Human Nature and its Remaking.
1919; Science Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 18 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2940090
ISSN2326-1986
AutoresTheodore de Laguna, William Ernest Hocking,
ResumoNo doubt, we have always had our authorities ready to spare us the trouble of search, ready to settle ex cathedra what human nature is and ought to become.And presumably we have always had a party of revolt against authority, convention, and the like, in the name of what is ^natural,'-a revolt which has commonly been as dogmatic and intuitional as the authority itself.But the revolt of today is no longer either impres- sionistic or sporadic.It is psychological, economic, political:-and it is general.The explosive forces of self-assertion which have finally burst their bounds in the political life of Central Europe have their seat in a widespread spiritual rebellion, a critical im- patience of 'established' sentiments and respecta- bilities, a deliberate philosophic rejection not more of Hague Conventions than of other conventions, a drastic judgment of non-reality upon the pieties of Christendom.This rebellion would hardly have become so wide- spread or so disastrous if it were wholly without ground.It indicates that our moral idealisms like our metaphysical idealisms have been taking their task too complacently.Our Western world has adhered to standards with which it has never supposed its prac- tice to be in accord ; but heaving a resigned sigh over the erring tendencies of human nature, it has offered to these standards that *of course' variety of homage which is the beginning of mental and moral coma.By labelling these standards 'ideals' it has rendered them innocuous while maintaining the profession of defer- ence: an 'ideal' has been taken as something which PEEFACE IX everybody is expected to honor and nobody is expected to attain.It is just these ideals that are now violently challenged, and the challenge is salutary.It is precisely the so-called Christian world which, having gone morally to sleep, is now put to a fight for life with the men who persist in reducing their standards to the level of common practice, in reaching their code of behavior from below upward, not from above downward, in keeping their 'ideals' close to the earth or at least in discernible working connection with the earth.Their creed we may name moral realism; and the craving for an ingredient of moral realism in our philosophy seems to me a justified hunger of the age.The whole set of realistic upheavals, Nietzscheian, neo-Machiavellian, Syndicalistic, Freudian, and other, crowd forward with doctrines about human nature and its destiny which at least have life in them.Whatever else they contain, unsound or sinister, they contain Thought: and this thought must be met on its own ground.The next step, whether in social philosophy, or in educa- tion, or in ethics, requires an understanding between whatever valid elements moral realism may contain and the vahd elements of the challenged tradition.We find our initial common ground with this realism by accepting, for the purposes of the argument, the picture of original human nature as a group of instincts.With this starting point, the usual realistic assump- tion is that human life consists in trying to get what X PREFACE these instincts want.Mankind's persistent concern in food, adornment, property, mates, children, politi- cal activity, etc., is supposed to be explained by the fact that his instincts confer value on these objects.By shaping our 'values,' instinct becomes the shaper of life.And the first and main business of the science of living would be to set up an authentic and propor- tionate list of the instincts proper to man.Then every social order, every moral or economic code, every standard of living would be judged by the satisfaction it could promise to the chorus of innate hungers and impulses thus revealed.This view is simple, attractive,-and profoundly untrue to experience.The trouble is that no one can tell by identifying and naming an instinct what will satisfy it.Certainly we cannot take the biological function of an instinct as a sufficient account of what that instinct means to a human being-as if hunger held the conscious purpose of building the body, or love were an aim to continue the species.The word 'instinct' has no magic to annul the obvious truth that satisfac- tion is a state of mind, nor to evade the long labor of experience in determining what can satisfy a mind.Conscious life is engaged quite as much in trying to find out what it wants as in trying to get it.The truth is, instinct requires interpretation.We can set up a usable measure of social justice and the like only if we can find something like a true inter- pretation of instinct, or of the wall as a whole.In- stinct by itself has no claims, because it has no head ; PREFACE XI it cannot so much as say what it wants except through an interpreter.Our essay becomes, accordingly, an experiment in interpretation.And