The Reverend Mr. Opitz is a member of the staff of the Foundation for Economic Education.
The modern world is coming unglued! The traditional ties that have held people together in families and societies are weakened; the loyalties which once produced such a variety of voluntary associations and groups lose their attractive and cohesive powers. The disintegrative forces now at work on us are reflected in the literature of alienation and estrangement; they are manifested, above all, in the enormous growth of the powers and functions of central governments in every country of the world. The increasing political direction of our lives introduces coercive relationships among people where the former attachments between persons were voluntary. Such are the symptoms of that spiritual malaise which constitutes the core of the problem to which Dr. Franz E. Winkler, a medical man, addresses himself in his Man: the Bridge Between Two Worlds (Harper & Bros., 268 pp. $5.00).
There are two kinds of knowledge, Dr. Winkler argues, intellectual and intuitive. The former is analytical and critical; it takes something apart in its effort to understand the thing in terms of its elements. The latter is synthesizing and creative, seeking to understand a thing in terms of the whole of which it is a constituent part. Intellectual knowledge is knowledge about something; intuitive knowledge is immediate awareness.
Many languages have separate words to denote these two kinds of knowing. Goethe, whom Winkler greatly admires, used Verstand and Vernunft; but English does not distinguish between the several ways of knowing. Our difficulty may be illustrated by a crude example. “Do you know how to swim?” we ask. “Sure,” is the reply, “you just kick your feet and paddle with your hands.” “But can you swim,” we continue. “Oh, no,” comes the answer. Doing is one mode of knowing which is different from intellectual knowledge; intuition is yet another mode.
Dr. Winkler’s more elegant illustration concerns a watch found by a man from Mars. He takes it apart and discovers wheels, springs, gears, and so on. Analyzing these items further, he breaks them down into their chemical elements which are then further reduced to positive and negative electrical charges—at which point the visitor from outer space may feel that he understands the watch. But we, who know the purpose of a watch, that it is a device for telling time, have to try to explain to the Martian that, although his knowledge about watches may not be without value, nevertheless, it is not the most relevant set of facts to know about watches.
Modern man’s predicament is similar to that of the Martian; he has developed the analytical and critical sides of his nature but neglected the intuitive and the creative. The result is that, although his sciences are in good shape, his philosophy of science, his religion, and his art are in a mess. There is no inevitability about this result; a regrouping of forces is possible, even now. “We must not believe that modern man has lost the gift of intuition,” writes Dr. Winkler. “It is rather that his interest has become so exclusively focused on the outer world, his mental activities so completely occupied with analytical thinking, that he has lost the full appreciation of inner experience. Thus he neglects one of the indispensable elements of his psyche, which must be rebuilt by an acceptable world of intangible truth.”
In short, there is an imbalance in man, which causes inner dislocations and strains in individuals. The inner distress is then projected onto our societies and translated into a need for social reform or revolution. Because half-men can know only half-truths we moderns read our current distresses solely in terms of social diagnosis for which we all too readily agree to accept a political remedy.
There is no disparagement of the intellect in this book; the author exhibits fine critical and analytical powers himself as he probes religion, art, mythology, and contemporary science to show the role which has been and may be played by the intuitive side of man’s nature. It is “the polarity between analysis and intuition,” writes Dr. Winkler, that “gives man his freedom.” But this freedom is given up or lost because of “the growing inability of modern man to master his subconscious impulses…. There is an inner world accessible to man through nonphysical perception as there is an outer world manifesting itself to his physical sense organs.”
Dr. Winkler’s stress on the urgent necessity for bringing the inner and intuitive sides of man’s nature up to the level of development of his critical faculties may sound like a call for a return to religion. In a sense it is just that, for genuine religion has always concerned itself with restoring balance and composition to the picture man entertains of himself by helping him discover new meanings able to assimilate every advance in fact-finding. The seers, the saints, and the religious geniuses possess a clarity and depth of inner vision far surpassing that of the average man. They explore and map what is for the rest of us the dark inner continent of the soul. During periods of history when the critical faculties of average people had not been developed at the expense of their intuitive faculties, “relatively great numbers of people were able to confirm the important experiences of religious leaders by lesser experiences of their own…. Yet the change in human consciousness took its course. Immediate knowledge of God turned into creed, and creed into a code of morals. But codes, even the most venerable ones, cannot meet the longings in the human soul. So it was that mysticism, turning earthward, ultimately came to worship at the altars of Trotsky and Lenin.”
But man is so constructed that he cannot find fulfillment in any earthbound or materialistic creed. Spiritual religion needs a spiritual object which, in the nature of the case, can only be intuitively apprehended. “Christianity itself cannot be comprehended unless the state of consciousness into which it was born is experienced.” This seems to be the crux of the matter. Argument and analysis may bring one to the point of admitting the need for a new frame of mind, a new mood. The next step is to train oneself to acquire these. Such a training exists, and although the volume under review is not a handbook, the last chapter describes it.
This immensely stimulating book does not, of course, have all the answers, but it does raise a lot of the right questions.
