate them, and to indicate briefly their bearing on existence.
The foremost outstanding is perhaps "the unity of the world."
Confronted by the perplexing menace of the variation of experience, the
dichotomies and oppositions of thoughts and things, the fusion and
diversifications of many things into one and one into many, mankind has,
from the moment it became reflective, felt in the relation of the One
and the Many the presence of a riddle that engendered and sustained
uneasiness, a mystery that concealed a threat. The mind's own
preference, given the physiological processes that condition its
existence, constitution, and operation, could hardly come to rest in a
more fundamental normation than Unity. A world which is _one_ is easier
to live in and with; initial adjustment therein is final adjustment; in
its substance there exists nothing sudden and in its character nothing
uncontrollable. It guarantees whatever vital equilibrium the organism
has achieved in it, ill or good. It secures life in attainment and
possession, insuring it repose, simplicity, and spaciousness. A world
which is many complicates existence: it demands watchful consideration
of irreducible discrete individualities: it necessitates the integration
and humanization in a common system of adjustment of entities which in
the last analysis refuse all ordering and reject all subordination,
consequently keeping the mind on an everlasting jump, compelling it to
pay with eternal vigilance the price of being. The preference for unity,
then, is almost inevitable, and the history of philosophy, from the
Vedas to the Brahma Somaj and from Thales to Bergson, is significantly
unanimous in its attempts to prove that the world is, somehow, through
and through one. That the oneness requires _proof_ is _prima facie_
evidence that it is a value, a desiderate, not an existence. And how
valuable it is may be seen merely in the fact that it derealizes the
inner conflict of interests, the incompatibilities between nature and
man, the uncertainties of knowledge, and the certainties of evil, and
substitutes therefore the ultimate happy unison which "the identity of
the different" compels.
Unity is the common desiderate of philosophic systems of all
metaphysical types--neutral, materialistic, idealistic. But the dominant
tradition has tended to think this unity in terms of _interest_, of
_spirit_, of _mentality_. It has tended, in a word, to assimilate nature
to human nature, to identify things with the _values_ of things, to
envisage the world in the image of man. To it, the world is all spirit,
ego, or idea; and if not such through and through, then entirely
subservient, in its unhumanized parts, to the purposes and interests of
ego, idea, or spirit. Why, is obvious. A world of which the One
substance is such constitutes a totality of interest and purpose which
faces no conflict and has no enemy. It is fulfilment even before it is
need, and need, indeed, is only illusion. Even when its number is many,
the world is a better world if the stuff of these many is the _same_
stuff as the spirit of man. For mind is more at home with mind than with
things; the pathetic fallacy is the most inevitable and most general.
Although the totality of spirit is conceived as good, that is, as
actualizing all our desiderates and ideals, it would still be felt that,
even if the totality were evil, and not God, but the Devil ruled the
roost, the world so constituted must be better than one utterly
non-spiritual. We can understand and be at home with malevolence: it
offers at least the benefits of similarity, of companionship, of
intimateness, of consubstantiality with _will_; its behavior may be
foreseen and its intentions influenced; but no horror can be greater
than that of utter aliency. How much of religion turns with a persistent
tropism to the consideration of the devil and his works, and how much it
has fought his elimination from the cosmic scheme! Yet never because it
loved the devil. The deep-lying reason is the fact that the humanization
of Evil into Devil mitigates Evil and improves the world. Philosophy has
been least free from this corrective and spiritizing bias. Though it has
cared less for the devil, it has predominantly repudiated aliency, has
sought to prove spirit the cause and substance of the world, and in that
degree, to transmute the aliency of nature into sameness with human
nature.
With unity and spirituality, _eternity_ makes a third. This norm is a
fundamental attribute of the One God himself, and interchangeable with
his ineffable name: the Lord is Eternal, and the Eternal, even more than
the One, receives the eulogium of exclusive realness. To the
philosophical tradition it is the most real. Once more the reason should
be obvious. The underlying urge which pushes the mind to think the world
as a unity pushes it even more inexorably to think the world as
timeless. For unity is asserted only against the perplexities of a
manyness which may be static and unchanging, and hence comparatively
simple. But eternity is asserted and set against mutability: it is the
negation of change, of time, of novelty, of the suddenness and
slaughter of the flux of life itself, which consumes what it generates,
undermines what it builds and sweeps to destruction what it founds to
endure. Change is the arch-enemy of a life which struggles for
self-_preservation_, of an intellect which operates spontaneously by the
logic of identity, of a will which seeks to convert others into sames.
