The Online Library of Liberty

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• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• The Perfectibility of Man
• One: Perfection and Perfectibility
• Two: From Olympus to the Form of the Good
• Three: the Godlike Man: Aristotle to Plotinus
• Four: Christianity Rejects Perfection: the Elements
• Five: Pelagius and His Critics
• Six: Perfectibility Within Christianity: the Ascetico-mystical Tradition
• Seven: Perfectibility Within Christianity: Protestant and Heretical
• Eight: Perfecting By Social Action: the Presuppositions
• Nine: Governmentalists, Anarchists and Geneticists
• Ten: the Perfecting of Man By Scientific Progress
• Eleven: Progress By Natural Development: From Joachim to Marx
• Twelve: Progress By Natural Development: From Darwin to Teilhard
• Thirteen: Perfection Renounced: the Dystopians
• Fourteen: Mysticism and Humanity
• Fifteen: the New Mysticism: Paradise Now

FOURTEEN

MYSTICISM AND HUMANITY

The dystopian criticism of technical perfectibilism rests on a fundamental assumption, namely, that certain forms of human relationship and certain forms of human achievement are intrinsically valuable. “Dehumanizing,” the dystopians do not for a moment doubt, is a condemnatory, dyslogistic adjective. This is what the Stoic, the mystic, the Buddhist, all question; to attain to perfection, they argue, man must first renounce his “humanity.” In the place of “humanity”—tender human relationships and human achievements—they set up the ideal of a mystical union, whether with God, or with the One, or with the Universe as a whole. Only through his participation in such a union, on their view, can man reach perfection.

The mystical perfectibilist’s attack upon “humanity” is two-pronged—moral and metaphysical. The moral criticism, very characteristic of Christianity, is that human relationships are all of them infected by such vices as pride, selfishness, ambition, vanity. The metaphysical criticism is that purely human relationships are by their very nature impermanent, transitory. The loved one dies; the cause to which a man devotes himself turns out to be a failure; the work of art, the technological achievement, the scientific theory are all of them liable to pass away, perhaps outmoded, perhaps deliberately destroyed in a new wave of barbarism. Only by becoming, or by uniting himself with, or by fixing all his affections upon, a Being who is eternal, simple, unchanging, wholly self-sufficient, can man, so the mystics conclude, find true peace of mind, true happiness, true perfection. “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.”1 Ecclesiastes here sums up that critique of human activity which mystical perfectibilism takes as its starting-point.

Up to a point, the mystical criticism of “humanity” can scarcely be gainsaid. That there is no object of human affection which is not, in some degree, a source of anxiety, that no human action, however admirable, is wholly free from such motives as pride, ambition, vanity—these are conclusions which, if not quite indisputable, are at least highly plausible. As for the transitoriness of human achievements, although we like to claim that a Shakespeare or a Newton is “immortal,” a few hundred years is a long way from immortality. It takes a bold man to presume that Newton and Shakespeare will still be familiar names ten thousand, to say nothing of ten million, years hence. The more modest achievements of the ordinary philosopher, scientist, artist, technologist, industrialist, are unlikely to survive his own decease, if they endure so long.

The real question, however, is whether such objections matter. Or, at a deeper level still, whether the attempt to substitute for ordinary human relationships and human achievements a supposedly “higher” relationship and “higher” achievement—union with God, or with the One, or with the totality of things—does not issue in what is actually a lower form of life, inferior to what human beings daily accomplish in their ambitious, proud, anxiety-ridden way. Is it so obvious that to attain to union with an undifferentiated unity—the typical mystical ambition—is a higher achievement than it is to succeed in loving a woman, or writing a poem, or cultivating a farm?

Consider in this light the perfectibilist’s moral criticism of “humanity.” Then we might first wish to challenge the traditional Christian view that pride is a vice, and that humility, resignation, self-surrender are virtues. As Zamiatin suggests in his We, the Christian view anticipates, at this point, the moral outlook of a totalitarian state. “The greatness of the ‘Church of the United Flock,’” he writes of the Christians, “was known to them. They knew that resignation is virtue, and pride a vice; that ‘We’ is from ‘God,’ ‘I’ from the devil.”2 The refusal of an artist or a scientist to accept the judgement of State or Church that his work must be suppressed contains within it, no doubt, more than a touch of pride. But his conviction of the value and importance of what he is doing, his refusal to be brow-beaten by authority, to submit, to obey, many of us, certainly, would refuse to characterize as vicious.

There are, however, many different forms of pride. For our present purposes, three are particularly important. Let us call them, respectively, aristocratic pride, Pelagian pride and, in a somewhat extended sense of the phrase, pride in workmanship. “Aristocratic” pride is pride in one’s status—spiritual, social, or economic. It, quite certainly, is dehumanizing, ruling out, for those who are obsessed by it, certain kinds of human relationship and certain kinds of human achievement as “beneath their dignity.” The aristocratically proud cannot love those who fall outside their own class, their own caste, or their own sect of élite Christians. Their relationships with such “outsiders” must be maintained at an impersonal level; the “chosen ones” can be charitable towards outsiders, relieving their sufferings, but they cannot enter into tender relationships with them, as friends or lovers. Nor can they embark upon such tasks, whether manual work or commerce, as are “unfitting” for members of the “aristocracy.” Often enough, as Wesley observed, “aristocratic pride” has been encouraged rather than discouraged by Christianity. It has been encouraged, at least, whenever Christianity has drawn a sharp distinction between a spiritual élite—an elect, God’s anointed, the One True Church—and the unregenerate masses.*

“Pelagian” pride lies in some respects at the opposite extreme from “aristocratic” pride; it is pride in being a “self-made” man, in being what one is entirely as the result of one’s own efforts. This is the kind of pride against which the Christian doctrine of grace is particularly directed. In so far as man can do anything that is good, so Calvin argues, it is entirely God’s, not his own, doing. No one is a “self-made” man; man is made what he is by God. Within Christianity, as we have seen, the controversy between Pelagians and Augustinians continues, and is likely to continue as long as Christianity survives. If we translate this controversy into secular terms, however, there can be little doubt that the secular Augustinians have the best of the argument. It is ridiculous for anybody to think of himself as “self-made”; if a man achieves anything at all this is very largely as a result of “grace,” of gifts which are not bestowed upon him as a consequence of his merit but which are, in a broad sense of that phrase, “a matter of luck.”

