At the Threshold of the Twentieth Century Tom Rubens looks at the religious vision of two formidable early twentieth-century atheists.
First of all, let’s consider what it meant, for the advanced Western mind, to stand at the threshold of the twentieth century. The nineteenth century had witnessed unparalleled advances in the sciences, and these had inevitably produced profound repercussions in philosophy. They had also massively weakened the ontological claims of Christianity, traditionally the West’s major religion. Perhaps the most famous example of this undermining effect was the impact of Darwinism and evolutionary biology; but, on all scientific fronts, the assault on Christian ontology was formidable. Overall, the intellectual changes wrought in the nineteenth century made it the first century in modern Western history whose leading thinkers were predominantly and overtly agnostic or atheistic. Schopenhauer, Marx, Feuerbach, Buchner, von Hartmann, and Nietzsche in Germany; Bentham, Mill, Tyndall, Clifford and Spencer in England; Comte in France: these men, with their radically challenging perspectives, were characteristic of the nineteenth century. Some exerted widespread influence not only in philosophy but also literature. In fact, the general intellectual atmosphere they created has remained characteristic of advanced Western culture; it prevails today, in advanced circles, just as it did, in the same circles, during the twentieth century.
It was this atmosphere that nurtured Bertrand Russell and George Santayana. Santayana, born 1863, and Russell, born 1872, came to intellectual maturity in the closing part of the nineteenth century; the momentum accumulated by the secular thinking of their predecessors was at its height. Respect for science, rationalism and open enquiry was, among exploring minds, at high tide.
However, this respect was exacting, as it always is.
Liberation from the mental shackles of a supernaturalistic outlook was of course exhilarating, but it was replaced by the exigencies of a scientific world view which saw the cosmos as godless, mindless, purposeless, and mankind as a minute, fragile feature of the cosmic totality. The disintegration of religious illusions about man’s origin and place in the universe left a grim perspective in which humanity was seen as a marginal and transient element in the continuing, wholly mechanistic changefulness of the cosmos. Both Russell and Santayana bore the full weight of this perspective, and unflinchingly explored its implications.
At the same time, they sought sustenance in the face of grimness: they looked to certain kinds of human association, shared activities and goals, which could provide inspiration and comfort without illusions, without any falsification of reality. Their engagement with both the negative and positive ramifications of a scrupulously scientific approach to the universe is, clearly, as relevant now as it was 100 years ago.
That engagement is definitively expressed by Russell in an essay published in 1903, entitled ‘A Free Man’s Worship’; and by Santayana in an essay published in 1900 called ‘A Religion of Disillusion’.
The Russell essay originally appeared in a journal called The Independent Review, and was later reprinted in Russell’s book Mysticism and Logic (1917). The Santayana essay appeared in his book Interpretations of Poetry and Religion ( as above, 1900). The closeness of the publication dates seems, in retrospect, highly significant, as if the two philosophers, though of course working entirely separately, were jointly presenting themselves as the inheritors of the nineteenth century secular achievement: an inheritance which they had filtered through the medium of their own sensibilities, and were now passing on to the twentieth, having infused it with their own personal colouring.
Let’s begin with ‘A Free Man’s Worship’. Russell avers:
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his Russell and Santayana:
Bertrand Russell origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.
In the process of referring to astronomy’s prediction that the sun will eventually self-destruct, a prediction already well established by the turn of the twentieth century, Russell powerfully conveys the aforementioned sense of man as an ephemeral and fortuitous episode in a fundamentally non-human march of cosmic events: as a passing phase of the solar system’s ultimately supra-human momentum.
This view finds a striking parallel in Santayana’s words in ‘A Religion of Disillusion’. Man’s fortuitous status is captured in Santayana’s definition of humanity as ‘the product and the captive of an irrational engine called the universe’. Mankind’s peripheral position in a cosmos which pursues its own course regardless of humanity is emphasised when Santayana says:
That Nature is immense, that her laws are mechanical, that the existence and wellbeing of man upon the earth are, from the point of view of the universe, an indifferent incident – all this is… to be clearly recognised.
The essay goes on to describe the human mind from a naturalistic standpoint. Man’s intelligence is seen as product of particular biological conditions, conditions which necessarily delimit it. The mind can never know more than it is biologically capable of knowing, can never transcend the context from which it originated; and since that context is but a small and transitory part of the stupendous physical evolution of the universe, intellect is, by its very nature, incapable of knowing all – or, at least, all about the future. To be omniscient, it would have to stand above space and time, as something wholly non-contingent, wholly independent of physical circumstances. The contrary being the case, the person of naturalistic outlook will recognise the futility of striving for omniscience and ‘will silence the demands of his own reason and call them chimerical’.
