The Present Outlook (Part 5)

(Pictured: Confucius.) I am happy to present the fifth 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.

A liberty that means only emancipation from outer control will result, I have tried to show, in the most dangerous form of anarchy—anarchy of the imagination. On the degree of our perception of this fact will hinge the soundness of our use of another general term—democracy. We should beware above all of surrendering our imaginations to this word until it has been hedged about on every side with discriminations that have behind them all the experience of the past with this form of government. Only in this way may the democrat know whether he is aiming at anything real or merely dreaming of the golden age. Here as elsewhere there are pitfalls manifold for the uncritical enthusiast. A democracy that produces in sufficient numbers sound individualists who look up imaginatively to standards set above their ordinary selves, may well deserve enthusiasm. A democracy, on the other hand, that is not rightly imaginative, but is impelled by vague emotional intoxications, may mean all kinds of lovely things in dreamland, but in the real world it will prove an especially unpleasant way of returning to barbarism. It is a bad sign that Rousseau, who is more than any other one person the father of radical democracy, is also the first of the great anti-intellectualists.

Enough has been said to show the proper rôle of the secondary power of analysis that the Rousseauist looks upon with so much disfavor. It is the necessary auxiliary of the art of defining that can alone save us in an untraditional age from receiving some mere phantasmagoria of the intellect or emotions as a radiant idealism. A Socratic dialectic of this kind is needed at such a time not only to dissipate sophistry but as a positive support to wisdom. I have raised the question in my Introduction whether the wisdom that is needed just now should be primarily humanistic or religious. The preference I have expressed for a positive and critical humanism I wish to be regarded as very tentative. In the dark situation that is growing up in the Occident, all genuine humanism and religion, whether on a traditional or a critical basis, should be welcome. I have pointed out that traditional humanism and religion conflict in certain respects, that it is difficult to combine the imitation of Horace with the imitation of Christ. This problem does not disappear entirely when humanism and religion are dealt with critically and is indeed one of the most obscure that the thinker has to face. The honest thinker, whatever his own preference, must begin by admitting that though religion can get along without humanism, humanism cannot get along without religion. The reason has been given by Burke in pointing out the radical defect of Rousseau: the whole ethical life of man has its root in humility. As humility diminishes, conceit or vain imagining rushes in almost automatically to take its place. Under these circumstances decorum, the supreme virtue of the humanist, is in danger of degenerating into some art of going through the motions. Such was only too often the decorum of the French drawing-room, and such we are told, has frequently been the decorum of the Chinese humanist. Yet the decorum of Confucius himself was not only genuine but he has put the case for the humanist with his usual shrewdness. “I venture to ask about death,” one of his disciples said to him. “While you do not know life,” Confucius replied, “how can you know about death?” (1)

The solution of this problem as to the relation between humanism and religion, so far as a solution can be found, lies in looking upon them both as only different stages in the same path. Humanism should have in it an element of religious insight: it is possible to be a humble and meditative humanist. The type of the man of the world who is not a mere worldling is not only attractive in itself but has actually been achieved in the West, though not perhaps very often, from the Greeks down. Chinese who should be in a position to know affirm again that, alongside many corrupt mandarins, a certain number of true Confucians (2) have been scattered through the centuries from the time of the sage to the present.

If humanism may be religious, religion may have its humanistic side. I have said, following Aristotle, that the law of measure does not apply to the religious life, but this saying is not to be understood in an absolute sense. Buddha is continually insisting on the middle path in the religious life itself. The resulting urbanity in Buddha and his early followers in India is perhaps the closest approach that that very unhumanistic land has ever made to humanism.

It is right here in this joining of humanism and religion that Aristotle, at least the Aristotle that has come down to us, does not seem altogether adequate. He fails to bring out sufficiently the bond between the meditative or religious life that he describes at the end of his “Ethics” and the humanistic life or life of mediation to which most of this work is devoted. An eminent French authority on Aristotle, (3) complains that this separation of the two lives encouraged the ascetic excess of the Middle Ages, the undue spurning of the world in favor of mystic contemplation. I am struck rather by the danger of leaving the humanistic life without any support in religion. In a celebrated passage, (4) Aristotle says that the “magnanimous” man or ideal gentleman sees all things including himself proportionately: he puts himself neither too high nor too low. And this is no doubt true so far as other men are concerned. But does the magnanimous man put human nature itself in its proper place? Does he feel sufficiently its nothingness and helplessness, its dependence on a higher power? No one, indeed, who gets beyond words and outer forms would maintain that humility is a Christian monopoly. Pindar is far more humble (5) than Aristotle, as humble, one might almost maintain, as the austere Christian.

A humanism sufficiently grounded in humility is not only desirable at all times but there are reasons for thinking that it would be especially desirable to-day. In the first place, it would so far as the emotional naturalist is concerned raise a clear-cut issue. The naturalist of this type denies rather than corrupts humanism. He is the foe of compromise and inclines to identify mediation and mediocrity. On the other hand, he corrupts rather than denies religion, turning meditation into pantheistic revery and in general setting up a subtle parody of what is above the ordinary rational level in terms of the subrational. On their own showing Rousseau and his followers are extremists, (6) and even more effective perhaps than to attack them directly for their sham religion would be to maintain against them that thus to violate the law of measure is to cease to be human.

