INTEGRAL HUMANISM - A Social Philosophy

All thinking men agree that there is something wrong somewhere in the contemporary world. The crassest expression of that is the fact that while nobody is consciously or deliberately aiming at a war, nevertheless the world is actually drifting in that direction. Mankind seems to have lost grip on its own destiny. This realization expresses itself in the frequent use of the term *crisis*.

The root of this crisis has been traced by various thinkers with different predispositions to different causes and different spheres of human activity and their theoretical background. Some call it an economic crisis due to the fact that the economic organization of the world has lost its balance, and as a result things have become chaotic; and if only this economy could be replaced by a more stable and better organization, all the evils of the modern world would be cured.

This theory is more than a hundred years old. In these hundred years, more and more people have been influenced by this opinion, until today most parties and persons engaged in efforts to remake the world accept this point of view, which is based on the doctrine of economic determinism. This view is not only held by the political left but widely shared, though not necessarily acknowledged, even by conservatives and reactionaries. lf socialization is the panacea of the one, free private enterprise is that of the others, both being economic concepts. According to both, the economic organization of society determines all other forms of social activities, and if things have gone out of gear, the only thing we have to do is to accept their respective economic remedies.

Others call the crisis of our time a political crisis. They say that in consequence of the horrors of two world wars, people have lost faith in the modern political institutions. Others have drawn the conclusion that the modern political institutions have revealed certain inadequacies and if better institutions replace the present ones, the crisis will be solved.

There is yet another school among the sociologists, who try to combine the findings of all the others and introduce certain psycho- logical considerations in it, and in a general way, call it a cultural crisis. But even if we could define culture and agree that there is a cultural crisis, how does this help us when trying to solve the economic and political problems which are certainly also aspects of the crisis of the contemporary world?

If we examine the condition of the world in all fields of human activity, we must come to the conclusion that the crisis is deeper than merely an economic or a political or even a cultural crisis. It is not that just any one department of human activities has gone out of gear and in consequence the entire world is disorganized. lf we must give it a name, it could be called a crisis of existence because the whole of human existence has been thrown into chaos and con- fusion. We find disharmony and unreasonableness in all departments of human life, and these are symptoms of crisis.

Examining this phenomenon, some people have come to the conclusion that the cause of the present state of things is that human affairs are no longer directed and controlled deliberately through the exercise of individual reason and judgment. In the case of perhaps 95 percent of human beings, the individual personality is completely eclipsed, unconscious, and inoperative. Individuals do not have anything to say, much less can they influence the guidance of human affairs either at home or abroad. Reason and discrimination are at a discount in public life because these can be exercised only by individuals, and the individual itself is at a discount. In consequence, a small minority of self-willed and often self-appointed men at the helm of affairs manage to guide everything according to their own proclivities or fixed ideas, irrespective of the enormous volume of reason that could be brought to bear on world affairs if the potential rationality of all human beings would assert itself in an intelligently expressed public opinion. ls it possible to change this state of affairs?

That question can be answered only if we start from an understanding of human nature. If human nature is creative and capable of taking rational initiative then conditions can be changed. But if the human being is by nature fatalistic, if man must believe in something and be guided by faith and illusions, then it cannot be changed. All the modern architects of social reconstruction are agreed on the basic proposition that man is the maker of history. History is a record of human activities, failures or achievements of his own making. If we have to state the fact that the overwhelming majority of men have nothing to do in what is happening in the world, that means that they have ceased to be the makers of history, the architects of their destiny. A few men have become the makers of the destiny of all. And this will not be changed by replacing one group of mentors by any other group of mentors. Some may claim that they know better what is good for the people, but others make the same claim. Only the people themselves can know what they really want and need. But they have lost the power and capacity, they have at any rate lost the confidence that they can judge for themselves.

This analysis leads to the conclusion that unless the average man and woman recover their capacity to think and judge for themselves what is good or bad, for them and generally, and become conscious of the fact that whatever exists in the world of men was created by men and women like themselves; that if there is to be any future for man, it must also be made by man-we cannot advance one single step in the direction of a way out of the crisis. Unless we can find a way by which man can regain faith in himself, there will be no freedom and no future for man. From time immemorial, man has believed in many things. But except for a very few exceptions, men never believed in themselves. When a creator is not conscious that it is his function to create, that is certainly a strange and sad situation. But this is where the crisis of our time has its roots.

