The Next Development in Man, page 29
Freud's theory provides a logic of human distortion but neglects the logic of development. In revolting from the subjective picture of man which naively accepted the conscious mental processes, he developed an objective view which neglected the formative processes expressing themselves in the will of the individual. Jung made an attempt to restore the balance by once again stressing the subjective aspects of individual experience and of community tradition. But in emphasizing the subjective formative tendencies, he tended to neglect the decisive facts which Freud had established. Adler recognized the formative will of the individual, but failed to relate it to the organic processes. The rapid succession of these complementary views suggests that the time is ripe for an approach which is neither subjective nor objective in emphasis but recognizes the single form of all processes. What is needed is not a psychosomatic science which assumes the co-existence of psyche and soma, or mind and body, but a unitary method in which no basic dualism is admitted. The truth lies not in a constructed synthesis of partial conceptions, but in a single vision of what is single in nature.
In these glimpses of the thought of nine men I have attempted to epitomize the changing structure of the European tradition. Before 2000 B.C. individual personality had rarely left a characteristic mark on the tradition, and until about 600 B.C. there are relatively few outstanding individuals in world history. If the unitary view is right, the outstanding individual will tend now to merge again into the continuity of the social background, but in a new manner. Personality will mature further, but one aspect of this maturing will consist in an awareness of the social and hereditary continuity which expresses itself in the thoughts and ambitions of the individual. Thus the special individual who contributes to the development of the tradition will not appear as an arbitrary or autonomous subject bearing a separate burden and responsible for separate achievement, but rather as one of the many formative organs of the social process. This will enable the individual to be more straightforward in asserting his vision, since he can recover something of the innocence of the ancients whose creative powers were not disturbed by undue awareness of themselves. The burden of European subjectivity can now be discarded, the formative personality being aware not only of himself, but of all the social tendencies which make him what he is. The subjective loneliness, and its companion the messianic temptation of genius, may thus lose their intensity.
If these nine figures stand out in this image of European thought it is only because the continuity which they expressed has been deliberately neglected in order to do justice to European individualism. The communities of the future will recognize the continuation of the sequence of this chapter in a general process of thought developing a universal tradition, rather than in a further series of selected figures.
X
Unitary Man
A view of the future can acquire a reliability greater than that of interpretations of the past, which in the last resort must rest on the support of informed opinion. Those who believe they are molding the future need not always wait for the judgment of others, since they may be able to test their view in action. If a view of the future develops successful action and is itself further developed in the course of that action, it becomes what I shall call a conviction. Though it may contain spurious elements, a conviction must in some degree conform to the structure of the contemporary historical process. A conviction is a principle which develops itself by organizing emotion and action as well as thought. No form of thought can enjoy a more complete relation to its social setting than such self-developing conformity to the historical process.
Such prophetic convictions have been the guiding threads of European history. Though only rare individuals have been conscious of the major trend, yet at critical moments communities have chosen their line of development by becoming aware of the path corresponding to their general tendency. This has been possible because specially placed individuals have continually made correct anticipations of the future which could be recognized by others. Amidst the clamor of conflicting views the reliable voices can often be recognized by their unhesitating assurance. Marcus Aurelius had them in mind when he wrote of the early Greek thinkers and "their kindred spirits, bold, soaring, unwearied, revolutionary, and sublimely confident." Such voices appeal because they convey the sense of a resolution of earlier tensions within a new harmonious rhythm. There is nothing mysterious in this. The significance of the new conviction can be recognized by thousands who cannot discern the future for themselves. Those to whom it is appropriate cannot but follow it. The power of prophecy thus becomes a commonplace in unitary thought: the attention of the many is held by any conviction which facilitates their developing tendencies; they are fascinated by any principle which offers the relaxation of some general tension within a new form of life. It is because the ways of history have been well and truly paved by prophecy that the peoples could move on while paying so little attention to the way they went.
But the prophetic conviction cannot be widely recognized until it has begun to do its work. The community can always, through its informed specialists, attempt to weigh the truth in any interpretation of the past, but it has no technique for a rational estimate of anticipations of the future. The prophet cannot be challenged in the field of thought, and if his assertions are viewed as abstract thought, his self-confidence must appear as irresponsible dogmatism. It is the action, not the intellectual response of the community, which provides the test of his conviction.
