The Next Development in Man, page 25
Yet Paul leaves as a permanent treasure his expression of the brotherhood of man : -- "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. -- And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity."
Kepler (A.D. 1571-1630) stands with Galileo at the watershed of the medieval and modern worlds. In Kepler the two most powerful ideas in the history of thought were fused: God is revealed in measured numbers, the numerical harmonies of the planetary motions are an expression of the divine nature. The Pythagoreans had held a similar view two thousand years before, but not with Kepler's reverent loyalty to the facts of the heavens. Greek religious thought was more pantheistic, and Greek interest in number was limited to the harmonic proportions of static figures. Kepler's intense adoration of the one God sustained his long search for the concealed numerical harmony that must, he felt, lie hidden beneath the apparent irregularities of the motions of the heavenly bodies. His passionate monotheism was coupled with respect for detailed fact. He could not doubt that the divine harmony was all-pervasive and would ultimately yield its secret to the searcher, provided that his patience and his loyalty to the facts were both inexhaustible. He announced to the world his self-appointed task, and struggled for twenty years to reveal, to the greater glory of God, a simple numerical rule concealed in the movements of the planets.
The two great agencies of the medieval and the modern world, the Christian God and measured quantity, achieved in Kepler their unique synthesis. The glory of his unwavering search brought him to the final fulfillment which transcended his dreams and he broke into triumphant song:
"That which I suspected twenty-two years ago, before I had discovered the relation of the five regular bodies to the paths of the planets; of which my mind was convinced even before I had seen the 'Harmony' of Ptolemy; which I had promised to my friends in the title of this Fifth Book, before I was quite certain of it; which I published sixteen years ago as my task; for which I have devoted the last part of my life to the study of the heavens, for which I came to Tycho Brahe and settled in Prag -- that have I now at last brought into the light of day and established more clearly than I had any right to hope . . . through the power of God, who fascinated me, inflamed my spirit with an inexhaustible yearning, and nourished my body and mind through the generosity of two princes who gave me the means."
Kepler goes on to describe how delighted he had been to find the same conception of the harmony of the heavens in Ptolemy's work written 1500 years before, and then confesses the rapture of discovery: "Nature had revealed herself through interpreters separated by many centuries; in the language of the Hebrews, it was the finger of God that allowed the same picture of the structure of the world to grow in the souls of two men who had given themselves up to the study of nature, though neither had influenced the other. But now, since eighteen months ago the first light dawned, since three moons the full day, and since a few days the sunshine of the most marvelous clarity -- now nothing holds me back: now I may give in to this holy rapture. Let the children of men scorn my daring confession: Yes! I have stolen the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build from them a temple for my God, far from the borders of Egypt. If you forgive me, I am glad; if you are angry, I must bear it. So -- here I throw the dice and write a book, for today or for posterity, I do not care. Should it wait a hundred years for a reader, well, God himself has waited six thousand years for a man to read his work."
Kepler's passion is single. To the western mind it may appear as a fusion of religious enthusiasm and the exact scientist's passion for numerical discovery. But it was something simpler. Kepler lived at the one moment in history when the religious and scientific passions could be identical. This is not hyperbole. At its root religion is an expression of man's search for unity; so also is science. Before Kepler, the subjective element was predominant and there was no exact science. In Kepler the two were balanced; the subjective did not confuse the objective; religious enthusiasm assisted the scientific aim, and the aim of the discovery was a religious offering. But this dual language obscures the true situation; Kepler's passionate belief in a harmony unifying diversity flowed at once into religious emotion and into the scientific organization of fact. After Kepler, the objective quantitative element predominated, and the subjective religious passion, divorced from the real world of exact science, faded into the background. Objective number is essentially alien to the human spirit and its gods; only at Kepler's time was the state of knowledge such as to bring the two into balance and to conceal their antithesis.
Never before or since has any man searched twenty years for a truth so new as that which Kepler sought and found. Kepler's life symbolizes the process of discovery; a process of long preparation and swift fulfillment; expressing unconscious tendencies, yet subject to the critique of consciousness; using capacities which are neither consciously rational nor irrational, but formative and organic. The formative process in Kepler's mind led him to search for a simple harmony; it was historical circumstance only that gave his subjective experience the form of devotion to a personal god. Indeed in opening a new field to the formative tendencies of the mind, the field of dynamical motions, Kepler and Galileo were doing much to eliminate the psychological necessity for religious faith. Thereafter the formative tendency of the mind increasingly expressed itself in shaping the quantitative picture of nature, and was directed less and less into religious conviction. The harmony which for Kepler was an expression of God soon became a substitute for God.
