The Next Development in Man, page 27
It would be easy to give support to this interpretation of Goethe by countless quotations. But Goethe was a poet, not a systematic thinker, and though his writings are rich with the overtones of his philosophic intuition, it would not be appropriate to tear passages from their context of poetry or scientific observation and build them into a theory. Goethe's thought, conscious and unconscious, was of unitary process form, not because he decided that was the right way to think, but because a process of that form dominated his life and person without the distortions which mark dissociated man. There is a deep productive tension in him, expressing itself as the alternating appeal of romantic and classic forms, as the need of loneliness and the desire for life, the need to experience intensely and then to outgrow each experience. But his profound sense of unity prevented this tension ever becoming a frustrating dualism, and throughout his long life he continued to develop as a person.
The dissociated man, divided in his loyalty between the ideal and the real, may find in Eros his opportunity to recover unity. The ultimate role of woman is to preserve unity and continuity in the chain of life. To herself she is the center and equilibrium of life's development; to man she appears as a complement, stabilizing his own achievements. For the dissociated man, woman has this special importance: she can heal him from the damage of a tradition absorbed too earnestly. He may fail to see this, or lack the courage to let himself experience it; to him Goethe's words "the spirit of woman draws us forward" express a sentimental enthusiasm, not the complement to man in a developing unity, which Plato came so near to expressing. The male principle obsessed with its differentiated action and thought too easily loses its unity, and hence its proper path of development, and man too long alone must live and think in a distorted manner. The irony of Goethe's situation was that his faculty for experience and growth was so great that each woman swiftly exhausted her role, and became a tie that thwarted his own further development. Only those without courage or generosity will doubt that in this Goethe was true to himself. He had to accept the limitations of a unitary man living two centuries before the period that would think and feel as he did; there was no need for him to accept further restrictions to his untiring spirit.
We have seen that the peculiar confusion of the last century and a half arises from the paradox that the intensive exploitation of quantitative, static, and dualistic thought has obscured the long-term tendency towards a unitary process system of thought. This antithesis has been paralleled in the social field, where the steadily maturing awareness of the unity of man and its gradual social realization has been accompanied by the anarchy of uncontrolled industrialization and of separatist movements asserting special privileges. Goethe had the good fortune to live before mechanism had seriously threatened the integrity of European society, and yet at a time when the need for process thought, that is, for a historical method of reasoning, had already become evident. His general approach to experience offers the first mature example of historical, as opposed to analytical, reason. Within those human and philosophical fields of which he was fully master, his use of historical reason was calm and lucid, because he was convinced of its validity in a way that was no longer possible for those who had to challenge the imposing successes of the mechanical age. Goethe's resentment of Newton was an indication of what was to come, but it was insufficient to disturb his own assured comprehension of the developing processes around him. Since Heraclitus, no other man has displayed Goethe's radical acceptance of process. Before Goethe the human mind was insufficiently aware of the historical background, while since his day a complete philosophy of process implied a re-interpretation of mathematical science which has only now begun to come within sight.
I find that it is impossible to leave Goethe without allowing him to speak to the reader, as he did to Eckermann:
"My tendencies were opposed to those of my time, which were wholly subjective; while in my objective efforts, I stood alone to my disadvantage. -- People are always talking about originality; but what do they mean? As soon as we are born, the world begins to work on us, and this goes on to the end. What can we call our own except energy, strength, and will? -- Whether a man shows himself a genius in science, or in war and statesmanship, or whether he composes a song -- it all comes to the same thing; the only point is whether the thought, the discovery, the deed, is living and can live on. -- Men will become more clever and more acute; but not better, happier, and stronger in action -- or at least only in epochs."
And finally:
"Meyer," said Goethe laughing, "always says: 'If thinking were not so hard.' And the worst is, that all the thinking in the world does not bring us to thought; we must be right by nature, so that good thoughts may come before us like free children of God, and cry, 'Here we are.'"
Within three years of Goethe's death Marx (1818-83) was already choosing his profession, and the sharp contrast between them bears witness to the swift advance of the industrial revolution. Yet in the broad perspective of this analysis, their situations are similar. They are both late Europeans in revolt against the dissociation, recognizing process in nature and man, and in their different ways seeking to promote development. Goethe and Marx are alike concerned with the development of man in this terrestrial world, and Marx's revolt against the anarchy of individualist capitalism has the same significance in the social sphere as Goethe's dislike of the disintegrating influence of analytical thought in the personal. Goethe's integral nature maintains its essential unity in spite of all inner tensions, though at the cost of an apparent detachment. But Marx's warring soul, deeply scarred by the social consequences of the European dissociation, projects its own dualism into history and generates his tremendous gospel of conflict.
