Tragic Sense Of Life Part 12

Our own struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase our own consciousness makes us discover in the endeavours and movements and revolutions of all things a struggle to acquire, preserve, and increase consciousness, to which everything tends. Beneath the actions of those most akin to myself, of my fellow-men, I feel--or, rather, I co-feel--a state of consciousness similar to that which lies beneath my own actions. On hearing my brother give a cry of pain, my own pain awakes and cries in the depth of my consciousness. And in the same way I feel the pain of animals, and the pain of a tree when one of its branches is being cut off, and I feel it most when my imagination is alive, for the imagination is the faculty of intuition, of inward vision.

Proceeding from ourselves, from our own human consciousness, the only consciousness which we feel from within and in which feeling is identical with being, we attribute some sort of consciousness, more or less dim, to all living things, and even to the stones themselves, for they also live. And the evolution of organic beings is simply a struggle to realize fullness of consciousness through suffering, a continual aspiration to be others without ceasing to be themselves, to break and yet to preserve their proper limits.

And this process of personalization or subjectivization of everything external, phenomenal, or objective, is none other than the vital process of philosophy in the contest of life against reason and of reason against life. We have already indicated it in the preceding chapter, and we must now confirm it by developing it further.

Giovanni Baptista Vico, with his profound esthetic penetration into the soul of antiquity, saw that the spontaneous philosophy of man was to make of himself the norm of the universe, guided by the _instinto d'animazione_. Language, necessarily anthropomorphic, mythopeic, engenders thought. "Poetic wisdom, which was the primitive wisdom of paganism," says Vico in his _Scienza Nuova_, "must have begun with a metaphysic, not reasoned and abstract, like that of modern educated men, but felt and imagined, such as must have been that of primitive men.

This was their own poetry, which with them was inborn, an innate faculty, for nature had furnished them with such feelings and such imaginations, a faculty born of the ignorance of causes, and therefore begetting a universal sense of wonder, for knowing nothing they marvelled greatly at everything. This poetry had a divine origin, for, while they invented the causes of things out of their own imagination, at the same time they regarded these causes with feelings of wonder as G.o.ds. In this way the first men of the pagan peoples, as children of the growing human race, fas.h.i.+oned things out of their ideas.... This nature of human things has bequeathed that eternal property which Tacitus elucidated with a fine phrase when he said, not without reason, that men in their terror _fingunt simul creduntque_."

And then, pa.s.sing from the age of imagination, Vico proceeds to show us the age of reason, this age of ours in which the mind, even the popular mind, is too remote from the senses, "with so many abstractions of which all languages are full," an age in which "the ability to conceive an immense image of such a personage as we call sympathetic Nature is denied to us, for though the phrase 'Dame Nature' may be on our lips, there is nothing in our minds that corresponds with it, our minds being occupied with the false, the non-existent." "To-day," Vico continues, "it is naturally impossible for us to enter into the vast imagination of these primitive men." But is this certain? Do not we continue to live by the creations of their imagination, embodied for ever in the language with which we think, or, rather, the language which thinks in us?

It was in vain that Comte declared that human thought had already emerged from the age of theology and was now emerging from the age of metaphysics into the age of positivism; the three ages coexist, and although antagonistic they lend one another mutual support.

High-sounding positivism, whenever it ceases to deny and begins to affirm something, whenever it becomes really positive, is nothing but metaphysics; and metaphysics, in its essence, is always theology, and theology is born of imagination yoked to the service of life, of life with its craving for immortality.

Our feeling of the world, upon which is based our understanding of it, is necessarily anthropomorphic and mythopeic. When rationalism dawned with Thales of Miletus, this philosopher abandoned Ocea.n.u.s and Thetis, G.o.ds and the progenitors of G.o.ds, and attributed the origin of things to water; but this water was a G.o.d in disguise. Beneath nature (_phhysist_) and the world (_khosmos_), mythical and anthropomorphic creations throbbed with life. They were implicated in the structure of language itself. Xenophon tells us (_Memorabilia_, i., i., 6-9) that among phenomena Socrates distinguished between those which were within the scope of human study and those which the G.o.ds had reserved for themselves, and that he execrated the attempt of Anaxagoras to explain everything rationally. His contemporary, Hippocrates, regarded diseases as of divine origin, and Plato believed that the sun and stars were animated G.o.ds with their souls (_Philebus_, cap. xvi., _Laws_, x.), and only permitted astronomical investigation so long as it abstained from blasphemy against these G.o.ds. And Aristotle in his _Physics_ tells us that Zeus rains not in order that the corn may grow, but by necessity (_ex anharchest_). They tried to mechanize and rationalize G.o.d, but G.o.d rebelled against them.