there are various agencies which offer aid in the undertaking.In the person of parent, pedagog, lawmaker, society stands ready to inform the individual through its discipline, ''This is what you want,-not that," and to insist on his choosing the alleged better part.All the usual processes of train- ing or remaking purport to be at the same time works of interpretation : they profess to bring to light a 'real' will, as contrasted with an apparent will, and so to introduce human nature to its own meaning.But if society (as not a few of our social philoso- phers believe) is the only or final interpreter of human nature, human nature is helpless as against society.Our individualisms, our democracies, with their brave claims in behalf of the human unit, have no case.' Socialization ' is the last word in human development ; and society is always right.If we refuse, as we do, to accept this conclusion, the alternative is to find some way, in independence of 'society,' to an objectively valid interpretation of the human will.The case of all liberalism, of all reform, of every criticism and likewise of every defence of any social regime, must rest in the last analysis upon the discovery, or the assumption, of such a 'true' inter- pretation.And my hope in this essay is that we may chart the way to it, and thus sketch the valid basis of an individualistic theory of society. Xll PREFACEWe are not, of course, presuming that mankind has ever, in practice, been without such a standard.For mankind has always had a religion, and it has been one of the historic functions of religion to keep men in mind of the goal of their own wills.And in so far as it has done its work well, religion has in fact set men free from the domination of unjust social and political constraints.The religious consciousness has apprised human nature of its 'rights'-not merely of its claims-and has become the source of whatever is now solid in our democracies.And even if the social order were perfectly just in its arrangements, freedom would still require the ful- filment of this religious function.For a man is not free unless he is delivered from persistent sidelong anxiety about his immediate effectiveness, from servitude to an incalculable if not whimsical human flux.He is free only if he can mentally direct all his work to a constant and absolute judgment, address his daily labor, if you like, to God, build his houses to God and not to men, write his books to God, in the State serve his God only, love his God in the family, and fight against the (incarnate) devil and the devil alone.Kepler's famous words at the end of his preface to the Weltharmonik are the words of the free man in this sense:Here I cast the die, and write a book to be read whether by contemporaries or by posterity, I care not.I can wait for readers thousands of years, seeing that God waited six thou- sand years for someone to contemplate his work.An age of competition, like our own, unless it is PREFACE Xlll something else than competitive, cannot be a free age, however democratic in structure, because its chief concerns are lateral.To the competitive elements in our own social order we owe much:-an impersonal estimate of worth in terms of efficiency which we shall not surrender, a taste and technique for severe self- measurement, incredible finesse in the discrimination and mounting of individual talents.But we owe to it also an over-development of the invidious comparative eye, a trend of attention fascinated by the powers, perquisites, and opinions of the immediate neighbors.XXll CONTENTS Chapter XXXIV.The Public Order and the Private Order .... 280How much of the individual man can find expression, or be 'saved,' in each of the two orders that constitute society, or in both taken together?Chapter XXXV.Society and Beyond Society . 285The private order and the public order are so related that each not alone supplements the other, but presupposes suc- cess in the other; this success is always rather relative and promissory than actual; and hence at no point can life in society be satisfactory, unless the will finds some point of absolute satisfaction outside society; the whole psychologi- cal structure of society depends on some provision whereby the wills of its individual members (in anticipation of the .result of infinite social evolution) may attain an absolute goal; this need is professedly supplied, in one way by art; in another by religion.Chapter XXXVI.The World of Rebirth . . 293It is not to be supposed that art and religion undertake to provide only for residues, or lost powers, in human nature: " their business is with the whole of human nature, and with residues only because they are concerned with the whole; in early law and custom, at the time when these were still regarded as sacred, we find art and religion assuming joint control over the shaping of human nature.And as every man was considered not alone subject to the law, but also a trans- mitter and wielder, if not a maker, of the law, he was supposed to come through it into the exercise of this same ulti- mate control; the experience of 'initiation'; of conversion: subordinating social passions to an ulterior passion.Chapter XXXVII.The Sacred Law . ..299A more detailed examination of the sacred law, showing that it was based not on social utility, but on a principle claiming to instruct utility; its aesthetic and ethical elements; truth and error in its claim to validity.Chapter XXXVIII.Art and Human Nature . 