Experience and feeling are, however, neither logical nor wise, and to these death is far from the mere non-being which the poet would have us think it. To these it has a positive reality which makes the fear of it a genuine cause of conduct in individuals and in groups, with a basis in knowledge such as is realized in the diminishing of consciousness under anæsthetic, in dreams of certain types, and most generally in the nascent imitation of the rigor mortis which makes looking upon the dead such a horror to most of us. Even then, however, something is lacking toward the complete realization of death, and children and primitive peoples never realize it at all. Its full meaning comes out as an unsatisfied hunger in the living rather than as a condition of the dead, who, alive, would have satisfied this hunger. And the realization of this meaning requires sophistication, requires a lengthy corporate memory and the disillusions which civilization engenders. Primitive peoples ask for no proof of immortality because they have no notion of mortality; civilized thinking has largely concerned itself about the proof of immortality because its assurance of life has been shaken by the realization of death through the gnawing of desire which only the dead could still. The proof which in the history of thought is offered again and again, be it noted, is not of the reality of life, but of the unreality and inefficacy of death. Immortality is like eternity, a negative term; it is immortality. The experienced fact is mortality; and the fear of it is only an inversion of the desire which it frustrates, just as frustrated love becomes hatred. The doctrine of immortality, hence, springs from the fear of death, not from the love of life, and immortality is a value-form, not an existence. Now, although fear of death and love of life are in constant play in character and conduct, neither constitutes the original, innocent urge of life within us. "Will to live," "will to power," "struggle for existence," and other Germanic hypostases of experienced events which the great civil war in Europe is just now giving such an airing, hardly deserve, as natural data, the high metaphysical status that Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and company have given them. They follow in fact upon a more primary type of living, acting form, a type to which the "pathetic fallacy" or any other manner of psychologizing may not apply. The most that can be said about this type is that its earlier stages are related to its later ones as potential is to kinetic energy. If, since we are discussing a metaphysical issue, we must mythologize, we might call it the "will to self-expression." Had this "will" chanced to happen in a world which was made for it, or had it itself been the substance of the world, "struggle for existence," "will to live," and "will to power," never could have supervened. All three of these expressions designate data which require an opposite, a counter-will, to give them meaning. There can be a struggle for existence only when there are obstacles thereto, a will to live only when there are obstructions to life, a will to power only when there is a resistance against which power may be exercised. Expression alone is self-implying and self-sufficient, and in an altogether favorable environment we might have realized our instincts, impulses, interests, appetites and desires, expressed and actualized our potentialities, and when our day is done, have ceased, as unconcerned about going on as about starting.
Metchnikoff speaks somewhere of an instinct toward death and the euphoria which accompanies its realization. He cites, I think, no more than two or three cases. To most of us the mere notion of the existence and operation of such an instinct seems fanciful and uncanny. Yet from the standpoint of biology nothing should be more natural. Each living thing has its span, which consists of a cycle from birth through maturation and senescence to dissolution, and the latter half of the process is as "fateful" and "inevitable" as the former! Dying is itself the inexpugnable conclusion of that setting free of organic potentialities which we call life, and if dying seems horrid and unnatural, it seems so because for most of us death is violent, because its occasion is a shock from without, not the realization of a tendency from within. In a completely favorable environment we should not struggle to exist, we should simply exist; we should not will to live, we should simply live, i.e., we should actualize our potentialities and die.
But, once more alas, our environment is not completely favorable, and there's the rub. That disorderly constellation of instincts and appetites and interests which constitutes the personality of the best of us does not work itself out evenly. At the most favorable, our self-realizations are lopsided and distorted. For every capacity of ours in full play, there are a score at least mutilated, sometimes extirpated, always repressed. They never attain the free fullness of expression which is consciousness, or when they do, they find themselves confronted with an opponent which neutralizes their maturation at every point. Hence, as I have already indicated, they remain in, or revert to, the subterranean regions of our lives, and govern the making of our biographies from their seats below. What they fail to attain in fact they succeed in generating in imagination to compensate for the failure; they realize themselves vicariously. The doctrine of immortality is the generic form of such vicarious self-realization, as frequently by means of dead friends and relatives to whose absolute non-being the mind will not assent, as by means of the everlasting heaven in which the mind may forever disport itself amid those delights it had to forego on earth. Much of the underlying motive of the doctrine is a sehnsucht and nostalgia after the absent dead; little a concern for the continuity of the visible living. And often this passion is so intense that system after system in the philosophic tradition is constructed to satisfy it, and even the most disillusioned of systems—for example, Spinoza's—will preserve its form if not its substance.
