The Next Development in Man, page 15
The most important consequence of this element in the tradition was not the raising of the social status of the individual, since it could not prejudice the hierarchy of power which exists in every ordered society, but in its effect on the subjective confidence of the individual in his own abilities. Nothing is more certain than that the human individual cannot stand alone; without example the individual can never learn to stand on his own feet, either literally as child or morally as adult; separated from the community his humanity perishes within him. But the new tradition gave the individual an assurance that was far-reaching in its effects. In earlier communities only the fortunate could view their lives with any feeling of security. The European system gave the individual the hope that he might discover a secure basis for his own life and so escape misery and frustration. The security in question was not primarily economic; scholar and saint did not hesitate to set out on lonely paths, since they were sure of their own way. With the illusion of a loving god, a free mind, and the promise of justice, the individual dared more than he ever could before.
This may appear a strange feat of auto-suggestion! The subjectivity of the tradition had been exploited with powerful effect. It was natural for man to believe that he had direct relation to universals which were projections of aspects of his own experience. He could scarcely help having a personal confidence in those universal ideals which had come into being precisely to satisfy his own need. Yet strangely enough he was able to derive encouragement from these projections of himself. He took courage from them as might a lonely man in a hall of mirrors gain comfort from the company around him, believing that the big battalions were with him. It was as well that the European did not know that the supporting company were mere echoes of himself, or he might mistakenly have concluded that the universals were as frail and transient as he felt himself to be.
But here the analogy fails and we observe that a mistaken interpretation may provide the basis for a modification which can correct it. The growing sense of security had this justification: the universals were not merely expressions of the characteristics of one individual; they were more reliable than the character of any one person could be without them, because they represented part of the accumulated and tested content of the social tradition. The efficacy of the European assurance to the individual arose from the fact that the new universals, though arising from the contributions of individuals to the tradition, had become stabilized as symbols which had proved to be effective in the organization of European life. These universals were the inspiration of European character. Here is the criterion we are seeking. The permanent truth which inspired the European tradition was the principle that every individual has direct access to the dominant elements of the social tradition. (Or shall we say every man, since woman was largely excluded.) The organization of power in any community has the form of a hierarchy which tends to confine the individual to relationships with those who are his neighbors in the social pattern. But if he is to be able to make his personal contribution to the enrichment of the tradition he must also have direct knowledge of universals which can assist him to escape the tyranny of local power and habit and to develop his own characteristic form of life. Here is the ultimate truth which enables Platonism, Christianity, and democracy to aid the development of man.
The fact that Europeans were often unaware that this was the underlying principle of the civilization which they were creating rendered it no less effective. The religious inspiration of the one God and the idealist aspiration towards simple eternal truth could be shared by all in varying manner and degree. The individual sometimes dared to stand alone against tradition and tyranny because of this sense of power within him. This is the permanent gift of Europe to mankind, which no other civilization or continent has equaled. It is this which justifies the respect which all the world has paid to the Europe now past. It is this, too, which justifies the inclusion, within this study of the development of European man, of an anticipation of the reorganized society which may inherit this principle from Europe.
Here we again reach the central theme of this study: Europe held the clue to so extensive a development, and yet it collapsed. Europe incorporated and made real this permanent truth, and yet in failing to maintain it has itself disappeared. In the West the individual has lost his foundation because there are today no universals, recognized within the tradition, of which he has direct unquestioning knowledge. The earlier convictions have disappeared, because the dissociation on which they rested has itself collapsed. The convictions were necessary and stable because they expressed and compensated the dissociation which lay deeper. This means that the history of European man can only be understood as the development and disappearance of his characteristic dissociation. This is a typical procedure in unitary thought; the universal formative process is postulated in order to emphasize and invite explanation of its distortion in particular circumstances.
We have already analyzed the origin and underlying features of the European dissociation, and in the next chapters we shall examine its intensification and final collapse. But before tracing this further historical development it will be useful to examine some of its consequences. The fundamental division is between deliberate activity organized by static concepts and the instinctive and spontaneous life. The dissociation of two components of an organic system results in a common distortion of both. The instinctive life lost its innocence, its proper rhythm being replaced by obsessive desire. On the other hand, rationally controlled deliberate behavior was partly deflected towards ideals which also obsessed the individual with their allure of perfection and disturbed the rhythm of tension and release. This similarity is not accidental. In splitting the organic system in a given manner, the same form of distortion appears in both dissociated components. In this case the periodicity of whole-natured process is transformed into a dual obsession; it matters little whether the aim is union with god or woman, the ecstasy of the pursuit of unity or truth, of power or pleasure -- the sustained intensity and lack of satisfaction proves the European stamp.
