[This is Chapter 4 of Murphey’s book Emergent Man:]
Chapter 4
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There are some men who to the depths of their
soul know that they are great and who feel so richly human that life takes on a
peculiar elevation in which the soaring spirit mixes in keen pleasure with the
fine carnality of the body, producing a man who -- as incongruous as it may
sound -- is a virtual combination of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Stravinsky's
Rite of Spring.
This is the emergent man: inquisitive, hungry
mind seeking in the unquenchable quest of the intellect; a mind impressed into
a posture of living, so that his actions befit his thoughts and do not bring
shame to the man, forming from day to day a rich expression of integrity; a
consequent pride by which the man knows the joy of his own value as a man; and
these elements, which are but a single impulse of life itself, touched with the
pulsating rhythm of sensuality, a sensuality of passion and tenderness.
Such is the man who -- though in many ways no
different from others among us --adds on top of the common substratum the
ingredient of an earned self-esteem which he at all times seeks to justify in
the light of his own highest standards, so that at every instant he knows at
the very root of his consciousness that for him there is no guilt, no shame,
but only the clean knowledge that in every way he is a man of civilization, of
strength, of virility, of intelligence. He is a man deeply imbued with the
religious sense of being alive. His is the morality of life, a morality that
holds health and strength to be the highest values.
Probably you would not recognize such a man on
the street. Instead of being a tall Aryan, an athletic figure of heroic stature
(though he could take such a shape), the chances are that he will be a man of
the most ordinary appearance, or he may even be a short little man with a large
wart on his nose. With a riotous laugh, nature may have played such a joke on
him as to box him in the most comical form, leaving him a Pandora's Box of
flesh and bone. I think it is well to appreciate this fact. The emergent man is
not to be judged superficially. It is of a man's personal expression of an
unabashed will to live vitally and expansively that we speak here. Such an
expression cannot be reduced to an easily recognized physical shape. It is
sometimes tragic or laughable the way greatness comes bottled. The human
spirit, a breathing combination of intellect and visceral awareness, is
illimitable. Fortunately it is able to transcend, though perhaps even through
the intensity of its own suffering, a circumstance that is commonplace or even viciously
barbaric.
Mind -- skeptical, inquisitive, unabused -- is
the essence of this man. His is a mind that knows the adventure of a struggle
with a problem, an adventure bringing with it in many cases the most intense
personal involvement and having as a part of it the mental agonies of
perplexity, the frustration of insolubility, the almost indescribable joy of
discovery, the fascination and warmth of long and loving observation. So
involved is he in this adventure of ideas that the world has come alive to him,
has gained a meaning that can only be the product of an active relation of
consciousness with the world that is its subject matter.
To him, this is a "bloodless
adventure," so to speak. It is an all-consuming quest that is exciting,
invigorating and satisfying, without having, though, as an attendant feature
the indignities that so many undertakings entail. The purely creative nature of
this adventure is well worth noting. When Brutus prepared to kill Caesar he
wished, in the gentle humanity that was so much a part of him, that he could
"come by Caesar's spirit, and not dismember Caesar," saying that
"in the spirit of men there is no blood." He wished that he could deal with the idea of Caesar without
having actually to go to the Capitol and butcher the man himself. Whether we
realize it fully or not while we watch Shakespeare's play, the act of killing
is for any gentle man an act of horror, even though on principle tyrannicide is
justifiable. Many "adventures" carry with them terrible and unworthy
aspects. A man may abhor them while at the same time he yearns for the
exhilaration of adventure. In Tolstoy's War and Peace Count Rostov felt
the full thrill of exhilaration during the cavalry charge that Tolstoy
describes so well. The soldiers felt this thrill as they shouted their
"Hurrahs" to the Czar. But one wonders whether at the bottom of this
exhilaration there must not necessarily, at least for a sensitive man, be a
nausea, a nausea coming out of the very real awareness that pain and butchery
and sorrow are the upshot of the whole thing.
