In the living organism, too, each part must assert its individuality, for otherwise the organism would lose its articulation and efficiency -- but at the same time the part must remain subordinate to the demands of the whole. Let me give a few examples. The heart as an organ enjoys, of course, an advanced form of self-government: it has its own 'pacemakers' which regulate its rhythm; if one is knocked out a second automatically takes over. But the kidneys, intestines, and stomach also have their autonomous, self-regulating devices. Muscles, even single muscle cells, isolated from the body, will contract in response to appropriate stimulation. Any strip of tissue from an animal's heart will go on beating in vitro in its own, intrinsic rhythm. Each of these organs and organ-parts has a degree of self-sufficiency, a specific rhythm or pattern of activity, governed by a built-in, organic 'code'. Even a single cell has its 'organelles' which independently look after its growth, motion, reproduction, communication, energy-supply, etc.; each according to its own sub-code of more or less fixed 'rules of the game'. On the other hand, of course, these autonomous action-patterns of the part are activated, inhibited or modified by controls on higher levels of the hierarchy. The pacemaker-system of the heart, for instance, is controlled by the autonomous nervous system and by hormones; these in turn depend on orders from centres in the brain. Generally speaking, each organ-matrix (e.g. a cell-organelle) has its intrinsic code which determines the fixed, invariant pattern of its functioning; but it is at the same time a member of a matrix on a higher level (e.g. the cell), which in turn is a member of an organ or tissue, and so forth. Thus the two complementary pairs: matrix and code, self-asserting and participatory tendencies, are both derived from the hierarchic structure of organic life.
Complex skills, too, have a hierarchic structure. However much you try to disguise your handwriting, the expert will find you out by some characteristic way of forming or connecting certain groups of letters -- the pattern has become an automatized and autonomous functional sub-whole which asserts itself against attempts of conscious interference. People whose right hand has been injured and who learn to write with the left soon develop a signature which is indistinguishable from the previous right-handed one -- 'the signature is in the brain', as a neurologist has said. [1] Again, touch-typing is a hierarchically ordered skill, where the 'letter habits' (finding the right key without looking) enter as members into 'word-habits' (antomatized movement-sequences, each with a 'feel' of its own, which are triggered off as wholes, cf. Book Two, XII). Ask a skilled typist to misspell the word 'the' as 'hte' each time it occurs -- and watch how the code of the correct sequence asserts its autonomy. Functional habits must have some kind of structural representation in the neuron-matrices of the brain; and these patterned circuits must be hierarchicaUy organized -- as organ-systems are -- to account for such complex and flexible skills as, for instance, transposing a tune from one key into another.
Under normal conditions, the various parts of an organism -- nerves, viscera, limbs -- perform their semi-autonomous functions as sub-wholes, while at the same time submitting to the regulative control of the higher centres. But under conditions of stress the part called on to cope with the disturbance may become over-excited and get 'out of control'. The same may happen if the organism's powers of control are impaired -- by senescence, for instance, or by a physiological blockage. In both cases the self-assertive tendencies of the part, isolated and released from the restraining influence of the whole, will express themselves in deleterious ways; these range from the remorseless proliferation of cancer cells to the obsessions and delusions, beyond rational control, in mental disorder (cf. Book Two, III, IV).
The single individual represents the top-level of the organismic hierarchy and at the same time the lowest unit of the social hierarchy. It is on this boundary line between physiological and social organization that the two antagonistic tendencies, which are at work on every level, even in a single cell, manifest themselves in the form of 'emotive behaviour'. Under normal conditions the self-asserting tendencies of the individual are dynamically balanced by his dependence on and participation in the life of the community to which he belongs. In the body social physiological controls are of course superseded by institutional controls, which restrain, stimulate, or modify the autonomous patterns of activity of its social sub-wholes on all levels, down to the individual. When tensions arise, or control is impaired, a social 'organ' (the barons, or the military, or the miners) may get over-excited and out of control; the individual, for the same reasons, may give unrestrained expression to rage, panic, or lust, and cease to obey the rules of the game imposed by the social whole of which he is part.
The participatory tendencies are as firmly anchored in the organic hierarchy as are their opponents. From the genetic point of view, the duality is reflected in the complementary processes of differentiation of structure and integration of function. We may extend the scope of the inquiry even further downward, from animal to vegetable and mineral, and discover analogous pairs of self-asserting and participatory forces in inanimate nature. From the particles in an atom to the planets circling the sun, we find relatively stable dynamic systems, in which the disruptive, centrifugal forces are balanced by binding forces which hold the system together as a whole. The metaphors we commonly use reflect an intuitive awareness that the pairs of opposites on various levels form a continuous series: when in rage, 'we fly off at a tangent' as if carried away by a centrifugal force; and contrariwise, we speak of social 'cohesion', personal 'affinities', and the 'attraction' exerted by an idea. These are no more than analogies; the 'attraction' between two people of opposite sex does not obey the inverse square law and is by no means proportionate to their mass; yet it remains nevertheless true that on every level of the evolutionary hierarchy, stability is maintained by the equilibration of forces pulling in opposite directions: centrifugal and centripetal, the former asserting the part's independence, autonomy, individuality, the second keeping it in its place as a dependent part in the whole. Kepler kept affirming that his comparison between the moving force that emanates from the sun and the Holy Ghost was more than an analogy; the cohesion between the free-floating bodies in the solar system must have a divine cause. Newton himself toyed with similar ideas.*
I must apologize for the seemingly sweeping generalizations in the preceding section; the reader will find them substantiated in some detail in the biological chapters of Book Two. For the time being, I only meant to give some indication of the broader theoretical considerations on which the proposed classification of emotions is based -- namely, that 'part-behaviour' and 'whole-behaviour' are opposite tendencies in dynamic equilibrium on every level of a living organism, and can be extrapolated by way of analogy, both upwards into the hierarchies of the body social, and downward into stable anorganic systems.
