The Present Outlook (Part 4)

(Pictured: Socrates.) I am happy to present the fourth post of the final chapter of Rousseau and Romanticism, “The Present Outlook,” in which Irving Babbitt concludes that, “[m]an realizes [the] immensity of his being . . . only in so far as he ceases to be the thrall of his own ego. This human breadth he achieves not by throwing off but by taking on limitations, and what he limits is above all his imagination. ” In Rousseau and Romanticism (first published in 1919), the reader is introduced to perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique of romanticism as a literary school ever penned. Babbitt (1865-1933) was a cultural and literary critic, serving as Professor of French Literature at Harvard. He and his friend Paul Elmer More (of Princeton) became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism. Babbitt was a pioneer in the study of comparative literature; his writing is notable for its clarity and perspicacity.

The positivist will not only insist upon fruits, but will rate these fruits themselves according to their bearing upon his main purpose. Life, says Bergson, can have no purpose in the human sense of the word. (1) The positivist will reply to Bergson and to the Rousseauistic drifter in general, in the words of Aristotle, that the end is the chief thing of all and that the end of ends is happiness. To the Baconian who wants work and purpose but according to the natural law alone, the complete positivist will reply that happiness cannot be shown to result from this one-sided working; that in itself it affords no escape from the misery of moral solitude, that we move towards true communion and so towards peace and happiness only by work according to the human law. Now the more individualistic we are, I have been saying, the more we must depend for the apprehension of this law on the imagination, the imagination, let me hasten to add, supplemented by the intellect. It is not enough to put the brakes on the natural man—and that is what work according to the human law means—we must do it intelligently. Right knowing must here as elsewhere precede right doing. Even a Buddha admitted that at one period in his life he had not been intelligent in his self-discipline. I need only to amplify here what I have said in a previous chapter about the proper use of the “false secondary power” by those who wish to be either religious or humanistic in a positive fashion. They will employ their analytical faculties, not in building up some abstract system, but in discriminating between the actual data of experience with a view to happiness, just as the man of science at his best employs the same faculties in discriminating between the data of experience with a view to power and utility.

I have pointed out another important use of the analytical intellect in its relation to the imagination. Since the imagination by itself gives unity but does not give reality, it is possible to discover whether a unification of life has reality only by subjecting it to the keenest analysis. Otherwise what we take to be wisdom may turn out to be only an empty dream. To take as wise something that is unreal is to fall into sophistry. For a man like Rousseau whose imagination was in its ultimate quality not ethical at all but overwhelmingly idyllic to set up as an inspired teacher was to become an arch-sophist. Whether or not he was sincere in his sophistry is a question which the emotionalist is very fond of discussing, but which the sensible person will dismiss as somewhat secondary. Sophistry of all kinds always has a powerful ally in man’s moral indolence. It is so pleasant to let one’s self go and at the same time deem one’s self on the way to wisdom. We need to keep in mind the special quality of Rousseau’s sophistry if we wish to understand a very extraordinary circumstance during the past century. During this period men were moving steadily towards the naturalistic level, where the law of cunning and the law of force prevail, and at the same time had the illusion—or at least multitudes had the illusion—that they were moving towards peace and brotherhood. The explanation is found in the endless tricks played upon the uncritical and still more upon the half-critical by the Arcadian imagination.

The remedy is not only a more stringent criticism, but, as I have tried to make plain in this whole work, in an age of sophistry, like the present, criticism itself amounts largely to that art of inductive defining which it is the great merit of Socrates, according to Aristotle, (2) to have devised and brought to perfection. Sophistry flourishes, as Socrates saw, on the confused and ambiguous use of general terms; and there is an inexhaustible source of such ambiguities and confusions in the very duality of human nature. The word nature itself may serve as an illustration. We may take as a closely allied example the word progress. Man may progress according to either the human or the natural law. Progress according to the natural law has been so rapid since the rise of the Baconian movement that it has quite captivated man’s imagination and stimulated him to still further concentration and effort along naturalistic lines. The very magic of the word progress seems to blind him to the failure to progress according to the human law. The more a word refers to what is above the strictly material level, the more it is subject to the imagination and therefore to sophistication. It is not easy to sophisticate the word horse, it is only too easy to sophisticate the word justice. One may affirm, indeed, not only that man is governed by his imagination but that in all that belongs to his own special domain the imagination itself is governed by words. (3)

We should not therefore surrender our imaginations to a general term until it has been carefully defined, and to define it carefully we need usually to practice upon it what Socrates would call a dichotomy. I have just been dichotomizing or “cutting in two” the word progress. When the two main types of progress, material and moral, have been discriminated in their fruits, the positivist will proceed to rate these fruits according to their relevancy to his main goal—the goal of happiness. The person who is thus fortified by a Socratic dialectic will be less ready to surrender his imagination to the first sophist who urges him to be “progressive.” He will wish to make sure first that he is not progressing towards the edge of a precipice.

