Bugbee - Obligation

The Moment of Obligation in ExperienceAuthor(s): Henry G. Bugbee, Jr.Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Jan., 1953), pp. 1-15Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1199727 .

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THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION

Volume XXXIII JANUARY 1953 Number I

THE MOMENT OF OBLIGATION IN EXPERIENCE

HENRY G. BUGBEE, JR.*

T IS paper attempts an interpretation of experience, concerned to understand what it may mean to

be obligated. Each of the three sections of the paper incorporates a leading theme. In the first section we shall presently develop the theme of respect, analyzing respect as involving acknowledgment of a ground of action which can obligate us. The second section deals with the willingness characteristic of the moment of obligation in experience, in its intimate connection with personal integrity. The final section of the paper analyzes humility as a condition of obligation, briefly relating this theme to the conduct of ethical inquiry, and also suggesting the possible independence of humility from humiliation.

Underlying the treatment of these themes is the controlling idea of a ground which can endow action with conclusive justification. I think such a ground can become immanent and clear to us as a matter of experience; and experience in

which it does so is what I have in mind in speaking of the moment of obligation. Yet I shall try to suggest certain fundamental qualifications about forming an adequate idea of such a ground. For a ground of action to become immanent and clear in experience, it does not seem necessary to have formed a clear and explicit idea of such a ground. Nor do the immanence and clarity of the ground seem to make an explicit idea of it easy to formulate and convey.

The procedure of this paper is based on the conviction that ultimate justification to be found in acting is primarily a deliverance of experience in acting and that thought cannot enable us to take command of the justifying, as it might if the justifying could be made fully and directly explicit for thought. Though I shall use the terms "spirit" and "the good" in speaking of that which can obligate us, I shall seek to define them only as they are used in the thematic analysis of experience to follow. This entire paper is a fabric of words woven to catch something of the meaning of "the good." And the method of inquiry on which we will be depending itself reflects the conviction that the good is essentially implicit, in that thought cannot seize upon the good and hold it before the mind, as it may objects of empirical knowledge. The method accordingly pursued is one of experi-

* Henry G. Bugbee, Jr., is assistant professor of philosophy in Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Born in New York City, he was educated at Princeton University (A.B. 1936) and the University of California at Berkeley (M.A. 1940 and Ph.D. 1947). From 1942 to 1946 he was in the armed service in the United States Naval Re- serve. He has held teaching positions in the Uni- versity of Nevada and at Stanford University. Dr. Bugbee has been a member of the Harvard faculty since 1948.

1



2 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION

ential reflection, as distinct from empirical investigation yielding knowledge of objects; it is further distinct from either linguistic analysis or abstract "analysis of concepts." In the course of this paper I will attempt to suggest some aspects of this method, such as its peculiarly retrospective orientation. But for the most part I shall not attempt to discuss the method as such. No doubt its affinity with a phenomenological approach to philosophical problems, and with the method of such current existentialist thought as that of Gabriel Marcel, will become apparent. Mainly, our problem will be to think objectively about our experience of acting without changing the subject, that is, without turning this experience into a shuffle of objects.

I

If there is any attitude of which we are capable that invites consideration as nonarbitrary, it would seem to be that of respect. On what is respect founded? How are we capable of it, and what does our capacity for respect seem to involve? We may begin by drawing a suggestion of our answer to these questions from concrete instances of respect of para- mount importance as they arise in inter- personal situations. Certainly when the actions of another person command our profoundest respect, we may find established in such experience a very distinct and fundamental communion and loyalty between ourselves and that person. When communion is so established, our loyalty would not seem oriented ultimately to the achievement of the individual, to the talent or skill displayed in his action, or to the pleasure of men which his action may occasion. Only a spirit which speaks through his action and achievement to its kindred in ourselves seems capable of summoning our loyalty;

and, when this occurs, a moment of obligation is indeed realized. We experience, at least fleetingly, that which we can af- firm and serve, that which can claim us; and, since the embodiment of spirit in action always seems unique and original, we may not expect to read how its demands upon us may be fulfilled in terms of a set and predetermined behavioral pattern, subject to imitation.

It would seem, in fact, that we tend to respect whatever in the focus of our attention provides us with a purchase for a fuller and freer assumption of responsibility, whatever can be a key to original personal commitment in action. Thus a craftsman may respect his tools and his material even to the point of revering them.' Thus we tend to respect, too, the elementary conditions under which endeavor may be ordered and disciplined in a way indissolubly connected with its becoming free; such may be the respect of an empirical scientist for the procedures of experimental method or of a poet for the restrictions of versification. Again, a man would be but a casual seafarer or mountaineer if he did not come to respect the sea, or the mountains, at times even to the point of luminous clarity.

In general, respect seems to involve the focus of attention either on that which can inspirit us and call out our aspiration or on that which can offer us the resistance, the mettling condition, or the medium upon which the clarification and embodiment of spirit through action depends. Of course these phases of respect tend to intermingle, as when a man raising a crop may look upon his fields, finding them good, and then move in a vein of unbroken contemplation to meet the demands of a day's work. Thus the fields call out his love and exact his effort, and each of these phases of his car- ing for them permeates the other.