Consider a very minor example—the writing of a book. This is made possible only by a series of “graces,” gifts from others, gifts the author has done nothing to deserve. These graces are manifold, and highly diversified in their origin—the great mistake of Augustinianism is to suppose that there is a single source of grace, an omnipotent being. In the case of a learned work they would include the tradition of scholarship which the author inherits; the encouragement, the criticisms, the suggestions, of teachers, pupils and colleagues; the contributions of his predecessors. It is not an author’s own doing, not a reward for his merit, that he lives in a country and at a time when he is free to write as he will, and that is the greatest grace of all.

For an author to feel proud of himself for what he has done would therefore be absurd. In relation to any single one of these graces he is, no doubt, a co-operator: no one of them, by itself, explains why he has written as he has written. To that extent, he can rightly speak of “his contribution” in relation to, let us say, the existing tradition of scholarship or the culture of his country; he can think of himself as “saying something original,” so long as he realizes that his “originality” is, in relation to what he has learnt from others, extremely slight in extent. A deeper exploration of the situation, however, soon reveals how dependent even that “originality” is on other sources of grace, on genetic inheritance, on upbringing, on the accidents of history. When Christians complain that humanists turn men into God, that they make men proud when they should be humble, their complaint is not entirely without justification—at least when, like Pico della Mirandola or Jean-Paul Sartre, humanists are enticed into the excesses of secular Pelagianism. “There but for the grace of God go I” has more humanity in it than “There, but for my own efforts, go I”—even if, or so I have suggested, what should properly be said is “There, but for the grace of other men, go I.”

But there is a third kind of pride, only too often, but wrongly, identified with Pelagian pride, viz., a man’s pride in what he is doing, in his work, as distinct from pride in himself for having done it. That is the sort of pride exhibited by Socrates before his Athenian accusers. Socrates displayed no sign of aristocratic pride; he would talk freely to anybody, to statesman, to workman, or to slave. Nor was he proud of himself; he did not think of himself as a “great man.” But he took pride in what he was doing. When he was called upon to desist, he refused to do so, even in the face of death. What mattered, to Socrates, was not himself but his work—and this we may properly think of as the “classical” attitude, in opposition to the Romantic, Pelagian, emphasis on “originality” and “genius.”

“Classical” pride, pride in workmanship, is the very stuff of civilization. Often enough, no doubt, it is objectively unjustified: men may take pride in what they are doing, persisting in the face of every obstacle, when what they are doing is intrinsically worthless. If “humility” means nothing more than the capacity to learn from criticism, then it has an undoubted value; but if “humility” means a willingness to submit to authority—to abandon or to modify what one is doing merely because it does not accord with the teachings of the Bible or the thoughts of Chairman Mao—then it is death to the spirit: the proper name for it, indeed, is “servility.”* In so far as mystical perfectibilism seeks to destroy pride in workmanship, to convince men that no human task is worth while for its own sake, it carries dehumanization to its extreme point.

Pride in one’s work carries with it a determination to accept the demands imposed by that work: in the case of philosophy to follow the argument where it leads, in the case of history to discover what actually happened, in the case of literature to explore to its depths a particular theme. In consequence, this sort of pride demands freedom: it has to be laid low in any authoritarian State. The historian, in such a system, has to conform to official interpretations of the past, the philosopher to dogmas, the writer to stereotypes of human action, the craftsman to “production-schedules.” More subtly, attempts are made to lay pride low in a consumer’s society: the film-director, the novelist, the craftsman are called upon to produce “what will sell” at whatever cost to their pride in workmanship. (Nothing could be more opposed to pride in workmanship than “built-in obsolescence,” the ideal of a throw-away society for which everything is replaceable.) Indeed, better novels may come out of an authoritarian state in which the author writes without any expectation of being published than out of a society in which he has one eye constantly fixed on “the market.” In the long run, however, the quality of a society will be largely decided by the degree to which it encourages and facilitates pride in workmanship; a society in which that pride is humbled will be a shoddy, second-hand, society.*

Pride, then, need not be an imperfection. But although the anti-human perfectibilist particularly directs his criticisms against pride, the attack on pride is not essential to his case. Let us grant, for the sake of argument, what the critics of “humanity” allege: that in man’s most dedicated and devoted acts, the dedication and devotion are always flawed, since the eye of the moralist can always detect an element of possessiveness in love, of self-seeking in courage, of self-display in science and in art. What is really striking, even then, is not that such a degree of Pelagian pride and self-centredness persists but, rather, to what heights of disinterested dedication and devotion, of courage and of love, men—not only famous heroes but quite ordinary men and women—have managed to attain. Those who reject human achievements as valueless because they are morally flawed are themselves, in that very act of rejection, offering testimony to the standards men have come to take for granted, the degree to which they have conquered self-satisfaction. But they are also testifying to the depths of absurdity into which men can be driven by their perfectibilist aspirations.

If ambition is a vice, one might finally add, it is certainly nowhere better illustrated than in the writings of the mystics. No Newton, no Einstein, has ever gone so far as did Angela of Foligno when she claimed that “the eyes of my soul were opened, and I beheld the plenitude of God, whereby I did comprehend the whole world, both here and beyond the sea, and the abyss and all things else.”3 If it be objected that Angela does not claim to have achieved this knowledge by her own efforts but only by God working in her, the claim to have become one with God is, to say the least, scarcely the extreme of humility.* Here ambition does not take its harmless, indeed desirable, form—the desire to create something worth while—but rather its dangerous form, to exercise control over the world.