Yet Kepler's passion for unity was limited in its scope; only through the limitation of its aim could it be effective. Kepler sought a transcendent and eternal harmony, and found it by neglecting the personal life and the world of change. His impulse was, like that of all exact scientists after him, to escape the apparent arbitrariness, confusion, and ceaseless process of the world around into a divine peace and harmony. The dualism of his temperament is concealed, because his emotion and his work are concentrated on the ideal world with the result that he displayed little interest in the world of human process. It has been said that the study of astronomy trained the human mind to understand nature. That is only true for the static aspects of nature and for motions which are stationary in the sense that they display no irreversible change or cumulative development. Kepler never conceived that the solar system might have a history; it had been created once and for all in the image of God, with even the axes of the various planetary orbits in permanent harmonic ratios. Kepler's discoveries contained as much illusion as truth, but in failing to distinguish between them he was true to himself, for his aim was to find the simplest possible reason for the permanent forms of nature being as they were. This emphasis on permanence corresponded to the fact that, as far as he could, he lived in the ideal world. But he believed that in his discovery he had united the real and the ideal, and that illusion made him great.
The supreme moment of Kepler's life was the fulfillment of twenty years of humble search in the final ecstasy of discovery; the comparable moment for Descartes (1596-1650) was an evening early in his life when he determined to set out on the search for truth by doubting everything. Kepler's search was guided by a sense of certainty because he felt himself to be the instrument of God, Descartes' by the conviction that amidst the uncertainty of prevalent opinions, truth could only be found by the deliberate processes of the conscious mind. Kepler felt that he was guided by the finger of God; Descartes proclaimed the complete autonomy of conscious reason. In a few decades, Kepler's temple, so reverently built by him for his god, had been occupied by the human mind.
Descartes determined to take nothing on trust, to sweep away his previous opinions, and to accept only those that could survive the scrutiny of reason:
"When I considered that the very same thoughts which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true, I supposed that all the objects that had ever entered into my mind when awake had in them no more truth than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be somewhat; and as I observed that this truth, 'I think, hence I am,' was so certain and of such evidence, that no grounds of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search."
If Descartes were right, and the value of thought depended on the degree to which it expresses the conscious perception of absolute truth, it would be hard to understand the success of his method. It led to results of the greatest utility to exact science though his first achievement, the assertion of consciousness as a primary, substantial reality, was an error. The religious veil had fallen; man had begun to discover the true forms of nature. He could not fail sooner or later to believe in the independence of his own mind and the supreme fertility of his own consciousness. Nor could Descartes that evening in November, 1619. He represented man torn from his roots, over-traveled, over-sceptical, over-lonely, over-conscious of himself. He sat alone and pondered: man, as conscious object, alone with the problem of truth, and therefore seeking an absolute philosophic truth separated from the practical life of the senses; man as subject, without conviction, or love, or action; alone with his doubts. The result was inevitable: an exaggerated emphasis on consciousness, and the overcoming of doubt by the new dogmatism of a precise deductive system of abstract necessity. Just as Descartes fled his doubts into a dogmatic system of clear ideas, Cartesian man-machine has compensated his inner uncertainty in a ruthless exploitation of mechanical technique.
To Descartes the consciousness of the self, from which he began, implied knowledge of one's own imperfect nature, and this in turn implied knowledge of a perfect being or god, the idea of whom enabled us to be aware of our own limitations. Kepler's spontaneous conviction of God had already become a scepticism which seeks to still itself with rational arguments for the existence of God, and doubt rather than faith become the means to attain knowledge. Yet Descartes, the sceptic, displays an innocent trust in his own mind. Man could discover the truth, for if he had a clear and definite idea of anything that was evidence of its existence. Since man found himself in possession of two clear ideas, the idea of consciousness or thought, and the idea of spatial extension, these were two realities: mind or consciousness without extension, and matter or extension without consciousness, behind which pair the idea of God was necessary to harmonize the dualism.
The dualistic-static form of thought which marks the European tradition attains its most radical expression in Descartes. Whatever lip service we pay to other ideas, and however certain we are of its falsity, after three centuries we still behave as if we lived in a Cartesian world. The static clarity of Cartesian thought inevitably fascinated and imposed on beings who were so badly in need of harmony and so ready to deny process in the search for it. The very clarity of the method exposes its own errors, but we are accustomed to them and like them, for they satisfy our vanity. It has been evident for a century that unity is necessary to thought, and that process is inherent in nature, but western man has preferred to perish in his dualism rather than give up the proud autonomy of reason and risk losing his identity in the universal process.
