Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 18 Individuality in the Nineteenth Century
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I WAS referring in certain preceding sections to the social mechanism through which the individual registers that which is peculiar to his own experience, a mechanism which is most strikingly illustrated in the newspaper, in its giving of news, news being regarded peculiarly as something that happens, something that in itself is novel. Now, that which is novel must appear in the experience of an individual as an individual. The rising of the sun, its going down, the ordinary courses of the seasons-these happen to us all, take place for us all. There is no necessity of bearing testimony to them from the point of view of any particular individual. But when something strange takes place, it can only be validated through its introduction into somebody's biography; it must be said of it that John Smith or A or B had this experience at such a time and such a place. That is, we cannot give universal value to that which is individual. It just happens; it is something that we can state only in terms of the fact that it happened to somebody, at a certain place and at a certain time.
I have already referred to the import of this in the exceptions to laws which make the basis for the scientific problems and the formation of new hypotheses. It is the observation of the scientist that is essential for the establishment of such an exception. I do not mean to say- that the statement is confined to a single individual. On the contrary, what the scientist does when he has experienced such a novelty is to state the conditions under which it has occurred, so that others may have the same experience. But it comes to them also as a separate experience. The data of science, especially the exceptions that are noted,
(406) are dated and located with reference to individuals. When we come back to those precious events which are the starting-point for the testing and carrying-out of the scientific problem, we come back to the experience of individuals as such, experiences which are the so-called "hard facts" of science. What is meant by their being "hard" is that they just happen when they are not expected. You stumble over them and scrape your shins against them. They are something there that you are not adjusted to, and they have no universal value as yet; so you have to state them in terms of your own experience only.
All this shows again the two sides of the scientific experience: one, its laws, which give meaning to the world; and the other, the experience of individuals just as individuals. Both must be kept clearly in mind. They are the two poles, the foci about which the orbit of science runs. What I want to point out is that even scientific observation of this individual sort is essentially news. That is what constitutes news. It is that which gives import to so-called news. What is of interest is not the mere fact, of course, that it has taken place in the experience of a single individual. That is going on everywhere all the time. The important thing is the fact that that which is going on in the experience of the individual in some way runs counter to that to which we are accustomed. For example, the result of the measurements of the positions of the stars about the sun during an eclipse was news when it started the hypothesis of Einstein. The flourishing of a new star in the heavens is news. And if it is recorded, that record has to be in terms of the experience of individuals. It has to be known just who the people were who made the observations. It could not be any Tom, Dick, or Harry; it has to be a competent person, from our standpoint, in order that his experience may be of importance. it is necessary to know when it took place, the exact second and fraction of a second, as well as the location which gave the conditions for the proper observation. The time at which it took place has to be stated. And it has what we may call from the journalese standpoint "sensational value." The data of science, if they can
(407) be brought out so that people can realize their merit, are all sensational. When murders and divorces are recorded, they are sensational just in so far as these immediate experiences run counter to the customs and habits, to the valuation of the group to which the persons involved belong. They are sensational for the same reason that the records of the positions of the stars about the rim of the sun were sensational. The same data which are presented in the sensational press become scientific data when a competent social scientist studies them, examines them, gets them into such shape that they can be evaluated. There is nothing we may assume that is improper to appear on the front page of a paper which does not have its perfectly legitimate place if only it is reported by a competent person who can evaluate it. But what I am insisting on now is that what gives it its importance is that it takes place in the experience of the individual.
I have perhaps given sufficient emphasis to the reason for this. Just because it is in some sense exceptional, you cannot state it in terms of uniformities. You have to state it, then, in terms of somebody's biography. It just happened to him. Well, what modern experience has succeeded in doing is to get control over these exceptional experiences and make use of them. Look through the literature of the ancient world, through such a really marvelous book as Aristotle's Habits of Animals, which sums up the biological knowledge of the ancient world. You will be struck by the fact that there is not a reference to a proper name, to an individual, as a basis for the accounts which are given of the animals with which Aristotle's treatise deals. He refers to a number of philosophers whose opinions he is combating; but when he comes to the statement of the character of animals he is describing, he never once refers to any individuals as having made this observation or that. He does not rest the value of the thought he is presenting on the testimony of anybody. On the other hand, if you are to look, for example, into that natural historian, Pliny, you will find recorded observations, statements of events with seemingly no basis for criticism
(408) of the value of the evidence. He gives you a remarkable account of the overwhelming of Pompeii, of the eruption of Vesuvius; and the facts he cites are such that any school child would discount. There is no basis for the criticism of the value of what we term "observation." The ancient world did not utilize what we call the "scientific method." It organized the experience and works of men such as Aristotle-the experience of the community-and put it in more or less systematic form; but there was no mechanism for its reconstruction, no mechanism for the test of the experience of the individual, and for a statement of the scientific problem, for the formation of hypotheses and the testing of these, which constitutes our scientific method.
