Chapter VIII: The Development of the "self" (2)

I ask you, neither for health nor for sickness, for life nor for death; but that you may dispose of my health and my sickness, my life and my death, for your glory.... You alone know what is expedient for me; you are the sovereign master; do with me according to your will. Give to me, or take away from me, only conform my will to yours. I know but one thing, Lord, that it is good to follow you, and bad to offend you. Apart from that, I know not what is good or bad in anything. I know not which is most profitable to me, health or sickness, wealth or poverty, nor anything else in the world. That discernment is beyond the power of men or angels, and is hidden among the secrets of your Providence, which I adore, but do not seek to fathom.[1]

[Footnote 1: Quoted in James: _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 286.]

Self-surrender, however, takes other forms than religious absorption or devotion. "Saintliness" is not unknown in secular forms of life, in the devotion of men to any ideal, despite pain and privation of worldly goods and successes. The doctor sacrificing his life in a leper colony is an extreme example. But something of the same humility and submissiveness is exhibited every time a man makes a choice which places the welfare of other people before his own immediate success. It is shown by the thousands of physicians and settlement workers and teachers who spend their lives in patient devotion to labors that bring little remuneration and as little glory. Men of affairs and a large proportion of other men generally measure worth by worldly success. But even from the worldly, such signs of self-surrender elicit admiration.

ECCENTRICS. There is one type of self so various and miscellaneous that it can only be subsumed under the general epithet, "eccentric." These are the unexpectedly large number of individuals in our civilization who do not come under any of the usual categories, who display some small or great abnormality which sets them off from the general run of men. That some of these are accounted eccentric is to be explained in the light of man's tendency, as a gregarious animal, to think "queer" and "freakish" anything off the beaten track. Some are clearly and unmistakably abnormal in some physiological or psychological respect. From these are recruited the inmates of our penitentiaries and insane asylums and the candidates for them. But there are eccentricities of social behavior, types of personality which though they cannot be classed as either insane or criminal, yet definitely set an individual apart.

These include what Trotter has called the "mentally unstable," as set over against "the great class of normal, sensible, reliable middle age, with its definite views, its resiliency to the depressing influence of facts, and its gift for forming the backbone of the State." There are the large group of slightly neurasthenic, made so, in part, by the high nervous tension under which modern, especially modern urban, life is lived. These include what are commonly called the hysterical or over-emotional, or "temperamental" types. In a civilization where most professions demand regularity, restraint, punctuality, and directness, unstability and excess emotionalism are necessarily at a discount. There are the vagabond types who, like young Georges, Jean-qhristophe's protégé, regard a profession as a prison house, in which most of one's capacities are cruelly confined. There are again those who, possessing singular and exclusive sensitivity to æsthetic values, to music, art, and poetry, find the world outside their own lyric enthusiasms flat, stale, and unprofitable. If, as so frequently happens, these combine, along with their peculiar temperaments, little genius and slender means, social and economic life becomes for them a blind alley. Every year at our great universities we see small groups of young men, who, having spent three or four years on philosophy, literature, and the liberal arts, and having no interest in academic life, are put to it to find a profession in which they can find a genuine interest or possible success.

Among these "eccentrics" a few have been reckoned geniuses by their contemporaries or by posterity. In such cases society hesitates to apply its usual formulæ. One cannot condemn out of hand a Shelley. He is not of the run of men.

Shelley was one of those spokesmen of the _a priori_, one of those nurslings of the womb, like a bee or a butterfly, a dogmatic, inspired, perfect, and incorrigible creature.... Being a finished child of nature, not a joint product, like most of us, of nature, history, and society, he abounded miraculously in his own clear sense, but was obtuse to the droll miscellaneous lessons of fortune. The cannonade of hard inexplicable facts that knocks into most of us what little wisdom we have, left Shelley dazed and sore, perhaps, but uninstructed.[1]

[Footnote 1: Santayana: _Winds of Doctrine_; Shelley, p. 159.]

