The main study of our present work is Totality in Human Life as revealed by Occidental thought. But in our world of dramatic strife, that may be tantamount to studying the very opposite, namely a force which has kept counteracting the trend of totality in every aspect of human existence down through the centuries of our history. We have called that opposing force splitness or disruption.
From the very beginning, however, our study will reveal itself as simply a study of dualism: to what degree is it correct to characterize that peculiar attitude towards human life as disruptive?
Dualism, as we see it, is not only a tendency to distinguish. Distinction is often inevitable and fully legitimate even from the monist's point of view. But dualism is a tendency to divide, to separate, we would even say to lacerate. In our opinion that tendency has proved pregnant with destiny in our culture.
As a sort of preamble, we shall here consider modern man's general attitude towards the "inward" and the "outward" in various domains of everyday life.
Of course it must be permissible--in fact, it is often absolutely necessary--to distinguish between something inward and something outward even in a totality as indivisible as that of human life. Typologists currently describe human attitudes in terms of inward-directedness and outward-directedness. Above all, in philosophy and religion one has always dwelt with great insistence upon a distinction between "something outward" and "something inward". Just at the moment, we are thinking here of what is commonly called the human body and the human soul.
Before we take our full step over to our philosophical anthropology, let us catch a rapid glimpse of certain historical trends in modern psychology. Here there seems to have been a vacillation similar to that of philosophy and religion, as regards the true relations between the inward and the outward. Some psychological schools one might be tempted to call "dualistic", others rather "monistic".
By way of example, suffice it to mention briefly the case of just one fairly typical trend towards views of totality in American psychology: the functionalist school. The entry upon the scene of functionalism is reckoned by some historians as starting just from the days when the philosopher John Dewey and the psychologist James Rowland Angell both came to Chicago University (in the middle of the nineties).[1]
The main point here relative to our topic is this: previous psychological schools had tended to divide up reflex actions into two rather sharply separate parts: on one hand the stimulus, on the other the response. Dewey thought this sharp separation between sensation and movement arbitrary. For even as early as at the moment of stimulation there is already some degree of reaction. On the other hand, in what is commonly called the reaction there is still something left of the original stimulus and the sensation continuing all the time.
Take for instance the distinction between seeing and looking. A child sees a flame and stretches out his hand for it. But even from the outset there is some active "looking" on the part of that child. Similarly, the "seeing" goes on during the whole ensuing reaction. In other words, that first stimulating phenomenon causing the child to see suddenly, to have a sensation, partly endures all the time.
Here we also see, by the way, how the new school came to be called functionalism. The conventional division--or splitting up--of reality into two separate elements, was now believed to be based upon the function which the different links of the series happen to have--on what they "do". Some distinct part of the process is emphasized as particularly important from the point of view of a certain function. The distinction is functional rather than existential. It does not depend upon really "existing" facts.
The process of human experience itself is in reality continual. It is not a reality divided into parts. In other words: once more the true point of view--we mean the one that is true for human life-is that of totality.
By the way, William James has already pointed out that the human consciousness can hardly be composed of a series of separate or separable particles. A static conception of reflexes had to be given up in favour of a conception of dynamic unity. Now functionalism continues his work. Unlike structural psychology, it makes no attempt to determine the number of variations in a mind material, considering perception as a sort of agglomeration of separate elements. It refrains from dividing up into distinct colours, tones, degrees of hardness, opacity, etc. It is only the highly abstracting psychologist who looks upon human perception as a chemist would look upon physical matter: a composition of separable atoms. Functional psychology has a very different viewpoint. It directs its attention towards the typical operations of consciousness under actual life conditions.
In fact, subsequent American philosophy has never really quite abandoned the principle established by James. We would call it a fairly clearcut principle of totality and monism in essential respects: the mental is here not just a quality pertaining to a sort of independent soul. On the contrary, it is so intimately connected with the body that the two constitute one absolutely inseparable whole. How have some investigators of man's mental faculties managed to adopt such views of human totality? We think the explanation is clear enough: they have simply taken care to include the element of life; the mental, too, has been placed right in its proper biological setting.
This provides a remarkable contrast, indeed, to what we shall find to be a common tendency of dualist ways and views. And let it be pointed out at once: not the view of totality, but rather the view of doublesightedness and disruption is the one which has most commonly been consecrated, down through the centuries, as the one respectable view adopted by the intellectual elite in our culture, not only in circles of typical "idealist", but even in circles of stern scientific research. It is rather just occasionally that a sort of intuition seems to be flickering through-and mostly for a quite limited spell of time: "Now it is high time that the abysmal gulf between a human body and a human soul, as our ingenious ancestors through so many centuries have done their utmost to forge it, be adequately bridged!" Then suddenly a curious question will tend to pop up once more for a certain period: what if those two "incommensurable elements" in human life should, after all, be entities belonging to the very same order, or even just sides of one single reality! Angell, for one, obviously regards their distinction as methodological rather than metaphysical. And for modern American psychology it would be right to admit that the general trend has been to regard the mental and the corporeal as a unity, and to study that unity in a matter-of-fact way, without bothering too seriously about the ontological problems.
But here it would seem imperative to make one thing perfectly clear:
There is in all science a tendency of trying, as it were, to adopt a monistic and a dualistic standpoint almost at the same time. Take this instance: modern psycho-physiology has tended to be very monistic on one point: it has general maintained the principle that to every thought or sensation in a human mind there must correspond some kind of exterior process in the human brain. Without brain cells-no consciousness or mental life whatsoever.
Let us here notice one thing, however: to speak so emphatically about the "problem" of the relation between those external brain cells and that internal consciousness, is not strictly monistic at all. It is by no means indicative of any particular vision of totality. Viewed with the eyes of a full-bred monist that "problem" must present itself as entirely a pseudo-problem. For, in the very act of opposing "brain" to "thought", the scientist makes an abstraction which has nothing to do with monism or with any empirical reality. In fact, what empirical right does he have to speak of brains as devoid of thought? In the experience of mankind, brains have always, without one single exception, presented themselves as thinking brains (or at least brains of some kind of mental activity, either conscious or subconscious). A brain without any such mental activity is no living human brain at all. And who is here concerned with the brain cells of a corpse? Are we not all speaking about the brains of a man?
Similar it is curious, indeed, to see how the concept of human "thought" is frequently being used here in an abstract or almost Platonic way, even by natural scientists who regard themselves as free from all "idealizing" tendencies. In fact, we all act sometimes as though it were the most natural and "scientific" thing in the world to imagine human thoughts as fairly "independent of human brains". How far from this is not the truly monistic attitude: the brain and the thought are only two aspects of one and the same reality.
Of course our scientists may excuse themselves saying: Oh, that is just a sort of game we are playing. Our dualist-or "Platonic"-use of the terms is simply a matter of convenience. It is all purely "methodological".
If that is the case, then one must at least be permitted to state emphatically: the practical impact of that methodology upon the eventual thinking of many scientists has been formidable. In fact, some of them are heard to say without any serious hesitation at all: "Brains produce thoughts." That certainly does not testify to any too great tendency towards monism. To believe implicitly in it must be dualism of the most inveterate type. Even just to express it-more or less thoughtlessly-is probably a sign of a certain dualistic trend in a person's thinking. To a real monist it would appear exactly as meaningless as to say about a sheet of paper: "Page 1 of this sheet produces page 2." To say that the brain produces thought would not make more sense, in his opinion, than saying that the thought produces the brain.
The viewpoint of consistent totality represents a radically different alternative, as regards the deepest relations between the inward and the outward. And that is, indeed, a most "problem-solving" alternative. But how far can it be applied as a fully reasonable explanation of the relations between the inward and the outward in human lives, wherever such relations are experienced?
We shall try and look at the whole question in a broad and unbiased way. This may prepare the way for a more detailed discussion in the properly philosophical section of our work. We shall make our preparatory notes as plain and commonplace as possible. One may arrive at the crucial problems soon enough, and the solutions we shall eventually suggest to some problems may turn out to be not quite as commonplace.
Our principal angle all the time, however, will rather be that of the historian. What are the historical facts about the development which man's ideas about man have gone through in this particular field? Is it a development towards greater totality or towards greater disruption? We shall try and show to what extent it is a development fraught with both drama and destiny. Too long already have men imagined that the anthropological relations of the inward and the outward are an insignificant thing, of practical interest to none but the speculative philosopher.
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