The late Nicolas Walter gave five radio talks in the “Words of Faith” series on the BBC World Service in 1996. Each programme took up one theme, relating humanism to:
- Living
- Thinking
- Feeling
- Science
- Weeping and Laughter
The transcripts are reproduced below.
Living
A few months ago I talked here about dying without religion. Now I want to talk about living without religion – a much more important subject. As many thinkers have said – from Epicurus to Spinoza and onwards – we should always think about life rather than death. This is especially true if you think there is no life after death, as I do.
The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy is best known for his long novels, but he also produced many short stories, which are still well worth reading after more than a century. In 1881 he wrote a moral fable called What Men Live By, in which he asked what he saw as a simple question, “What do men live by?”, and gave a single answer, “Love!” But that just isnt good enough, is it? If you seriously ask this difficult question, “What do men – and women, and children for that matter – live by?”, you will get many different answers.
Think of all the things people dolive by – air and water, food and drink, parents and children, friends and enemies, land and work, power and glory, wealth and strength, duty and service, king and country, church and state, race and class, ideology and religion. These things can involve hate as well as love, competition, inhumanity as well as humanity. People don’t only live by them, they will kill and die for them too. If you want evidence, look around you.
If you ask a different question, “What should we live by?”, you will still get many answers, several of which contradict one another and lead to more difficulties. So what seems to be a simple problem is actually a very complex one. And it isn”t solved by bringing in religion to tell us how we should live, since religion also gives different answers to such questions. Again, if you want evidence, look around you.
What I want to do is go back and ask the original question, “What do people live by?” – that is, when they aren’t trying to make a living but are just living, when they don’t believe in any kind of superhuman person or supernatural power which can help them, when they have to rely on themselves. There are four things I shall discuss. The first thing is thinking, which includes everything from the first ideas of a child to the finest forms of philosophy. The second thing is feeling,which includes everything from the first ideas of a child to the finest forms of philosophy. The third thing is special thinking about ourselves and the world around us, which includes everything which can be called science. The fourth thing is special feelings, which include weeping and laughter, and, after all, love.
Before I discuss these things, let me mention one thing which brings them all together. Ludwig van Beethoven came from a Flemish family, was born in Germany, worked in Austria, admired the French, and was admired by the English. The Philharmonic Society in London paid him to write his last symphony, the Choral, which in our time has become the anthem of universal freedom, of the European Union (and also of the recent European football series). The last movement consists of a setting of the “Ode to Joy”, An die Freude, by the German poet Friedrich von Schiller, inspired by a French proposal for perpetual peace between the nations. It includes the following verse, which expresses what I want to discuss:
Deine Zauber binden wieder
Was die Mode streng geteilt
Alle Menschen werden Brüder
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.For thy magic brings together
What our custom sets apart;
All mankind shall be as brothers
Where thy gentle wings have dwelt.But how much better it sounds in music!
[ Finale of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony ]
Thinking
Think! How often do we think about thinking? Even though we think all the time, and it is the most important thing about us. The scientific name for the human species, after all, is Homo sapiens – “thinking man”. The French thinker René Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am”. One might as well say, “I am, therefore I think.” The new-born baby who doesn’t think yet, and the dying person who doesn’t think anymore, are not fully human. It is thinking which sets us apart from and above other animals and computers. Unlike animals or computers, we sit here inside our heads, looking out but also looking in, watching he world around us and ourselves within it, considering and controlling the relationship between the two. We think not only when we are awake, but when we are asleep, in our dreams.
Yet few people think enough or thoughtfully enough, and many people don’t think much of thought. It is unfortunate that we are hardly ever taught how to think or how to understand reason. The German thinker Immanuel Kant wrote Critiques of Pure Reason and of Practical Reason, but they were full of both pure and practical reasons. The French thinker Blaise Pascal, in a book actually called Thought, doubted thought. He said, “The heart has its reasons which reason doesn’t know.” Does it? How do we know? Through our reason! How can you attack reason except by giving reasons? It is by thinking about thinking that we know what thinking is, and that we know it isn’t everything.
For example, we know by thought that there is no such thing as pure thought. Our minds are part of our brains and our brains are part of our bodies; our mental activities are associated with and even dominated by our physical circumstances. The Scottish philosopher David Hume said, “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions”, though he was the most rational and least passionate of men. Karl Marx thought that our consciousness comes from our being, and Sigmund Freud thought that conscious activity comes from unconscious activity; this may be true, but the point is that Marx and Freud could think such things, that our consciousness can perceive our being and our conscious mind can perceive our unconscious mind. Psychology may depend on biology and sociology, but philosophy transcends them all, and the greatest achievements of humanity include the thoughts of philosophers over the thousands of years that we have records of them.