THE MOMENT OF OBLIGATION IN EXPERIENCE 3

I believe everything is to be gained from seeing that the mode of regard of which we are capable, when it attains to the stature of respect, is not confined to instances of regard for persons and their actions. Even when our attention is fo- cused on persons and their actions, we may confirm the fact that the possibility of respect is essentially conditioned by our capacity for respecting; for, unless we are prepared to harbor respect, actions which may be eminently worthy of it simply fail to elicit it. Often it is only as remembered that actions we have wit- nessed, then, and for the first time, elicit our respect. Again, we may revive the memory of persons in action whom we can remember having respected and yet find ourselves presently incapable of re- living that respect for them. For capacity to respect is our ultimate strength, and we are not always strong; nor do we seem to invest ourselves with strength at will.

I would not deny for a moment that there is something eminently personal in the capacity for respect; I would only free the conception of that capacity from the supposition that it necessarily involves the focus of attention on persons and their actions; for then we may see that respect is not primarily distinguished as an interest in persons but rather as a mode of interest of which persons are capable. To be exact, our regard for anything approaches respect in so far as our interest in that thing becomes inspirited in a way qualifying our mode of interest as disinterested. It seems exactly the spirit in which a person is able to take things and act in relation to them that is crucial in his capacity to regard them in the manner of respect. Where respect is for things other than the actions of persons, it is especially clear that it involves a profound and active commitment of the person in his relation with whatever he

can regard with respect. His respect is toward that upon which his attention fo- cuses with deep interest and absorption, but at the same time it is from a spirit by which he is invaded from within, rendering his interest disinterested.

Thus we may understand that respect is essentially, though implicitly, an hon- oring of spirit realized in ourselves, an affirmation of meaning immanent in our experience; though explicitly, through the focus of attention on the object of interest, it is a mode of regard for that object itself. Without an objective orientation of interest we would seem incapable of respect; and this we may confirm by noticing the absence of introver- sion in moments of real respect and the impediment to respect of the intrusion of ourselves into the field of our attention. Neither aggrandizement nor humiliation of self, but a commitment of self seems characteristic of pure respect as a mode of interest. And the spirit which differen- tiates this mode of interest is not an object of interest for the person in whom it is realized. In so far as he may be said to be aware of it, perhaps we should say that he is reflexively aware of it, a very different matter from attending to it as one attends to an object.

We began our present reflections on respect by thinking of it as recognition and affirmation of spirit as ground of action, and we considered it first as it may be elicited by the actions of other persons. Then we moved to the review of the capacity for respect in ourselves, finding that it involved an objective orientation of interest, intent absorption in something being attended to, distinguished by a spirit in which we are actively com- mitted and by virtue of which our interest is rendered disinterested. According- ly, to summarize our analysis simply, we may say that our capacity for respect is




our capacity for disinterested participation in a field of interest; and we have tried to make this clear by pointing out that this capacity can be focalized in ourselves without requiring the focus of attention on the actions of persons in the field of interest.

I would now add two points which may prevent misunderstanding of the foregoing analysis and emphasize the drift of our thought. First, the more we realize a capacity for respect in ourselves, the more we seem capable of regarding other persons with respect, regardless of whether their actions seem to confirm this mode of regard toward them at the moment. Here, perhaps, is the root of compassion, a steady affirmation of the absolute value which is the ultimate birthright of any man, through all the trials that may obscure this birthright from us, in ourselves and in others. And this brings us to the second point: though knowledge of this birthright seems to be ultimately and finally reflexive, as we have suggested, and need not derive from active attention to the actions of others, yet, precisely for this reason, perhaps nothing else than its revelation through the actions of others can quite as clearly authenticate for our understanding what is man's birthright and testify to its commonness and mutual authority among us. The nearest we can come to beholding that which can ground human actions is through its embodiment in actions occupying the field of our interest. Thus, in so far as respect is a matter of recognition of that which may ground action, requiring that such a ground greet us and that we acknowledge it as pre- sented for our attention out of the field of interest, it would seem to require attention to the actions of others. It is in such mutual testimony as we may give to each other of that which mutually grounds our

actions that communication seems to achieve its ultimate point. And any action providing testimony in this way would seem to establish fundamental communication. We seem to learn this, for example, from working hard with someone, side by side. Sooner or later, a man who can commit himself whole- heartedly in his work is likely to com- municate to those who join him in his endeavors, by his deed, that which can be respected in any man.2

It will now be clear that we are not construing the capacity for respect, or disinterested interest, as peculiar to any special mode of human activity, such as inquiring activity, and still less as de- pendent upon some fiat, let us say, an intellectual fiat or decree, by which a person may render his interests disinterested. We are certainly far from supposing that disinterested interest can be identified with a high degree of indiffer- ence toward a field in which at least some minimal interest, say, that of curiosity, is still involved. We are not reckoning with the prerogative of a mythical Olympian spectator. On the contrary, we have tended to suppose that disinterestedness is only possible for a person whose interest is profound; the very opposite of su- perficial, or casual, or optional.

