Self-Transcendence Part V

Today and Tomorrow

Part I    Self-Betrayal

Part II  The Destroyers

Part III The Heroes

Part IV The Defenses

Part V  Today and Tomorrow

Preface

This five part series might have been titled The Power of Imperfection, that is, if that title wasn’t so self-helpy. But, the point still stands as we shall see in Part V, ie; there is a power in imperfection, so long as that imperfection is acknowledged and inspires us into thoughtful action.

I

Toward the end of Part IV I wrote, “in the concept of growth lies not only what they (the artists, thinkers, writers, etc. of the 19th century) were trying to do, but the way out of their intolerable dilemma, and ours.”

Obviously, this requires some elaboration.

From the point of view of European cultural history, up to the 19th century mankind’s problem was to fulfill the patterns which already existed, perhaps to clarify the pattern, as Milton and Pope did, perhaps to complete it up to its logically necessary contours, as did the philosophers, but essentially the notion was that there is a pattern for human behavior which has but to be discovered, and of which we can already trace the general outlines.

But, with the close of the 18th century arose new problems, problems of energy, of populuation, of communication, of clarified reason, problems such as the human race had never faced before, anywhere in the world. That being the case, maybe instead of condemning the cultural rebels of the 19th century for their “whiteness”, we should praise their insight into human behavior - all of it - certainly more of it than anyone else before them.

To be sure, they failed, but so what? They faced problems for which, at the time, and anywhere in the world, there were no known solutions. Our social institutions were hopelessly inadequate for the functions for which they had to try to fulfill. From this point of view, the city itself, which The Destroyers, well, destroyed, was simply a human institution which was hopelessly inadequate, inappropriate, for the world which was developing.

II

This was indeed the failure that the cultural rebels were caught up in like everyone else around them. This is certainly one of the main causes, if not the cause, for the disaster of the 19th century (the study of which over the last 30+ years, has fascinated, and horrified, but ultimately, inspired me).

A seemingly trivial, but ultimately important example of that failure, a failure that led to the disaster that was the 19th century, can be found in the row house discussed in Part I. Important because it is paradigmatic.

In using the row house in a way and for a purpose for which it was simply not designed, they merely applied an already existing pattern to an entirely new situation. The unpleasant fact of the matter is that the problem of decent mass housing has never received an adequate solution, even in principle, nor have I seen any signs of an adequate solution - have you?

And wherever we look in the 19th century we can see the same thing happening, and it is still - still! - happening today, especially, and ironically, among "progressives" who claim to not only know better, but really are better, intellectually and morally, than anyone else, when just the opposite is true. And what is still happening now that started happening then?

The answer is: Old Solutions for New Problems - Big and Small.

The classical economics of Smith, which was only a part of his total thought and which was a kind of construction developed to see what kind of results you would get if you looked at human affairs only from an economic point of view, an economics developed from an examination of economic behavior which was on the verge of being totally transformed - this classical economics was applied as an explanation and justification for a wholly new kind of economic world, characterized by necessary behavior for which there was no precedent. Marxism did the same thing in the other direction. Far from standing Hegel on his head, he simply poured his interpretation of Hegel (an interpretation which Marx and Marxists ever since, from the gullible to the fanatical, called “the truth”) into a pre-existing mold. We can look back now and see how terribly inadequate both economic solutions were. Only Carlyle and Ruskin and a few others saw this at the time.

Or, we can look at the history of architecture: Gothic for religious buildings, classical for public and financial buildings. For the home, either, according to your taste. Only Ruskin saw that both were inadequate. It was another example of applying ready-made formulas to a new situation.

Or in art, the vast mass of painters were still choiring sweetly about the glories of Poussin. But Turner (a personal favorite) and the Impressionists, in the face of public hatred, perceieved that a new world had come into being, and that it must be looked at in a new way.

Or in poetry, most English and American poets continued to write in the style of Milton, or Shakespeare, or Chaucer, or Pope, even Thomson. Only Coleridge, out of his agony, created in Kubla Khan a new poetic vision, which Tennyson tried to handle and then gave up. And Whitman, the greatest poser of them all - for which I admire him - was experimentalist enough to attempt, clumsily, and brutally, a new prosodic instrument.

III

These examples then direct attention to what our heroic rebels perceived.