And what is the concept of G.o.d, a concept continually renewed because springing out of the eternal feeling of G.o.d in man, but the eternal protest of life against reason, the unconquerable instinct of personalization? And what is the notion of substance itself but the objectivization of that which is most subjective--that is, of the will or consciousness? For consciousness, even before it knows itself as reason, feels itself, is palpable to itself, is most in harmony with itself, as will, and as will not to die. Hence that rhythm, of which we spoke, in the history of thought. Positivism inducted us into an age of rationalism--that is to say, of materialism, mechanism, or mortalism; and behold now the return of vitalism, of spiritualism. What was the effort of pragmatism but an effort to restore faith in the human finality of the universe? What is the effort of a Bergson, for example, especially in his work on creative evolution, but an attempt to re-integrate the personal G.o.d and eternal consciousness? Life never surrenders.

And it avails us nothing to seek to repress this mythopeic or anthropomorphic process and to rationalize our thought, as if we thought only for the sake of thinking and knowing, and not for the sake of living. The very language with which we think prevents us from so doing.

Language, the substance of thought, is a system of metaphors with a mythic and anthropomorphic base. And to construct a purely rational philosophy it would be necessary to construct it by means of algebraic formulas or to create a new language for it, an inhuman language--that is to say, one inapt for the needs of life--as indeed Dr. Richard Avenarius, professor of philosophy at Zurich, attempted to do in his _Critique of Pure Experience (Kritik der reinen Erfahrung_), in order to avoid preconceptions. And this rigorous attempt of Avenarius, the chief of the critics of experience, ends strictly in pure scepticism. He himself says at the end of the Prologue to the work above mentioned: "The childish confidence that it is granted to us to discover truth has long since disappeared; as we progress we become aware of the difficulties that lie in the way of its discovery and of the limitation of our powers. And what is the end?... If we could only succeed in seeing clearly into ourselves!"

Seeing clearly! seeing clearly! Clear vision would be only attainable by a pure thinker who used algebra instead of language and was able to divest himself of his own humanity--that is to say, by an unsubstantial, merely objective being: a no-being, in short. In spite of reason we are compelled to think with life, and in spite of life we are compelled to rationalize thought.

This animation, this personification, interpenetrates our very knowledge. "Who is it that sends the rain? Who is it that thunders?" old Strepsiades asks of Socrates in _The Clouds_ of Aristophanes, and the philosopher replies: "Not Zeus, but the clouds." "But," questions Strepsiades, "who but Zeus makes the clouds sweep along?" to which Socrates answers: "Not a bit of it; it is atmospheric whirligig."

"Whirligig?" muses Strepsiades; "I never thought of that--that Zeus is gone and that Son Whirligig rules now in his stead." And so the old man goes on personifying and animating the whirlwind, as if the whirlwind were now a king, not without consciousness of his kings.h.i.+p. And in exchanging a Zeus for a whirlwind--G.o.d for matter, for example--we all do the same thing. And the reason is because philosophy does not work upon the objective reality which we perceive with the senses, but upon the complex of ideas, images, notions, perceptions, etc., embodied in language and transmitted to us with our language by our ancestors. That which we call the world, the objective world, is a social tradition. It is given to us ready made.

Man does not submit to being, as consciousness, alone in the Universe, nor to being merely one objective phenomenon the more. He wishes to save his vital or pa.s.sional subjectivity by attributing life, personality, spirit, to the whole Universe. In order to realize his wish he has discovered G.o.d and substance; G.o.d and substance continually reappear in his thought cloaked in different disguises. Because we are conscious, we feel that we exist, which is quite another thing from knowing that we exist, and we wish to feel the existence of everything else; we wish that of all the other individual things each one should also be an "I."

The most consistent, although the most incongruous and vacillating, idealism, that of Berkeley, who denied the existence of matter, of something inert and extended and pa.s.sive, as the cause of our sensations and the substratum of external phenomena, is in its essence nothing but an absolute spiritualism or dynamism, the supposition that every sensation comes to us, causatively, from another spirit--that is, from another consciousness. And his doctrine has a certain affinity with those of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. The former's doctrine of the Will and the latter's doctrine of the Unconscious are already implied in the Berkeleyan theory that to be is to be perceived. To which must be added: and to cause others to perceive what is. Thus the old adage _operari sequitur esse_ (action follows being) must be modified by saying that to be is to act, and only that which acts--the active--exists, and in so far as it acts.

