516
FRANCIS GOlFFING
lectively. This too is an experiment, but of a different sort. Our
dissatisfaction with the rigidity and barrenness of the motive/act
sequence is due, not to any flaw in that sequence itself, but to our
sense that both our motives and our acts do not really matter
very much, either to ourselves or to others. Since we are not fully
convinced of our own motives (or those of our fellow beings) we
do not regard our acts (or theirs) as necessary and binding. This,
obviously, is not a purely individual problem and so cannot be
adjusted through individual counselor therapy. So long as there
is no vision common to all, motive and act will continue not only
unproductive but cankered and self-destroying. That which gives
the psychic machinery a clear reference will give it, by the same
token, self-confidence and a true content.
3. Whenever man realizes-be it dimly or clearly-that his
motive/act sequences are sterile, guilt supervenes. No individual
today is totally immune from this feeling of guilt. Guilt-feeling is
one of the most widely discussed topics in Western society today,
but explanations of the phenomenon have been largely obscur–
antist. It has rarely been taken into account-not even by Freud
and his most advanced followers-that the non-specific and
universally diffused guilt here in question is the direct outcome of a
social malfunction; not in reference to any existing society (as
the Neo-Freudians would have us believe) but in reference to a
society existing only as
Wunschbild
or Utopia. This is less para–
doxical than it sounds. Speaking of Europe only: what sustained
earlier societies, founded and operated under the aegis of Chris–
tianity, was never any actual fulfillment or achievement but the
vision of a society
yet to be-the
millennial hope. In our post–
Christian era that same hope has been articulated very clearly
and in secular terms by such thinkers as Whitehead, Peirce, Ken·
neth Burke and the German Ernst Bloch. During the period of
transition from the former to the latter phase Feuerbach, Marx
and the French Utopian Socialists were its most intelligent spokes–
men. Individual schemes have differed greatly and so have the
accents-placed now on an explicit social order, now on an
"intelligible" order of mind only. But what unites them is more im·
portant than what divides them: the fierce vision of man's final
emergence,
mankind's collective self-transcendence. It is this vision
