The next development in.., p.26
The Next Development in Man, page 26
In his concept of God-substance he denied process; in his life he avoided relations with others; in his heart he failed to maintain that transcendent aesthetic comprehension in which all things are pure because necessary. Here nature and life are merciless; whoever aspires far, necessarily reveals his limitations. Excellence is indeed difficult and rare. All forms of intellectual idealism express the very human desire for a lasting harmony, and the intensity of one special form of idealism arises from a deep-lying emotional disharmony. In one sentence which stands out as alien to the rest of his entire work Spinoza confesses to us what he dared not admit to himself, a clue to the source of his denial of woman, and with her of the fuller life of man. He is discussing "jealousy":
"This situation occurs principally in the case of love of woman; since whoever imagines that the woman whom he loves has given herself to another, will be sad not merely because his own desire is thwarted, but because he will feel disgust with it, being compelled to connect his image of the beloved person with the privy parts and excreta of the other."
To the unitary consciousness organic facts are innocent, but dissociated man may by a shudder reveal that his divine comprehension is no more than an intellectual pretense. The spiritual achievement of Europe is displayed in our ability to recognize the significance of those betraying words; we are learning to recognize the limitations of the subjective consciousness, and to separate in it the valid from the invalid. To the dissociated mind, engrossed in its own subjective ideas, it appears that something is damaged when attention is called to a defect in genius, but in fact only its own illusions are affected. Spinoza remains the same, so true to himself that we can learn not only from his superb intellect, monistic but static, but also from the underlying division which separated his consciousness from the organic matrix of his life. The perverse association confessed by Spinoza is one of the many sources of dissociated idealism. Disgust with any aspect of organic function, whether it leads to over-emphasis or inhibition, expresses the distortion which accompanies a dissociation of the human system. The, example of Goethe shows that such dissociation is not a necessary element in a developing and creative personality. Spinoza overcame much of the ignorant dogmatism of Christian morality, but in preferring a static harmony to development, and isolation with his god to the fuller life of action, he reveals a limitation which renders his thought relatively infertile. In this he represents the idealism which has now to be overcome.
Yet in many respects Spinoza was not merely ahead of his own century, but represented an attitude of self-conscious man towards his own life which still lies ahead. Christianity serves to maintain and compensate a dissociation; Spinoza, in spite of the limitations of his static isolation, rejects the moralistic attitude, and the religious emphasis on sin and repentance. Rationalism still divides matter and spirit, and uses different techniques to study the two realms; Spinoza asserts their unity. He is thus at once the symbol of European rational idealism, and yet also far ahead of it. This paradox arises because the form of his temperament and thought constitutes a transitional state; between the static dualism of Europe and the unitary process thought which is now in development, Spinoza represents a mixed unitary static form. This explains why he is at once ahead of and behind contemporary thought. Such conceptions as process, tendency, development, find no place in his ethical geometry; in this he is before Bruno, before even Aristotle, back with Plato and Euclid. On the other hand, in his radical monistic emphasis, his inability to see man in any other way than as a part of the general order of nature, and his vision of the divine as a pervasive unity of form, he reaches far ahead through Goethe to Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and the unitary age. But this far-reaching intuition of a new morality, a revaluation replacing the morality of dissociation, was not the result of any arbitrary prophetic magic. It arose directly from his single outlook, and displays some of the positive qualities of the unitary principle, prejudiced by its static frame. Monistic thought may be static but a unitary attitude to life cannot be; in Spinoza the static element represented a failure to live and think according to his own conceptions. He was a yea-sayer to God and to nature, while denying the fuller personal life.
The following extracts show Spinoza's intransigent monism, in which he parts company with the main European tradition; his pantheism, which sees God in everything and man himself as a part of God which happens to have a thinking body; and his enjoyment of the detailed variety of fact in this pervasive unity. This characteristic emphasis on unity and order links Spinoza on the one hand with Heraclitus, prior to the differentiation of European conceptual thought, and on the other hand with the present age in its need to re-establish order. Yet in his thought we feel the poverty of an intellectual idealism which neglects the development of personality by active experience through which old ideals are transcended. Spinoza's thought is a ghost-like spirit, lacking the time-sense which is indispensable to a more mature and complete life and thought.
