When we look for answers to the questions we have been discussing, we find, curiously enough, that every answer seems to somehow impoverish the problem. Every answer sells us short; it does not do justice to the depth of the question but transforms it from a dynamic human concern into a simplistic, lifeless, inert line of words. Hence, Denis de Rougement says, at the end of his Love in the Western World, that there “probably aren’t any answers.”

The only way of resolving—in contrast to solving—the questions is to transform them by means of deeper and wider dimensions of consciousness. The problems must be embraced in their full meaning, the antinomies resolved even with their contradictions. They must be built upon; and out of this will arise a new level of consciousness. This is as close as we shall ever get to a resolution; and it is all we need to get. In psychotherapy, for example, we do not seek answers as such, or cut-and-dry solutions to the question—which would leave the patient worse off than he originally was in his struggling. But we seek to help him take in, encompass, embrace, and integrate the problem. With insight, Carl Jung once remarked that the serious problems of life are never solved, and if it seems that they have been solved, something important has been lost.

This is the “message” of all three of the central emphases in this book: eros, the daimonic, and intentionality. As the function of eros, both within us and in the universe itself, is to draw us toward the ideal forms, it elicits in us the capacity to reach out, to let ourselves be grasped, to preform and mold the future. It is the self-conscious capacity to be responsive to what might be. The daimonic, that shadowy side which, in modern society, inhabits the underground realms as well as the transcendent realms of eros, demands integration from us on the personal dimension of consciousness. Intentionality is an imaginative attention which underlies our intentions and informs our actions. It is the capacity to participate in knowing or performing the art proleptically—that is, trying it on for size, performing it in imagination. Each of these emphases points toward a deeper dimension in human beings. Each requires a participation from us, an openness, a capacity to give of ourselves and receive into ourselves. And each is an inseparable part of the basis of love and will.

The new age which knocks upon the door is as yet unknown, seen only through beclouded windows. We get only hints of the new continent into which we are galloping: foolhardy are those who attempt to blueprint it, silly those who attempt to forecast it, and absurd those who irresponsibly try to toss it off by saying that the “new man will like his new world just as we like ours.” There is plenty of evidence that many people do not like ours and that riots and violence and wars are necessary to force those in power to change it. But whatever the new world will be, we do not choose to back into it. Our human responsibility is to find a plane of consciousness which will be adequate to it and will fill the vast impersonal emptiness of our technology with human meaning.

The urgent need for this consciousness is seen by sensitive persons in all fields and is especially made real by the new consciousness in race relations, where we live if we transcend racial differences and die if we do not. I quote James Baldwin: “If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time.’”¹

Love and will are both forms of communion of consciousness. Both are also affects—ways of affecting others and our world. This play on words is not accidental: for affect, meaning affection or emotion, is the same word as that for affecting change. An affect or affection is also the way of making, doing, forming something. Both love and will are ways of creating consciousness in others. To be sure, each may be abused: love may be used as a way of clinging, and will as a way of manipulating others in order to enforce a compliance. Possibly always some traces of clinging love and manipulating will crop up in the behavior of all of us. But the abuse of an affect should not be the basis for its definition. The lack of both love and will ends up in separation, putting a distance between us and the other person; and in the long run, this leads to apathy.

LOVE AS PERSONAL

In the embracing and transformation of the antimonies of love and will, we have discovered that sexual love moves through drive to need to desire. Freud began with sex conceived as a drive, a push from the past, a stored-up set of energies. This concept came largely from the fact that his patients were victims of Victorian repression. But we now know that sexual love can evolve from drive, through primary need, to desire. As a drive, sexuality is essentially biological, has the character of force, and is physiologically insistent. Need is a less imperative form of drive. So long as a need is repressed, it tends to become a drive. We shall lump the two together here, as need, contrasting them both with desire.