Thus we are trying to understand above all how in matters of the utmost importance to a person, in matters where his stake is maximal rather than minimal, he may nonetheless epitomize the assumption of responsibility and a corresponding absence of arbitrariness, wilfulness, and bias. Surely it is this task to which the examination of our capacity for respect leads us. This is, precisely as Kant saw that it was, the task of understanding what it means to be obligated. To indicate the direction of our thought here, however, I would suggest that, so




long as a person is subject to what can be legitimately interpreted as constraint, indicative of internal conflict, it may be doubted that he is free from bias. In line with this suggestion, let us carry our reflection to the aspect of willingness in the moment of obligation.

If

How, and to what extent, may we suppose willingness to be characteristic of the moment of obligation?

Let us be as explicit as possible about how we will deal with this question; and to this end let us distinguish between a prospective orientation and a retrospective orientation of the attempt to understand obligation. So long as our reflection proceeds in a prospective vein, our task would seem to be one of showing why at least some definitely characterizable ways of acting ought to be undertaken by men under certain specifiable circum- stances and willy-nilly. This approach directs our attention primarily to the characteristics of specific acts, and no less so when it is insisted that ethical inquiry should take into account what is intended as well as what is done. Now the supposition of a prospective orientation of ethical inquiry seems to be that we can understand what it means to be obligated by spelling out a set of conditions by virtue of which we should be able to discern what actions under specifiable cir- cumstances are obligatory. And if the ethical inquirer is convinced that action out of obligation involves freedom from bias, from arbitrariness, from wilfulness, it is likely to seem to him that this re- quires demonstration in the form of arguments to show that certain acts of ready- made character can be obligatory for rea- sons independent of what the person brings to bear on their conception and performance.

A retrospective orientation of the attempt to understand obligation would clearly have to postpone the business of giving advice and of trying to decide in advance what we ought to be doing. It certainly could not begin by supposing that formulas for justified action are possible, whether in the form of advice, in the form of purposes and ideals, or in the form of mandates. For it would not be seeking a touchstone for determining what ought to be done; it would consist, rather, of an attempt to review experience in the hope of understanding what it means to be obligated. And above all it would seek to examine that experience in which one can retrospectively appreciate the meaning of acting well. One would be reviewing the past with a concern to understand the conditions pertinent to those actions which have come closest to making sense of our lives; and so one's reflections would be concrete, that is to say, concerned with experience actually lived through, and not abstract, in the sense of revolving around hypothetical situations and actions considered in ab- straction from experience.

Persistent reflection in this retrospective vein may convince us that no simple set of describable characteristics of possible ways of acting can suffice to expli- cate that significance, lived far more than formulated and planned, which action at its best may realize.

From a retrospective viewpoint, then, I would identify the moment of obligation in human experience with those oc- casions when a person is empowered to act with all his energy and resources by a spirit which can command our profoundest respect and found the loyalty of man to man. Such moments seem distinguished by unstinting affirmation and completeness of commitment, for they, if any, are the moments of reassurance, in




which a spirit enabling us to act conclu- sively permeates experience. Such reassurance, so far as it comes to life, involves integrity of will. We may find ourselves acting under great difficulty; our resources may be taxed to the limit; we may be faced with a most uncertain future; and the failure of enterprises on which we have set our hearts may stare us in the face; yet, under genuine obligation, we may stand and stand firm, we may act and act decisively. Indeed, nothing short of such strength of spirit seems capable of making us equal to the acceptance of our own limitations and assets in the vein of constructive self-criticism or equal to the renunciations surely re- quired of us. Man is capable of facing extreme adversity and renunciation with poise. The moment of obligation is exactly akin with such a capacity.

Is it not in focalizing such possibilities of spirit that tragedy fulfils at least one of its basic themes? May not tragic art help us to consummate awareness of the possibility of rising with integrity to meet even the most dire adversities sown of our own deeds? At the bottom of tragic consciousness do we not find our alle- giance strengthened to man in any person, born of this man in ourselves, do we not find reliable hope? That very hope strengthened in tragic consciousness and involving self-transcendence seems to me the essence of sustained willingness; and it seems to consist in our assurance of being equal to what may lie ahead rather than in the expectation of effecting any specific results. Such assurance does not lie in a tightened grip upon the future; for it involves appreciation of a ground of action which we cannot ordain or contrive: a spirit arising in ourselves out of profound frankness and trust. Is it not the case that initiative and alertness tend to increase as tenseness diminishes? The

power derived of spirit cannot be usurped; it increases only as we are able to serve it.