In our own time, the doctrine of a “moral flaw” sometimes takes, under Freudian inspiration, a somewhat different form. And although Freud himself used this doctrine as a way of criticising secular perfectibilism, it has recently been invoked in support of a new variety of mysticism. “What appears in a minority of human individuals,” Freud writes, “as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization.”4 So far, then, as man perfects himself through his civilization he does so, if Freud is right, only at the cost of repression, a repression for which he has to pay a price, in neurosis, in aggression, in suffering. Complete perfection, in consequence, lies beyond man’s reach: he may, in some measure, improve his condition in science, in art, in civilization, but what he can achieve is always limited by the very psychological circumstances which make such creative achievements possible. For him to be at once entirely free, entirely happy and entirely civilized—the typical ambition of secular perfectibilists—is by the very nature of the case impossible.

Were men wholly free, Freud argues, they would seek immediate instinctual gratification: they would not submit to that delay in gratification which is the foundation of civilization. They would not work, they would not produce, they would not create. Instinctual repression, and that alone, makes possible the transition from a gratification-seeking animal, entirely governed by what Freud calls “the pleasure principle,” to a reasonable, socialized, civilized, human being. This repression is made necessary, Freud tells us, by scarcity. Men cannot support themselves without toil; were they always to seek the immediate gratification of their instincts, the human race would soon die out. Repression and scarcity, then, are the foundations of “humanity”; by their very nature, nevertheless, they limit and warp the “humanity” they make possible. Perfection is not to be expected. The repressed always returns, whether as a nightmare to trouble the repose of civilized man or as a war which destroys his illusions of peaceful, perpetual, progress.

The Freudian doctrine that civilization inevitably rests on repression has been diversely deployed for controversial purposes. Most often, perhaps, it is invoked in defence of repression, sexual repression in particular. Since civilization rests on repression, it is then suggested, sexual permissiveness must be destructive of civilization. To permit or to encourage freer sexual relationships would be to destroy, as Freud himself suggests, “all that is most precious in human civilization.”5

But in, to mention only one example, Norman Brown’s Life Against Death, Freud’s doctrine is taken as the starting-point of a critique of civilization, or of some of its most notable achievements, and used to defend a new variety of mystical perfectibilism. Freud himself, at the very end of Civilization and Its Discontents had raised the question whether civilization is worth the instinctual sacrifices it entails. We must think the worse of civilization, Brown more confidently affirms, if it is based on instinctual renunciation. So whereas the classical mystics argued that men’s passions must first be destroyed if they are to reach perfection, the new mystics argue that, on the contrary, their passions must be freed from the inhibitions which now restrain them. Yet the astonishing fact, as we shall see later, is that in their ultimate objectives the new and the old mystical perfectibilism almost wholly coincide: the dispute is about means.

If we turn now to the “metaphysical” critique of human achievements, the question is whether what the metaphysical perfectibilist, from Plato on, condemns as a defect in human relationships, their transitoriness, has the importance he attaches to it. Aristotle long ago pointed out, arguing against Plato, that a white thing which lasts forever is no more white than a white thing which lasts only for a short time. Everything we love, no doubt, will pass away, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps thousands of years hence. Neither it nor our love for it is any the less valuable for that reason.*

The opposite feeling—that nothing is worth while unless it lasts for ever—runs, however, very deep in human thinking. We must try to understand it, however absurd, once coolly considered, it may look. At this point, mystical perfectibilism links up with teleological perfectibilism, and especially with the idea of a “happiness” which is man’s final or ultimate end—a happiness taken to consist, as the Epicureans took it to consist, in an absolute and total peace of mind. The search for such an absolute and total peace of mind is only too intelligible; there is no difficulty in understanding why so many human beings have looked with longing towards a state of affairs, individual and social, in which they would be entirely free from anxiety, or care, or concern. Interestingly enough, they have often constructed for themselves a legend of a time when that condition was satisfied, in the Golden Age or the Garden of Eden. And perhaps it once was satisfied, not only in legend but in fact. In their mother’s womb, or in sucking her breast, in childhood play, men may have known a condition of unalloyed enjoyment without the intrusion of care.

Mystical perfectibilism takes as its ideal such a state of unalloyed enjoyment. It is no accident that the language it employs to describe the mystical state is so often sexual, that when we read a mystical poem by John of the Cross we should certainly read it as a poem of sexual love were we not told to read it otherwise, or that the Song of Solomon was for so long interpreted as a mystical paean. For what the mystic is seeking is a form of union, of unalloyed enjoyment, which is most easily exemplified in sexual terms.* It is sometimes said that while this may be true of the “ecstatic” mysticism of a Teresa—whom Bernini’s famous statue depicts in a state of orgiastic satisfaction—or of a John of the Cross, it is certainly not true of “intellectual” or contemplative mysticism. And no doubt the mystical emphasis on unalloyed enjoyment is somewhat concealed when the mystical relationship to the One is described as a form of “vision.”

The fact remains that “vision,” in this context, is a form of unalloyed enjoyment, the consciousness of an object in a manner which is devoid of anxiety—a seeing without striving, without concern, without care. When a human being looks at anything, it is, for the most part, with “care.” He looks at the sky and sees it as promising or as threatening; only rarely does he simply contemplate it as an object, to be enjoyed for its own sake. “The mere looking at a thing,” Goethe once wrote, “is of no use whatsoever. Looking at a thing gradually merges into contemplation, contemplation into thinking, thinking is establishing connexions, and thus it is possible to say that every attentive glance which we cast on the world is [ultimately] an act of theorizing.”6 That is the typical “humanist” attitude.* But the mystic is not interested in theorizing: he is in search of a “looking” which can be enjoyed for its own sake, without the difficulty, the care, which is inherently involved in theorizing, in the tracing of connexions. Leibniz set out to rebut the charge that the vision of God would be an essentially boring experience—did not the fallen angels tire of it?—by suggesting that God’s infinite attributes left the mind always with something to contemplate. But God, by his very nature, cannot be explored; he sets, to a transfigured mind, no problems; he cannot be worked upon, investigated, in the manner of a scientific problem. And that is even more obviously so when God is defined, in the typical mystical fashion, as a “Primordial One” or an “undifferentiated unity.”