Furthermore, a critical humanism would appear to be the proper corrective of the other main forms of naturalistic excess at the present time—the one-sided devotion to physical science. What keeps the man of science from being himself a humanist is not his science but his pseudo-science, and also the secret push for power and prestige that he shares with other men. The reasons for putting humanistic truth above scientific truth are not metaphysical but very practical: the discipline that helps a man to self-mastery is found to have a more important bearing on his happiness than the discipline that helps him to a mastery of physical nature. If scientific discipline is not supplemented by a truly humanistic or religious discipline the result is unethical science, and unethical science is perhaps the worst monster that has yet been turned loose on the race. Man in spite of what I have termed his stupidity, his persistent evasion of the main issue, the issue of his own happiness, will awaken sooner or later to the fearful evil he has already suffered from a science that has arrogated to itself what does not properly belong to it; and then science may be as unduly depreciated as it has, for the past century or two, been unduly magnified; so that in the long run it is in the interest of science itself to keep in its proper place, which is below both humanism and religion.

It would be possible to frame in the name of insight an indictment against science that would make the indictment Rousseau has framed against it in the name of instinct seem mild. The critical humanist, however, will leave it to others to frame such an indictment. Nothing is more foreign to his nature than every form of obscurantism. He is ready indeed to point out that the man of science has in common with him at least one important idea—the idea of habit, though its scientific form seems to him very incomplete. One may illustrate from perhaps the best known recent treatment of the subject, that of James [William James, American philosopher and psychologist; 1842-1910] in his “Psychology.” It is equally significant that the humanist can agree with nearly every line of James’s chapter on habit and that he disagrees very gravely with James in his total tendency. That is because James shows himself, as soon as he passes from the naturalistic to the humanistic level, wildly romantic. Even when dealing with the “Varieties of Religious Experience” he is plainly more preoccupied with the intensity than with the centrality of this experience. (7) He is obsessed with the idea that comes down to him straight from the age of original genius that to be at the centre is to be commonplace. In a letter to C. E. Norton [Charles Eliot Norton, American author, social critic, and professor of art; 1827-1908] (June 30, 1904) James praises Ruskin’s Letters and adds: “Mere sanity is the most philistine and at bottom unessential of a man’s attributes.” “Mere sanity” is not to be thus dismissed, because to lack sanity is to be headed towards misery and even madness. “Ruskin’s,” says Norton, who was in a position to know, “was essentially one of the saddest of lives.” (8) Is a man to live one of the saddest of lives merely to gratify romantic lovers of the vivid and picturesque like James?

However, if the man of science holds fast to the results reached by James and others regarding habit and at the same time avoids James’s romantic fallacies he might perceive the possibility of extending the idea of habit beyond the naturalistic level; and the way would then be open for an important coöperation between him and the humanist. Humanists themselves, it must be admitted, even critical humanists, have diverged somewhat in their attitude towards habit, and that from the time of Socrates and Aristotle. I have been dwelling thus far on the indispensableness of a keen Socratic dialectic and of the right knowledge it brings for those who aspire to be critical humanists. But does right knowing in itself suffice to ensure right doing? Socrates and Plato with their famous identification of knowledge and virtue would seem to reply in the affirmative. Aristotle has the immediate testimony of consciousness on his side when he remarks simply regarding this identification: The facts are otherwise. (9) No experience is sadder or more universal than that of the failure of right knowledge to secure right performance: so much so that the austere Christian has been able to maintain with some plausibility that all the knowledge in the world is of no avail without a special divine succor. Now the Aristotelian agrees with the Christian that mere knowledge is insufficient: conversion is also necessary. He does not incline, however, like the austere Christian to look for conversion to “thunderclaps and visible upsets of grace.” Without denying necessarily these pistol-shot transformations of human nature he conceives of man’s turning away from his ordinary self—and here he is much nearer in temper to the man of science—as a gradual process. This gradual conversion the Aristotelian hopes to achieve by work according to the human law. Now right knowledge though it supplies the norm, is not in itself this working, which consists in the actual pulling back of impulse. But an act of this kind to be effective must be repeated. A habit is thus formed until at last the new direction given to the natural man becomes automatic and unconscious. The humanistic worker may thus acquire at last the spontaneity in right doing that the beautiful soul professes to have received as a free gift from “nature.” Confucius narrates the various stages of knowledge and moral effort through which he had passed from the age of fifteen and concludes: “At seventy I could follow what my heart desired without transgressing the law of measure.” (10)

(1) Analects, xi, cxi. Cf. ibid., vi, cxx: “To give one’s self earnestly to the duties due to men, and while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.” Much that has passed current as religion in all ages has made its chief appeal, not to awe but to wonder; and like many humanists Confucius was somewhat indifferent to the marvellous. “The subjects on which the Master did not talk were: extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder and spiritual beings” (ibid., vii, cxx).

(2) One of the last Chinese, I am told, to measure up to the Confucian standard was Tsêng Kuo-fan (1811-1872) who issued forth from poverty, trained a peasant soldiery and, more than any other one person, put down the Taiping Rebellion.

(3) See J. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire’s Introduction to his translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, p. cxlix.

(4) Eth. Nic., 1122-25.

(5) I have in mind such passages as P., viii, 76-78, 92-96; N., vi, 1-4; N., xi, 13-16.

(6) “II n’y eut jamais pour moi d’intermédiaire entre tout et rien.” [“There was never for me an intermediary between everything and nothing.”] Confessions, Livre vii.

(7) Some wag, it will be remembered, suggested as an alternative title for this work: Wild Religions I have known.

(8) Letters, ii, 298; cf. ibid., 291: “I have never known a life less wisely controlled or less helped by the wisdom of others than his. The whole retrospect of it is pathetic; waste, confusion, ruin of one of the most gifted and sweetest natures the world ever knew.”

(9) Nic. Eth., 1145 b. The opposition between Socrates or Plato and Aristotle, when put thus baldly, is a bit misleading. Socrates emphasized the importance of practice (μελέτη) in the acquisition of virtue, and Plato has made much of habit in the Laws.

(10) Analects, ii, civ.