Ultimate ignorance and universal mutability are the realities he will accordingly resign himself to.
Russell too is keenly aware of the limitations imposed on the mind by humanity’s physical situation. In FMW, he speaks of man’s ‘brief years’ and ‘little day’ – in which, however, he may try to garner as much knowledge as his situation allows. At the same time, there is in Russell, though not in Santayana, a sense of the cosmos as a place of darkness, despite its many suns. He refers to those people who have shed the illusions bred by Christian ontology, and are therefore bereft of the false certainties which accompany those illusions, as ‘fellow sufferers in the same darkness’. Further, mankind is seen as positioned on a narrow raft surrounded by ‘the dark ocean on whose rolling waves we toss for a brief hour’. The raft itself is illumined only by ‘the flickering light of human comradeship’. ( Incidentally, in the use he makes of the idea of darkness, Russell is remarkably similar to James Thomson, in his famous poem The City of Dreadful Night, published 30 years before FMW) Santayana’s way of describing the cosmos is less dramatic, but equally gaunt. He speaks of ‘the intractable infinite,’ of ‘the blind energy behind Nature,’ and of the universe apart from humanity as ‘a chaos’.
It is clear that much of the above, both in substance and tone, anticipates the writings of the atheistic existentialists in a later part of the twentieth century, especially Sartre and Camus. There are also echoes backwards, particularly of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.
Given this daunting viewpoint, Russell and Santayana sought, as said, support and inspiration from wholly human sources. Supernaturalistic categories of all kinds were eschewed. In Russell, there is a call to assert human solidarity, and to maintain compassionate and civilised values in the face of a brute universe devoid of them. In Santayana, the argument is similar but more extensive, urging the creation of a specifically human order – social, artistic, scientific – as a riposte to the outer cosmic chaos. In these views, contemporary humanism is prefigured: the perspective of all present-day humanists is that mankind can establish and maintain its context only as something distinct from the surrounding cosmos.
Civilisation is up to us, not to some super-human agency.
Let’s now look in more detail at Russell’s position.
He begins by emphasising the limitations within which humanity must work to construct its habitation. The harsh truths revealed by astronomy are the ‘scaffolding’, the inescapable parameters, which set the boundaries to such construction. The recognition of these parameters, and of the non-moral character of the omnipotent cosmic processes, must both be continually borne in mind as humanity goes about the task of creating moral and psychological anchorage for itself. Russell argues that full acknowledgement of limits will lead to a renunciation of desire for personal goods, since the latter are ‘subject to the mutations of Time’. Renunciation is also called for by the recognition that ‘the world was not made for us’. This attitude should, he says, be shared by all people of panoramic outlook. (One might add that the call for renunciation carries obvious echoes of the asceticism traditionally associated with religious culture. But we should remember that asceticism has been as much a part of general philosophical culture as of religious. In this case, it is humanistic.) Russell goes on to say that renunciation is not in fact an end in itself but a path ‘to the daylight of wisdom, by whose radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to gladden the pilgrim’s heart’. (Again, in the diction, note echoes of religious culture, but also the applicability to humanism.) This inspiring and sustaining outlook is actually a state of mental mastery over ‘the thoughtless forces of Nature’. By understanding these forces fully, by perceiving even their physical superiority, one achieves mental superiority over them. They are cognitively absorbed, assimilated, placed, and so lose the power to terrify and dismay. Likewise the sorrow and pain with which human life is fraught: ‘to feel these things and to know them is to conquer them’.
The internal victory over the adversity of external fact constitutes a kind of cognitive heroism, and is ‘the true baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into the over-mastering beauty of human existence’. That beauty includes the great achievements in the arts and sciences – the work, indeed, of ‘the noon-day brightness of human genius’ to which Russell has previously referred. This is a beauty everyone can avail himself/herself of.
From psychological triumph over external adversity comes not only renunciation and wisdom but also ‘charity’; ‘with their birth, a new life begins’.
The new life means ‘to burn with passion for eternal things’, and so gain a freedom which attachment to the merely personal and temporary can never give.
Such burning is in fact ‘the free man’s worship’. In these words, we are inevitably reminded of Spinoza and his concept of sub specie aeternatis.
Spinoza was actually a major influence on Russell, though he is not mentioned in FMW.
Pervading this whole mind-set is a panoramic joy and happiness which is fully deserved because it has a valid ontological foundation. Scientifically endorsed, hard-won, purified, it is the rightful reward of everyone who has consistently trod the scientific path and steadily shed illusions. That path constantly demands toil, is constantly upward, and is unsparing in many of the vistas it unfolds. At the same time, being equal to its exigencies is a source of profound satisfaction: possessing the unflagging zeal to move higher and higher is the foundation of happiness and the essence of the free man’s worship.