As regards Schopenhauer, there is no need to endeavour to show that the will, which he posits as the essence of things, proceeds from consciousness. And it is only necessary to read his book on the Will in Nature to see how he attributed a certain spirit and even a certain personality to the plants themselves. And this doctrine of his carried him logically to pessimism, for the true property and most inward function of the will is to suffer. The will is a force which feels itself--that is, which suffers. And, someone will add, which enjoys. But the capacity to enjoy is impossible without the capacity to suffer; and the faculty of enjoyment is one with that of pain. Whosoever does not suffer does not enjoy, just as whosoever is insensible to cold is insensible to heat.

And it is also quite logical that Schopenhauer, who deduced pessimism from the voluntarist doctrine or doctrine of universal personalization, should have deduced from both of these that the foundation of morals is compa.s.sion. Only his lack of the social and historical sense, his inability to feel that humanity also is a person, although a collective one, his egoism, in short, prevented him from feeling G.o.d, prevented him from individualizing and personalizing the total and collective Will--the Will of the Universe.

On the other hand, it is easy to understand his aversion from purely empirical, evolutionist, or transformist doctrines, such as those set forth in the works of Lamarck and Darwin which came to his notice.

Judging Darwin's theory solely by an extensive extract in _The Times_, he described it, in a letter to Adam Louis von Doss (March 1, 1860), as "downright empiricism" _(platter Empirismus)_. In fact, for a voluntarist like Schopenhauer, a theory so sanely and cautiously empirical and rational as that of Darwin left out of account the inward force, the essential motive, of evolution. For what is, in effect, the hidden force, the ultimate agent, which impels organisms to perpetuate themselves and to fight for their persistence and propagation?

Selection, adaptation, heredity, these are only external conditions.

This inner, essential force has been called will on the supposition that there exists also in other beings that which we feel in ourselves as a feeling of will, the impulse to be everything, to be others as well as ourselves yet without ceasing to be what we are. And it may be said that this force is the divine in us, that it is G.o.d Himself who works in us because He suffers in us.

And sympathy teaches us to discover this force, this aspiration towards consciousness, in all things. It moves and activates the most minute living creatures; it moves and activates, perhaps, the very cells of our own bodily organism, which is a confederation, more or less solidary, of living beings; it moves the very globules of our blood. Our life is composed of lives, our vital aspiration of aspirations existing perhaps in the limbo of subconsciousness. Not more absurd than so many other dreams which pa.s.s as valid theories is the belief that our cells, our globules, may possess something akin to a rudimentary cellular, globular consciousness or basis of consciousness. Or that they may arrive at possessing such consciousness. And since we have given a loose rein to the fancy, we may fancy that these cells may communicate with one another, and that some of them may express their belief that they form part of a superior organism endowed with a collective personal consciousness. And more than once in the history of human feeling this fancy has been expressed in the surmisal of some philosopher or poet that we men are a kind of globules in the blood of a Supreme Being, who possesses his own personal collective consciousness, the consciousness of the Universe.

Perhaps the immense Milky Way which on clear nights we behold stretching across the heavens, this vast encircling ring in which our planetary system is itself but a molecule, is in its turn but a cell in the Universe, in the Body of G.o.d. All the cells of our body combine and co-operate in maintaining and kindling by their activity our consciousness, our soul; and if the consciousness or the souls of all these cells entered completely into our consciousness, into the composite whole, if I possessed consciousness of all that happens in my bodily organism, I should feel the universe happening within myself, and perhaps the painful sense of my limitedness would disappear. And if all the consciousness of all beings unite in their entirety in the universal consciousness, this consciousness--that is to say, G.o.d--is all.

In every instant obscure consciousnesses, elementary souls, are born and die within us, and their birth and death const.i.tute our life. And their sudden and violent death const.i.tutes our pain. And in like manner, in the heart of G.o.d consciousnesses are born and die--but do they die?--and their births and deaths const.i.tute His life.

If there is a Universal and Supreme Consciousness, I am an idea in it; and is it possible for any idea in this Supreme Consciousness to be completely blotted out? After I have died, G.o.d will go on remembering me, and to be remembered by G.o.d, to have my consciousness sustained by the Supreme Consciousness, is not that, perhaps, to be?

