Speculations

Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art

Herbert Read

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317829966
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 2000. This is Volume III of seven in the Library of Philosophy series on Philosophy of Religion and General Philosophy. Written in 1924, this is a collection of essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art by Thomas Hulme who published five poems as well as commentary and various articles. The current volume has been collated from his daily notebooks and unpublished manuscripts as well as his introduction to Sorel's Reflections on Violence.

Humanism and the Religious Attitude

Humanism and the Religious Attitude

A Method

ONE of the main achievements of the nineteenth century was the elaboration and universal application of the principle of continuity. The destruction of this conception is, on the contrary, an urgent necessity of the present.

Originally urged only by the few, it has spread—implicit in the popular conception of evolution—till it has attained the status of a category. We now absorb it unconsciously from an environment already completely soaked in it; so that we regard it not as a principle in the light of which certain regions of fact can be conveniently ordered, but as an inevitable constituent of reality itself. When any fact seems to contradict this principle, we are inclined to deny that the fact really exists. We constantly tend to think that the discontinuities in nature are only apparent, and that a fuller investigation would reveal the underlying continuity. This shrinking from a gap or jump in nature has developed to a degree which paralyses any objective perception, and prejudices our seeing things as they really are. For an objective view of reality we must make use both of the categories of continuity and discontinuity. Our principal concern then at the present moment should be the re-establishment of the temper or disposition of mind which can look at a gap or chasm without shuddering.

I am not concerned in these notes, however, with gaps in nature, in the narrow sense of the word. I am thinking rather of general theories about the nature of reality. One of the results of the temper of mind I have just discussed is that any general theories of this kind which assert the existence of absolute gaps between one region of reality and another, are at once almost instinctively felt to be inadmissible. Now the method of criticism I wish to employ here is based on the fact that most of the errors in certain subjects spring from an almost instinctive attempt on our part to gloze over and disguise a particular discontinuity in the nature of reality. It was then necessary first of all to deal with the source of this instinctive behaviour, by pointing out the arbitrary character of the principle of continuity.

What is this Method? It is only possible here to describe it quite abstractly, leaving the details till later. Certain regions of reality differ not relatively but absolutely. There exists between them a real discontinuity. As the mind looks on discontinuity with horror it has attempted to exhibit these opposed things as differing only in degree, as if there is in reality a continuous scale leading from one to the other. From this springs a whole mass of confused thinking in religion and ethics. If we first of all form a clear conception of the nature of a discontinuity, of a chasm, and form in ourselves the temper of mind which can support this opposition without irritation, we shall then have in our hands an instrument which may shatter all this confused thinking, and enable us to form accurate ideas on these subjects. In this way a flood of light may be thrown on old controversies.

A necessary preliminary to this, however, must be some account of the nature of the particular absolute discontinuity that I want to use.

In order to simplify matters, it may be useful here to give the exposition a kind of geometrical character. Let us assume that reality is divided into three regions, separated from one another by absolute divisions, by real discontinuities, (i) The inorganic world, of mathematical and physical science, (2) the organic world, dealt with by biology, psychology and history, and (3) the world of ethical and religious values. Imagine these three regions as three zones marked out on a flat surface by two concentric circles. The outer zone is the world of physics, the inner that of religion and ethics, the intermediate one that of life. The outer and inner regions have certain characteristics in common. They have both an absolute character, and knowledge about them can legitimately be called absolute knowledge. The intermediate region of life is, on the other hand, essentially relative; it is dealt with by loose sciences like biology, psychology and history. A muddy mixed zone then lies between two absolutes. To make the image a more faithful representation one would have to imagine the extreme zones partaking of the perfection of geometrical figures, while the middle zone was covered with some confused muddy substance.

I am afraid I shall have to abandon this model, for to make it represent faithfully what I want, I shall have to add a further complication. There must be an absolute division between each of the three regions, a kind of chasm. There must be no continuity, no bridge leading from one to the other. It is these discontinuities that I want to discuss here.

