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CHAPTER VI The Objective and Subjective Views of Life
THE principle of individualism is the liberty of the human being regarded as a separate existence to develop himself and fulfil his life, satisfy his mental tendencies, emotional and vital needs and physical being according to his own desire governed by his reason; it admits no other limit to this right and this liberty except the obligation to respect the same individual liberty and right in others. The balance of this liberty and this obligation is the principle which the individualistic age adopted in its remodelling of society; it adopted in effect a harmony of compromises between rights and duties, liberty and law, permissions and restraints as the scheme both of the personal life and the life of the society. Equally, in the life of nations the individualistic age made liberty the ideal and strove though with less success than in its own proper sphere to affirm a mutual respect for each other's freedom as the proper conduct of nations to one another. In this idea of life, as with the individual, so with the nation, each has the inherent right to manage its own affairs freely or, if it wills, to mismanage them freely and not to be interfered with in its rights and liberties so long as it does not interfere with the rights and liberties of other nations. As a matter of fact, the egoism of individual and nation does not wish to abide within these bounds; therefore the social law of the nation has been called in to enforce the violated principle as between man and man and it has been sought to develop international law in the same way and with the same object. The influence of these ideas is still powerful. In the recent European struggle the liberty of nations was set forth as the ideal for which the war was being waged - in defiance of the patent fact that it had come about by nothing better than a clash of interests. The development of international law into an effective force which will restrain the Page-48 egoism of nations as the social law restrains the egoism of individuals, is the solution which still attracts and seems the most practicable to most when they seek to deal with the difficulties the future1
The growth of modern Science has
meanwhile created new ideas and tendencies, on one side an exaggerated
individualism rather vitalistic egoism, on the other the quite opposite ideal
collectivism. Science investigating life discovered that the nature of all
living is a struggle to take the best advantage the environment for
self-preservation, self-fulfilment, self-aggrandisement. Human thought seizing in
its usual arbitrary trenchant fashion upon this aspect of modern knowledge has
founded on it theories of a novel kind which erect into a gospel the right for
each to live his own life not merely by utilising others, but even at the
expense of others. The first object of life this view is for the individual to survive as
long as he may, to become strong, efficient, powerful, to dominate his
environment .,d his fellows and to raise himself on this strenuous and egoistic
line to his full stature of capacity and reap his full measure enjoyment.
Philosophies like Nietzsche's, certain forms of Anarchism, - not the idealistic
Anarchism of the thinker which is rather the old individualism of the ideal
reason carried to its logical conclusion, - certain forms too of Imperialism have been largely influenced and
strengthened by this type of ideas, though not actually created by them.
1 No longer perhaps now, except with a dwindling minority - now that the League of Nations, constantly misused or hampered from its true functioning by the egoism and insincerity of its greater members, has collapsed into impotence and failure. Page-49 sacrifice himself to the growth, efficiency and progress
of the race rather than live for his own self-fulfilment and subordinate the
race-life to his' own needs. Modern collectivism derives its victorious
strength from the impression made upon human thought by this opposite aspect of
modern knowledge. We have seen how the German mind took up both these ideas and
combined them on the basis of the present facts of human life: it affirmed the
entire subordination of the individual to the community, nation or State; it
affirmed, on the other hand, with equal force the egoistic self-assertion of
the individual nation as against others or against any group or all the groups
of nations which constitute the totality of the human race. Page – 50 considered as so many mechanical rules or settled forces
acting upon the individual or the group which, when they have been observed and
distinguished by the reason, have by one's will or by some will to be organised
and applied fully much as Science applies the laws it discovers. These laws or
rules have to be imposed on the individual by his own abstract reason and will
isolated as a ruling authority from his other parts or by the reason and will
of other individuals or of the group, and they have to be imposed on the group
itself either by its own collective reason and will embodied in some machinery
of control which the mind considers as something apart from the life of the
group or by the reason and will of some other group external to it or of which
it is in some way a part. So the State is viewed in modern political thought as
an entity in itself, as if it were something apart from the community and its
individuals, something which has the right to impose itself on them and control
them in the fulfilment of some idea of right, good or interest which is
inflicted on them by a restraining and fashioning power rather than developed
in them and by them as a thing towards which their self and nature are impelled
to grow. Life is to be managed, harmonised, perfected by an adjustment, a
manipulation, a machinery through which it is passed and by which it is shaped.
A law outside oneself, - outside even when it is discovered or
determined by the individual
reason and accepted or enforced by the individual will, - this is the governing idea of objectivism; a mechanical
process of management, ordering, perfection, this is its conception of
practice. Page – 51 means by which we recognise and realise ourselves.
