Chapter I: Poe at Last (2)

I think at once of “The Outline of History” of H. G. Wells, which had an analogous popular appeal in America and England. Wells, like Spengler, under the guise of writing history, offered a thesis and a myth. Here the analogy stops. The story in Wells is a vulgar, obvious narrative of “events”: his thesis is the most illiterate notion of “human progress” and his myth is a mere flatulent, optimistic dream. Spengler’s work is formally beautiful. He builds, not by storytelling, but by the presentation and analysis of analogies. And he concludes on a note as darkly glamorous as it is pessimistic. The Winter is upon us, he declares in doom words that are closer to the note of the prophets than he would care to admit. Our salvation is to perform, nobly and perfectly, the work of Winter: to understand ourselves, to set down as the Seal of our glorious dying life a ruthless scrutiny of what we were.

I shall criticize Spengler harshly enough. Let it be, however, always clear that Spengler has written a work of heroic poetic power. The land that dared to welcome such a volume still possesses culture.

The book’s main thesis seems to be disguised in the title. “The Decline of the West”—is it not a misnomer? Has not Spengler really written a history and a morphology of Cultures? But no. Though the title may mislead—may, indeed, have misled its author and its readers, it is a true self-confession of the poet’s veritable purpose. Spengler has composed this erudite, overpoweringly brilliant thesis on the anatomy and physiology of cultures, in order to prove that _his_ Culture (the Culture of the West) is dying. This is where his heart lies. He has written a swan song. And since he is a citizen of the world whose most valid mythic material is no longer the personal legend, the hero, the war, the romance; is, on the other hand, metaphysics, history, epistemology and science, Spengler has employed these elements to make his tragic tale.

And the value of the book lies not in its thesis and its proof. This decline of the West is obvious enough. Spengler shares his conviction of it with a great measure of good Europeans. For several generations the disaster has been in the air. The Great War was but an episode. Rousseau had some ideas on the subject. No sooner had the Germans after Kant invented the notions of Culture, Progress, Spirit, than the critics rose to prove that their culture was moribund and their spirit sleeping. Since Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Europe’s religious decline has been taken for granted. Tolstoi and Nordau from contrary directions met in calling modern art the herald of the fall. Rimbaud, Blake, Dostoevski, Whitman, were the sort of prophets who declared the death of Western Europe, although it was to predict a new spiritual rise. Long past its zenith is the myth that the “modern age” is a height rather than a decline from the medieval. The notion that the Middle Ages were “Dark Ages” is relegated to Chautauqua.

Spengler’s value (and it is very real) lies in his attitude toward this decline of the West and in the method whereby he establishes it. His attitude is poetic. He despises the Superman construction whereby Nietzsche cheated his despair of tomorrow: he is closer to the marvelous poet Rimbaud who accepted the complete negation of all values, without hope of heavens or nirvanas, and who, yet, made of his acceptance a last song. Spengler is in love with winter. So bitter-passionate is his embrace of the death he feels in his own soul that he has written a vast book to prove the inevitability of his love. The romantic “proves” the perfection of his lady by showing how the birds and the trees and the winds sing her praises. Thus has Spengler bent the art and mathematics of the Greeks, the religion of the Jews and Arabs, the cultures of Egypt, India and China to his one loved purpose: he has made them over into ineluctable signs of the winter upon Europe.

Before such thorough passion one must be respectful. This is a song—a death song the Prussian is singing. The work of art is a matter of focus. Here a man with the whole world’s learning in his hand has _focused_ it to make refrain for a great downgoing. He has seen mankind whole, in order to make that whole the accomplice of his own particular end. He has warped history, maimed philosophy, chain-ganged science, perverted art. But he is an artist himself. He has written a book which is poor history, worse anthropology, perhaps. So was Dante’s “Divina Commedia.”

Spengler, I have said, is a poet, his metaphysics eclectic rather than sound, his historical research vast rather than uniformly deep. Spengler’s masters, as regards the material with which he works out his conception, are almost legion, nor has he always done them justice. The notion of a culture-organism, independent, impenetrable, yet somehow mirroring the universe within its autonomous self, and moved only by God in the mysterious shape of Destiny, is very close to Leibnitz with his Monads. Spengler, indeed, is an instance, with Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, of the revival of Leibnitz, whose realistic, pluralistic universe was for a time submerged under the idealistic waves of Kant and Hegel. To this Leibnitzian base, Spengler adds a good measure of Hegel. His treatment of mathematics, science, history, all the attributes of culture from geometry to esthetics, as expressions of Spirit and as subjective, is Hegelian or Kantian idealism. On the other hand, his radical differentiation of mathematical time (which is reversible) from the irreversible Time which he calls Destiny brings to mind Bergson who opposed creative Time, the signature of Life, to the false, spatial, materialistic time which he condemns as a constructed figment of the intellect. Spengler’s anti-intellectualism, whereas it is as logical as Hegel, springs from Bergson, as does, likewise, his hostility to the geneticisms of Darwin and of Marx. His treatment, however, of the art-phenomena of any age as physiognomic traits of its people is a brilliant evolution of what Taine and Renan themselves derived from Hegel.

Spengler avows Goethe as his master. He is forever quoting Goethe, appealing to him as the scientific and philosophic source of his conception. And he is right, in so far as both these men are poets. Spengler is very far from the ideas of Goethe; but in his use of ideas toward an absolute, mythmaking end, he is allied to the creator of Faust.