That pure vision and pure enjoyment are somehow linked is brought out in the ideal of a “beatific vision,” the mode in which, in classical theology, the enjoyment of God and the vision of God are run together. Now we can understand why, too, there has been so much emphasis on the passivity of the mystic in his relationship to God: he is looking for a condition in which he no longer has to act, but simply to enjoy, or in which he no longer has to take care.7

The word “care” has, of course, more than one meaning. Consider, as well as “take care!”, “he takes good care of her”; “he cares for nothing else but his work”; “he doesn’t care”; “he is full of care”; consider, too, the difference between being carefree, being careless, and being uncaring. The mystic is prepared to admit as permissible a form of “care” which, he tells us, is simply love, but he is looking for a love which is devoid of anxiety,* which no longer needs to “take care.” We are suggesting, rather, that it is no accident that the word “care” conveys—like the German “Sorge”—both love and wariness, or anxiety, or sorrow. The Stoics were right; to care for anything is no longer to be carefree; the man who cares will not be careless. Where there is no care there is no love; the mystic’s “love” is no love at all, but only passive enjoyment.

Most typically, as Heidegger has emphasized, man’s care is directed towards the future.8 British epistemologists have tended to think of consciousness as an optical device, recording what immediately surrounds it and generalizing these records by means of reasoning. On such a view consciousness records, let us say, “there is something green at time t₁,” “there is something tall at t₁.” This is then mysteriously combined into “there is a green tree at time t₁,” and even more mysteriously compounded, with other such records, into the generalization “all trees are green.” To think of consciousness in such a manner is at once to divorce it from the general flow of nature—to which it is related, on this view, only as an observer—and completely to misunderstand the nature of man’s ordinary attitude to the world. Man is not a recording demi-angel, but someone who has to make his way in the world, to cope with it, who finds in it promises of help and threats of frustration. Generalization is man’s natural attitude to the world, because only by means of generalization can he confront the future; memory is important to him because it suggests generalizations; imagination is crucial because it anticipates the future; error is inevitable because the future is not identical either with the present or with the past. Man is a generalizing animal, a rational animal, an imaginative animal, a disappointed animal, a triumphant animal, because he is an animal whose “principal home,” as Paul Valéry puts it, “is in the past or in the future.”9 To say to him, then, “take no thought for the morrow” is to say to him: “Cease to be conscious—cease to be human.”

No doubt, as we have already suggested, care is not the only human attitude to the world; there is also unalloyed enjoyment. But enjoyment is, in man’s “humane” relationships, always conjoined with care. “He that hath wife and children,” as Bacon tells us, “hath given hostages to fortune.”10 More generally, he who loves anything at all—persons, places, activities—has “given hostages to fortune.” That is a principal point of difference between love and simple enjoyment. Enjoyment, as such, gives no hostages. To love is to care about, to care for, to take care of; to enjoy is to delight in what is immediately present. A love devoid of enjoyment is not love at all, it is what Cudworth called “slavish imposition,” duty masquerading as love. But a love devoid of care, equally, is simple enjoyment pretending to be love.

Let us appropriate the word “play” for what I have been calling “simple” or “unalloyed” enjoyment, defining it, in a classical manner, as “pure activity, without past or future, and freed of worldly pressures and constraints.”11 “Play” includes, to take our examples from perception, gazing at something as distinct from looking at it, hearing instead of listening, touching rather than examining with the hands.12 When we handle a cup, for example, we are at the same time taking care of it, being wary; this is no longer pure play. But to stroke its surface is to enjoy it, purely, in a tactile way. To gaze, similarly, is a form of play, as distinct from looking which is an active attempt to “make something of” what surrounds us, to see whether it threatens or promises us anything. Play may take strange forms: the child twirling himself around to become giddy is playing, and so is the adult who makes himself drunk, or the vandal in the enjoyment of destruction—when his destruction is wholly purposeless and not, for example, a deliberate revolt against authority.

A child is engaging in play, in this limited sense of the word, when he touches or sucks a block. If, however, he uses his blocks to build a tower, although he is still playing, he is no longer simply playing: he is playing a game.* For he is no longer acting “without past or future”: the order in which he acts is now essential. Nor is he any longer free of “worldly pressure and constraints”; what he is building is not a tower unless it satisfies certain objective criteria, in relation to which his tower-building is successful or unsuccessful. In other types of games, the element of constraint takes a different form. Sometimes, the game is governed by formal rules, to which the child must conform in order to win or lose: sometimes the element of constraint—as in “playing doctors”—lies in the need for conforming to certain pre-existing modes of behaviour. “Playing Indians” is very different from “playing doctors”; in either case, however, there is an element of constraint, of care. A child cannot play even the simplest of games, like ring-o’-roses or snakes and ladders, without submitting in some measure to discipline, without taking care.

A game, indeed, can become nothing but a form of care, it can turn into toil. “What used to be a pleasure,” as Caillois puts it, “becomes an obsession. What was an escape becomes an obligation, and what was a pastime is now a passion, compulsion, and source of anxiety.”13 A compulsive gambler is no longer playing. But equally a child is not “playing chess” if he moves the pieces at random merely out of physical delight in pushing them across the chess-board. (Playing with chessmen is very different from playing chess.) Play is direct, unalloyed, enjoyment of what is immediately present; a game is enjoyment—with care; toil is care without enjoyment—an activity undertaken merely out of a sense of duty, or merely for the sake of money, or status, or wholly under compulsion, internal or external. Most characteristically, “games” become toil when the outcome of the game—the gratification which success brings, in the form of money, or reputation, or status—comes to be more important than the game itself. But a game can also become a form of toil because a person is obsessed by it, or because he finds himself in a position in which he has to engage in the game out of a sense of duty, or because—as in the case of a schoolchild—he is compelled to engage in it.

