The Outsider (52 page)

Hulme failed to grasp, or did not wish to grasp, that Nietzsche never denied the possibility of an objective philosophy; he only denied that a non-Existential philosophy can be valid. Nietzsche and Hulme meant precisely the same thing by their criticism of philosophers. This might have been clearer to Hulme if he had known the work of Kierkegaard.

To non-philosophical readers, all this may seem to be hair-splitting that has come a long way from our analysis of the Outsider, but let me try to get the matter straight with a few sentences. The Outsider
’
s problem amounts to a way of seeing the world that can be termed
‘
pessimistic
’
(q.v.
Roquentin). I have tried to argue that this pessimism is true and valid. It
therefore discounts the humanistic ideals of
‘
man rising on stepping stones of dead selves to higher things, etc.
’
, and criticizes philosophy by saying that there is no point in the philosopher
’
s trying to get to know the world if he doesn
’
t know himself. It says flatly that the ideal
‘
objective philosophy* will not be constructed by mere thinkers, but by men who combine the thinker, the poet and the man of action. The first question of philosophy is not
‘
What is the Universe all about?
’
but
‘
What should we do with our lives?
’
; i.e. its aim is not a System that shall be intellectually consistent, but the salvation of the individual. Now, I assert that this formula is a religious formula, whether we find it in St. Augustine or Bernard Shaw, and an important part of my aim in this book has been to try to point this out.

Hulme is unprecedentedly clear on the subject of the distinction between the philosopher
’
s view (humanism) and the religious view, and we can pick up the basis of his disagreement with Nietzsche from the opening pages of the
Speculations,
where he divides reality into three realms: the physical, the vital, the religious:

Let us assume that reality is divided into three regions; separated from one another by absolute divisions, by real discontinuities, (i) The inorganic world, dealt with by mathematics and physical science, (2) the organic world, dealt with by biology, psychology, history, and (3) the world of ethical and religious values.
²⁷

Nietzsche is at one with Augustinian theology in seeing the world as made up essentially of matter and spirit, and seeing life as the region of the interaction of the two. There is no absolute gulf. Inorganic matter is being continually transformed into organic. Hulme recognizes this in another essay on Bergson:

The process of evolution can only be described as the gradual insertion of more and more freedom into matter. ... In the amoeba, then, you might say that impulse has manufactured a small leak through which free activity could be inserted into the world, and the process of evolution has been the gradual enlargement of this leak.
²⁸

Here, as elsewhere, Hulme uses the term
‘e
volution
’
without any implied criticism. The essence of his criticism of humanism and romanticism is contained in the sentence (describing classicism):
‘
You are always faithful to the conception of a limit.
’
He says:

The amount of freedom in man is much exaggerated. That we are free on certain rare occasions both my religion and the views I get from metaphysics convince me. But many acts that we habitually label free are in reality automatic.
²⁹

There is no need to point out the similarity to
Gurdjieff ‘s
vitalism. There is a conception of the limit there. And Hulme summarizes:

You could describe the facts of evolution, then, by saying that it seems as if an immense current or consciousness had traversed matter, endeavouring to organize this matter so that it could introduce freedom into it.

But in doing this, consciousness has itself been ensnared in certain directions. Matter has captured the consciousness which was organizing it, and entrapped it into its own automatism. In the vegetable kingdom, for example, automatism and unconsciousness have become the rule. In the animals, consciousness has more success, but along the whole course of evolution, liberty is dogged by automatism, and is, in the long run, stifled by it. One can get a picture of the course of evolution in this way: It is as if a current of consciousness flowed down into matter as into a tunnel, and, making efforts to advance on every side, digs galleries, most of which are stopped by rock which is too hard, but which in one direction at least has broken through the rock and back into life again.... The passage through matter may give to a part of the current of consciousness a certain kind of coherence which enables it to survive as a permanent entity after its passage.
³⁰

We might compare this with Lilith
’
s speech at the end of
Back to Methuselah,
with its sentence,
‘
I brought life into the whirlpool of force, and compelled my enemy Matter to obey a
living soul; but in enslaving Life
’
s enemy, I made him Life
’
s master, for that is the end of all slavery.
...
’
And Lilith
’
s speech contains the Outsider
’
s credo:
‘
I say, let them dread above all things stagnation. .. .
’
³¹

There is in Shaw, as in Gurdjieff and Nietzsche, a recognition of the immense effort of Will that is necessary to express even a little freedom, that places them beside Pascal and St. Augustine as religious thinkers. Their view is saved from pessimism only by its mystical recognition of the possibilities of pure Will, freed from the entanglements of automatism. (Mr. Eliot
’
s line in the
Family Reunion,
“
And partial observation of one
’
s own automatism
’
, places him with Hulme and Gurdjieff and Bergson, in the same way that his
‘
Make perfect your will
’
in
‘
The Rock
’
emphasizes the affinity of his thought with Nietzsche as well as with Boehme and Eckhart.)

Hulme predicted the end of the present humanist epoch, an epoch that, as he pointed out, was inaugurated with the Renaissance and its discarding of the dogma of Original Sin, the absolute limiting principle. He believed that this dogma cannot be discarded without blurring all lines of clear thinking, and throwing open the doors to optimistic modes of thought. He recognized that:

A new anti-humanist ideology could not be a mere revival of medievalism. The humanist period has developed a certain honesty in science, and a certain conception of freedom of thought and action that will remain...
³²

A gradual change in the intellectual climate since Hulme wrote these words vouches for his penetration.