Goethe’s philosophic master was Spinoza. This manifest fact would be inadmissible to Spengler who regards Goethe as the last master of the Faustian soul and Spinoza as an anomalous survival, out of time and out of place, from the alien Magian or Arabian culture. Spengler’s thesis of intact, autonomous culture-organisms does not allow that a master from one culture can do more than impede the evolution of another. Spinoza, he declares, shows his strangeness from Western (Faustian) Culture in that he lacks the _force-element_ which is that culture’s primary trait. Faust denotes force tending toward the infinite. But why cannot the same be said of the personal nature of any of the Hebrew prophets or of Prometheus? In Spinoza, it is true that this trait of personal force is assimilated—or, rather, it is equated—in that balance of individual wills whose sum is God. The point is that whereas Goethe as artist depicted personal force in Faust, he transcended it as a philosopher precisely in his acceptance of the Spinozistic synthesis of forces. Goethe, maturing as a thinker, transcended the concept of personal will as ultimate. Spengler has taken Goethe’s esthetic creation of the individual, _willing_ Faust, and made of it a philosophic symbol for an entire culture.

Let us take Spengler for a while, as he demands to be taken, critically. My notes of specific disagreements with the Spenglerian presentation of facts and of conclusions would cover many pages. This is no place to print them. Yet I cannot avoid some minimum of analytical discussion.

The major thesis is the critical issue. Spengler considers the culture as an organism. He discerns in history a number of such cultures. He examines the Chinese, the Egyptian, the Indian (Hindu), the Classical (Greek and Roman), the Magian (Jewish-Persian—early Christian-Arab), and the Western or Faustian (roughly Western Europe since 900 C.E.). He discovers in each of these cultures a regular life span of four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter. They sum to about one thousand years. The form and length of this course never varies. Each culture has a _soul_: this it expresses through a chief spiritual attitude, through an individual vision of life and through a specific symbol. The mathematics, science, art, religion, political, financial and economic forms of every culture express its soul, its vision—are symbols of its attitude toward life. These expressions go, with the culture itself, through the seasons to decrepitude from youth. Each epoch in any culture is strictly homogeneous with the “contemporary” epoch of any other culture. In the spring, that is, of Classical culture, you will find manifestations in every activity of man which are analogous to those of the spring of Western or of Chinese culture. Each culture lives out its own destiny, dies its own death. No other culture can do more than impede it, even as one tree may impede another’s sunlight. There is no interpenetration. There is no mutual understanding. It is an illusion on the part of the Western soul to believe it understands the Chinese, the Arabian, the Greek. The inherent growth of each culture is a matter not of geneticisms and material evolutions, but of Destiny. There is no cause and effect; there are monadlike cultural units, mapped through irreversible Time from birth to death.

Now, the trouble with these organisms is that they are placed _in vacuo_. They are described as evolving their destiny sheerly out of themselves, without relational struggle, drama, reaction, interference. And yet they are also described as having the nature of biologic organisms: i. e., they have youth, maturity, old age; they have a specific lifespan. But no organisms known to man exist in this utter isolation. One and all, they arise from other organisms like them, they live in a continuum of interaction with other organisms like them, they give birth before death or in death to other organisms like them. The culture-organisms of Spengler do not seem to be really alive: they are mere synthetic constructions of the author. In order to prove them alive, Spengler has been forced to a progressive and virtuosic deforming of the facts.

When I say that the Spenglerian culture-organism, absolute, monadlike, impenetrable, does not exist, I do not mean that there is no valid view of cultures as organic within their rise and fall. Before I can come to this, I must examine in at least one detail the Spenglerian proof.

Each culture, Spengler undertakes to show, has a soul unique and radically different from that of any other culture. (If this is so, why is there such strict analogy in the forms, seasons and lifespan of all cultures?) This soul’s Weltanschauung is its own. And its prime symbol is its idea of space or of extension. From this symbol each culture-soul constructs its mathematics, its sciences, its religion, its architecture, etc. They are all expressions of the prime symbol. Therefore every mathematics, science system, religion, etc., differs radically from every other. Moreover, there is no one mathematics, no one system of physics, etc. There are as many as there are cultures. Each is true, and true uniquely for _its_ culture.

To prove his thesis of the individual prime symbol of each culture, Spengler bravely ventures to establish that Greek “number” and “space” and “mathematics” differ radically from the Western. The Classical prime symbol is the finite unit, the entity, the _here and now_. It denies infinitude, past, future. It considers space as the mere emptiness between objects. Therefore it looks on number (Pythagoras) as the essence of all things: and by all things it means literally things perceptible to the senses. From this prime symbol has come the Classical esthetic unit—the human body: the Greek tragedy of episode and exterior fate: the political unit, a small city (polis): the coin, etc. But the Western (Faustian) soul has infinity as its prime symbol. Space for it is infinite and comes prior to the objects which have their being _within_ it. Western mathematics is, therefore, one of function, analysis, relation. Its geometry is non-Euclidean. Its State is a cosmic empire. Its money is credit, not the coin. Its signal art is not sculpture but atmospheric painting and contrapuntal music. Its architecture is not the interiorless Greek temple, but the infinitely soaring Gothic church.