This view of placing man in the position of supremacy and primacy and maintaining that man precedes everything that exists, that society itself is the creation of men, that all history is the creation of man, that all economic and political institutions are the creation of man, and that therefore individual man must have the position of priority in relation to all of these-this view has been held by the profoundest and most advanced thinkers of all times. But it was only at the close of the European Middle Ages, when the intelligence of that continent revolted against the spiritual tyranny of the Catholic Church, that this philosophy of placing man in the center of things found wider acceptance. Because the human being was the central point of their philosophy, the leaders of the European Renaissance called themselves humanists. They have gone down in history as humanists, and their ideas and thoughts are known in history as humanism.

But we can trace the history of humanism further back, at least to the philosophers of ancient Greece. And if we search in our own past, we shall discover strands of similar humanist thought in Indian history also. Only, unfortunately, those chapters of ancient Indian thought have been forgotten, and in consequence, in India more than anywhere else, man, the individual, has been forgotten today. The question arises, why when humanism is such an old and venerable tradition in the history of human thought, things could yet have come to such a pass, and why this line of thought could not commend itself to a larger number of people and hence did not determine the generally accepted way of life. This question must be answered because this deplorable fact is the cause of the crisis of our time.

Revolting against organized religious faith, which had become a spiritual tyranny, the philosophers of the Renaissance declared man to be sovereign. But the defect was that the people who had talked about man as the center of all things and attached such a high value to the human being kept the concept of man himself clouded in mystery. And how could they help it? There was no scientific explanation of man. Therefore, this view of man was bound to degenerate into some form of mysticism and even in a new religion.

Even today many of those who want a revival of humanism are inclined toward a religious point of view. A man like Jacques Maritain, certainly a humanist, is the best example for this. He believes that a restatement of Christianity can take the world out of the present crisis and give man back his moral sanity. Similarly is the case with the Quakers and other humanitarian groups of reformers, who attach the highest importance to man but cannot get away from the fallacy of subordinating man to some superhuman and supernatural agencies.

We have known all sorts of slavery and revolt against slavery. But the worst form of slavery is spiritual slavery and no progress is possible unless it is preceded by freeing the minds of men from that slavery. If man was by nature subordinated to supernatural and superhuman powers beyond his comprehension and control, all talk about placing man in the center of things is meaningless. These assumptions mean that man is born a slave and will stay a slave and can never come out of his slavery. This so-called spiritual point of view is only a sublimation of slavery, and it has been the evil genius of human history throughout. Whenever any form of revolt against terrestrial oppression has taken place except on the background of at least an attempt to revolt against this most fundamental spiritual slavery; it has led to defeat. Revolutions have taken place, but if they were not preceded by a philosophical revolution, they never succeeded. Historians record that fact but generally do not explain it.

We can get out of the blind alley in which earlier humanist thought has led only with the help of the knowledge which man has accumulated since the days of the European Renaissance. Since those days, human knowledge has expanded enormously. But it was the men of the Renaissance themselves who began to throw the searchlight of their inquisitiveness in all the dark corners of nature. Since their days, the store of knowledge about nature his grown considerably. But it was not until very recently that a scientific search into the nature of man himself was undertaken and still more recently that a plausible hypothesis could be set up about man's place in nature on the basis of scientific knowledge.

The movement for a humanist revival, starting from the attempt to explain what is human nature, has been called scientific or simply New Humanism, as distinct from the older humanism, which took man for granted as an elementary indefinable, which shifted man's blind belief simply from God to man, while man remained a mystery, himself a matter of faith.

New Humanism tries to go into the genesis of man and to examine the background out of which man emerges in nature. The study of science establishes that there is nothing extra-natural in man; nowhere in his evolution does anything extraneous to his own nature enter into this process. Whatever we call human nature, man's attributes and potentialities, can be strictly deduced from the background of the evolving physical universe. Insofar as modern science has acquired a good deal of knowledge of this background, it is now possible to dispense with many assumptions and prejudices, which were at some time or other set up by way of hypotheses, and to have a rational scientific understanding of human nature.

