In this essay an endeavor will be made to sketch the place of the individual in the culture of industrialism. The conclusions to be drawn cannot be other than tentative, for we live at the beginning of a new period in world history which we shall call that of industrialism, and our experience with it has been limited. Nonetheless, the subject bears such vital significance for our future that the temerity of the attempt may be justified. Since industrialism emphasizes speedy change, we must continuously check on the direction which it is taking. One of the most revealing indicators is that of the position of the individual; and on that problem a comparison of the role of the individual, actual and potential, in this culture with his role in pre-industrial societies may throw some light. In so brief an essay it is impossible to attempt to explain the change in the position of the individual or to condition general statements by the discussion of exceptions. The interest is concentrated upon the broad lines of the historical process.

To speak of oral narratives or song-poems, particularly those of primitive peoples, as constituting true literature has until recently met with the greatest suspicion not only from the general public but from students of literature and, indeed, from most ethnologists as well. Their objections are basically of two kinds. No literature is possible, they contend, without writing, and the languages spoken by primitive peoples are inadequate both in vocabulary and the range of ideas which can be expressed in them to permit the development of what we call true literature. Both of these contentions are, I feel, quite incorrect. One has only to read such studies as those of F. Boas and Edward Sapir to realize on how slight a basis of fact such statements rest. There is no need, consequently, to spend any time refuting the theories of philosophers like Lévy-Bruhl or E. Cassirer concerning the structure of primitive languages. The only thing that can be said in defense of their generalizations is that, given the manner in which many of the recorders of these languages presented their data and the many loose statements they made, it is easy to see how Lévy-Bruhl and Cassirer and those who were influenced by them arrived at their unsound generalizations. The first objection, particularly, that without writing no substantial literature can possibly develop, will, I am certain, be adequately disproved by the examples of prose and poetry which I am presenting in this essay.

In a cloud, the imagination can cut out patterns freely. The substance which fills them is real, but the objects which they outline do not exist. To exist, they would have to be distinguishable from the continuity within which they arose; they would have to constitute within it a particular and identifiable state endowed with an egregious privilege: duration. This duration can be brief or long, that of a cake of soap or of a spiral nebula; it is always of finite dimensions. This is what makes it the opposite of the instantaneousness of the mathematical beings which differential calculus arbitrarily cuts out within the continuity of movements.

Existence is a singularity that endures. But this duration, in the domain of the realities that are offered to our cognition, is never unlimited. In the universe of men there is nothing that escapes the slow or rapid, but always active, degradation which debases everything that has risen, which attenuates every kind of diversity in order to bring about a uniform distribution that physicists call the maximum state of entropy and housekeepers, as well as sociologists, call the maximum of disorder.

The antithesis between paganism and Christianity is usually resolved, in current opinion, into the theological antithesis between polytheism and monotheism. But a religious life means more than mere theology, and one has the right to ask oneself what is, in reality, the religious character of paganism.

Between polytheism and monotheism, the enotheism of Max Muller (and of F. W. J. Schelling) is not a mean term, and still less a moment of transition from one to the other, for the simple reason that it is situated on a different plane. In the fervour of prayer, under the impulse of devotion, the believer is so absorbed in the thought of the God he is adoring at that very moment-this is described as enotheism-that for him, at that moment, it is as if no other god existed. This will not prevent him, at another moment, from consecrating himself with equal fervour to the adoration of another god. The famous Egyptian hymn inspired by the religious ideas of Amenophis IV, and which invokes Aten, the Sun, as “sole God,” is just as far from true monotheism with its absolute negation of every divine being except the One, as are the Vedic hymns in which Indra is celebrated as the god “besides whom there are no others” (Rig-Veda, VI 21.10; cfr. I 81.5; 165.9; IV 30.1; VII 32.23).

In 1929, Sir Halford Macknider gave a talk before the International Congress of Geography at Cambridge. He upheld the supremacy of water over all the elements that one must consider in the study of a region and its land. “The hydrosphere,” Sir Halford said, “should be considered as the central theme in geography.” There is nothing more important in the study of man than his relations with water—with sea water, river water, the condensed water in clouds, with rain or thaw, with subterranean water, the water that flows through plant sap or circulates in the arteries and veins of animals; even with the water content of blood, man's very life. Thus he expressed an almost mystical attitude toward water.