There are types of adventure that are unworthy
and there are types that are worthy. The point is that the adventures of
inquisitive intellect contain no implicit destruction. They are fully life-affirming.
There are also, along the same lines, adventures involving physical action in
the world that adhere to an ethic of liberty and tolerance and are altogether
worthy, since they involve only growth and freedom and the incorporation of
mind into rational action, and cannot (when properly understood) be said to
cause injury.
The mind of which I write is a hard-boiled,
incorruptible thing. It lives by
rational tests, and it does not hesitate to discard that which cannot meet such
tests when they are honestly applied. Thus, as a matter of morality it has no
traffic with error. There is in this mind no softness that tolerates error. Its
basic impulse is that it has no vested interest in any preconception to the
extent of holding it in the face of the idea's inability to meet satisfactorily the tests that a sound epistemology would impose.
To the extent that it is tolerant of error, it
is tolerant only in the limited sense that it offers courtesy and the
right-to-exist to other men and
to such of their ideas as -- because of their non-violent nature -- are
compatible with a continuing society of discourse. But in the integrity of its own thinking the truth of the idea is
the important thing, and the amenities of a tolerant co-existence do not drain
it of the power to make a virile judgment as to the rational validity of
different ideas. In this ethico-intellectual sense Aristotle’s Law of Identity,
that "A is A," is its guiding principle. Logic is to such a mind a
hard and fast reality, not to be ignored or wished away. Today one hears over
and over again such statements as that "that is just theory" or that
"experience, not logic, is the best guide." The emergent man knows this to be the false dichotomy that it
is. He knows that experience
uninterpreted by reasoned intellect is a worthless hodgepodge. A mental
softness that does not realize this, and then breathe this understanding into
its every process, is doing little less than making this dichotomy an excuse to
avoid sound thinking and for the uncritical extension of its own prejudices.
I could not attempt to
spell out the content of such an intellect.
It might range with a great facility over an enormous area and pick and
choose matters of interest from the wealth of subject-matter that any active
mind sees about it. I have tried only
to spell out briefly its temper. I have
not even discussed the epistemology it would adopt, since that subject is so
vast as to entail a separate book by itself.
But certainly it would be concerned with the problems of epistemology so
as to be able to think with a judicious selectivity rather than a wanton
wandering. As I have spoken of it,
then, the mind is almost a temperament: a temperament of vigorous intellect,
containing a will to expand to its uppermost possibilities. The mind of an emergent man is one that
lives its ideas, knowing them to be important and being dogmatically unwilling
to forfeit the rigorous tests of reason for any purpose. To such a man the intellect is not an accessory appended to the rest of his life, but
instead lies at the very root of his vitality as a man.
While as an abstraction this point may seem
palatable and easy, it is a quality that renders the man so unique that he must
of necessity stand out starkly from his fellows because of it. Robert A. Taft was such a man. When he said
that "tact is dishonesty" he showed that he was sharply aware of what
this quality requires. Many people as a
matter of course subordinate the rigorous honesty of mind to the expediency of
a likeable personality, and surrender constantly to the pressures of those who,
when it comes down to the raw core of the demands they make on other persons,
fundamentally do not want honesty, but rather demand the constant oozing of an
everlasting fiction. But an emergent man works hard to avoid this
subordination. He lives with hard-boiled, incorruptible, warm mind as his
highest value.
All of this is to say that he is a man of
integrity. Integrity is the day-to-day
breathing of his untainted mind into his action and even into the subtlest
aspects of his relations with other people. It is the welding together by a man
of his life and his convictions, so that there is no breach between them, not
even the slightest hypocrisy. One might say that integrity is the human spirit
as it stands naked and unashamed, apologizing to no one for being just what it
is.