This is very important not only from the theoretical point of view but for very concrete and practical considerations of man's life in society. When attempts are made in our time to formulate a new social philosophy, it is maintained that owing to the development of technology and the expansion of communications in the modern world, human relations have decisively altered, and any rules for the governance of those relations must be adjusted to those changed conditions. Rules which were good enough for relations existing under different conditions cannot be applied under the changed circumstances of the modern world.

That sounds plausible. But some sociologists who propound these ideas do not take the one necessary step forward which would give to all these changes a significance satisfactory for the life of man. And as long as they do not take that step, their efforts will be useless. What is the decisive category of all social sciences? It is man. Society has men for its constituent units. And if we want to have any ideas or rules for governing the changing relations between men and society, we must have first an idea about the nature of man, just as you cannot study physics unless you have knowledge of the elementary constituents of the matter with which physics is concerned.

When modern political theories were first conceived, all thinkers started with a certain idea of man. Some said, like Rousseau, that man is simple and good by nature, and civilization degenerates and corrupts him. Others still held to the older idea that it is human nature to believe, and human existence cannot be sustained unless it is anchored in the belief in some thing super- human. However, in the seventeenth century, a school of thought gradually developed which, while recognizing the complexity of human nature, laid emphasis on reason as the distinctive characteristic of humanity. A whole structure of social and political thought was built on that idea. Throughout the eighteenth century and even in the beginning of the nineteenth century, this idea predominated; it was widely held that man is essentially rational, and all appeals of social progress or political revolution had to be addressed to the reasoning capacity of man. But there were also other trends of social thought which tried to push this idea into the background and confronted it with the more superficial strata of the human personality, which appeared to contradict the idea of man's essential rationality. According to them, instincts and emotions are the decisive elements in human nature, and emotions would always overwhelm reason.

Modern philosophers, and especially social philosophy have come very largely under the influence of this emphasis on man's essential emotionalism. For instance, Bergson, but also many others, attributed to emotion by far the greater role as a determinant of human action and behavior. But emotions cannot be exactly known; they have to be taken for granted as something given in the make- up of man; however much we may try to analyze them, they have an element of unpredictability, and you cannot say that they were either correct or mistaken.

This view of human nature brought about a relapse and a reversal in social science, away from the trend which was to make man the maker of his world. Therefore, since the early days of the twentieth century, we have this curious spectacle of a ''scientific'' religious revival and a whole host of men of science in frantic search of God. Human knowledge is never perfect. But to draw from this fact the conclusion that whenever we come across something unknown, it must be something unknowable-that amounts to installing ignorance as a godhead.

This development was the result of a certain ideological reaction which followed upon the French Revolution. It was motivated by various factors. As revolutionary political theories developed, which challenged the sanctity of the established order by declaring that man is the maker of his world, the advocates of the old order went over to the offensive. When they found that they could not challenge the humanist sanction of the forces of progress, they fell back on the age-old authority of a superhuman sanction, and consciously or unconsciously, mostly perhaps unconsciously, those modern scientists who tend to invest all that they do not yet know with the mystic halo of something unknowable have played into their hands.

Later in our time, when one world war was followed by another, and a third one is threatening now the whole world with disaster, a sense of horror, despair, and helplessness appeared to leave man no other alternative but to relapse into the religious mode of thought, which historically belongs to the Middle Ages. Confronted with this spectacle of a total reversal of human development the bolder thinkers of our time have come to the conclusion that unless the sanction for social change and a further development of man and society can be found in man himself, rooted in human nature, all change can only be for the worse.

Because it is quite clear that if man cannot do anything by himself, he must merge himself in this modern monstrosity called the masses. Nothing but this self-abasement of the individual in mass meetings, mass prayers, mass demonstrations can give to the man who does not believe in himself a sense of security and power. The power of the masses is extolled so much that some of the detractors of humanism who do not believe in the old God anymore have made a new god of the masses. But this God is an insult to the good old God as well as to men. Yet we find modern men worshipping this strange god which they have themselves created out of their own ignorance and lack of faith in themselves.