It is difficult to draw the line in some cases between genius and insanity.[1] There have been time and again in society Cassandras who have spoken true prophecies and have been thought mad. There have been, on the other hand, those who, having some of the external eccentricities of genius, have given an illusive impression of greatness. The professional Bohemian likes to make himself great by wearing his hair long and living in a garret. But it is unquestionably true that a highly sensitive and creative mind is often ill at ease in the world of action, and remains a vagabond, an _enfant terrible_ or an eccentric all through life. It remains a fact that in contemporary society there are a small number of people, some of them of considerable talents, who simply cannot be made to fit into the social routine. For such Bertrand Russell suggests a "vagabond's wage." This he conceives as being just large enough to enable them to get along, to give them a chance to wander and experiment, but sufficiently small to penalize them for not settling down to the accustomed social routines.[2]

[Footnote 1: Thus Plato: "But he who, not being inspired and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art--he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman." _Phoedrus_ (Jowett translation), p. 550.]

[Footnote 2: Russell: _Proposed Roads to Freedom_, p. 177. There was recently introduced to the writer a boy, aged nineteen, for whom this would be an admirable solution. Brought up in a tenement and working as a clerk, this youngster wrote what competent judges pronounced to be really extraordinary lyrics. He was at the same time utterly helpless in the world of affairs. Even at college his casual habits and absorption would have prevented him from getting through his freshman year.]

Mill has generalized the situation of the genius:

Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an _atmosphere_ of freedom. Persons of genius are, _ex vi termini_, more individual than any other people--less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own character.... If they are of a strong character, and break their fetters, they become a mark for the society which has not succeeded in reducing them to commonplace, to point at with solemn warning as "wild," "erratic," and the like; much as if one should complain of the Niagara River for not flowing smoothly between its banks, like a Dutch canal.[1]

[Footnote 1: Mill: _Essay on Liberty_, chap. III.]

THE ACTIVE AND THE CONTEMPLATIVE. One final distinction must be made, one that cuts across all the types of self hitherto discussed, namely, the distinction between the man of action and the man of thought. One need not go far in literature or in life to find the contrast made. In the Scriptures Mary is set over against Martha, Rachel against Leah. Hamlet and Ulysses are permanent representations of the melancholy thinker and the exuberant adventurer. The business man and the executive may be put over against the poet and the scholar; the strenuous organizer and administrator over against the quiet philosopher. Both have their outstanding uses, and, in their extreme forms, their outstanding defects. The active type, as we say, "gets things done." He builds bridges and industries; he manages markets and men. His eye is on the practical; he is dependable, rapid, and efficient. In an industrial civilization he is the great heroic type. The statesman and the railroad builder, the newspaper editors and the political leaders captivate the imaginations as they control the destinies of mankind.

On the other hand, there are those who stand aside (either from incapacity or disinclination or both) from the management of affairs and the life of action, and spend their lives in observation and contemplation. Plato and Aristotle regarded this as the highest type of life; it may have been because they were themselves both philosophers. In its extreme form it is exhibited in such men as Spinoza or Kant, spending their lives in practical obscurity, speculating on time and space and eternity. But it is apparent in less extreme types. The "patient observer," the genial spectator of other men's actions is not infrequent. When he has literary gifts he is a philosopher or a poet. Lucretius in a famous passage stated the contemplative ideal, contrasting it with its opposite:

Sweet it is when on the great seas the winds are buffeting, to gaze from the land on another's great struggles; not because it is pleasure or joy that any one should be distressed, but because it is sweet to perceive from what misfortunes you yourself are free. Sweet is it, too, to behold great contests of war in full array over the plains, when you have no part in the danger. But nothing is more gladdening than to dwell in the calm high places, firmly embattled on the heights by the teaching of the wise, whence you can look down on others, and see them wandering hither and thither and going astray, as they seek the way of life, in strife matching their wits or rival claims of birth, struggling night and day by surpassing effort to rise up to the height of power and gain possession of the world.[1]

[Footnote 1: Lucretius: _De Rerum Natura_ (Bailey translation), book II, lines 1-12.]

But in the two types it is not the fruit of action or contemplation, but action and contemplation themselves that the two types find respectively interesting. The man of action finds an immediate satisfaction in movement, change, the clamor of affairs, the contacts with other people, the making of changes in the practical world. The man of thought finds as immediate enjoyment in noting the ways of men, and reflecting upon them.

That contemplation, disinterested thinking, also has its use goes without saying. The thinker and the dreamer may be something at least of what the Irish poet boasts:

"... the movers and shakers
Of the world, forever, it seems."