In Marx himself, and in his thought, necessity conquered idealism. These three words express the strength and the weakness of militant socialism. The illusions of idealism had to be replaced by a broader view of the historical process. Marx accomplished that, and thereafter history could never be the same. But just as Judaism was a premature monotheism, and thereby condemned to distortion, so Marxism was a premature attempt at unitary thought, and therefore similarly distorted. Marx could not at that time, and being himself would not have wished to replace idealism by a unitary conception which embraced and transcended it. His role was to use the conception of material necessity to destroy a spurious idealism, and though his doctrine rested on a dialectical theory of process, it was dualistic and not unitary. Marxist necessity was one-sided, and lacked the comprehensiveness essential to any universal doctrine. Marxism distorted process thought by forcing it to provide a gospel for militant socialism.
Goethe is the best representative of unitary man, but if our concern had been with intellectual systems rather than the complete man, his contemporary, Hegel, might have served even better. The naive static rationalism of the eighteenth century had placed the emphasis on the conscious discovery of material laws as the main source of further social development; enlightenment guaranteed progress and its prophets did not look behind consciousness to any general historical trend. Hegel revolted from this analytical and materialistic attitude, and drawing on many sources from Heraclitus to his immediate German predecessors developed what is often regarded as a dogmatic metaphysical interpretation of history as a continuous process of development. In fact it was no more metaphysical than the outlook of the French rationalists, the difference being that they were ignorant of the essentially static form of their concepts, while as a rebel Hegel had to make his process form explicit. The Hegelian form was as ancient as the early Greeks but it was alien to the European tradition, and it is interesting to see the same process structure developing simultaneously in Goethe's intuitive aper�us and in Hegel's logical intellect. Hegel systematized Heraclitus. The universality of process, the inevitability oF conflict between antitheses, their synthesis within the wider wholes of a new level of development, the interpretation of history as the continuous development of the spirit -- these Hegelian conceptions were the natural outcome of a Heraclitean type of thought in an idealistic European growing conscious of human history and biological evolution and reacting from the analytical methods of contemporary science.
In transforming the Hegelian dialectic of consciousness into a more general dialectic of natural process, Marx broadened its basis and helped to prepare the way for unitary process thought. The religious dynamic of communism derives from its roots in process thought, not from its expression of material interests. Modern man is reborn when he becomes convinced of his role in history, and to many communism brought that conviction. But Marx forced the method to fit the aspect of the contemporary historical situation with which he was most concerned, the role of the proletariat in the class war against the bourgeoisie. In their calmer moments, Marx and Engels knew that their doctrine was not a universal conception of man or of history, but an interpretation of one phase only in the development of a particular civilization. The "Theses of 1845" are almost beyond criticism from this point of view. The Communist Manifesto of 1848 also states explicitly: "the theoretical propositions of the communists in no way rest on ideas or principles that have been invented or discovered by this or that would-be universal reformer. They are merely the expression, in general terms, of the actual conditions of an existing class struggle, of a historical movement going on under our very eyes."
If Marx is judged by this limited claim, his position is unassailable. But as a general philosophy of history or a universal conception of man, Marxism is inadequate. The difficulty in evaluating the doctrine arises from the fact that in it an immature unitary system of thought has been distorted through its adaptation to one burning practical issue. This adaptation led to the creation of a communist state in the pre-unitary world. It is to be hoped that the unitary community now developing will not continue to regard the communist state as an alien body, and turn on it as the European community has so often turned on the Jewish. In each case a community had to isolate itself and to take special measures to defend a premature doctrine. But the parallel implies the realization of the unitary world, and the more swiftly that is achieved the less the risk of a clash between the American West and the Russian East.
The confusions of Marxist thought arise from the prejudiced application of dialectical thought to a social situation charged with intense emotion. Marx was aware that his concepts did not fully parallel reality. "The concept of a thing and its reality run side by side like two asymptotes, always approaching each other but never meeting. This difference prevents the concept from being directly and immediately reality, and reality from being immediately its own concept." This dualism of concept and reality is alien to process thought and appears in Marx only because, thanks to his partisan mission, he is bound to use static concepts and to betray the unity of process thought. Marx must treat as absolute, at least for this phase of history, such concepts as "the proletariat," "the class war," the "productive relations," "the economic structure." But these terms beg the question, by assuming that the classes retain their separate and characteristic identity, and that economic production is a separable and permanently dominant element in society.
Marx and Engels repeatedly assert that the productive relations are only one component of a total system in process of transformation, in which everything influences everything else. But this attitude is never developed, for the good reason that it would rob Marxist dogmatism of its authority. Nowhere in Marxist literature is there a consistent development of dialectical materialism as a general method of thought, and there cannot be, since the resulting interpretation of history could not be Marxist. True dialectical thought, in the sense of a system of Hegelian form based on natural process, cannot provide either the dualism of right and wrong or the economic emphasis which are essential to Marxism as a fighting doctrine. To justify its appeal to force, Marxism requires the moral mission of the proletariat to redeem humanity, and so has to distort the tension which is inherent in all processes into an absolute dualism of good and evil. But a lucid development of dialectical thought would reveal this error and rob militant socialism of its logical foundation.