The European soul never truly loses itself in God; the mind never finds ultimate truth; power is never secure; pleasure never satisfies. Bewitched by these illusory aims which appear to promise the absolute, man is led away from the proper rhythm of the organic processes to chase an elusive ecstasy. Morbid religiosity, hyperintellectualism, deliberate sensuality, and cold ambition are some of the variants of the dissociated personality's attempt to escape its own division. The oscillations from emotional mysticism to rationalism, and from rationalism to a materialism of power, which mark the history of Europe, do not represent any essential change. They only express the successive oscillations of the search for novel stimulation within the limits set by the basic dissociation. Superficially they may appear as reversals of pole, but the structure of the tradition has not changed, the strenuousness, the absence of natural rhythm, and the sense of inner conflict remain.
In those whose constructive tendencies are thwarted, the disease may turn outward in the intolerance of the repressive moral will. We may call this the projection of the cruelty principle, self-hate turning itself outward upon others. But such terms leave the dualisms unresolved. The actual form of the situation is that a partial tendency (rationally controlled deliberate behavior) has achieved dominance, another component (spontaneous behavior) being thereby simultaneously distorted; this act of self-distortion involves the tendency to strain oneself, which is masochism; and this form, like every other, tends to extend itself, which implies sadism, though it may disguise itself as morality desired for others.
But beneath all these special forms lay the fundamental division between two ways of organizing behavior. Europe experienced this division more intensely than any other continent because it went further in differentiation. Though the roots of this dichotomy lay almost hidden in the organic and mental processes of the individual, Europeans could speak of little else. Their language tells the persisting story of two distorted and incompatible tendencies: heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, Apollonian and Dionysian, super-ego and ego, deliberate and spontaneous. With rare exceptions the procession of European genius maintains the dualistic chant. The best proof that the day of that Europe is over is that we can look back dispassionately at the structure of the turbulent story. The biologist and ethnologist know that there is no one "human nature," and that other civilizations have displaced other types of structure. The dissociation of the typical adult European is a consequence not of any universal human nature, a term that has no meaning, but of the influence of an inadequately organized tradition.
The condition which we have analyzed characterizes the whole of the third period, in the sense that during it the tradition retained this dominant structure. For two thousand years this mode of organization was stable and effective; its influence on the lives of individuals tended to increase as the centuries passed. The results of the transformation which took place around 1000 B.C. matured in European society from A.D. 200 to 600 as the ancient world disappeared and the medieval world took its place. During the subsequent centuries until A.D. 1200, medieval society was relatively stationary and displayed many features of the dualistic state which has been described. But its stability was only temporary. The formative tendency, already evident in the adaptive vitality which had developed the European mind from that of ancient man, remained at work, forming new patterns of behavior and new symmetries in thought. Indeed the European dissociation, though appearing to provide a basis for stability, actually intensified the urge to further development. This paradox is characteristic of a biological adaptation which is incomplete, and while meeting certain requirements leaves others unsatisfied as sources of further modifications which must ultimately upset the apparent stability.
Until about A.D. 1200, the prevalent conception of man was of a passive personality guided by universal authority. The individual had to play his role as a passive component in a stable and static natural order. Change was regarded as irrational, the early Greek philosophies of process being forgotten in favor of the fixed categories of Platonism, Christianity, and the feudal order. Even the individual will which had been vigorously displayed in the Roman polity was a will normally reverent towards tradition and operating within its forms. The barbarian invasions brought in a fresh element of vigor, independence, and variety, but did not modify the dominant doctrines of the tradition. The late Middle Ages were more rational, in the sense used here, than the Age of Enlightenment, for the medieval church believed it was in possession of an adequate intellectual system enabling all important questions to be answered by pure reason.
The collapse of the medieval world cannot be ascribed to any one factor. The adaptive vitality of the species inevitably produced new differentiations to supplement its dissociated and underdeveloped state. This is seen in the gradual development of improved practical techniques of production and construction, in the interaction of cultures, the speculations of philosophers, and all the arts of peace and war. An uncertain current of thought and experiment persisted through the centuries of the Roman Empire, of the spread of Christianity and Islam, and of the Crusades. The tendency towards the greater differentiation of thought and action was in evidence throughout this period but produced little cumulative result compared with what followed later.