In our country, Arthur Orlando, one of the most energetic publicists of his generation, underlined the importance of water-the water one absorbs and which has such a great influence on man's life, as well as the river and ocean waters, which play such an important role in civilizations. It is true that water appears to be the dominant factor in the life of the land, in its physical as well as its cultural existence. This does not mean, however, that we must think of it mystically, as Sir Halford does.

It would be both impudent and imprudent to speak of good sense in relation to philosophy without first of all mentioning Descartes and giving his remarks on the subject. Impudent because we would be depriving a great man of the homage which is his by right and by virtue of long possession; imprudent because we would be depriving ourselves of an opportunity to define our terms exactly. Another equally legitimate motive lies in the fact that if we were to pass over it in silence, someone would be sure to compare our text with the one we quote herewith:

“Good sense,” says Descartes—and the Discourse on Method opens with these words—”is the most equally distributed thing in the world: for everybody thinks himself so abundantly provided with it that even those most difficult to satisfy in everything else do not usually desire more of this quality than they already possess. In this it is unlikely that they are mistaken; the conviction seems rather to support the view that the power of good judgment and of distinguishing the true from the false, which is properly called good sense or reason, is by nature equal in all men; and hence the diversity of our opinions comes not from the fact that some are more rational than others, but solely from the fact that we conduct our thoughts along different channels, and do not all consider the same things. For to possess good mental powers is not enough: the prime requisite is to apply them well.”

Anthropology, as it developed in the latter part of the last century, took as its central, if not sole, field of interest the attempt to discover and explain human progress from the emergence of man before the Ice Age many millennia ago down to the complex life of civilised peoples in the modern world. It sought not only to range both living races and fossil remains of extinct forms in a succession of advancing forms, but to formulate broad sequences of discovery and invention by which new crafts and ways of life developed, and to trace the birth and development of cosmological, religious and moral ideas, and the elaboration of social institutions from the family to the state.

Such a programme was not new. It had been the subject of considerable speculation in classical thought and of more critical elaboration by the rationalist philosophers of the eighteenth century, who shared Hume's view that the history of mankind had been one of “gradual improvement from rude beginnings to a state of greater perfection.” The nineteenth century anthropologists had, however, the great advantage of being able to set their studies within the wider framework of the considerable geological and archaeological knowledge that was then accumulating and of the theories concerning biological evolution that were then being elaborated.

The phenomenon of “possession” continues to elude satisfactory explanation because of the ambiguity of its nature. It belongs to one of those marginal zones where beliefs and rites are allied in the closest possible way to still obscure psychological mechanisms. We know that the phenomenon dates from antiquity, and that in numerous so-called primitive societies it is one of the means by which the faithful communicate with the supernatural. Our object is to offer a contribution to the clarification of this ambiguity by an analysis of the forms and functions of the trance in voodoo. This term, originating in Dahomey (in Fon, a voodoo is a god or spirit), denotes the ensemble of religious beliefs and practices observed on the fringes of Catholicism by the common people of Haiti. It is a syncretic religion in which elements from West Africa predominate, although other African cults have left their mark; however, this religious amalgam was impregnated from the beginning with Catholic beliefs and rites. The practice; of voodoo is not limited to Haiti. Under such names as macumba, candomblé, santeria, it is found in Brazil and in Cuba, where the Negroes, closer to the period of slavery, have conserved African traditions more completely than in Haiti. Observations made in Brazil can help to explain certain aspects of possession which, in Haiti, took an aberrant form.

The term proletariat became ambiguous when it no longer denoted industrial workers alone.

In the writings of Marx himself, one can trace the origin of a distinction between the working class and the proletariat, between factory workers as such and the total dehumanization which the term proletariat suggests. This distinction remains a virtual one for Marx and Marxists, because neither the prophet nor his disciples questioned, officially, the coincidence of these two definitions: it is the industrial workers who possess, par excellence, the proletarian characteristics of exclusion from the community and of disintegration of all special traits. And so one does not feel the need to separate the concrete group to which the term applies from the social condition or the state of mind that it evokes.