316Art wins independence from all religious entanglements; in this free shape it is neither wish-dream nor imitation of fact: it is a symbolized achievement of the will in real and ORIENTATION I do not say that man is the only creature that has a part in its ovm making.Every organism may be said (with due interpretation of terms) to build itself, to regenerate itself when injured, to recreate itself and to reproduce itself.But in all likelihood, it is only the human being that does these things with conscious intention, that examines and revises his mental as well as his physical self, and that proceeds according to a preformed idea of what this self should be.To be human is to be self-conscious ; and to be self-conscious is to bring one's self into the sphere of art, as an object to be judged, altered, improved.ORIENTATION psychology and ethics, are the especial servants of these arts.The agencies have thus become diverse, and to some extent have lost touch with each other,-until of late, when common difficulties have tended to remind them here and there of their common origin and common purpose.It is our wish in this study to concern our- selves with these common and original problems, enquiring into the raw material of human nature with which all such agencies must work, and considering in what goal their various efforts should converge, and what principles may guide them to success.CHAPTER II THE EMERGENCE OF PROBLEMS FOR all the agencies which are now engaged in remaking mankind, three questions have become vital.What is original human nature?What do we wish to make of it?How far is it possible to make of it what we wish 1 I say that these questions have become vital, because (though they sound like questions which any wise workman would consider before beginning his work) they are not in any historical sense preliminary ques- tions.It is always our first assumption that we already know both what human nature is and what we A\ish it to be.Nothing is more spontaneous and assured than the social judgment which finds expres- sion in a word of passing criticism: yet each such judgment ordinarily assumes both these items of knowledge.And it assumes, further, that human nature in the individual criticised could have been, and without more ado can now become, what we would have it.If we convey to our neighbor that he is idle, or selfish, or unfair, and if he perceives our meaning, nothing but wilful failure to use his own powers (so our attitude declares) can account for any further continuance in these ways.Now and always, all spontaneous human intercourse-a nest of un- ORIENTATION ORIENTATION siastic idealism is too precious an energy to be wasted if we can spare it false efforts by recognizing those permanent ingredients of our being indicated by the words pugnacity, greed, sex, fear.Machiavelli was not inclined to make little of what an unhampered ruler could do with his subjects; yet he saw in such passions as these a fixed limit to the power of the Prince."It makes him hated above all things to be rapacious, and to be a violator of the property and women of his subjects, from both of which he must abstain."^Andif Machiavelli 's despotism meets its master in the undercurrents of human instinct, gov- ernments of less determined stripe, whether of states or of persons, would hardly do well to treat these ultimate data with less respect.It is peculiarly the legislator who needs this wisdom, since he must deal with masses and averages.And there is, in fact, a kind of official legislative pessimism or resignation, born of much experience of the unequal struggle between high aspiration and nature, a pessi- mism found frequently in the wise and great from Solomon to this day.At present it derives large nour- ishment from statistics.The secular steadiness of the percentages, let us say of the major crimes, shows in the clearest light where the constant level of no-effort lies.When Huxley likened the work of civilization to the work of the gardener with his perpetual war- fare against wildness and weeds, he pictured a philos- ophy for the legislator.The world-wise lawgiver will respect the attainable and maintainable level of cul-1 The Prince, ch.xix.WHAT IS POSSIBLE?13 ture, a level not too far removed from the stage of no-effort.Indeed, there are many who believe, at present, that our social pilots would do well to relax their strain in the field of conscious character-building and turn their attention to the stock.If anything extensive is to be
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