I have suggested that the ultimate source of the achievement of Europe is not exhausted and can serve as a guiding principle for the species. A general truth which was only partially recognized by Europe can now become explicit and universal. This forbids any wholesale rejection of the old traditions. The European tradition must be recognized as an inadequate version of a more general truth whose full significance can now be recognized. The tradition has to be reorganized so as to re-integrate the anarchy of Western civilization in a new form appropriate to all peoples. That new form will have many variants; the broad continental tendencies, the regional differentiations, and the local specializations finding their common sanction in a universal tendency characteristic of man at this stage in his social development.
The formulation of this universal human norm is not merely an immediate need, it is implied in the continuity of history which unitary thought traces forward from the past. It appears to offer as great a promise as that offered in the past by Christianity, humanism, or quantitative science, but it must fail, as they did, to fulfill this promise in every individual life. Yet this reorganization of the tradition is assisted by clear limitations of its scope. The reorganization is a social task to be achieved in this century. It can neglect both the extended processes of natural selection and the limitless variety of individual lives. It is no more and no less than the transformation of the dominant human tradition, the tradition of European and western civilization, into a form appropriate to the world community of the decades immediately ahead.
An advanced stage has already been reached in the transition from the recent anarchy of contrasts to this new universalism. This transition is expressed in a relaxation of the tensions which arose from the exaggerated contrasts between races, nations, and classes. But that release of tension could not come about by a conscious or rational reconciliation, since thought itself was prejudiced by two thousand years of search for separate persistent identity rather than for unity in process. The relaxation has therefore taken the form of violent clashes resulting from the separatism of different races and doctrines, often expressing the conflict between exclusive privilege and general development.
The terrestrial globe is a unit gradually settling down into a hydrodynamic equilibrium; in this process strains are set up which cause eruptions and earthquakes. Mankind is experiencing a corresponding development, but as a community in course of discovering the process equilibrium appropriate to its present state. The strains of this process cause social disturbances which echo through the whole system. The old separating traditions are thus ground down upon one another until prejudice loses its power and the conception of the one species with its common history can emerge to dominate the life and thought of man. This does not mean the making uniform in every aspect of life of what was previously varied, but the bringing to awareness of a unity of situation previously neglected but now becoming dominant. This transformation is not merely subjective and internal, or social and external, but a unitary development involving all aspects at once.
I suggest that one conviction alone can serve as the central principle of the reorganized tradition, the conviction that a formative process pervades nature. Man needs this principle to organize his thought. He needs it equally to organize his feeling, and through his thought and feeling, his action. This conviction is on all grounds indispensable to the recovery of man. It is a biological need which once recognized cannot be denied. Man can only understand himself by viewing himself as a system in which a dominant formative process organizes an organic hierarchy of such processes in an environment of similar processes. Distortions and maladaptations in the development of man, whether as individual or species, represent disturbances to the balance and integrity of this hierarchy. The European tradition represents an inadequate social adaptation which for a period facilitated man's development. The next stage is marked by the recognition of the complete co-ordination proper to man as organism and social community. This implies a norm for man: the recovery of animal harmony in the differentiated form appropriate to man at this stage in history. But the clue to this recovery is the conceptually formulated conviction, at once subjective and objective in origin, that the form common to all processes is that of a formative tendency. When this conviction has become the basic principle of an objectively established universal tradition, the period of unitary man will have begun.
Visions of similar promise have continually haunted men's minds and hearts, particularly at those seductive moments when everything is fluid and all things appear possible. The messianic hope of a new world near at hand seems to be necessary at certain periods to enable man to tolerate his lot. Through the centuries countless individuals, consumed by a sense of what man might be, have lost themselves in esoteric doctrine, introspective mysticism, or mania. But mid-twentieth century man has a unique advantage: he is supported by the sane tradition of a progressive body of knowledge that is now beginning to throw light on man himself. Today science brings the individual a double protection from illusion: it enables him to scrutinize both the subjective and the objective sources of his ideas. If a vision is seen to be only the compensation of a personal failure, the warning is patent. If an idea is incompatible with scientifically established fact, it can only be followed at risk.
This double check was not available when the visions of the past were formed. But today if anyone is tempted to live in a dream there will sooner or later come a moment when he can question its validity. Then science can save him provided he desires either subjective integrity or objective truth. If he cannot overcome his dream he may become either the permanent victim of an illusion or the instrument of a conviction which will transform him into a willing agent of history. Time alone can decide which, but the question does not exist for him. As far as unitary thought is concerned, the situation is unambiguous. What is put forward here is without authority. No science and no tradition supports it. But it is positive and explicit. If need be it will be quickly disproved by events. Moreover if any reader is tempted to accept the doctrine of unitary man without appropriate reserve, let him select any conflict in feeling, thought, or action and attempt to realize the unitary solution. Optimism is quickly lost.
