The Meaning of Happiness. Alan Watts
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is thine. It was meet that we should make merry…for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.
Civilized man is the prodigal, and the primitive is the elder son who always stayed at home—unconsciously in harmony with nature, living more by instinct than intellect and without the civilized man’s acute self-consciousness. The primitive differs from us in somewhat the same way as the child differs from the adult. The child has no psychological problems of its own, and even if it has they are only latent and do not manifest themselves until later life. Its inner affairs are managed partly by nature and partly by its parents; not until the sense of self-consciousness is fully developed does it feel that sense of responsibility which arises when we become aware of our power to direct and control our own affairs. But when man attains that state of self-consciousness he becomes a Prodigal; he feels isolated and lonely, and more particularly in his “low” moments is certain that the universe is against him. Superficially his whole culture is a violation of nature; he becomes utterly dependent on his machines and perishes when left to fend for himself against the elements. But soon comes the “famine.” In our own day war and economic disorganization are the “famine”; there is no actual scarcity of wealth; men starve only because of human stupidity. In time there are some who “come to themselves,” realizing that in some way or other we must return to nature and experience in full consciousness the harmony which the primitive has by unconscious instinct.
But it is not often realized that the apparent departure from nature which we have in civilization is an absolutely essential stage in man’s development. Without it we should remain like the elder son in the parable, jealous and unappreciative. For only those who have sinned can understand and appreciate the bliss of redemption. Perhaps, therefore, this wandering away from nature is not so unnatural after all, for it seems that our task is not to go back to nature but forward. The Hindus represent the evolution of man as a circle. Starting at the top he falls, instinctively and unconsciously, to the bottom, at which point they say he enters the extreme of materiality and self-consciousness, the age of Kali Yuga. From thereon he must climb up the second half of the circle and so return in full consciousness to the point from which he began. But truly to be united with nature again, he must first experience that absolute division between himself and the universe (or life).
At this point, however, two things must be remembered: first, that civilized man’s division from nature is only apparent, and it would seem that this very appearance is part of a natural scheme of evolution, something into which we have grown by instinct as the caterpillar grows into a chrysalis; second, that although the return journey is done in consciousness, it is not done by consciousness, by the efforts of the self-conscious ego. This part of the journey is again as natural as the development of chrysalis into butterfly, and any attempt to force this growth egotistically is like trying to open the chrysalis with tweezers. It only results in keeping us back in the state of acute opposition between ourselves and life.
Here again we meet with the familiar proverb that those who search for happiness do not find it, because they are trying to manufacture it by the very means which defeat it. Therefore the first step on the homeward journey is to understand that we have never actually been cut off from nature at all, that our present acute conflict with life is necessary, is part of a natural purpose and that self-consciousness is not a denial but a fulfillment of natural law. In other words, we have to accept that conflict, because the ego can no more extract itself from it than a tooth can pull itself out of your jaw. The second step arises naturally from the first: by accepting the conflict between itself and life as part of the nature of life, the ego begins to feel itself in harmony with the “dark” side of nature. For the conflict becomes unhappiness only through our desire to escape from it, which adds one tension to another. But when it is accepted we make a paradoxical discovery, namely that by accepting the ego and the conflict which it involves we also accept and become united with that which stands behind the ego and takes on self-conscious form, that is, with nature. (See diagram on the next page.)
The Historical Background
It is important to consider this problem in relation to its historical background and to discover some of the ways in which the modern divorcement from nature developed. What is said here is true, in the main, only for Western peoples rooted in the European and Christian tradition, which is to say, for the white races. The Oriental has a different problem, at least in its preliminary stages. Of course, it is impossible to say just exactly when the modern conflict began, but an obvious and convenient starting point may be found in Catholic philosophy of the Middle Ages, although its seeds may be noticed even earlier in late Roman times. Christianity differs from many other religions in according the existence of an immortal soul only to man. The rest of creation exists principally for man’s convenience, for no other living creature is of any special significance in the divine plan. This view was never shared by the Hindus or the Chinese, and a Buddhist scripture says that in time even trees and grass shall become Buddhas. But in early Christian thought and practice there was, with few exceptions, an utter lack of concern for anything beyond the salvation of man. It was not surprising, therefore, that Christianity took on an increasingly human or anthropomorphic conception of God. His nature was made to correspond more and more with human reason while the “merely animal,” the “irrational” in nature, was more and more identified with the Devil, so that Christianity saw in the beauties of nature little more than a snare for the unwary soul, an essentially sinful world, doomed in the end to perish and give way to a supernatural Paradise.
But the thinkers of the Renaissance did not seem to share this idea, for apparently they were concerned far more with the human and natural than with the spiritual and supernatural. They were the forerunners of the natural sciences. Among them were such men as Leonardo da Vinci and Sir Francis Bacon, men who, as the latter boasted, “took all knowledge for their province.” But their preoccupation was still with man, and with the rational aspect of man as distinct from the divine on the one hand, and the bestial on the other. Certainly they found a new interest in the world of animals, trees, flowers, rocks, stars, and mountains, but only to discover therein analogies of the human being; they knew almost nothing of the Chinese and Japanese feeling for nature as nature. In their belief “the proper study of mankind was man.” And in this, for instance, we find the principal difference between Dante and Shakespeare, the former concerned with man in the supernatural world, the latter with man in his own human world, for “what a peece of worke is man, how noble in reason, how infinit in faculties, in form and moving, how expresse and admirable in action, how like an Angell in apprehension, how like a God!”
The faith of Humanism in the capacity of human reason to solve all problems and subdue all nature made possible the astounding advance of rational science in our epoch, for mathematics and machinery are constructed in the very image of human intellect, sharing its rigid and inevitable logic. But by making a god of this faculty man tends to become machinelike, for reason is essentially the mechanical aspect of the mind. Its laws of logic are as predetermined as the motions of a steam engine, for a given cause can have only one effect and in this principle the universe is reduced to a machine whose every event has been fated from all eternity. Having discovered the potentialities of his reason man became obsessed with it, and the mechanical Weltanschauung of nineteenth-century science, the Utopia of machines conceived by Wells, and the social anthill of Marx were logical results.
Similar changes came to pass in religion. It is particularly significant that the rediscovery of reason should have been accompanied by the birth of Puritan morality and Calvinistic Protestantism with its doctrine of determinism as reactions against “Popish superstition.” With the confessional gone and the dark side of life rigidly suppressed, man’s unmoral nature was denied and rejected by religion as forcibly as his irrational nature was thrown down by science. This is not to say, however, that Protestantism was essentially a rational system; it was not, and consequently came increasingly into conflict with science as the years went by. But the conflict was concerned rather with matters of theory than with those of practice, for though Protestantism was not doctrinally rational in the strictest sense of the word, it was rational in its psychology. Its beliefs were based to a great extent upon literal interpretation of the Bible,