Hey Rub-a-dub-dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of LifeDreiser, Theodore
General
Hey Rub-a-dub-dub: A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of Life
Dreiser, Theodore
American essays -- 20th century
if it is anything at all, a sense of self-preservation and conditional
desire for equation or peace--stillness, rest, lack of friction.
It is true that the individual may not always agree with the ethics of
his time, or that he may smack of anything but sweetness and light, may
even seem a little gross or terrible; but if he prove essential, as he
nearly always does, his revolt against the commonplace fixity, rigidity
and the like of the slower-moving man cannot be looked upon as either
wholly evil or in vain. Indeed, if he did no more than throw a new light
on this strange phantasmagory called existence, then, ethics or no
ethics, he would have been worth while and it would make no essential
difference whether he agreed with passing theories or not. Apparently
the world, or let us say the race, is moving along in some curious way
to possibly a larger, more widespread condition of complexity and
articulation, part with part (variety in unity, unity in variety), and a
self-sensating intellectual perception and appreciation of the same. Who
knows? But beyond that, what? Is man better, purer, more spiritual, more
generous than ever he was? Do any of the savages or animals lack any of
the emotional or charitable traits which we possess? Observe the wolf
with its young; the cat; the dog; the lion. Are not all swayed by
conditioning laws of subsistence and which they obey, but nothing more?
True, they kill to eat, to preserve themselves. Has man ever done
less--or more?
Any naturalistic philosopher can, of course, trace all the steps for
you, how it is that you have come to be seemingly so different, although
he cannot tell you why or where you are going. My own guess would be
that we, or rather the race, is going on to a greater individuality,
plus a greater weakness as to its component and clinging atoms,
providing it does not suffer an endless dark age of mass control or
total extinction in some form or other. Nietzsche appeared preaching
individuality, greater individuality for everybody who could achieve it,
and to a certain extent he was right. Greater individuality than the
world has yet seen will certainly be achieved by some. Schopenhauer,
before him, announced that only failure for the individual was possible,
and to a certain extent he was right also. The two saw the oversoul from
different angles. Again, Marx, the humanitarian, appeared preaching
solidarity for the mass and mass control, and his work will probably
result in greater material battles between the individual and the mass
than any yet witnessed. If one stands with the individualists, as one
may well do, and believes that there are no laws created by mass
conditions and necessities which the individual should not be allowed to
break for the subsequent good of the mass, and also that the mass only
moves forward because of the services of the exceptional individual,
then one will be compelled to agree with Nietzsche that it is folly not
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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