The Counterfeit Culture and the Sought-After Culture

What is the sought-after culture? What are all the great ideals, all of man’s lofty ideals? What does man seek in life?

If only man knew what he should seek in life! All great ideals were only created, as it were, to give an answer to the question of what to seek in life. But they do not give it, for they lead to an endless regress: “Your guarantor needs a guarantor.”¹ What is the purpose of life? Here is the answer. Man would first of all seek the meaning of life, the secret of life—the secret that lives and acts within him of its own accord, he would seek—he would seek if he had any hope of finding it.

Does not man’s superiority over beast (Ecclesiastes 3:19) consist in his greater cognition and his greater vitality?—and these two, cognition and vitality, contradict each other, preventing each other from fully developing.²

One does not have to look deeply to see that all the evil in life is the fruit of these contradictions—that man sees everywhere he lives and wherever he turns—as if these contradictions are the foundation of life. He views himself as an individual and still regards himself as if he is one with the whole commune, as if he lives its life, the life of everyone in it, and is responsible for everything that it lives through, together with all who are in it. This is the first contradiction, which, on the one hand, effectively generates the aspiration to reconcile the contradictions, to seek a life surpassing all contradictions, and on the other hand gives room for all the kinds of contradictions in the world, for as an individual a person has nothing but the four-square cubits of his private domain, his “I.”³ In this respect he sees countless individuals, and each individual exists from the standpoint of “I, and there is no one else” (Zephaniah 2:15). From this—contradictions and unending war among the various individuals and subgroups, cruel war, blind, futile, and the wounded and fallen comprise, sooner or later, all life with all that is in them. In this respect, he sees contradictions and wars within himself as well, among the various powers of the body and soul. From this follows, on the one hand, the defects of the body: pains, physical blemishes, illnesses, and every evil ailment; and on the other hand, the defects of the soul: pettiness, lying, malice, all kinds of unclean thoughts, and ugly deeds. And here, a spark of light shines, as it were, from the aspect of his feeling himself one with the universe and all of creation. In this aspect, all boundaries seem effaced, all individuals seem to be united into one whole unity, and there is no contradiction or war among the individuals, for the person lives with all of them together; living the whole universe’s creation in its entirety, and within all the particular individuals in their breadth, their depth, without limit, living all their pain, all their poetry, living all and enlivened by all—one soul, one living entity, one infinite attainment. Here is the root of the religious relation—man’s feeling as if he is one with all nature; of the ethical relation—his feeling as if he is responsible for all the life of nature; and of the aesthetic relation—that he is, as it were, the child of the union of the soul’s vitality and cognition, and that his essence is the quest for the form, for the tangible expression.

That is how life is perceived in idea, that is perhaps how life is in certain moments, but life itself is not so. The feeling of life—the feeling of pain, of pleasure, and generally the feeling of everything that constitutes one’s real life—is private. Moreover, even cognition, which reveals to a person the whole world, exposes his own self to him, is private. Its whole power is in specifying and calibrating the particulars; but to grasp the whole living generality that is not particularized, the absolute unity, the life in that unity, if one can speak that way, is not within the cognition’s power. It is possible to say, indeed, that life surpasses cognition, the life that is in the soul grasps—but life does not do so cognitively. The first question therefore is: How can one nourish the cognition with the soul’s life? And second: How to bring the soul to live in this way?

The first question is easily answered if one takes into account what nourishes cognition. Cognition is not nourished here by knowledge; rather, it is in new feelings and new movements of the soul—it discovers in a person’s spirit a depth of soul, a vital depth. All these will perhaps serve in the end to deepen cognition itself, to enlarge and strengthen its power of comprehension, but this is secondary, not primary. The primary thing here is clarifying what is renewed in the soul: it should be obvious that when renewal takes place in the soul its clarification will spontaneously come from cognition.

There remains, then, the second, more primary question: How are we to bring the soul to live in such a way—that is to say, how are we to bring about that which a person tastes in such a life will be so profound and so strong that it will withstand the [competing] tastes of private desires, and the feeling of unity with all nature will win out over the feeling of separation from nature?

I don’t know if anyone has comprehended more deeply than Buddha the hidden longing of man’s soul to achieve liberation from the chains of narrow privateness, which blocks it from the higher life. But he erred in his thinking. In elaborating on this hidden longing, he erred in seeking the object of longing in the realm beyond life, whereas if truth be told, it is life itself. The Nirvana that he sought is sheer life, which surpasses cognition in this regard: a life that is wholly united with the universe’s creation, which is ready to nourish cognition by the living soul that is bound to nature, are not to be perceived by cognition without a medium. It is to be understood that when he saw in cognition itself man’s unique conceptualizing power—the unique power by which man comprehends what he perceives—and when he ventured accordingly to bring into the bounds of the cognition what cannot be brought there, he was compelled to negate what does not fit, [namely] to negate life, which surpasses the cognition. The way to the higher life is, however, not the negation of life, not the aspiration to live less, but to live more, to weld the private “I” to life, to the life of all that lives and existence, to universal life.

To nature! To life! That is to say—to the nation! Human life starts with the nation, and the nation’s life starts from nature.