A convenient way of realising the nature of these divisions is to consider the movement away from materialism, at the end of the nineteenth century. In the middle period of the century, the predominant popular view entirely ignored the division between the inner and outer zones, and tended to treat them as one. There was no separating chasm and the two were muddled together. Vital phenomena were only extremely complicated forms of mechanical change. (Cf. Spencer’s Biology and the entirely mechanical view involved in the definition of life as adaptation to environment.) Then you get the movement represented in very different ways by Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Bergson, which clearly recognised the chasm between the two worlds of life and matter. Vital events are not completely determined and mechanical. It will always be impossible to describe them completely in terms of the laws of physics. This was not merely a local reaction against a local false doctrine. It contained an original element. This movement made the immense step forward involved in treating life, almost for the first time, as a unity, as something positive, a kind of stream overflowing, or at any rate not entirely enclosed, in the boundaries of the physical and spatial world. “In dein Auge schaute ich, O Leben,” etc.

So far so good. But the same movement that recognises the existence of the first absolute chasm (between the physical and the vital), proceeds to ignore the second, that between biology and the ethical, religious values. Having made this immense step away from materialism, it believes itself adequately equipped for a statement of all the ideal values. It does not distinguish different levels of the non-material. All that is non-material, must it thinks be vital. The momentum of its escape from mechanism carries it on to the attempt to restate the whole of religion in terms of vitalism. This is ridiculous. Biology is not theology, nor can God be defined in terms of “life” or “progress.” Modernism entirely« misunderstands the nature of religion. But the last twenty years have produced masses of writing on this basis, and in as far as thought to-day is not materialistic, it tends to be exclusively of this kind.

It is easy to understand why the absolute division between the inorganic and the organic is so much more easily recognised than the second division. For the first falls easily into line with humanism, while the second breaks the whole Renaissance tradition.

It is necessary, however, that this second absolute difference should also be understood. It is necessary to realise that there is an absolute, and not a relative, difference between humanism (which we can take to be the highest expression of the vital), and the religious spirit. The divine is not life at its intensest. It contains in a way an almost anti-vital element; quite different of course from the non-vital character of the outside physical region. The questions of Original Sin, of chastity, of the motives behind Buddhism, etc., all part of the very essence of the religious spirits, are quite incomprehensible for humanism. The difference is seen perhaps most obviously in art. At the Renaissance, there were many pictures with religious subjects, but no religious art in the proper sense of the word. All the emotions expressed are perfectly human ones. Those who choose to think that religious emotion is only the highest form of the emotions that fall inside the humanist ideology, may call this religious art, but they will be wrong. When the intensity of the religious attitude finds proper expression in art, then you get a very different result. Such expression springs not from a delight in life but from a feeling for certain absolute values, which are entirely independent of vital things. The disgust with the trivial and accidental characteristics of living shapes, the searching after an austerity, a monumental stability and permanence, a perfection and rigidity, which vital things can never have, leads to the use of forms which can almost be called geometrical. (Cf. Byzantine, Egyptian and early Greek art.) If we think of physical science as represented by geometry, then instead of saying that the modern progress away from materialism has been from physics through vitalism to the absolute values of religion, we might say that it is from geometry through life and back to geometry. It certainly seems as if the extreme regions had resemblances not shared by the middle region. This is because they are both, in different ways, absolute.

We can repeat this in a more summary form. Two sets of errors spring from the attempt to treat different regions of reality as if they were alike, (i) The attempt to introduce the absolute of mathematical physics into the essentially relative middle zone of life leads to the mechanistic view of the world. (2) The attempt to explain the absolute of religious and ethical values in terms of the categories appropriate to the essentially relative and non-absolute vital zone, leads to the entire misunderstanding of these values, and to the creation of a series of mixed or bastard phenomena, which will be the subject of these notes. (Cf. Romanticism in literature, Relativism in ethics, Idealism in philosophy, and Modernism in religion.)

To say that these bastard phenomena are the result of the shrinking from discontinuity would be an entirely inadequate account of the matter. They spring from a more positive cause, the inability of the prevailing ideology to understand the nature of this absolute. But they are certainly shaped by this instinctive effort to dig away at the edges of the precipice, which really separates two regions of reality, until it is transformed into a slope leading gradually from one to the other.

