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Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
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Encounter With Thomas Hill Green, by George J. Irbe (con't)
DISCUSSION Transcendental Beliefs One of the main reasons why I find Green's thoughts fascinating is because of what he posits on faith alone. His ideas about the soul are in several ways the same as my own and those of Aristotle. Green's numerous references to the soul, in various contexts, leads one to conclude that he believes the soul to be an immaterial presence in man, which is a belief held by many, including myself. Yet, he also has his own unique concept that there is what he calls interchangeably an 'eternal consciousness' and 'divine consciousness' which reproduces itself in the soul of man and acts through man. Green, like I, believes in the moral development of the soul and in its survival, in some spiritual form, after biological death. Green believes that there must be eternally a subject which is all that the self-conscious, as developed in time, has the possibility of becoming; in which the idea of the human spirit, or all that it has in itself to become, is completely realized. This consideration may suggest the true notion of the spiritual relation in which we stand to God; that He is not merely a Being who has made us, in the sense that we exist as an object of the divine consciousness in the same way in which we must suppose the system of nature to exist, but that He is a Being in whom we exist; with whom we are in principle one; with whom the spirit is identical, in the sense that He is all which the human spirit is capable of becoming.(#187); and that the end of man must be a state of being which is not a series in time and which is comprehended in the eternal mind and is itself intrinsically eternal. A capacity consisting in a self-conscious personality cannot be supposed to pass away like the capacities of myriads of lower animals pass away every hour.(#189) To express in my own words my understanding of how Green sees the relationship between the soul and what (to my understanding) is a characterization of God in various terms by Green, I describe it as a process of gradual infusion and permeation of our self-consciousness by an eternal, all-pervasive spirit. In other words, our soul is the receptacle and conduit for the ethereal, transcendental emanations from an eternal source. My own theory on the soul, which can be found in several of my previous essays (How it all comes together: God, Life, Soul; The Dark Side of Human Nature; A Statement of My Faith), posits that God exnihilates a proto-soul to every life form, with a potential for conscious free-willed action which is commensurate with the complexity of its biological host and its assigned mission in life. This soul learns as it matures along with its biological host and fulfills its mission in life by entirely autonomous actions. My theory on the soul agrees well with Aristotle's, and it avoids the embarrassing question immediately raised by Green's theory of the soul, which is: If our souls are simply conduits for divine action, which, by definition, can be nothing less than perfect, how is it that so many men have acted imperfectly, even most horridly, throughout history? Green tries to get around this problem, but, in my opinion, not very convincingly. He explains that when he speaks of the human self, or the man, reacting upon circumstances, giving shape to them, taking a motive from them, he means by it a certain reproduction of itself on the part of the eternal self-conscious subject of the world -- a reproduction of itself to which it makes the processes of animal life organic, and which is qualified and limited by the nature of those processes, but which is so far essentially a reproduction of the one supreme subject, implied in the existence of the world, that the product carries with it under all its limitations and qualifications the characteristic of being an object to itself. It is the particular human self or person, he holds, thus constituted, that in every moral action, virtuous or vicious, presents to itself some possible state or achievement of its own as for the time the greatest good, and acts for the sake of that good.(#99) He also admits that the self, as he conceives it, is in a certain sense 'mysterious.' It is in a sense mysterious that there should be such a thing as a world at all. The old question, why God made the world, has never been answered, nor will be. We know not why the world should be; we only know that there it is. In like manner we know not why the eternal subject of that world should reproduce itself, through certain processes of the world, as the spirit of mankind, or as the particular self of this or that man in whom the spirit of mankind operates.(#100) Green concedes that proof of his doctrine, in the ordinary sense of the word, from the nature of the case there cannot be. It is not a truth deductible from other established or conceded truths. It is not a statement for an event or matter of fact that can be the object of experiment or observation. It represents a conception to which no perceivable or imaginable object can possibly correspond, but one that affords the only means by which, reflecting on our moral and intellectual experience conjointly, taking the world and ourselves into account, we can put the whole thing together and understand how (not why, but how) we are and do what we consciously are and do. Given this conception, and not without it, we can at any rate express that which it cannot be denied demands expression, the nature of man's reason and man's will, of human progress and human short-coming, of the effort after good and the failure to gain it, of virtue and vice, in their connection and in their distinction, in their essential opposition and in their no less essential unity.(#174) If I understand him correctly, Green ascribes the imperfections in man's soul to a struggle between his intelligence, his free will, and his animal wants when he says: The reason and will of man have their common ground in that characteristic of being an object to himself which, as we have said, belongs to him in so far as the eternal mind, through the medium of an animal organism and under limitations arising from the employment of such a medium, reproduces itself in him. It is in virtue of this self-objectifying principle that he is determined, not simply by natural wants according to natural laws, but by the thought of himself as existing under certain conditions, and as having ends that may be attained and capabilities that may be realized under those conditions. It is thus that he not merely desires but seeks to satisfy himself in gaining the objects of his desire; presents to himself a certain possible state of himself, which in the gratification of the desire he seeks to reach; in short, wills. It is thus, again, that he has the impulse to make himself what he has the possibility of becoming but actually is not, and hence not merely, like the plant or animal, undergoes a process of development, but seeks to, and does develop himself. The conditions of the animal soul are such that the self-determining spirit cannot be conscious of them as conditions to which it is subject -- and it is so subject and so conscious of its subjection in the human person -- without seeking some satisfaction of itself, some realization of its capabilities, that shall be independent of those conditions.(#175) Green concludes by stating his belief in a law of 'divine origin' which man at times contravenes. He describes this law as applying equally to the universe and to human society. Green and I appear to concur on this theory of a divine law; my ideas are stated in the essay on God, His Laws, and Mankind. Green's 'absolutely desirable' echoes the 'real good' of Adler and Aristotle. Green states that due to the presence of the animal nature in man there arises the impulse which becomes the source, according to the direction it takes, both of vice and of virtue. It is the source of vicious self-seeking and self-assertion, so far as the spirit which is in man seeks to satisfy itself or to realize its capabilities in modes in which, according to the law which its divine origin imposes on it and which is equally the law of the universe and of human society, its self-satisfaction or self-realization is not to be found. The difference between the virtuous life, which proceeds from the same self-objectifying principle as the vicious life, is that it is governed by the consciousness of there being some perfection which has to be attained, some vocation which has to be fulfilled, some law which has to be obeyed, something absolutely desirable, whatever the individual may for the time desire; that it is in ministering to such an end that the agent seeks to satisfy himself.(#176) I must say that I cannot subscribe to Green's concept of the manner in which God (however described) acts on or through men's souls. However, a man's transcendental beliefs are his own property, so to speak, and, so long as they do not skew his ability to reason rationally about the facts of this existence here on earth, they must be accepted as such by other men, each of whom likewise harbors his own particular transcendental beliefs and faith. Furthermore, aside from this particular disagreement between me and Green on a point of pure faith, I am in complete agreement with his reasoning on the evolution of our moral and ethical values. |
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