It is indeed difficult for me to look at this book impartially, or criticize it objectively. It is the sort of book which I write every day of my life in my off moments. Only about a hundred pages long, its language is at once true, precise, necessitous.
It carries far beyond its scope and intention, as every vital book should. In my mind it situates itself exactly at that angle of time and space which is most portentous. More than any book I have ever read this one is born at precisely the right time. Turning its pages is like turning the pages of life itself, the life which we all know and deny, the life which has never been realized.
The prophetic is not set forth in the usual prophetic manner; on the contrary, the deep certitude which inspired the work creates a sort of axiomatic ecstasy, a residue of truth which is implicit and unshakeable.
The book is true in the highest sense, because based on acceptance, which is to say that it is entirely on the side of life. This acceptance of life is again merely to say recognition of the cosmic principle.
The climate of this opus is a sort of spiritual equinox in which life and death are seen to be at balance. Is it necessary to add that it is precisely at such moments that the miraculous nature of life reveals itself, at just such moments that the whole order of life can be reversed, or transcended?
The men who exerted the greatest influence over the world were those who stood at just such junctures and revealed the truths which were vouchsafed them.
In their wake they brought about devastating changes; they altered the face of the world—and more than the face of the world, the heart of the world! In each case the miracle almost happened; yet somehow something always intervened, the message was aborted, the vision lost.
This has happened so repeatedly as to create in the majority of men an ingrained pessimism as to the destiny of the race. The world is perpetually divided on the question of truth versus illusion.
The two co-exist in man, creating a perpetual duality, a seemingly unhealable schism. More tragic still is that the example which the lives of these great pioneers of the human spirit have given us sputters out in empty symbol and servile fetishism. The tremendous impulse which these great spirits unleashed stiffens into hobbling fetters and manacles imposed by stupid cult and religion.
Every inspired man has been at some time aware of the real significance of these great figures, but the inspiration passes off, unfortunately, into religiousness or into art. Art has been just as crippling as religion, because like religion it has always represented the triumph of man over an imaginary world.
The man of action, it is true, places himself in a real world, but his world is a diminished one and becomes finally even more illusory than the imagined world of the artist or the religious minded individual.
“We have not yet dared to face the world as we should!” writes Gutkind, and that is so. The history of cultural man is one long tale of evasion, of trial by error, of repetition, of cul-de-sac.
Here and there the isolated man of genius has had a vision of the way, but no one man can lead the way! Sacrifice, if it has any meaning, reveals to us that true progress can only be made by all simultaneously.
Today, from the most irreconcilable quarters, there is coagulating the conviction that this futile repetition which has marked the era of “civilization” is destined to cease. We stand at the threshold of a new way of life, one in which MAN is about to be realized.
The disturbances which characterize this age of transition indicate clearly the beginnings of a new climate, a spiritual climate in which the body will no longer be denied, in which, on the contrary, the body of man will find its proper place in the body of the world.
Man’s domination over nature is only now beginning to be understood as something more than a mere technical triumph: behind the brutal assertion of power and will there lies a smoldering sense of the awesomeness, the majesty, the grandeur of his responsibility. Is he perhaps just faintly beginning to realize that “all the ways of the earth lead to heaven?”
Thus, the complete destruction of our cultural world, which seems more than ever assured now by the impending smashup, is really a blessing in disguise. The old grooves of race, religion and nationality are destined to go, and in their place we shall see, for the first time in the history of man, a community of interest based not on the animal in him but on the human being which he has so long denied.
The fight is between the death instinct and the life instinct. It has nothing to do with culture, or bread, or ideology, or peace or security. The schism has grown so wide that it is either self-destruction or a totality never before imagined. With each new conflict one is made increasingly aware of the real battle, which is inner, and which is nothing but a warfare between the real and the ideal man.
The ideal man must perish, and the ideal man will certainly perish, for the last props are now giving way. Man must open up, prepared to live the life of the world in all its worldliness, if he is to survive. For, as Gutkind cogently points out, even worse than the wholesale slaughter in which we indulge is what he calls “sublimated murder,” or the refusal to overflow.
I stress this aspect of the book particularly, because it has always seemed to me incontrovertible that war is just and necessary, so long as men insist on repressing their murderous instincts. War is not an economic affair, nor a curse of the gods, nor an inevitability: it is the reflection of an inner split, the projection of our continuous repressed lusts and hatreds.
That man has always lived in what Gutkind calls “a broken state” seems only too evident. Moreover, man has always known that this condition was evil and unnecessary. The sense of guilt which has accumulated throughout centuries of struggle towards enlightenment and liberation has at last become overwhelming.
It is absurd and wrong to wish to remove this sense of guilt. The sense of guilt is the spiritual barometer which we carry in our blood. It is not only useless to deny sin, it is impossible. Man has been throttling and strangling himself ever since the dawn of history.
He has been fear-stricken—more daring in his panic sometimes than God Almighty, and again more cowardly than the worm. He has never understood what the conflict was about precisely. He has never wanted to accept his real nature, his responsibility, which is creation, and which must begin with himself.
All the forces of coercion are maintained on the false theory of protection—protection against the wicked, or the insane, or the greedy. But the truly insane, the truly wicked, the truly greedy ones are we ourselves, we who try to bolster up the crumbling edifice with external remedies, with prisons, asylums and instruments of war.
Whom are we trying to protect? And against what? The real ghost is fear—we are confronted with it at every step. The whole movement of the social order is a retrograde movement, a retreat, a panic in the face of reality. The man who decides to live his own life is without fear; he lives positively, not negatively.
That is why men like Hitler and Mussolini, who are one with their destiny, move with lightning-like rapidity and assurance. What is there to hinder them? There is no resistance—there is only on the part of their opponents fear, which expresses itself in terms of “peace and security.” The moment one is on the side of life “peace and security” drop out of consciousness. The only peace, the only security, is in fulfillment. On the other hand, whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.
There can be no real life until murder ceases, that is incontestable. “The highest activity,” says Gutkind, “is an effect rather than an act.” In the highest type of activity there is a radiation of energy, as from the sun itself, he adds. “From a center that is at rest.” To overcome the world is to make it transparent, I believe he says, which is a remarkable statement and of a simplicity which is profound.
It is precisely here that one detects the abysmal gulf which separates a Christ or a Buddha, let us say, from a Hitler or a Mussolini. With the latter it is sheer Will which manifests itself, and which in the end destroys itself. In the case of the former it is a vital emanation from a being at peace with himself and the world, and consequently irresistible. The use of the will is the sign of death; it is only as a half-being that the man of will triumphs.
What lives on, when he has worked his will, is the death which was in him. It is this exaltation of the will, the mark of the divided self, which emasculates the world of men and women. Thus, whereas