To make his thesis absolute instead of merely suggestive, Spengler is forced to explain away the Dionysian (anti-Apollonian) element in Greek culture and the Renaissance in Western Europe: to ignore the mystical in Pythagoras and Plato, together with the Aristotelian elements of medieval thought and modern science. The idea of the infinite and of aspiration toward it existed, indeed, in Greece. It came over, organically, from Egypt. Classic Greece did not lose it, but formed it, rather; and transformed it. Moreover, the modern mathematics is different from the classic and the Newtonian only in so far as it is a growth. Infinity was a problem evaded by the classical geometers: admitted as insoluble by the Cartesians: and _eliminated as solved_ by the non-Euclidean mathematicians of the nineteenth century. The Classical attitude toward ultimate problems was a status of childhood. It admitted only the object and the material. So it evolved materialistic systems like those of Thales, Democritus, Heraclitus; or turned the abstractions of ideas into quasi materials called essences, as in Plato. The Faustian attitude was one of adolescence. It stressed the unsolved and aspirational: the concept of infinite space, the autonomy of the personal will. Faust is a growth from Œdipus; even as the Cathedral is a growth from the Temple. To differentiate the prime symbols of cultures which so obviously were interpenetrated, not alone one by the other, but each by still other cultures (such as the Egyptian and the Hebrew), is to do them violence. It is an unnecessary abstraction. Why Spengler wanted to make this abstraction we shall see in the sequel.

Here is a book packed with intricate allusions. To criticize it in detail would take almost page for page. I must confine myself to one more example. One of the cultures discussed by Spengler is the Arabian—the culture of the Magian soul. Its prime space-symbol is the _world-cave_. It lacks the force element of the Faustian, and the unit-object notion of the Greek. The individual, here, is a mere passive emanation within God, as within an aloof yet immanent and defining Cave. The Arab arch, the mosque-dome, the mosaic painting, are alike expressions of this symbol. As are also algebra (the arithmetic of indefinite number), the arguments of Talmudry, the fatalism of the Moslem. The Magian culture-soul was born about the first year of our era. Precultural to it was the whole pre-Christian history of Judea, Persia, Arabia. Now, as “springtime scriptures,” come the Gospels, come the philosophies of Origen, Philo, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Mani. With Augustine and the Nestorians we are at the summer. Mohammed marks the decline into the autumnal dryness whose strawlike flowers are the Arab and Judaic thinkers of Babylon and Spain.

Perhaps this amazing violence done to such various spirits as ancient Hebrew prophet, Berber mystic, Alexandrian pseudepigraphist, Arab Moslem and Granadan Moor, in the attempt to enclose them all within one organic cultural conception, born at the birth of Christ, reaching summer about 400, drooping in 800 and dead with the _rigor mortis_ of “civilization” at the year 1,000, will most briefly prove the dangers of the Spenglerian method.

Of course, there are analogies between St. Augustine and Ibn Gabirol. Are there, then, none between Faust and Job? between the writers of the Upanishads and Whitman? between the sculptors of Egypt and the painters of Spain? If Maimonides is a “Magian Winter man,” why is Aquinas a “Faustian Spring man”? If kinship of “prime symbol” bring Philo, Plotinus, Mohammed, Rabbi Akiba and Jehuda Halevi together as seasonal expressions of a single culture, why not prove for the entire world one spiritual Body, one organic culture—with its systoles and diastoles, of course, its tides, its shifts, and yet as well with its deep unity of purpose, its continuity of form and of method of creation?

Death is a breaking up; a lapse from unity into multiplicity. When a human being dies, only his unity is gone. Disease means _dis-wholeness_. Spengler breaks up the world into these absolute cultures which are really fragments, because there is the tendency toward death—toward disunity—in his own high Prussian soul. _He_ is breaking and so is his particular portion of the world. Let him, therefore, make conscription of all the wisdom of his world to prove that his experience is the Law.

Nowhere is the man’s will to see crooked plainer than in his virtual ignoring of the Jews. The whole Scriptural era before the Gospels is set aside as “inorganic”—not cultural at all. Now, Spengler’s thesis is that the pure mystical religious ethos is the trait of the birth of a culture. Legalism, materialism, socialism, communism, the various systems of utilitarianism, mark that culture’s end and herald the “state of suspended death” which he calls civilization and which, with all its wintry signs, he declares now to be upon the European and American worlds. But if, hypothetically, he had deigned to consider the Hebrews and Jews as a culture, what would he have found? Mosaism (read: materialism, legalism, utilitarianism) came first! “Civilization” or death came before culture or birth. And from this winter a gradual unfolding toward the spring of the prophets. He would have found matter even more disquieting than that. For this “organism” of the Jews is hopelessly irregular: its seasons and states recur and are intermingled. Nor does Spengler’s millennial limit for the entire story tell one-half of its creative tale. He would have found, moreover, that this hypothetic culture interpenetrated with others: revived and created others, was revived by others.

And, looking from the Jews back to his Greeks and Faustians, he would have found a similar intricate story. He would have found, in other words, hope in lieu of his dear despair. Wherefore he looked elsewhere, reasoned otherwise.

The culture-organism is a notion abstracted from human life. It _is_ an abstraction. And abstractions are needed for intellectual work. They are right when they are fruitful. To regard the life of Greece as a strict cultural whole is wrong: yet pragmatically it may be correct to do so, since it enables us to get the results which observation in isolated status alone brings. The danger rises when we forget that abstractions are of use qua abstractions. Take them for real and they turn monsters.