It is because we do utilize this method that these experiences of individuals qua individuals have come to have such supreme importance in our lives, and I am calling your attention to the fact that the newspaper is simply the popular expression of just this fact. And that which appears in the newspaper is logically of the same character as that which appears in scientific magazines. We can just as well refer to these magazines as constituting newspapers. They record observations, happenings, experiments of scientists, which are things that happen to certain individuals; and the importance of these events lies in the fact that they have happened to just these individuals, that they can be put into the experience of this man whom we know to be competent, who can state just what the custom or law or theory is that this particular event has contravened. Consequently, we can state the problem and the ideas of the individuals that are brought forward. The hypotheses are brought forward not in the form of the newspaper editorial but as the interpretation of events. The newspaper editorial in some degree, of course, does this same thing. It undertakes to give the interpretation of what has happened. It takes the events of the day or of the preceding day and picks out what is peculiarly important, and interprets it either in terms of older laws or of some new idea. There is not the scientific control, of
(409) course, in the editorial that you have in the scientist's hypothesis; but the newspaper editorial does put before us the community problems. And what appears in the editorial is an attempted interpretation of them in some sense, giving the meaning of them so far as they are novel, implying that some change, some reconstruction, ought to take place in order to deal with them.
Our whole literature from the period of the Renaissance has become increasingly more journalese in its character. We have become distinctly interested in biographies, for example. Go back again to the ancient world, and you have in Plutarch the biography of the ancient world. Read his Lives, and you find that he presents his figures either as typical heroes or typical villains, one class or the other. They embody the attitudes and the views, the values, of the community to which they belonged. Or they stand out as striking criminals, people of the type of Alcibiades. But, on the other side, you have the person who is essentially of the hero character. These figures present what is characteristic, that which represents the virtues and the vices of the community. What we fail to find in these biographies as contrasted with modern biographies is just that which commonly goes under the caption of "local color." They do not try to record experiences just as they took place; there is no reference to the form of, say, the food the hero ate, nothing of particular interest in the matter of clothes, or his golf score, the elements which we bring in by way of making a person seem real to us. These elements are all omitted. What the modern biography does is to try to reproduce as far as possible those little things which enable you to put yourself into the situation of the individual so that you get his experiences and experience them.
To get an analogous contrast, go to the Louvre and see the statues which have come down from the ancient world "Venus," "Hermes," in their calmness and perfection; and then step across to the Luxembourg to see modern statues. You get a sense of life, of movement. The one with that perfection of the
(410) type which ancient art has given and which has never been given in any such transcendent type since that time. When we undertake to represent that which is typical, we always present what is abstract. Look at the statue we have put on the Chamber of Commerce building, which represents "Commerce." Compare it with the ancient statue "Hermes"; or the statue on the Courthouse representing "Justice." The ancient world was able to take that which is typical and give it the content and the meaning which belongs to such a philosophy as Plato's. What we present is that which is immediate, living, because we are able to utilize that, because we can take that which occurs to the individual and utilize it for the interpretation of life.
A great expression of this, of course, is in the novel , which undertakes to present the meaning of life in terms of its occurrence to the individual. You can see that the novel and the newspaper belong to the same picture. They are taking happenings and putting the meaning of life not into a moral theory, not into a social theory as such; they are trying to give life as it actually happens to individuals, to men, women, and children. It takes place there; and when a person is able to see exactly what it is that he gets from the novel he is reading, he feels in some sense enriched when he has read an admirable one. His life has had content added to it. He has been given a new point of view, a new approach, a new way of looking at things; and the novelty involved in it leads to a richer experience, just as novelty in some way makes us feel that the meaning of the social problems which we face has been revealed to us. It makes us realize that our consciousness as such is a continued meeting and solution of problems, or an attempted solution of them. This is not abnormal; it is just the nature of consciousness itself. And, as I have insisted, the problem has to appear in the experience of the individual. The problem never appears in a generalized form. The solution we work out and test becomes universal. The problem itself is always individual.