Human activities which are not ordinarily regarded as games can nevertheless be “treated as games.” We can say of someone: “He treats science as a game”—or love, or politics, or commerce, or philosophy. To treat such activities as games is, positively, to enjoy them and seek, with care, to be successful in them but also, negatively, not to care about the object towards which that activity is characteristically directed. Let us suppose, for example, that a man “treats love as a game.” Then he enjoys his relationships with women, he takes pride in the skill and care with which he flirts with, or seduces, them, but he does not care for, or about, the women as such. For the libertine, the woman in relation to whom he judges himself successful or unsuccessful is replaceable; should she die, or move elsewhere, he is only momentarily disconcerted. It is not that such a games-player cares for nothing except victory over women; they are not, to him, merely a means of acquiring wealth or status, or satisfying a compulsion to dominate. There are Don Juans for whom relationships with women are compulsive, a form of toil, not a game: they derive no joy from their relationships with them. The man for whom “love” is a game is not like that: he enjoys his sexual relationships; he likes women and prefers them to be witty and attractive. Simply, he is not prepared to take care of the woman, nor is he concerned with her future development; he does not cherish her. She exists for him only in the present, as a companion at table or in bed.

Parallel attitudes are sometimes to be met with in politics, in science, in art, in philosophy. Some philosophers and some scientists are quick-witted, clever, but not really interested in arriving at conclusions. They enjoy science and philosophy just as they might enjoy a crossword puzzle, as an exercise of ingenuity. “The mathematician,” writes Adam Ferguson, “is only to be amused with intricate problems, the lawyer and the casuist with cases that try their subtilty.” He goes on to suggest that human happiness largely depends on man’s capacity thus to turn his occupations into “games,” or, as he calls them, “amusements.”14 In our own society, it is rather disreputable for anyone to admit that he is in business except as a way of earning money,* just as in that Calvinist Edinburgh in which Ferguson was writing it was rather disreputable for him to admit that he was in business except in order to fulfil a God-bestowed vocation. But Ferguson is certainly right; a man is more likely to enjoy his life if he can treat his work as a “game”—one does not have to watch Polynesians at work on a Pacific island to realize that fact; watching an enthusiastic bricklayer will do as well. What Sartre calls “serious people” will no doubt find this attitude objectionable; they cannot shake off the feeling, so powerful in Genesis, that work is a punishment for sin, that to treat business as an enjoyable occupation rather than as the pursuit of profit is like singing in a prison cell—an insult to the majesty of the Law. Indeed, to “save their face” in the eyes of “serious people” men often pretend that they are acting out of duty, or out of necessity, or in order to achieve some external end, rather than because they enjoy what they are doing. To answer the question “Why are you doing this?” with “Because I enjoy it” has come to seem improper. But the “serious people” have run the world for too long, the world “has grown grey at their breath.” If our society does not permit men to enjoy their work, so much the worse for our society.

Games, in the broad sense of the word, are, then, by no means to be despised.* We need, all the same, to differentiate between games and a somewhat more complex form of activity, distinguished from games by its special relationship to the object towards which it is directed. Let us call that more complex activity “love.” A judge may enjoy-with-care, as a game, the subtleties of legal debate, but we expect of him, above all, to “love the law”—to care about the outcome of his decisions, the situation which arises out of them, as distinct from enjoying his ingenuity in applying the law to an unfamiliar case. Similarly, although these phrases now sound pretentious and are undoubtedly in some respects downright misleading, we expect a serious artist—as distinct from someone who simply “makes a game” of painting—to “love beauty,” a scientist to “love truth,” a statesman to “love his country.”*

What is meant in such contexts by “love”? To “love” is to take delight in the continuing existence of an object, to find it beautiful, to rejoice in its qualities and structure, and—when this lies within our power—to help it to survive and to develop. (This is not, by any means, a complete analysis of the concept; but these, at least, are some of the things it entails.) It involves enjoyment of the object as it now is—love without enjoyment, with no element of play in it, is, as I said, no longer love but toil. However, it goes beyond play, as it goes beyond the enjoyment of the activity directed towards an object.† What we call “the appreciation of art,” and reckon as part of humanity, is much more than a merely sensuous enjoyment of colour, of sound, or tactile surface, but it is not always displayed, either, by the trained critic. A critic may enjoy his own activity in dissecting a painting, in pointing to its defects and virtues. But he may still not love the works of art he is dissecting. What he enjoys is the game of criticizing, not the paintings. His work seeks to arouse in his readers an admiration for his talents, not for the works of art he is discussing; he may be read with pleasure, talked about, even by those who never venture into a gallery. The critic who loves works of art would be completely dissatisfied with this situation. Nor would a judge who loved justice be content merely because the cleverness of his judgements is greatly admired, if the effect of these judgements is to bring law into contempt. When a man loves a woman he does not merely like looking at her, or enjoy his own relationship with her: he cares about her as an individual, he suffers and rejoices with her. A scientist who loves science cares about the extension of human knowledge, as an activity which he not merely enjoys but would fight for. (Love, it should be observed, is far from being a merely sentimental expression of feeling; the lover needs courage.) Such a scientist could no more imagine abandoning science for administration, at least while he still has something to offer to science, than a mother could imagine exchanging her child for another, at least while he still needs her care.

In describing any individual case, we no doubt meet with problems. Only too often, we find on closer examination that love, in spite of professions to the contrary, is directed not towards the object of an activity but only towards the agent himself. We can properly speak, in such cases, of “self-love.” The mother who at first sight seems to love her children may in fact love nobody but herself: her children are but an extension of herself; their successes are her successes, their failures are her failures. An artist, similarly, may be interested in works of art only when he can think of them as “expressions of his own personality”; his love of the objects he creates is but a love of himself; if he is a writer, he does not write novels but only thinly disguised egoistic autobiographies, designed to make plain his “genius,” not to expose objectively and critically the kind of person he is.