The scholar, the thinker, the man who stands aside from immediate action, may, often does, help the world of action in a far-reaching way. The researches of a Newton make possible eventually the feats of modern engineering and telegraphy; the abstruse study of the calculus helps to build bridges and skyscrapers.

Both types, in their extremes, have their weaknesses. The extremely practical man "may cut off the limb upon which he is sitting," or "see no further than the end of his nose." A really great administrator is not penny-wise; he thinks far ahead, around and into a problem. He is concerned for tomorrow as well as to-day. The contemplative man may come to be "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." There is the hero of one Russian novel who reflects through three hundred pages on his wasted life, all at the ripe age of twenty-three.[1] The practical man gains width and insight by checking himself with reflection; the contemplative finds thought called home and made meaningful by contacts with the world. It was something of this balance which Plato had in mind when he insisted that his future philosopher-king should, after fifteen years' study, go for fifteen years into the "cave" or world to learn to deal with men and affairs. The "mere theorist" is often an absurd if not a dangerous character; the practical man may come to make the wheels go round without ever taking note of his direction.

[Footnote 1: Contchareff: _Oblomoff_.]

As pointed out in the beginning of this discussion, no one of these types is exclusively exemplified in any one individual. To be exclusively any one of these would be to be a caricature rather than a character.[2] But to be no one of these types to any degree at all is to be no character at all, is to be socially a nonentity, a minus quantity; it is to be determined by the vicissitudes of chance or circumstance; it is to be a succession of vacillations rather than a distinctive self-determined personality. Each of these types, moreover, if not extreme, has its specific excellences, and their various presence lends richness and diversity to social life.

[Footnote 2: Dickens's success lay, perhaps chiefly, in his ability to draw these unforgettable exaggerations, these outstanding types: "Micawber" waiting for something to turn up; the fiendish cruelty of "Bill Sikes"; the angelic self-effacement of "Little Nell"; the hypocritical "Mr. Pecksniff"; the gossipy "Sairy Gamp." He had a unique gift for representing psychological traits in large. The so-called psychological novelists like Meredith, trace a character through its moods and fluctuations, making truer, more composite, though less memorable characters.]

EMOTIONS AROUSED IN THE MAINTENANCE OF THE SELF. These various types of self may be defended with bitterness and pertinacity, and in their support the most powerful emotions may be enlisted. As pointed out in connection with individuality in opinion, men may be willing to die for their beliefs. Similarly invasion of one's home, infringement or threat against what one regards as one's rights or one's possessions, whether physical or social, may be bitterly contested. And in this conflict in support of the integrity of the self, anger, hate, fear, submissiveness, all the nuances of emotion may be aroused. The themes of great tragedy are built largely on this theme of insistent selfhood. Any obstruction of the self-integrity one has set one's self may provoke a violent reaction. It may be interference with one's love, as in the case of Medea or Othello, the pain of ingratitude as in Lear, the conflict between "the lower and the higher self," as in the case of Macbeth's loyalty and his ambition. These are the staple materials of drama. In common experience, an insult to one's wife or friend, an obstacle placed in the way of one's professional career, deprivation of one's liberty or one's property, or one's unhindered "pursuit of happiness," are the provocations to violent emotions in the sustaining of the self. How violent or what form the reaction will take depends on the situation of the "self" involved. If one has been grossly insulted by another upon whom one is utterly dependent socially and economically, a rankling and impotent rage may be the only outlet. To a person gifted with humility, the disillusions of a false friendship may provoke nothing more than a deep but resigned disappointment. Where passion and determination run high, and retaliation is feasible, a violent hate may find violent fulfillment. In earlier and more bloodthirsty days, the dagger, the duel, and poison were, as illustrated in the history of the Borgias, ways of maintaining the self and venting one's anger or revenge. Even in modern society the still distressingly large number of crimes of violence may be traced in many, perhaps most cases, to blind and bitter hate. To any deep personal injury, hate, whether it takes overt form or not, is still the instinctive answer; just such hate as Euripides represents in the jealous Medea, when she, a barbarian captive among the Greeks, sees Jason, her lover, about to be married to a Greek princess:

"... But I, being citiless, am cast aside,
By him that wedded me, a savage bride.
. . . . . . . .
"I ask one thing. If chance yet ope to me
Some path, if even now my hand can win,
Strength to requite this Jason for his sin,
Betray me not! Oh, in all things but this,
I know how full of fears a woman is,
And faints at need, and shrinking from the light
Of battle; but once spoil her of her right
In man's love, and there moves, I warn thee well,
No bloodier spirit between Heaven and Hell."[1]

[Footnote 1: Euripides: _Medea_ (Gilbert Murray translation), p. 16.]

