The Aristos

by John Fowles

  (I) Sex is an exchange of pleasures, of needs; love is a giving without return.

  (J) It is this giving without return, this helping without reward, this surplus of pure good, that identifies the uniqueness of man as well as the true nature of the true marriage. This is the quintessence the great alchemy of sex is for; and every adultery adulterates it, every infidelity betrays it, every cruelty clouds it.

  THE INWARD EDUCATION

  124 Man should not be, above all, necessary to society; he should be above all necessary to himself. He is not educated until his self has been analysed and he understands the common psychological mechanisms. At present we teach the persona, not the real self. The persona is made up of all the incrustations, however formed, that hide what I really feel and what I really think. It is plain that we must all have some persona; but not that we should hide so much of our real selves as our societies and their educational systems now require. We must not teach how to conform (society does that automatically) but how and when not to conform.*

  THE IMPORTANCE OF THE NOW

  125 In this universe of mirrors and metaphors, man reflects and parallels all the realities. They are all in each mind, but deep. The infinite process is made finite in each thing; each thing is a cross section of eternity.

  126 The end of all evolution is dissolution. This is not absurd. It would be absurd if the end of evolution was the perfect state. It would be absurd if evolution had any other end but dissolution. Evolution is therefore meaningless if it is evolution towards. It is now or nothing. A better state, a better design, a better self, a better world; but always these things beginning now.

  127 The whole is not a chain, but a spinning top. The top spins on, but stays in one place. One can point to a link in the chain or a point on the road and say ‘That is the best place to be’; but a top is always in the same place. The weight of the top must be distributed evenly about its central axis, or the top will tilt and wobble. All those tendencies, in so many religious and political philosophies, to think and persuade away from the present life, from the now; those attempts to make us put the great weight and energy of our beliefs and hopes in some other world (heavenly or Utopian) are like erratic movements of weight inside the top. We disperse our powers centrifugally. The real meaning of life is close around the axis of each now.

  128 It is not by accident that the discovery of self is not encouraged by the state. An educational system is organized by the state to prolong the state; and the discovery of the self is also often the discovery of what the state really is.

  129 Our present educational systems are all paramilitary. Their aim is to produce servants or soldiers who obey without question and who accept their training as the best possible training. Those who are most successful in a state are those who have most interest in prolonging the state as it is; they are also those who have most to say in the educational system, and in particular by ensuring that the educational product they want is the most highly rewarded.

  130 State and government are ways of thinking of the then; they are systems of the then. We say ‘He lives in the past and we say it with pity or contempt; yet most of us live in the future.

  131 The state does not want to be; it wants to survive.

  132 It is true that many of us live in tomorrow because today is uninhabitable. But to make today habitable is not in the interest of the state. It is principally the inadequacies of the state that force man to live in the future; and the main reason for these inadequacies is that the states of the world refuse to act jointly and do these two essential things – depopulate and educate.

  INWARD KNOWLEDGE

  133 Most of us still carry in our minds the myth of a clearly marked frontier between the healthy and the sick; and perhaps in no area so much as mental health, which happens to be the area where such demarcations are most absurd. The endless fun made of psychiatry, and especially of psycho-analysis, is a sure sign of fear. The ‘healthy’ among us tend to cherish our phobias and neuroses; we do not want them exposed.

  134 There is no greater inadequacy in our present systems of education than the attitude to psychology. The notion that school psychologists should devote all their time to the ‘sick’ (the neurotic or backward students) is absurd. The ‘healthy’ need their attention just as much. A key subject in any education in humanity must be general psychology; and a key service must be the personal analysis of each student.

  135 This is not the place to discuss the comparative merits of the different schools of psychological theory. But since the psychological aspect of an education in humanity must have a strong social bias, we should certainly pay far more attention to the biological theory of domination-subordinance.

  136 This theory has sprung from the study of non-human primates like gorillas and chimpanzees. It has been discovered that their relative domination over or subordinance to one another depends largely on size and (outside the periods when females are in heat) nonsexual factors akin to human self-confidence. Thus a large female and a small male in the same cage will be respectively the dominator and the subordinate; the male will ‘present’ (adopt female copulatory positions) as a sign of submission. We must realize that all humans adopt (or veer between) one or other of these roles, irrespective of sex. The common organizational behaviour known as boot- or arse-licking is a clear example of the subordinate role. The man who goes in for it is metaphorically ‘presenting’; and it is not for nothing that the two commonest obscenities in every language are ‘Fuck you’ and ‘Bugger you’. They are both assertions about dominance, and the nature of the dominated.

  137 But of course human beings are not caged and live in far more complex situations; and it is the chain-reaction aspect of this relationship need that is the most dangerous for society. The conscious subordinate in regard to one person will become the more or less aggrieved dominant in regard to another. Human subordinates are generally conscious of their subordination, and the secret displeasures it brings them, and so the road to a compensatory pleasure elsewhere in their lives becomes only too clearly signposted. The general ‘historical resentment’ or sense of inferiority felt by the German people between the two world wars leads straight to the persecution of the Jews. The vicious circle of sado-masochism in society is only too easily and naturally established.