It has sometimes been argued, as part of the critique of humanity, that all loves are of this kind, self-love in disguise. But there are ways of distinguishing object-loves from self-love: object-love is marked by a generosity and freedom which is not to be found in self-love. A mother loves herself rather than her children if she will not grant them freedom, if she tries to force them into a predetermined shape, if she is jealous of any influence upon them other than her own. (Just as if she would like them never to change, her relationship to them is a play-relationship, not love.) “If we be distrustful or jealous,” writes Adam Ferguson, “our pretended affection is probably no more than a desire of attention and personal consideration, a motive which frequently inclines us to be connected with our fellow-creatures. . . . We consider them as the tools of our vanity, pleasure, or interest.”15 An artist loves himself rather than his art if he cares only for his own work, is jealous of the work of other artists, and resents all criticism of his work as a form of personal attack. He loves himself rather than his work, too, if he is prepared to accept outside directives as to what he should do, and how he should do it, directives he accepts because they will increase his income or improve his status. Love is closely connected with taking pride in one’s work, as distinct from being proud of oneself as its creator. Pure cases of love, we must admit to the critics of humanity, are rare; love and self-love, pride in workmanship and Pelagian pride, are usually so intertwined that it is easy to confuse them, as are games and “ego-games.” But the distinction between them is nevertheless both real and important.

The very same type of activity, it must always be remembered, can be for one person a game, for another a form of love, for yet another a form of toil. Take, for example, building a boat. A skilled carpenter can enjoy building a boat even though he does not love boats; he would equally enjoy any other intricate task, e.g. building a jewel-cabinet. For him, building a boat is, in my broad sense of the word, a “game.” But it is also possible for building a boat to be, as we say, “a labour of love”; then the builder not merely enjoys what he is doing: he cherishes the boat he is making. Finally, a man may be building a boat quite without enjoyment, merely to obtain some external end—to earn money, to gain prestige, to fulfil a promise. For him, boat building is toil. This is a crucial fact: it is of the first importance to realize that what we ordinarily call work can sometimes be a “game” and sometimes a form of “love,” just as what we ordinarily call a “game” can sometimes be “toil,” and what is ordinarily called “love” may be either a “game” or “toil.” A man can be described by the world as a “scientist” who neither enjoys its ingenuities or loves its objectives; science, to him, is “just a job.” “Love,” as we have already seen, can be for a certain type of man a form of toil, for another a game. It is not wholly arbitrary thus to cut across ordinary usage; this is the best way of bringing out exactly what is wrong with the mystical—and a good many other—criticisms of everyday human life. Such phrases as “a labour of love,” and “tennis isn’t a game to him: all his interest is in winning,” will perhaps help to break down any initial resistance to what is admittedly a somewhat disconcerting redeployment of everyday distinctions.

To return to the main theme. Mystical perfectibilism, we can now say, is an attempt to find a way of life which is purely play, devoid of care.* It rejects as valueless both games and love, rejects them on the ground that they are imperfect, flawed by self-love, flawed by care. It permits toil, but only that species of toil which is a stage in the progress towards the mystical union. Or else it thinks of toil as the proper way of life only for the Marthas of this world, for those who are not fit for the higher kinds of spirituality.

Very commonly the mystic sets out to free himself from care by denying the existence of the future. Time, he suggests, is unreal, an illusion; in reality, there is only the present, the “Everlasting Now.” There is no future for men to care about. If men fasten all their affection, the mystic tells us, upon that “Everlasting Now”—given such names as God, the One, the Universe as a Whole—they will no longer have any need for care. It is the only object which men can love without giving hostages to fortune. They can unite with it without any fear that it will change, because it is immutable; there need be no fear that it contains secret threats which will only later be revealed, for it is absolutely simple; there is no risk that it, and through it those who love it, will suffer, for it is impassible. So man’s relationship with the Everlasting Now can be unalloyed enjoyment, entirely carefree. Thus it is that the supposedly “higher” mystical love turns out to be identical with the elementary relationship of uncaring enjoyment. “Joy,” as Nietzsche puts it, “. . . does not want heirs, or children—joy wants itself, wants eternity, wants recurrence, wants everything eternally the same.”16 In short, “joy”—the spirit of play—wants, and in mysticism professes to have found, the One, the Eternal Now. We need no longer be surprised that the German mystics are so fond of the word “Spiel”—play—and its derivatives.17

[1. ]Ecclesiastes 1:14.

[2. ]We, Record Twenty-Two; ed. cit., p. 121.

[* ]Aristocratic pride can take the most extraordinary forms. The nun in Kawalerowicz’s film The Devil and the Nun is proud of being possessed by the devil; the only option she is prepared to consider is to become a saint; to be exorcized would make of her a “merely ordinary” person. Similarly, the young are sometimes proud of their youthfulness: they think of themselves as forming a superior caste and regard affectionate relationships with the elderly as demeaning. Drug-takers are no less proud of their drug-taking and condemn relationships with non-drug-takers as unworthy of the initiated.

[* ]It is interesting to observe that Socrates and Jesus are the stock-types of humility. Yet neither was prepared to abandon what he took to be his proper work because the authorities—whether political or ecclesiastical—condemned it as worthless or dangerous. William Blake’s The Everlasting Gospel (written about 1810) is largely devoted to this theme. Jesus, he says, “acts with honest triumphant pride.” (Section V, 1.30 in The Poetical Works of William Blake, ed. John Sampson, Oxford Standard Authors, London, 1913; repr. 1958, p. 150.)