Integrity is also the great rock upon which
the ship may crash. Since it is an
attempt at self-assertion in a world that abhors a truly honest existence, it
is the point of contact of the obscene soul with the extroverted
sterility. And this is bound to be a
disharmonious contact. Those whom we
know as "practical men" avoid both mind and integrity as religious
imperatives because of this
danger. There are cataclysmic
potentialities in almost every
personal contact: one is assumed, in accordance with the sterility, to be a
nothing; in his integrity he insists on being something alive and
self-determining, and the impact as the two forces meet is liable to be
considerable. To insist on ones full integrity often creates a cleavage that
roars and echoes like a cannon. Even
the smallest things many times involve important principles, and to overlook
the principle is easy, but to insist on it may leave ones associates
dumbfounded, amazed and angry. And this
anger cannot be counted on to remain passive. Ultimately, it takes the form of
the beast of unreason and is vicious.
A man of integrity today makes it a central
aim, considers it religiously as vital to his best existence, and seeks at
every turn to maximize it. But unfortunately survival and the ultimate
maximization require that the man choose his battlegrounds, that he take his
stand on principle only where major events are involved, and that he seek to
penetrate the oozing fiction as much as he can, though without the possibility
of ever really surpassing it. He cannot always raise his voice to register his
dissent. Sometimes he must just be silent and wish it were otherwise.
Perhaps emergence in its finest fruition
cannot exist in the world of the split realities where the soul is obscene and
the external reality sterile. Even an heroic, struggling man, trying to break
through the sterility as though it were a hard shell that may be broken rather
than a mist or a magnetic field, is not really an emergent man. Emergent man is
not a type of human sacrifice. He is the living product of civilization, of
tolerance, of creativity. When a man tries for emergence in defiance of the
semi-civilized sterility, he is a sacrificial figure, a martyr. Perhaps morally
and in every other way he is emergent but the cost is so high that he must
eventually be robbed of much that should attend his emergence. And this robbery
leaves him deficient. A deficient man, though a very great man, is not emergent
in the sense that he has the pure, easy, overflowing love of life. The best
that can be said for him is that he is a grand hero of struggle. He is a man in
an age of non-emergent men, and that non-emergent milieu deprives him, by its
very lack of rich development, of much that he might gain from his fellow man.
His life, therefore, though perhaps intensely creative, is of a different
quality, has a vastly different tone, than that of an emergent man in an
emergent society. The extroversive ooze is all about him, stealing from him
here and there. The benefit of their fertilization is not available to him. And
in addition he must ultimately lack the final perfection of integrity, since he
simply cannot fight enough moral battles to make good all the loss.
To speak momentarily of the highest ideal of
integrity, so that we may see a glimmer of its real meaning and be guided by
that glimmer, we might say that it requires a developed social setting, a
sensibility and a courtesy, that is not unlike that of the United States Senate
as ideally conceived: a society of equals where even though the men may not be
the same in ability, they nevertheless, by their almost aristocratic manners,
possess the chance for unsuppressed greatness: each man on a level from which
he may, if he chooses, reach to the furthest extent of his capacities. (I am
well aware that this does not exactly paint the picture of the Senate as it is.
But it at least paints it as some of its finest members have conceived it.)
When, with this sort of conception, a man has
cultivated his mind and his integrity, the monumental product of these
ingredients is his self-esteem.
I think that a justly earned pride is the
finest attribute of a man's character. I mean a man's
"pride-in-himself." This is
not a pride that he has "done something for others." It refers to his sense of personal worth.
(Doing something £or others, of course, may give rise to such a feeling about
himself, but I should like to distill from my conception of pride any element
of purchased self-esteem. Earned, yes! but purchased, no.) It does not stem from placing some donation
on the altar of life, thereby paying to humanity a price that a depraved point
of view demands in order that the man may feel a justification for his own
existence. Instead, it is a pride that above all realizes that the man need pay
no one for the moral justification of his existence, a pride that knows that
he, by himself, is so constituted as to be eminently worthy of life. He knows with an inner ecstasy: “I am a man.” And in this he uses “man” as a term of
religious import, a rapturous affirmation of all that is healthy, strong, moral,
intelligent. Here is a man who has no
sense of sin, no idea of personal guilt.
Perhaps he has no real understanding of evil, either (since introspectively
he has no conception of the impulses of evil).
