First briefly an incident related recently from an American community. It is a simple story from everyday life. But it may imply deeper philosophical problems than most people imagine. To us it serves the purpose perfectly of posing those problems, thus forming an excellent basis for some essential points we want to make in our further discussion:
A young woman visited a well-known psychiatrist one day. Her marriage had gone on the rocks, and now she wanted to be divorced. However, before leaving her husband she had the frenetic desire to hurt him as vehemently as ever possible. She hated him with all her heart. That was the only reason why she solicited the psychiatrist's advice.
"Well, I know men," said the psychiatrist. "So I can tell you exactly what will hurt your husband's feelings more acutely than anything else. If you take my advice you simply stay with him for another three weeks or so. In the course of that time you should treat him with treacherous friendliness. In fact, you ought to do him all the good you could ever imagine. Let him gradually be wrapped up in the deceptive idea that you love him sincerely. And then, suddenly one day, you break away from him as cold as ice. That will hurt him to the core. But we shall plan the rupture in more detail once you have practiced your fraudulent work upon his self-conceited mind. The departure should be made as scornful and cutting as possible. But remember: now in the first round you are to load him with goodness and all imaginable tokens of love. And see to it that they look as genuine as possible."
The woman thought that was a shrewd plan, and just sufficiently wicked and cynical to suit her purpose. She joined it wholeheartedly and followed the instructions as closely as she could.
Finally one day she came back to the psychiatrist, as she had promised.
"Well, did you proceed exactly as I told you?" he inquired.
"Yes, I have been heaping him with goodness and love every day since I left your consulting room", she said.
"Good, and now, what date do you think would be most convenient to leave him?"
"Leave him? Why should I leave him? I couldn't think of leaving him now. Not for a moment. I love him. I have never loved him as I do today."
We do not bother about the authenticity of any details in this case history as a particular event. To us it may simply serve to represent an endless number of stories in actual life, presenting very similar features in the main trend. And what particularly interests us at the moment is just some theoretical problems they all seem to raise. (We shall later have opportunity to discuss Aristotle's theory that "we do not possess virtue until we have put it into practice".[1])
What is it, generally speaking, that takes place in cases of this order? Has the inward transformation been brought about through the simple instrumentality of an outward action? That sounds almost like magic--the more so as the actions in many cases do not even have the advantage of basing themselves on any palpable trace of genuine motives from the outset. But in spite of that serious handicap, they simply seem to seize any motive available, just as the potter seizes the neutral lump of clay. The decisive is not the material, it seems, but rather the mould. "By constantly repeating acts of vice you become vicious. By constantly repeating acts of virtue you become virtuous" (Aristotle, see his Nicomac. Ethics--1103 a, ss.).
But still, how could such totally external movements of expression actually mould the deepest emotional attitudes of human minds after their own image? Is not this, after all, exaggerating the power of the outward over the inward--exaggerating it almost just as unreasonably as, from times immemorial, the tyranny of the inward over the outward has tended to be described in exaggerated terms?
We are certainly as afraid as anybody of every kind of exaggeration. As a general principle we would rather warn against the tendency to consider the outward and the inward, exaggeratedly, in terms of superiority and inferiority. In the history of our culture so far--as we shall amply demonstrate later--the inward has been extolled as the one "sovereign reality". Don"t let us commit a similar blunder in the opposite direction. That would only tend to keep false dualism alive, and to go on indefinitely doing violence against totality.
An endless debate taking place between eminent American psychologists regarding the so-called "James-Lange Theory of Emotion", certainly show to what extent the classical dichotomy penetrating our whole culture has been able to confuse the issues here, even for sober-minded scientists who do their best to obtain a true and objective picture of human nature.
We have mentioned James" point already: a danger suddenly perceived may be the stimulus. The response follows immediately: the subject starts trembling. Only then comes the conscious feeling of fear. Or, as Hebb puts it: James and Lange postulate that the awareness follows the emotional behaviour; it does not precede it and cause it. ("I see the bear, I run, I feel afraid.") The more recent assumption that the "higher" centres of the cortex are not needed for the response,[2] is no refutation of the position adopted by James. On the contrary, it clearly supports it. What, then, can be responsible for an inconsistent argumentation on the part of some investigators here? Hebb finds only the explanation: It must be "the immutable idea that only emotional awareness or feeling can produce emotional response. If the response is there, the feeling must be there also".[3]
Perhaps it would be a still clearer expression of what people have always erroneously tended to think: "If the response is there now, the feeling must have been there even earlier."
Or is it, after all, the common people who are most inclined towards this inveterate view that the inward comes first? It strikes us as a noteworthy historical fact that, repeatedly, men with no scientific theories of modern psychology at all, but with a fair amount of intuitive perception, prove admirably capable of grasping some flashing truths about the relations between the outward and the inward in human lives. May we, by way of example, mention a seeming paradox from Roman literature. It once made an indelible impression on our minds, as soon as we became fully aware of its deeper significance. It is Tacitus who says somewhere in his Annals:
Proprium est humani ingenii odisse quem laeserit.
"Can that be true?" some would immediately inquire. Is it really a characteristic of the human mind to hate the person it has hurt?
Of course we are all quite familiar with the idea that human beings have a characteristic tendency to proceed to the act of hurting a person towards whom they already accumulated a certain amount of that not too uncommon emotion called hatred. But suppose I have, myself, happened to cause some offense or damage to somebody--perhaps even quite inadvertently. In other words, that unfortunate victim, perhaps an entire stranger to me, has so far had only one "fault": in some way or other he has exposed himself to my presumably quite thoughtless and involuntary blows. And now comes the serious anthropological question: What monster from the bottomless abyss of human wretchedness urges me to entertain suddenly an instinctive resentment against that unfortunate and perfectly innocent fellow-creature?
If you are rather lenient in your evaluation of my case, you will perhaps say that my guilty conscience--or even just an intensely unhappy consciousness of that poor fellow's sufferings--has finally rendered the bare thought about him quite disagreeable to me. So--consciously or unconsciously--I get busy trying to track some concrete and more "decent" reason for that gradually increasing resentment I feel against the person himself. And those who search shall find. That seems to apply even to the absurd and evil things for which human minds may search.
Anyway, before long, I have half a dozen excellent "reasons", all nicely adapted to the urgent needs of the case.
"Why!" I say to myself--"of course that fellow was not, after all, quite as innocent as he looked at first. Why did he do this and that in connection with the accident? Others, too, I hear, have had difficulty with him. Perhaps he is just the "rascal" who would deserve all the bad treatment he has now received." It is so comforting to know that finally someone got "just what he bargained for". In fact, even if he got a little more, that probably just "serves him right". So why not give him a little more?
The further relations between me and my "enemy" develop at a rattling pace, both internally and externally. I hurt him still harder now--and not quite as inadvertently this time, I am afraid. Every new negative action against him, however, draws along new negative feelings--exactly in accordance with the principle laid down by old Tacitus. Hurting produces hate, and hate produces hurting--an interminable vicious circle.
But notice this above all: to divide up that restlessly rotating wheel of human misery--or, in the opposite case, of human happiness--into sharply delimited sectors, is an absolutely hopeless task--probably also an absolutely meaningless task!
To separate hate, "the inward reality", from hurting, "the outward reality", is an analysis undertaken in the closet of the theorizing philosopher. But whether it will be acknowledged as legal tender on the empirical exploration grounds of practical life is another question.
Notes: