From Essays in Socialism New & Old (1907), pp.19-24.
The common opinion that the results of metaphysical analysis are barren hair-splitting, destitute of all practical value, is nowhere more conspicuously refuted than in the deeper aspects of ethics. Here we see what are strictly speculative issues assuming a guise which has determined the whole current of men’s views on life and conduct. By this I do not mean to say that it is as philosophy that they have operated on the practical world, or that the philosophical side of the issue has, except in very few instances, and then only partially, been present to men’s minds. But it is none the less certain that there is a definite speculative and logical connection between a certain type of ethical ideal and a certain position in philosophy, even although it may never have been very distinctly formulated. The popular line drawn on this point is between Materialist and Spiritualist. This antithesis, however, only represents a very crude phase of speculative thought. In that more developed stage of philosophical analysis in which consciousness, as such, is recognised as the basis of all – beyond which there can be nothing save the meaningless and the self contradictory – at this stage of the philosophic intelligence the distinction appears as between the Material and the Formal, or (as I have elsewhere expressed it) between the Alogical and the Logical, from one point of view, and between the Potential and the Actual, from another. The tendency, as I have shown, has, from Plato and Aristotle downwards, been to hypostatise the Formal or the Logical (and at the same time the Actual) at the expense of the other and deeper principle constituting the complementary element in the synthesis of Experience or Reality. This is no less true of the moral consciousness than of any other aspect of Reality. Here, too, one element of the synthesis has been hypostatised at the expense of the other. I might point out how this particular phase of the moral consciousness has been historically connected with certain stages in the economic and political development of Human Society. My object, however, in the present essay is to analyse the philosophical aspect of the doctrine referred to, rather than to trace its practical evolution in the concrete world. As a consequence I merely refer to this side of the question briefly and where unavoidable.
The metaphysical distinction between Alogical and Logical which interpenetrates the whole sphere of experience, in the region of Ethics assumes the form of the so-called lower and higher nature, the “brute nature” and the “divine nature” in man. Now this latter distinction came into prominence concurrently with another, to wit, with the distinction between the individual man as such and the Society or Stock – the kinship group – to which he belonged. The distinction, once made, tended, as is the wont of such distinctions, to develop into a separation and thus to give rise to a pair of hypostatised abstractions, each of which was regarded as in absolute and eternal hostility to the other. As the individual man began to assume an independent, economical and political value apart from his tribal kinship, a further distinction arose and grew clear within his own personality, the distinction between his intellectual or moral nature and his animal or material nature. The identification of the former in essence with the great spiritual power of the Universe, and of the latter with the Sensible world around him, followed in due course. The first became the hypostatised formal Principle. We have, therefore, in the crudely-expressed antithesis between Body and Soul, the World and God, the earliest form of the philosophical antithesis of Matter and Form, of Alogical and Logical. The foregoing is the historical genesis of the notion.
The hypostasis of the formal principle, or the idea of the divine in man being separable from the animal, the notion that man as individual can by a voluntary act, so to say, slough off the brute and become absorbed in the divinity – formal principle to formal principle – has been the basis of the whole introspective morality on which the so-called “universal” religions of the world are based. Now this idea belongs to what in philosophy I have termed the theory of Pallogism for wherever formal principle is set up in opposition to its material base, and given an independent reality of its own, there you have Pallogism. In philosophy Pallogism takes various shapes. It starts with the conception of the primitive unity of the consciousness as purely formal. In its “theory of knowledge” it proceeds to oppose the category to the sense impression as the only True, the universal in contradistinction to the particular, as the only Real. Its Metaphysic postulates the Absolute as the totality of the system of Categories in which the Material and Sensible are abolished. Its psychology similarly founds on the absolute absorption of feeling and will in reason. Thus, as will be seen, in each department the formal principle is proclaimed as that which is alone valid, the material being a dross which has to be got rid of – the matter of sense blurring and confounding the “Platonic idea.” It is therefore not surprising that in Ethical theory the “material” is identified with Evil, and the “formal” with Good. The absurdity of this is apparent when we reflect that, in reality, Evil falls quite as much on the side of form as Good. The “Material” here, as elsewhere, is the element of indifference which becomes indeed one or the other, but which as distinguished per se is neither one nor the other. Viewed more closely, the “Good” of a pallogistic ethic takes the form of the hypostasis of certain imperfectly defined aspirations which are collectively termed the Divine or the Higher in man – i.e., in short, certain differentia of Man as such – and their opposition to the purely animal instincts, or to what I may term the mixed instincts, namely, those into which the real instincts enter, but which are not exclusively animal. Now the notion of killing off the animal with a view to living the Higher or Divine life with the abstract residuum preparatory to some sort of union with the Divinity after death, has been the aim and ideal of the prophet and saint for more than two thousand years past, and has been termed “Holiness.” This ideal, therefore, I regard as the practical side of the same fallacy which in speculative philosophy appears as Pallogism, viz., the abstraction of one element in a synthesis and its treatment as an independent entity. For the notion of cutting adrift a certain formal aspect of human nature from the parent matter of which it is the form, is the sign-manual of Pallogism, and forms a part of the time-honoured scholastic fallacy called “Realism” or Universalia ante rem.