This does not mean that his innocence is necessarily naïve, but it is
innocence just the same, but an innocence that is much more than just innocence
alone, an innocence given texture and shape by the rapid pursuit of life that
mind and integrity entail.
This is the pride of a man who, whenever he
sees something fine and able, does not envy its creator, but rather feels a
great respect and knows that the thing does not belittle him, because he can
and does say to himself, “I am capable of something equally good, and I do
things that are equally good.”
Such a pride is a reverence for creative life,
a nobility surging up through the man, from his heels up his legs and through
his shoulders, a nobility that finds itself in a sense of strength and
unchallengeability.
What if we were to attempt to form an apt
poetic image of this quiet, unseeable strength and gladness? What would we include in it? Certainly it would be an unusual mixture, a
mixture including in it an ordinary man on the street, in all of his seemingly congenial
smallness, along with the varied ecstasies of a Catholic priest at an ancient
mass, and a general astride a white horse among his soldiers on the eve of
battle, and a professor of philosophy walking in his academic procession
attired in a black gown and colorful hood: all that would make up a romanticist’s
picture of sublimity reduced to ordinary human form. If it is possible to imagine these various rituals reduced to an
essence of feeling, and this feeling carried over into the body of a man of
contemporary dress and appearance, one may then have some idea of the pride
that, along with the mind and integrity that form its basis, is the generator
of the emergent man’s vital élan.
If a man is actively intelligent and thereby
brings into his life the bloodness adventure of intellect, and incorporates
this intelligence and vitality into his every act, and feels in his own
creativity his own worth as a man, it is hard to imagine that his own existence
will not become meaningful to him. He
will not need to look elsewhere for a “purpose” for his being alive. The objects of his love are themselves a
sufficient justification. Intelligence
mixed into life creates purpose. The
man himself becomes, to use Ayn Rand’s phrase, “the motor of the world.”
What I am describing as “emergent man” here is
a religious symbol, a portrait of what some men nearly are and what others
might become. This man is an
aspiration, though an aspiration that (provided we allow for the subtraction made
necessary by an association in the effete reality) is easily attainable by
those who will to attain it. The word “religious”
in this connection is pregnant with meaning.
Emergence is the elevation of life beyond the commonplace and the
casual, the giving to it a full-blown excitement and joy. It is a lot more than just a “way of life:
it is a dedication of the soul.
By now, though, it should be apparent that
emergence is at odds with much prevalent religion. It is at odds because it is not a religion of guilt, or of
promise of deliverance from a presupposed guilt. Rather, its essence is an unabashed absence of guilt.
This absence of shame is potent in its
implications. It implies, for example, that
in such a thing as the control of human sexuality an intelligent morality must
supplant the inhibitions of shame. Very
little is left of the old morality if it is bereft of shame as a principal
ingredient. The morality of emergence
purges men and women of embarrassment and robs the “obscenity" of the human body of its force,
just as it would rob the "obscenity" of the soul of any place.
It has been convenient to raise this
particular illustration at this point because it serves to introduce yet
another element of the emergent man that has yet to be explored. And this
element is that he is, as Unamuno would say, a man of flesh-and-bone, an animal
of the finest carnality who may stand in communion with the earth and his
fellow man through touch and smell, pain and orgasmic pleasure. He is a creature
capable of loving, and his body is the instrument of this catharsis. Emergence
as a religion involves in part a worship of sex, of the human body, of the
human mind, all as parts of purposeful and expressive life. "The worship
of sex" may be shocking words to that impotency that still very much finds
its place in our thinking. It is alien to much that is found in the Christian
tradition. But it is a part of the affirmation of the right to exist, to think
and to feel. And, too, it is alien to a thoroughly mundane view of sex, since
it looks on the very carnality of lust as connected with a man's spirituality
and active virility.