In a dissociated age it is not possible for a lonely thinker to discard the illusory security of sharp categories and to trust the formative power of unitary thought, and least of all for a man who is himself divided. On the one hand Marx was inspired by the magnificent dialectical interpretation of history, which had grown from the Hegelian unitary form. But he was a man whose passionate sense of justice had led him to identify his entire being with the struggles of the poor. The form both of his thought and temperament tended to separate him from his contemporaries, and this external division was echoed in the ruthless demands he made on others for the sake of his own work. For Marx, morality was concerned with social relations rather than the control of the instinctive life. Denying himself normal co-operative relations with others, he had to find compensation in a fierce doctrine of social morality. The dialectical process of history ceased to be an objective vision of a natural development; it was the story of the mission of the proletariat against the exploiting capitalist class. This dualism of good and evil is an expression of the need for sharp concepts through which the division in his own nature could express itself. Had Marx himself not been so divided, or had he lived in another time, he might have accepted the historical process with less moral distortion, and have seen, in place of a battle of good and evil supposed to culminate in the sudden achievement of freedom, the perpetual interplay of special privilege and general development.
For reasons which were partly personal and partly due to his historical situation, Marx needed clear-cut, black and white, and therefore static concepts, even though his system was one of process. The same dualism is expressed in his emotional nature, an Old Testament morality repudiating his understanding of the necessity within human motives. Moral exhortation and historical thought are incompatibles; a dissociated temperament cannot use process thought properly. Marx could not escape the old error of idealism, to treat one component (in man or history) as right and the other as wrong, and thereby seek to measure the future by the ideals of a dissociated past. It led to the charmingly naive expectation of a sudden leap into freedom on the beautiful tomorrow when Marxism, which Marx hated, would no longer be relevant. Here again we find the irony: the most intransigent fighter must after all go down on his knees and confess that the ugly struggle of good and evil is not the whole truth, and project into a sentimental future the state he cannot himself attain today. It is true that there is a developing rhythm in history and that the economic age has now come to an end, but it is doubtful whether Marx would recognize in the unitary hierarchical community of tomorrow the classless society of his idealistic vision.
To read Marxist literature is to be torn between the brilliance of the general method of thought and the inadequacy of its conclusions as regards either man in general or society as we know it today. Marx's role was to facilitate the development of one component of unitary man, his awareness of the economic basis of life, with all that such awareness implies. Marx, Lenin, and Stalin are the great realists of that partial movement, each of them narrowing the universal truth a stage further in order to carry forward its practical realization and survival. Thus step by step the comprehensive generality of the dialectical method is betrayed, till the gospel of the historical process finally becomes the patriotism of one community. Throughout this process, unrestricted dialectical thought was the deadly enemy. Just as the one god which pretended universality was a jealous god, so the Marxist line had to claim a monopoly of true historical thought. But revolutionary socialism could not avoid admitting its indebtedness to that ancient and aristocratic philosopher who first gave form to process thought. It is impossible to facilitate the historical process without thinking about process, and any revolutionary seeking logical justification had to copy the thought forms of the earliest Greeks. Lassalle emphasized Hegel's debt to Heraclitus in a book which stung Marx to abuse. But the connection was clear to Lenin, and his editors, secure within their socialist state, could afford gracefully to acknowledge Heraclitus as "one of the most prominent dialecticians of ancient times." At the judgment day of the intellect the last trump will find Heraclitus, Lao Tse, Bruno, Goethe, Hegel, and one half of Marx in lively intercourse, speaking the language of process. But the other half would be elsewhere with the orthodox Marxists and Christians in the confusion of their sharp divisions.
We have seen that by 1850 the subjective character of the European tradition was growing inadequate. The subjective emphasis had become explicit in Descartes, had been developed by Kant, and culminated in Hegel's absolute idealism. While Spinoza had reached a static intellectual unity by his choice of God-substance-nature as the one primary concept, Hegel by a more arbitrary choice of mind as the primary reality was able to formulate a unity of process. The one-sidedness of the European subjectivism here reached its extreme form, and gave Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels the opportunity of turning it inside out. Hegelian subjectivity became Marxist objectivity, and the dialectics of mind that of matter. But this inversion was illegitimate; the formal structures of the mental and material components of process are wholly different, mind is formative while matter is not. When Marx asserted that matter was the name of an objective reality in perpetual dialectical transformation, his intention was correct but he failed to identify the formative principle which was necessary to emancipate matter from static mechanical determinism and to allow mind its proper role. Thus in spite of dialectical theory Marxist concepts remained dogmatically static, and in accepting a materialistic dialectic the individual mind committed suicide. Not only was humanism destroyed, but socialism lost all faculty for leadership in the areas that had experienced the centuries of humanism. Only in Asia, where individualism had never taken root, could the doctrine find its adequate leaders.