"Free is that which exists solely according to the necessity of its own nature, and whose action is determined by itself; necessary, or rather compelled, is that which is determined by something else to exist and act in a given manner. -- There is nothing arbitrary in the nature of things; but everything is determined by the necessity of the nature of God to exist and act in a given manner. The order and relationships of ideas are the same as the order and relationships of things. -- The will cannot be called a free, but only a necessary cause. -- To those who ask why God did not make all men in such a manner that they would live by their reason, I answer, because he had enough material to make everything from the highest degree of perfection to the lowest. -- Men deceive themselves when they regard themselves as free; and this view merely results from the fact that they are aware of their actions but do not know the causes which determine them. -- There is in the mind no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause which in turn is determined by another and this again by another, and so on without end. -- Every man comes into the world without knowledge of the causes of things, but with the instinct to seek his own benefit and full awareness of this. From this it follows that men consider themselves free, since they are aware of their own wills and instincts and do not even dream of the causes which determine them to desire and to will, because they are ignorant of them. Most of those who have written on the emotions and behavior of men do not appear to be dealing with natural phenomena which follow the general laws of nature, but with matters which stand outside nature. Indeed they seem to treat man as a state within the state. For they believe rather that man disturbs the order of nature, than that he must follow it, and that he has absolute power over his actions and is determined by nothing other than himself. Further, they ascribe human frailty and instability not to the general forms of nature, but to goodness knows what crimes of human nature, which in consequence they lament, laugh at, or despise, or more commonly curse. And everyone who can eloquently decry the weakness of the human spirit, is regarded as divinely inspired. -- Happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; and we enjoy happiness not because we control our desires; on the contrary we are able to control our desires because we enjoy happiness. -- Yet excellence is as hard as it is rare. -- Whoso truly loves God must not desire God to love him in return."
Goethe (1749-1832) is a unitary man, living in the eighteenth century. All that is universal in him is characteristic of the periods which still lie ahead, while his limitations are those of two centuries ago. Goethe stands beyond the range of personal or literary criticism because, like Socrates and Jesus, he unhesitatingly followed a vision of life which bore within it the germ of centuries to come. Like them he dared to live his vision, not in isolation but in the world of men, and to live it out to the end. The vast difference between him and them, which makes the comparison bewildering unless the mind is held steadily on the major issue, arises from the fact that they heralded the dissociated man whom we know while he foretells a unitary man who is not yet recognized. At the level of philosophic truth the three had comparable inspiration; their differences give some measure of the changes wrought by the two thousand years of that dissociation. Ancient man was innocently at one with nature; the attention of European man was drawn to all that seemed to separate himself from nature; unitary man re-establishes his unity with nature through the discovery of the universal forms of process operating in himself. Goethe is not merely the first unitary process thinker since Heraclitus; he is the only figure of stature who did not lessen but enriched his knowledge and his personality by the recovery of the sense of unity with nature. He is the only adequate example of unitary man.
Those who approach Goethe merely as man or author of the eighteenth century are bound to end in a confusion of values; to dissociated man, the forms of his genius and of his personal life seem to invite both reverence and protest. There is only one unfailing clue: Goethe was a sport of nature; unitary man finding himself alive between Newton and the industrial age; compelled to attempt universality, but prematurely; lacking certain essential clues to the understanding of himself and nature; damaged by his failure to achieve in science what he was convinced his method should ensure; driven back in his loneliness to feed arrogantly on his own superb assurance; uniquely wise, and yet so rarely self-forgetful; genius, and yet court official. We need not here look deeper into either his frustrated spontaneity or his satisfactory art of eluding tragedy. Most of these things fall into place; they express the necessary situation of a unitary process nature in Goethe's time.
The foundation of his uniqueness was perhaps a peculiar form of vitality, an intense enthusiasm for life, which prevented the development of any inner dualism and led him to reject the dissociated aspects of the tradition. His vitality was peculiar only because it was, in a dissociated community, abnormally normal. Life and nature were manifestly a process of change and, wherever possible, of development. That was as clear to him subjectively in his own passionate demands of life, as it was objectively in his observation of men and of nature and in his study of history. The whole affair was a rhythm of change and development, in which the diastole and systole, the alternations of tension and release, and the steady intensification of the process, all played an essential part. The unity of nature as process was beyond question. Nothing persisted unchanged, metamorphosis was universal, and time was necessary for the completion of each stage. Logical systems and mathematical analysis missed the point; the individual phenomenon constituted by each system following its own development was the only truth, further symbolism was unnecessary. Each aper�u could be displayed through individual examples, from human life or nature; in the one case it was in a literary form, drama or poem; in the other as a scientific description of the significance which some natural object had for him as subject. The dualisms of "Faust" are a poet's recording of dissociated life; he warned Eckermann not to look there for any general attitude to life.
If the whole of nature is one system in perpetual transformation and development, the attempt to isolate any part is bound to lead to failure. In particular the separation of man as subject from the field of objective nature blinds him to the form of life proper to him. Man can only fully understand himself by fusing the objective knowledge which is gained by observation of the whole of organic nature with the subjective knowledge of individual experience. This can bring a new ease and self-acceptance, an innocence based on knowledge. The negative prejudices of conventional morality are replaced by a positive enthusiasm for developing life, and condemnation by ironic tolerance. Yet this operative self-knowledge could not be attained by the merely introspective or intellectual analysis proposed by Spinoza. The ancient admonition "know thyself" was suspect, as part of a priestly conspiracy to distract men from the fuller practical life towards the illusions of introspection and penitence. "Man only knows himself in so far as he knows the world, for he only becomes aware of the world in himself, and of himself in the world." Effective self-knowledge can only be gained in action, and can only be maintained by being perpetually developed.
