Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance

71. Creating the Ideal: Spengler, Lewis, Hugo, Proudhon. Buber!

                                                Buber's Paths in Utopia: The Picture of an Ideal  

        In Martin Buber's Paths in Utopia (Syracuse University Press 1996), the author discusses the idea of socialism, the movement's forerunners and its possibilities for modern society. In his Foreword of 1945, Buber states, "The intention underlying this book is to give genetic account of what Marx and the Marxists call 'Utopian Socialism,' with particular reference to its postulate of a renewal of society through a renewal of its cell-tissue. I am not concerned to survey the development of an idea, but to sketch the picture of an idea in process of development." In this regard, he traces the growth of a movement comparable to an organic development of what Oswald Spengler calls the only true interpretation of history, per se. In his Decline of the West (1917), Spengler presents a unique view of history when he says, "The world-as-history, conceived, viewed and given form from out of its opposite, the world-as-nature—here is a new aspect of human existence on this earth." In another passage Spengler says, "With all rigor I distinguish (as to form, not substance) the organic from the mechanical world-impression, the content of images from that of laws, the picture and symbol from the formula and the system, the instantly actual from the constantly possible, the intents and purposes of imagination ordering according to plan from the intents and purposes of experience . . ." (Spengler 5). In this respect, as with Buber, Spengler conceives a concept of organic history, not based upon details, but upon images and symbols, uniquely characteristic of psychoanalysis, music, and art. Interestingly, Victor Hugo makes a comparable observation when he compares the material and moral world as an organism of constant change and intermixture. Writing in Les Miserables, Hugo says, "Elements and principles are mingled, combined, espoused, multiplied one by another, to the point that the material world and the moral world are brought into the same light. Phenomena are perpetually folded back on themselves. In the vast cosmic changes, universal life comes and goes in the unknown quantities, rolling everything up in the invisible mystery of the emanations, using everything, losing no dream from any single sleep, sowing a microscopic animal here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and gyrating, making a force of light and an element of thought, disseminated and indivisible, dissolving all, save that geometric point, the self: reducing everything to the soul-atom; making everything blossom into God; entangling, from a dizzying mechanism. Linking the flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating—who knows, if only by the identity of the law—the evolution of the comet in the firmament to the circling of the protozoa in the drop of water. A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat and whose last is the zodiac" (Hugo 886-887).

             Buber alludes to the illusory nature of this historic imagery in its Platonic sense as "a picture of what should be" and a vision of what "one wishes it to be" (Buber 7). He furthermore refers to these various endeavors as a quest, or "spiritual history of mankind" providing "pictures moreover of something not actually present but only represented" (7). Like Freud's concept of the wish-fulfillment, these images, he calls "Utopian wish-pictures" which archetypically "make us think of something that rises out of the depths of the Unconscious, and in the form of a dream, a reverie, a seizure, overpowers the defenseless soul, or may at a later stage, even be invoked, called forth, hatched out by the soul itself" (7). Like Jung's collective unconscious, this imagery emerges from the inner recesses of the mind and is transferred over generations. Buber differs from both Freud and Jung, however, in his determination that these pictures stem from a source other than the desire for self-gratification or those characteristically associated with those instinctual in nature. According to Buber, these idealistic visions originate in the spiritual realm. As the author suggest, "In the history of the human spirit the image-creating wish—although it, too, like all image-making is rooted deep down in us—has nothing instinctive about it and nothing of self-gratification. It is bound up with something supra-personal that communes with the soul but is not governed by it. What is at work here is the longing for the rightness which, in religious or philosophical vision, is experienced as revelation or idea, and which of its very nature cannot be realized in the individual, but only in human community" (7). C. S. Lewis maintains a similar notion when he suggests an underlying ethical predisposition apart from instinct or self-preservation. Writing in Mere Christianity (Macmillan 1975), Lewis says, "Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires, one a desire to give help (due to herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away." In another passage, Lewis uses a piano metaphor to reinforce this idea: "Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the right notes and the wrong ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts" (Lewis 22-23). Buber suggests a similar sentiment that both positive and negative energy can be channeled into constructive outcomes: it is merely a matter a direction. Ironically, it is through man's tragic suffering that he most clearly envisions this dichotomy between the real and the ideal. Both history and literature bear witness to the unfortunate fact that man sees clearest when under oppression. Buber goes on to say, "All suffering under a social order that is senseless prepares the soul for vision, and what the soul receives in this vision strengthens and deepens its insight into the perversity of what is perverted. The longing for the realization of the seen fashions the picture" (7-8).