The need is physiological in origin, but becomes imperious because of the constant stimulation of sexuality all about us. In contrast, the desire is psychological, and arises from human (in a total organismic sense) rather than physiological experience. The first is an economy of scarcity; the second is an economy of abundance. The need pushes us from the rear—we try to get back to something, to protect something, and we are then driven by this need. The desire, on the other hand, pulls us ahead to new possibilities. The need is negative, the desire positive. To be sure, if sexual love, or specifically sex, is unrelieved when the person is in a constant state of stimulation over a period of time, it reverts to its earlier status as a compelling need and may then become a drive.

We find, from sources where we would least expect, impressive evidence that even on infrahuman levels, sex is not the primary need we have thought it to be. In Harry Harlow’s extensive work with rhesus monkeys, it becomes clear that the monkeys’ need for contact, touch, and relationship takes precedence over the “drive” toward sex. The same is true of Masserman’s experiments with monkeys, where sex turns out not to be the primary, all-encompassing drive. To be sure, sex is a primary need for the race, and its biological survival depends on sex. But as our world becomes less and less bound by the exigencies of that kind of biological survival—indeed overpopulation is our threat—and more and more open to the development of human values and choices, we find that this emphasis is not constructive, and that the individual does not depend upon sexuality as a primary need.

Now it is in the shift from drive to desire that we see human evolution. We find love as personal. If love were merely a need, it would not become personal, and will would not be involved: choices and other aspects of self-conscious freedom would not enter the picture. One would just fulfill the needs. But when sexual love becomes desire, will is involved; one chooses the woman, is aware of the act of love, and how it gets its fulfillment is a matter of increasing importance. Love and will are united as a task and an achievement. For human beings, the more powerful need is not for sex per se but for relationship, intimacy, acceptance, and affirmation.

This is where the fact that there are men and women—the polarity of loving—becomes ontologically necessary. The increased personal experience goes along with the increased consciousness; and consciousness is a polarity, an either/or, a saying “yes” to this and “no” to that. This is why, in an earlier chapter, we referred to the negative-positive polarity held in the theories of both Whitehead and Tillich. The paradox of love is that it is the highest degree of awareness of the self as a person and the highest degree of absorption in the other. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin asks, in The Phenomenon of Man, “At what moment do lovers come into the most complete possession of themselves, if not when they are lost in each other?”²

The polarity which is shown ontologically in the processes of nature is also shown in the human being. Day fades into night and out of darkness day is born again; yin and yang are inseparable and always present in oscillation; my breath expires and I then inspire again. The systole and diastole of my heartbeat echo this polarity in the universe; it is not mere poetry to say that the beat of the universe, which constitutes its life, is reflected in the beating of the human heart. The continuous rhythm of each moment of existence in the natural universe is reflected in the pulsating blood stream of each human being.

The fact that love is personal is shown in the love act itself. Man is the only creature who makes love face to face, who copulates looking at his partner. Yes, we can turn our heads or assume other positions for variety’s sake, but these are variations on a theme—the theme of making love vis-à-vis each other. This opens the whole front of the person—the breasts, the chest, the stomach, all the parts which are most tender and most vulnerable—to the kindness or the cruelty of the partner. The man can thus see in the eyes of the woman the nuances of delight or awe, the tremulousness or the angst; it is the posture of the ultimate baring of one’s self.

This marks the emergence of man as a psychological creature: it is the shift from animal to man. Even monkeys mount from the rear. The consequences of this change are great indeed. It not only stamps the love act as irrevocably personal, with all the implications of that fact, one of which being that the lovers can speak if they wish. Another consequence is the accentuation of the experience of intimacy in giving the side of the person closest to “ourselves” in the sexual experience. The two chords of love-making—one’s experience of himself and his experience of the partner—are temporarily merged here. We feel our delight and passion and we look into the eyes of the partner also reading there the meaning of the act—and I cannot distinguish between her passion and mine. But the looking is fraught with intensity; it brings a heightened consciousness of relationship. We experience what we are doing—which may be play, or exploitation, or sharing of sensuality, or fucking, or lovemaking, or any form thereof. But at least the norm given by this position is personal. We have to block something off, exert some effort, to make it not personal. This is ontology in the psychological area: the capacity for self-relationship constitutes the genus Homo sapiens.