The place of the individual as an important, extremely valu-
(411) -able, thing comes into our thought by way of religion. The preciousness of the human soul was made central in modern experience in religious terms. The soul was that which was to be saved, and saved from an eternity of suffering. That was the yardstick, in some sense, by which one estimated the value of the individual. But we have another sense of the import of the individual as such, namely, that the problems with which our reflective consciousness deals are in the experience of the individual. They must appear in the experience of the individual; and for the individual they come in some sense as a new view of life, as an aspect of life peculiar to him. If we do not get this, we lose a certain kind of experience, a certain amount of it. There are problems that arise, as we all know, in the lives of every one of us; and in so far as they are not mere mistakes, they represent an onward movement. Progress, as I have pointed out, even from the point of view of evolution, is the constant meeting of problems and solving them. It may take nature five hundred thousand years to solve a particular problem in digestion. But the problems that appear in the experience of each individual represent the poles of life itself. This is what we are doing: we are solving problems, and those problems can appear only in the experience of the individual. It is that which gives the importance to the individual, gives him a value which cannot be stated. He has a certain preciousness which cannot be estimated. You cannot tell what will happen to him, what must happen to him. Take cattle, on the other hand; one is like another. There is nothing represented in the experience of one ox that is peculiar to him. But a human individual, when he is a self, has this capacity to state and meet problems peculiar to himself. There is something that takes place in his perspective that does not occur for anybody else. Each one of us has an outlook on the universe which belongs to each one of us alone, and it appears in so far as we have in us a reflective consciousness in which life seems to be interpreted.
We do not write epics in our day; or, when we do, nobody reads them. We write novels, and we write dramas, which rep-
(412) -resent life and its import in terms of that which happens to an individual as such. Of course, this makes the individual invaluable in the sense that we cannot evaluate him-not in terms of the eternity of suffering, or of more or less abstract blessedness, but in terms of what his function is as an individual in the community, that function which belongs to him in his particular perspective. I have brought in the term "perspective" both because it expresses this point of view which I was presenting and also because it brings us into this latest expression both of science and philosophy, "relativity."
From the point of view of the most abstract of physical sciences, it has been recognized that the world, taken from the point of view of any particular physical particle or any particular physical structure, even such as that of an atom of iron, is shifting. If you think of it for a moment, it is really astonishing the change that has taken place recently in the mechanical sciences from that in which every physical particle could be given its place in an absolute space and time. By the mere development of physical science itself, especially through the theory of electromagnetism and the analysis of the spatial and temporal conception, we find abstract physical science taking this most extremely novel point of view: if you give a certain velocity to a certain particle, the world from the point of view of that particle is a different world than it is if the particle has another velocity; the time is a different time; and the space is a different space. That is, you cannot regard the universe except from the point of view of this particular particle in its essential characters. Well now, perhaps that particle does not exist by itself. There is a consentient state, a group of other physical particles which have the same velocities. Take them at rest, and the whole world has a certain value from that standpoint; put them in motion, and it has another value; change the motion again, and again the value changes. What we had assumed was that such a relative statement could always be read over into an absolute statement. We realize that we cannot take the revolution of the heavens as a presentation of the real movement of
(413) things. We put ourselves in the position of the sun and see that the earth is moving about its axis; and when we come to the position of the sun with reference to other stars, we see that it is moving; and so we set up so-called "co-ordinates" of the fixed stars. But we know there is no such thing as a fixed star. Thus, in the end we have nothing to which to attach our Cartesian coordinates. We cannot take our point of view and the point of view of a man from Mars and that of a man in the sun and reduce them all to a certain absolute space in which we can tell what the real mass of a body is. All we have is an indefinite number of perspectives. From the point of view of the physical sciences, that shift of perspectives is analogous to what we have been presenting from the point of view of society. That is the reality of the world: it is an organization of the perspectives of all individuals in it. And every individual has something that is peculiar to himself. Our science has grasped that precious peculiarity of the scientist that enables him to get hold of the problem whose solution gives a new heaven and a new earth. And we realize this in our daily talk and conversation, where we see that each one of us has his own value and own standpoint.
Now, from an earlier point of view that meant what the philosophers called "solipsism." It meant that the real world had to be translated into the perspective of each one, and that there was no way of getting out of one's perspective into that of somebody else. That is, it means the defeat of any universal philosophy or, seemingly, of science. And, of course, there have been all sorts of philosophical battles waged over this. What 1 want to point out is simply that science itself has never been disturbed by this sort of so-called "subjective idealism." It has gone on utilizing that which is peculiar to the individual, seeing the world in terms of the individual, getting the problem involved there and then obtaining a solution which is one that belongs to the more inclusive consentient set, which belongs to the community of which the individual is a member. The individual himself is, after all, there only in so far as he arises in the community, as his own particular perspective arises in that com-
(414) -munity. In some sense you may say that that represents the form of the philosophical problem which has been presented through relativity.
Another striking phase that has arisen in modern scientific and philosophic thought is found in the category of emergence. From such a relativistic point of view as we are stating, people will recognize, for example, that there is such a thing as color in the world. It belongs to the perspective of people that have normal retinas. If your retina is not normal, then your color perspective is different. The color does not exist in your "soul", it exists in the relation of your self to the world. It is a different world in its relation to you than in its relation to me. There are slight differences if you like, and there are other differences which we can interpret as real differences. Well now, if that is true, when retinas appear, in their relation to the central nervous system, color appears. It is presented not in the consciousness of these particular forms, but it appears in the relationship of the world to organisms that are endowed with retinas. When the canals, which developed into an ear, appeared in the side of the head and enabled the form to orient itself to sound, noise and music appeared. It did not come to exist in the consciousness of the individual as such, but in the relationship to the world of the organisms endowed with such apparatus. When individuals with appreciation for beauty appeared, beauty appeared. It did not reside in the consciousness of these individuals but came into existence, emerged, through the relationship of the world to the individual.