  138 Birds provide us with the clearest example of the mechanism nature has evolved to deal with this vicious circle – that is, ‘territory’. In some species, the biological value of nesting in large colonies is so great that their sense of territory is small; and in these species we find highly developed systems of pecking-order. Such species gain both ways. They are defended by sheer numbers; and the ones who get pecked to death are the weakest individuals. Other species, at any rate during the breeding season, establish areas on which no other pair may trespass with impunity. Under this system they are less prone to infectious disease, famine, and so on. That both systems work we may see clearly in the Corvidae (the most ‘intelligent’ bird family) in which closely-related species have adopted different systems. Thus jackdaws and rooks live largely communally; while crows and magpies live largely in pairs or small families.

  139 Man utilizes both systems. We defend ourselves and organize our essential needs communally; and it is in these communal situations, which obviously require hierarchies of command and importance, that we see most clearly the workings of the human pecking-order. But we equally demand domains analogous to the territories of the solitary species, in which we can be the dominants. Though we more naturally think of spheres like the home, the garden, the property and possessions we own, as our ‘territory’, we all carry about with us a much more important psychological corpus of emotions and ideas and beliefs. This mental territory governs all our social behaviour, and it is of vital importance that it receives more study and attention in our education, since it is almost certainly the aspect of ourselves that we know least of.

  140 A very frequent demarcator of this mental territor
y is the Jungian complex. A complex is an idea or group of associated ideas about which we cannot think rationally and objectively, but only emotionally and subjectively. Jungian theory explains the complex as the conscious manifestation of unconscious fears and desires; but complexes also serve very well as warnings to other members of the species not to trespass in this area. A crank who maintains that the world is flat may become very angry when he is given clear proofs to the contrary. His anger will certainly not prove his case; but it will often tend to preserve his case from further attack.

  141 The prime intention of this mental territory we erect around us is of course to counteract our sense of nemo, of nonentity; and this immediately warns us that it is not sufficient to destroy the vanities, illusions and complexes with which we wall ourselves in (or demarcate ourselves) since thereby we risk destroying identity. What we need to do is to discover what is valid in this demarcation-fortification material; and then to let the discovery of what is valid show to the frightened person inside the fortifications what is invalid.

  142 The understanding of the roles subordinate and domination play in our fives; the analysis of what is strictly necessary in the role adopted (or of the way the individual distributes different roles to himself); and establishing the validity of the mental territory’ we attempt to define; these represent the basis for an educational personal analysis of each student. This does not of course preclude analysis based on more familiar psychological theories; the systems of Adler and Karen Homey must be particularly relevant. But this gives most hope of bringing more self-understanding, tolerance and a greater equality in existence to our world.*

  143 I can best describe this inward phase of education by giving the questions it should, by the time it is complete, enable its students to answer.

  Who am I?

  In what ways am I similar to and in what ways different from most other human beings?

  What are my duties to myself?

  What are my duties towards others?

  What are the duties of an employer, an employee, a member of a state, an individual?

  To what extent, given my capacities, do I fulfil and balance these conflicting extremes?

  What do I mean by love?

  What do I mean by guilt?

  What do I mean by justice?

  What is science to me?

  What is art to me?

  THE SYNOPTIC EDUCATION

  144 This education is concerned with only one thing: why all is as all is. Since we are in the same situation as human beings, it must be identical the world over.

  145 It must comprehend the study of the great religions and philosophies of the past – and present – but since its intention is synoptic, they must be presented as interpretations or metaphors of reality. We know that in this domain the truth is always more complex than our formulation of it.

  146 It seems to me that the inescapable conclusion of any truly synoptic view of human existence is that the chief aim of evolution is the preservation of matter. Each form of animate matter is given a reason for living; and our human reason is the establishment of equality of recompense in living. Since in our present world unnecessary inequalities are ubiquitous, a proper synoptic education must lead to a sense of discontent that is also a sense of moral purpose.

  147 I believe also that it must discredit the notion that God (in the traditional sense) can, in any but the negative way I have described, be presumed to have human characteristics or powers; in short, we will do better to assume there is no such God.

  148 Finally it will destroy our last childish belief in an afterlife, through which, like a hole in a bucket, real life leaks away. If death is absolute, life is absolute; life is sacred; kindness to other life is essential; today is more than tomorrow; noon conquers night. To do is now, living; death is never able to do.

  149 Everything finally is means, nothing is end. All we call immortal is mortal. What a nuclear holocaust may do, time certainly will do. So live now, and teach it.