The banal word “relating” is lifted to an ontological level in this act which is anything but banal, in which male and female re-enact their counterpart of the age-old cosmic process, each time virginally and with surprise as though it were the first time. When Pythagoras talks of the music of the stars, he refers to a music which has as its obligato the basic act of sexual love.

One result of this personal aspect of sexual love is the variety it gives us. Consider, as an analogy, Mozart’s music. In some portions of his music Mozart is engaged in elegant play. In other portions his music comes to us as pure sensuous pleasure, giving us a sheer delight. But in other portions, like the death music at the end of Don Giovanni or in his quintets, Mozart is profoundly shaking: we are gripped by fate and the daimonic as the inescapable tragedy rises before us. If Mozart had only the first element, play, he would sooner or later be banal and boring. If he presented only pure sensuality, he would become cloying; or if only the fire and death music, his creations would be too heavy. He is great because he writes on all three dimensions; and he must be listened to on all these levels at once.

Sexual love similarly can not only be play, but probably an element of sheer play should be regularly present. By this token, casual relationships in sex may have their gratification or meaning in the sharing of pleasure and tenderness. But if one’s whole pattern and attitude toward sex is only casual, then sooner or later the playing itself becomes boring. The same is true of sensuality, obviously an element in any gratifying sexual love: if it has to carry the whole weight of the relationship, it becomes cloying. If sex is only sensuality, you sooner or later turn against sex itself. The element of the daimonic and tragic gives the depth and the memorable quality to love, as it does to Mozart’s music.

ASPECTS OF THE LOVE ACT

Let us summarize how the love act contributes to the deepening of consciousness. First, there is the tenderness which comes out of an awareness of the other’s needs and desires and the nuances of his feelings. The experience of tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves but a union. In this love act, the lover often cannot tell whether a particular sensation of delight is felt by him or his loved one—and it doesn’t make any difference. A sharing takes place which is a new Gestalt, a new field of magnetic force, a new being.

The second aspect of the deepened consciousness comes from the affirmation of the self in the love act. Despite the fact that many people in our culture use sex to get a short-circuited, ersatz identity, the love act can and ought to provide a sound and meaningful avenue to the sense of personal identity. We normally emerge from love-making with renewed vigor, a vitality which comes not from triumph or proof of one’s strength but from the expansion of awareness. Probably in love-making there is always some element of sadness—to continue an analogy suggested in an earlier chapter—as there is in practically all music no matter how joyful (precisely because it does not last; one hears it at that moment or it is lost forever). This sadness come from the reminder that we have not succeeded absolutely in losing our separateness; and the infantile hope that we can recover the womb never becomes a reality. Even our increased self-awareness can also be a poignant reminder that none of us ever overcomes his loneliness completely. But by the replenished sense of our own personal significance in the love act itself, we can accept these limitations laid upon us by our human finiteness.

This leads immediately to the third aspect, the enrichment and fulfillment—so far as this is possible—of personality. Beginning with the expansion of awareness of our own selves and our feelings, this consists of experiencing our capacity to give pleasure to the other person, and thereby achieving an expansion of meaning in the relationship. We are carried beyond what we were at any given moment; I become literally more than I was. The most powerful symbol imaginable for this is procreation—the fact that a new being may be conceived and born. By new being I mean not simply a literal “birth,” but the birth of some new aspect of one’s self. Whether literal or partially metaphorical, the fact remains that the love act is distinguished by being procreative; and whether casual and ephemeral or faithful and lasting, this is the basic symbol of love’s creativity.

