The Unhappy Intellectuals

I

MY friend is an intellectual. He is, in fact, a professor. I do not wish to identify a state of mind with a profession, for I know professors who are pedagogical mechanics rather than intellectuals; but when a professor is an intellectual it may be assumed that he belongs to the simon-pure intelligentsia. Since ages of experiment have been required to bring our social institutions and our educational enterprise to the state of perfection in which they could produce a mind so disciplined and sensibilities so refined as those of my friend, it seems rather tragic that life could find no way to apportion its gifts with its achievements. For my friend is unhappy. His mind is brilliant, but his heart is sad. The gift of joy has been withheld from him. Men, we are told, seek happiness more avidly than wisdom, and the latter only as a means to the former. If so, life has played a sorry trick on my friend and upon all those who share his fate.

The chronic state of melancholia into which my friend has fallen defies every ameliorative effort. Like Job, he refuses to be comforted. His active resistance and my own sense of futility have pul a stop to all efforts of consolation. Like a good doctor, I therefore turn to pure diagnosis in the virtuous hope of making the patient who is beyond hope serve the needs of those who are not past redemption. My diagnosis is no doubt as faulty and as tentative as most diagnoses are — perhaps more so; for the intricacies of a sensitive spirit arc more difficult to discern than the maladjustments of a physical organism or the neuroses of a physiopsyehic system. This malady is not in the realm of either doctor or psychiatrist. Physically the patient is perfectly healthy, and no acute neuroses trouble his life. His malady has a deeper root or a higher cause. It is in those regions of life where a bad philosophy is more disturbing than a bad liver. I am not accusing him of holding a faulty philosophy — but let us not anticipate.

Being an intellectual, my friend has been at pains to make an astute analysis of every tradition by which human life is disciplined and every custom which informs our social action. He finds them all bad. Monogamy rests upon irrational taboos, according to his judgment, and is destruct ive of human freedom. Patriotic loyalties are the cause of group conflicts, and a mildly selfish individual would therefore be preferable to a patriot of any description, or the devotee of any cause. He takes no part in politics, because its coarseness offends him. Business is little more than organized banditry. The religious hopes and faiths of his fellow men arc viewed with high disdain. They are the fantastic illusions of children. The state’s penal system represents the effort of society to take vengeance upon the unhappy victims of its own inadequacies. He finds that the rules of conduct which govern his follow men are remnants of superstitions or outmoded fashions which ought to bind no sensible person; and what men call conscience is merely the tyranny of the group, enforced by its approval and disapproval of the individual’s action.

I find myself in partial agreement with every judgment of my friend in these matters. No doubt it is very necessary that we bring the irrational impulses and standards of society under the discipline of reason. But there seem to be limits to what can and what ought to be accomplished in this direction; certainly there are limits to what one man ought to undertake. Might not my friend be happier if he maintained some kind of contact with the race in at least one area of life? Would he not be happier if he lived his life traditionally in at least one field of activity? If he wants to defy the canons of political life, might it not be well if he accepted traditional monogamy and made his home a haven of rest in which there should be no adventurous experiment with traditional standards and therefore no undue strain? Or, if he wants to challenge the pedagogical methods of his school, would he not be prudent to stop fretting about its business administration? He can hardly succeed in any battle if he insists on waging battles on every front. The fact is that he envisages so many battles that he lacks the time or energy to engage seriously in any one of them. The resulting sense of futility is a fruitful source of his unhappiness.

Moreover, it may be questioned whether the world would be so much fairer if he could mould it closer to his heart’s desire. Take, for example, his views on marriage. He thinks marriage is destructive of freedom, and therefore he and his wife have reached an agreement which permits each absolute liberty. Love which is possessive, he declares, is not true love. He thinks the highest love will result when a man and his mate do not merely enjoy each other, but enjoy each other more than they do any other relationship. He feels very virtuous in holding to, and living by, this principle, because he and his mate have arrived at it mutually. Yet there is no complete happiness. And one may well suspect that, the arrangement received the doubtful acquiescence rather than the hearty approval of his wife. Women, after all, lose more than men in the loosening of the marriage tie. High-sounding principles may beguile them from loyalty to instinctive attitudes; but an unconscious wisdom, implanted by ages of bitter experience, has a way of asserting and avenging itself. I suspect that my friend’s unhappiness is due not only to a shrewd recognition of the cause of his wife’s lack of happiness, but to the violence which he has done to his own nature in the name of his principles. If he were not quite so intelligent he might be wise enough to appreciate that the monogamous relationship is based upon something more fundamental than ‘irrational taboos.’