It substitutes a different self for the old, it falsifies systems of
thought and deteriorates systems of life. It makes unity impossible and
manyness inevitable. It upsets every actual equilibrium that life
attains. It opens the doors and windows of every closed and comfortable
cosmos to all transcosmic winds that blow, with whatever they carry of
possible danger and possible ill. It is the very soul of chaos in which
the pleasant, ordered world is such a little helpless thing. Of this
change eternity is by primary intention the negation, as its
philological form shows. It is _not-time_, without positive intrinsic
content, and in its secondary significances, i.e., in those
significances which appear in metaphysical dialectic, without meaning;
since it is there a pure negation, intrinsically affirming nothing, of
the same character as "not-man" or "not-donkey," standing for a nature
altogether unspecific and indeterminable in the residual universe. By a
sort of obverse implication it does, however, possess, in the
philosophic tradition, a positive content which accrues to it by virtue
of what it denies. This content makes it a designation for the
persistence and perdurability of desiderated quality--from metaphysical
unity and spirituality to the happy hunting-grounds or a woman's
affection. At bottom it means the assurance that the contents of value
cannot and will not be altered or destroyed, that their natures and
their relations to man do not undergo change. There is no recorded
attempt to prove that evil is eternal: eternity is _eternity of the good
alone_.
Unity, spirituality, and eternity, then, are the forms which contents of
value receive under the shaping hands of the philosophic tradition, to
which they owe their metaphysical designation and of which the business
has so largely and uniquely been to _prove_ them the foundations and
ontological roots of universal nature. But "the problem of evil" does
not come to complete solution with these. Even in a single,
metaphysically spiritual and unchanging world, man himself may still be
less than a metaphysical absolute and his proper individuality doomed to
absorption, his wishes to obstruction and frustration. Of man,
therefore, the tradition posits _immortality_ and _freedom_, and even
the materialistic systems have sought to keep somehow room for some form
of these goods.
To turn first to immortality. Its source and matrix is less the love of
life than the fear of death--that fear which Lucretius, dour poet of
disillusion, so nobly deplored. That he had ever himself been possessed
of it is not clear, but it is perfectly clear that his altogether sound
arguments against it have not abolished its operation, nor its effect
upon human character, society, and imagination. Fear which made the
gods, made also the immortality of man, the denial of death. What the
fear's unmistakable traits may be has never been articulately said,
perhaps never can be said. Most of us never may undergo the fear of
death; we undergo comfort and discomfort, joy and sorrow, intoxication
and reaction, love and disgust; we aim to preserve the one and to
abolish the other, but we do not knowingly undergo the fear of death.
Indeed, it is logically impossible that we should, since to do so would
be to acquire an experience of death such that we should be conscious of
being unconscious, sensible of being insensible, aware of being unaware.
We should be required to be and not to be at the same instant, in view
of which Lucretius both logically and wisely advises us to remember that
when death is, we are not; and when we are, death is not.