How is it that men can be capable of acting with a confidence and joy which seem independent of fair prospects stretched reassuringly before them? From time to time we encounter persons who radiate through the most commonplace actions in the most casual circumstance, disarming and warming those who come within their orbit. Is it by anything so stilted and deliberate as a design of theirs to disarm and warm us that we are so affected? If they respond to us with interest and concern, as they well may, I think we might note that this is a very different matter from their intending to do us good or designing to please us.3 That spirit out of which men may benefit each other most profoundly seems to bear on their actions, however complex and planned, with simplicity and direct- ness. Perhaps even an intention of benefiting others is irrelevant to our capacity to do so. The ability to deal with men as equals in the face of inequalities of ad- vantage and endowment seems to require a sincerity antecedent to the forma- tion of intention and impregnated with the realization that any man always, and unavoidably, has his hands full in doing what he can do, which no one else can do for him.

Once we become reflectively convinced that we do not deliberately institute in ourselves the power of benefiting others, and once we ascertain that the most profound benefit we receive at the hands of others stems from a basis in themselves deeper than anything they can muster and confer upon us by decree, we may be more prepared to think of the moment of obligation, not as a moment in which the imperative to act goes against the grain, but rather as that moment in which a




person may find immediate incentive and confirmation from within himself for complete commitment in action. I am assuming, of course, as most ethical in- quirers have done, that there is some connection between our capacity to "fulfil obligation" and our capacity to actually benefit people. And I am suggesting that our capacity to benefit people at all profoundly is decisively formed in moments of obligation in our own experience, when we are gathered and founded on a basis within ourselves instinct with authority, where the authority in question is not ours to wield but ours to serve, and con- sists in a spirit which we can honor with all energy and resourcefulness in action-- no less in the judgmental phase of action than in any other. Judgment is not the valve, or the hand on the valve, that lets the flow of good into life. To the extent that judgmental activity may serve the good, it presupposes that very spirit essential to the grounding of any phase of action. We may only hope that the good may inform our judging as well as anything else we may do; we may not expect to control the good by rendering it sus- ceptible to judgmental control, as if the possibility of justified action were contingent upon making grounds for action explicit for judgment as we would adduce explicitly the grounds supporting a truth claim. It seems futile to suppose that justified action must await initiation from a judgmental conclusion by which we could underwrite a policy of action with a Q.E.D. The case for the view that virtue is knowledge does not appear to have made much headway when pursued in this direction, whether argued in behalf of philosopher-kings, of happiness-en- hancers, or of engineers of social welfare.

Clear thought is indeed eminently respectable and may be a large phase of justified action, especially if the mode of

action in question be some form of inquiry. But what is respectable about it, if not the spirit by virtue of which thinking is responsibly undertaken and capable of achieving fundamental clarity? It seems the case that such thought presupposes such a spirit and so may be said to serve it rather than to control it. From a legal point of view we may be encouraged to forget that in thinking we are active: as the saying goes, we cannot be hanged for our thoughts. But any inquirer knows that his thoughts can hang him and that they can also involve the full energy and interestedness of a person. Again, we may note that the meeting of minds in conclusions presupposes more than agree- ment on the considerations relevant to their support; it also presupposes com- munity of enterprise in the act of inquiry. Because we are apt to take this commu- nity of enterprise for granted, we are especially liable to overlook the moral ground of our concern for what ought to be thought and for the procedures which our inquiries should employ. Further- more, we are not apt to adduce explicit arguments in support of activities we really believe in unless our conduct is challenged. This in itself suggests that the ground on which we are able to act most faithfully is apt to be implicit in our address to what we do and is not supplied to our action by deliberate selection out of the field of interest to which we explicitly attend.

If we recognize spirit as ground of action and make firm our understanding of spirit through the appreciation of creative action, of whatever kind, we will surely acknowledge that spirit must arise as demanding action within any person who is to be able to act on such a ground. In a word, that which can obligate a man and enable him to act out of obligation can only be forthcoming from a fund of




meaning pressing upon him from within himself, which he alone can advance to the point of creative resolution in action. If this is so, then how could the starting point for determining what a man ought to do be located in any fixed conception of modes of action which would be obligatory for him or anyone else in his overt circumstance? The stage of judging by what action a man may be able to fulfil obligation may be a relatively late phase of that over-all action by which he may actually fulfil it; indeed, it may not be until after a man has rounded out the fulfilment of what obligates him that he can be clear that this was the action called for. Thus it would seem that thought must be fresh and live to play its part in a fresh and live act or to interpret one. We may be no less bound to outdo our former selves in judging of what is to be done than we are to transcend action by rote or imitation in any other respect, if our action is to achieve the stature of ful- filling obligation.