I wish to make it clear that this article will not be concerned with a general theory of the matriarchate. I have limited myself to a clearly defined cultural zone, from which I think that the hypothesis of a primitive matriarchal society cannot be rejected on the debatable grounds (recently stated), that the matriarchate could not have been established until after the discovery of agriculture. If in fact the matriarchate cannot legitimately be separated from the divine cult of the Mother, this in itself presupposes a matriarchal constitution, not political and military save for exceptions, but based simply on feminine authority and prestige. On the other hand, ethnologists and historians of religion tell us that the great goddesses are not born of agricultural civilizations, which merely provide them with conditions particularly favorable to their development. They exist before these civilizations and are worshipped by peoples who live solely by hunting, fishing, and the rudimentary gathering of products from still virgin land.

In one of his admirable letters to Princess Elizabeth, Descartes asserts that the best way to overcome the annoyances of life is to “divert one's imagination and one's senses away from them as much as possible and to make use merely of one's understanding in dealing with them.” This advice is not easy to follow, and one of the devil's principal tricks is to identify himself so profoundly with our intimate concerns that, in disowning him, we come to believe that we disown ourselves. It sometimes seems that man cares more for his misery than for his pleasure.

But whether easy or not to follow, the advice is good. To convert the evil which oppresses you, insofar as possible, into a knot to untie, a safety lock to take apart, a problem to resolve, is to detach it from yourself; it is no longer me, it is mine. I can censure it and perhaps even pin it down. When one can state the evil, then what remains is only half-evil.

The influence of man on man is exercised sometimes to assemble a group of individuals moved toward common action, sometimes to remedy the antagonisms which naturally result from the conflict of human wills. These two situations give rise to two forms of authority which are seldom found in the same person, since one form is essentially exciting and the other essentially calming. The contrast between them can be illustrated by the two images of the bridge of Arcole and the oak of Vincennes.

The print which shows Bonaparte hurling himself at the enemy and urging his soldiers to follow sums up in a single scene all the influence toward action he had exercised on them since he had taken command. He had found troops low in morale and without any disposition to take the offensive; he breathed his own fire into them; his famous proclamation tended to imbue them with his own ambition, and united them as participants in his plan. By a remarkable feat of transference, impatient because he was without glory, he made them realize that they were without shoes, and he materialized for them his own vast dreams in the visible form of “the fertile plains of Lombardy.”

When Dante climbed on the devil's flank from the hell-center of earth he was puzzled and disturbed. He could not understand, since he had never changed direction, how he was going up now where he went down before. We have lived through a similar experience. In the old world of rational absolutes one could move indefinitely in the right direction. That was the nature of progress. But in our interwoven and tensile fields we escape one vortex only by slipping into another, and the right when followed leads always more or less to the wrong. It is like running a beast around a tree—there is the critical moment at which the pursuer becomes the pursued.

No research in the field of aesthetics can avoid the question of the value which every work of art poses as urgently as does every living thing: its raison d’être. Traditional aesthetics conceived only an absolute value. That is why it attempted to establish absolute, eternal criteria. More modest, the psychologist of the creative person, the philosopher of creativity and the historian of civilizations tend to acknowledge a value which is of relative importance only. Certain works suggest new criteria and survive them. Others, which conform to established criteria, frequently die with them. A work which does not beget, sooner or later, its own public and the sensitivity which recognizes itself in it, would consequently be ephemeral.

The commercial value of an artistic production is determined by the intensity and the duration of the satisfaction that it procures for a sufficiently widespread need. The relation between supply and demand also regulates the market for that curious species of merchandise which paintings, books, songs, etc., represent-but not definitively. The creative work is quite often devoid of “exchange value” because it scarcely encounters a demand before it has stimulated one. It is sought only after it has been found, sometimes a long time after the death of the artist.

About twenty years ago a book entitled Umsturz im Weltbild der Physik (“The Revolution in the World-View of Physics”) appeared and was eventually widely read. It described the basic change which our views in the natural sciences had undergone during the first three decades of this century.

A similar book could be written today concerning the other, humanistic side of our conception of the world, for so radical a change has taken place since then in humanistic ideas as well, that it approaches complete revolution. This change can be briefly described as a transition from the part-whole synthetic point of view to whole-part, analytic thinking; from a Ptolemaic, egocentric standpoint to a Copernican, relativistic one; and from “thinking in terms of nations” to “thinking in cultures.”

