It is a common assumption among the most educated people in the Western world that the peoples of Asia are more primitive than we, and therefore represent within the scale of evolution a standpoint that for us would be regressive. It is furthermore understood that they do not in these cultures place much value upon individual personality and have ideas of man in which the individual tends to be merged in the collective, whether the collective be social or cosmic. It is understood that the ideal, say, of Indian spirituality is to enter into a state of consciousness in which the individual ego disappears into the undifferentiated esthetic continuum (courtesy of Dr. Northrup).
Now this, of course, is a travesty, but historically it is rather interesting that this view of essential differences between East and West, a view to a large extent espoused by psychoanalysis, arose at just the time when the West was busy colonizing other peoples, particularly those in Asia. It thus became an extraordinarily convenient doctrine, for purpose of colonization, to suppose that this was not mere rapacity, but bringing the benefits of a higher order of civilization and culture to less developed peoples.
Greater knowledge in the course of time shows us to what an enormous degree all these suppositions were unfounded and shows us furthermore that the typical contrasts that we believe to exist between East and West are to a large extent imaginary. Nevertheless, to make some of these contrasts is instructive just for theoretical discussion. I’m not, at the moment, going to point out by detailed facts and illustrations how wrong these contrasts were, but to try to carry the discussion to a more constructive level.
Now, I suppose it is true that the Western view, by which I mean largely the Anglo-Saxon-Protestant view of the nature of man, does set an enormous value upon integrity and the uniqueness of the individual. We have, of course, seen in this country a great epoch for so called rugged individualism, which has now collapsed. And, it is curious as one looks around even in such an intelligent assembly as this to notice an extraordinary uniformity of appearance. In other words, what individualism led to was an increasing conformity and loss of individuality, because when the value of each individual finger is so emphasized that it amounts to the severance of the finger from the hand, the finger begins to lose its life.
I believe we are seeing the consequence of this individualism by the fact that it is swinging over into its opposite—that is to say into simple collectivism—because actually the individualist and the collectivist doctrine, the capitalist doctrine and the Marxist doctrine, rest upon the same misconception of man’s nature: the conception of man as something that is not truly natural. That may sound odd because the flavor of scientific thought in the nineteenth century, from which Marxism and Capitalism and, of course, much of psychotherapeutic doctrine emerges, was a philosophy of scientific naturalism or monism. It was felt that the human psyche was a naturalistic phenomenon and not a soul imprisoned in flesh from another world. But the behavior of Western man has belied this theory altogether. For it is out of a climate of scientifically naturalistic opinion that there arose a technology whose avowed aims were “the conquest of nature” and an attack of major dimensions on the physical world.
For the feeling was no longer that man was a supernatural soul embodied but that he was a natural freak—an accident of nature—a completely spontaneous and unreliable emergence of intelligence resulting from the process of natural selection that could not be relied upon to perpetuate the phenomenon. Therefore, man as the intelligent accident had to seize the initiative and defend his intelligence and his culture against all forces of natural erosion. Thus, the natural freak took the place of the supernatural creation, but the two doctrines are in practice identical.
Now we contrast this, though the contrast is a flagrant generalization, with such conceptions of man as we find especially in China, in the doctrine known as “Taoism,” and to some extent in India, in conceptions of man that are found in Buddhism and Hinduism. Here we find, I think, something of enormous importance. It is generally understood that the view of man’s identity among Buddhists and Taoists is based on some terrifying regressive experience called “mysticism” or the “oceanic feeling,” and I think much misunderstanding arises from the use of such words. Generally speaking, the content of this sort of experience is that the boundaries that are ordinarily established between the ego, or the individual, and the rest of the world are not rigid boundaries at all and that they are not boundaries in the sense of being walls but rather boundaries in the sense of being bridges. In other words, in these types of thought the human being inside the skin and the world outside the skin are regarded as having in the skin a common boundary that belongs to both. We know this in our own behavioral sciences, especially in human ecology and social psychology. We know very well that if we try to describe accurately the behavior of the human organism, whether that behavior be called psychic or physical, we have only to go a few steps before it becomes necessary for us to describe the behavior of the environment—and vice versa. In other words, you can’t go very far in talking about the behavior of an individual person, or of a social group, or of a species, without talking about the behavior of the environment: thus you are beginning to describe the behavior of a unified field.
Although, in these sciences, it is perfectly clear theoretically that this is what we are talking about, there is no parallel as yet between this theoretical conception of man and our personal feeling of our own identity. We still feel ourselves to be what I have called skin-encapsulated egos, and whatever value this feeling may have, carried too far it leads to a chronic alienation, a sense of loneliness, of being isolated intelligent organisms in a blind, unintelligent universe. This drives us to seek security in a herd-like social structure. Therefore, there are two views of man that are not contradictory, but that should stand to each other in a hierarchical order. (1) The Eastern view of man as a node in a unified field of behavior, because, after all, this so called mystical experience is nothing other than a direct sensation of man-and-the-universe as a single pattern of behavior. That’s all it is. You don’t need to invoke any spooky business whatsoever. (2) The Western view, which stresses the special value of each organism and its unique character.
These two views of man go together in a hierarchical pattern. They are not mutually exclusive. I have sometimes said that it is characteristic of maturity to be able to distinguish what is more important from what is less important, without making what is less important unimportant. I feel that it is quite basic that we need a conception of man coupled with a sensation of man as really belonging in his natural and cosmic environment. We cannot assume that we are unique islands of intelligence in a completely capricious world. For a world in which man evolves must be an environment itself evolved to the point where it can ecologically sustain the human organism. An intelligent organism argues an intelligent environment.
It is of capital importance for the Western world to find some means of sensing ourselves in this way unless we are to run amuck completely and abuse and exploit our natural resources and animal, insect, and bacteriological fellow-beings. We shall never use this world correctly without the concrete definite experience that it is as much our own body as what is inside our skin. But this universal feeling of man’s nature is not antithetical to Western values concerning the importance of the individual and its personality. As a matter of fact, not only is there no conflict between them but they are mutually essential. To return to the finger: the fingers of the hand can move separately. They are plainly articulated and quite different, but their life, their difference, their individuality, depends upon their belonging to one organism—to having beneath their individual difference a common ground.
These Eastern views of man have emphasized our common ground, what in Hindu philosophy is called the Atman, the super-individual self that is always underlying our individual selves. To go back down into that ground is not a regression. It is recovering again the foundation of one’s house. To use the French phrase, it is reculer pour mieux sauter—going back to take a better jump. Childhood and the maternal basis of nature is not something that we leave and quit in becoming adult. It is something from which we grow up as a tree grows up from the soil.
From L. N. Solomon (Ed.). (1962). A symposium on human values (pp. 107–110). Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 2(2), 89–111. Copyright © 1962 by the Association of Humanistic Psychology. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Inc.