Emergent man's sensuality is hardly confined
to sex as narrowly conceived. It includes much more than this. This carnal
presence is, rather, the same as that that may be found in Tolstoy's Anna
Karenina where Levin goes out into the fields and, mixing with the peasants
there, works with muscle and body until the full exuberance of his own
perspiration and exhaustion comes over him; the same as Somerset Maugham
describes in Of Human Bondage when Philip and the Athelny family
spend their happy days together working in the hopfields; the same as the
cow-milking in Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. In all of these there
is a communion of body and earth and a close friendliness with other human
beings. It is the same sensuality one feels in sex, but directed toward the
earth and the sky rather than toward a woman, and perhaps it is more diffused.
Its catharsis is found, as in the cases mentioned, in the pleasure of hard work rather than in the
analogous sexual climax, but the two are strikingly similar, at least
spiritually, though perhaps not physiologically. This sensuality is the sheer
enjoyment of having muscles to stretch, a sensuous presence in the world, a way
of knowing by touch and sight and smell the pleasures of sunlight, snowfall,
the cozy warmth of a mountain cabin, the wetness of the rain. A man can wade
into a beaver pond in the rain and cast his line up where the water comes
running into the pond and then feel the sharp thrill as a brook trout takes
hold. This is sensuality as I mean it. To the emergent man it flows as a part
of his exultation, part and parcel of his mind, integrity and self-esteem,
inseparable from them, just as they are inseparable from it.
One disembowels the human spirit if one does
not realize that sensuality and lust are a part of the best in human life
itself, fundamental to happiness, thoroughly compatible with intellect and the
most meaningful religion. Indeed, religion is depraved to the extent it
overlooks or denies these things.
In light of all that I have discussed above,
emergence takes form as the most creative introversion and, as part of the same
thing, a spiritual and bodily reaching out into the world (though certainly not
through commonplace extroversion). In
the rich language of sex, it is an intercourse with life, a fertilization.
Is it odd that the language of sex should
express so well the nature of emergence? If it seems so, perhaps it is time we
took a long, hard look at sex in its relation to emergent humanity. We will see
that a new morality must stem from such an inquiry, a morality and an
appreciation that, in its affirmation of life and denial of shame, knows that
there is no proper obscenity in the love of men and women, and that sex is good
in all its dimensions. The limitations to which it is needfully subjected are
the product of a morality of liberty, and therefore are hardly limitations at
all, when understood as means to a full life in civilized society, but are
rather only ways to achieve that maximum emergence that is the end of all liberty. Such a morality must differ
even from those more recent views that see sex as healthy and capable of
sublimity, because it is part of a philosophy that knows this sublimity and
healthiness to be part of a broad humanism, which in turn gives significance to
all it touches. Sex itself is the best refinement of that sensuality, the
mixture of animalism and mind, involved in the existence of the emergent man.
Two years ago I drove a mail truck in West
Denver during my Christmas vacation from law school. Although it was, of
course, December, one day was especially warm and the boys of the neighborhood
were out playing just as they would in the middle of summer. I saw something
that day which has curiously stayed in my mind, though I might easily have
forgotten it. Or else I could have thought it obscene and condemned it. The
boys, who were about fourteen years old, had taken a stick and drawn the figure
of a girl in the sand near the curb. By doing push-ups over it, they were
simulating intercourse with this girl-in-the-sand. Hardly could we credit these
boys with being poets, but their girl-in-the-sand struck me as a strong poetic
image, a representative of much that is true about human sexuality. Here, in
the boys of fourteen, was the raw lust of desire as it exists deep and lonely
in the spirit of a man, a part of his primordial longing, independently of any
specific woman: a yearning that courses through him and that, though not vague
in a bodily sense, is a vague spiritual longing for the warmth and softness and
passion of feminine carnality in general. What a tremendous force this is, how
important in the secret obscene soul of a man, and here it was spread out in
the simplest pantomime of adolescence.