Indeed, the idea of the periodic rise and fall of man is probably a similar abstraction. Yet it is justified so long as we employ it either to criticize the past or to envisage a greater future. Both of these acts require the analytic method: and analysis _is_ abstraction. And now we are at the root of what ails Spengler. His “cultures” are counters of the analyst. And these he has turned into a poet’s bodies. This is why his book, although its impulse is poetic, cannot rank as great poetic art. He tells us a good deal about the cultures which have filled the world. And much of what he says is true and is profound. Nowhere, for instance, have I encountered better comment on German music, on the deep significances of Classic and Gothic architecture. Yet the cultures themselves, whereof he speaks as breathing entities, do not become plastically real. We learn much in detail about their traits. _They_ neither breathe for us nor move. They cannot. For they are not persons of a drama: they are tools of an argument.

Human spirit takes forms, of course, and all forms die. But the _constant_ is the human spirit. And it is poor philosophy to take its forms as really abstracted from each other. Even the painter of a group of persons must relate them, one and all, upon his canvas if he aims to achieve esthetic truth.

Among the forms of human spirit are the arts which rise and fall; are social entities like state and city, which are builded and broken. But the Spenglerian assumption that the human spirit has no other life than in the splendor of great buildings, great realms, great arts, is a profanation. To prove that the abstraction called Rome was “decadent” in the year 400 is not to prove that Man, then, was less great than in the days when Caesar strutted. It may require a peculiar conjunction of poetic genius and social readiness to produce a Vergil. But there are other ways to the light. And some of them are always open.

Spengler feels death in his own soul. Wherefore he marshals a whole retrospect of life to funeral him in true Prussian glory. But human history is subtler. Man is a variable constant. He can achieve greatness with the ruins of a world as his sole instruments, as well as with the aid of outward fortune. Here, too, the evidence of the Jew might have saved Spengler—from the writing of his book! Variant circumstance has infinitely varied the expressions of this people. They have been warlike and humble; unphilosophical and, later, abstruse beyond the Greeks and Hindus. They have had no drama and flooded the stage: no worldly arts at all, and later supplied such arts for all the world. They have been pastoral, and adverse from the soil. They have been creators, politically, of Greek polis, of Oriental empires, and of invisible, Platonic Zions.

Only in so far as Man remained alive among the Jews was Jewish culture a constant. And this is true of any culture. The undying kernel is humanity: this is the locus of organic growth and of organic permanence which Spengler should have studied. For cultures are never isolate. Cut them off from their immersion in other cultures—in Life, they will die uprooted. They move upon and within each other: they fall to rise, fade to be transfigured.

Above all, the human spirit, in any cultural body, is capable of _unprecedented transformation_, provided an unprecedented new element of life comes fertilely upon it. This is the destiny of evolution. And evolution is true, however discarded the mechanistic form of it may be which Darwin degraded from Lamarck. _And this crucial fact—that the culture, if to be regarded as an organism at all, must be taken as a transforming organism; an organism related to the genus, not to the individual, to the possibly infinite genus, not to the sharply delimited and mortal person—is entirely ignored by Spengler._

Look on cultures, not as biologic bodies with their youth and age, but as indefinite series like those in mathematics, and you have a fertile abstraction in lieu of a dead one. These series have, each, their inner laws, perhaps, but they are intertwined and any figure belonging in one place to one series may differently occupy other series. Paul, then, who in the Spenglerian sense was a “winter man” for the Jews, could be a “spring man” for Western Europe. And Jesus, his strict contemporary in time and race, could have in him all seasons.

Or take America. Spengler would rightly say that America was born of the dying of European culture. So he condemns us to the _rigor mortis_ of civilization; to a noisier Egyptian fellahdom. But what of the new mythmakers, the springtime men, those creatures of pure ethos—Whitman, Lincoln, Melville, Thoreau? In an organic body, shut by Destiny, they have no place, and Spengler doubtless would deny them. In a life series, self-contained yet indefinitely progressing, they are in place. For with such a series each integer is at once the conclusion of what came before and the outset of an infinity beyond....

_1926_

8. THE MODERN DISTEMPER

(_A diagnosis through Joseph Wood Krutch and Bertrand Russell_)

a.

In the days when all men of a nation shared a view of life—worshiping Jehovah and obeying Torah, dwelling within the cosmos of the Catholic Church, accepting the divine right of their king or of their reason—it was possible for the author and critic to make his individual contribution without explicitly stating the philosophic ground on which he rested. The base of his point of view was common, and was commonly understood. The personal variation was what mattered. This, of course, is the contrary of our modern state. It is precisely the foundations of human vision—hence of human thought and of language—that have shifted. In place of essential harmony in the premises of intellectual action, there is chaos. But the American writer, despite this obvious fact, seldom honors his public with a clear-cut statement of what his philosophy and his religion are. He may even go so far as to deny that he possesses any, and make of his lack a virtue.

Yet, however negative and confused, each human being must possess an attitude toward life. Every thought is a judgment, every act is a judgment, the interpretation of every word is a judgment: and judgment implies a standard. If that standard is not stated, it may function contrary to the conscious will of its possessor. But it functions nevertheless. Current literary work is for the most part the expression of a philosophy and a religion that are not stated at all. The essential implications never come to light. The student could, of course, go to the complete works of each writer and discover the traits of his _Weltanschauung_; but most readers possess neither time nor power for such research. They are therefore constantly taking in, under cover of a stream of articles, biographies, poems, novels, plays, an attitude toward life of which they never become aware. And this hidden attitude works in them; shapes and nourishes, or corrupts them.