To quote from the Concluding Remarks in Part IV:

“The forms with which mankind had organized his experience, the very structure of our thinking, would have to be changed. It was not a matter of simple adaptation. That wouldn’t work. They had only to look at what was happening around them to see that it wouldn’t. What was needed was something else, some new principle, some way whereby our culture as a whole could transform itself without betraying itself…. To this purpose it was first of all necessary to make certain decisions.”

And the first decision was the most basic one, from which all others would flow. Growth, they felt, was the way that was desirable. This would be the path through the jungle or midnight forest that led someplace and not merely to a whited sepulcher filled with the bones of the dead.

But growth must first found itself on some foundation. To live a life of growth through developing a life style of experimentation- the ambition and solution of men as various as Thoreau and Walter Pater - was to require some jutification, some sanction. And they found it!

Mankind, they said, is inadequate. It always was and always will be. We can never achieve the perfect adjustment and adaptation we wish. Nor is this a matter of Original Sin. It is not the fault of something that happened only a few thousand years ago to an entirely mythical human pair. It is endemic to our situtaion, to the human condition, to use a wonderfully vauge but still occasionally useful phrase. The point is, it is not unnatural but natural.

IV

Mankind’s moral failures, Darwin implied, come not from some metaphysical, and therefore imaginary sin, but from our organic character.

Instead of being so perfectly adapted to our environment that the only conceivable explanation of our failure is some moral malevolence (often attributed to us by those who are truly malevolent, The Destroyers), our failure arises from the fact that we are imperfectly, inadequately, badly adapted to our environment. As Mill once put it, if there is a God he is not very good at creation and he certainly is not interested in mankind.

But this very inadequacy is the source of the principle of growth, of self-transformation, of Self-Transcendence! This then is the paradox of the 19th century failure. Success is to be founded on a necessary and eternal fauilure.

It is for this reason that I have referred to them as heroes, for I take this to be an heroic position. The thinkers, writers, and artists we’ve looked at in this series, and many others we haven’t, all had one thing in common.

The 19th century deeply wounded the soul of man because it had not grasped the fact that the forms of its culture and its thought had suddenly become hopelessly inappropriate. Yet in that very failure lies the one hope for success. For if we realize that failure, we can act, thoughtfully.

Any action taken without that realization can only destroy. Hence, the “success” of The Destroyers that first emerged in a formidable way in the 19th century and has continued to this day. Again, just look around.

Hence the single task of the 19th century hero - to hurl at, not just Western civilization, but all human civilization, as powerfully as they could, over and over again, the terrible indictment, “We have failed. And we always will fail. And yet from that failure, from the very fact of that necessary and eternal failure can, if we realize it, arise our one hope of success.”

V

Our cultural rebels of the 19th century. What unites them? This one hope of growth from failure, of self-transcendence without self-betrayal.

Darwin looked at the biological world, pushed it back millions of years, and said, “See, we struggle for our existence, by cooperation as well as competition, for we are part of nature, and so all nature does. But self-transcendence through adaptive failure is also part of the natural process.”

Hegel turned ancient thinking on its head and said, “See, we have created culture, and created it badly, but, if we understand how and why our very limitations led us to create the cultures that we did, those limitations can teach us to refashion our culture in the present and for the future.”

Nietzsche looked at mankind’s soul and said, “See, we are wounded and those wounds interfere with our capacity for growth. But the capacity is there, and the wounds can, if rightly understood, become not the chains of a prison but the windows of a palace. Joy is Deeper than Sorrow.”

And the artists said, “Look! Look at the world! See what it is, and see how the artist transforms it. Like the language of a thinker like Nietzsche, the artist is free, not tied to the world. Within ourselves we have the power of the symbols which can re-create our vision.”

And, lastly, the musicians of the 19th century said, “Listen! Listen to our work and to its freedom and sadness, softly above the reasoning mind and with that strange, yet extraordinary, speaking unspokenness given to music alone, our work touches the soul, and though wordless, somehow fills that soul with meaning, even though its not infrequent darkness permits no consolation, no happy ending, no appeasement, or “change” as the Cultural Philistine sees it. For a moment, for more than a moment, until the heart is about to break, all seems hopeless, until, that is, we recognize the creative paradox that is found in all art, but especially in music, our music. The creative paradox, hidden from us by our own unhappiness, is that out of that hopelessness, hope might grow, only this time, with more awareness of what we were then, what we are today, and what we might be tomorrow.”