And if anyone should say that G.o.d has made the universe, it may be rejoined that so also our soul has made our body as much as, if not more than, it has been made by it--if, indeed, there be a soul.

When pity, love, reveals to us the whole universe striving to gain, to preserve, and to enlarge its consciousness, striving more and more to saturate itself with consciousness, feeling the pain of the discords which are produced within it, pity reveals to us the likeness of the whole universe with ourselves; it reveals to us that it is human, and it leads us to discover our Father in it, of whose flesh we are flesh; love leads us to personalize the whole of which we form a part.

To say that G.o.d is eternally producing things is fundamentally the same as saying that things are eternally producing G.o.d. And the belief in a personal and spiritual G.o.d is based on the belief in our own personality and spirituality. Because we feel ourselves to be consciousness, we feel G.o.d to be consciousness--that is to say, a person; and because we desire ardently that our consciousness shall live and be independently of the body, we believe that the divine person lives and exists independently of the universe, that his state of consciousness is _ad extra_.

No doubt logicians will come forward and confront us with the evident rational difficulties which this involves; but we have already stated that, although presented under logical forms, the content of all this is not strictly rational. Every rational conception of G.o.d is in itself contradictory. Faith in G.o.d is born of love for G.o.d--we believe that G.o.d exists by force of wis.h.i.+ng that He may exist, and it is born also, perhaps, of G.o.d's love for us. Reason does not prove to us that G.o.d exists, but neither does it prove that He cannot exist.

But of this conception of faith in G.o.d as the personalization of the universe we shall have more to say presently.

And recalling what has been said in another part of this work, we may say that material things, in so far as they are known to us, issue into knowledge through the agency of hunger, and out of hunger issues the sensible or material universe in which we conglomerate these things; and that ideal things issue out of love, and out of love issues G.o.d, in whom we conglomerate these ideal things as in the Consciousness of the Universe. It is social consciousness, the child of love, of the instinct of perpetuation, that leads us to socialize everything, to see society in everything, and that shows us at last that all Nature is really an infinite Society. For my part, the feeling that Nature is a society has taken hold of me hundreds of times in walking through the woods possessed with a sense of solidarity with the oaks, a sense of their dim awareness of my presence.

Imagination, which is the social sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes everything identical with man.[36] And the work of man is to supernaturalize Nature--that is to say, to make it divine by making it human, to help it to become conscious of itself, in short. The action of reason, on the other hand, is to mechanize or materialize.

And just as a fruitful union is consummated between the individual--who is, in a certain sense, a society--and society, which is also an individual--the two being so inseparable from one another that it is impossible to say where the one begins and the other ends, for they are rather two aspects of a single essence--so also the spirit, the social element, which by relating us to others makes us conscious, unites with matter, the individual and individualizing element; similarly, reason or intelligence and imagination embrace in a mutually fruitful union, and the Universe merges into one with G.o.d.

Is all this true? And what is truth? I in my turn will ask, as Pilate asked--not, however, only to turn away and wash my hands, without waiting for an answer.

Is truth in reason, or above reason, or beneath reason, or outside of reason, in some way or another? Is only the rational true? May there not be a reality, by its very nature, unattainable by reason, and perhaps, by its very nature, opposed to reason? And how can we know this reality if reason alone holds the key to knowledge?

Our desire of living, our need of life, asks that that may be true which urges us to self-preservation and self-perpetuation, which sustains man and society; it asks that the true water may be that which a.s.suages our thirst, and because it a.s.suages it, that the true bread may be that which satisfies our hunger, because it satisfies it.

The senses are devoted to the service of the instinct of preservation, and everything that satisfies this need of preserving ourselves, even though it does not pa.s.s through the senses, is nevertheless a kind of intimate penetration of reality in us. Is the process of a.s.similating nutriment perhaps less real than the process of knowing the nutritive substance? It may be said that to eat a loaf of bread is not the same thing as seeing, touching, or tasting it; that in the one case it enters into our body, but not therefore into our consciousness. Is this true?

Does not the loaf of bread that I have converted into my flesh and blood enter more into my consciousness than the other loaf which I see and touch, and of which I say: "This is mine"? And must I refuse objective reality to the bread that I have thus converted into my flesh and blood and made mine when I only touch it?

There are some who live by air without knowing it. In the same way, it may be, we live by G.o.d and in G.o.d--in G.o.d the spirit and consciousness of society and of the whole Universe, in so far as the Universe is also a society.

