The Meaning of Happiness. Alan Watts

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the thinkers of the Renaissance did not seem to share this idea, for apparently they were concerned far more with the human and natural than with the spiritual and supernatural. They were the forerunners of the natural sciences. Among them were such men as Leonardo da Vinci and Sir Francis Bacon, men who, as the latter boasted, “took all knowledge for their province.” But their preoccupation was still with man, and with the rational aspect of man as distinct from the divine on the one hand, and the bestial on the other. Certainly they found a new interest in the world of animals, trees, flowers, rocks, stars, and mountains, but only to discover therein analogies of the human being; they knew almost nothing of the Chinese and Japanese feeling for nature as nature. In their belief “the proper study of mankind was man.” And in this, for instance, we find the principal difference between Dante and Shakespeare, the former concerned with man in the supernatural world, the latter with man in his own human world, for “what a peece of worke is man, how noble in reason, how infinit in faculties, in form and moving, how expresse and admirable in action, how like an Angell in apprehension, how like a God!”

      The faith of Humanism in the capacity of human reason to solve all problems and subdue all nature made possible the astounding advance of rational science in our epoch, for mathematics and machinery are constructed in the very image of human intellect, sharing its rigid and inevitable logic. But by making a god of this faculty man tends to become machinelike, for reason is essentially the mechanical aspect of the mind. Its laws of logic are as predetermined as the motions of a steam engine, for a given cause can have only one effect and in this principle the universe is reduced to a machine whose every event has been fated from all eternity. Having discovered the potentialities of his reason man became obsessed with it, and the mechanical Weltanschauung of nineteenth-century science, the Utopia of machines conceived by Wells, and the social anthill of Marx were logical results.

      Similar changes came to pass in religion. It is particularly significant that the rediscovery of reason should have been accompanied by the birth of Puritan morality and Calvinistic Protestantism with its doctrine of determinism as reactions against “Popish superstition.” With the confessional gone and the dark side of life rigidly suppressed, man’s unmoral nature was denied and rejected by religion as forcibly as his irrational nature was thrown down by science. This is not to say, however, that Protestantism was essentially a rational system; it was not, and consequently came increasingly into conflict with science as the years went by. But the conflict was concerned rather with matters of theory than with those of practice, for though Protestantism was not doctrinally rational in the strictest sense of the word, it was rational in its psychology. Its beliefs were based to a great extent upon literal interpretation of the Bible, but its morality was founded mainly on the spirit of Jewish law as set forward in the Old Testament, and it is curious that though doctrinally both Lutheranism and Methodism are anything but legalistic, their standards of morality follow the rigid Puritan tradition. A similar inconsistency may be noted in Calvinism, for belief in predestination, in the doctrine that each man is irrevocably damned or saved from the beginning of the world, might easily encourage moral laxity, seeing that nothing that man can do can affect his ultimate fate. But the result was the very opposite, and nowhere were there more uncompromising moralists than the Calvinists.

      Such morality is rational in that it is an attempt to force mankind to conform in thought and action to a rigid and idealistic law. This may be giving a rather wide meaning to the term “rational,” but in essentials there is little difference between attempts to force man to be moral and attempts to make him reasonable. There may be differences between the moral ideal and the rational ideal, but as they were conceived in the Puritan and Humanist traditions they were ideals contrary to nature in that they ignored that aspect of man’s being which corresponds to “nature red in tooth and claw.” Indeed, prior to the twentieth-century rationalist and Puritan ideals had numerous points in common, especially among the Anglo-Saxon peoples. For the ideals of progress, of the rational society of liberty, equality, and fraternity, of pure communism, were not originated in the eighteenth century by the rationalistic philosophers of France. As important forces they first came to light in Puritan England of the seventeenth century.⁴

      Yet these ideals, especially the purely rationalistic, held within themselves the seeds of their own decay. It is interesting to note that, so far as science was concerned, in spite of its exaltation of human reason there arose, as in religion, an inconsistency between its doctrine and its psychology and practice. It removed man from nature and made him its master by giving him machines and by overestimating the potentialities of his reason; yet in theory it showed his essential connection with and subservience to nature. Man was evolved from animals and was not a special creation of the Deity; furthermore, he might think himself free, but the universal law of causality made it obvious that his every thought and deed was predetermined and that he was as helpless a tool in nature’s hands as a drifting cloud. But determinism is a doctrine which self-assertive man has never taken seriously (as witness the Calvinists); it convinces his head but not his heart, and in practice he has to temper it with what Vaihinger calls the philosophy of “as if,” for he behaves as if he were free. But in the glorification of human reason there was an appeal to his pride, and reason had something to show for itself in steam engines, factories, medicine, electric power, airplanes, and radio. But the god of reason had some serious reverses, one of the most important of which came out of science itself, as a result of the uncomfortable and searching inquiries of a certain Sigmund Freud into matters connected with the other aspect of scientific discovery—the inseparability of man and nature.

      Freud, Original Sin, and the Unconscious

      The rationalists of the nineteenth century were essentially optimists, and it was not surprising that they had no more taste for Freud than for the Church’s doctrine of original sin. Their faith in the ideal of progress and the certain triumph of reason was not at all in harmony with Freud’s contention that man’s highest aspirations had their origin in unconscious forces of a very different character, forces to which he gave such unpleasant names as “incest wishes,” “castration complexes,” “mother or father fixations,” and other phrases of bluntly sexual type. Nor did rationalism take kindly to so irrational an idea as that man’s unconscious goal might be to reenter the womb and revert to a condition of protected irresponsibility, floating blissfully in a warm, sleepy darkness. But Freud’s teaching was original sin in a new garb, for it showed the unregenerate Adam behind a thin shell of reason, and if man’s highest aspirations were just “rationalizations” of these dark, unconscious forces, did not this go to prove a fundamental doctrine of the Church? Did it not show that man’s efforts to save himself by exercise of his unaided will and reason are fruitless? For Humanism and rationalism had altogether neglected a mysterious factor called the Grace of God, believing that the human mind was sufficiently powerful to work out its own salvation. And by the mind they understood merely that aspect of the soul known as intellect.

      Now we have seen that intellect is the thinking machine; a power drives that machine, but whatever the character of that power the machine can only interpret it in a mechanical way. Therefore when it has to accept an irrational impulse it rationalizes it in the course of putting it into effect. When the unregenerate Adam desires blood just for the sake of blood, the reasoning machine has to find a reasonable purpose for shedding blood, however specious. And it finds it because in many ways the intellect has the most intricately subtle power of adaptation and an almost infinite capacity for self-deception. For it is of immense importance to the self-esteem of the ego that rationalizations should be convincing; otherwise man must admit his failure to stand above nature.

      Nevertheless, Freudian doctrine aroused little sympathy until after the Great War when it achieved sudden success, primarily through the ability of its method of psychological healing to cure cases of shell shock. But the outburst of the unregenerate Adam in the war itself made Freud’s ideas much more acceptable, though it is surprising how many intelligent people even today will refuse to admit that they have such a thing as an unconscious mind. They regard it as quite an impertinence for anyone to suggest that they do not always know why they want what they want and do what they do. Yet they are quite ready to admit СКАЧАТЬ