If the clarity of an idea is the criterion of its reality, then the real must be static, since static ideas are the clearest, or at least appear so to European man. Descartes does not say, "I am aware of the intermittent processes of thought in myself, born of the changing relations to the environment which make up my transient life." His demand for clarity leads him to isolate not a component of process, but an existent entity "I" -- I think, therefore I am -- and so to establish the dualism of mind and matter. Beneath the aim of clarity is the demand for permanent entities, substances which in themselves do not change. The immature intellect, being unable as yet to cope with process, creates these persisting entities for its own convenience. The Cartesian mind was satisfied with a spurious subjective clarity in the form of its ideas and neglected to consider how ideas develop, or what their relation is to nature.
The procedure developed by Descartes is the analytical method which assumes that thought must pass from simple, clear, and local facts to the general and complex. This method would be adequate in a world of changeless entities possessing motion but no history, and contemplated by a static mind endowed once and for all with the necessary clear ideas. In Descartes' thought there is no duration, no history, and no approach to an understanding either of the development of form in nature or of the origin of ideas in the mind. Analytical clarity is a comforting illusion, but a dangerous one because it obscures the profound limitations of static dualistic thought. European hopes were ultimately frustrated because a civilization built on static dualistic rationalism could not control its own development. Descartes reduced form to quantity, and opened the way to the anarchy of mechanism and the decay of culture. Unitary man by recognizing that form is prior and quantity one aspect of form can facilitate the recovery of ordered development.
IX
Nine Thinkers (continued)
SPINOZA, GOETHE, MARX, FREUD
In Kepler, the desire for unity had expressed itself in a passion that was both religious and scientific, but was limited to a special field. Spinoza (1632-77) displays the same desire in a more general and philosophic form. His passion for unity, at once intellectual and emotional, was so intense that it carried him in certain respects outside the European tradition, beyond the limitations of Judaism, Christianity, and contemporary dualistic science. This was inevitable; Spinoza's intellectual consciousness could not accept a dissociated tradition. His transcendental desire for unity expressed itself in a form that had the superficial appearance both of religion and of theoretical science. But the fifty years since Kepler had broadened the human mind, and Spinoza's demand for a universal unity took him beyond religion and science into the unitary realm. The unity of God was not to be revealed merely in external nature but in the perfection of a complete intellectual system, within which all phenomena, including man, would lose their apparent arbitrariness and be recognized as necessary, components in the whole. Within this single order there could be no fundamental dualism; there was therefore no sin in the eyes of God, and there should be no separation of mind and matter in the mind of man. Spinoza thus denied the essential tenets of Christianity and of dualistic science; for him Plato and Paul had betrayed the unity of the divine truth. Yet Spinoza remained relatively infertile, and must be considered as European rather than universal, because his single vision was static, and subject to the limitations of intellectual idealism. For Spinoza the emotional and intellectual consciousness was supreme, and prior to life and action.
Spinoza's aim was the same as that of Socrates: the therapy of man through the divine truth. He sought to reveal the necessary order of nature, and in particular the interrelations of human emotions, thought, and action, so that man could live the life proper to him. The aim of science, the discovery of the natural order, and the aim of ethics, the realization of the life proper to man, were here combined in a conviction of the unity in nature and man, which being recognized must lead man towards the permanent harmony which was God. Spinoza's devotion to this aim resulted in what is perhaps the highest expression of idealism in the world's literature. Europe does not lack its symbolic figures: Descartes is the sceptical analytical rationalist, and Spinoza the fervent intellectual idealist. Yet however sublime Spinoza's enthusiasm, his reading of nature and of human nature was wrong. It was rounded morally on a doctrine of self-knowledge which he could not apply to himself, and intellectually on a timeless concept of God-substance-nature which reveals his ignorance of nature and his lack of self-knowledge.
To desire honesty with all one's heart is not enough to ensure its realization, for honesty in thought can only exist beside integrity in life. Spinoza loved his dream world, his vision of God, the blessing of a calm transcendent truth, the emancipation from disturbing emotions -- he loved these things too much to be able to confess to himself that the external conflicts which he sought to escape still remained reflected in his own heart. He had renounced the traditional, sectarian superstitions of Jewish orthodoxy, received their curse of banishment, and discovered a universal truth and compassion which was more generous even than the Christian. Like Jesus and Paul he had revolted from the arbitrary rigidity of the Jewish Law. That was wholly positive. But he had also renounced the world of men and women to pursue a lonely harmony. Being drunk with God, he certainly had no choice. Yet if we are to estimate Spinoza sub specie aeternitatis -- and he himself would accept no other approach -- his god was only a part of the whole; his conception of nature of limited validity; his technique inadequate; and his emotion, thought, and life a special form that we can now interpret from a broader and more secure foundation.