Only a robust humanism can put an end to these perverse cults by striking at their roots, which lie in ignorance and a glorification of this ignorance. This new humanism is an integral humanism, distinguished from the older forms of humanism, which were more poetic and romantic, by being strictly based on a scientific knowledge of man and human nature. But scientific knowledge as learned in schools and colleges is not enough to make a humanist. You may learn something about physics and yet not be a scientist. There may be even recognized scientists who have not necessarily imbibed the scientific spirit. Knowledge in our days has become departmental- ized. But true scientific knowledge presupposes an understanding and coordination of all the departments of science. The function of philosophy is precisely that. It must supply a coherent picture of the various branches of knowledge acquired by human experience at a given time. An integrated picture of the knowledge of modern science leads to an integral scientific humanism because it can explain man.

Man is said to have a soul, and the soul is the greatest thing about man, and there are various theories about the nature of the soul. But if you study all that is known about man, you find no place where this extraneous and mystic element of a soul could have entered into man. It is said that the soul is something divine, and so are all man's higher emotions. But like the soul, emotions also do not enter man from without, even if they may be evoked by external stimulation. Modern science knows a good deal about man's emotions and can trace them wholly to physico-chemical processes. Once you know these processes, you can actually change the emotions of men. We can therefore make the hypothetical assertion that emotions have no extra-physical origin or significance. Of the soul, however, nothing is known for the obvious reasons that there is no such thing. But if it is identified with man's highest emotions, then it is reduced to a part of man's psycho-physiological nature.

Much emphasis is laid in modern theories on instincts and intuition, on which moral judgment is supposed to be based in preference to man's reason and intelligence. But if we trace the biological development of man back beyond the appearance of the human species, you can find rudimentary forms of the power of thinking and reasoning and even of moral judgment already in the lower animals. Instinct and intuition are nothing mysterious but an undifferentiated form of rationalism, which can, however, teach us a good deal about the working of man's reason. So long as the cortex in the cerebral processes was not sufficiently differentiated, these functions took place in the neural system as a mechanical biological reaction. Therefore, they cannot be analyzed in terms of conscious thought. But the cerebral activity was there in elementary form even before the appearance of homo sapiens.

We can trace the biological evolution of man further through the entire process of natural evolution back to inorganic matter. There is supposed to be a hiatus somewhere. This hiatus is, so to say, the last leg on which the doctrine of creation stands today, of which the assumption of the soul is a part. Assuming that there is a ''missing link'' the problem is of an adequate hypothesis. Two hypotheses are possible. One is the old hypothesis of creation, according to which a God took it in his head to create the world. The other hypothesis is that out of the background of inanimate nature, life evolved through a certain combination of material substances under particular circumstances and conditions. This hypothesis is logically more plausible, and there is more empirical evidence in its favor than for the former hypothesis, even if it is not yet conclusively proved.

That places the origin of man plainly into the background of the physical universe. The physical universe is a harmonious and law- governed system. The law-governedness of this system, of which man is a part, expresses itself in man as his capacity for reason and judgment. Because the background of physical nature, out of which man has grown as the highest product of evolution, is harmonious and law-governed, therefore, the elements of harmony and law-governedness are also inherent in man. They are the foundation of the special human qualities.

If that is accepted, then we have also laid the foundation for the belief in the basic equality of all men. The difference between an ordinary man and a great man becomes a difference only of degree and may be caused only because the great man had better opportunities to develop his potentialities than ordinary men have. There may be real differences based on abnormalities. Even genius is a form of abnormality. It may be a very desirable disease, but it is a form of disease, a deviation from the norms of the species. A wide variety of special traits, gifts, and characteristics in ordinary human beings do not affect this basic equality.

This view of human nature gives us a new approach to the problem of social reorganization and opens up new prospects for solving the crisis in all spheres of human life from which men suffer in our time. This new approach allows us to start from the assumption that man can think for himself, that man has created his world, and that he can remake it according to his own decision rationally arrived at. That is possible on the assumption that man is essentially rational.