Experience and feeling are, however, neither logical nor wise, and to
these death is far from the mere non-being which the poet would have us
think it. To these it has a positive reality which makes the fear of it
a genuine cause of conduct in individuals and in groups, with a basis in
knowledge such as is realized in the diminishing of consciousness under
anaesthetic, in dreams of certain types, and most generally in the
nascent imitation of the _rigor mortis_ which makes looking upon the
dead such a horror to most of us. Even then, however, something is
lacking toward the complete realization of death, and children and
primitive peoples never realize it at all. Its full meaning comes out as
_an unsatisfied hunger in the living_ rather than as a condition of the
dead, who, alive, would have satisfied this hunger. And the realization
of this meaning requires sophistication, requires a lengthy corporate
memory and the disillusions which civilization engenders. Primitive
peoples ask for no proof of immortality because they have no notion of
mortality; civilized thinking has largely concerned itself about the
proof of immortality because its assurance of life has been shaken by
the realization of death through the gnawing of desire which only the
dead could still. The _proof_ which in the history of thought is offered
again and again, be it noted, is not of the reality of life, but of the
unreality and inefficacy of death. Immortality is like eternity, a
negative term; it is _im_mortality. The experienced fact is mortality;
and the fear of it is only an inversion of the desire which it
frustrates, just as frustrated love becomes hatred. The doctrine of
immortality, hence, springs from the fear of death, not from the love of
life, and immortality is a value-form, not an existence. Now, although
fear of death and love of life are in constant play in character and
conduct, neither constitutes the original, innocent urge of life within
us. "Will to live," "will to power," "struggle for existence," and other
Germanic hypostases of experienced events which the great civil war in
Europe is just now giving such an airing, hardly deserve, as natural
data, the high metaphysical status that Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and
company have given them. They follow in fact upon a more primary type of
living, acting form, a type to which the "pathetic fallacy" or any other
manner of psychologizing may not apply. The most that can be said about
this type is that its earlier stages are related to its later ones as
potential is to kinetic energy. If, since we are discussing a
metaphysical issue, we must mythologize, we might call it the "will to
self-expression." Had this "will" chanced to happen in a world which was
made for it, or had it itself been the substance of the world, "struggle
for existence," "will to live," and "will to power," never could have
supervened. All three of these expressions designate data which require
an opposite, a counter-will, to give them meaning. There can be a
struggle for existence only when there are obstacles thereto, a will to
live only when there are obstructions to life, a will to power only when
there is a resistance against which power may be exercised. Expression
alone is self-implying and self-sufficient, and in an altogether
favorable environment we might have realized our instincts, impulses,
interests, appetites and desires, expressed and actualized our
potentialities, and when our day is done, have ceased, as unconcerned
about going on as about starting.
Metchnikoff speaks somewhere of an instinct toward death and the
euphoria which accompanies its realization. He cites, I think, no more
than two or three cases. To most of us the mere notion of the existence
and operation of such an instinct seems fanciful and uncanny. Yet from
the standpoint of biology nothing should be more natural. Each living
thing has its span, which consists of a cycle from birth through
maturation and senescence to dissolution, and the latter half of the
process is as "fateful" and "inevitable" as the former! Dying is itself
the inexpugnable conclusion of that setting free of organic
potentialities which we call life, and if dying seems horrid and
unnatural, it seems so because for most of us death is violent, because
its occasion is a shock from without, not the realization of a tendency
from within. In a completely favorable environment we should not
struggle to exist, we should simply exist; we should not will to live,
we should simply live, i.e., we should actualize our potentialities and
die.
But, once more alas, our environment is not completely favorable, and
there's the rub. That disorderly constellation of instincts and
appetites and interests which constitutes the personality of the best of
us does not work itself out evenly. At the most favorable, our
self-realizations are lopsided and distorted. For every capacity of ours
in full play, there are a score at least mutilated, sometimes
extirpated, always repressed. They never attain the free fullness of
expression which is consciousness, or when they do, they find themselves
confronted with an opponent which neutralizes their maturation at every
point. Hence, as I have already indicated, they remain in, or revert to,
the subterranean regions of our lives, and govern the making of our
biographies from their seats below. What they fail to attain in fact
they succeed in generating in imagination to compensate for the failure;
they realize themselves vicariously. The doctrine of immortality is the
generic form of such vicarious self-realization, as frequently by means
of dead friends and relatives to whose absolute non-being the mind will
not assent, as by means of the everlasting heaven in which the mind may
forever disport itself amid those delights it had to forego on earth.
Much of the underlying motive of the doctrine is a _sehnsucht_ and
nostalgia after the absent dead; little a concern for the continuity of
the visible living. And often this passion is so intense that system
after system in the philosophic tradition is constructed to satisfy it,
and even the most disillusioned of systems--for example, Spinoza's--will
preserve its form if not its substance.