Joseph Wood Krutch is a well-known American critic. He is neither more able, nor less so, than a dozen others who write in our liberal magazines. But he has done what all of his fellows should have realized the need of doing; and what most of them have shamefully neglected to do. He has written a book, entitled “The Modern Temper,” in which, with all the clarity and honesty at his command, he has set forth the philosophy behind his judgments—the _measure_ of life that determines his specific critical responses. How far he is justified in calling his mood _the_ modern temper, we shall see. Certainly, his is _a_ modern temper, widespread and hence significant. His book therefore offers an occasion, exceptionally concise, to study the philosophy and spirit of some of the men who write our books and who review them.

In order to take fair advantage of this occasion, I must begin by setting forth in some detail what Mr. Krutch has said. In my summary I shall, without criticism, follow the line of the book in its exact progression, using wherever possible the words of the author.

_Chapter 1._ (a) Freud says that the unborn babe is the happiest of
creatures; into his consciousness has entered no conflict, nor is
there any limitation upon his desires, (b) As the babe grows up and
experience and knowledge make life miserable, he invents myths of all
sorts to recapture or protect his infant bliss. The realm of poetry,
mythology, religion, represents the world as a man would like to have
it, while science represents the world as it is. (c) Connections
between parts of life, explanations of life, reasons for
life—relations between the parts—are supplied by the imagination.
Which means, they are illusions, (d) Only man has rationality; the
universe is not rational, (e) Therefore man is an alien in the
universe. His rationality, being “unnatural,” is hence an illusion,
(f) Our morality and emotional lives are adjusted to a world which no
longer exists—because it has been destroyed by reason (science being
the reasoning from facts).

_Chapter 2._ (a) The social virtues of the humanists—serving one’s
children and posterity, living for society, etc.—are really animal
traits, (b) Don Juan is the real type of human, (c) An individualism
that is antagonistic to and destructive of the social virtues is the
highest human value, (d) Human individualism, the real human value, is
perfect separatism of each soul, (e) Nature reveals no ends only means
for its own self-perpetuation, (f) Man in civilization strives for
ends, and turns means (sex, thought, etc.) into ends. Therefore man is
unnatural, (g) Apotheosis of the ant, as the ideal of nature; since
the ant has no individualistic ends, living entirely for the anthill,
(h) The antithesis between natural means and human ends is
irreconcilable, for when man makes his own thought or sensation or
life an end, he neglects the procreation of the species, (i)
Therefore, all cultures no sooner ripen than they rot. (j) The
alternatives for man are an antlike stable group, or recurrent death
at the top. (k) Humanism is riddled with mutually destructive
contradictions.

_Chapter 3._ (a) The generation of Huxley, Tennyson, etc., was sure
that science was going to disclose a world in which man is perfectly
and regally at home, (b) But science has revealed only a vast
emptiness, in which, lost like Milton’s Satan, we wing our way. (c)
Scientific mastery of the inner life, the soul, leads likewise to no
real mastery of it, but only to more confusion. (d) There is no ethics
or morals. Anthropology and psychology reveal merely a variety of
ethics and morals. (e) Yet man persists in being an ethical, moral
creature. (f) There is no royal reason. (g) The reason in which
Aristotle, Shakespeare, Spinoza, believed is revealed by science to be
mere rationalization. (h) Science itself is doubtful. 2,000 years of
epistemology have made it dubious if man can know any reality outside
himself. (i) Science gives us one table—consisting of nothing but
electrons. Our senses give us another table. The former we know as
truth; but the second only can be of use to us in our experience. (j)
Science gives us the real universe. (k) Huxley, etc., were deluded,
thinking we could make this universe ours. (l) There is no relation
between the outer world of science and the inner world of man’s needs
and emotions.

_Chapter 4._ (a) Love is defined as the sexuality of the individual
separate ego. It is a discontinuous, physical phenomenon with no
implications in reality beyond its naked self. (b) Since science and
modern freedom have freed love of the old taboos and of the religious
and poetic myths, love, as more than naked sexuality, turns out to be
illusion. (c) Sex is a mere physical need, and hence has no values
whatsoever. Man is simply cursed with this need and must make his
peace with it, as he can. (d) We shall have to get used to a loveless
as well as to a godless world.

_Chapter 5._ (a) Tragedy is based on noble action, and noble action is
based on the belief (as Sophocles and Shakespeare had it) in the
dignity of man’s soul. (b) This dignity is an illusion; for it derives
from the notion that man is the center of the universe, or at least
that he belongs to the universe, and that his deeds have some
universal import. (c) With the going of this illusion has gone man’s
dignity, his possibility of noble action—and Tragedy. (d) The art of
the present can only distrust its own thoughts, despise its own
passions, realize man’s impotent unimportance in the universe, and
tell no story except such as makes it more acutely aware of its
trivial miseries. (e) Yet with the passing of Tragedy, our need of
Tragedy (i.e., of dignity, noble actions, etc.) has not passed.

_Chapter 6._ (a) To medievalism, life was an exact science. The laws,
rules, etc., of that science have broken. (b) Life regarded as a
science is now and forevermore intellectually indefensible. (c) The
modern mind, realizing that there is no Peace unless each life is made
into some self-sufficient pattern or order or whole of its own,
strives to achieve this. Strives, that is, to make life an art. (d)
For in science, there is only one Truth; but in art, there may be many
truths. Many men have striven to make their lives an art: e.g.,
Cellini, St. Francis, the heroes of Henry James’s novels, Anatole
France. (e) In art, there is no standard except the artistic
perfection of the individual work, according to its own rules. As an
artistic creation, Othello is no better than Iago. (f) In art, there
is no ethics. (g) To conceive of life as a group of works of art
means, therefore, anarchy. (h) No society can five by such a scheme.
Life lived as an art is pragmatically impossible, from the standpoint
of mankind.