Such an approach does not imply any philosophical dualism; it is in fact no more dualistic than Newton's law of action and reaction, or the conventional method of 'thinking in opposites'. The choice of 'ultimate' and 'irreducible' principles (such as Freud's Eros and Tanatos) is always largely a matter of taste; 'partness' and 'wholeness' recommend themselves as a serviceable pair of complementary concepts because they are derived from the ubiquitously hierarchic organization of all living matter. They also enable us to discuss the basic features of biological, social, and mental evolution in uniform terms as the emergence of more differentiated and specialized structures, balanced by more complex and delicate integrations of function.
Lastly, increased complexity means increased risks of breakdowns, which can only be repaired by processes of the regenerative, reculer-pour-mieux-sauter type that I have mentioned before and which will occupy us again. I shall try to show that seen in the light of the relation of part to whole, these processes assume a new significance as aids to the understanding of the creative mind.
NOTES
To p. 285. I am using 'self-transcending emotions' as a short-hand expression for 'emotional states in which the se
lf-transcending tendencies dominate'.
To p. 290. In the only excursion into science fiction of which I am guilty, I made a visiting maiden from an alien planet explain the basic doctrine of its quasi-Keplerian religion:
'. . . We worship gravitation. It is the only force which does not travel through space in a rush; it is everywhere in repose. It keeps the stars in their orbits and our feet on our earth. It is Nature's fear of loneliness, the earth's longing for the moon; it is love in its pure, inorganic form.' (Twilight Bar, 1945)
XIV
ON ISLANDS AND WATERWAYS
In the chapter on the 'Logic of the Moist Eye' I have discussed weeping as a manifestation of frustrated participatory emotions. Let me now briefly consider the normal manifestations of this class of emotions in childhood and adult life.
As Freud, Piaget, and others have shown, the very young child does not differentiate between ego and environment. The mother's breast seems to it a more intimate possession than the toes on its own body. It is aware of events, but not for a long time of itself as a separate entity. It lives in a state of mental symbiosis with the outer world, a continuation of the biological symbiosis in the womb, a state which Piaget calls 'protoplasmic consciousness'. [1] The universe is focussed on the self, and the self is the universe; the outer environment is only a kind of second womb.
From this original state of protoplasmic or symbiotic consciousness, the development towards autonomous individuation is slow, gradual, and will never be entirely completed. The initial state of consciousness may be likened to a liquid, fluid universe traversed by dynamic currents, by the rhythmic rise and fall of physiological needs, causing minor storms which come and go without leaving any solid traces. Gradually the floods recede and the first islands of objective reality emerge; their contours grow firmer and sharper and are set off against the undifferentiated flux. The islands are followed by continents, the dry territories of reality are mapped out; but side by side with them the liquid world co-exists, surrounding it, interpenetrating it by canals and inland lakes, the relics of the erstwhile oceanic communion. In the words of Freud:
Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling -- a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world. If we may suppose that this primary ego-feeling has been preserved in the minds of many people, to a greater or lesser extent, it would co-exist like a sort of counterpart with the narrower and more sharply outlined ego-feeling of maturity, and the ideational content belonging to it would be precisely the notion of limitless extension and oneness with the universe. [2]
It is this 'oceanic feeling' which mystics and artists strive to recapture on a higher level of development -- at a higher turn of the spiral.
Until the end of the second or third year, while the separation of ego and non-ego is as yet incomplete, the child tends to confuse the subjective and the objective, dream and reality, the perceived and the imagined, its thoughts and the things thought about. Children and primitives not only believe in the magical transformations which occur in myths and fairy tales, but also believe themselves capable of performing them. The child at play becomes at will transformed into a horse, the doctor, a burglar, or a locomotive. Some primitives believe that they change at night into certain animals; if the animal is killed, they have to die. Magic causation precedes physical causation; to wish for an event is almost the same as producing it; children are great believers in the omnipotence of thought. As thought becomes increasingly centred in verbal and visual symbols, these become instruments of wishful evocation -- of word-magic and symbol-magic.