Romanticism, for example, confuses both human and divine things, by not clearly separating them. The main thing with which it can be reproached is that it blurs the clear outlines of human relations—whether in political thought or in the literary treatment of sex—by introducing in them the Perfection that properly belongs to the non-human.

The method I wish to pursue then is this. In dealing with these confused phenomena, to hold the real nature of the absolute discontinuity between vital and religious things constantly before the mind; and thus to clearly separate those things, which are in reality separate. I believe this to be a very fertile method, and that it is possible by using it, not only to destroy all these bastard phenomena, but also to recover the real significance of many things which it seems absolutely impossible for the “modern” mind to understand.

A Critique of Satisfaction

ON an earlier page I made this assertion: “In spite of its extreme diversity, all philosophy since the Renaissance is at bottom the same philosophy. The family resemblance is much greater than is generally supposed. The obvious diversity is only that of the various species of the same genus.” It is very difficult to see this when one is inside this philosophy; but if one looks at it from the standpoint of another philosophy, it at once becomes obvious. A parallel may make this clearer. The change of sensibility which has enabled us to regard Egyptian, Polynesian and Negro work, as art and not as archaeology has had a double effect. It has made us realise that what we took to be the necessary principles of æsthetic, constitute in reality only a psychology of Renaissance and Classical Art. At the same time, it has made us realise the essential unity of these latter arts. For we see that they both rest on certain common pre-suppositions, of which we only become conscious when we see them denied by other arts. (Cf. the work of Riegl on Byzantine art.) In the same way an understanding of the religious philosophy which preceded the Renaissance makes the essential unity of all philosophy since seem at once obvious. It all rests on the same conception of the nature of man, and exhibits the same inability to realise the meaning of the dogma of Original Sin. Our difficulty now, of course, is that we are really incapable of understanding how any other view but the humanistic could be seriously held by intelligent and emancipated men. To get over this difficulty I intend in later Notes to say a good deal about those comparatively unknown philosophers at the beginning of the Renaissance, who are exceptionally interesting from this point of view, because they exhibit clearly the transition from one ideology to the other. They at least were capable of understanding that an intelligent man might not be a humanist.

But we can leave this on one side. In order to explain this family likeness between all philosophers since the Renaissance, it is not necessary to state specifically, what the likeness consists in. The fact can perhaps be made comprehensible by the manner of its occurrence; by stating the aspect or department in philosophy in which the resemblance occurs, without stating in detail what it is.

Philosophy is a surprising subject to the layman. It has all the appearance of an impersonal and exact science. It makes use of a terminology as abstruse as that of mathematics, and its method is so technical that he cannot follow it; yet he can see for himself that it is not a science, or it would have the same solid growth as the other sciences. It ought surely to have arrived by now at results valid for everyone. But the scandal in philosophy of the contrast between apparently impersonal, scientific method, and its results—which are often so personal, that no one but their author accepts them—is obvious to everyone.

This scandal is so evident, that certain philosophers have endeavoured to end it, by acknowledging it. They say that the subject should renounce its claim to be a science, and should acknowledge itself to be, what it clearly is, a Weltanschauung, or expression of an attitude towards the world. The personal element in it would then be legitimate.

This I now believe to be a false solution. What is the right solution? To recognise that actual Philosophy is not a pure but a mixed subject. It results from a confusion between two subjects which stand in no essential or necessary relation to each other, though they may be combined together for a certain practical end. One of these subjects is a science, the other not. The scientific element in philosophy is a difficult investigation into the relations between certain very abstract categories. Though the subject matter is abstract, the method employed should be as purely scientific and impersonal as that of mathematics.

Mixed up with this is the function which ph...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• AUTHOR’S PREFACE
• HUMANISM AND THE RELIGIOUS ATTITUDE
• MODERN ART AND ITS PHILOSOPHY
• ROMANTICISM AND CLASSICISM
• BERGSON’S THEORY OF ART
• THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTENSIVE MANIFOLDS
• CINDERS
• APPENDICES
• INDEX