_Chapter 7._ (a) What progress did philosophy or religion ever make?
None. It was only when the thinker discovered how small are the things
he can do, that he did anything at all: only when he renounced looking
for the key to heaven, that he was able to keep chimneys from smoking.
(b) The world grows more comfortable, as man ceases to strive for
anything beyond comfort. (c) But now, despite this progress, behold
metaphysics is reborn! (d) It is typified by the neo-Catholicism of
France, and the neo-Anglicanism of England. (e) Its essence is
expressed by T. E. Hulme, who wrote: “One of the main achievements of
the nineteenth century was ... the principle of _continuity_. The
destruction of this conception is, on the contrary, an urgent
necessity of the present.” The premise of the new metaphysicians is
therefore _dualism_, or discontinuity. It says: “There are two worlds:
one, the empty spaces of materialism and science, and two, the world
of man—spirit, faith, ethic, value, emotion, God. And there is
discontinuity between them.” (f) But there is nothing of which we are
so sure as of the _continuity_ taught by science. To earlier, naïve
men, the important thing about _living matter_ was that it _lived_:
but science can only be sure that it is _matter_. (g) We believe in
matter, accepting _its_ continuity, wiping out the merely hypothetic
world of spirit, value, etc.—the world of the modern metaphysicians.
(h) Metaphysics is but another petty effort to make life an art: it is
a confession of its own despair and failure.

_Chapter 8._ (a) It is not by thought that men live. The less they
think, the better they live. The more they think, the more willing
they are to die. (b) The very need of thought proves that man’s
vitality is ebbing. An animal, a barbarian, has no such need. (c)
Civilizations, constructed on thought, reach death; then the naïve
barbarians rush in, the man begins anew. (d) The fresh hordes of
barbarians destined to renew us are perhaps the Russians. (e)
Communism, despite its sophisticated phraseology, is a new barbarism.
In communism the individual does not count, only the anthill counts.
No religious speculation is allowed. Life is perpetuated,
unquestioningly, for its own blind sake. (f) But the inevitable
despair of the modern man who, having learned to think, has learned
the hopeless abyss between himself and nature, is not so bad after
all: since he has physical comfort. Philosophical pessimism is not so
hard to bear as cold or hunger. Ours is a lost cause, but we should
rather die (in comfort) as men, than live as animals.

b.

Our next step is to examine the various elements of Mr. Krutch’s philosophy of life: to test their quality, their typicality, and to compare them; to measure their cogency as the cause of such desperate conclusions. The references are to the divisions of his argument, as catalogued, omitting repetitions and minor points.

_Chapter 1._ (a) states with apparent sympathy that a prenatal, vegetable life, bereft of struggle or aspiration, is a possible desideratum. (b) asserts that there is a dualistic conflict between art, which is an illusory world, and science, which is the real world. Here is the author’s doctrine: the relation between the unborn babe and the womb in which it lives is real; but the relation between the born man and the world in which he lives is illusion. Therefore, since life in any individual consists of the relation between it and its environment, and since no man could live an instant without some relation with the air and the world, what Mr. Krutch is really saying is: the life of the unborn babe is real; the life of the born man is an illusion. (c) implies that relations and connections between man and the universe, such as imagination supplies, are necessary for his welfare. But they are illusory, since the imagination is delusion. Yet Mr. Krutch has not even attempted to prove that imagination is delusion. This is his premise, so that, of course, this must be his conclusion. (d) and (e) invalidate man’s reason, since the universe has no reason. Yet the author employs his reason to prove his alienness in the universe. Virtually, he says: “My reason is invalid, since the universe is not rational. Yet my reason is, miraculously, valid enough to _prove_ that no relation between me and the universe exists.” What he should have said, logically, from the premises, is this: “I declare my reason to be exclusively mine. Therefore it is not a cogent measure to determine any relation outside myself. To discover if I belong in the universe, I must employ some measure common to both me and it: some measure that I can move from myself to the universe.” Of course, if he had relied on some such measure—a measure of mass, for instance, or of causation—he would have found _continuity_ between man and the universe. Conclusion: the chapter assumes that continuity between man and the universe is desirable, but that absolute discontinuity exists. The assumptions are sustained by means of indefensible logic.