The new anti-humanist epoch will be the consequence of the rigorous questioning of suc
h men as Blake, Nietzsche, Dost
oevsky, Shaw. Humanism is only another name for spiritual laziness, or a vague half-creed adopted by men of science and logicians whose heads are too occupied with the world of mathematics and physics to worry about religious categories. For such men, it is only necessary to make the outlines and derivations of these categories clear and graspable. They cannot be expected to sort out all the rubbish left over from the Renaissance. That is the concern of men who are deeply enough touched by religious issues to get to work with a pick
and shovel. Shaw had put his finger on the real need in the
Back to Methuselah
Preface:

Let the churches ask themselves why there is no revolt against the dogmas of mathematics though there is one against the dogmas of religion. It is not that the mathematical dogmas are more comprehensible. The law of inverse squares is as incomprehensible to the common man as the Athanasian Creed. It is not that science is free from witchcraft, legends, miracles, biographic boosting of quacks as heroes and saints, and of barren scoundrels as explorers and discoverers. On the contrary, the iconography and hagiology of science are as copious as they are mostly squalid. But no student of science has yet been taught that specific gravity consists in the belief that Archimedes jumped out of his bath and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting Eureka, Eureka, or that the Law of Inverse Squares must be discarded if anyone can prove that Newton was never in an orchard in his life. ... In mathematics and physics, the faith is still kept pure, and you may take the law and leave the legends without a suspicion of heresy...
³³

Let us couple this with Hulme
’
s disclaimer of the
‘
sentiment
⁵
of religion in
Speculations:

I have none of the feeling of
nostalgia,
the reverence for tradition, the desire to recapture the sentiment of Angelico, which seems to animate most modern defenders of religion. All that seems to me to be bosh. What is important is what nobody seems to realize—the dogmas like that of Original Sin.
...
That man is in no sense perfect, but a wretched creature who can yet apprehend perfection. It is not, then, that I put up with the dogma for the sake of the sentiment, but that I may possibly swallow the sentiment for the sake of the dogma.
³⁴

The understanding of the attitude behind this paragraph is, I believe, one of the most important needs of our time.

Hulme regarded his
Speculations
as a prolegomena to the reading of Pascal. It was my ambition, in writing this study in
the Outsider, to serve as a prolegomena to an even wider field, to a field bounded by Shaw and Gurdjieff on the one hand, and on the other by an orthodox Protestant like Kierkegaard or an orthodox Catholic like Newman. In this aim, I have admittedly covered a great deal of the ground already brilliantly dealt with in Reinhold Niebuhr
’
s
Nature and Destiny of Man,
and in various works of Berdyaev, and I must acknowledge my indebtedness to them, as also (in common with many others of my generation) to Mr. Eliot
’
s penetrating essays on humanism and the religious attitude. In retrospect, I feel that probably no book running to a hundred thousand words could achieve this aim. If the present book could serve as a stimulus to the re-reading of Shaw, it would have more than served its purpose. At the time of writing this, Shaw is passing through a period of undervaluation that is without parallel since Shakespeare was forgotten in the seventeenth century. Such an undervaluation of a major religious teacher would be the worst possible symptom of our age, if it were not for the increasing interest in Existentialist thinkers like Berdyaev, Kierkegaard, Camus. If Hulme
’
s
‘
new religious age
’
is to be born before our civilization destroys itself, it may require an intellectual effort of gestation that will involve the whole civilized world.

There are still many difficulties that cannot be touched on here. The problem for the
‘
civilization
’
is the adoption of a religious attitude that can be assimilated as
objectively
as the headlines of last Sunday
’
s newspapers. But the problem for the individual always will be the opposite of this, the conscious striving
not
to limit the amount of experience seen and touched; the intolerable struggle to expose the sensitive areas of being to what may possibly hurt them; the attempt to see as a whole, although the instinct of self-preservation fights against the pain of the internal widening, and all the impulses of spiritual laziness build into waves of sleep with every new effort. The individual begins that long effort as an Outsider; he may finish it as a saint.

The outsider
first appeared eleven years ago, in 1956, and achieved a success that made one critic write:
“
Not since Lord Byron woke up one morning and found himself famous has an English writer met with such spontaneous and universal acclaim.
”
It was true, and it was hard luck on me, for reasons I shall try to explain.

I was born in 1931 into a working-class family in Leicester; my father was a boot-and-shoe operative who earned £3 a week. This meant that education was hard to come by. I realize this sounds absurd at this point in the twentieth century. But what has to be understood is that English working-class families—particularly factory workers—live in a curious state of apathy that would make Oblomov seem a demon of industry. My own family, for example, simply never bother to call in a doctor when they feel ill; they just never get around to it. One family doctor—an old Irishman, now dead and probably in Hell—killed about six of my family with sheer bumbling incompetence, and yet it never struck anyone to go to another doctor.

This explains why, although I was fairly clever at school and passed exams easily enough, I never went to a university. No one thought of suggesting it. Anyway, my family wanted me to bring home a weekly wage packet. So I left school at sixteen. (My brother left at fourteen.)