That the "freedom of the will" shall be a particularized compensatory desiderate like the immortality of the soul, the unity, the spirituality, and the eternity of the world is a perversion worked upon this ideal by the historic accident we call Christianity. The assumptions of that theory concerning the nature of the universe and the destiny of man, being through and through compensatory, changed freedom from the possible fact and actual hope of Hellenic systems into the "problem" of the Christian ones. The consequent controversy over "free-will," the casuistic entanglement of this ideal with the notion of responsibility, its theological development in the problem of the relation of an omnipotent God to a recalcitrant creature, have completely obscured its primal significance. For the ancients, the free man and the "wise man" were identical, and the wise man was one who all in all had so mastered the secrets of the universe that there was no desire of his that was not actually realized, no wish the satisfaction of which was obstructed. His way in the world was a way without let or hindrance. Now freedom and wisdom in this sense is never a fact and ever a value. Its attainment ensues upon created distinctions between appearance and reality, upon the postulation of the metaphysical existence of the value-forms of the unity, spirituality, and the eternity of the world, in the realization of which the wise man founded his wisdom and gained his freedom. Freedom, then, is an ideal that could have arisen only in the face of obstruction to action directed toward the fulfilling and satisfying of interests. It is the assurance of the smooth and uninterrupted flow of behavior; the flow of desire into fulfilment, of thought into deed, of act into fact. It is perhaps the most pervasive and fundamental of all desiderates, and in a definite way the others may be said to derive from it and to realize it. For the soul's immortality, the world's unity and spirituality and eternity, are but conditions which facilitate and assure the flow of life without obstruction. They define a world in which danger, evil, and frustration are non-existent; they so reconstitute our actual environment that the obstructions it offers to the course of life are abolished. They make the world "rational," and in the great philosophic tradition the freedom of man is held to be a function of the rationality of the world. Thus, even deterministic solutions of the "problem of freedom" are at bottom no more than the rationalization of natural existence by the dialectical removal of obstructions to human existence. Once more, Spinoza's solution is typical, and its form is that of all idealisms as well. It ensues by way of identification of the obstruction's interest with those of the obstructee: the world becomes ego or the ego the world, with nothing outside to hinder or to interfere. In the absolute, existence is declared to be value de facto; in fact, de jure. And by virtue of this compensating reciprocity the course of life runs free.
Is any proof necessary that these value-forms are not the contents of the daily life? If there be, why this unvarying succession of attempts to prove that they are the contents of daily life that goes by the name of history of philosophy? In fact, experience as it comes from moment to moment is not one, harmonious and orderly, but multifold, discordant, and chaotic. Its stuff is not spirit, but stones and railway wrecks and volcanoes and Mexico and submarines, and trenches, and frightfulness, and Germany, and disease, and waters, and trees, and stars, and mud. It is not eternal, but changes from instant to instant and from season to season. Actually, men do not live forever; death is a fact, and immortality is literally as well as in philosophic discourse not so much an aspiration for the continuity of life as an aspiration for the elimination of death, purely immortality. Actually the will is not free, each interest encounters obstruction, no interest is completely satisfied, all are ultimately cut off by death.