  150 The mystery is not in the beginning or the end, but in the now. There was no beginning; there will be no end.

  10

  THE IMPORTANCE OF ART

  1 By art, I mean all the arts; by artists, creators in all the arts; by artefacts, anything that can be enjoyed in the absence of the artist. Since the discovery of sound recording and cinematography it is arguable that great performances, for example in music or in drama, are now artefacts. However, by artefact I mean here what it traditionally means. The composer’s, not the interpretant’s, kind of creating; the playwright’s, not the actor’s.

  2 The practice and experience of art is as important to man as the use and knowledge of science. These two great manners of apprehending and enjoying existence are complementary, not hostile. The specific value of art for man is that it is closer to reality than science; that it is not dominated, as science must be, by-logic and reason; that it is therefore essentially a liberating activity, while science – for excellent and necessary causes – is a constricting one. Finally and most importantly it is the best, because richest, most complex and most easily comprehensible, medium of communication between human beings.

  TIME AND ART

  3 Art best conquers time, and therefore the nemo. It constitutes that timeless world of the full intellect (Teilhard du Chardin’s noösphere) where each artefact is contemporary, and as nearly immortal as an object in a cosmos without immortality can be.*

  4 We enter the noösphere by creating, whereby we constitute it, or by experiencing, whereby we exist in it. Both functions are in communion; ‘actors’ and ‘audience’, ‘celebrants’ and ‘congregation’. For experiencing art is experiencing, among other things, that others have existed as we exist, and still exist in this creation of their existing.

  5 The noösphere is equally created, of course, by great achievements in science. But the important distinction between the artefact and what we may call the scientifact is that the former, unlike the latter, can never be proved wrong. An artefact, however poor artistically, is an object in a context where proof and disproof do not exist. This is why the artefact is so much more resistant to time; the cosmogonies of ancient Mesopotamia make very little impression and have very little interest for us. They are disproved scientifacts. On the other hand the artefacts of ancient Mesopotamia retain both interest and immediacy. The great test of a scientifact is its utility now; of course utility-now is of vital importance to us and explains the priority we accord science in our world now. But disproved scientifacts – those that no longer have this utility – become mere items of interest in the history of science and the development of the human mind, items that we tend to judge by increasingly aesthetic standards; for their neatness of exposition, style, form and so forth. They become, in fact, disguised artefacts, though far less free of time and therefore less immediate and important to us than true artefacts.

  6 This timelessness of the artefact has a quantitative aspect; it is of course illogical and ungrammatical to speak of one object as being more timeless than another. But our eagerness to conquer time – or to see time conquered – does lead us into this illogic. We have to be very ruthless, suppress all our intuitive feeling, to find worthless ugliness in an artefact of over a few hundred years’ age. It is true that the passage of time often constitutes a kind of selection committee; objects of beauty stand a better chance of being preserved than ugly ones. But in many cases – such as archaeological finds – we know that there was no selection committee. Ugly objects in their own age survive side by side with beautiful ones; and yet we find beauty in them all.

  7 Time, the length of survival of an artefact, becomes a factor in its beauty. The aesthetic value of the object becomes confused with its value as witness, or carrier of information from far places. Its beauty merges into its usefulness as a piece of human communication; and this will plainly vary according to our need of (previous lack of) communication from the particular source.

  8 The older an a
rtefact the nearer it is to the timeless; the newer the artefact the further away. Because it is new, yearless, it has none of the beauty or utility of having survived in time; but it may have the beauty or utility of being likely to survive time. Some artefacts are likely to survive because the future can use them as evidence against the age that produced them; and others as evidence for. Onicial art requires only the second kind. Monuments, not testaments.

  9 Though this prejudice in favour of what is old or likely to become old affects our judgement of artefacts, and even our attitude to such things as fossils, it does not normally affect our judgement of other objects. In the stone, the mere enduringness of matter; in the artefact, the enduringness of man; of a name or of a nameless human existence; the thumb-mark below the handle of this Minoan pot.

  10 An aged artefact is both what could not be created today and what still exists today; we admire in it the number of nows survived. It is doubly present; both survivant and now. This explains the long vogue of the antique. As organisms aware that we shall die, we are in one way nearer the oldest artefact than the newest natural object.

  11 Since the normal standard by which we judge artefacts is their worthiness to survive, it is only to be expected that a contrary kind of artefact should on occasion appeal to us: that is, the ephemeral artefact.

  12 A whole host of minor arts are, in themselves and by their natures, banned from the noosphere: for example, the arts of gardening, coiffure, haute cuisine, pyrotechnics. If they get into the noösphere, it is by chance, by happening to be made items in some greater art. It is true that the camera and the cinecamera, the tape recorder and the tin can, counter the intrinsic ephemerality of these sub-arts; and it is sometimes possible to reconstitute them by recipe. But it is precisely a part of our pleasure that the direct experience of these arts is essentially ephemeral and not shared by others.