Yet philosophy and all the other forms of thought have a final limit. Our thinking ends when our mind ends, when our brain and body die. As William Shakespeare says for the dying Harry Hotspur, in his play Henry IV, Part 1:
“But thought’s the slave of life, and life’s time’s fool,
And time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop.”There’s a thought.
It is often said that thought can only be expressed in words. But babies think before they talk, and people who lose words through strokes still think. We often dream without words. Painters think in pictures, sculptors think in shapes, and musicians think in tones. Listen to the thought of the German composer Johann Sebastian Bach in one of his fugues.
[ The Art of Fugue ]
I shall end with a thought from the Polish writer Stanislaw Lec: “Think before you think!”
Feeling
Last week I talked about thinking; now I want to talk about feeling. This is the first thing we do, and the last. When we are born we feel hungry and alone, or we feel fed and held. When we wake up, we feel ourselves coming from nothing before we think. When we fall asleep or lose consciousness, or when we die, we stop thinking and feel ourselves going into nothing.
It is by feeling that we are living beings. We know we are part of the world through our feelings, before we know it through our thoughts. It is through our feelings that we respond to others, before we have thoughts about such things. Without thinking we would just be animals; but without feeling we would just be calculators. We have to think about how we feel; but we also have to feel how we think. Many people say that our thoughts come from our feelings, though they disagree about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing; either way, it is something we have to remember. Similarly our thoughts must go back to our feelings. If our feelings don’t make sense to our thoughts, something is wrong; but if our thoughts don’t make sense to our feelings, something is more wrong. Our intellectual and emotional lives are both part of our selves; if they get out of step, things go all wrong with us. It is unfortunate that we are hardly ever taught about our feelings, or learn how to handle them. One sign of growing up is that childish feelings are developed without being destroyed, but few adults seems to have managed this.
Human feelings are expressed not just in simple and immediate emotional reactions, but in such complex and permanent things as our sense of right and wrong, of good and evil, of beautiful and ugly – in our ethical and spiritual and aesthetic lives, again in everything that makes us human. As children we soon learn what we should or shouldn”t do, what is wonderful or frightful, what is exciting or boring. As adults we turn this into religion and morality, art and literature, drama and romance.
These emotional things are much more difficult than intellectual things, and raise complex questions. The English novelist Kingsley Amis wrote in his first book, “Nice things are nicer than nasty things”; but his son Martin Amis replied in his first book, “Nasty things are more interesting than nice things.” Good people are better than bad people, but in films baddies are more fun than goodies. The English writer John Milton made the most attractive person in his epic poem Paradise Lost not God but Satan. A completely faithful portrait is not as truthful as a slightly distorted painting. A fine building mustn’t be quite symmetrical. Favourite children’s stories end happily ever after, but great adult novels hardly ever end happily. Just as our rational minds tell us that the world is not a perfect place, so our emotional minds want the imperfect world to be reflected in our art.
Art demands pattern and imposes rhythm on its raw material. The greatest literature is not prose but poetry, and great prose has a metre of its own. Good stories and plays have a structure which real life lacks. Painting and sculpture have form as well as content. Significant movement turns into dance. Music has a beat as well as a tune.
The finest expression of human feeling in art is that which turns an ugly experience into a beautiful form – as when Henry Purcell wrote music for the funeral of Queen Mary in 1695, music which was played again at his own funeral later the same year.
[ March for Queen Mary ]
Science
Last week and the week before, I talked about thinking and feeling. Now I want to talk about the special kind of thinking which is called science . This isn’t just being able to do things, which is technology, or knowing about the way things are, which is common sense. Children learn that the earth goes round the sun and not the sun round the earth, without understanding why, and most of us are just bigger children in such matters.
