Читать книгу The Essential Agus - Steven T. Katz - Страница 28

In the development of a philosophy of life for the individual, the tension between the Vision and the Way provides the general perspective. The Way for us today in the Western World is to be found in the accumulated wisdom in our common heritage. While our philosophy and literature have become infinitely more complex than those of the Greek world, the essential outlines of human wisdom have not been greatly altered. The counsels of the ancient Sages are still valid—the avoidance of extremes, the “golden mean,” the sense of balance, the endeavor to “give all men their due,” to be a good citizen, and to know ourselves. Above all, it is to order one’s personality and one’s work so as to permit the serene joy of contemplation.

We might describe this classical view as the attempt to see life in its wholeness, and to order all things accordingly.

Within our own personality, the sense of the whole guards us against the medieval nightmare of dualism and the modern disease of alienation. In the ages of faith, the body and all its impulses were assumed to be evil, corrupted by “original sin” and subject to the wiles of Satan. Accordingly, man was to be forever embroiled in a battle against his lower nature. While Judaism did not surrender to the spell of this dismal doctrine as completely as medieval Christianity, it did feel the effects of this philosophy, and its lingering after-effects are recognizable even today.

The sense of the whole leads us to accord to every impulse its due place. Man is urged to cultivate all the facets of his personality, to esteem beauty as much as truth, the health of the body as well as the soundness of the mind, the competition in the arena as much as the dialogues in the forum. The goal is to become Headam Hashalem, the Perfect or the Complete Man.

This ideal appears to be self-centered in an age of mass-conformity. Is it not sinful to lavish one’s energy on one’s own self? But if we do not concern ourselves with the improvement of our understanding and the refinement of our sensibilities—old-fashioned as these goals may appear—we shall not acquire a firm base for our social ideals. The river cannot rise above its source. So, there cannot be in the mass that which is not in the individual’s composing it. To love one’s neighbor as oneself makes sense only when one does love oneself—intelligently. Without a reasoned self-love, social idealism is certain to deteriorate into some kind of technocratic Utopia, where the wheels of society as a whole hum most efficiently, but where the individual is no more than a bolt or a nut.

The sense of alienation that our literary artists have been describing for half a century is essentially the inhospitality of our society to the life of the soul. Those who strive to polish the mirror of their soul, the better to reflect the Divine, are bound to feel alien among people who are content to be mirror-images of one another. In the “lonely crowd” of “other-centered” people, the mass is all and the individual is nothing. There is then no unforgivable sin, save that of straying too far from the Gallup-poll. But, if the faceless mob should become aware of its power and shake off the reins of restraint, it will gallop to destruction. Hence, the need of keeping alive the classical ideal of wisdom—the man who is as well-governed and motivated as the ideal republic. Said Plato in The Laws: “If you ask what is the good in general of education, the answer is easy; education produces good men and good men act nobly. . . .”

For the Greeks, the individual was incomplete apart from the state. Man is by nature a political being, Aristotle insisted; hence, he is complete only when he fulfills his role as a citizen: “In addition to the full development of his personality, a person should train himself to serve the state. . . .” The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives.⁵

In Judaism, man is made complete, not so much by loyalty to the state, as by the love of God. The Divine mystery is within the individual, as well as between him and his neighbor. Man is fully himself only when he detaches himself from the mass so as to reflect in his being “the image of God.” “Complete ye shall be,” says the Torah, “with the Lord your God.”⁶ The polarity that Judaism established is between man and God, with the love of neighbor as a corollary of the love of God. “Thou shalt love him as thyself, I am the Lord thy God.”⁷

The love of God presents to man the vision of an infinite task. To love God is not to wallow in sentimentality, but “to make His Name beloved in the world.” ⁸ It is, therefore, to be loyal to an ideal kingdom that can never be fully realized in this mundane world. This loyalty serves as a check upon the web of political loyalties, in which we are involved.

In this view, the state is ideally not an all-consuming Leviathan; nor is it simply the supreme focus of loyalties; rather it is the social context within which we are to fulfill our obligations to our neighbors and to the Kingdom of God. Thus, religious humanism rejects all concepts of the state, which are based either upon the analogy of a biological organism or that of a machine. The ideal is to have a minimum of force and maximum of persuasion—a society of individual’s responding voluntarily to calls of duty and compassion. The individual is the enduring focus of all values, while the community of which he is a part continues to change. At one time, it was the clan, then the tribe, then the nation.

To the Greeks of old, the Polis was the center and circumference of all laws and all duties. It is difficult for us today to realize that states and nations too are transitory phenomena, like the Polis in the classical world. An Atlantic community may arise in our day, superseding the nation-states. The ideal society is always in the future. We must recognize the tension between the empirical state, within which we belong and by the laws of which we are bound, and that vision of humanity which looms as a potential reality on the horizon.