FEELING AND IDEOLOGY
71
people can't really see it, but because they don't want to. People face
real terrors much better than the idea of them.
It is clearly very difficult to produce a working philosophy which
is adapted to human possibility and which does not at the same time
suffer from the important defects of all the ideologies: which are that
they use reasoning for propaganda, and that they seek to become self–
evident exclusive systems which propagate an "ought,"
a.
categorical
imperative like Kant's-and are therefore inherently browbeating. It is
significant that Kant's altruistic maxim glorified masochism-you could
suspect your unselfishness if it gave you any fun.
The rationalistic humanists of the nineteenth century who had
argued their way out of an original orthodoxy could never quite close
the bulkheads against the threatening inundation of moral anxiety; and
this accounts, I think, more than cosmic or social preoccupations, for
the famous mid-century blues of the more imaginative characters such
as Matthew Arnold. Few people have wanted to be good so ardently
as these agnostics. And they often set about trying to erect another self–
evident system.
It
was much more important to them that it should
be axiomatic or self-evident than that it should be workable. To be ex–
cluded even if one has excluded oneself is extremely alarming. Thrown
out of one absolute you try to dig yourself into another for dear life.
Long-faced, gifted George Eliot, with her headaches and her hysteria
and her tremendously moral amorality, was addicted to the search for
the self-evident. I suppose there was something very self-evident about
the Victorian father who settled everything like an angry God.
Existentialism-in a form which does not unduly systematize or
proselytize-seems to me the most acceptable philosophy for a humanist.
A symptomatic advantage is the variety of existentialisms; and it is a
philosophy of post hoc agreement, it is valuable in so far as you dis–
cover, on reading, that you have been living that way yourself for years:
it is a philosophy which has to be lived before it is thought out.
There are really as many existentialisms as there are people who
reflect honestly and consistently on themselves and their circumstances
and thus learn
to
see that the only valid ethical statements are personal
statements--of
my
experiences,
my
realizations,
my
choices and prefer–
ences. This kind of subjectivity might lead to agreement of a kind
which no statements of an objective system can reach-the concurrence
of feeling. The great and increasing interest in autobiographies of non–
eminent characters may be due to recognition that this is the case.
People want-and need-to know about people, because they need to
know about themselves, to look over the wall into parallel Clrcum–
stances and see that one must do so and not otherwise.