_Chapter 2._ (a) states that since man’s social virtues are found also in animals, they cannot be human. This is tantamount to asserting absolute discontinuity between animal and man. Darwin, evolution, modern biology, are therefore flouted. The author unconsciously assumes an attitude more close to the early ascetic Christian and neo-Platonic concept of an abyss between man and brute. (b) and (c) lift up an old Spanish myth as the real human type. Don Juan was a “man” who could make love to countless women without ever becoming tired, without ever becoming attached, without ever changing, without ever feeling. Psychologists class him as the archetype of “fixated adolescent” and agree that he never existed, outside the realms of pathology. This insulate human “atom,” the “perfect individualist,” with no social relations or connections, this abstract fiction of infantile will, is the human ideal of our author. (e) and (f) carry on the thesis of discontinuity. Nature has no ends and is not moral: man has ends and is persistently a moral creature. The traits of nature are determined by studying the ant, etc.: they are by no means to be determined by studying man. For the ant, by some inscrutable right, belongs to nature, whereas man does not. This is really the premise of the argument: Mr. Krutch makes it the conclusion. His syllogism in its pure form is this: “Man is not part of nature: man has certain traits: hence these traits are not part of nature. Therefore man, possessing these (unnatural) traits, is not part of nature.” However, let us grant the premises that the ant is in nature, man is not. The conclusion must be that man is different from the ant. From this, our author is inspired to conclude that man, to _succeed as man_, must behave like an ant! Man, to succeed like a man, must build anthills and—nothing else. Conclusion: the chapter declares, in the face of anthropology, biology, sociology, psychology, that man is utterly apart from nature and from animals, and that (even as the old ascetics and transcendentalists insisted) he is a separate creation. Here is the syllogism, transposed for clarity: “A tree is made of wood. Apples are not wood. Therefore, apples cannot belong on trees.” But despite the organic difference between man and “natural creatures,” he must behave—if he would succeed—just like the creatures whom he in no way resembles! (Here, the ascetics were more logical. Having posited man as different from the brute, they mapped out for him a totally separate course.) Assuming the organic difference, our author insists that the two relationless entities must go the same way. He builds up the definitions of his humanism upon illogical contradictions; and then dismisses “humanism” as full of the contradictions of his own bad thinking.

_Chapter 3._ (a) and (b) are repetitions. (c) looks for science to “master” the soul—and looks in vain. Pure science attempts merely to measure, from the outside. For instance, it weighs the sun and names its elements. It has no mastery of the sun, in the sense of controlling the sun. To a slight degree, science has similarly tried to “measure” the soul: i.e., to analyze its components. Pure science has never attempted more, leaving the application of its discoveries to education and religion. The modern effort in these fields is unknown to our author. (d) comes down to this: science has found that _noses_ are not alike, in any two parts of the world. Negro, Eskimo, Malay, Nordic, have decidedly different noses. Ergo, science has discovered that _noses do not exist_!... To prove that morals and ethics do not exist, it would be necessary to prove that the sense of right does not exist or is at least very rare. But anthropology shows that this sense is universal. Its diversity of ethical and moral forms, of course, is due to the fact that morals are a product of the interplay between men and their environment. To say that morals vary is simply to say that men vary. To say that morals do not exist, because they do not agree, is to say that men do not exist because men do not agree. Chapter 1 revealed the genesis of the author’s mood as the result of an exorbitant faith in reason. Now (f) and (g) call reason a bad name, and dismiss it. Chapter 1 illogically employed human reason to establish the preponderance of an external, irrational universe over man. Now the evidence of the mind is declared to be poor: the universe itself may be but the projection of that poor human’s reason which (in another part) has no existence within the universe. Mr. Krutch has said: the table of science is real. The table of his senses, like the neo-Platonist dwelling in Tyre or Batanaea in the year 300, he rejects as unreal. But the old Tyrian was logical. He lived where his faith was: he utterly declined to follow his senses. This is too athletic for our modern. With one breath, he gives credence to the table of electrons; with the next, he confesses that the false table is the only one he ever hopes to live with! But the lack here is greater than merely one of logic. Mr. Krutch has the most childish notion of what science _means_, when it states that the table is a congeries of electrons.... The language of science is mathematics; and mathematics is a logic of _forms_. Everything that cannot be expressed in symbols of mass and motion is nonexistent within the realm of mathematics. Now, pictured in so far as it exists within the domain of science, i.e., in so far as it is a congeries of mass in motion, a table, of course, can be nothing but a congeries of mass in motion: a chart of electrons. In the precise same way a living body, pictured in terms of anatomy, can be nothing but an anatomical structure. But there are other domains; for instance, human behavior, which has qualities that the language of mathematics does not cover. In this domain, the description of the chair as a group of electrons will not work: but the notion of the child who has never heard of electrons, but who wants to sit down in the chair, works very well, indeed. To say that science is the _whole_ truth, because it prophesies an event like an eclipse, is just as reasonable as to say that the ideas of the child are the _whole_ truth, because the child prophesies that it is going to sit in that chair, and straightway does so. The eclipse takes place in a realm where human quality is largely extracted: so we are right to deal with eclipses in the logic of science. But man’s experience of beauty, for instance, before that eclipse is largely in the realm of human value. Here, the language of poetry is more adequate than that of mathematics. To deny one of these measures in absolute favor of the other is as reasonable as it would be to say that the architect’s blueprint is more real than the house. Mathematicians of high order, of course, are aware of the limitations of their language and therefore of the realm which their language expresses. It is only the weakling, desperately in need of an absolute Word, who speaks like Mr. Krutch, of the “certitudes of science.” Not Poincaré, not Einstein. Not the typical Eddington who says: “There is a constant unknowable in science.... Scientific laws are merely truistic measurements of a single physical condition.... So long as the electron is not reacting with the rest of the universe, we cannot be aware of it.... A particle may have position or it may have velocity, but it cannot in any exact sense have both. An association of exact position with exact momentum can never be discovered by us, because there is no such thing in nature.”... All of which is tantamount to saying, that the mathematical electron is an abstraction, that it is a mere plausible symbol; and that certitude can never exist in a field which is built up on the assumption of discrete, separate parts; since these parts do not exist—cannot exist in a continuum; and could not be observed by man, even if they existed.

