An ethical philosophy of life presented in its main outlines

by Felix Adler

In the first place, it is my own craving for resurrection out of that death in life to which I seem doomed that must impel me to penetrate to the essential life in others. My own spiritual nature is in fetters, and to burst the fetters, to escape from the prison, there is but one way. The unique personality, which is the real life in me, I cannot gain, nor even approximate to, unless I search and go on searching for the spiritual numen in others.[67] The force which incites me to penetrate beyond the empirical traits of others, to surmount the walls which surround the shrine in them, is the consciousness that unless I do so I am myself spiritually lost, I remain myself spiritually dead. For it is only face to face with the god enthroned in the innermost shrine of the other that the god hidden in me will consent to appear.

The expression “death in life” means living, even living passionately and in a way efficiently, with a sense, nevertheless, underneath of the hollowness, the futility of the objects of pursuit. The death in life is the state of discontent that slowly gathers and augments in a man’s mind as he pursues his customary ends, as he reviews his intellectual achievement, the books he has written, the pictures he has painted, the meager outcome of his schemes of social reform, the uncertain result of his efforts at moral self-development. It is the ensuing distaste for what he has actually accomplished, the disallowance of it as in any way ultimately satisfying. And yet this death in life is itself the well-spring of resurrection, out of which is engendered an irrepressible yearning of the mind to attach itself to something greater than all ephemeral interests, to something that has eternal worth, and is of such a kind as to communicate of its eternal nature to him who touches it. The god in the other, the eternal personality in the inner sanctuary of the other, is that object which must be sought and touched. The cry of my own soul for salvation is the impulse that leads me on to search for that object. Without the previous discontent, I shall not seek; without the appraisement of the temporal ends and interests of man as in the last analysis unsatisfying, I shall not set out on my quest. Enmeshed in the jungle of the empirical world, I shall find no exit. I shall remain the victim of the illusion that the peace I need can be found in the realm of temporal desire. I shall commit what the theologians called Original Sin, that is, the preferring of “the works of the Creator to the Creator himself.”

But there is a second force that must act in conjunction with this keen desire for personal liberation or highest personal self-affirmation. It is the sense of the dependence of others upon what I can do for them. Notoriously it is the dependence of the child that evokes in the parent the noblest qualities of which he is capable, the self-denial, the incessant willingness to labor for the good of the offspring. It is the dependence of the student on the teacher, of the disciple on the master that elicits the latter’s best thought. It is the dependence of the multitude on the religious teacher that puts him on his mettle. But if the dependence of others upon oneself is to produce its appropriate results, that dependence will have to be interpreted in a spiritual sense. We shall have to think of others as dependent on us not only for the necessary empirical services we are bound to render them, but those empirical services themselves will have to be regarded as instruments by means of which we may render them the highest spiritual service.

This leads to a more rigorous scrutiny of the notion of service than has hitherto been customary.

The question we must answer, and it is one that has never been adequately met, is: What is it in the other that we are to serve, what is the true object of our service? Man is worth while on his own account. Now no one can pretend that the welfare of the animal part of man is an object worth while on its own account. To satisfy the hunger or the thirst of another, or to promote his health is to serve his body. But the body is the servant of a master. And I am not bound to serve a servant. If I am to serve the servant at all it must be for the sake of the master. Who then is the master?

The same argument applies also to the intellect. Human science is after all but a narrow littoral along the illimitable continent of nescience. No one who compares the intellectual achievements of mankind with the problems that remain unsolved will pretend that the accomplishments of the intellect are worth while on their own account. The mental no less than the physical part of us has a master. There is an object higher than the acquisition of knowledge to be attained in the course of the mind’s endeavors to acquire knowledge, namely the growth of the scientist towards unique personality, as will be shown in the chapter on the Vocations in the last Book. Analogous considerations apply to art and its achievements.

And if someone should say that neither the satisfaction of the body alone, nor of the intellect, nor of the æsthetic sense, nor of the affections, but of all of them taken together, is to be the object of our service, the answer is that this would be merely serving a whole household of servants, and still not serving the master. This quite aside from the fact that the ideal of happiness as consisting in the harmonious gratification of the various elements enumerated is chimerical. Since some of the most indispensable elements of happiness, such as freedom from disease and from bereavement, are beyond our control. While even the higher faculties are far from harmoniously coöperating, the one-sidedness of human nature being such that a marked development in one direction is actually incompatible with complete development in other directions.

Unless, then, there be some master end in everyone’s life, one paramount to all others, to which all others are subordinate (the subordination and the renunciation involved being themselves means of spiritualizing one’s nature) there is no point to the notion of service. That master end I have defined as the attainment of the conviction of one’s infinite interrelatedness, the consciousness of oneself as a member of the spiritual universe, a ἄπαξ λεγόμενον[68] in the eternal life, a source of energy induplicable in its kind, which radiates out and touches at the center each one of the infinite multitude of spiritual associates, and receives from them the effect of their aboriginally diverse modes of energizing in return.

I have mentioned two motives that impel me to search for the numen in others. The one, the craving for my own liberation from the death in life, my own desperate outreaching toward salvation; the other, the sense of the dependence of others upon me. Yes, but this dependence of theirs I must now interpret as spiritual dependence. I must look for them also beyond the death in life to life itself. I must have the courage and the truthfulness to look upon neighbor, friend, wife, husband, son, daughter sub specie æternitatis, that is, as primarily spiritual beings, and estimate any physical, intellectual or emotional help I can give them by the consideration whether it does or does not advance them toward the master end of their being.

Courage of this sort is rare, because precisely the physical, mental and emotional wants of those who depend on us are the most obvious and clamorous. I do not of course mean that we should not attend effectually to their immediate wants. How could we avoid doing so? How could we neglect the health, the education, etc., of our children? What I say is that we should acquire the habit of looking upon the immediate ends as instrumental, and keep in view the supreme end which they in turn are to serve, and that we should beware of what I have called the fallacy of provisionalism—that of supposing that we are at liberty to provide for the lower immediate necessities first, leaving the higher and the highest needs to be attended to later on.