Since that time I have often thought of this
girl-in-the-sand, and I have come to think of her as
"two-dimensional" woman and of sex itself as involving four
dimensions. Two-dimensional sex is the yearning by itself, addressed by the
individual to the body and ideal
of the opposite sex, the basic sexuality that is unattached to any specific
woman who actually lives and breathes as a person. It is the yearning that a
man feels when he sees a beautiful woman at a distance, the image of femininity
per se; it is the feeling one must have when one walks near the corner
of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City, or near Grauman's Chinese
Theatre in Hollywood on a Saturday night and senses (painfully) the presence of
hundreds of beautiful women coming and going. In simple terms, it is lust. It
is two-dimensional because in this form is does not get beyond the
girl-in-the-sand or the woman-at-a-distance. Only when a real woman of flesh
and bone comes along to be the object of this lust and to add to it the reality
of her own body in conjunction with the man's does it become three dimensional.
I call it three-dimensional because here the girl-in-the-sand becomes no longer
flat and imaginary, but takes her place in space, assumes a personality and a
life.
The three-dimensional women I have known do
not seem to appreciate the presence of the two-dimensional woman they
themselves incorporate. They mistakenly think of sex as a man's response to
them in particular. They do not realize that it is their incarnation of
femininity in general that is the most potent force behind a man's love for
them. To most of them the lust of which I have spoken seems unworthy.
But lust is not unworthy. It is the root of
love and springs from the very depths of a man's finest obscenity. The broad sensuality
of the emergent man itself gives rise to this torrent.
The lust is even more, though, than this. In
the man of highest sensibility and intellect the lust is the overflowing desire
of his soul to escape the hiding place into which the sterility has forced it,
and to do so by grasping passionately another human being as worthy as himself
who has no desire to escape or to shout "obscene" or to do anything
other than share the violent coition of mind, pride and sensuality. Knowing
that most of his relations with
other men are doomed to a perpetual superficiality, this man yearns for
something more, something much better, and this yearning, until it is satisfied
by the legs and breasts and bright eyes of a four-dimensional woman, is a wild,
random, searing agony, a spiritual pain and aching.
This four-dimensional woman is a woman who
brings a mind, integrity, pride and sensuality of her own into mixture with the
other dimensions. She is an emergent woman in her sexual aspect. As such, this
four-dimensional woman is the most splendid perfection of life, a creature who
is the raw essence of sex at its best, a woman who may come together in body
and soul with the finest man and cause in him a spiritual joy unmixed with loss
or regret. Here is the satisfaction of the strongest lust. In it we may see the
most meaningful human relation, a relation where obscenity of body and soul is
broken down between two people. It is perhaps the only hope for a religiously
satisfying connection between the inner humanity of a man and any other part of
the human race, since it is a full, rewarding relation that the sterility of
shallow extroversion makes very rare and difficult, a relation involving all
the love of life that emergence implies and the sterility would deny.
I am in favor of such a beautifully obscene
sex. Except for its lack of a thoughtful regard for the moral implications of
adultery, D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover truly delights me,
especially in its more "obscene" parts. This book has stated
sex in the full pleasure of its carnality. Its regard is to the spiritual and
animalistic need of men and women, as living beings, as seekers after warmth
and tenderness and passionate intimacy, for the sex act as an expression of
pride, an act that -- while immediately sensual in an electrifying sense --
symbolizes for the man and the woman their pride in themselves and each other,
an act that throws their obscenities into hotchpot and brings them out married
in the most pregnant meaning of that word. Clearly, the religion of emergence
and its morality as to sexual matters must regard this sort of relation as one
of the worthiest and noblest expressions of human life.
This religion ought to stand firmly at odds with
the basically immoral view held by the Roman Catholic Church, about which it
has been said by Otter Piper in his The Christian Interpretations of Sex
that "The Roman Church stresses a negative virtue, viz., relative
sexual abstinence. It teaches that the highest obligation of marriage is to
abstain from non-conjugal intercourse, and from conjugal intercourse which is
only for the sake of pleasure." Rather than take this impoverished view,
men ought to regard sex (as they do) as the supreme pleasure. "To hold the
body of women in our arms," Ayn Rand has so correctly stated in her Anthem,
"is neither ugly nor shameful, but the one ecstasy granted to the race
of men." Sex, in the raw carnality of lust, is a great and positive good.