Of course, if you ask me whether I maintain that man is really rational, I must admit that very often he is not. But that does not invalidate the humanist assumption. It is so because man has been told for ages that his nature is to believe and to follow some higher authority, and that, trying to think for himself, he has fallen from grace. We have to work hard to atone for this sin of our forefathers in order to make man conscious of his humanness and that his fate is not preordained by any supernatural power or divine will. That false belief was the basis of man's subordination to successive oppressive terrestrial powers also, and if we want to make man free, if we want to have a free society; we must first make him free of these unfounded beliefs.

Any significant change in the institutional structure of society has been preceded by a change in the thinking processes of men. Every political revolution has been preceded by a philosophical revolution. The modern age started with the Renaissance, which was a revolt of man against God. It came to a dead end because a god was made of man in the absence of a more scientific explanation of man. What the world needs today is a new renaissance, a revolt against those new mystic gods which man, or some men, or men in the mass, are supposed to be. Man has been made into gods, into kings and leaders and supermen. But never yet has man been satisfied and proud to be just man. When men will be content and proud that they are men, and that man is rational and has endless potentialities in him, then only shall we experience a reconstruction of society into an order of freedom as we want it to be.

There have been changes in social institutions in the past, but they were all imposed by some men on other men from the top. New constitutions have been framed from time to time and were imposed on people who had no way of knowing whether those constitutions were good or bad, and why they were so. The modern ideal is democracy, which means self-government of the people. But the people themselves never think that it is really they who might govern. They have come to believe that any change must begin with a group of well-meaning men, having the blueprint of a new social order in their heads, capturing power and with the help of that power imposing their idea of a new order.

That is a great fallacy. Even assuming their ideas are good, the process contradicts all interpretations of democracy This is truly a case of playing Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. They want a democracy but without the demos. But there can be no democracy when the demos know nothing about it. Institutions are after all run by men. Good institutions cannot persist unless they are run by good men. A good government cannot be established unless the demos can discriminate between what is good and what is bad for their society. For this we must appeal to man's rationality. lf that appears to be a long process, that is our atonement for the sins of our fathers who deprived man of faith in himself. But how long the process will be, that also depends to a large extent on us.

Human beings being essentially rational, if we persistently appeal to their reason and not place premiums on unreason, they will ultimately respond to the appeal to their reason rather than to any other appeal, because it is only through the application of their reason that they can ever establish a government of themselves and by themselves and make a success of such a government. It appears so obvious and so simple, and yet this will be truly a revolution, that philosophical revolution without which no social change in the direction of greater freedom is possible.

New humanism is not an abstract philosophy, nor merely a social philosophy or a political or economic theory. It is a set of principles which have relevance to all branches of man's life and social existence and show a way toward their reorganization. They are principles which can inspire mankind to take things in their own hand and shape their social world according to their reason and their needs. New humanism has grown out of the experience of a perennial crisis, which has become all-pervasive, affecting the entire existence of man, and it is that very crisis which has inspired some of the bolder spirits of our time to rethink mankind's entire history and tradition and come to the conclusion that unless man can recover his confidence in himself, society cannot be reconstructed as a happy and harmonious abode for all.

New Humanism is a scientific integral philosophy. The human being is taken not only in the context of society but of the whole universe. It is not an anarchic individualism, because a point has no existence in space. Similarly, while individuals cannot exist independent of society, society is no more than an integration of individuals. Until now, we have put the cart before the horse and said that we must have a good society in order to have good men. That led to the theory that in order to reconstruct society, we must capture power first and that this end justifies all means. At that point all ''goodness'' goes by the board. To make a good society even bad means are justified. But bad means spoil good men. In the process, good men become bad. And bad men cannot make a good society.

New Humanism is not a closed system. Being based on experience and science, it will evolve as experience grows and science develops. It can be considerably elaborated and improved. But it is decidedly a new approach which promises to lead to better results than any other known so far. All the old avenues have led where we did not want to go. Therefore, we must blaze a new trail. The ideas and principles of New Humanism appeal to the best in man, and there must be enough men and women in the world who will respond to an appeal to all that is best in them.