LINCOLN AND MODERN AMERICA

Friday, May. 10, 1963

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but is remarkably wise on the question of individualism. The man who worries about whether he is an individual, says Goodman, is a little sick. The healthy person does not think in those terms at all, because he is committed to some worthy enterprise larger than himself.

"Forces." Ultimately, what affects the individual most deeply is not the physical organization of his life, but the spiritual view he has of himself. The Medieval stonemason may not really have left a far more personal mark on a cathedral than the Detroit assembly-line worker leaves on a car, but he thought of himself and of his work as more important.

When it became clear to man that Reason alone did not really give him an adequate view of himself, a number of surrogate deities emerged—"forces" that supposedly rule man's fate. One was History, and modern man still sees himself to a great extent ruled by this abstraction. A second was Science, which tremendously increased modern man's sense of power over nature. But it also humbled him, by producing new forces of destruction, by building computers incredibly faster than his own brain, and by transforming the simple physical concepts of Newton's day into an almost metaphysical dream world beyond his grasp.

In the name of science, depth psychology tells man that he is really guided not by his conscious will but by his unconscious drives. Sociology, invented by the French Philosopher Auguste Comte—who visualized a scientific religion worshipping a "great being" that was actually humanity itself—says that man is only the product of his environment. No votary of Comte's, the American pragmatist William James told the individual that he stands at the very center of his world, and yet in the end everything in the pragmatic view of man is relative and transitional. How much use the philosopher is in this situation is perfectly summarized by the note found on James's desk after his death: "There is no advice to be given . . . Farewell."

When the surrogate deities fail him, the individual is left alone in an empty and meaningless universe. At that point, existentialism, which is the pragmatism of despair, tells him that he must act and seek out causes even though his very life is absurd.

Religious Elements. Ultimately, the individual can see himself only in the eyes of others—and can see himself great or free only in the reflection of the eye of God. All past attempts to assert the worth of the individual without measuring him against a higher cause have failed, have in the end only diminished him. Nietzsche's rhapsodic worship of man's will, of which Hitler was an absurd and gruesome caricature, fits no more into the true Western tradition than does the soul's meek expectation of nirvana or the patient Russian submission to worldly tyranny. "If it were not for the religious element," says Hocking, "individualism would spell chaos."

Philosopher Hocking, 89, is in a more detached position than most Americans to contemplate the problems of the individual. More than 30 years ago, "to get away from the city," he moved to New Hampshire's White Mountains, where he designed and built three houses from materials found on his 670 acres. He grows most of his own food, has his own herd of cattle, and spends much of his day