Читать книгу Contemporary Mind - Some Modern Answers - J. W. N. Sullivan - Страница 7

“MAN is born free,” said Rousseau, “and is everywhere in chains.”

It is difficult to discover any interpretation of this remark which would make it sound true. Rousseau seems to have had in mind some mythological Golden Age in which naked and noble savages walked freely about the earth. There is no evidence for such an age. The evidence we have goes to show that savages are almost as cramped and limited by laws and conventions as is a modern civilized man, and in some cases the laws and conventions are even sillier than our own. If Rousseau believed that man had ever been more free than he was in eighteenth-century France, he was probably mistaken. The chains have always existed, and always will exist. Perfect individual freedom, as long as man is a member of society, is, of course, impossible.

But perhaps all that Rousseau meant was that there was once a Golden Age, before the world was cursed with civilization, when men followed their natural impulses more freely. Freedom to do whatever you want to do is probably what Rousseau meant by freedom. But there have been men to whom their natural impulses were “chains.” “Oh, that I were delivered from the body of this death!” said St. Paul. To St. Paul it must have appeared that to be a human being, with all a human being’s normal impulses and desires, was to be a slave. The freedom he craved for was a freedom that could only be attained by mastering the imperative urge of the bodily appetites. The elements which dominate most men’s lives: hunger, sex, the desire for power and for the esteem of one’s fellows, were felt by him to be constraints. The insistence of their demands was to him intolerable. To yield to them would have been for St. Paul a denial of life. The first condition of life, for him, therefore, was to be free from “the body of this death.” His aim, in his endeavour to master his “natural” impulses, was not nullity, but the achievement of a more abundant life. He believed that there were elements of his being, apart from those connected with the body of this death, whose fulfilment would lead to this more abundant life. But the body is the enemy of these other impulses; only by transcending the body can they come to fruition. This idea has been shared by all the great ascetics. Only through the crucifixion of the body can man attain real freedom.

Is there any justification for this belief? Is it true that our impulses differ in value and that our “human nature” is an obstacle, hindering us in the realization of a higher, more abundant life? There have always been men who believed this, but the majority of men to-day, and doubtless in all ages, have emphatically striven after the freedom of Rousseau, and not at all after that of St. Paul. But they have, for the most part, respected the Pauline ideal. They have not coveted his freedom, but they have agreed that it is “beyond” them. The great saints, ascetics, mystics, have, on the whole, been regarded as the spiritual aristocrats of the race.

It is a testimony to the amazing degree of democracy we have now achieved that this attitude has almost entirely disappeared. Walt Whitman was the first great modern voice to preach what Santayana calls “the democracy of the passions,” and the discovery is now acclaimed on every hand. An increasing body of opinion holds that every impulse is, intrinsically, as much entitled to satisfaction as any other. There is no hierarchy of the passions, as St. Paul believed. The Christian Doctrine of original sin is a myth. None of our impulses are intrinsically bad. The art of life consists in effecting a balance between our impulses and in gratifying as many of them as possible. The suppression of certain impulses in favour of others leads, on this view, to an impoverishment of life. The one sin is unbalanced excess, and it matters not what we choose to be excessive in. A man like Henry Cavendish, with his cold and exclusive passion for scientific knowledge, is, judged by this new criterion, as far removed from what a man should be as is a dipsomaniac. A man or woman obsessed with sex arouses, rightly, a certain feeling of distaste. We must learn to cultivate a similar reaction in the presence of a mathematician. Both types are excessive, and therefore imperfect. The imperfection comes, not from the fact that one appetite is abnormally developed, but from the fact that its indulgence inhibits or prevents the indulgence of other appetites. Abstinence is the real crime. Thus, if a man were abnormally sensual and abnormally ascetic, abnormally selfish and abnormally unselfish, there would be nothing to object to. He would, in fact, have life, and life more abundantly than other people. The essential thing is that his different impulses should be properly balanced. Nero was imperfect and so was Newton. But a Newton and a Nero rolled into one would probably be magnificent.

It is difficult to discover in what consists the perfect state of balance recommended by this theory. It is obvious that certain impulses are stronger in some men than in others. Indeed, certain impulses seem to be practically non-existent in some men. To say, for instance, that Newton devoted insufficient time and energy to wine, women and song, is probably to blame Newton for not indulging impulses he never possessed. For all we know, Newton never abstained from anything he wanted to do. Only he never wanted to do what most men want to do. If, therefore, we are to cry, “Poor brutes!” with Mr. Aldous Huxley, “at the sight of such extraordinary and lamentable souls as those of Kant, of Newton, of Descartes,” it can hardly be on the ground that these men did not effect a balance between their impulses, but rather on the ground that certain impulses were insufficiently strong. This, surely, is a rather arbitrary objection. If a life impresses us as an harmonious and satisfactory whole, does it matter that it lacks certain elements? Is a string quartet to be condemned because it is not a full orchestra?