The American poet Emily Dickinson didn’t like science, because she felt that it spoilt the mystery of the world:
It”s very mean of science
To go and interfere!But she wrote a neat poem about the place of science in the world:
Faith is a fine invention
When gentlemen can see –
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.Not just in an emergency. Microscopes – and telescopes, and all the other instruments of science – have enabled us during the past few centuries to know more about ourselves and the world than was known by our ancestors for thousands of years. Many people dislike the results, including some scientists. The English writer D.H. Lawrence couldn’t accept the Darwinian theory of natural evolution because, he said, pressing his hands to his breast, he didn’t feel it here. Charles Darwin probably wouldn’t have liked what evolutionary theory has become. Isaac Newton felt that God must interfere in the universe to start it off and keep it going. Albert Einstein, who discovered the new theory of relativity, couldn’t accept the newer theory of quantum mechanics because he couldn’t believe that God plays dice with the world. But science is always on the move. We have tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge, our eyes are opened, and there is no going back.
T.H. Huxley said science is organised common sense, but Lewis Wolpert says science actually goes against common sense, and J.B.S. Haldane said science shows that the world is not only queerer than we know but queerer than we can know. Science began alongside religion, as a useful hobby, but it became something different among the ancient Greeks and the ancient Chinese, and it has become one of the driving forces of Western civilisation. Now it no longer depends on superstition and myth and magic spells, but on observation and experiment and mathematical calculation.
Like religion, scientists can be good or bad. They have made a bargain with nature – like the bargain which Faust made with the Devil – to have the power of understanding how things really are, with the chance of doing great good, but also at the risk of doing great harm. Science can enormously improve our standard of living, but it can also enormously increase our efficiency of killing. It is up to us to choose which. One comfort is that, despite everything, there is progress in human history. Two centuries ago hardly anyone believed that all men should have a voice in society, and one century ago hardly anyone believed that women should also have a voice in society; now most of us live longer and better, and all of us must use our voices intelligently, about science as about everything else.
Science enables me to talk to you like this, but is also enables wicked people to talk to weak people and persuade them to do terrible things. I think of the prophet in the book Thus Spake Zarathustra by the German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche, who can talk good sense or utter nonsense. You can hear him in the music Richard Strauss wrote.
[ Thus Spake Zarathustra ]
Weeping and Laughter
Last week I talked about the special kind of thinking called science. Now I want to talk about some special kinds of feeling. Perhaps the strangest human actions are weeping and laughter. Other animals grieve, but I don’t think any of them cry as we do, and no machine can grieve. Nor do I think that other animals find things funny, though some make noises like laughter and others do things we find funny, and I am sure that no machine could make or take a joke.
The first thing and often the last thing we do is to weep, and the first sign that a baby is one of us is when it smiles at us. It is hard to understand the biological advantages of weeping and laughter. Perhaps science will explain them – though I rather hope not. These things are at the heart of our humanity, and of our art – whether in the tragedies or comedies of our higher art, or in the sensational and amusing journalism of our lower art. Indeed it sometimes seems that we use tears and laughter to hide ourselves from ourselves and each other, that we seek trivial emotion on the surface in order to avoid serious thought and feeling underneath. “Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry”, is the slogan of the showman. But however much we enjoy the show, it is soon over, and we must go back to into the real world. And even that doesn”t last for ever. As the English poet Ernest Dowson said:
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate.
I think we have no portion in them after
We pass the gate.They are not long, the days of wine and roses
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.Between these dreams, we are awake, through the will to live, and through love. For what we live in the end by is indeed love, as Tolstoy said in the story I mentioned four weeks ago. Plants and animals reproduce themselves through sex, and many animals bring up their young, but it is love which makes sex and the family truly human, the personal love which binds parents and children, lovers and friends, the impersonal love which binds society and humanity. But love isn’t a straightforward matter. It is love which makes the world go round, as the song says, but it is also love which makes much trouble in the world. It is said that God is love, but what a Devil love can be! Think of love in life and literature, from Helen of Troy to the latest story in the news, and think how love so easily goes wrong or turns into hate. But at its best love dominates our literature and art, our philosophy and morality, and also our ordinary daily lives.
I shall end with a cautionary tale. The Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi, who wrote the first great operas to survive, wrote one three and a half centuries ago on the Roman Emperor Nero and his mistress Poppea – one of the most immoral stories in history. Monteverdi hides none of the wickedness of his subject, but the opera ends with a duet between the villainous couple which is one of the most beautiful love songs in music – a rich irony (made richer by the fact that it may not be by Monteverdi at all). This seems a suitable point to end this exposition of my humanism, which includes thought and feeling, art and literature, science and philosophy, tears and laughter, love and paradox.
[“Pur ti miro”, from L’Incoronazione di Poppea ]