FEELING AND IDEOLOGY
trination has sunk into the habitual
feelings
of Western intellectuals.
But perhaps the important generalization is that all ideologies are based
on a confusion between a radical fact of feeling and its rationalization.
It looks as if a human being is an anxious kind of animal, anxious about
himself and about the fact that he both needs and resents his species:
and that may be as deep as you can go. But all useful thinking must then
be based on recognition of this fact of feeling. One's feelings are one's
own and nobody else's; therefore all valid thinking must in the first
place be for oneself, all useful philosophizing must be an attempt to
work out a personal way of life. This may serve as an example but can
hardly aim to be a direct precept. Thinking which is useful for living
is useful for somebody's living; it is likely to begin as a personal therapy,
and do good in "minute particulars" only. The Christianity of Jesus ap–
pears to be like this, an attempt to deal with subjective anxiety and
with the next experience, the immediate relation, the neighbor; and
its expression was poetic, aphoristic, non-argumentative, stating, not
trying to prove. Paradoxically, the Church has obliterated the per–
sonality of Jesus and made him unhistorical by insisting on historicity.
Studied in his activity and self-expression he would have always had
that reality of a vivid artistic creation which would not have de–
pended on proof of existence. Rigid pseudo-scientific formalization has
ruined the meaning and use of such poetic and philosophical intuitions
as the notion of incarnation, which means that the word must become
flesh, the abstract can only express itself through the concrete, thinking
must not try to escape from feeling or philosophizing from poetry.
Organized and systematized Christianity in fact became the most
formidable of the ideologies, especially because of its retrospective and
prospective claims: that previous ethical views were valid in so far as
they could be adopted or digested by Christianity, and that all human–
ist ethics, lacking the absolute divine sanction, are doomed to failure.
This has been expressed by T. S. Eliot and others. I have elsewhere
called it the rentier view, because it implies that we are living on de–
clining moral dividends drawn from Christianity.
Certainly in its refusal to believe that there is any moral health
in
us without divine sanction and aid, Christianity, especially in its Roman
Catholic form, has become the most exclusive of all enclosures.
But this appears to be only a matter of degree. The value of the
divine sanction for morality, to the orthodox, is largely that it is ab–
solute; in its attempt to allay moral anxiety it creates the most water–
tight of systems. To achieve peace of mind, or to get as near it as pos–
sible, the orthodox have to have
all
the answers. But what I am pro–
posing here is that all western systematic philosophizing is an attempt