[* ]In his study of pride, Robert Payne concludes that it is the great disease of the West: “Through the whole of Western history,” he writes, “there rings the continual implacable cry: Non serviam.” In the manner characteristic of contemporary mystics, Payne sets against Western pride the self-abnegation of the East. I am suggesting, in contrast, that “Non serviam,” the refusal to obey, to submit, is the great glory of humanity, the fount of human creativity, the guardian of freedom. But the pride inherent in this attitude, I am also saying, is not pride in status nor is it the pride of the “self-made man”: simply, it is the conviction that what men can achieve has its own independent value. See Robert Payne: Hubris: A Study of Pride (New York, 1960), p. 305. This is a revised edition of a book first published in London (1951) as The Wanton Nymph: A Study of Pride.

[3. ]Book of Divine Consolation, trans. M. G. Steegmann, p. 172, quoted in Sidney Spencer: Mysticism in World Religion (Harmondsworth, 1963), p. 238. Compare Robert Payne on the pride of John of the Cross and of Pascal in Hubris, ed. cit., pp. 113, 193.

[* ]There are a great many examples to illustrate this point in Robert Payne’s Hubris, especially in his chapter on “The German Agony” (pp. 147–67) which is devoted to the German mystics. Here, for example, is Angelus Silesius: “I must myself be the Sun, and with my rays Stain the discoloured Sea with my divinity” (p. 160).

[4. ]Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as trans. J. Strachey in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVIII (London, 1955; repr. 1957), p. 42.

[5. ]J. D. Unwin: Sex and Culture (London, 1934).

[* ]This does not imply that artists, in the manner of some contemporaries, should deliberately design works of art so that they will be self-destructive, or that authors should confine themselves to ephemera and teachers to the contemporary scene, or that men and women should begin from the presumption that their love for one another will not last. That is a totally absurd, but only too characteristic, reaction to the discovery that nothing will last for ever. There are works of art, buildings, ideas, which human beings can continue to enjoy over long periods of time and which lend continuity to civilization. The ambition to create such objects is both potent and desirable. But it does not follow that only what lasts for a long time is valuable. The world is a better place for every love, every example of clear thinking, of devoted workmanship, of courage, which occurs within it, even when it passes unnoticed by all but a very few. One finds it hard to decide which is the more distasteful: that vulgar Philistinism for which “out-of-date,” “nineteenth-century,” “old-fashioned” and the like function as dismissal-terms or that inhuman complacency which waves aside whatever is lively and experimental in the present on the ground that it is “only a passing phase.”

[* ]Puritanical Christians have sometimes tried to drive enjoyment out of the Garden of Eden, but Aquinas, for one, was quite convinced that Adam and Eve enjoyed sensual pleasures far greater than anything fallen men can experience. The element of direct sensual enjoyment in the idea of the Greek Golden Age has never been concealed; it is made particularly manifest in Agostino Caracci’s painting The Golden Age and the chorus at the end of Act I of Tasso’s Aminta. That popular English Utopia the fourteenth-century poem The Land of Cockaygne is no less unabashed in its description of a world where “All is sporting, joy and glee.” For Aquinas, see Summa theologica, Pt. I, q. 98, 2; for Caracci and Tasso see Wayland Young: Eros Denied, 2nd ed. (London, 1967; paperback ed., 1968), plate 22 and ch. 26. For The Land of Cockaygne see A. L. Morton: The English Utopia (London, 1952; paperback ed., Berlin, 1968), p. 280. On Paradise and the womb, Simon Magus is said to have argued that the Garden of Eden is but a symbol for the uterus, and to have explained in detail how the two correspond. Compare Wilhelm Fränger: The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch (trans. E. Wilkins and E. Kaiser, London, 1952), p. 50 n.

[6. ]J. W. von Goethe: The Theory of Colours, Preface, quoted in Erich Heller: The Disinherited Mind (Cambridge, 1952), p. 19.

[* ]Contrast Wordsworth, describing his childhood:

• The mountain and the deep and gloomy wood
• Their colours and their forms, were then to me
• An appetite, a feeling and a love,
• That had no need of a remoter charm
• By thought supplied, or any interest
• Unborrowed by the eye.

[7. ]For the passivity of mysticism see pp. 132–33 above.

[* ]The word “anxiety” is very commonly used—as in “anxiety neuroses”—to suggest a state of affairs one would certainly wish to be free of, a degree of solicitude which inhibits love. But if an excess of anxiety is destructive of love, some measure of anxiety, solicitude, care, is, I am suggesting, essential to love—just as, which is more and more recognized, it is essential to learning.

[8. ]See J. A. Passmore: A Hundred Years of Philosophy, 2nd ed., ch. xix, pp. 476–516. The corresponding chapter in the first ed. is unsatisfactory.

[9. ]Paul Valéry: The Outlook for Intelligence, ed. cit., p. 97.

[10. ]The quotation is from his essay Of Marriage and Single Life.

[11. ]This is Roger Caillois’ summary, in his Man, Play, and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (New York, 1961), p. 163, of the position taken up by Karl Groos in The Play of Animals (New York, 1898).

[12. ]Cf. I. A. Sikorski: “L’évolution psychique de l’enfant,” Revue philosophique, XIX (1885), p. 418.

[* ]Most of the classical writings on “play” and “games” fail to make this distinction, perhaps because many of them are written in the German language; in German the words “spielen” (to play) and “Spiel” (game) are so closely allied that German writers are inclined to presume that whenever a child is playing, he must be playing a game. Partly in consequence, the definitions such writers offer—attempting as they do to bridge every type of play and every type of game—are quite unsatisfactory: most often, they define “game” as if what they were defining were “play,” missing the element of seriousness in a game, or alternatively, they define “play” as if they were defining “games,” ascribing rules to direct sensuous enjoyment. It will be obvious, of course, that I am myself using the word “play” in a way which is not wholly in accord with common usage. But there is, I think, a very important distinction to be made at this point—even if, like most distinctions, it is not sharp at the edges—and the words “play” and “game” lie ready to hand as a fashionably quadriliteral way of making it. The distinction between “play” and “playing games” is made by P. H. Nowell-Smith in “Morality, Religious and Secular” (Rationalist Annual, 1961, p. 10). It is at least suggested in Jean Piaget’s study of the game of marbles, contained in his The Moral Judgment of the Child (London, 1932).