Unitary man is marked by his conviction of a universal formative process. -- The integrating convictions of past civilizations have also been of high generality, expressing a particular conception of god, nature, or man. But they did not develop from scientifically disciplined thought nor were they subject to the challenge of science as they spread. Hitherto science has tended to disintegrate rather than to develop general convictions and hence also to damage the unity of society. But the unitary conviction is more radical than those of the past, since it must ultimately either transform or reject everything which does not conform to its universal pattern. Subjective attitudes have to be tested against it and the facts of analytical science re-interpreted through it so that the duality of subjective and objective knowledge may disappear. From this restoration of the unity of thought there comes a new vigor: knowledge from science becomes inseparable from knowledge for action, and thought no longer delays but kindles action.
Viewed historically, unitary man is the universal type which begins to appear about the middle of the twentieth century as the result of a reorganization of the tradition based on the unitary conviction. The coming period in history, the fifth in our analysis, is thus characterized by man's awareness of the formative process which unites him with nature. Subjective religion and neutral objective science represent components of the process of social development in the past which stand in contrast to the comprehensive unitary conviction which grows out of them. The unitary form of life cannot be described in the partial terms of a dissociated civilization. It is not religion, for it is based on the socially recognized facts of science and it neither seeks nor promises eternity. It is not objective science unconcerned with its influence on life, for it is one with feeling and action; its criterion is not an objective neutrality, but the development of life by truth. The unitary form transcends the modes both of dissociated and of less differentiated societies. The human need for unity first created subjective religion, then objective analytical science; now it corrects the partiality of these attitudes by substituting one complete doctrine.
Regarded as an instrument for reorganizing knowledge, the unitary conviction that nature is a system of formative processes constitutes a second heuristic principle which transcends the principle of quantity. The fourth period of our analysis, from 1600 to date, has been the age dominated by the idea of quantity; we are now entering the age dominated by the idea of development. But since we are not concerned with knowledge in isolation, the unitary conviction is more than a heuristic method. The reorganization of a tradition involves a challenge to traditional social forms. The second heuristic principle is explicitly a revolutionary principle, just as the first was implicitly. Society is already in course of rapid transformation; the unitary principle, when recognized, will facilitate the process of social development by revealing that this process has the sanction of the biological nature of man. The second heuristic principle does not merely promote the discovery of neutral truth, but also the discovery by man of his own potentialities. In doing so it must challenge privilege.
The conceptions of god, nature, and man which served as the integrating convictions of past civilizations did not lead directly to practical conclusions regarding particular situations. In contrast, the unitary conviction leads on from a general conception of nature and man to the development of a detailed system of thought applicable to the diversity of individual phenomena. It is able to do this because it is not a new method of thought appearing in a virgin field, as was the principle of quantity in 1600, but a method for the reorganization of a vast body of existing knowledge. In Chapters II and III, I have already given an outline of the unitary conception of nature and of the general characteristics of man. There remains the description of unitary man, of man when he becomes aware of the unitary process and organizes his community and its tradition in conformity with that awareness. We therefore now turn to consider the unitary individual and community as conceived by unitary thought. If unitary thought is valid, it is this form of human life which is now in course of development.
Unitary man's conception of himself is based on a norm of human life at this stage, that is, a general form to which the individual conforms in so far as he has not been distorted by special features in his hereditary constitution or his environment. The conception of such a norm implies that there exists one general form of development proper to man in the coming period. The norm is not restricted to any section of mankind, but is potentially universal as the dominant type of the period. The unitary norm extends the principle of organic or animal harmony by applying it to a species with the degree of differentiation and intellectual development characteristic of the new unitary man. It thus comprises, in addition to the conception of animal harmony, this unitary human principle: the individual only becomes mature through his recognition of himself as a component in the unitary system of nature and in the developing system of his community.
This knowledge is the essential feature of the unitary norm, yet it is not an arbitrary intellectual perception but the recognition by man of certain facts about himself, with all that that implies. It comprises realization of the fact that in the course of development of his community, he is himself led to facilitate its general development and also the development of all its components including himself. He recognizes in his own formative passion, that is, in his vitality, his love, and his whole-natured organic will, the expression of the pervasiveness and continuity of the formative process. Dominated by his conviction of the universality of this process, he seeks to identify the characteristic form in course of development in every system around him and to facilitate its development. In every situation, including his own, he seeks to identify and facilitate development.