Such are the general features of all human experience, by age unwithered, and with infinite variety forever unstaled. The traditional philosophic treatment of them is to deny their reality, and to call them appearance, and to satisfy the generic human interest which they oppose and repress by means of the historical reconstruction in imaginative dialectic of a world constituted by these most generalized value-forms and then to eulogize the reconstruction with the epithet "reality." When, in the course of human events, such reconstruction becomes limited to the biography of particular individuals, is an expression of their concrete and unique interest, is lived and acted on, it is called paranoia. The difference is not one of kind, but of concreteness, application, and individuality. Such a philosophy applied universally in the daily life is a madness, like Christian Science: kept in its proper sphere, it is a fine art, the finest and most human of the arts, a reconstruction in discourse of the whole universe, in the image of the free human spirit. Philosophy has been reasonable because it is so unpersonal, abstract, and general, like music; because, in spite of its labels, its reconstructions remain pure desiderates and value-forms, never to be confused with and substituted for existence. But philosophers even to this day often have the delusion that the substitutions are actually made.[92]
IV
It is the purity of the value-forms imagined in philosophy that makes philosophy "normative." The arts, which it judges, have an identical origin and an indistinguishable intent, but they are properly its subordinates because they have not its purity. They, too, aim at remodeling discordant nature into harmony with human nature. They, too, are dominated by value-forms which shall satisfy as nearly as possible all interests, shall liberate and fulfil all repressions, and shall supply to our lives that unity, eternity, spirituality, and freedom which are the exfoliations of our central desire—the desire to live. But where philosophy has merely negated the concrete stuff of experience and defined its reality in terms of desire alone, the arts acknowledge the reality of immediate experience, accept it as it comes, eliminating, adding, molding, until the values desiderated become existent in the concrete immediacies of experience as such. Art does not substitute values for existence by changing their rôles and calling one appearance and the other reality: art converts values into existences, it realizes values, injecting them into nature as far as may be. It creates truth and beauty and goodness. But it does not claim for its results greater reality than nature's. It claims for its results greater immediate harmony with human interests than nature. The propitious reality of the philosopher is the unseen: the harmonious reality of the artist must be sensible. Philosophy says that apparent actual evil is merely apparent: art compels potential apparent good actually to appear. Philosophy realizes fundamental values transcendentally beyond experience: art realizes them within experience. Thus, men cherish no illusions concerning the contents of a novel, a picture, a play, a musical composition. They are taken for what they are, and are enjoyed for what they are. The shopgirl, organizing her life on the basis of eight dollars a week, wears flimsy for broadcloth and the tail feather of a rooster for an ostrich plume. She is as capable of wearing and enjoying broadcloth and ostrich plume as My Lady, whose income is eight dollars a minute. But she has not them, and in all likelihood, without a social revolution she never will have them. In the novels of Mr. Robert Chambers, however, or of Miss Jean Libbey, which she religiously reads in the street-car on her way to the shop; in the motion picture theater which she visits for ten cents after her supper of corned beef, cabbage, and cream puffs, she comes into possession of them forthwith, vicariously, and of all My Lady's proper perquisites—the Prince Charming, the motor-car, the Chinese pug, the flowers, and the costly bonbons. For the time being her life is liberated, new avenues of experience are actually opened to her, all sorts of unsatisfied desires are satisfied, all sorts of potentialities realized. All that she might have been and is not, she becomes through art, here and now, and continuously with the drab workaday life which is her lot, and she becomes this without any compensatory derealization of that life, without any transcendentalism, without any loss of grip on the necessities of her experience: strengthened, on the contrary, and emboldened, to meet them as they are.
I might multiply examples: for every object of fine art has the same intention, and if adequate, accomplishes the same end—from the sculptures of Phidias and the dramas of Euripides, to the sky-scrapers of Sullivan and the dances of Pavlowa. But there is need only to consider the multitude of abstract descriptions of the æsthetic encounter. The artist's business is to create the other object in the encounter, and this object, in Miss Puffer's words, which are completely representative and typical, is such that "the organism is in a condition of repose and of the highest possible tone, functional efficiency, enhanced life. The personality is brought into a state of unity and self-completeness." The object, when apprehended, awakens the active functioning of the whole organism directly and harmoniously with itself, cuts it off from the surrounding world, shuts that world out for the time being, and forms a complete, harmonious, and self-sufficient system, peculiar and unique in the fact that there is no passing from this deed into further adaptation with the object. Struggle and aliency are at end, and whatever activity now goes on feels self-conserving, spontaneous, free. The need of readjustment has disappeared, and with it the feeling of strain, obstruction, and resistance, which is its sign. There is nothing but the object, and that is possessed completely, satisfying, and as if forever. Art, in a word, supplies an environment from which strife, foreignness, obstruction, and death are eliminated. It actualizes unity, spirituality, and eternity in the environment; it frees and enhances the life of the self. To the environment which art successfully creates, the mind finds itself completely and harmoniously adapted by the initial act of perception.
In the world of art, value and existence are one.