The idea of moral and cultural sharing which runs through Russell’s thinking is taken substantially further in Santayana. Once, he says, humanity has realised that, outside the human sphere, all is alien, chaotic and beyond control, it should aim to create and maintain order in the small physical region it occupies. If the extra-human area is chaos, in the sense of being purposeless, then the human area may be made a cosmos – meaning, as in the original Greek sense of the word, a purposively ordered system.
Though human evolution is founded on the aimlessness and non-rationality which underlie all physical facts in the universe, man can give that nonrationality a conscious direction and aim. Through the exercise of intelligence, he can bring satisfaction and fulfilment to the energies which, having come into being blindly, precede intelligence. In thus rationalising the pre-rational, humanity creates ‘the cosmos of society, character and art’ – indeed, the whole realm of culture and civilisation.
Metaphorically speaking, this cosmos is ‘a Noah’s ark floating in the Deluge’ or ‘an oasis…in Nature’.
In examining the benefits of such order within chaos, Santayana puts considerable emphasis on equanimity. Once, he feels, man has properly understood his place in nature, he will attain peace with himself, and at the same time make peace with the crude forces that surround him. Having established his province and differentiated himself from the rest of the universe, he will have no desire to George Santayana sink back to the mindless turbulence from which he first emerged, and out of which he has, with great difficulty, managed to raise himself.
Also, in achieving inner peace, he will take an objective view of the whole range of his volitions, and so be better able to satisfy them in an intelligent, circumspect manner. This objectivity will be instinct with the naturalistic perspective, and so will ensure that men do not regard their will as having a sacred character or supernatural source.
The constructing of the human cosmos is ‘the building of our own house’, the race’s way of achieving ‘something like its perfection and its ideal’, under planetary conditions which constitute a fortuitous equilibrium of natural forces favourable to that advanced form of animal evolution that is mankind. This equilibrium, though accidental, has proved long-lasting, and may well be ‘no less stable than that which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits’. (Santayana does not here refer to the prediction about the sun’s self-destruction, though he does elsewhere in his work.) Thus civilisation ‘need not be short-lived’.
Nevertheless, such a balance of forces is only culture’s necessary condition. Its sufficient condition is the human willingness and resolve to create it – ’for there is none other that builds it for us’. Civilisation is up to us, not to some super-human agency. Only by understanding this in all its implications can we make ‘that rare advance in wisdom which consists in abandoning our illusions the better to attain our ideals’.
Throughout RD, Santayana maintains a distinctive note of sobriety and restraint. Recognising the contingent and accidental character of human existence, and confronting the vastness and indifference of nature, he recommends ‘patience and dignity’. He emphasises the need to avoid unrealistic hopes and excessive or misplaced enthusiasm. One of the many strengths of his writing in general is its effect of radically disciplining mind and emotion.
We might add that the world could do with far more of the restraint he advocates, because it would reduce violence and the threat of it. The century at the start of which Santayana wrote has been the most murderous on record. It has been fraught with killing produced, for the most part, by conflicts with roots in rigid ideology, nationalism and ethnicism. These conflicts could, in the main, have been resolved peacefully if human beings had had a wider scientific sense of themselves: a sense of common evolutionary origin and of shared vulnerability as members of a hard-pressed species which is alone – as far as present knowledge shows – in a universe which knows it not.
The same point can of course be made in connection with Russell’s advocacy of wisdom and charity. It even relates to his recommendation of renunciation. In a highly acquisitive society, such as our own has increasingly become in the twentieth century, there is clear merit in arguing for a major reduction in consumerism and the desire for possessions. This is not quite the renunciation urged by Russell, which is perhaps not what most of us wish for, or could attain even if we did wish for. But it is a significant step in that direction: one that brings considerable benefits by increasing peace of mind, and co-operation between individuals and whole societies.
All in all, the contemporary situation stands in need of improvement. The resurgence of fundamentalist religious influence, and the consequent hostility to or neglect of strict scientific method; the worsening of economic pressures on people with the growing emphasis on competitiveness; the international violence produced by both fundamentalist resurgence and the ruthless pursuit of economic interests on the part of the rich and powerful: these are among the factors militating against the outlook which is truly appropriate to modern man, and which can offer genuine guidance, illumination and peace. Such is the outlook jointly provided by Russell and Santayana 100 years ago, and one that still awaits general adoption.
Tom Rubens teaches English at Havering College in Essex.
He is the author of four books on philosophy,and also writes poetry and fiction.
An earlier version of this article appeared in the Ethical Record. Reprinted with permission.