Yet the process was at work and about 1300 the veil which religion and scholasticism had imposed between the mind and nature began to fade. Dissociated man had put God as a bridge between himself and nature; but neither scholasticism nor his own knowledge of God could answer the new questions which occurred to him as he observed nature. Religion could not prevent him using his own eyes, though its tendency was to obstruct unprejudiced interpretation. Now, slowly, as he looked around, man's awareness of himself began to change. No longer satisfied to regard himself as a passive recipient of divine favor and doctrine, he began to discover that he could experience things in a manner personal to himself. This transformation, which was most marked in specially placed individuals but rapidly spread to others, was in some respects similar to the previous development of self-awareness of the opening of the third period, and thus was appropriately followed by the renaissance of classical culture. But in other ways it was sharply distinguished from the earlier transformation whose background was poverty and fear. At the end of the twelfth century, the individual was becoming aware of his own positive faculties, and the background was now pride rather than fear. What had for many centuries been the experience only of rare individuals, now became representative in the sense that it was shared by all the leading figures of the time. The urgent desire to explore, to investigate, to allow new forms of awareness and of thought to develop in oneself, was expressed in a novel form of personal initiative. Marco Polo, Roger Bacon, Petrarch, Columbus, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci express the new type of active personality. The European genius found itself.
These names introduce a new stage in the history of Europe, which for convenience we shall call the humanistic phase. Humanism, in the sense in which it dominates the development of Europe from A.D. 1300 to 1800, is a special form of rationalism based on the view that man, as conscious subject, is supreme; his will free, his reason autonomous, his allegiance due only to his own ideals. This attitude is a natural expression of the subjective European tradition. If the humanist view had been valid, it might have provided the basis of a stable society; if the subject had in fact had direct knowledge of a personal god, humanism would not have come into conflict with Christianity. But it was based less on the Christian component of the tradition than on rationalism, and so rational humanism became the expression of the new pride of the individual, and for five centuries gained increasing influence.
The pageant of European humanism is the richest and most complex spectacle of history. It lacks the grand simplicity of the antique world, but for variety and scope of new development it is unique. Yet it was not, as many thought, a steady path of human progress. Just as the ancient world, in spite of its relatively static character, generated a movement which gave the leadership of the species to a new kind of man, so the European system with its inner dissociation intensified the process which later exposed its own inadequacy. But this exposure came about by a long deviation. The tension in the European drove him out from the medieval world on a voyage of discovery. In this adventure he was guided and intoxicated by the discovery of a method of discovery. This frenzy led him to neglect himself as subject, but the new method enabled him to explore the mechanism of nature and so to rediscover himself as object. A deep consistency marks the centuries from 1600 until today. We cannot say that all that has happened has been necessary, because that word, except in special contexts, has no meaning in unitary thought. But we can see that the main tendencies of this period are consistent with the assumption of a progressive transformation of the European tradition into a reorganized unitary form.
The obscurity of the present situation and the difficulty of identifying the continuity which underlies these centuries is due to the fact that the principle which dominated this last period, the new method of discovery, is of a form alien to that of the ultimate reorganization. Not only the positive achievements of this final period, but also its limitations and apparent confusion derive from the characteristics of this method. Yet the deeper continuity of development through which this period must be interpreted is in sharp contrast to its dominant science. The general tendency of the period is towards the recognition of the unitary process, but its science is quantitative.
VI
Europe after 1600
We now enter the fourth period, the period of western man. This covers the last three and a half centuries and represents a transitional stage between the European tradition and a reorganized tradition whose appearance will bring it to a close. It is the age of quantitative technique. The continued differentiation of knowledge and of social organization renders the universal ideals ineffective, and leaves man without adequate organizing convictions. The individual enjoys neither pagan innocence nor naive religious faith. Religion no longer suffices to stabilize the inner dissociation and the individual develops intense personal ambitions. The old order is no longer accepted, personality becomes active, and the individual sets out to explore and dominate nature. In the age of magic, man sought to control nature through ritual; in the age of monotheism he could dispense with this control by relying on the mediation of a personal god; in the age of quantity, man exerts his own will and seeks to control nature himself.
During these centuries Europe still led the race, from its surplus vitality scattering pioneers to the new lands of the West. The inheritors of the tradition, confident of the future, multiplied more rapidly than any human sub-species ever had before, until in the old and the new lands they formed one third of mankind. But their influence far surpassed their numbers. The active personality of western man, expressing itself through the new techniques, ensured his dominance over all other peoples, and every major development during this period sprang from the European tradition. This is particularly evident towards its close. Washington and Lincoln were Europeans in this sense; Japan set out to copy western technique; Lenin followed Marx, and Stalin is the expression of western purposefulness in an Asiatic setting; Gandhi, though repudiating western force, calls his life an experiment with truth; Chiang Kai-shek, in seeking to preserve his country from the methods of its neighbors, relies on the guidance of a Wesleyan conscience. The world is united in its struggle to assimilate what it has inherited from Europe.