What shall we say, then, of the bind- ingness and the note of constraint on which emphasis is so apt to fall when we speak of our obligations? What shall we say of that strain of austerity entering into the depiction of obligation, suggesting that the individual is typically involved in a struggle to overcome his own inclinations and wishes if the obligatory act, about which he is perfectly clear in advance, is to be performed? The line of thought here alluded to seems as perennial as Plato evidently took it to be in fashioning that masterly presentation of it spoken by Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Republic. If I read aright the purport of the last two propositions of Spinozo's Ethics, the answer there given seems most to the point: that it is out of the condition of human bondage that we become accustomed to think and speak in

this manner. But from the point of view of human freedom: "Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; neither do we rejoice therein, because we control our lusts, but contrariwise, because we rejoice therein, we are able to control our lusts."'4

Now it would seem that we may understand the supreme willingness or vol- untariness of the moment of obligation in this vein. Above all we might avoid con- fusing the willingness here meant with that wilfulness characteristic of self- assertion or the rush of casual desire. There is a vast difference between the willingness bred of spirit permeating a person and his actions and that wilfulness in which a person usurps the authority of spirit or acts upon fragmentary, unin- spirited reaction and desire. Though it may appear in the latter cases that the individual acts voluntarily, perhaps we must concur with that broader and more penetrating perspective which has re- peatedly suggested to men that the essence of bondage and compulsion is ex- emplified in such action. For our actions to be compulsive and constrained, we need not be opposed or threatened by the intentions and deeds of others. We need only lead patchwork lives, all too autono- mous in so far as we suppose that we can give ourselves the pattern of justified action. This we may tacitly attempt, whether according to shifting whim or in compliance with some more sober and providential scheme which we work out, with happiness, security, virtue, or self- realization as its goal. Even by rigid im- position on ourselves of some inflexible interpretation of duty, we cannot will wholeness into our lives. After all, loose- ness, calculatingness, and rigidity are apiece in self-assertion, by whatever names they are graced, however re- strained their intonation. And the anom-




aly of self-assertion is that we would not seem capable of freedom so long as we presume to mastery of the significance of our lives and deeds. What we are more apt to see as bondage in the case of actions ruled by violent and shifting whims may be equally so in the case of actions that are self-controlled: however uni- form the patches thus pieced together, they still comprise a patchwork life. But perhaps it would be a mistake not to look for a real person behind all the

facades of

contrivance, however imposing; and by "real" I mean uncontrived, innocent, lacking in pretense, authentic-a person to whom honor is always due.5

Once we have experienced the hint of a spirit which may render us whole in its absolute worth and obligating power, once we have experienced the fundamental liberation of action at its best, then I believe we may be haunted by at least a latent sense of our inadequacy whenever we are only fragmentarily engaged in acting. Perhaps something of the austerity with which the notion of obligation is so frequently imbued may be traced, in the last analysis, to our predicament as fragmentary creatures. For how will we rise to wholehearted action of any final significance when we find ourselves in bits and can view acting only as a round of events, in which each successor dis- places its predecessor without fundamental increment of meaning? Will we bury ourselves violently in the successive moments of the series? Will we withdraw from serious participation in a piecemeal world, refusing to be a party to its decep- tion? But then the finality of our own limited time unquiets us. Will we piece ourselves together, bit by bit, until at last we tot up to men who are whole? Or will we violently expurgate our nature and insist that the tolerated remainder, suffered to act, is ourselves? Shall we

force the issue of our wills? Or perhaps it will be by learning the right parts and their cues that we may live well, setting ourselves to prove by the roles we play that our lives make sense. In so far as we are trying to keep to such a role, whatever it may be, let us be very clear that we could always represent to ourselves only too explicitly what "we ought to be doing"; and so we could see all too readily what we are obliged, if reluctant, to do.6 Now it would be a mistake to suppose that this could be a game for us; for the point of keeping a ready-made script before us to act upon, and the point of insisting on an idealized image of ourselves which we are constrained to realize, is to impose a unity and significance upon our lives by which we can hold ourselves together. This is the enormous stake we may have in conforming to patterns of action not only escaping our genuine support but actually capable of burden- ing us to the breaking point. The more iron-willed our determination to control our lives, the more liable we will be to represent obligation to ourselves in rigid patterns, the very essence of which will lie in the theme of constraint and compulsion celebrated in the name of moral imperativeness and invoked in behalf of very definite blueprints of justified action.

I do not want to suggest for a moment that channels of trained and planned endeavor are inimical to the possibility of acting out of obligation; I think, rather, the contrary. For surely to act responsibly is always to act in a disciplined way involving technique and skill relevantly applied to a structured situation. Fur- ther, the structured situation must be responsibly taken into account if action is to be made relevant to it. Finally, a degree of mastery in some channelized mode of persistent endeavor seems neces-




sary to the possibility of that fluency in action by which we can transcend a halt- ing and artificial approach to what we are doing.' To act under full commitment, we must know what we are about. But the full commitment of which I speak as essential to obligation resides precisely in those actions which transcend routine or imitative performance, when we give ourselves up to what we are doing with profound and implicit trust, the very opposite of bargaining on a guaranty of what the future will bring. In retrospect we may conclude that no actions could have been more prudent than these. They are nonetheless very far from being merely prudential acts.