A fourth aspect of new consciousness lies in the curious phenomenon that being able to give to the other person in love-making is essential to one’s own full pleasure in the act. This sounds like a banal moralism in our age of mechanization of sex and emphasis on “release of tension” in sexual objects. But it is not sentimentality; it is rather a point which anyone can confirm in his own experience in the love act—that to give is essential to one’s own pleasure. Many patients in psychotherapy find themselves discovering, generally with some surprise, that something is missing if they cannot “do something for,” give something to, the partner—the normal expression of which is the giving in the act of intercourse itself. Just as giving is essential to one’s own full pleasure, the ability to receive is necessary in the love relationship also. If you cannot receive, your giving will be a domination of the partner. Conversely, if you cannot give, your receiving will leave you empty. The paradox is demonstrably true that the person who can only receive becomes empty, for he is unable actively to appropriate and make his own what he receives. We speak, thus, not of receiving as a passive phenomenon, but of active receiving: one knows he is receiving, feels it, absorbs it into his own experience whether he verbally acknowledges it or not, and is grateful for it.

A corollary of this is the strange phenomenon in psychotherapy that when the patient feels some emotion—eroticism, anger, alienation, or hostility—the therapist normally finds himself feeling that same emotion. This inheres in the fact that when a relationship is genuine, they empathetically share a common field of emotion. This leads to the fact that, in everyday life, we normally tend to fall in love with those who love us. The meaning of “wooing” and “winning” a person is to be found here. The great “pull” to love someone comes precisely from his or her loving you. Passion arouses an answering passion.

Now I am aware of all the objections which will immediately be raised to this statement. One is that people are often repulsed by someone’s loving them. Another is that my statement does not take into account all the added things one is motivated to do for the beloved and that it places too great an emphasis on passivity. The first objection, I answer, is the reverse proof of my point: we inhabit a Gestalt with the one who loves us, and to protect ourselves against his emotion, possibly with good reason, we react with revulsion. The second objection is merely a footnote to what I am already saying—that if someone loves us, he will do the many things necessary to show us that this is so; the actions are not the cause, however, but part of the total field. And the third objection will be made only by people who still separate passive and active and who have not accepted or understood active receiving. As we all know, the love experience is filled with pitfalls and disappointments and traumatic events for most of us. But all the pitfalls in the world do not gainsay the point that the given affect going out to the other does incite a response, positive or negative, in him. To quote Baldwin again, we are “like lovers [who] insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others.” Hence, making love (with the verb being neither a manipulative nor accidental one) is the most powerful incentive for an answering emotion.

There is, finally, the form of consciousness which occurs ideally at the moment of climax in sexual intercourse. This is the point when the lovers are carried beyond their personal isolation, and when a shift in consciousness occurs which they experience as uniting them with nature itself. There is an accelerating experience of touch, contact, union to the point where, for a moment, the awareness of separateness is lost, blotted out in a cosmic feeling of oneness with nature. In Hemingway’s novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, the older woman, Pilar, waits for the hero and the girl he loves when they have gone ahead into the mountain to make love; and when they return, she asks, “Did the earth shake?” This seems to be a normal part of the momentary loss of awareness of the self and the surging up of a sudden consciousness that includes the earth as well. I do not wish my account to sound too “ideal,” for I think it is a quality, however subtle, in all love-making except the most depersonalized sort. Nor do I wish it to sound simply “mystic,” for despite limitations in our awareness, I think it is an inseparable part of actual experience in the love act.

CREATING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Love pushes us toward this new dimension of consciousness because it is based on the original “we” experience. Contrary to the usual assumption, we all begin life not as individuals, but as “we” we are created by the union of male and female, literally of one flesh, produced by the semen of the father fertilizing the egg of the mother. Individuality emerges within this original “we,” and by virtue of this “we.” True, no one of us would actualize himself at all if he did not, sooner or later, become an individual, did not assert his own identity against his mother and father. Individual consciousness is essential for that. Though we do not begin as lonely selves, it is necessary—as we have lost the first freedom, the Garden of Eden at our mother’s breast—that we be able to affirm our individuality as the Garden crumbles and the beginning of a man emerges. As the “we” is original organically, the “I” is original in human consciousness. This individual is a man because he can accept the crumbling of the first freedom, painful as it is, can affirm it, and can begin his pilgrimage toward full consciousness. The original “we” is always a backdrop against which we conduct the pilgrimage. As W. H. Auden puts it:

We have said that sex is saved from self-destruction by eros, and that this is the normal condition. But eros cannot live without philia, brotherly love and friendship. The tension of continuous attraction and continuous passion would be unbearable if it lasted forever. Philia is the relaxation in the presence of the beloved which accepts the other’s being as being; it is simply liking to be with the other, liking to rest with the other, liking the rhythm of the walk, the voice, the whole being of the other. This gives a width to eros; it gives it time to grow; time to sink its roots down deeper. Philia does not require that we do anything for the beloved except accept him, be with him, and enjoy him. It is friendship in the simplest, most direct terms. This is why Paul Tillich makes so much of acceptance, and the ability—curious loss for modern man that this will sound strange—to accept acceptance.⁴ We are the independent men who, often taking our powers too seriously, continuously act and react, unaware that much of value in life comes only if we don’t press, comes in quietly when it is not pushed or required, comes not from a drive from behind or an attraction from in front, but emerges silently from simply being together. This is what Matthew Arnold refers to in his lines,

Hence Harry Stack Sullivan emphasized the “chum” period in human development. This period includes the several years, from about eight to twelve, before the heterosexual functioning of the boy or girl begins to mature. It is the time of genuine liking of the same sex, the time when boys walk to school with arms around each other’s shoulders and when girls are inseparable. It is the beginning of the capacity to care for someone else as much as for yourself. If this “chum” experience is missing, holds Sullivan, the person cannot love heterosexually afterwards. Furthermore, Sullivan believed that the child cannot love anyone before the “chum” period, and held that if one forces it, one can get him to act as though he loves someone, but it will be a pretense. Whether or not one accepts these beliefs in their extreme form, the import is still clear.

An added confirmation of the importance of philia is also given in the experiments of Harry Harlow with rhesus monkeys.⁶ Harlow’s monkeys, who were not permitted to make friends in their childhood, who never learned to play with siblings or “friends” in all sorts of free and nonsexual ways, were those who later could not adequately function sexually. The period of play with peers is, in other words, an essential prerequisite to the learning of adequate sexual attraction and response to the opposite sex later. In his article, Harlow says, “We believe that the role of affection in the socialization of primates can only be understood by conceiving love as a number of love or affectional systems and not as a single emotion.”

In our hurried day, philia is honored as a kind of vestige of bygone periods when people had time for friendship. We find ourselves so rushed, going from work to meetings to a late dinner to bed and up again the next morning, that the contribution of philia to our lives is lost. Or we get it mistakenly connected with homosexuality; American men are especially afraid of male friendship lest it have in it some trace of the homosexual. But, at least, we must recall that the importance of philia is very great in helping us to find ourselves in the chum period and begin the developing of identity.

Philia, in turn, needs agapé. We have defined agapé as esteem for the other, the concern for the other’s welfare beyond any gain that one can get out of it; disinterested love, typically, the love of God for man. Charity, as the word is translated in the New Testament, is a poor translation, but it does contain within it the element of selfless giving. It is an analogy—though not an identity—with the biological aspect of nature which makes the mother cat defend to her death her kittens, and the human being love his own baby with a built-in mechanism without regard for what that baby can do for him.

Agapé always carries with it the risk of playing god. But this is a risk that we need to take and can take. We are aware that no human being’s motivations are purely disinterested, that everyone’s motivations are, at best, a blending of these different kinds of love. Just as I would not like someone to “love” me purely ethereally, without regard for my body and without any awareness of whether I am male or female, I also don’t want to be loved only for my body. A child senses the lie when he is told that adults do something “only for your good,” and everyone dislikes being told he is loved only “spiritually.”

Each kind of love, however, presupposes care, for it asserts that something does matter. In normal human relations, each kind of love has an element of the other three, no matter how obscured it may be.

