Modern Civilization and the Human Spirit

 

From The Philosopher, Volume LXXXVIII No. 1 Special History Issue

MODERN CIVILISATION

AND THE HUMAN SPIRIT 

 

by the 

Rev. A. H. Greenwood

From The Philosopher,Volume XXVI, 1949 and thus published shortly after the end of the Second World War, offering a glimpse of the times.

The question is: How does it come that in a day when the material means of happiness are much greater and more accessible than ever before, humanity, as acknowledged on all sides, should be going through a. period of greater and more widespread unhappiness than at any time in the past? The recent vast progress in invention and in the development and perfection of mechanism and technique has led to man's almost complete mastery of his physical environment and of the material resources necessary to maintain life, and it has ushered in a day in which by even the most conservative estimate there can be abundance for all. how then should man be the unhappier for such an unquestionable advance? It will not do to say that the unhappiness is caused by the fact that great numbers are still denied access to the world's abundance for not only is this modern unhappiness a marked characteristic of those social grades in which there is no lack, but it is incontrovertible that the state of even the most depressed classes at the present day is materially in many respects higher than that of the most favoured classes of other times. How then are we to explain the growth of unhappiness and spiritual unrest, side by side with so great a progress in the material side of life, accompanied as it has been by a great development of medical and all other social services?

 The difficulty takes us back to a distinction between the individual and the person which was very clearly made in Scholastic has been for all practical purposes ignored or forgotten since.

 On this distinction between the individual and the person, Professor Maritain says: Christian philosophy tells us that the person is a complete individual substance, intellectual in nature and master of its actions,' sui juris, autonomous, in the authentic. sense ;word. And so the word person is reserved for substances which possess that divine thing, the spirit, and are in consequence, each, by itself, a world above the whole bodily order, a spiritual and moral world which, strictly speaking, is not a part of this universe, and whose secret is hidden even from the perception of,the angles. The word person is reserved for substances which, choosing their end, are capable of themselves deciding on the means, and of introducing series of new events into the universe by their liberty, for substances which can say after their kind, 'fiat,' and it is so. And what makes that dignity, what makes their personality, is just exactly the subsistence of the spiritual and immortal soul and its supreme independence in regard to all fleeting imagery and all the machinery of sensible phenomena. 

"The word individual, on the contrary, is common to man and beast, to plant, microbe, and atom. And, while personality rests on the subsistence of the human soul . . . (Thomist philosophy tells us that) individuality as such is based on the peculiar needs of matter which is the principle of individuation because it is the principle of division, because it requires to occupy a position and have a quantity, by which that which is here will differ from what is there. So that in so far as we are individuals we are only a fragment of matter, a part of this universe, distinct, no doubt, but a part, a point of that immense network of forces and influences physical and cosmic, vegetative and animal, ethnic, atavistic, hereditary, economic and historic, to whose laws we are subject. As individuals we are subject to the stars. As persons, we rule them.

 With this distinction we are at. the heart of the problem. For, says Maritain, "what is modern individualism? A misunderstanding, a blunder, the exaltation of individuality camouflaged as personality, and the corresponding degradation of true personality. The fact is that in practice modern civilisation ignores that man is primarily person, and spiritual, a living soul; and therein lies the root cause of so much dissatisfaction, distress and suffering. For if we fail to consider man as primarily spiritual, what is left? A certain quantity of matter, so many appetites, impulses and desires, a point in space, a digestion, a thing of senses, nothing more. If we proceed to act on the assumption that man is such a creature as that, there must result the stifling of the spirit under the weight of matter, there must result the enslavement of 'man to those appetites and senses, and, in consequence, very great misery. On this point Fr. Garrigou-Legrange says: "Man will be fully a person, only in so far as the life of reason and liberty dominates that of the senses and passions in him; otherwise he will remain like an animal, a simple individual, the slave of events and circumstances, always led by something else, incapable of guiding himself; he will be only a part,without being able to aspire to be a whole. . . To develop one's individuality is to live the egoistical life of the passions, to make oneself the centre, of everything, and end finally by being the slave of a thousand passing:goods which bring us a wretched momentary joy. Personality, on the, contrary, increases as the soul rises above the sensible world and by intelligence and will bind itself more closely to the life of the spirit". 

The subordination of the person to the individual, therefore, must end in the enslavement of man to his appetites and passions. It is the error of the modern age that it has attempted to construct a civilisation on the assumption that man is no more than an individual. As a result, it has made this the most tormented and unhappy age in history. In Communism, for instance, we have the completest and, most thorough-going attempt yet made to establish happiness by means of the organisation of the externals of life, by means of the extension to all of the benefits of modern progress. But this system is no more successful than any other in establishing human happiness. It is even less so than any other. And the reason is that all this organisation, this increasing complexity, only concerns the surface and circumference of human life; not the centre. All these modern developments and improvements are directed to the good of man considered purely as an individual, and it is because man is primarily a person and not an individual they have brought in their train, along with many undoubted benefits, a total increase of unhappiness and human misery. In two words, the unhappiness and unrest of modern times is caused by the fact that the individual in man is strangling the person.

This is why little comfort or hope for the immediate future is be derived from the study of most of the expedients that are afoot and greatly canvassed for the alleviation of modern distress and the planning of a new order. For in them also the confusion of individuality with personality is as marked as ever. Sifted down to their essentials they prove to be concerned with man as an individual as they are concerned with the amelioration of material conditions, claiming to improve man's economic or social state, even appealing, many of them quite frankly, to his appetite and passions. But even if they could produce all that they claim the great distress of humanity would not thereby be removed,: because they miss the root of the matter when they fail to.consider man as primarily mind and spirit.

What is imperative, therefore, is that while by no means neglecting to satisfy legitimate material needs,.we must redress the balance of events and forces by affirming in action at all times and in every connection that man is an intellect and a spirit, and primarily so. 

What is required is a deepening of the spiritual life. In other words, we must go in search of our personalities. Indeed, whether we are aware of it or not, that is what we are doing at present, and it is the cause of our unhappiness that we are unable to find them because we have been looking in the wrong place. "Look", says Maritain again, "look at the Kantian shriveled up in his autonomy, the Protestant tormented by concern for his inward liberty, the Nietzschean giving himself curvature of the spine in his jump beyond good and evil, the Freudian cultivating his complexes and sublimating his libido, the thinker preparing an unpublished conception of the world for the next philosophical congress, the 'surrealist' hero throwing himself into a trance and plunging into the abyss of dreams, the disciple of Monsieur Gide viewing himself with gloomy enthusiasm in the mirror of his freedom!"

What is the secret? "All those unhappy people for their personalities".

The great need, therefore, the inescapable necessity, is that external, mechanical, economic and social progress must be paralleled by a deepening and strengthening of the moral and spiritual life of men. 

He must be planned for as a spiritual being.