An apparent obscurity and incoherence in this democratic theory of the passions becomes more obvious when we meditate on the difference between Newton and an ape. Newton, that lamentable soul, so strikingly deficient in natural impulses, was probably even more removed from the ideal Rabelaisian standard than a full-blooded gorilla. Reckoned numerically, the gorilla is probably more richly endowed than Newton with impulses. And yet Newton is generally regarded as an improvement on the gorilla. In fact, our feeling that the evolutionary process has been a progress from the lower to the higher is inexplicable on this theory. When a distinctively human passion emerged, such as that passion for knowledge so excessively exemplified by Newton, man’s advance in the scale of being was not simply due to the fact that he had added one to his already numerous impulses. It was not merely one step upward and on, as we must assume occurred when he developed a craving for tobacco. The difference between the animal and man is not to be explained by saying that man has a larger number of impulses, or that he effects a better balance (he probably does not) between the impulses he possesses. We must admit that some impulses are “higher” than others. It is not true that all impulses are of equal value.

In order to account satisfactorily for our conviction that some impulses are more valuable than others, it is probable that we should have to accept the philosophic doctrine of “absolute values.” We would then have to suppose that what we call an advance is an increasing approximation towards the complete embodiment of these absolute values.

If we admit that there are activities which are good in themselves, then we can hardly deny that a life devoted to such activities is a good life. If knowledge is a good in itself, and not only because of its usefulness, then a life devoted to the acquisition of knowledge is a good life. It is along these lines that Newton must be justified. He was not some tropical jungle of impulses, it is true. Probably he had not even the normal dosage of “human nature.” But the sort of excellence he achieved was made possible by his very limitations. Mankind definitely attained a higher level of development, in him, in a certain direction, and this direction is admirable and desirable. Man’s awareness, his degree of consciousness, has been increased through the life-work of Newton. If human beings, as a whole, can be said to be up to anything, and do not exist merely in order to breed more millions of human beings, then we may be confident that Newton has helped us a step towards the goal. He has taken us further in one particular direction. If we regard the human consciousness as a developing thing, then we must surely value whatever helps forward this development. Consciousness, of course, contains many elements; every human impulse enters into it. Newton’s advance is concerned with comparatively few of those elements. A more comprehensive advance, including more elements, has probably been effected by certain great artists and religious teachers. But we invariably find that the syntheses achieved by such men lay more stress on some impulses than on others. There is no reason whatever to believe that the ideal synthesis would present all impulses as of equal value. Indeed, it seems to be a necessary condition of advance that certain impulses should be subordinated.

We may, therefore, sympathise with St. Paul’s desire to be free from the body of this death, even if we think he was mistaken. He was aware of elements within himself that he estimated more highly than his bodily passions—and we cannot say that he was wrong in doing so. We do not know enough about the final synthesis, or state of consciousness, that St. Paul achieved. He may have been in the line of evolution, for all we know. It may be that man will have to burn with St. Paul’s fever before he reaches his goal. We feel that St. Paul was a great man, and not merely a freak. And his passion has been shared by too many illustrious examples for us to be able to dismiss it with any confidence. It is possible, even, that some of the great ascetics were not altogether unjustified in their lives, although here the freakish element certainly seems to be much more perceptible. Such men are not examples for the human race, but it may be that they were explorers and found some treasure. To assume that man already is all that he ever will be is surely unjustified. Before certain manifestations—experiments, we might call them—we must suspend judgment.

At the back of our conviction that there are higher and lower elements in our nature lies the assumption that life has a purpose, that the universe is not meaningless. The doctrine that all our impulses are of equal value does not, as its upholders assert, lead to a fuller, more varied and more intense life but, in general, to despondency and boredom. A life that serves no purpose, where there is no subordination to some final aim, is felt to be a dreary affair, for all its activities, however numerous and intense, are essentially meaningless. A man craves for his life to have direction, and no direction is possible without the subordination of some impulses to others. The unescapable boredom that affects our rich pleasure-seekers, who are, one would suppose, in the best possible position for cultivating all their impulses, is due precisely to the fact that their lives lack direction. The direction that a life assumes is determined, of course, by a man’s dominant impulses. A life where every impulse was given equal weight would be entirely lacking in direction. Most men have no very strong intellectual or spiritual passions, and the direction of their lives is determined almost wholly by sex, paternity, and the herd instinct.