G.o.d is felt only in so far as He is lived; and man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of G.o.d (Matt. iv. 4; Deut. viii. 3).

And this personalization of the all, of the Universe, to which we are led by love, by pity, is the personalization of a person who embraces and comprehends within himself the other persons of which he is composed.

The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.

For where there is no consciousness there is no finality, finality presupposing a purpose. And, as we shall see, faith in G.o.d is based simply upon the vital need of giving finality to existence, of making it answer to a purpose. We need G.o.d, not in order to understand the _why_, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate _wherefore_, to give a meaning to the Universe.

And neither ought we to be surprised by the affirmation that this consciousness of the Universe is composed and integrated by the consciousnesses of the beings which form the Universe, by the consciousnesses of all the beings that exist, and that nevertheless it remains a personal consciousness distinct from those which compose it.

Only thus is it possible to understand how in G.o.d we live, move, and have our being. That great visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg, saw or caught a glimpse of this in his book on Heaven and h.e.l.l _(De Coelo et Inferno_, lii.), when he tells us: "An entire angelic society appears sometimes in the form of a single angel, which also it hath been granted me by the Lord to see. When the Lord Himself appears in the midst of the angels, He doth not appear as encompa.s.sed by a mult.i.tude, but as a single being in angelic form. Hence it is that the Lord in the Word is called an angel, and likewise that on entire society is so called. Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael are nothing but angelical societies, which are so named from their functions."

May we not perhaps live and love--that is, suffer and pity--in this all-enveloping Supreme Person--we, all the persons who suffer and pity and all the beings that strive to achieve personality, to acquire consciousness of their suffering and their limitation? And are we not, perhaps, ideas of this total Grand Consciousness, which by thinking of us as existing confers existence upon us? Does not our existence consist in being perceived and felt by G.o.d? And, further on, this same visionary tells us, under the form of images, that each angel, each society of angels, and the whole of heaven comprehensively surveyed, appear in human form, and in virtue of this human form the Lord rules them as one man.

"G.o.d does not think, He creates; He does not exist, He is eternal,"

wrote Kierkegaard (_Afs.l.u.tende uvidens-kabelige Efterskrift_); but perhaps it is more exact to say with Mazzini, the mystic of the Italian city, that "G.o.d is great because His thought is action" (_Ai giovani d'ltalia_), because with Him to think is to create, and He gives existence to that which exists in His thought by the mere fact of thinking it, and the impossible is the unthinkable by G.o.d. Is it not written in the Scriptures that G.o.d creates with His word--that is to say, with His thought--and that by this, by His Word, He made everything that exists? And what G.o.d has once made does He ever forget? May it not be that all the thoughts that have ever pa.s.sed through the Supreme Consciousness still subsist therein? In Him, who is eternal, is not all existence eternalized?

Our longing to save consciousness, to give personal and human finality to the Universe and to existence, is such that even in the midst of a supreme, an agonizing and lacerating sacrifice, we should still hear the voice that a.s.sured us that if our consciousness disappears, it is that the infinite and eternal Consciousness may be enriched thereby, that our souls may serve as nutriment to the Universal Soul. Yes, I enrich G.o.d, because before I existed He did not think of me as existing, because I am one more--one more even though among an infinity of others--who, having really lived, really suffered, and really loved, abide in His bosom. It is the furious longing to give finality to the Universe, to make it conscious and personal, that has brought us to believe in G.o.d, to wish that G.o.d may exist, to create G.o.d, in a word. To create Him, yes! This saying ought not to scandalize even the most devout theist.

For to believe in G.o.d is, in a certain sense, to create Him, although He first creates us.[37] It is He who in us is continually creating Himself.

We have created G.o.d in order to save the Universe from nothingness, for all that is not consciousness and eternal consciousness, conscious of its eternity and eternally conscious, is nothing more than appearance.

There is nothing truly real save that which feels, suffers, pities, loves, and desires, save consciousness; there is nothing substantial but consciousness. And we need G.o.d in order to save consciousness; not in order to think existence, but in order to live it; not in order to know the why and how of it, but in order to feel the wherefore of it. Love is a contradiction if there is no G.o.d.

Let us now consider this idea of G.o.d, of the logical G.o.d or the Supreme Reason, and of the vital G.o.d or the G.o.d of the heart--that is, Supreme Love.

FOOTNOTES: