The Transformations of Man
Lewis Mumford
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| Pg. 165 Now the persistence of old biological or historic residues, whether active or inert, does not mean, as many still falsely suppose, that they have a pre appointed or fated outcome. If certain aspects of man’s nature are relatively fixed, since they are structured in his organs, they function like the warp in the loom: not merely is there considerable play in the fixed threads themselves, but the shuttle that weaves the fabric lies in man’s hands, and by his conscious efforts, introducing new colors and figures, he modifies even the over-all design. Every culture attaches different estimates to man’s nature and history; and in its creative moments, it adds new values that enlarge the human personality and give it new destinations. Though man’s release from nature’s conditions or his own past selves can never be complete, the effort to achieve it is what gives individuality to every historic form: this indeed is what keeps even the most repetitive movements of history from being entirely meaningless. The making of the future is an essential part of man’s self revelation.The problem for man today is to use his widened consciousness of natural processes and of his own historic nature to pro-mote his own further growth. Such knowledge must now be turned to fuller uses, in the projection of a fresh plan of life and a new image of the self, which shall be capable of rising above man’s present limitations and disabilities. This effort, as we have seen, is an old one; for even before man achieved any degree of self-consciousness, he was actively engaged in self fabrication. If `Be yourself’ is nature’s first injunction to man, “Transform yourself was her second even as “Transcend yourself” seems, at least up to now, to be her imperative. What will distinguish the present effort to create world culture, if once it takes form, is the richness and variety of the resources that are now open, and the multitude of people now sufficiently released from the struggle for existence to play a part in this new drama. The readiness to face existence in all its dimensions, cosmic and human is the first requirement for human development today This readiness is itself a new fact, for even scientists whose curiosity seems boundless, for long recoiled in fear against any exploration of the subjective self that penetrated beyond the threshold of isolated stimuli, abstracted sensations, and measured responses. Not without a certain irony, the scientific rationalism of Dr. Sigmund Freud, with its fine surgical indifference to the seemingly morbid, brought to light the areas of the personality that positivism and rationalism had dismissed as “unreal”-the wish and the dream, the sense of guilt and original sin, the elaboration of fantasy into art; and by carrying this inquiry further, into the normal and healthy manifestations of these inner states, Dr. Carl Jung disclosed the integrating functions of the symbol, and thus opened a passage from self-enclosed subjectivity to those common aesthetic expressions and practical constructions that can be shared, in a spirit of love, with other people. This opening up of every part of the psyche coincides, it would seem, with the new relationship that has begun to develop between cultures. This is symbolized by an appreciative awareness, hardly a generation old, of the aesthetic values of African or Polynesian or Aztec or Andean art, following an equally radical change in Western man’s attitude toward the great arts of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India and China, once considered too far below the absolute standard of Greek art to merit study, still less appreciation. That change might, of course, lead to an abortive cultural relativism, innocent of any principle of development, were it not attached to the emergent purposes of world culture. The partial and fragmentary selves that man historically achieved sacrificed completeness for the sake of temporary order, and in the most partial and fragmentary form of all, that now sought by post-historic man, the order would be almost absolute, because so much that was essentially human would be left out of it. From this negative universalism the acceptance of man’s whole self, disclosed only in the fullness of history, helps to rescue us; for organic wholeness itself is impossible unless the creative and integrating processes remain uppermost. Religion and art, if not science, remind us of the constant reappearance of angelic saviors and redeemers: Promethean heroes who bring fire and light, defying the tortures of the envious gods: mother images of succor and loving devotion. We have learned nothing from historic experience if we have not learned that -tman lives by more than his applied intelligence alone. Out of the depths of life itself come the superego, the conscience, the idealized image and the imagined ideal, the voice of reason and the promptings of divinity: all as integral to168 The Transformations of Manpsyche were in a worse state under this new dispensation than the rejected parts of the physical world had been under the axial self. At all these stages in the development-of the self, only a small part of man’s potentialities were consciously represented in image or idea. Fortunately, the repressed or neglected aspects, even in primitive society, were not effectively excluded from living experience. However well fortified the inner world, some of the outer world is constantly breaking through, making demands that must be met, offering suggestions that, even if unheeded, produce a certain effect. So, too, however heavy the crust formed by external nature, by human institutions and habits, the pressure from the inner world would produce cracks and fissures, and even from time to time explosively erupt. By no attention to magic formulae, by no probing of the unconscious, can one shape a tool. Similarly, by no feat of mechanical organization can one write a poem. In other words, by the very act of living men have always in some degree escaped the imperfections of their knowledge and belief. Just as life itself, in its constantly unfolding creativity, is far richer than any conception we are able to form of it, so