The Next Development in Man, page 14
Now that both methods are being outgrown, we are in a position to look back and to identify the common features which were less evident in earlier times. Faced by the increasing differentiation of thought and the conflict between spontaneity and deliberation, the rationalist and the monotheist both tended to distrust instinctive impulses and sought to rely on repressive moral ideals to guide and control behavior. Both attitudes moreover express a dislike of the implications of process, and a fear of the transience of the individual life. The Christian seeks the solace of ultimate harmony in a life after death; the rationalist tends to neglect the real world and takes refuge in a harmonious and permanent system of thought. Again, both attitudes reflect the dualism of the self-awareness in which spirit is separated from nature: ideas exist in a world of their own, independent both of the external world and of the organic processes in the thinker, and the soul is distinguished from nature and from the transient physical frame of man both by its permanence and by its partaking in the harmony of the divine nature. This isomorphism, or identity of structure, is inevitable, since both methods developed in response to the same human situation. Indeed it is misleading to regard the two methods as distinct; some communities gave their thought a religious, and others a rational emphasis, and sometimes, as in the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, the distinction is lost in a complex system of religious rationalism.
The development of monotheism and of rationalism is thus an expression and reinforcement of the divorce in thought, and therefore also in the organization of behavior, between the background of instinct, impulse, and universal process, and the ideal forms of religion and intellect, between Dionysian vitality and Apollonian measure. This divorce and the resulting conflict was the source of tragedy not only in Greek drama, but also in the life of the European. We have already seen that its ultimate origin lay in a duality of the central nervous system, which had served animal species well until in man the achievement of a symbolic or rational control of behavior had at first to be paid for by a dualism that passed out of the control of the organic balance. The conceptual organization of behavior implies that standards of behavior must be established, and at that stage a standard had to be clear and definite, and therefore universal and unchanging. The ideals of monotheistic religion and of rationalism were therefore necessarily static and antagonistic to the developing forms of all processes, and in particular of human vitality.
This fundamental antithesis of form is of great importance; it pervades the thought and behavior of every European and every western man, in so far as he has been influenced by the European tradition. In unitary thought a formal difference is neither abstract nor unimportant; formal correspondences and antitheses are the significant factors through which alone the processes of nature and of man can be understood. The only truth is to be found in form; the apparent content and spurious substance that constitute the body of language are merely late types of magical incantation.
For example, we shall not be misled by the Christian who seeks to conceal his own lack of faith and to follow contemporary trends by asserting that Christianity can transcend the division of spirit and matter. Christianity can be re-interpreted without limit, and names may not matter, but so long as emphasis is placed on a personal god as the guarantor of the survival of individual personality, a static idea, in the formal sense of a timeless one, is made dominant, and everything else is secondary. Even those forms of Christianity which recognize the tragic character of life still pay their due to the general cry for comfort and rob experience of its validity by promising consolation elsewhere. If death is robbed of its sting, life is patched up with a silver lining. Illusion may still be necessary to make life tolerable, but this particular superstition loses its appeal for those who have recognized that spirit and flesh have no meaning except as aspects of the process here and now which makes each of us what we are. Indeed if this analysis is right the enthusiasm which is indispensable to every great adventure can now only be created by the objective discovery and personal recovery of unity in process, and this is prevented where static ideals are given a dominant status.
This antithesis between the static conceptions of monotheism and rationalism and the process character of nature as a whole must be interpreted not merely as a dualism in man's thought, but as a contrast of two alien types of form which lies deeper than conscious thought. There is a close correlation between rationalism and self-consciousness, which reveals their common root deep in the structure of mental processes. Rationalism implies that man is aware of his ideas as separate from the external world, and to be aware of this separateness man must also be aware of himself. Self-awareness is thus implied by rationalism. In establishing general ideas man uses a part of his own thought for the interpretation of the world. The processes which drew man's attention inward thus produced two simultaneous results: first, the integration of the continuity of personal experience in the conception of the self; and second, the integration of the verbal symbols of language in the conception of universal ideas. Self-awareness, rationalism, and monotheism were thus intimately related expressions of the state of the social tradition during the early development of European man.
The antithesis between the static conceptions of self-conscious rationalism and the process forms of nature had further consequences. The images of the imagination were separated from those of the senses, the tendencies and desires of the conscious subject were regarded as independent of the tendencies of other natural processes, and the subjective will appeared to stand in sharp contrast to the general course of nature. This division led to the conception of the autonomous and responsible moral will as "free" of the "necessity" which appeared to govern natural processes. In what follows I shall use the term "morality" to express the attempt of the conscious will to control behavior to conform with social standards in ignorance of the conditions of proper organic integration. During the metamorphosis from ancient to European man, self-awareness, rationalism, monotheism, and morality all developed in parallel as expressions of the influence of a new form of social tradition on the organization of the individual. In less marked forms these features were also present in previous societies, and elsewhere in the world, but in Europe they acquired a peculiar emphasis. Europe forced the new mode of life till it produced a definite dissociation, for self-awareness did not then bring with it an adequate understanding of the self; religion could not offer a complete integration; the rational intellect knew nothing of its own origins, limitations, or mode of operation; and morality necessarily failed to realize its aim.
This was the general tendency of the new tradition. If we select any particular period in European history, or any individual whose life we may believe we can reconstruct, we may find that the impress of the European tradition was less important than the influence of special tendencies and local situations. Moreover the underlying instinctive and habitual patterns of primitive and ancient life continued to determine the general forms of life upon which this European organization was gradually imposed. The institutions of marriage and the family, the rituals of religion and craft, the alternation of peace and war, and the preoccupation with the struggle for survival -- all tended to preserve a balance and to protect the individual from taking the European tradition too seriously.
Nevertheless the dissociation eventually affected all to some degree, and some to a disastrous degree. Individuals and communities that were deeply affected by the European ideals showed the result in instability, oscillation between asceticism and excess, conflict, neurosis, or insanity. European genius and insanity have been often associated; the temperament which gave a whole-natured response to the implications of the tradition often paid the full price. Some latent organic weakness, not being protected by whole-natured function, was aggravated by the dualistic tradition until the organic self-regulation was frustrated and the dualism achieved its logical fulfillment in schizophrenia. The supreme exception checks the rule: Goethe rejected the European dualism in all its forms and escaped its distortions. This is not a moral or aesthetic valuation, but a statement and interpretation of fact. On the other hand those who attempted to give the most radical expression to the religious, emotional, and intellectual idealism of the European tradition announced not only their own impending breakdown, but also the ultimate collapse of Europe.
We have so far been able to neglect the political component in the tradition. The political and social organization of any community tends to display its special characteristics less sharply than do its religion or its ideas. The polity of a community is at any moment a compromise between habits inherited from the past and new methods which have still to develop their full influence. For this reason we find the European dissociation and its various aspects much less clearly expressed in its political than in its religious and intellectual forms. Nevertheless the same essential features are present. Europe absorbed from Rome the conception of society as the conscious integration of individual wills within a social order. It is as if in Rome the new subjectivity had emphasized the subject's awareness, not of his emotion or his thoughts, but of his will to action. Therefore in place of the one god or the universal idea, Rome was chiefly concerned with the co-ordination of individual action within a consciously developed political system. The Roman mind, becoming aware of tradition, transformed it into law and established the conception of a political community in which every full citizen shared in law-making and enjoyed equal justice.
Since Roman political methods blended with the Christian-rationalist system to form a single tradition we must expect to find that they have a similar structure. But Rome met each aspect of the new situation in its own characteristic manner: the increasing differentiation of society by a conscious organization of its activities; the growing conflict between spontaneity and deliberation by a realistic adaptation to the requirements of the social order rather than by a moral decision; the sense of the separation of man from nature by the recognition of the power of the human will to mold nature; and the realization of the transience of the individual by emphasizing the continuity of the family and of the political community. In common with Greece and Palestine and in contrast to the ancient civilizations, Rome stressed the deliberate control of aspects of social life previously dominated by habits and traditions which had not been the subject of conscious attention. But unlike the other two components, the Roman polity, being based on a practical compromise between the instinctive tendencies of the individual and the social circumstances of the time, tended to lessen the conflict between spontaneity and deliberation.
Roman traditions, law, and ethics lacked the absolute character of Christianity and rationalism, and drew their sanction not from any strictly religious source, but from a principle of continuity. Like the British people much later, the Romans lacked every fanaticism except the passion for continuity; for them a slowly developing tradition expressed natural human law. Neither the Greek nor the Christian communities had this practical quality which enabled Rome and the societies developing from it to preserve much of their traditions through the disintegration of the ancient world. Rome provided the realistic continuity which, though in some respects antagonistic to the contemporary intellectual, artistic, and religious movements, nevertheless provided the soil in which they could be preserved as part of a cumulative tradition. In the same way the temperament of the English-speaking peoples may enable them to provide the link between the dissipated European culture and a re-organized world community. Just because the Romans and the English-speaking peoples do not take thought seriously, they are able to act as its carrier without themselves succumbing to its weaknesses.
We have now completed the analysis of the transformation which produced European man. Emphasis has been laid on those elements which formed the distinguishing characteristics of Europe up to 1600. It has not been necessary to consider the peoples who inhabited Europe in earlier times, nor shall we discuss the movements which during this period determined the main pattern of European history: the barbarian invasions, the growth of feudalism, the medieval church, the communes, the crusades, the gradual appearance of the government and the people, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. Important as these developments were, their consequences remained within the general form of the European tradition as I have described it. The fundamental conception of a Christian church, the standards to be aimed at in thought, and the general idea of a political society remained essentially unchanged. The history of Europe consists in the interplay of these principles within the changing historical and technical conditions of the different centuries.
The possibility of this interplay arises from the fact that in European, in contrast to ancient civilization, the unity of society was differentiated into a number of specialized institutions and groups: the monarchy, the aristocracy, the church, the government, the people, the academies and professions. This differentiation was the main source of the rich variety of Europe and the guarantee of some degree of liberty and continued development. The ancient civilizations had a more simple and relatively static unity; European civilization displayed a differentiated unity which, as we shall see, contained the stimulus and opportunity for the progressive maturing of the potentialities of the stock. It has long been realized that the co-existence in Europe of theocracy, monarchy, autocracy, democracy, and of varied creeds and outlooks prevented the tyranny of any one system and promoted fertile interchange. European civilization owes its supremacy to the fact that it was diversified rather than exclusive. This feature was present at the start, and has dominated its history until the twentieth century.
We have here come close to the permanent truth latent in the European tradition which it has been our aim to discover: the combination of unity with sufficient diversity to ensure the possibility of continued development. Yet this principle is indefinite. What is sufficient diversity? What conditions determine whether the possibility of further development is in fact realized? We have still to discover the essential condition which Europe satisfied during the period of its ascendancy. The criterion for the continued development of the species must be that the community tradition facilitates the development of the individual. This implies that the only permanent social principle must be one facilitating this balanced relation between individual and community. In animal communities the proper relation of the members to the group is of less importance and is adequately maintained by the conservative tendencies of heredity, instinct, and mimicry. But in man a new relation has developed between the individual and the cumulative social tradition, and society has today reached the stage when the proper form of that relation must be explicitly recognized and incorporated as part of the tradition. The proper relation of the individual to the community tradition cannot any longer be maintained without an explicit formulation which is generally accepted and becomes itself an element in the tradition.
At the commencement of the third period, the increasing complexity of life destroyed the ancient unified communities and resulted, on the one hand, in a differentiation of authority between church, state, and academy, and, on the other hand, in the organization of empire, religion, and thought on a potentially universal basis. The species was insufficiently developed, and its knowledge inadequate, for a single universal synthesis of thought and authority. Thus, while universalism was realized in certain respects, this was limited by the partial separation of religion, politics, and thought. Europe was favorably placed to take advantage of this situation, and we can now identify the clue to its success.
The social principle which made possible the unique achievement of Europe was this: in the European tradition the individual is conceived to be in direct relation to the universals in terms of which individual and social life are organized; every man stands in direct relation to God, to the world of ideas, and to the law and justice of the community. In the centralized ancient societies, the formative tendencies of the individual were stifled under the rigid system which dominated him; the new communities which laid the foundations of Europe threw aside that tyrannical bondage. It was the individual alone with his emotions in the desert, the isolated traveler perplexed by the contrasts of different ways of life, the philosopher contemplating nature and human life, the artist giving permanent expression to his personal experience, who established the new universals, and from their origin these universals retained, at least potentially, their direct significance for every individual brought up within the European tradition. Vested interest builds up its hierarchies to confuse and dominate the many; the great systems of economic, political, religious, and social privilege develop their jargon and rituals to fortify themselves and intimidate the outsider. But the European never wholly forgets that the great symbols of European life are not the monopoly of a privileged group, but were created by individuals like him from their own experience. He only needs to laugh at the vast system of incantations, and he has conquered it, for it has failed to intimidate him. He is free to think, to pray, to interpret justice, for himself. Europe is the name of this priceless inheritance.
The European tradition is unique in the status which is granted to the individual through the assumption that all men are potentially equal, each and all having direct access to God, being endowed with the faculty of thought, and entitled to the appropriate forms of justice. This was an ideal, and was not realized. But that is not the point. The declaration of this equality of opportunity encouraged the individual. This declaration is unmistakable in Greek thought, in Roman law, and most of all in Pauline Christianity: "Glory, honor, and peace to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile: for there is no respect of persons with God." This assurance Europe gave to all its members.