At no time should we slander a "lustful glance and lascivious touch"
as "sinful".
Indeed, the whole concept of sin is depraved
and ought to be abhorred by good men. This concept, and its attendant negation
of the beauty of the carnality of life, is fundamentally related to that view
which Archibald Alexander points out in his Christianity and Ethics when
he says: "Many passages in the New Testament, and especially in the
writings of St. Paul, seem to emphasize the utter degradation of man. It was
not, however, until the time of Augustine that this idea of innate depravity
was formulated into a doctrine. The Augustinian dogma has colored all later
theology." It is time that "later theology" freed itself from
this depraved view of life as depraved, and began to think of human beings as
born to a sublime potential as human beings. And while this is true for all
aspects of religion -- (I am using the
word religion broadly to include the basic answers given to man's questions
about the purpose and significance of his existence) --, it is especially true
for those aspects that relate to man's sexuality.
Emergent man, joyously alive and married to a
four-dimensional woman, generates
his own religious answers. His life takes on a significance through the things
he does, which are the things he loves doing. This self-generation is the
solvent in which the Existentialist feeling of despair and ennui must dissolve,
however valid this feeling may be as a response to the frustrations and
emptiness of the sterile human reality which is so trivial and non-emergent.
Emergence is aware of the Existentialist void, but knows that men must count on
themselves to be the source of the motive power of their own existence and
stresses, therefore, their own vitality as the creator of the great something
from the great nothing.
The answer to trivia is intense creativity.
One must turn ones back on trivia and become preoccupied in the life that one
makes for himself.
There is no answer to death, unless perhaps
medical science can eventually solve the problem of aging, except to so live as
to make it a tragedy for us to pass off into nothingness. “If it is nothingness
that awaits us,” Miguel de Unamuno has written in The Tragic Sense of Life,
“let us make an injustice of it; let us fight against destiny, even though
without hope of victory; let us fight against it quixotically."
His entire existence is emergent man's answer
to the basic questions of religion. And as a part of this dynamic existence he
goes through life with a sense of impelling time. He is a man who is always
aware of time. He considers it a precious raw material. To waste time is to
waste a portion of what one loves doing; and so, spiritually, emergent man is
always in a hurry. According to his own purpose, he knows that he has someplace
to go, a great many things to do; the lack of time threatens a limitation, and
he seeks to overcome it. To him there is the same sad tragedy in a wasting of
time as there is in death itself: the two have the same quality.
In the past several pages I have painted in
broad outline the underlying values of the religion of emergence. I could not
hope to paint in the face and
detail of the emergent man himself.
Above all, I have tried to stress the ethic of creativity. This ethic is
the two-dimensional ideal, the lust itself. It remains for individual men to
make this their ethic, to incorporate it, to adopt it as the backbone
--ethically speaking -- of their own emergence. Within this ethic, the men who
actually seek emergence, as indeed those in the past who have already done so,
may take an infinity of shapes. To spell out the values sets the temper, but
does not dictate the particularity.
Just as with the remainder of the philosophy of liberty, we have opened
the door to infinite variation, a variation, though, pointed in a specific
direction looking to health rather than to disease, to peace rather than to
war, to interest rather than to boredom.
Emergent man is the natural product of
historic liberalism and of the free laissez faire civilization that is
synonymous with it. It is absurd to think that liberalism (in its traditional
and European sense, as meaning the whole mood and philosophy of liberty and
tolerance) would endorse capitalism, the rule of law, the entire social,
economic and political foundation for liberty, without having as its natural
culmination an ethic that says, "Love life, and that will be your
future" (just as, as D. H. Lawrence has suggested, one might say about a baby,
"Be tender to it, and that will be its future").
The philosophy of liberty involves a highly
spiritual orientation. It is concerned fundamentally with religious issues as
to a man's feeling of the significance of his own existence. We are long
overdue in realizing that the "negative" and
"materialistic" philosophy of liberty is in fact the source of the
finest possible solution, on an intensely humanistic level, for the spiritual
problems of modern man. The extroverted, commercial civilization that is the
product of liberty is only a plateau, the soil from which better men may
emerge. And they may emerge if they adopt the philosophy of emergence as the
moral rationale for their own spontaneous will to live.