That the "freedom of the will" shall be a particularized compensatory
desiderate like the immortality of the soul, the unity, the
spirituality, and the eternity of the world is a perversion worked upon
this ideal by the historic accident we call Christianity. The
assumptions of that theory concerning the nature of the universe and the
destiny of man, being through and through compensatory, changed freedom
from the possible fact and actual hope of Hellenic systems into the
"problem" of the Christian ones. The consequent controversy over
"free-will," the casuistic entanglement of this ideal with the notion of
responsibility, its theological development in the problem of the
relation of an omnipotent God to a recalcitrant creature, have
completely obscured its primal significance. For the ancients, the free
man and the "wise man" were identical, and the wise man was one who all
in all had so mastered the secrets of the universe that there was no
desire of his that was not actually realized, no wish the satisfaction
of which was obstructed. His way in the world was a way without let or
hindrance. Now freedom and wisdom in this sense is never a fact and ever
a value. Its attainment ensues upon created distinctions between
appearance and reality, upon the postulation of the metaphysical
existence of the value-forms of the unity, spirituality, and the
eternity of the world, in the realization of which the wise man founded
his wisdom and gained his freedom. Freedom, then, is an ideal that could
have arisen only in the face of _obstruction to action directed toward
the fulfilling and satisfying of interests_. It is the assurance of the
smooth and uninterrupted flow of behavior; the flow of desire into
fulfilment, of thought into deed, of act into fact. It is perhaps the
most pervasive and fundamental of all desiderates, and in a definite way
the others may be said to derive from it and to realize it. For the
soul's immortality, the world's unity and spirituality and eternity, are
but conditions which facilitate and assure the flow of life without
obstruction. They define a world in which danger, evil, and frustration
are non-existent; they so reconstitute our actual environment that the
obstructions it offers to the course of life are abolished. They make
the world "rational," and in the great philosophic tradition the freedom
of man is held to be a function of the rationality of the world. Thus,
even deterministic solutions of the "problem of freedom" are at bottom
no more than the rationalization of natural existence by the dialectical
removal of obstructions to human existence. Once more, Spinoza's
solution is typical, and its form is that of all idealisms as well. It
ensues by way of identification of the obstruction's interest with those
of the obstructee: the world becomes ego or the ego the world, with
nothing outside to hinder or to interfere. In the absolute, existence is
declared to be value _de facto_; in fact, _de jure_. And by virtue of
this compensating reciprocity the course of life runs free.
Is any proof necessary that these value-forms are not the contents of
the daily life? If there be, why this unvarying succession of attempts
to _prove_ that they are the contents of daily life that goes by the
name of history of philosophy? In fact, experience as it comes from
moment to moment is not one, harmonious and orderly, but multifold,
discordant, and chaotic. Its stuff is not spirit, but stones and railway
wrecks and volcanoes and Mexico and submarines, and trenches, and
frightfulness, and Germany, and disease, and waters, and trees, and
stars, and mud. It is not eternal, but changes from instant to instant
and from season to season. Actually, men do not live forever; death is a
fact, and immortality is literally as well as in philosophic discourse
not so much an aspiration for the continuity of life as an aspiration
for the elimination of death, purely _im_mortality. Actually the will is
not free, each interest encounters obstruction, no interest is
completely satisfied, all are ultimately cut off by death.
Such are the general features of all human experience, by age
unwithered, and with infinite variety forever unstaled. The traditional
philosophic treatment of them is to deny their reality, and to call them
appearance, and to satisfy the generic human interest which they oppose
and repress by means of the historical reconstruction in imaginative
dialectic of a world constituted by these most generalized value-forms
and then to eulogize the reconstruction with the epithet "reality."
When, in the course of human events, such reconstruction becomes limited
to the biography of particular individuals, is an expression of their
concrete and unique interest, is lived and acted on, it is called
paranoia. The difference is not one of kind, but of concreteness,
application, and individuality. Such a philosophy applied universally in
the daily life is a madness, like Christian Science: kept in its proper
sphere, it is a fine art, the finest and most human of the arts, a
reconstruction in discourse of the whole universe, in the image of the
free human spirit. Philosophy has been reasonable because it is so
unpersonal, abstract, and general, like music; because, in spite of its
labels, its reconstructions remain pure desiderates and value-forms,
never to be confused with and substituted for existence. But
philosophers even to this day often have the delusion that the
substitutions are actually made.[92]