Contemporary Mind - Some Modern Answers - J. W. N. Sullivan

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we can hardly deny that a life devoted to such activities is a good life. If knowledge is a good in itself, and not only because of its usefulness, then a life devoted to the acquisition of knowledge is a good life. It is along these lines that Newton must be justified. He was not some tropical jungle of impulses, it is true. Probably he had not even the normal dosage of “human nature.” But the sort of excellence he achieved was made possible by his very limitations. Mankind definitely attained a higher level of development, in him, in a certain direction, and this direction is admirable and desirable. Man’s awareness, his degree of consciousness, has been increased through the life-work of Newton. If human beings, as a whole, can be said to be up to anything, and do not exist merely in order to breed more millions of human beings, then we may be confident that Newton has helped us a step towards the goal. He has taken us further in one particular direction. If we regard the human consciousness as a developing thing, then we must surely value whatever helps forward this development. Consciousness, of course, contains many elements; every human impulse enters into it. Newton’s advance is concerned with comparatively few of those elements. A more comprehensive advance, including more elements, has probably been effected by certain great artists and religious teachers. But we invariably find that the syntheses achieved by such men lay more stress on some impulses than on others. There is no reason whatever to believe that the ideal synthesis would present all impulses as of equal value. Indeed, it seems to be a necessary condition of advance that certain impulses should be subordinated.

      We may, therefore, sympathise with St. Paul’s desire to be free from the body of this death, even if we think he was mistaken. He was aware of elements within himself that he estimated more highly than his bodily passions—and we cannot say that he was wrong in doing so. We do not know enough about the final synthesis, or state of consciousness, that St. Paul achieved. He may have been in the line of evolution, for all we know. It may be that man will have to burn with St. Paul’s fever before he reaches his goal. We feel that St. Paul was a great man, and not merely a freak. And his passion has been shared by too many illustrious examples for us to be able to dismiss it with any confidence. It is possible, even, that some of the great ascetics were not altogether unjustified in their lives, although here the freakish element certainly seems to be much more perceptible. Such men are not examples for the human race, but it may be that they were explorers and found some treasure. To assume that man already is all that he ever will be is surely unjustified. Before certain manifestations—experiments, we might call them—we must suspend judgment.

      At the back of our conviction that there are higher and lower elements in our nature lies the assumption that life has a purpose, that the universe is not meaningless. The doctrine that all our impulses are of equal value does not, as its upholders assert, lead to a fuller, more varied and more intense life but, in general, to despondency and boredom. A life that serves no purpose, where there is no subordination to some final aim, is felt to be a dreary affair, for all its activities, however numerous and intense, are essentially meaningless. A man craves for his life to have direction, and no direction is possible without the subordination of some impulses to others. The unescapable boredom that affects our rich pleasure-seekers, who are, one would suppose, in the best possible position for cultivating all their impulses, is due precisely to the fact that their lives lack direction. The direction that a life assumes is determined, of course, by a man’s dominant impulses. A life where every impulse was given equal weight would be entirely lacking in direction. Most men have no very strong intellectual or spiritual passions, and the direction of their lives is determined almost wholly by sex, paternity, and the herd instinct.

      THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING

      THE question of whether life has a meaning requires a little definition. The question is, I believe, one that everybody understands; it corresponds to a universal human wonder and anxiety. But it is possible, when one thinks about it, to find it ambiguous. This is often the case where fundamental questions are involved, and too much importance should not be attached to that fact. In particular, one should not fall into the error of supposing that the difficulty of defining something affects the existence of that thing. Most of the things that matter most to us are those which are the hardest to define. But the word “meaning” is certainly somewhat ambiguous. It has, as a matter of fact, a great wealth of meanings. A symbol, for instance, has meaning; it means what it symbolises. Also, an element in a scheme has meaning; its meaning is found in its connections with the other elements in the scheme. It is in this last sense, I think, that we ask whether life has a meaning. But even then the question admits of two interpretations. It is usual, I think, to imagine vaguely some future state of illumination which shall throw a retrospective light upon our present experience, justifying it and showing it to be wholly necessary and good. In that day, in St. Paul’s words, we shall know even as we are known. Evil will be seen as “apparent”—as an aspect of good. All the pain and suffering of the world will be resolved and accounted for as indispensable elements in the great universal harmony. But there are mystics who claim that life does not need justification as an element in some all-inclusive scheme. Our experience, they assert, is justified here and now. There is nothing that has to be argued away or explained in the light of later knowledge. In the light of the mystic vision there is no problem; all is good and all is one. This way of resolving the question, if one could accept it, would seem to be the most satisfactory. Unfortunately, however, the mystic vision appears to be incommunicable.

      It is, of course, the existence of evil which makes acute the question of whether life has a meaning, and which also seems to make the question insoluble. All attempts to represent life as part of a divine plan, conceived by a beneficent creator, seem to break down over the fact of suffering. These attempts usually take the form of trying to show that suffering is not evil, but an aspect of good. Good, we are told, could not exist without suffering. Suffering supplies the necessary discipline for the development of the free soul. Thus, courage cannot exist without danger, unselfishness cannot exist without sacrifice. It is true that some forms of suffering seem to enrich and perfect a life. It is also true that suffering has probably been essential to the creation of the greatest works of art we know. But there are forms of suffering for which this explanation loses all plausibility. This is particularly obvious in the case of the sufferings of children. It is also sufficiently obvious in various cases of accident and disease. A detailed description of certain episodes in human history, such as witch-burning, is also sufficient to make incredible the idea that suffering is disciplinary. One feels, indeed, that the idea is not only incredible, but contemptible. One suspects its authors of a smugness, a lack of imaginative sympathy, a cold selfishness, which is almost sub-human. At the best one can only suppose that they are so incapable of experience that they can construct their theories in a sort of imbecile detachment.

      Very few men have had the courage fully to face this problem, and perhaps the greatest of these is Dostoevsky. The last word on this question, it seems to me, has been said in his chapter Pro and Contra in The Brothers Karamazov. He there gives cases, not imagined, but taken from the Russian newspapers, of sufferings inflicted on children, and on these cases he founds his argument. Many discussions on this question, as I have said, do little but reveal the insensitiveness of their authors. The theoretic, philosophic, scholarly type so often seems to lack the imagination necessary to realize the problem involved. The realization can only be effected through feeling, and in his capacity to awaken this feeling Dostoevsky is unique. For that reason I cannot do better than state the problem in his terms. A more abstract treatment of the problem would be an evasion of it.

      Ivan Karamazov is talking to his brother Alyosha, who intends to become a monk. Ivan wishes to make clear to him what is involved in the acceptance of the religious view of the world.

      “I’ve collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of five who was hated by her father and mother, ‘most worthy and respectable people, of good education and breeding.’ You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane Europeans; but they are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of children themselves in that sense. It’s just their defencelessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child

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