Anthology: Devotion

[1] Man has always been his most vexing problem.
Have those who inveigh so violently against otherworldliness in religion, justified as their criticisms may be, ever fully realized what the error of denying life implies in regard to the stature of man? The man who can negate “life” must be something other than mere vitality. Every effort to dissuade him from the neglect of natural vitality and historic existence implies a vantage point in him above natural vitality and history; otherwise he could not be tempted to the error from which he is to be dissuaded.///Man’s place in the universe is subject to the same antinomies. Men have been assailed periodically by qualms of conscience and fits of dizziness for pretending to occupy the center of the universe. Every philosophy of life is touched with anthropocentric tendencies. Even theocentric religions believe that the Creator of the world is interested in saving man from his unique predicament. But periodically man is advised and advises himself to moderate his pretensions and admit that he is only a little animal living a precarious existence on a second- rate planet, attached to a second-rate sun. There are moderns who believe that this modesty is the characteristic genius of modern man and the fruit of his discovery of the vastness of interstellar spaces; but it was no modern astronomer who confessed, “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man that thou art mindful of him?” (Psalms 8:4). Yet the vantage point from which man judges his insignificance is a rather significant vantage point. This fact has not been lost on the moderns whose modesty before the cosmic immensity was modified considerably by pride in their discovery of this immensity. It was a modern, the poet Swinburne, who sang triumphantly:///The seal of his knowledge is sure, the truth and his spirit are wed;…? Glory to Man in the highest! For man is the master of things, thereby proving that the advance of human knowledge about the world does not abate the pride of man. While these paradoxes of human self-knowledge are not easily reduced to simpler formulae, they all point to two facts about man: one of them obvious and the other not quite so obvious. The two are not usually appreciated with equal sympathy. The obvious fact is that man is a child of nature, subject to its vicissitudes, compelled by its necessities, driven by its impulses, and confined within the brevity of the years which nature permits its varied organic form, allowing some, but not too much latitude. The other less obvious fact is that man is a spirit who stands outside of nature, life, himself, his reason and the world. This latter fact is appreciated in one or the other of its aspects by various philosophies. But it is not frequently appreciated in its total import. That man stands outside of nature in some sense is admitted even by naturalists who are intent upon keeping him as close to nature as possible. They must at least admit that he is homo faber, a tool-making animal. That man stands outside the world is admitted by rationalists who, with Aristotle, define man as a rational animal and interpret reason as the capacity for making general concepts. But the rationalists do not always understand that man’s rational capacity involves a further ability to stand outside himself, a capacity for self-transcendence, the ability to make himself his own object, a quality of spirit which is usually not fully comprehended or connoted in “ration” or “nous” or reason or any of the concepts which philosophers usually use to describe the uniqueness of man.///How difficult it is to do justice to both the uniqueness of man and his affinities with the world of nature below him is proved by the almost unvarying tendency of those philosophies, which describe and emphasize the rational faculties of man or his capacity for self transcendence to forget his relation to nature and to identify him prematurely and unqualifiedly, with the divine and the eternal; and of naturalistic philosophies to obscure the uniqueness of man. [51-54]///The romantic and materialistic protest against the pretensions of rational man as essential man and against the perils of the enervation of vitality by reason is borne by the two classes in modern society: the lower middle classes and the industrial workers, who are forced by historical necessity to challenge the economic and political supremacy of the higher middle classes. The lower middle classes express themselves in various forms of romanticism culminating in fascist politics; while the industrial workers gravitate naturally toward the philosophy of materialism and communist politics. These protests gain in plausibility as the power and the prestige of the bourgeois civilization decays; for the truth embodied in a culture maintains itself, and hides the error in which all historical truth is involved more by the prestige and stability of the civilization in which it is incarnated than by the inherent plausibility of its ideas.///Unfortunately, in spite of the important truths about human nature and history which romanticism and materialism have discovered, these philosophies are becoming instruments of deepening decadence on the one hand and of abortive regeneration on the other. They do not see the problem of human nature in sufficient depth and therefore remain in the confusion, and sometimes accentuate the errors, in which modern culture has been involved from the beginning. Romanticism asserts both the vitality of nature and its primitive and organic unities against the universalities of rationalism. It therefore either defies every principle of form and order (as in Nietzscheanism) or it emphasizes primitive and inadequate natural forms of unity (Blut and Boden). It thus becomes an instrument of decadence, hastening the destruction of bourgeois civilization without offering a way to a new order. Significantly the lower middle classes (individualists who desperately flee from their isolation into unities of race and nation, and persons without a sense of history who rediscover history in terms of primitive tribalism) are the instruments of this decadence.