Perhaps his real difficulty at this point, illustrated but not exhausted in his marital experiment, is the fanaticism which the intellectual hides behind his assumed tolerance. He thinks that he regards all values as relative. But in reality he is a fanatic for the value of freedom. He is afraid of being bound by any relationship, political, social, religious, or marital. He sees the imperfections in every community which demands his loyalty, and he is sensitive to the limitation of the principle of loyalty itself. He thinks men can be happy only if they are emancipated of every loyalty and restraint except those which they impose upon themselves. His fanatic devotion to the principle of freedom has blinded him to the social character of life. He does not realize that our problem is not how free we can be, but how free we can be in our several bondages. The highest character develops, not in complete emancipation, but in the achievement of liberty within terms of our various social obligations. Society is at once the enemy and the support of every man; and the isolated soul withers like the cut flower. The emancipated intellectual is just, as unhappy as the proud plutocrat, whose fenced-in palace proclaims his eminence at the expense of his race and his own social character.

II

While my friend thus sacrifices everything for the principle of freedom, he has fallen into a complete moral skepticism in every other respect. He laughs at values which men call good and evil. Nothing is really good or evil if you arc intelligent enough to make a complete analysis of its character. You say that love is good? My friend is Nietzschean. We love when we are powerless to hate, and forgive when our impotence frustrates our vengeance. You believe in kindness? Generosity is the method which the strong employ to exhibit their strength before the weak. Justice? That is a compromise between conflicting interests and is as variable as the stock market. If you try to create order in society, you do so for t he sake of protecting the interests of those who benefit by present arrangements. If you seek the reorganization of society, you are helping the rabble to live at the expense of the efficient. The engineers who have conquered nature and created physical comfort and affluence have only helped the culturally vacuous middle classes to live in an orgy of animality. The aristocrats who have used their leisure to create culture have merely saved themselves from ennui by creating a fantastic world of unreal values. One is not sure at this point whether my friend’s pessimism is the result of his moral skepticism or whether it is the fruit, of his cynical evaluation of human character. Certainly both the skepticism and the pessimism are the inevitable results of the intellectual’s complete detachment from life. Thought and life depend upon each other and frustrate each other. The sublimest impulse is not as sublime as it seems to the man who is transported by it; but it may be questioned whether it is as worthless as it seems to the man who merely reflects upon it. No cause is as good or as potent as it seems to its devotees; but without their irrational devotion there could be neither virtue nor progress. Whatever is good in life can prove itself so only by those who incarnate it. Those who merely reflect upon it are bound to be overcome in the end by the limitations in the virtue and the evident futility of achieving it. What my friend needs is the wholesome irrationality of the extrovert, who chooses his ends, let. us hope, with some measure of reflection, and tries to achieve them without too much further reflection.

My friend’s moral skepticism has resulted not only from his contemplation of the world of abstract values, but from his critical analysis of his fellow men and his morbid introspection. Pure analysis lias robbed him of self-respect and respect for his fellows. The college president is engaged in a campaign for an endowment; he is seeking his own glory. The head of the department criticizes my friend’s latest article; his kindly tone cannot obscure his jealousy. Having discovered that all motives are mixed, my friend lets his mind dwell upon the ignoble rather than the noble portions of ihc mixture. His misanthropic tendencies are really the inevitable result of a purely analytic approach to human nature. It is true that analysis may lead to understanding; and perfect understanding may be the basis of appreciation. But appreciation can never be purely analytical. Love is always, in a sense, mystical and intuitive, which means that it proceeds from a sense of the whole. Whenever we fragmentize life we debase it.

The perfect fruit of this modern tendency is a behavioristic psychology which denies the reality of consciousness. My friend thinks that his analytical astuteness has merely proved that love lives on illusions. He would rather not love than be the victim of illusions. He is, of course, in error. Analysis destroys love, not because love is identical with illusion, but because we cannot appreciate personality when it is fragmentized. We can love and appreciate only if we catch a view of the whole. No one who spends his time trying to identify the tone of every instrument in a symphony orchestra and to isolate it from the general symphonic effect, can really appreciate the symphony concert. Nor can my friend enjoy his friends while he is preoccupied with the task of making a critical analysis of the springs of their action.