The problem which faces thought, then, is the problem of the relationship of individuals to each other, or the perspectives of these individuals to each other. These philosophical problems appear in terms of relativity. It may be that it presents an attempted solution in terms which are thought to be consistent with Einstein's statement, as is the case with Bertrand Russell's book called Philosophy, which still leaves each perspective more or less in the consciousness of the individual but does set up some unknowable world outside. This is one
(415) philosophical attempt to solve that problem. Or it may be attempted from the point of view of Whitehead, with his recognition of an organization of these perspectives themselves.
I will just call your attention again to the fact that the statement we have given of the self as it arises in the human community is one which does definitely represent such an organization of perspectives. That is, the individual comes to realize himself just in so far as he can take the attitude of the group to which he belongs. He can approve or disapprove of himself in those terms. He stands on his own legs just in so far as he assumes his own perspective, criticizes it, and reconstructs it. Other people can put themselves in his place, as in the novel and newspaper; and then the same reconstruction can take place. There you seemingly have just this organization of perspectives going on. What society represents is exactly this. The community as such is the organization of the perspectives of all. They all belong to the same consentient set. But it is an organization of the perspectives of real individuals. Each one has his own perspective, and he can assert it against the group.
And the scientific method is that by means of which the individual can state his criticism, can bring forward the solution, and bring to it the test of the community. We do have in social consciousness-or, better, in social experience, since "consciousness" is an ambiguous term -- a real organization of perspectives. That is what takes place. Whether that can be taken over and made the basis for a philosophic solution is another question. But the problem as it lies is whether to take it in terms of relativity and of a space-time world or whether to take it in terms of the lives of individuals in a human community. Whether in terms of scientific advance in any direction, the problem is definitely one of this organization of individual perspectives and the finding-out of what is universal, but with the recognition that, when we do find that out, the very character of one's self as an individual lies in discovering some exception to the universal and going on to the formation of other universals. It also requires the recognition that this is not simply a series of I
(416) revolutions but the very quality, the very nature, of reflective experience. It is that which distinguishes each individual from every other in the whole group to which he belongs. That is the form of the problem, then, which science, philosophy, and reflection approach at the present time.
There is another phase of it I wanted also to call to your attention particularly. As I have said, a subjective idealism takes the content of the world and puts it into the consciousness of the individual. And as you remember, the romantic idealists took the meaning of the universe as a whole and put it into the consciousness of an Absolute Self of which our separate consciousnesses were mere aspects or phases. They took the whole of the world and put it into the consciousness of the individual. I have referred again and again to the ambiguity of this term "consciousness." What the modern movement is doing is taking what has been the consciousness of the individual and carrying it out into the world again and realizing that it belongs to the latter, and yet keeping this relationship of the world to the particular individual. The world is a different world to each individual. That does not mean that the consciousness inside of me is different from yours, but that the universe from my point of view is different than it is from your point of view. Those are genuine aspects of the world as such. The relationship of the universe to the separate individuals is genuine. One can, from this conception, return the stolen goods to the universe, give it back its color, its form, its meaning and beauty, which had been lodged in the consciousness of separate individuals. They can be returned to the world when we realize that the universe has a different aspect as it exists over against each separate individual.
What science has always assumed, whether we have been able to give a philosophic statement to it or not, is that the universe has a definite import in its relationship to separate individuals. And in some way we have to get an organization of those differences in the whole, the meaning of which shall be different from that of absolute idealism. Absolute idealism tried to solve the
(417) problem by uniting all these different individuals into a single Absolute Self, and the attempt broke down, because it never could state the scientific method as such. But the scientific method goes on. And the continued reconstructions of the world go on-reconstructions not only of the future but of the past. The history which we study is not the history of a few years ago. We cannot say that events remain the same. We are continually reconstructing the world from our own standpoint. And that reconstruction holds just as really with the so-called "irrevocable" past as with reference to a future. The past is just as uncertain as the future is. We do not know what the Caesar or the Charlemagne of the next century will be. We look over histories which have dealt with Caesar, but we find a different Caesar portrayed in each one. A dozen different Caesars have crossed the Rubicon. We are continually reconstructing the world, and that is what our consciousness means; it means this reconstruction from the standpoint of the individual.
Stating it in as broad a form as I can, this is the philosophical problem that faces the community at the present time: How are we to get the universality involved, the general statement which must go with any interpretation of the world, and still make use of the differences which belong to the individual as an individual?