_Chapter 4._ A display of the same dualism and an assumption of the same discontinuity between the various functions of man, and between man and his world. The author’s attitude toward sex is worthy of the hermit in the Egyptian desert. Sex, as an energy expressing the whole man and woman, linking them in a full human relation, mobilizing their creative as well as their possessive nature, is unreal for the author. But unlike the antique gymnosophist whose rejection of sex he shares (while ignoring his science of self-control and despising his God), Mr. Krutch has not the courage or the will to carry out his own convictions. He considers himself superior to his sex; but he is quite willing to capitulate before it.

_Chapter 5._ The finest writing of the book is here. Mr. Krutch discourses on Tragedy “as it once was” with discernment and fervor. It is plain that he is attached to Tragedy, “dead child of fallacy and illusion”; he can write with loving observation about the body of a “fraud.” (a) and (b) assume discontinuity, once more. (c) and (d) misread the modern status of literary art. Human dignity still exists, noble action and noble lives still persevere. The disappearance of the anthropocentric cosmos and of the personal heaven have enhanced man’s sense of dignity within himself. He is responsible now, not as the child of a mythic Father, but as the father of himself. Yet more is needed than dignity and noble action for the production of Tragedy. Tragedy is a social form. It must enact man’s dignity in communicable, common terms. These terms are wanting. The modern conscience of the world has not yet bridged from private into public symbols. There is nothing discouraging in this. There were ages of social preparation, also, before Sophocles and before Shakespeare: ages in which individual men had dignity, in which men lived nobly, and yet in which no great Tragedy was written.

_Chapter 6._ (a) begins with a dubious statement. The medieval science of life was inexact; it was, indeed, founded upon self-contradictory laws, and the dualism of these laws, which were supposed to conform to life but did not, eventually disrupted medieval science. In “The Re-Discovery of America,” I have gone into this question at some length. Here it is not centrally cogent, so we let it pass. (d) and (e) again imply discontinuity and discreteness not alone between man and the universe, but between man and man. Men, says the author, have so little relation among themselves that (f) if each man lived his truth according to his essence, these multiple truths would sum to anarchy! If men are essentially related, if the reality or truth of each is a focus of the interplay of the whole (as philosophy, psychology and social sciences agree), then their living by the light of their individual reality and truth would bring them into active relation with one another, and would result in harmony. These premises are denied by Mr. Krutch. The rest of the chapter is less essential. It is interesting to note, however, that it implies the impossibility of man’s ever achieving any inner principle of order or control, whereby he might integrate his life within the vicissitudes of the world. The chapter is the final admission of man’s impotence. The artist is the creator of a kind of order. Man can be an artist, says the author, when he deals with words or pigment or marble. When he deals with life, man can be only an amoeba.

c.

But the reader has had enough of this dissection of a dreary argument. Let him give one final backward glance to Chapter 7, and I shall insist no more. There he will discover that Mr. Krutch, after desperately building upon the premise of _discontinuity_ (of absolute separation between man and nature, between man and man, between certain traits in man and certain others), refutes the “new metaphysicians” on the ground that _they are the discontinuists_; while he falls back on the continuity of science! The reader will agree that Mr. Krutch has now sufficiently revealed himself as a befuddled man. If he were a thorough pessimist like Schopenhauer or Gautama, if he were a thorough transcendentalist like St. Paul, if he were a thorough materialist like Haeckel, if he were a thorough individualist like Rousseau, we could disagree with him and yet respect him. But he is thoroughly nothing, except confused. His thinking quavers between contradictory extremes of which he is not even aware; his values are a crazy-quilt of fragments pieced together from the worn creeds of Manichaeism, Puritanism, Rousseauism, Nietzscheanism, Haeckelian monism, etc., etc. His emotions are infantile. His spirit is an aggressive fear that would deny to others the dignity it lacks. He has nonetheless been worth our scrutiny. For his argument contains most of the clichés and most of the implications of our current “culture.” It shows the distemper of the modern mind, unable to bear the chaos of three centuries of ideological destruction, and unschooled to reform that chaos. If the average pundit in “The Nation,” “The New Republic,” “Harper’s,” “The Atlantic Monthly,” “The Dial,” were to put down, with a like candor, his philosophy of life, it would turn out a no less pitiful confusion. If our current literary arts were analyzed, they, too, would reveal a message as ill-founded. Behind the stubborn bewilderment of Theodore Dreiser, behind the lyric bewilderment of Sherwood Anderson, behind the bravado of Hemingway, behind the dandified despairs of Cabell and the earlier T. S. Eliot, behind the dainty froth of Thornton Wilder and of Carl Van Vechten—behind the materialism, the cynicism, the indifferentism, the impertinence, the impotence of most of our popular writing[9]—exists a failure to think straight from the facts, and to feel straight, not identical with the failure of Mr. Krutch, but essentially related.

The key to the situation—perhaps the basic cause of the “modern temper”—is suggested in Chapter 7 of Mr. Krutch’s book. What the author calls the “new metaphysic” is merely the old transcendentalism. These men whom he attacks—neo-Catholics, sentimental mysticalists, spiritualists, deniers of the “flesh” in one way or another—answer the “certitudes of science” by declaring that there is _another world_—their world of value, spirit and religion. Here, you have transcendentalism defined. And Mr. Krutch rejects it on the proper ground of discontinuity. But he does not see that his own argument—the separateness of parts and traits of man from other parts, and of man from men, and of men from nature—is discontinuity no less. And he does not see that he has blinded himself to the discontinuity of his own thought by the naïve method of calling _his favorite part of reality the Whole_.