In defense of the self in its narrower or broader sense, courage and heroism may be displayed. The martyr will die rather than submit; there have been many to whom Patrick Henry's "Give me Liberty or give me death," was something more than rhetoric. The self for which we will fight, of course, varies. A spoilt child will go into a paroxysm of rage if its toy is taken away. Older people will fight for smaller or larger points of social position. There is the familiar citizen who will insist on his rights, often of a petty sort, in a hotel, theater, or department store. Or a man may display the last extremity of courage in defense of some ideal, as in a man's surrender of his life for his country. Something of the same heroism is displayed by individuals who stand out against their group in the face of ridicule or persecution. It is the general sympathy with the desire to preserve one's selfhood untarnished that gives point to Henley's lines:

"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
. . . . . . . .
"It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul."[2]

[Footnote 2: _Invictus_.]

In the same way as the emotions fear, anger, and hate, and their variations and degrees, may be aroused by attack or threat against the self, so help and encouragement of an individual's selfhood arouse love, affection, and gratitude. Even our affection for our parents, though in part instinctive, is undoubtedly increased by the care and persistence with which they have fostered our own life and hopes, have educated us, and made possible for us a career. The same motives play a part in our affection for teachers who have beneficently influenced our lives, for other older people who "give us a start," advice and encouragement or financial aid. Even the love of God has in religious ritual been colored with gratitude for God's mercies and benevolences.

THE INDIVIDUALITY OF GROUPS. Groups may display the same individuality and sense of selfhood as is exhibited by individuals. And the members of the group may come to regard the group life as something quite as important and inalienable as their own personalities and possessions. Indeed in defense of the integrity of the group life, as in the case, for example, of national honor, the individual life and possession may come to be reckoned as naught. Man's gregariousness and his instinctive sympathy with his own kind make it easy for the individual to identify his own life with that of the group. What threatens or endangers the group will in consequence arouse in him the same emotions as are aroused by threats or dangers that concern his own personality. An insult to the flag may send a thrill of danger through the millions who read about it, just as would an insult to themselves or their families.

Group feeling may exist on various levels. It may be nothing more momentous than local pride, having the tallest tower, the finest amusement park, the best baseball team, or being the "sixth largest city." It may be a belligerent imperialism, a "desire for a place in the sun." It may be a desire for independence and an autonomous group life, manifested so strikingly recently by such small nationalities as Poland and Czecho-Slovakia and influential in keeping Switzerland alive as a nationality through hundreds of years, though surrounded by powerful neighbors.[1] While a group does not exist save as an abstraction, looked at as a whole it may exhibit the same outstanding traits, or the same types of selfhood as an individual. It may be fiercely belligerent and dogmatic; it may, like literary exponents of the German ideal, desire to spread its own conception of Kultur throughout the world.[2] It may be insistent on its own position, or its own possessions or its own glory. It may be fanatic in aggrandizement. It may be interested in the welfare of other groups, as in the case of large nationalities championing and protecting the causes of small or oppressed ones, such an ideal as was expressed, for example, by President Wilson in his address to Congress on the entrance of America into the Great War:

[Footnote 1: Group feeling may be displayed under the most disadvantageous conditions, as in the strong sentiment for nationalism current among the Jews, even through all the centuries of dispersion.]

[Footnote 2: Thorstein Veblen has pointed out how the "common man" comes to identify his interest with that of the group: "The common man who so lends himself to the aggressive enhancement of the national Culture and its prestige has nothing of a material kind to gain from the increase of renown that comes to his sovereign, his language, his countrymen's art or science, his dietary, or his God. There are no sordid motives in all this. These spiritual assets of self-complacency are indeed to be rated as grounds of high-minded patriotism without afterthought." (_The Nature of Peace_, p. 56.)]