[Note in 2001: Upon reading this chapter for the first time
in several years, I am struck, as almost certainly all readers will be, by the
passion and Chernyshevsky-like stridency of the first several pages. We aren’t accustomed to that, and so it is
surprising. Those qualities, however,
have the effect of stating the point of view with complete honesty and
feeling. The stridency must be
understood in the context of the entire discussion, and no one excerpt from it
taken out of that context, since the context shows that it is intended as a
passionate devotion to a higher standard of life, accomplished within the
context of a society founded on individual liberty and a tolerance for
individuality. While the language
sounds like Chernyshevsky or even Nietzsche, it employs its rhetoric on behalf
precisely of a non-totalitarian ethos.
A reader will do well to understand
that the “religion of emergence” that is sought in these pages seeks to address
the very objection that Thomas Carlyle and many others have raised to the
“bourgeois mediocrity” that they have seen in commercial, peaceable
societies. One of the great merits of
Ayn Rand, who certainly greatly influenced what I wrote here, was her heroic conception of personal freedom, and in these pages I
took up much the same imperative. The
point is that a free society does not need to be – indeed, ought not to be – a
society dominated by the mundane round of existence.
Why has American civilization in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries not, for the most part, approximated this
higher vision? The answer, composed of
several parts, comes in my later books, especially where they relate Jose
Ortega y Gasset’s insights and the vastly important fact of the modern
intelligentsia’s alienation precisely against elevated values. It lies also in the insight by William James
that in fact there is much that is meaningful going on in the lives of
people, if only we will see it.
On other aspects:
In recent years, I have come to think that an
important function of an artist is to render into consciousness the beauty of
the world, which rocks, trees, clouds, streams and other inanimate objects have
no way of perceiving. On reading the
foregoing pages, I see that that particular thought fits in very well with the
sensibility I express in them.
It is worth mentioning that shortly
after Emergent Man was published in 1962 I and two other members of the
Universalist Church in Denver set upon the venture of founding a new religion
that would be based on the passion and principles expressed in these
chapters. Unfortunately, the endeavor
ran aground immediately. Those other
two members no doubt have their own perceptions of why, but from my perspective
it was for two reasons: that the one we ordained as the first minister of the
new church almost instantly decided he wanted the views to be “respectable,” especially
in bringing in references to “God” (in which none of the three of us believed);
and that the second other member wanted to spend a lot of money before we had
it, which was a financial strategy I thought dangerous. The failure of this effort turned me away
from the aspiration of founding a “religion and ethic of liberty,” which is
voiced in the subtitle to Emergent Man.
I still think such a thing is needed, and needed profoundly; but I have
long-since decided to leave that to others.
When this chapter was written, I had no
conception of “sex” as it would come to be championed by the “gay liberation”
or "sexual liberation" movements. My statement that “sex is good in all its dimensions”
unfortunately demands an asterisk. The
statement is too broad. Sex that
produces disease, death and pain – as so much homosexual and sado-masochistic
sex does -- or the breakdown of family relations, is not the sex I had in mind in my discussion of “emergence.” The reader will no doubt notice, too, that
in my later chapter on the “ethics of sex” I stated a need to channel human
sexuality into service to the broader needs of a free society, needs that have
included monogamous marriage and commitment to family. It may be helpful to think of my passion for
sex, as voiced in the preceding pages, as identical with that felt by virtually
all young married couples on their honeymoon.
The only difference is that I did not hesitate to state that feeling in
writing, because I considered it a valid and very important ingredient in life
as best conceived, and as part of the secularly religious vision I was
imparting. My view on that
hasn’t changed. None of what I wrote in this chapter was included for
titillation. Instead, it was part of a long-standing effort on my part to
grapple with the questions that relate to the value of human existence.]]