This erstwhile method of establishing magic connections between events -- regardless of distance in space, succession in time, or physical intermediaries, is a basic feature of primitive, but also of some highly developed societies, particularly in the East. Lévy-Bruhl -- an anthropologist now somewhat out of fashion who greatly influenced Freud, Piaget, and Jung -- had called this phenomenon 'participation mystique' or the 'Law of Participation'. [3] It is reflected in innumerable rites and observances; in the individual's experience of a quasi-symbiotic communion between himself, his tribe, and his totem; between a man and his name, a man and his portrait, a man and his shadow; between the deity and its symbol; between a desired event -- rain, or a successful hunt -- and its symbolic enactment in dance, ritual play, or pictorial representation. Here is the ancient, unitary source out of which the dance and the song, the mystery plays of the Achaens, the calendars of the Babylonian priest-astronomers, and the cave-paintings of Altamira were to branch out later on -- a magic source which, however great the distance travelled, still provides artist and explorer with his basic nourishment.
At an even earlier stage of social evolution, magic participation could be achieved by still more direct methods: the physical prowess of animals, the courage and wisdom of other men, the body and blood of the sacrificed god, could be acquired and shared by the simple means of eating them.* The sacrament of Holy Communion reflects, in a symbolic and sublimated form, the ecstasies of the Dionysian and Orphic mystery-rites: the devouring of the torn god. The participatory magic of trans-substantiation operates here not only between the communicant and his god, but also between all those who have partaken in the rite, and incorporated the same substance into themselves. A ghastly degeneration of this ritual was revealed when the circumstances of taking the Mau-Mau oath became known. A more harmless form of it is the 'blood-brother' ceremony among Arab tribes, performed by drinking a few drops of the elected brother's blood; a socially valuable survival of it are the rites of conviviality -- from the symbolic sharing of bread and salt, to the ceremonial banqueting of the Chevaliers du Taste-Vin. The emotions derived from the feeding-drive seem to be of the purely self-assertive type; in fact, commensality, with its archetypal echoes, invests them with a more or less pronounced participatory character.
The progress from the historically earlier, or infantile forms of symbiotic consciousness towards voluntary self-transcendence through artistic, religious or social communion, reflects the sublimation of the participatory tendencies -- emerging at the other end of the tunnel, as it were. Needless to say, the culture in which we live is not very favourable to this progress; the majority of our contemporaries never emerge from the tunnel, and get only occasional intimations of a distant pinpoint of light. The forces which effect the gradual replacement of the child's subjective by objective reality arise through continuous friction between self and environment. Hard facts emerge because objects are hard, and hurt if one bangs against them; wishes do not displace mountains, not even rocking horses. A second type of friction, between the self and other selves, drives home the fact that these latter too exist in their own right. Biological communion with the mother is dissolved by a succession of separative acts: expulsion from the womb, weaning from the breast, the cessation of fondling and petting, Western man's 'taboo on tenderness'. Things and people wage a continuous war of attrition on the magic forms of participation -- until the floods recede, and the waterways dry up. Symbiotic consciousness wanes with maturation, as it must; but modern education provides hardly any stimuli for awakening cosmic consciousness to replace it. The child is taught petitionary prayer instead of meditation, religious dogma instead of contemplation of the infinite; the mysteries of nature are drummed into his head as if they were paragraphs in the penal code. In tribal societies puberty is a signal for solemn and severe initiation rites, to impress upon the individual his collective ties, before he is accepted as a part in the social whole. Vestiges of these rites still survive in institutions such as the Church and the Army; yet the majority of individuals take their place in the body social not by a process of integration, but as a result of random circumstances and pressures. The romantic bursts of enthusiasm in adolescence are like a last, euphoric flicker of the self-transcending em
otions before they submit to atrophy and begin to shrivel away.
But they are never completely defeated. For one thing, the attritive forces of the social environment affect different strata of the personality in different ways. The most affected are the conscious, rational surface-layers directly exposed to contact; whereas the non-socialized, non-verbalized strata become the natural refuge of the thwarted participatory tendencies. The more remote from the surface, the less sharp the boundaries between the self and non-self; in those depths the symbiotic channels still remain navigable in the dream and other games of the underground, from which mysticism, discovery, and art draw their intuitions.
There exists, however, a whole range of more ordinary phenomena through which the self-transcending emotions manifest themselves in everyday life, and which I must briefly mention. The most banal of these is perceptual projection, which does not properly belong in this context -- except in so far as it demonstrates that the boundaries of the self in our subjective experiences are not as clear-cut as we are wont to believe. 'Projection' in this technical sense means that the processes which take place in the retina and the brain are experienced as taking place not where they actually do take place, but yards or miles away. (This becomes at once obvious when one remembers that very low-pitched sounds are experienced -- correctly -- as reverberations inside the ear, and dazzling flashes, again correctly, as occurring in the retina.) Similarly, when you drive a nail into the wall you are aware, not that the handle has struck your palm, but that its head has struck the nail, as if the hammer had become part of your body. [4] These are not inventions of psychologists to make the simple appear as complicated, but examples of our tendency to confuse what happens in the self with what happens outside it -- a kind of 'perceptual symbiosis' between ego and environment.
The Act of Creation Page 34