with the human self. Man not merely builds but lives better than he knows. At the same time, it should be plain that a great measure of man’s potential energy and vitality and creativity has been dissipated, because he has not been fully oriented to every aspect of reality, outward and inward. His various historic selves have served as fine meshes that rejected far more than they admitted. We can hardly yet picture the transformation that would be wrought if every part of man’s experience were hospitably received; and if every part of the inner world were as accessible and as subject to conscious direction as the outer world. So far we have lived mainly in partial worlds; and they have allowed only a small share of our energies to be directly employed. Neither the loose subjective wholeness achieved by primitive man nor, at the other extreme, the accurate, piecemeal objectivity now sought by science could do justice to every dimension of human experience. If the first was limited by its caprices, which recognized no external order or causality, the latter is equally limited by its compulsions, which recognize no inner flow of purpose and make no account of free creativity or potential divinity. Living in half-worlds, it is hardly strange that we have produced only half-men, or creatures even more distorted than these homunculi, “inverted cripples,” magnifiedNRSS ~~ N.aX+~~Human Prospects / 169ears, eyes, bellies, or brains, whose other parts have shrunk away. Perhaps an even better figure for the state of man, as disclosed by history, would be that of a series of experimental plants, each fed with some of the elements necessary for full growth, but none yet supplied with all of them: here an excess of nitrogen has favored a leggy growth of stem, there the absence of water has withered the whole plant; and, to make the figure even more accurate, in addition to these natural defects, the horticulturist himself has often clipped and pruned the growing plant or pinched its buds. What the experiment shows, if we may at last draw a lesson, is that man requires a sounder get,dncluding minute trace elements, than any self-enclosed historic culture has supplied him. He needs both a fuller ex -historic to sunlight above ground and a richer soil in the anconces.e ideal of wholeness itself is what has been lackin-gotten ., culture of man his s specialties and particularities s have gotten the better of him But from occasional periods, like the Renascence, when the ideal of the whole man has commanded the foremost representatives of the age, we have a hint of the immense energizing that may take plate when every aspect of life is open to cultivation, when the instinctual life is no longer cut off from rational development, and when order and reason are not impoverished by torpid emotions or listless routines or limited purposes. But even in unpropitious periods, individual figures, who had reached some degree of maturity in every department of life, may have appeared from time to time, only to be rejected by the society they transcended. At more than one moment in history, indeed, the effort to achieve wholeness, balance, universality, brought a measure of fulfillment. Greek culture, from the sixth century to the fourth, was remarkably peopled by such whole men: Solon, Socrates, Sophocles, were outstanding examples, but not rare ones: indeed, the proportion of highly developed persons in relation to the total population seems to have been greater than at possibly any other place and time. These examples of wholeness may account for the attraction that Greek culture has exercised on the best minds of the West. To a degree that few other cultures could claim, the Greek self seems to stand for the truly and fully human. The development of any individual might show flaws: witness Socrates’ serious failure to connect man in the city with man in nature. But in the main, no part of life was closed to them, and no part of the mechanical functions the freedom the old craftsman used to exercise. This kind of creativity is largely lacking in the meretricious art of the market place, but has long been prophetically visible in art, such as the sculptures of Naum Gabo or the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. At this point, Le Play’s great dictum, that the most important product that comes out of the mine is the miner, will apply to every occupation. Even more, we may now favor certain types of products and certain systems of production, and reject others, with reference to the effect that the work has upon the human personality: we shall weigh its influence upon love, fellowship, family life, citizenship, not merely upon mechanical efficiency. The other great benefit of the transformation of the industrial process is the fact that its outcome need not be a plethora of material goods and gadgets, nor yet of instruments a of warfare and genocide. Once we revamp the institutions of the market, and distribute goods mainly on the basis of need, rather than in proportion to toil or sacrifice or privileged status, our gains will be gains in leisure. In fact, without leisure, our expansion in industrial production would be almost meaningless; for we need a plenitude of time if we are to select and assimilate all the genuine goods that modem man now commands. Schola means leisure; and leisure makes possible the school. The promise of a life economy is to provide schooling for the fullest kind of human growth-not for the further expansion of the machine. This does not mean simply that more of our lives will be devoted to education: it means rather that education will constitute the principal business of life. This change promises to be so profound that one must emphasize it by bestowing on it a new name, to indicate that the processes of infusing value and meaning into every phase of life will not stop with the formal school. The words education, self-development, character formation, conversion all bear upon the process; but they carry with them the limited references of their original use. That of education is still tied to the bookish training that used to begin with the mastery of the ABC’s and even now lasts no longer, formally, than the attainment of the highest professional degree. The concept of self-development