I would suggest, then, that to become obligated is to find it possible to give ourselves up in action. I mean this in a double sense: first, we find it possible to commit our resources univocally, to the limit of our capacity and with utter willingness; second, we find it possible to re- linquish a possessive concern for making secure some future good or forefending some future evil. We find ourselves free, as it were, to cast our bread on the waters without strings attached. The strings are not attached because they are not needed. What we do satisfies us profoundly in the doing; the books are already balanced, whatever the future may bring. Thus liberation and a liberality that can leave no man its bondsman seem to go hand in hand. In the liberation of spirit into action we may experience the growth of a compassion which reaches out from acknowledgment of man as we have discovered him in ourselves to man in any person. Perhaps it is only from experience in which a man is awakened in ourselves who knows his affinity with man in any person that we may understand the legitimacy of the perennial moral claim that we ought to act with

regard for our fellows. To grasp the full force of this "ought," and to be able to indorse it apart from all the prestige with which it is impressed upon us, is not merely to have enjoyed the company and convenience of other men; nor is it a matter of susceptibility to feelings simi- lar to theirs; it is primarily to have found and cleaved to that man who is universal in ourselves, who is prepared to seek out and recognize and respect himself wherever he may be found, in any man. As our analysis of respect attempted to make clear, this mode of regard toward other men is one of which we become capable in so far as we achieve disinterested interest. Our analysis of the willingness involved in the moment of obligation has brought us back upon the spirit differentiated in disinterested interest, now amplified as that which can claim us wholly, free us from arbitrariness, and endow those actions in which we serve it with ultimate and conclusive point.

Tii:

In the closing portion of this paper I would like to carry further the notion that the possibility of becoming obligated seems to involve a certain fundamental relaxation and deepening of earnestness; and again, of course, I must urge that I am not recommending something to be aimed at but trying to note retrospectively and experientially something characteristic of the possibility of becoming obligated and very clear in those moments of obligation which we have been concerned to understand. It seems to me that much of our striving, so tense with effort, so preoccupied with security, so imbued with the conviction that everything depends on our perspicacity and rigorous surveillance, indicates a supposition which is both reflected and en-




couraged in a great deal of Western ethical thought; namely, that we can get before our minds and deliberately control those factors on which the justification for what we do depends. In our ethical thought we have been driven almost inadvertently, at times, in this direction. For, if we are to show that there is justification for what we do, must we not make explicit for thought the nature of the justifying? And what could be more natural than to suppose that the explication of the justifying will place it at our disposal? Once we determine its nature, surely this will enable us to aim at it, produce it, spell out the means of its at- tainment, or at least to attain intellectual mastery of the conditions of its occur- rence, however difficult we may conceive the technique of their fulfilment to be. In every case where ethical thought has ar- rived at an explicit conception of grounds for action, the temptation has been almost irresistible to work the conception out from a prospective standpoint and to expect of it decisive direction in insuring the justification, so far as possible, of what we will do. When we yield to this temptation, though we may not be aware of it and certainly may not intend it, we implicitly shift to a standpoint in which we aspire to mastery over that which can justify what we do.

It may help to elucidate the idea of a ground of action that is ultimately implicit, as we have conceived spirit to be, if we can see how, as a matter of experience, humility may constitute a condition of the possibility of obligation. We have already touched on humility in the key notion of disinterestedness, for example, and in exploring the meaning of giving one's self up in action. And we have approached the analysis of it by suggesting concentration on a certain relaxation combined with deepening of

earnestness as conditional to becoming obligated, explicitly urging that these are not to be dramatized; if we can understand humility in this vein, we may hope to dispel that aura of uneasiness and ostentation which sometimes clings to the notion.

Humility I take to consist in a standpoint from which a person acts, com- patible with the fact that it is not in our power deliberately to endow our actions with what is necessary to their experienced justification. This is certainly not to say that the way we act will have little or nothing to do with the possibility of experienced justification for what we do. Nor, on the other hand, is it merely to accede to a legitimate emphasis on the limitations within which even our best intelligence and effort operate in at- tempting to command events. I think it not sufficiently precise to connect humility with "a sense of our dependence upon forces that go their way without our wish and plan," as Dewey does, if the "forces" meant are those over which empirical knowledge yields considerable foresight and such deliberate control as we have.8 I have in mind, rather, the person as agent who cannot be understood or ma- nipulated as an object. Now it is the person from this standpoint, the person who acts, who crucially determines the possibility of experienced justification for what is done; and to note this is a very different matter also from claiming that the "subjective" determination of experienced justification for action places what ought to be done at the casual disposal of the individual agent. Rather the contrary; for the agent cannot manipu- late himself capriciously, he cannot play fast and loose with himself, and he cannot escape himself; for he cannot reach and connect the self which is agent by causal laws with the order of objects and




so deliberately cause the character of the self in which experience will subsequently center and upon whom its significance will crucially depend. I venture to think that the fundamental benefit which may accrue to persons helped by methods of analysis (as in psychoanalytic therapy) involves an implicit shift in the standpoint of the person and that the essence of improvement in their condition might be marked by an increase in genuine humility.' The shift of which I speak would not consist in the acquisition of a knowledge and skill by which the person would become better equipped to contrive the kind of self he ought to be; it would be marked, rather, by decrease in effort to contrive the self and a corresponding de- cline in self-centeredness. It may help to work such a change in a man if he realizes the futility of posturing and discerns the trammels of subtle imposture in which he may be caught; but the change probably involves becoming a man whom he could not have imagined, gradually consoli- dated through deeds which, in their very frankness, do not follow some well-established outline obviating his responsibility in committing himself anew in them; nor would these deeds represent means for effecting a change in himself which he has understood in advance and chosen as an end of action.

We have been approaching humility as a key to the understanding of obligation, and I would now suggest that the moment of obligation may constitute a decisive stage in our experiential lessons with respect to humility; in so far as experience becomes graced with final significance, we may discover that such significance is indeed strictly a matter of grace, an unpremeditated and uncontrived invasion "from within." From such experience a man may indeed have an understanding of his finitude, pre-

cisely because his finitude becomes il- luminated and is brought to clarity by a radiance that finite perceptiveness and intelligence cannot cast upon the human condition. And here I must venture the reflection that an appreciation of human finitude in the light of such experience would not sustain self-depreciation any more than it would encourage self- aggrandizement. It may well be that humiliation and reduction to helplessness must precede the advent of experience impregnated with humility; yet the depiction of humility in terms of self-condemnation bespeaks more of the strug- gles and despair attendant on outgrowing the presumption to a power we do not have than of a sober clarity which may supervene at times when that presumption has been genuinely transcended.

We might surmise that the suffering we are liable to incur precedent to humility is proportional to the strength of our presumption to an ability "to take the good by siege or by storm." And it can be uncomfortable to discern what subtle forms that presumption may take; theo- retically, every localization of good in experience may tempt us to try for some commanding hold over it; and every insight with respect to spirit which we can make explicit to ourselves may be turned into a liability, in so far as we may try to use it as a means by which to control the life of spirit and exert deliberate mastery over its development. I venture to think that many forms of "the pursuit of salvation" come down to this and that it is precisely because such a pursuit is self- stultifying, operating as it does on the presumption to a power that we do not have, that those who have followed it have filled the literature of salvation with a depiction of humility in terms of humiliation and agonized suffering. Wher- ever we read passionate declamations on




the worthlessness of man the creature, prophetic denunciation of human powers, and unmerciful condemnation of the corruptness of human nature, may we not sense the struggle to pulverize and grind down that presumption on which the pursuit of salvation so often depends? Wherever we read of the necessity of man's being brought to a condition of utter hopelessness and disillusionment with respect to his own capacity and worth before he can find a ground of action upon which he may rely, can we not discern the report of an experience of disillusionment coming from men who have known what it was to attempt the invest- ment of their lives with the prerogative of divine surveillance, exercised by themselves?

One may respect these reports of experience; one need not doubt that such men have come to know a power of spirit which a man can only serve and not command. But I think we might be wary of taking the experience of disillusionment, and the experience of agonized struggle, as offering the primary, if not exclusive, key to reflective understanding of humility in connection with the power of spirit which may come to men.

Perhaps it is true that we tend to learn most explicitly and with greater reflective thoroughness those truths which we have once opposed. If so, then it seems reasonable to suppose that many of those who would be most articulate and vocif- erous on the subject of human salvation, and who also suggest authenticity in their account of it, are apt to be men who have been preoccupied with it and undergone disillusionment about it. Fur- ther, those who have been able to speak in the most commanding way on the subject are very often exceptionally gifted, men of at least considerable learning and intellectual acumen. And it is just the

gifted and brilliant mind that might be unusually liable to the temptation of supposing that, since so much lies within its power and surveillance, surely it must be able to discern that way of life which would be justified and, by virtue of its own exceptional powers, to effect that way of life. So, again, may it not be the case that those most prepared to articulate an understanding of human salvation would be men particularly liable to the kind of presumption of which a man must become disabused, perhaps by the most severe purgatory experience, before he can discover the meaning of "losing one's self"?

Yet must we suppose that the only experiential vein in which humility is to be found is that of abject humiliation? Shall we suppose that the life of spirit is to be adequately characterized almost exclusively from a point of view engen- dered by passage through "sickness unto death"? May it not be pertinent to consider modes of experience which may not be contingent upon disillusioned presumption to "take the good by siege or by storm"? If humility is indeed unself- conscious, it seems reasonable to suppose that it may be vastly more pervasive in human experience than may be our occasion to take notice of it and underline its character and importance as a matter for explicit thought. And we may further suspect that much might be learned of humility, and of the life of spirit of which it is a condition, if we might fathom the experience of men whose walks of life do not happen to involve the development of discursive articulateness or the learning from which to make a contribution to the theory of the subject.

