The Tower and the Abyss by Erich Kahler

Author:Erich Kahler [Kahler, Erich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781351472654
Google: 2co3DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-29T04:37:32+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Man Without Values

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

YEATS

IN THE FOUR previous Chapters I attempted to show the situation of the individual in our time and the various forces that tend to disrupt him from without and from within. I surveyed the different forms of collectivization and totalization of human beings which split the individual from without into a functional and a human part, and showed how the functional part keeps growing through the rising power of the collectives, while the human part shrinks in importance and effectiveness. We observed a corresponding movement evolving from within the human psyche and the human mind, which, partly as a consequence of the outer situation, partly in opposition to it, worked toward a fragmentation of the human being and of his experience. We saw how the scientification and technicalization of our world and of our life brought about that impersonal collective consciousness inherent in our institutions and techniques, tending to objectify all human relations and make man and all his outer and inner manifestations an object of impassible scrutiny and analysis. We saw how this technical, impersonal approach and the overcrowding of the surfaces of our world, with its new violent incongruities and contrasts, produced a new human insensibility and at the same time fostered observational sensibility, a sensibility which had originally arisen from a revolt against middle-class civilization and its rationalistic, commercial and mechanistic spirit. Cultural uneasiness and discontent, a growing alienation of the intellectual and particularly of the artist from his society drove the artist into l’art pour l’art and, through the exclusive concentration on artistic techniques, into the development of an ever more rarefied sensibility. In concurrence with increasingly acute psychological and scientific analysis, this sensibility wound up in decomposing the organic object and the organic person, indeed, the underlying texture of our feeling of existence. In the scientific and practical, as well as in the artistic sphere we observed the same process, an immense and glorious expansion of man’s scope and, at the same time, a bursting, a disruption, a sweeping away of the very basis of his existence: the human personality.

This, then, is the situation and the network of correlations which I wanted to demonstrate in this study. Our task appears to be to counterbalance the perilous effects of otherwise irresistible and unpreventable developments. We are in a state of transition from an individual form of existence to a supra-individual form of existence, the character of which is still in the dark. But whatever this new supra-individual form of existence may be, it should not be a mere collective, but a new comprehensive community, a human community. However, before making an attempt to answer the question of how this could be achieved, we have to consider the problem of values, which is closely connected with this question.

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