To moralists this outlook appears pagan, to analytical minds it seems vague, and to monotheists it has the quality of a return to primitive pantheism. Yet it was neither pagan, nor vague, nor pantheist. Goethe did not propose a return to the undifferentiated condition of Heraclitus. The development of man led from undifferentiated unity with nature, through a differentiation achieved by separation, to a new organized unity. But this last state would be different from the first; it must contain within its recovered unity all the differentiated knowledge, all the specialized organs and faculties, of two thousand years of development. What appeared pagan was a re-integration of human nature by the self-acceptance that must result from a unitary knowledge of the human system as part of the system of nature; what appeared vague was the outline of a novel world of unitary process thought lacking the illusory precision of static concepts but offering instead an ordered system of thought; what appeared pantheistic, was not, as with Spinoza, the vision of God in everything, but an unquestioning acceptance of the phenomenon itself, of the unity in the variety of concrete processes, which took the place of dissociated man's need of religion. Goethe, as unitary man, had no need of a personal god or of the promise of immortality, except perhaps towards the end of his life, but lacking a unitary language he was compelled to use Christian symbolism to convey his thought. Heaven, he said, would be terribly boring, one would meet so many self-righteous Christians there. The Christian symbolism was the most convenient one available, but it held no monopoly of truth. For those whose understanding embraced both the sciences and the arts, who could recognize objective and subjective truth, there was no need of other religion.
If Goethe is the best example of unitary man, this does not mean that men of the unitary age will model themselves on him. Christians do not copy the life of Jesus, or rationalists imitate Socrates. But he was a man who manifestly expressed a unitary attitude to life. There is nothing vague or obscure about this, and it will bear closer examination. His life was unitary in that it reveals no general or permanent conflict, no neurosis of dissociation, no fanaticism, or moral intolerance, or anger. No part of his nature being denied in consciousness or in expression, there was no such fundamental distortion. The tensions which are evident in his life and work arise from his acceptance of his own nature, and contribute to his fertility. He never allowed the dualities of his nature to harden into a dualism. Moreover his thought was not divorced from his life, but continuous with it, influencing it and influenced by it. His thought and creation were the overflow and re-ordering of experienced life. This re-association of thought and life is evidenced in the balance and interplay of professional and personal life, poetic creation, and natural observation. Similarly within his thought there was no dualism or separation: "All effects, of whatever kind, which experience brings to our notice are continuously related to one another; they pass into one another, and undergo the same rhythms. The pedantry of sharp classification and vague mysticism are equally harmful. But all activities, from the most commonplace to the highest, from the tile falling from the roof to the illuminating aper�u which comes to one and which one shares with others, are continuous with one another. We attempt to express this in the series: chance, mechanical, physical, chemical, organic, psychic, ethical, religious, genial."
This continuity of experience extends through the subjective and the objective realms, and these too are fused in Goethe's thought. His love for Spinoza arose not from any high valuation of the static analysis of the human emotions and their influence on action, but from his sharing of Spinoza's profound sense of unity. This unity, by including man in its scope, overcomes the misleading antithesis of free will and necessity. It also brings within the field of his poetic gift the whole range of experience, extending from the "divine" to the "indecent." But if the term has any useful meaning, it is Spinoza's perversion which is indecent, not Goethe's straightforward vitality. A study of the European dissociation should not devote attention to the divine in man and wholly neglect what a dissociated tradition regards as indecent. But unfortunately the natural health of Goethe's phallic poems cannot be offered as antithesis to Spinoza's unconscious confession of distortion, since contemporary law still expresses the dissociated attitude. Perversion can be admitted by a dissociated tradition, but it cannot rise to a simple acceptance of the naked Eros.
Besides those fields in which Goethe established a unitary form, there were others in which he was necessarily less successful. For example he could not see, what unitary thought must prove, that the analytical, quantitative approach has a special but restricted role as a limiting case of the more general unitary method. To Goethe the two methods stood in absolute contrast, and it was inescapable that he should resent the success of mathematical analysis and seek to limit its scope. It was this situation also which made him seek, prematurely, as we can now see, to bring art and science together. He was right that the formative principle is universal, but wrong in the view which he held so obstinately that it was possible in his time to prove this by using it as an instrument of research. How relieved he would have been to know that one day it would all be clear, and that in this point too the strain he felt was only the inevitable lot of genius, at once in his time and out of it. More light may be granted to us.