III

I need hardly add that this unhappy victim of consistent intellectualism is a thoroughgoing naturalist, who divides his scorn for philosophy and religion in equal proportion. Philosophy, in his view, is merely a vestigial remnant of religion. He sees nothing in the universe that would justify any of the more pretentious conclusions of the philosophers in regard to the principles and purposes revealed in the cosmos.

Curiously enough, he proceeds upon philosophical assumptions in his own chosen field of science. In fact he works upon the basis of a principle of causality which t he larger facts will probably not justify. But outside of this field he is a perfect agnostic. There was a time when he abandoned the world to confusion with perfect satisfaction; he felt, that a dismissal of cosmic problems would leave him free to devote himself to ‘human ends.’ At that stage of his life he was flippant and joyful. He believed in the redemption of the world through science. Now the same intellectualism which robbed him of his faith in the universe has robbed him of his faith in man and has inundated all the values of his dev otion in a sea of relativity. His present mood of resignation is really more consistent and, in a sense, more noble than his previous flippancy, just, as the pessimism of a Joseph Wood Krutch is, in many respects, more noble than the sophomoric iconoelasm of the recently emancipated intellectual.

My friend knows at least that the religious problem over which the ages have agonized was more than an invention of priests. He sees that with the sacrifice of religion’s irrationalities it is not easy to maintain loyalty to the reasonable values of life. These values have meaning only as they achieve it. through human life; and human life is a sorry accident, viewed from a cosmic perspective. Thus my friend has been reduced to a state of complete pessimism, and cries with the Preacher of old, ‘All is vanity.’ He qualifies his sense of absolute futility only by insisting that, the reflective life is worth the agony it brings and the destruction it works. With Mr. Krutch he would rather ‘live like a man than die like a beast.’ So he saves his life of reason by the last shred of irrationality at his disposal. The difficulty with his cosmic views is not very different from those which betrayed him in his personal relations, He mistakes analytic intelligence for wisdom. He does not see that the poet and the artist and the prophet have an imaginative grasp of reality which is no less intelligent than that of the pure analyst. If they are less consistent than the scientist, they have at least, the merit of arriving at convictions which are more inclusive of all the facts. They regard life telescopically rather than microscopically, and while they are therefore bound to make many errors in the details, they compensate for them by a view of the whole which is more satisfying because it is more true. Regarding the great cosmos, they do not leave human consciousness out of consideration merely because it is dwarfed by spatial immensities. They are, in fact, quite anthropomorphic in their conceptions; and if they are poets who are not too sophisticated they will ascribe reality to the world of their fantasies, and thus create and preserve religions. All this would be very unreasonable except for the fact that reason depends upon this unreason. Reason may direct energy, but it cannot create it. The energy which is life itself is not reasonable. It may rationalize itself to a certain degree by interpreting its functions and ends in terms of ends higher than its own; but these ultimate ends are too vague to stimulate a jaded life, once its irrational energies have been dissipated. Life is dynamic. We make it purposive by directing its energies to ideal ends; but the energy itself is not rational. It may be subjected to progressive rationalization; but in that process there is loss of energy with gain in ideal direction. That is why values, cultures, civilizations, and even families which are most deserving of perpetuation are most likely to lose the energy which ensures perpetuation.

The function of religion is to preserve life’s highest irrationality, the urge toward the ideal. The ideals of religion need to be progressively rationalized, but the vigor with which they are pursued is easily lost in this process of refinement. Completely rational ideals are either completely separated from the world of reality or completely identified with it. In either case moral vigor is lost. If they are completely separated from the world of reality, they become illusions incapable of prompting moral effort; if they are completely identified with the world of reality, they lose their ideal character and give the real world an undeserved aura of ideality. A religion which expresses the urge toward the ideal in moral emotion and defines the ideal through poetic symbol escapes the enervation of complete rationality. Without faith, therefore, a reasonable life must sink into unreasonable pessimism.

My friend cannot see this. I am not surprised. Constant analysis has destroyed his organs of imaginative insight. He is too much the scientist to be a poet; and without the sublime madness of the poet he cannot preserve the highest rationality. I must therefore consign him to or leave him in his misery, hoping, without too much reason, that his generation may be saved from sharing his fate.