... We shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts--for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.[3]

[Footnote 3: Woodrow Wilson: _Address to Congress_, April 2, 1917.]

The selfhood displayed by various groups varies with the degree and integration of the individual within the group. In extreme cases, such as that of Germany under the imperial régime, the group individuality may completely overshadow and engulf that of the individual. This ideal was not infrequently expressed by German political writers:

To us the state is the most indispensable as well as highest requisite of our earthly existence.... All individualistic endeavor must be unreservedly subordinated to this lofty claim.... The state eventually is of infinitely more value than the sum of the individuals within its jurisdiction. This conception of the state which is as much a part of our life as the blood in our veins, is nowhere to be found in the English constitution, and is quite foreign to English thought, and to that of America as well.[1]

[Footnote 1: Eduard Meyer: _England, Its Political Organization and Development and the War Against Germany_ (English translation), pp. 30-31.]

While custom-bound and feudal régimes may emphasize the tendency to suppress development of individuality, and insist on regimentation in thought and action--an ideal proclaimed with increasing generality in Germany from Hegel down[2] there may be on the part of both individuals and groups the tendency to promote individuality as itself a social good. In such a case the social structure and educational systems and methods will be designed to promote individuality rather than to suppress it. Individual variations, if it be generally recognized that they are the only source of progress, will be utilized and cultivated instead of suppressed.[3]

[Footnote 2: See Dewey: _German Philosophy and Politics_.]

[Footnote 3: Individuality is the theme of Montessori kindergarten methods.]

Throughout the nineteenth century (indeed throughout the history of political theory), the pendulum swung between individualism and complete socialization. Spencer long ago proclaimed the dominance of the individual; T. H. Green, following the German philosophers, the dominance of the state. Like the contrast between egoism and altruism, an emphasis on either side is bound to be artificial. The individual can only be a self in a social order; the individual is only an individual in contrast with others. It is doubtful, for example, whether a man living all his life alone on a desert island would discover any individuality at all. A man's character is displayed in action, and his actions are always, or nearly always, performed with reference to other people. And a man's best self-realization cannot be achieved save in congenial social order. A man will not readily grow into a saint among a society of sinners, and unless the social order provides opportunities for the highest type of life, it will exist only in a very fortunate and favored few. One of the charges that has been laid against democracy is that it fails to encourage the highest types of scientific and artistic interests, that it is the gospel of the mediocre.[1]

[Footnote 1: This is the essence of the aristocratic position, that a choice life lived by a few is better than a vulgar one shared by the many.]

It is too often forgotten, on the other hand, by those who emphasize the importance of society, that society is, after all, nothing more than an aggregate of selves. The "state," the "social order" is nothing but the individuals who make it up, and their relations to each other.

The group exists, after all, even as the most completely socialized political doctrines insist, for the realization of individual selves, for freedom of opportunity and initiative. It is when "individualism" runs rampant, when self-realization on the part of one individual interferes with self-realization on the part of all others that individualism becomes a menace. Individuality is itself valuable, in the first place, because as Mill pointed out in his essay on _Liberty_ earlier quoted:

What has made the European family an improving instead of a stationary portion of mankind? Not any superior excellence in them, which, when it exists, exists as the effect, not the cause; but their remarkable diversity of character and culture. Individuals, classes, nations, have been extremely unlike one another; they have struck out a great variety of paths, each leading to something valuable; and although at every period those who traveled in different paths have been intolerant of one another, and each would have thought it an excellent thing if all the rest could have been compelled to travel his road, their attempts to thwart each other's development have rarely had any permanent success, and each has endured in time to receive the good which the others have offered.[2]

[Footnote 2: Mill: _Essay on Liberty_, chap. III.]

Apart from the variations in group customs and traditions, and their progressive application to changing circumstances which individuality makes possible, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that society is the name for the process by which individuals live together. It is the individuals who are the realities and the happiness of individuals which is the aim of social organization. Such happiness is only attainable when individuals are allowed to make the most of their native capacities and individual interests. The social group as a group will be more interesting, colorful, and various when every experimentation and variety of life are encouraged and promoted. And the individuals in such a society will be personalities, not the mere mechanisms of a regimented routine.