In 1933, the rector of the University of Leyden, J. Huizinga, chose as the theme of his solemn speech, “the boundaries of play and of work in culture.” He was to take this subject up again and to develop it in a powerful and original work published in 1938, Homo ludens. Most of the statements in this book are debatable. Nonetheless, it opens the way to extremely fertile research and reflection. It is to Huizinga's lasting credit that he masterfully analyzed the fundamental characteristics of play and that he demonstrated the importance of its role in the development of civilization. He wanted on the one hand to find an exact definition of the essential nature of play; on the other hand, he attempted to shed some light on that part of play that haunts or enlivens the principal manifestations of all culture, the arts as well as philosophy, poetry as well as juridical institutions, and even certain aspects of war.

Cybernetics has fallen prey to snobs and journalists, who, in dealing with it, tend to mix myth with science. In this study we shall try to sift out the chaff, which a regrettable sensationalism has needlessly mixed with the good grain. Concentrating our attention on the rational bases and some of the lines of force of this new field of study, we shall try to eliminate the element of fable, but we shall not prohibit ourselves from opening windows on any perspectives that seem reasonable.

The notion of “information,” cornerstone of cybernetics, sheds light on the theory of knowledge. What is science, indeed, but an interpretation, which tries to be objective, of the flood of signals with which the universe submerges us? A Protean notion, it permits us to discover a certain unity among the most disparate phenomena. But it is a dangerous notion, too, because of the multiplicity of senses one may give to it.

Philosophical symbolism is first of all a concrete interpretation of abstract truths. It permits one to become aware of the complex realities of intellectual and moral life by borrowing the cloak of symbols and myths whose external meaning disguises their esoteric significance. Plato's use of the myth is a characteristic example. The Platonic myth is, in reality, merely the concealment of a thought which, according to the philosopher, seemed too daring and too advanced for its period. If one wishes to explain the ideas that affect the suprasensible world, one cannot avoid using concrete symbols or alluding to them by the use of figurative meanings. Concrete symbols and myths make it possible to examine doctrines in allegorical form, wherein the imagination is given full rein, combining its freest fantasies with underlying truths. Symbolic thought proceeds in this way, by imagery and analogy, in contrast to logical thought.

There is a growing concern in the western world with the nature and function of democracy, a concern induced by outside pressures of conflicting ideologies and by internal development of protective devices. The latter source of concern, which finds its highlight in America in congressional investigative techniques, has its origins in the practical and political arena. The issues it raises are tremendously significant for the future growth of democratic processes of government. The struggles which it has released will be a long time abating. But behind these local issues of democracy there lies a more subtle and less popular difficulty, the difficulty of harnessing enlightened political consciousness to the broad-based electorate required by democratic theory. This particular difficulty is not without its practical ramifications and applications; in fact, it is the nub of the struggle over investigative techniques in America. But the problem of uniting political wisdom with an extended franchise has a closer connection with the theory of democracy than does the problem of technique of investigations: it raises, in fact, the critical theoretical question of whether democracy is possible. Put more carefully, the question to which I have reference asks whether democracy is possible as government directed from below by the electorate, or from above by the intelligentsia.

The interpretation of man which I have defended in my book, Theory of Man, agrees with the Linnaean designation of homo sapiens, which is more exact, in my opinion, than the classical one of “rational animal.” In that work I maintain that what is peculiar to man is that he is conscious of a reality outside of himself and of his own intimate being, or, in other words, that he recognizes the independent existence of the world and is an ego. Both matters can be reduced to a unique primary function: the objectifying activity, which in normal, continuous, and accumulative operation belongs only to man, and from which all essentially human traits are derived. The peculiar characteristic of perception properly so called, that is, human perception, is the observation of things that are present, the recognition that a given thing exists. To perceive, then, is to attribute presence or existence to what is perceived, to admit it as an object existing by itself, certainly in different ways according to whether it is a question of external things, of the subjective entity, or of the processes and “states” inherent in it; let it be noted that when perceptive attention fastens upon the “states,” that is to say, on subjective, unintentional processes like those of coenesthesia which ordinarily are not perceived but are lived, enjoyed, or suffered, these become objectified without losing in themselves their condition of states. The capacity to objectify is the bedrock of human nature; animal conscience (if it deserves this name) must be imagined, save for rare exceptions, to be a succession of “states” to which objectifying attention is not applied because such attention can only come from an ego.