All the truly human emotions we find spring out of the animal, and are inseparable from the animal. Sympathy, love, friendship, generosity, good-heartedness, all have their root in the animal life; the mere nerve-vibration which is the material basis of sympathy, the responsive echo in one personality, of suffering in another, is the source of all the higher concrete emotion. To separate these from the animal is impossible; but there are certain conditions under which the reflective moral consciousness we term conscience claims the violation in our own person of what are otherwise the primary dictates of our being; for example, the “ought” of conscience may point to the duty of our facing personal pain, or even destruction, for the sake of an ulterior extra-personal object. The extra-personal object (viewing the matter historically) was originally concerned with the material things, affecting the life of the race, viz., with the continuance and prosperity of kindred and tribe, as is familiar to every student of early religious thought and of the religious ideas of primitive races. Now with the gradual destruction of the old kinship of tribe and clan and the rise of the new morality of introspective Individualism, the notion of the duty under all possible circumstances of crushing the natural or animal instincts becomes detached from its connection as an element of a concrete moral consciousness and hypostatised as the end of all morality and the highest object of man’s being. Concurrently with the divorce of ethical sentiment from social life, and the hypostasis of one of its elements, took place similarly the divorce of the Formal principle of the Universe from the Material and its hypostasis in antagonism to the latter. The two sides of the pallogistic fallacy, the moral and the metaphysical, worked into each other’s hand, their full fruition, their complete historical development, being realised in the type of the Catholic saint. The majority of mankind, however much they may have in theory given in a nominal adhesion to the principle, were preserved by their healthy understanding, by the “blessed animal” within them, from becoming mere lumps of morbidity, such as a St. Anthony, a St. Bernard, or a St. Theresa. “Holiness,” the life of the saint, was nevertheless the ideal of conduct to which men looked up throughout the Middle Ages, and in a debased form the view has survived even to the present day.
With the fall of Pallogism in speculative philosophy, the last shred of raison d’etre for its maintenance in practical philosophy is abolished. That apotheosis of pain and of want which is the hall-mark of Christianity, the belief that the Beatific Vision, the union with God – or, however otherwise the ultimate goal of life may be designated – can be attained by the negation of the animal on the part of the individual man falls to the ground. This being so, the whole Christian theory discloses itself as resting on a misconception, on a diseased growth of the speculative understanding. The notion that there is anything intrinsically noble in the struggles of the saint to crush out his animal nature disappears. The higher life that he thinks he obtains is seen to be an illusion – an illusion based upon bad metaphysics. We then become aware of the fact that the detachment of the higher from the lower – that the antagonism between the intellectual and the animal – is not an essential but a merely transient and phenomenal phase in the unfolding of the moral consciousness. The true “higher” includes the lower, it is only the false higher, the pseudo-spiritual, which would violently detach itself from its animal basis.
But does the foregoing imply that the distinction between higher and lower, between intellectual and animal is spurious? By no means. The distinction indeed exists, it is only the attempted hypostasis of one of its terms to the exclusion of the other, whereby a mutual antagonism is created, that is spurious. The way to the true, the concrete, higher, will from this standpoint be seen to lie not in the suppression but in the cultivation of the animal instincts, while the mere apotheosis of suffering, the outcome of the former view, will go by the board. But with the rehabilitation of the “animal” as at least the basis of all that is best in us, and the recognition of the impossibility of any permanent good existing apart from the “animal,” much less in opposition to it, then the ethical idea of Holiness becomes obsolete. By the clear recognition of this, mankind will finally emancipate itself from the cul-de-sac in which the moral consciousness has been confined throughout the period of Christian civilisation.
The apparent contradiction which obtains between the animal life as such with its appetites based on sensation, and the higher intellectual and emotional life, will assuredly in the end be resolved in the natural course of things – by the inevitable process of the exhaustion of the lower forms assumed by the animal through these forms themselves becoming repellent – and not by the effort, in the long run for mankind at large always futile, to violently suppress them. The attempt to “rush” what for want of a better word we may term the “higher life” on the part of the individual, by crushing out the animal has been a failure. It is the killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs. You cannot by any act of will on the part of the individual forestall what to be effective must be the issue of a determinate social process. So long as the desire for the lower form remains, the time is not yet ripe for the higher; so long as the lower gives pleasure, the lower has still a part to play. The violent disruption of the two sides of the synthesis leaves you with a spurious simulacrum and abstract “higher” manifested in the morbid emotional state called “Holiness.” With the fall of this abstract introspective morality falls also its special mark, the apotheosis of suffering as such. [1]
The historical function of the movement represented by Christianity, part of which, at least, was founded on the notion of pity, has received its travesty in the most logical and developed form of that movement, as the glorification of pain, poverty and ostentatious humility. In consequence it has issued in cruelty and the violation of every social instinct in turn.
Antithetical to “Holiness” or the rejection of the animal, is “Sin,” or the affirmation of the animal, each side of the antithesis being alike conceived by the Christian ethics as a hard-and-fast abstraction. That the same action may be under one set of circumstances, and under one aspect, a violation of morality, cruel under another set of circumstances or in another aspect, be compatible with the highest morality never enters the purview of the saint.
Now the characteristic of the concrete morality which is gradually supplanting the old abstract, ethical categories, but the full fruition of which it were vain to expect under existing social conditions, is entirely opposed to the ethics of introspection and the morbid ideal set up thereby. For the former the sole standard is social utility, using the word not in the narrow sense in which it has sometimes been employed, but as meaning that which is conducive to the needs of human society, at once static and dynamic. Morality is thus brought down from heaven to earth. The extra-personal for which the individual may be called upon to sacrifice himself casts off the form of an abstract Divinity and takes on the form of a concrete Humanity. Mere personal self-sacrifice finds its proper level, as, in certain stages, indeed a most important incident in morality, but yet as no more than an incident. It is in fact, under present moral conditions, like gold coinage under present economical conditions. Just as coined gold, though possessing no economic utility in itself, is nevertheless the ultimate measure and standard of all economic utilities, – so self-sacrifice, though having no ethical utility in itself, is nevertheless the ultimate measure of all ethical utilities. But the function in either case is not absolute, but strictly dependent on the social order into which it enters. Most persons, at present, as regards their ethical conceptions, are in a position equivalent to that of the “mercantile theory” in Economics. Just as the mercantilist believed gold and silver to constitute the only riches of a nation, so the current moralist believes the whole of morality to be summed up in mere self-sacrifice, as such.
The mere suffering of the Individual no longer appears as good in itself once we have got rid of Introspectivism, but, on the contrary, is seen to be in itself an evil which only assumes another aspect in a special relation to the total conditions of which it is an element.
The moment we reinstate the “animal,” the moment we catch a glimpse of the real synthesis of human life, the fallacy of the Christian apotheosis of pain becomes apparent. [2] The only meaning the word Evil has is that of pain, want or suffering. There is no other real evil. From the mere nerve-vibration, which is the physiological basis of what we term sympathy – the point of connection between ourselves as individuals and ourselves as element of the social body – springs our whole ethical life and consciousness, just as from simple sense-perception springs our whole aesthetic life and consciousness. Contrary to the theory of introspective moralists, the individual now ceases to embrace the self-sufficient end of all within his own personality. The notion that we can achieve the goal of all consciousness, as it were, per saltum by a voluntary act, or a series of voluntary acts, and thus become absorbed in the Beatific Vision, attain union with the Divine, disappears. Even now there is universally present a feeling, vague it may be, but none the less persistent, that somehow or other the most important ideal with which the modern man can concern himself is connected with the social life around him. The change in the attitude of the religious sects is sufficient proof of the foregoing. From an exclusive concern for the individual soul as being the one thing needful, they have nowadays betaken themselves to schemes, good, bad, or indifferent, for the “regeneration of the masses.” Even where the old dogmas, the old moral saws, are still preached and still nominally adhered to, it is easy to see that they have lost their old savour. Whatever may be the ultimate telos of Reality, there is a consensus of instinct that it lies along the highway of social progress rather than in the cul-de-sac of individual purification. For this new attitude, if it be but logical, it is obvious the only true virtues are the social virtues in which the animal plays its part, just as the only ideal is a politico-social ideal. The false “spiritual” of morbid introspection is as much “the enemy” as the lower “brutal” of mere animalism. But it may be objected by the Introspectivist that politico-economic change can affect no more than material conditions, and that the so-called higher interests it must fail to touch. The objection is characteristic of the one-sidedness of Introspection, with its ideal of “Holiness.” For the Introspectivist the Higher, the “Spiritual,” is absolutely cut off from material things. The former comes from above, the latter from below. The concrete moralist, as I may term him, sees on the other hand that good material conditions are the basis of all that is, truly speaking, higher life. In their absence there is nothing but the lowest and most squalid brutality on the one side and the spurious pallogistic ideal called “holiness” on the other. Which of these is the better or the worse I will not pretend to decide.