LOVE, WILL, AND THE FORMS OF SOCIETY

Love and will take place within the forms of the society. These forms are the myths and symbols viable at that period. The forms are the channels through which the vitality of the society flows. Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry is aware, the forms ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it. And the present revolt against forms only proves the point in reverse: in our transitional age, we are hunting, exploring, reaching about, struggling to assert whatever we can find in the experiment for some new forms. In a homely illustration, Duke Ellington recounts that when he writes music, he must keep in mind that his trumpeter cannot hit the very high notes securely, whereas the trombonist is very good at them; and writing under these impediments, he remarks, “It’s good to have limits.” Not only with libido and eros, but other forms of love as well: full satisfaction means the death of the human being; love runs itself out with the death of the lovers. It is the nature of creativity to need form for its creative power; the impediment thus has a positive function.

These forms of the society are molded and presented first of all by the artists. It is the artists who teach us to see, who break the ground in the enlargement of our consciousness; they point the way toward the new dimensions of experience which we have, in any given period, been missing. This is why looking at a work of art gives us a sudden experience of self-recognition. Giotto, precursor to that remarkable birth of awareness known as the Renaissance, saw nature in a new perspective and for the first time painted rocks and trees in three-dimensional space. This space had been there all the time but was not seen because of medieval man’s preoccupation with his vertical relationship to eternity reflected in the two-dimensional mosaics. Giotto enlarged human consciousness because his perspective required an individual man standing at a certain point to see this perspective. The individual was now important; eternity was no longer the criterion, but the individual’s own experience and his own capacity to look. The art of Giotto was a prediction of the Renaissance individualism which was to flower a hundred years later.

The new view of space pictured by Giotto was basic for the new geographical explorations of oceans and continents by Magellan and Columbus, which changed man’s relation to his world, and for the explorations in astronomy by Galileo and Copernicus, which changed man’s relation to the heavens. These new discoveries in space resulted in a radical upheaval of man’s image of himself. Ours is not the first age to be confronted with loneliness arising from man’s discovery of new dimensions of external space and similarly requiring new extensions of his own mind. The psychological upheaval and spiritual loneliness in this period was expressed by the poet John Donne,

The loneliness was also expressed in the philosopher Leibnitz’s doctrine of isolated monads with no doors or windows by which one could communicate with the other. And by the scientist Pascal:

But just as these men were able to find the new planes of consciousness which did, to some extent, fill the new reservoirs of space, so in our day a similar shift is necessary.

Cézanne, at the beginning of our century, saw and painted space in a new way, not in perspective now but as a spontaneous totality, an immediate apprehension of form in space. He painted the being of space rather than its measurements. As we look at the rocks and trees and mountains on his canvases, we do not find ourselves thinking, “This mountain is behind this tree,” but we are grasped by an immediate whole which is mythic in that it encompasses near and far, past and present, conscious and unconscious in one immediate totality of our relationship to the world. Indeed, I was recently intrigued to notice, when looking at one of Cézanne’s oils in London, Le Lac d’Annecy (which I had never seen before), that he actually paints brushstrokes of the mountain over the tree, in complete contradiction to the literal fact that the mountain, as he looked at it, was twenty miles away. In Cézanne, the forms are not before us as compartmentalized items to be added up, but as a presence that grips us. The same is true in Cézanne’s portraits—the subject is presented to us not as a face with a forehead and two ears and a nose, but as a presence. The eloquence of this presence beggars our naïve slavery to literalism, and reveals to us more truth about the human being than does realism. The significant point is that it requires our participation in the picture itself if the painting is to speak to us.

In Cézanne, we see this new world of spaces and stones and trees and faces. He tells us the old world of mechanics is gone and we must see and live in the new world of spaces. This is evident even with his seemingly banal apples and peaches on a table. But it is particularly clear and eloquent in his paintings of trees. In my college days, I used to walk to classes across the campus of my college under tall elms, whose size and strength I admired. Nowadays, I walk to my office under elm trees on Riverside Drive. Between these two, I saw and learned to love Cézanne’s paintings of elms in their architectural grandeur, and what I now each morning see—or rather experience—is altogether different from the college campus. Now the trees are part of a musical movement of forms which has nothing to do with literal measurements of trees. The triangular white forms of the sky are as important as the tree limbs which give them their form; the sheer power hanging in the air has nothing to do with the size of the trees but consists of the lines the branches block in on the gray-blue of the Hudson River.