carries with it, if not a hint of humanistic priggishness or romantic willfulness, the general axial belief that the welfare of the self can be secured in separation from that of society, or at least that its cultivation has no public concerns: thus the personal is falsely identified with the private. Page 184the common development. Today, neither the technical means nor the relevant social pressures are absent: it is rather the inner readiness that is lacking. Our generation needs– faith in the processes of life sufficient to bring about –1 willing surrender to life’s new demands. Yet in isolated persons, like Albert Schweitzer in the present day, like Peter Kropotkin or Patrick Geddes in an earlier day, and Goethe and Emerson even earlier, the kind of self that the moment demands has actually been incarnated. Schweitzer, for example, has transcended the specializations of vocation and nationality and religious faith. In deliberately choosing an uninviting region in Africa as the seat of his lifework, and the ministry of medicine as a means of translating his Christian ethic into practice, he sacrificed the opportunities that his special talents as theologian, musician, and philosopher seemed to demand. Seemingly under the most hostile conditions, he has demonstrated the possibility of actualizing a unified personality; and the course of life he chose, which involved the heaviest of renunciations, has proved richer in its fruits than one that would have conformed to more orthodox patterns of Old World culture. To reach full human stature, at the present stage of development, each of us must be ready, as opportunity offers, to assimilate the contributions of other cultures; and to develop, for the sake of wholeness, those parts of his personality that are weakest. Not least, he must renounce perfection in any single field for the sake of balance and continued growth. He who belongs exclusively to a single nation, a single party, a single religion, or a single vocation without any touch or admixture from the world beyond is not yet a full man, still less can he take part in this transformation. This is a fundamental lesson of human growth, always true-but now imperatively true. In its critical moment of integration, Christianity took in Persian and Egyptian myths, Greek philosophy, and Roman organization, just as Mohammedanism took in the lessons of Moses and Zoroaster and Jesus. So One World man will embrace an even wider circle; and the whole person so created will cast aside the series of masks, some weakly benign, some monstrous, that so long concealed the living features of man. In his very completeness, One World man will seem ideologically and culturally naked, almost unidentifiable. He will be like the Jain saints of old, “clothed in space,” his nakedness a sign that he does not belong exclusively to any nation, group, trade, sect, school, or community. He who has reached the level of world culture will be at home in any part of that culture: in its inner world no less than its outer world. Everything that he does or feels or makes will bear the imprint of the larger self he has made his own. Each person, no matter how poorly endowed or how humble, is eligible to take part in this effort, and indeed is indispensable; yet no matter how great any individual’s talents may be, the results will always be incomplete; for the equilibrium we seek is a dynamic one and the balance we promote is not an end in itself but a means to further growth. “It is provided in the essence of things,” as Walt Whitman said, “that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.” So we stand on the brink of a new age: the age of an open world and of a self capable of playing its part in that larger sphere. An age of renewal, when work and leisure and learning and_ love will unite, to produce a fresh form for every stage of life, and a higher. trajectory for life, as, a whole. Archaic man, civilized man, axial man, mechanized man, achieved only a partial development of human potentialities; and though much of their work is still viable and useful as a basis for man’s further development, no mere quarrying of stones from their now-dilapidated structures will provide material for building the fabric of world culture. No less important than the past forces that drive men on are the new forms, dimly emerging in man’s unconscious, that begin to beckon him and hold before him the promise of creativity: a life that will not be at the mercy of chance or fettered to irrelevant necessities. He will begin to shape his whole existence in the forms of love as he once only shaped the shadowy figments of his imagination though, under the compulsions of his post-historic nihilism he now hardly dares thus to shape even purely aesthetic objects. But soon perhaps the dismembered bones will again knit together, clothed in flesh. In carrying man’s self-transformation to this further stage, world culture may bring about a fresh release of spiritual energy that will unveil new potentialities, no more visible in the human self today than radium was in the physical world a century ago, though always present. Even on its lowest terms, world. The problem for man today is to use his widened consciousness of natural processes and of his own historic nature to pro-turned to fuller r uses, in the projection of a fresh plan of life and a new image of the self, which shall be capable of rising above man’s present limitations and disabilities. This effort, as we have seen, is an old one; for even before man achieved any degree of self-consciousness, he was actively engaged in self fabrication. If “Be yourself” is nature’s first injunction to man, “Transform yourself” was her second–even as “Transcend yourself” seems, at least up to now, to be her final imperative. What will distinguish the present effort to create world culture, if once it takes form, is the richness and variety of the resources that are now open, and the multitude of people now released from the struggle for existence to play a part in this The ideal of wholeness itself is what has been-lacking in the culture of nascence, when the ideal of the whole man has commanded the foremost representatives of the age, we have a hint of the immense energizing that may take place . . . |