Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

left once for all. And the suggestions point in two quite different directions. One side of us, so to speak, urges breadth of mind, width of experience. It wants us to be artists as well as thinkers, men of affairs and men of religion. Im Guten, Ganzen, Schönen resolut zu leben was the famous rule of the poet who held personality to be the highest good of the children of men. But even while these strivings towards universality, towards a balanced and duly proportioned depth of personal powers and activities, are felt, another side of us wants not to be tolerant, not to be catholic: it aims not at unity but at intensity, and instead of the humanity to which no human interest is alien, it praises the apostle who knows only his one task, the artist for whom beauty is the only truth, the lover for whom the world contains one person only. Now the paradox to which we have reached is that both these divergent ideals are ideals of personality: they represent two alternatives, each of which might be called 'self-realization'. Let us look further into the question from this standpoint and under this title.

III

SELF-REALIZATION

§ 1. The Real Significance of the Term

SELF-REALIZATION is one of the formulas which attract only to disappoint. That it attracts is shown not by the practice of moralists alone, but by the epigrammatic and impersonal wisdom of generations recommending us to know ourselves and to be ourselves.

The disappointment is bound to come soon if only because from some aspects of himself any right-minded man must endeavour to escape. Unless the mists of optimism cloud from our view the real defects of our own nature, we cannot want to develop all its powers: and as the self is in any case a vast complex of powers and faculties there is always an infinite diversity of behaviour possible which could quite conveniently fall under this formula.

Yet it is possible to find a definite meaning for the phrase in the light of the previous discussion. The personality, as we have seen, is more than a mere sum of powers and activities: from the first it is a principle of coherence and harmony. Under the name of self-realization a goal is set for personal endeavour. Or rather, by the same word two different lines of action may be recommended to us. The one is to know our individual tastes and to live accordingly: to emphasize the differences which mark us off from others: to assert ourselves in contradistinction to them. The other is to cultivate a breadth of taste: to enter by action or sympathy into all the diverse forms of goodness and to be distinctive only so far as the balance in which these different forms appear will be appropriate to us rather than to anyone else.

To illustrate the meaning let me refer to a somewhat distant logical doctrine. In Hegel and his followers we are familiar with the constant exaltation of the 'concrete' over the 'abstract' universal: the former typified by a self with different powers, the latter by a genus with different species. Now the genus must exist in one or other of its species: the self on the other hand would seem to live not merely in this or that of its powers but

in all of them taken together. So far as this is true the self-realization must involve a balance and proportion of activities: so far as within the self, too, as within the plans a real disjunction of attributes can be traced, of which only one could be realized, a man would have to choose whether he will strive for this quality or for that. Here, then, are two different views of the nature of a self, and the meaning of self-realization must vary accordingly. That some possible attributes of a self are alternatives none can deny; it cannot be self-indulgent and ascetic, just and unjust. But does the same disjunction exist between asceticism and good nature, justice and kindness? This is what one theory of the matter really suggests. It implies that if we have the goodness of the strong silent man, we cannot also have that of the bon camarade: that it is not only impossible to serve both God and Mammon, but it is also and equally impossible to serve both Apollo and Dionysus.

To realize that there are different and incompatible kinds of goodness is the true foundation of any wholesome tolerance. But even in the cases we have been putting, the champion of broad humanity might urge that the disjunctions are too absolute: that even the strong silent man would do better sometimes to relax at the fireside, and that a week in the desert would be admirable for the bon camarade; in fact, that it is not so much a choice between different excellences as between different modes of blending them. He might further defend his ideal by pointing to the true nature of the tolerance that this very perception of necessary differences ought to engender. For what is such tolerance but the sympathetic understanding of the course rejected and to sympathize is in some small degree to live in the experience thus understood.

2332 .

:

F

On the whole I believe that the real nerve of the arguments in support of self-realization is a sense of the value of universal sympathies, the widest range of interests a recognition that man's nature is complex and that there are in him multiple elements of good which ought all to find expression. Such a belief is at the centre of a great deal of reforming activity and the only justification for it. For unquestionably there are peculiarly valuable qualities for whose cultivation poverty offers an unequalled opportunity. Beyond question there are peculiarly despicable qualities to whose development wealth is a powerful stimulus. If, nevertheless, reformers want to make the poor richer, it is largely because their life, however good it may be, seems necessarily cramped, forcibly cut off from enjoyment and activities that leisure and freedom from the constant pressure of fundamental economic anxieties might allow.

The true ideal in self-realization then is breadth: the keynote of the other doctrine which as we saw might come under the same title is depth. Everyone would recommend whole-heartedly a great range of interests and pursuits if it were possible to do justice to them all : because this soon becomes impossible we turn to the other extreme and urge men to find their true selves in concentration, even in apparent narrowness. The second doctrine therefore, though apparently as positive as the first, is a qualification to it, made necessary through our weakness. It exists because of the inherent dangers of the first.

§ 2. The Difficulties of this Ideal

THESE dangers might be stated more precisely. They are three in number; the first two depend on the

general difficulties of obtaining continuity in creatures of our nature: the third more especially on the relations between individual and society.

In the first place, the co-existence of a great number of interests at once is, of course, difficult to reconcile with the intensity of any one interest. The preceding pages have dealt with that theme. It is enough to repeat that men simply cannot avoid some predominant interest. No mind, however catholic, is adequate to the countless possibilities. All that can be asked is that the scientist should not lose all sense of beauty, nor the artist all regard for truth:1 that the practical man should not altogether scorn the library, nor the scholar be too proud to think politically. As I have implied, we are willing to forgive total neglect of certain interests to the triumphant cultivator of one or two. But we nevertheless regard such narrowness as something to be avoided when possible by ourselves. When it comes to trivial prejudices, capricious and unproductive bias, we do not really approve, though we often enjoy such limitation. The world is more amusing because of their existence, and it may as well be admitted at once that an imperfect universe is as necessary for humour as it is for tragedy. When the Golden Age has dawned and the world awakes from the long nightmare of stupidity and vice, its main occupation according to some dreamers will be the artistic contemplation of past silliness and evil.2 A somewhat similar use has been found by Mr. Bradley's despondent idealism for human foibles and human sorrows: the

1 It is partly the desire to lose no valuable element in our life that makes us eager to believe with Keats that beauty and truth are one, and so can be attained simultaneously.

2 See for example Mr. T. C. Snow's charming paper 'Imagination in Utopia'.

« AnteriorContinuar »