I need only point out that these conditions – this material basis – of a higher life has hitherto failed save for a small minority of mankind, and that even this minority, if not immediately sufferers from the general conditions of society, have been none the less indirectly affected by them as regards their aspirations and views of life generally. What, therefore, mankind will attain to when all are freed both directly and indirectly from the presence of material care and material squalor can at best be dimly imagined, but cannot even be distinctly conceived. It is surely not unreasonable (as I have elsewhere suggested) to assume that we shall hereafter enter upon the first stage in a social life the end of which may be consciousness under a totally new phase. At present the social psyche is dominated by the animal consciousness of the individual human being. It manifests itself directly only in and through the latter. It is but one of the forms or determinations of this consciousness. But who shall say that it shall not, in its turn, obtain a form and substantiality of its own and shall subordinate to itself that individual animal-consciousness, of which in its present stage it is but a mode?
Whatever may be our view on these points of ulterior speculation, the failure of the Individualist introspective morality to satisfy human aspirations is apparent. It is equally apparent that its metaphysical basis is Pallogism, which is in the last resort identical with that theory of Universalia ante rem, with that hypostasis of the formal element in every real synthesis, which has, with little intermission, dominated the higher speculative thought of the world since Plato. (1) The introspective phase of the ethical consciousness postulates two hypostatised abstractions, it abstracts the individual from his social environment, and gives to types of character a value in themselves which they only possess in synthetic union with that environment. (2) Again, it abstracts the higher life (real or supposed) of the individual from his animal life and postulates a spurious antagonism between the two which is fatal to all concrete moral progress. It assumes, in a word, that the Individual as such stands in a direct moral relation to the Universe or to the Absolute nature of things. It declines to accept the obvious truth, that he has no direct, but a purely indirect relation thereto, i.e., one existing only in and through man’s social growth, and that hence in a social connection alone can morality exist. Hence I say, the ethics of the future must inevitably involve a rehabilitation of the social against the spurious abstract individual, and a rehabilitation of the animal as against the spurious abstract-spiritual. Such a rehabilitation must indeed be the next stage in the evolution of the moral consciousness of humanity.
1. The infamous Christian dogma of the atonement is based upon the notion of suffering as something good in itself. The suffering must be there, even though it be the just that suffer. It has entered into Catholic asceticism. The scourgings and macerations of the monk were conceived of, as so to say, the filling up of the cup of the atonement by voluntarily increasing the sum of suffering in his own person with the view of being the more acceptable to the Deity. In the last resort asceticism meant of course the doctrine of the inherent evil of matter. Pain was good as tending to destroy matter. Pain was the enemy of the “natural man” and therefore the friend of the “spiritual man.”
2. It is a cheap sneer of the champion of the ethics of “holiness” to urge that his opponent is incapable of understanding the mental attitude of its votaries. The answer to this insinuation is obvious for one who regards “holiness” as a morbid state, to wit, that there are many morbid conditions, animal no less than intellectual or moral, which he is incapable of entering into sympathetically. For example, the impulses of a lunatic, or, again, certain aberrations of sexual psychopathy; but this incapacity does not necessarily argue any intellectual or moral inferiority, but rather, on the contrary a healthiness of mind.
Last updated on 14.1.2006