Rousseau would have us get rid of analysis in favor of the “heart.” No small part of my endeavor in this work and elsewhere has been to show the different meanings that may attach to the term heart (and the closely allied terms “soul” and “intuition”)—meanings that are a world apart, when tested by their fruits. Heart may refer to outer perception and the emotional self or to inner perception and the ethical self. The heart of Pascal is not the heart of Rousseau. With this distinction once obliterated the way is open for the Rousseauistic corruption of such words as virtue and conscience, and this is to fling wide the door to every manner of confusion. The whole vocabulary that is properly applicable only to the supersensuous realm is then transferred to the region of the subrational. The impulsive self proceeds to cover its nakedness with all these fair phrases as it would with a garment. A recent student of war-time psychology asks: “Is it that the natural man in us has been masquerading as the spiritual man by hiding himself under splendid words—courage, patriotism, justice—and now he rises up and glares at us with blood-red eyes?” That is precisely what has been happening.

But after all the heart in any sense of the word is controlled by the imagination, so that a still more fundamental dichotomy, perhaps the most fundamental of all, is that of the imagination itself. We have seen how often the Arcadian dreaming of the emotional naturalist has been labelled the “ideal.” Our views of this type of imagination will therefore determine our views of much that now passes current as idealism. Now the term idealist may have a sound meaning: it may designate the man who is realistic according to the human law. But to be an idealist in Shelley’s sense or that of innumerable other Rousseauists is to fall into sheer unreality. This type of idealist shrinks from the sharp discriminations of the critic: they are like the descent of a douche of ice-water upon his hot illusions. But it is pleasanter, after all, to be awakened by a douche of ice-water than by an explosion of dynamite under the bed; and that has been the frequent fate of the romantic idealist. It is scarcely safe to neglect any important aspect of reality in favor of one’s private dream, even if this dream be dubbed the ideal. The aspect of reality that one is seeking to exclude finally comes crashing through the walls of the ivory tower and abolishes the dream and at times the dreamer.

The transformation of the Arcadian dreamer into the Utopist is a veritable menace to civilization. The ends that the Utopist proposes are often in themselves desirable and the evils that he denounces are real. But when we come to scrutinize critically his means, what we find is not a firm grip on the ascertained facts of human nature but what Bagehot calls the feeble idealities of the romantic imagination. Moreover various Utopists may come together as to what they wish to destroy, which is likely to include the whole existing social order; but what they wish to erect on the ruins of this order will be found to be not only in dreamland, but in different dreamlands. For with the elimination of the veto power from personality—the only power that can pull men back to some common centre—the ideal will amount to little more than the projection of this or that man’s temperament upon the void. In a purely temperamental world an affirmative reply may be given to the question of Euryalus in Virgil: “Is each man’s God but his own fell desire?” (An sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?)

The task of the Socratic critic at the present time is, then, seen to consist largely in stripping idealistic disguises from egoism, in exposing what I have called sham spirituality. If the word spirituality means anything, it must imply, it should seem, some degree of escape from the ordinary self, an escape that calls in turn for effort according to the human law. Even when he is not an open and avowed advocate of a “wise passiveness,” the Rousseauistic idealist is only too manifestly not making any such effort—it would interfere with his passion for self-expression which is even more deeply rooted in him than his passion for saving society. He inclines like Rousseau to look upon every constraint (4) whether from within or from without as incompatible with liberty. A right definition of liberty is almost as important as a right definition of imagination and derives from it very directly. Where in our anarchical age will such a definition be found, a definition that is at once modern and in accord with the psychological facts? “A man has only to declare himself free,” says Goethe, “and he will at once feel himself dependent. If he ventures to declare himself dependent, he will feel himself free.” In other words he is not free to do whatever he pleases unless he wishes to enjoy the freedom of the lunatic, but only to adjust himself to the reality of either the natural or the human law. A progressive adjustment to the human law gives ethical efficiency, and this is the proper corrective of material efficiency, and not love alone as the sentimentalist is so fond of preaching. Love is another word that cries aloud for Socratic treatment.

(1) “C’est en vain qu’on voudrait assigner à la vie un but, au sens humain du mot.” [“It is in vain that one should wish to assign a goal to life, in the human sense of the word.”] L’Evolution créatrice , 55.
(2) Metaphysics, 1078 b.
(3) In the beginning was the Word! To seek to substitute, like Faust, the Deed for the Word is to throw discrimination to the winds. The failure to discriminate as to the quality of the deed is responsible for the central sophistry of Faust . . . and perhaps of our modern life in general.
(4) “J’adore la liberté; j’abhorre la gêne, la peine, l’assujettissement.” [“I abhor discomfort, pain, subjugation.”] Confessions, Livre i.