The new world which Cézanne reveals is characterized by a transcendence of cause and effect. There is no linear relationship in the sense of “A” produces “B” produces “C” all aspects of the forms are born in our vision simultaneously—or not at all. This demonstrates the new form which will takes in our day. The painting is mythic, not literalistic or realistic: all categories of time, past, present, and future, conscious and unconscious, are included. And most important of all, I cannot even see the painting if I stand totally outside it; it communicates only if I participate in it. I cannot see Cézanne by observing his rocks as an accurate rendering of rocks, but only by looking at the rocks as patterns of forms which speak to me through my own body and my feelings and my perceptions of my world. This is the world that I must empathize with. I must give myself to it in a universe of basic forms in which my own life is grounded. This is the challenge to my consciousness which these paintings give.

But how do I know I will find myself again if I let myself go into the orbit of Cézanne’s new forms and spaces? This question explains much of the rabid, irrational, and violent opposition many people feel toward modern art; it does destroy their old world, and must, therefore, be hated. They can never see the world in the old way again, never experience life in the old way; once the old consciousness is shattered, there is no chance of building it up again. Though Cézanne, bourgeois that he was, seems to present strong, solid forms on which life could look secure, we should not be lulled into failing to realize that in his paintings a radically different language obtains. It was a degree of consciousness which drove Van Gogh into psychosis a few years previously and with which Nietzsche struggled at great cost.

Cézanne’s works are the opposite of the “divide-and-conquer” fragmentation which has characterized modern man’s relation to nature since Bacon and has led us to the brink of catastrophe. There is in Cézanne a statement that we can, and must, will and love the world as an immediate, spontaneous totality. In Cézanne and his fellow artists, there is a new language of myth and symbol which will be more adequate to love and will in the new conditions we must confront.

It is the passion of the artist, of whatever type or craft, to communicate what he experiences as the subconscious and unconscious significance of his relation to his world. “Communicate” is related to “commune,” and, in turn, both are avenues to the experience of communion and community with our fellowmen.

We love and will the world as an immediate, spontaneous totality. We will the world, create it by our decision, our fiat, our choice; and we love it, give it affect, energy, power to love and change us as we mold and change it. This is what it means to be fully related to one’s world. I do not imply that the world does not exist before we love or will it; one can answer that question only on the basis of his assumptions, and, being a mid-westerner with inbred realism, I would assume that it does exist. But it has no reality, no relation to me, as I have no effect upon it; I move as in a dream, vaguely and without viable contact. One can choose to shut it out—as New Yorkers do when riding the subway—or one can choose to see it, create it. In this sense, we give to Cézanne’s art or the Cathedral at Chartres the power to move us.

What does this mean concerning our personal lives, to which, at last, we now return? The microcosm of our consciousness is where the macrocosm of the universe is known. It is the fearful joy, the blessing, and the curse of man that he can be conscious of himself and his world.

For consciousness surprises the meaning in our otherwise absurd acts. Eros, infusing the whole, beckons us with its power with the promise that it may become our power. And the daimonic—that often nettlelike voice which is at the same time our creative power —leads us into life if we do not kill these daimonic experiences but accept them with a sense of the preciousness of what we are and what life is. Intentionality, itself consisting of the deepened awareness of one’s self, is our means of putting the meaning surprised by consciousness into action.

We stand on the peak of the consciousness of previous ages, and their wisdom is available to us. History—that selective treasure house of the past which each age bequeaths to those that follow—has formed us in the present so that we may embrace the future. What does it matter if our insights, the new forms which play around the fringes of our minds, always lead us into virginal land where, like it or not, we stand on strange and bewildering ground. The only way out is ahead, and our choice is whether we shall cringe from it or affirm it.

For in every act of love and will—and in the long run they are both present in each genuine act—we mold ourselves and our world simultaneously. This is what it means to embrace the future.