Perhaps none of us can wholly escape the kind of presumption to control our lives in a way that is beyond our power which will require very painful disillu-




sionment if we are to be able to give it up. Still more surely, it would seem that each of us must sooner or later face a man's full share of adversity and of failure and of suffering; so there will probably be no lack of these, in any case, in the life of any man on which we may re- flect. Possibly, if we were to obtain suf- ficient penetration into experience of such a kind, we would have to recognize an element of humiliation in at least more instances of suffering than those in which it is readily apparent. Neverthe- less, however preconditional to humility and depth of spirit suffering may be, and however much suffering may be legitimately construed as humiliation-as whittling men down to size-it seems to me that men may act commensurately with their finitude, and often most char- acteristically do so, when they give themselves up to action quite apart from antecedent desperation and despair. I should wish to consider the spirit of craftsmanship in this vein, and, indeed, an adequate philosophy of work might well involve due consideration to the fundamental humility to be found in the experiential meaning of work. For whatever work may produce, and whatever needs the results of work may be considered to meet, it seems doubtful if the ultimate significance that a man's work can have is to be comprehended in terms of products, results, and the remedy of need. Fundamentally, in work a man may bring to life in his deeds a spirit which illuminates his finitude, eases him of its burdens, and makes him equal to the disposal of his life with patience and the affirmation of endeavor that is service. But service is first and foremost action from the spirit of disinterested interest, and such action can only transpire out of such a spirit in the man who acts. It is that spirit which alone can be served, and it is only in serving it that a

man may serve man in any person. To miss this point is to miss the possibility of comprehending a ground of disinterested action.

That the ground of disinterested action is implicit and immanent in the address of the person to what he is doing rather than explicit is suggested by the fact that the majority of men who are devoting their lives to the activity of disinterested inquiry seem on the whole silent and virtually unaware with respect to that -which they are serving. The spirit which may obligate us is not an end of action or a rule by which we can profit- ably control our behavior. Nothing can be more difficult to conceive, for it is not a thing, not a cause, and not an effect. Action does not strengthen or enhance it, therefore, by producing it; and, since it

i,3 not a product, action does not serve

it by proceeding from an intention to produce it. That which can justify action is neither itself a product of action nor an intention with respect to what that action may effect; it cannot be held before the mind's eye and so used. It cannot be conceived in terms of "motive" either, if to consider actions in terms of motives is to view them under the aspect of caused behavior; that is not the point of view of one who commits himself in acting.

Our position, then, comes down to this: the good can only be served; one cannot command or produce it, not by any stretch of intellectual power or skill, no matter on whose behalf employed. But if one serves the good, in so far as one can do this, one serves man in any person. When this becomes clear to us as a matter of experience, we become obligated and free. As I read such experience, it suggests that in ethical reflection, as in any other form of undertaking, we must be prepared to find anew that meaning which can justify what we do.




NOTES

1. Ernst Cassirer takes important notice of this in Language and Myth (New York: Harper & Bros., 1946), pp. 59-62, and offers a searching analysis of man's regard for things on which his power of inspirited (i.e., creative) action may crucially depend.

2. Especially where work is mentioned, but also for discussions of the entire subject of this paper, I am very much indebted to Professor John M. Ander- son.

3. Cf. Thoreau's remark: "If I knew for a cer- tainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.. . for fear that I should get some of his good done to me,-some of its virus mingled with my blood" (see the closing pages of the section of Walden entitled "Economy" for the context ampli- fying this remark). Cf. also John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Modern Library, 1930), Part IV, Section I, especially the last three paragraphs.

4. Ethics, Part V, Prop. XLII. I would state one reservation about this formulation: blessedness seems to suffuse and transfigure what may be viewed under the aspect of desire, or inclination; it does not seem to supervene as an opposing and more power- ful "force." Perhaps Spinoza is handicapped in stating an insight that will not submit to the mode of conception of which he avails himself throughout his attempt to explain the "mechanics" of affectivity (cf. especially Part IV, Prop. VII: "An emotion can only be controlled or destroyed by another emotion

contrary thereto, and with more power for controlling emotion." On such a view action can only be viewed as consequent upon prevailing motiva- tional factors, among which a responsible person cannot be found).

5. Has any writer in our time pioneered the way for this thought more persistently and penetratingly than William Faulkner? Also I should mention that Professor D. T. Suzuki, the Buddhist philosopher, has especially helped me to surmise the original man in all men.

6. Dr. Karen Horney's Neurosis and Human Growth (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1950) has seemed to me a mine of considerations which may help us to understand how we may come to chain ourselves within the framework of "pride systems" articulated in the form of patterns of what we ought to be and do. . 7. Professor D. T. Suzuki brings this out with great clarity in his discussions of "stopping" and "no-mindedness"; see, e.g., the chapter on "Swords- manship" in Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japa- nese Culture (Kyoto: Eastern Buddhist Society, 1938).

8. See John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Modern Library, 1930), p. 289.

9. I am very much indebted to the works of Dr. Karen Homey for helping me to focus on "moral earnestness" and release from tension as clues to the meaning of humility. These same works also point out very clearly the possible connections between self-condemnatory "humility" and self- detestation.



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Bugbee - Obligation