///Marxist materialism on the other hand contains a genuine principle of construction. It is itself a type of rationalism; for it believes in the forming and creative capacity of reason, though not of human reason. The creative human force in history lies below the level of reason in the vital impulses which are expressed in the dynamic class relations. But it believes that these vital impulses are under the simple control of a higher logic, a dialectic of history. Under the illusion that it can tame the destructiveness of man by a simple change in social organization, that it can purge human creativity of its destructiveness, it prompts modern rebels against an established social and cultural order to a demonic fury, assuring them that their destruction will result in a new society in which the vital forces of human existence will be brought under and remain within, the forming power of a dialectical suprahuman historical logic. If romanticism leads in politics to primitivistic tribalism and concomitant anarchy, Marxist materialism believes that the anarchy of class conflict in modern society can be guided, by those who understand its underlying logic, into a resolution of all conflict.///It is not altogether strange that Marxist politics should result in political realities in Russian, not too distinguishable from the fruits of fascism, for in both cases the paradoxical relation of the creative and the destructive forces in human life is not fully understood; nor is the relation of form to vitality in human life fully comprehended. The romantic fascist, conscious of the element of pretension in the culture of bourgeois rationalism, dispenses with all norms and rational principles of order, insisting upon the self-justifying character of the romantic- natural order of race and blood, if only it is expressed with sufficient vitality. The Marxist rebel, also conscious of the element of pretension in the social standards of the rationalist, but oblivious to the inevitability of a degree of pretension in all forms of human spirituality, including his own, blandly hopes for a new social order in which human creativity will express itself without destructiveness; and human vitality will be captured and contained in a perfect social harmony. The provisional cynicism of the Marxist is thus given a moral sanction and facade of a too simple principle of universal form and order; just as the deeper cynicism of the romanticist, unable to exist in terms of pure nihilism, is compounded with a too primitive and natural principle of natural cohesion and order. In both cases the moral facade allows human impulses to express themselves without sufficient discipline. Hence the similarity in the political fruits of these two creeds. It must be admitted, however, that the moral cynicism and nihilism of romantic fascism is more unqualifiedly destructive than the provisional cynicism and ultimate utopianism of communism.///It might be added that the insights of Freudian psychology, considered in terms of social history, may be regarded as elaborations of the basic romantic- materialistic protest against rationalistic interpretations of human nature and history. In the Freudian protest those aspects of a common rebellion are emphasized which are available to the members of the dominant social classes rather than to the lower-middle class and proletarian rebels. In Freudianism the dark labyrinths of man’s unconscious impulses are illumined in such a way that he loses confidence in the pretensions of rational man and the disciplines of culture and civilization. Since these insights are expressed within the terms of the given social order and do not envisage moral or political alternatives, they lead to a deeper pessimism which despairs not of a particular civilization or culture but of civilization itself. This may be the consequence of the sense of impotence of individuals who are socially too bound to their culture and civilization to allow themselves to envisage alternatives. It may also be a way of deflecting insights into the pretensions of a particular historical form and discipline so that the individual who is still attached to it socially and benefits from its privileges, need not undergo the pain of seeking socio-moral alternatives. In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud arrives at conclusions almost as nihilistic in their implications as Nietzsche’s. He believes that the discipline of the super-ego (significantly regarded not as transcendent spirit but as a social construct) leads inevitably to complexes and aberrations. Provisionally inclined to draw anarchistic conclusions from these premises, Freud is ultimately unable either to deny the necessity of social discipline or to find a real cure for the psychopathic aberrations which are, in his opinion, inevitable concomitant of such discipline. This insoluble problem leads him to the cul-de-sac of pessimism.///In a sense his pessimistic conclusions reveal the basic spiritual problem of the upper middle classes as clearly as Marxism reveals that of the proletarian classes and fascism that of the lower middle classes. Freudianism is a typical product of the uneasy conscience of that portion of the upper middle class which has discovered the realm of chaos under the pretenses and partial achievements of rational order and discipline, but is unable or unwilling to find a basic solution for the problem which it has discovered.///The fact is, that it is not possible to solve the problem of vitality and form, or fully to understand the paradox of human creativity and destructiveness within the limits of the dimension in which modern culture, whether rationalistic or romantic, views this problem. Within those limits modern culture is forced to choose between four equally untenable viewpoints: (a) It exalts destructive fury because it is vital, as in fascism; or (b) it imagines a harmony of vital forces in history which the facts belie, as in liberalism; or (c) it admits the dishonest pretensions of rational discipline and the reality of human destructiveness provisionally but hopes for a complete change in the human situation through a revolutionary reorganization of society, as in Marxism; or (d) it despairs of any basic solution for the problem of vitality and discipline and contents itself with palliatives, as in Freudianism.”