Subjectivism tends to take a large and complex view of our nature and being and
to recognise many powers of knowledge, many forces of effectuation. Even, we
see it in its first movement away from the external and objective method
discount and belittle the importance of the work of the reason and assert the
supremacy of the life-impulse or the essential Will-to-be in opposition to the
claims of the intellect or else affirm some deeper power of know- ledge, called
nowadays the intuition, which sees things in the whole, in their truth, in
their profundities and harmonies while intellectual reason breaks up,
falsifies, affirms superficial appearances and harmonises only by a mechanical
adjustment. But substantially we can see that what is meant by this intuition
is the self-consciousness, feeling, perceiving, grasping in its substance and
aspects rather than analysing in its mechanism its own truth and nature and
powers. The whole impulse of subjectivism is to get at the self, to live in the
self, to see by the self, to live out the truth of the self internally and
externally but always from an
internal
initiation and centre. Page-52 claim of the individual to have a law of his own being, a law of his own nature which he has a right to fulfil and his demand for freedom of thought involving necessarily the freedom to err and for freedom of action involving necessarily the freedom to stumble and sin may be regarded as an insolence and a chimera. The collective self-consciousness will then have the right to invade at every point the life of the individual, to refuse to it all privacy and apartness, all self-concentration and isolation, all independence and self-guidance and determine everything for it by what it conceives to be the best thought and highest will and rightly dominant feeling, tendency, sense of need, desire for self- satisfaction of the collectivity.
But also we
may enlarge the idea of the self and, as objective Science sees a universal
force of Nature which is the one reality and of which everything is the
process, we may come subjectively to the realisation of a universal Being or
Existence which fulfils itself in the world and the individual and the group
with an impartial regard for all as equal powers of its self-manifestation.
This is obviously the self-knowledge which is
most likely to be right, since it most comprehensively embraces and
accounts for the various aspects of the world-process and the eternal
tendencies of humaniy. In this view neither the separate growth of the
individual nor the all-absorbing growth of the group can be the ideal, but an
equal, simultaneous and, as far as may be, parallel development of both, in
which each helps to fulfil the other. Each being has his own truth of
independent self-realisation and his truth of self-realisation in the life of
others and should feel, de- sire, help, participate more and more, as he grows
in largeness and power, in the harmonious and natural growth of all the
individual selves and all the collective selves of the one universal Being.
These two, when properly viewed, would not be separate, opposite or really
conflicting lines of tendency, but the same impulse of the one common
existence, companion movements separating only to return upon each other in a
richer and larger unity and mutual consequence. Page – 53 and determinant here of the mental and vital movements and capacities. Or it may identify itself with the vital being, the life soul in us and its emotions, desires, impulses, seekings for power and growth and egoistic fulfilment. Or it may rise to a conception of man as a mental and moral being, exalt to the first place his inner growth, power and perfection, individual and collective, and set it before us as the true aim of our existence. A sort of subjective materialism, pragmatic and outwardgoing, is a possible standpoint; but in this the subjective tendency cannot long linger. For its natural impulse is to go always inward and it only begins to feel itself and have satisfaction of itself when it gets to the full conscious life within and feels all its power, joy and forceful potentiality pressing for fulfilment. Man at this stage regards himself as a profound., vital Will-to-be which uses body as its instrument and to which the powers of mind are servants and ministers. This is the cast of that vitalism which in various striking forms has played recently so great a part and still exercises a considerable influence on human thought. Beyond it we get to a subjective idealism now beginning to emerge and be- come prominent, which seeks the fulfilment of man in the satisfaction of his inmost religious, aesthetic, intuitive, his highest intellectual and ethical, his deepest sympathetic and emotional nature and, regarding this as the fullness of our being and the whole object of our being, tries to subject to it the physical and vital existence. These come to be considered rather as a possible symbol and instrument of the subjective life flowing out into forms than as having any value in themselves. A certain tendency to mysticism, occultism and the search for a self independent of the life and the body accompanies this new movement - new to modem life after the reign of individualism and objective intellectualism - and emphasises its real trend and character. But here also it is possible for subjectivism to go beyond and to discover the true Self as something greater even than mind. Mind, life and body then become merely an instrumentation for the increasing expression of this Self in the world, - instruments not equal in their hierarchy, but equal in their necessity to the whole, so that their complete perfection and harmony and unity as elements of our self-expression become essential to the true Page – 54 aim of our living. And yet that aim would not be to perfect life, body and mind in themselves, but to develop them so as to' make a fit basis and fit instruments for the revelation in our inner and outer life of the luminous Self, the secret Godhead who is one and yet various in all of us, in every being and existence, thing and creature. The ideal of human existence personal and social would be its progressive transformation into a conscious out- flowering of the joy, power, love, light, beauty of the transcendent and universal Spirit. Page - 55 |