[13. ]Man, Play, and Games, p. 44.

[14. ]An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Pt. 1, Section VIII; ed. cit., p. 50.

[* ]Attitudes on this question are very complex. Many businessmen are in fact much more interested in status than in money, but it is more respectable to be interested in money. Most Americans, according to David Riesman, will insist—at least in certain moods—“that they act only out of self-interest” even when they are conspicuously not doing so. At the same time, he draws attention to the growth of a convention amongst Americans to speak of their work as “good fun” (David Riesman: Individualism Reconsidered, Glencoe, 1954, pp. 294, 319). This is a natural reaction from Puritanism. But “fun” suggests play rather than “games,” as I have described them—or at the very least “games” in which the element of care is at a minimum. Business, in contrast, requires the exercise of enterprise and intelligence: it is more like chess than it is like a day at Luna Park. “Business is fun,” in short, over-reacts against Puritanism.

[* ]I mean, of course, that games as such are by no means to be despised. Flirtation can be cruel when one of the parties to it takes it seriously. Indeed, cruelty, malice, deception can all be enjoyed with care, they can all be “games” in my sense of the word. (We often speak, in such circumstances, of someone as “playing with” his victim.) Eric Berne in his Games People Play (New York, 1964; Pelican edition, Harmondsworth, 1967) uses the word “game” to describe those forms of stereotyped behaviour which men employ to disguise their real motives; a “game,” as he describes it, is “basically dishonest”—to treat politics as a game would mean being in politics only for what one can get out of it (Pt. I, ch. 5, § 1). That this use of the word “game,” rather than its older use as “amusement, fun, sport, diversion” should now come so strongly to the fore—as if the typical games-player were the cheat—reflects the cynicism of a society which has good grounds, no doubt, for its cynicism. I need hardly explain that this is not the sense in which I am using the word “game”; what Berne calls a “game” I should prefer to describe as a “ploy,” a special form of toil. Concealment of motive can, of course, occur during the course of a game of football, or chess; both parties can enjoy with care the deception and the attempts to see through it. But such “ploys” are not designed finally to deceive, nor are they essential to all games. Some American writers on this subject, amusingly enough, have taken Stephen Potter’s “gamesmanship” seriously. Potter cuts through the pretence that whenever anyone is playing a game he is “playing the game,” in the English idiomatic sense. But that idiomatic sense is not itself a form of hypocrisy. There is an earlier, now classical, distinction between play and games in G. H. Mead: Mind, Self and Society, ed. C. W. Morris (Chicago, 1934), pp. 150–64. Mead’s concerns are different from mine, and he substantially restricts games to team-games.

[* ]I should explain, perhaps, that I am not suggesting that all “loves” are good—the love of money, the love of power and the love of glory are sufficient evidence to the contrary. I should also explain, in case anyone supposes otherwise, that I am not setting out to offer a complete classification of human activities. There are, for example, “hatreds” as well as “loves”—Philistinism is one form of hatred, racialism another. Hatreds, far from cherishing, seek the destruction of the object towards which they are directed.

[† ]The word “love,” especially in the language of everyday discourse, is often used in an extremely broad sense, to cover any case where there is enjoyment. (“I simply love chocolates.”) There is an element of stipulation, admittedly, in my restriction of it to that range of activities where the lover cares about the continued existence and the growth of the object towards which his activity is directed. But “love,” I think, is the proper, if a somewhat open-textured, word for what I have in mind. The verb “cherish” in its older sense—it is now mostly used in the phrase “cherish the idea”—might serve as an alternative, but the noun “cherishment” is a dictionary-word, if ever there was one. It is certainly vital to keep it in mind that “love,” as I am using the word, refers to an activity, and that it is not a synonym either for “enjoy” or for “like.” At the same time, it entails both enjoying and liking. A child, it should be observed, cannot love his parents until he is able, in some measure, to care for them, to take account of their interests when he acts. The baby’s relationship with his mother is a play-relationship; play only gradually gives way to a love-relationship, marked by the decline of selfish possessiveness. (It may, of course, be replaced not by love, but by fear, or even by hatred.) Theocentric Christianity treats the love of child for parent as the typical relationship and urges us to become as little children. It will be obvious that, on the contrary, I think of love as typically a relationship between adult human beings or between adult human beings and the objectives which they foster. Of course, what happens in childhood can determine whether, and what, a human being learns to love. But to learn to love is at the same time to learn no longer to be a child.

[15. ]An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Pt. I, Section VIII; ed. cit., p. 54.

[* ]That is why the “One” of mysticism replaces the “God” of everyday religious practices, and why, too, all forms of mysticism, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, drug-taking, converge in their description of their supreme objective. Mysticism, as has often been pointed out, has no special connexion with any particular religion—or, indeed, with any religion at all. For Luther, it is far from true that man’s relationship with God is a form of “play”; it is, indeed, unremitting toil. In the religious life of Italian peasants, it is more like a “game”—which, somewhat unexpectedly, Plato tells us it ought to be. Only mysticism converts man’s relationship with God into a form of play. For Plato see his Laws, 803; ed. cit., pp. 187–88. [After completing this book, I set about writing a review of Selected Critical Writings of George Santayana, ed. Norman Henfrey (Cambridge, 1968). There I read: “Changeless pleasure without memory or reflection . . . is just what the mystic, the voluptuary, and perhaps the oyster, find to be good” (Vol. II, p. 168). See also Santayana’s essay on “The Philosophy of Bergson” (Vol. II, pp. 122–60).]

[16. ]Quoted in Norman Brown: Life Against Death, Pt. III, ch. viii; ed. cit., p. 108.

[17. ]J. Huizinga: Homo Ludens, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London, 1949), p. 38.