William Macneile Dixon - The Human Situation

Wikipedia:

William Macneile Dixon (1866 – 31 January 1946) was a British author and academic.

The Gifford Lectures’ Bio of Dixon:

William Macneile Dixon was a poet, historian, and scholar of the English language. His writings, both popular and academic, were renowned in the first half of the twentieth century. Dixon studied in Dublin and was awarded his Litt.D. at the University of Glasgow where he was Professor of English Language and Literature.

Dixon was in love with his country and its language. From his collections of poems to his book The Englishman, we find a scholar and a poet whose patriotism inspired a generation. His expertise also included Hellenism, Classical Philosophy, and neo-Platonism. Dixon was a true Renaissance thinker who believed that a civilization was more indebted to the genius of its ‘intuitive’ individuals—its artists and writers—than to its politicians, engineers, scientists or leaders.

Originally, Dixon was not scheduled to deliver the 1935-1937 Glasgow Gifford Lectures, but Emil Meyerson, who had been selected to follow after William Temple, died before he could deliver any of his courses. Dixon stepped into the breach with little time to prepare. Nevertheless, Dixon’s two courses of Glasgow Gifford Lectures were well received and immediately published upon their completion in 1937. By 1944 The Human Situation had been printed in seven editions. The popularity of Dixon’s work in the first half of the twentieth century makes unfathomable the relative obscurity of his work (outside of his poetry) in the second half of the century.

The Gifford Lectures - William Macneile Dixon – The Human Situation:

Delivered in Glasgow from 1935–1937, Dixon’s course of Gifford Lectures, entitled The Human Situation, explores the life of the human soul and contrasts a rationalist/scientific understanding of the world with Dixon’s own poetic/spiritualist understanding. Alongside Plotinus and Leibniz, he asserts that all nature is animate with endless congeries of monads that are ever in pursuit of becoming.

I: Introduction

The most singular and deepest themes in the History of the Universe and Mankind, to which all the rest are subordinate, are those in which there is a conflict between Belief and Unbelief, and all epochs, wherein Belief prevails, under what form it will, are splendid, heart-elevating and fruitful. All epochs, on the contrary, when Unbelief, in what form soever, maintains its sorry victory, should they even for a moment glitter with a sham splendour, vanish from the eyes of posterity, because no one chooses to burden himself with the study of the unfruitful.

Goethe

Had Emil Meyerson been alive I should not now be addressing you. He had accepted the invitation to succeed His Grace, The Archbishop of York, as Gifford Lecturer in this University. From him, had he survived, you would have had a survey of modern thought such as I cannot hope to rival. By his scientific attainments, his subtle and searching intellect, he was brilliantly equipped for such a survey. Few among the thinkers of our time possessed in as high a degree that delightful lucidity of thought and expression which seems to be a birthright of all Frenchmen. To your misfortune an amateur takes the place of a tried and laurelled veteran.

If it be said, and it is no more than the truth to say, that I owe my position here to the friendship of my colleagues, I would wish this to be added, that I take more pleasure in the regard of my friends than in any honour that could be done me. And yet their choice is, indeed, a great and signal honour. Possibly—it is a conjecture—I was invited to deliver this course of lectures partly at least in the hope that if I could not be so profound as my predecessors, I might, for that reason, be more easily followed. My colleagues may have had the Founder’s intention in mind. The ‘Deed of Gift’ clearly sets forth his wish that the Gifford Lectures should be ‘popular discourses’. ‘Popular’ I take to be within the compass of the plain man’s understanding. Some Gifford Lecturers have ranked his mental powers and accomplishments very high, so high, indeed, that I have wondered at times whether I had myself attained to them. You would wish me, I fancy, to avoid the ‘holy jungle of transcendental metaphysics’, as Swinburne irreverently called it, the tangled wilderness of technical and inconclusive debate. You would prefer discourses as little in the manner of Spinoza or Hegel as possible. If such be your wish, I am in the heartiest sympathy. You might even go so far as to hope that I am in a state of innocence in respect of philosophy. However that may be, I am certainly in an embarrassing position. Before some of my colleagues my philosophical errors will be an open book, before others my scientific, before others again my theological errors; more especially as it will be my aim to reduce the issues that confront us to their simplest terms. I do not propose to apologise for these errors. I have never believed in excuses, and I have hopes that they may possibly in a measure cancel each other out. Were it possible I should gladly avoid the Chinese puzzle of metaphysics. Alas, we cannot. For, however little we are conscious of it, we are one and all metaphysicians, good or bad, generally indeed bad, yet inveterate metaphysicians.

The best we can do, the most I can promise you, is to employ familiar words, the words of our daily speech, and to use them in the sense to which we are all accustomed. I shall abide, as far as I can, by the tradition of our country and our ancestors.

Our appreciation of these 1935-37 Gifford Lectures stems less from a desire to canonize Dr. Dixon than to make use of a great opportunity which this particular book, alone of his works, affords. Dixon, it seems to us, here took a long stride into the future possibilities of human thought. We say this partly because he was so well able to understand the dilemma of our civilization—a culture which had, fortunately, forsaken religion, but which, unfortunately, has been forsaken by science.

Dixon not only vividly portrays the dilemma of “modern man in search of a soul,” as Carl Jung phrased it, but clarifies greatly the problem of how that search may now be legitimately pursued. In so doing, he takes us back to some very ancient philosophers, not because they are made imposing by age, but because they lived in a simpler time, centuries before all human opinions were encompassed by the “religion vs. science” debate. The freer perspective of ancient philosophy certainly needs to be reborn, to fill the great need for high and broad hopes in our time. Thus Dixon’s view on the “great books” is stimulating. For him, such books are not the end of thinking, but only a beginning of philosophizing which we must ourselves institute, sometimes along lines quite different from those sanctified by the passage of centuries.

It is all very well to point out, as a precautionary measure, that the classics have stood the test of time, and that a work like Dr. Dixon’s own, for instance, however excellent it may appear, has not yet endured this test. But we are not sure that “time” can be relied upon to perform the task of “testing” any better than we can, here and now. Nor are we sure that we can afford to wait. The value of “time” has been in the extensive “filtering” of a work through many acute human minds which it allows, accomplishing, finally, the judgment of a collectively broad perspective; but since we cannot today think at all, in terms of important questions, unless we adopt a broad perspective, it should be less necessary to wait centuries for just appraisal. The Human Situation, then, we hold to be a great book for our testing.

What are its basic propositions? First, that we must, in all matters, “aim at conclusions upon which both the heart and the intellect can agree.”Poetry and metaphysics, for instance, or even our own private intuitions, may be just as capable of revealing reality to us as is rational analysis. Why should we be privileged to cut nature asunder, proclaiming that the intellect alone can give us “true knowledge”? What right have we to make this distinction? If nature misleads us in the one case, why not in another? Let us consider both or neither as avenues of approach to reality, and if we conclude the latter, we may as well, in resignation, stop all efforts to search for truth.

The great intuitions of man need, on this view, intensive re-examination. The human yearning for immortality, and the consistency of many beliefs in respect to its possibility, are primary facts of the “human situation.” Dixon predicted that mechanistic speculation would soon reach a dead-end because the primary puzzles of life’s meaning always remain no matter how thoroughly you have charted its mechanical motions. The soul must be a reality, he said, or, if it is not, it matters little whether anything else be “real.”

So Dixon goes on to view “the great experiment of existence” from the standpoint of a collectivity of evolving human souls. He wrote of birth and death, of changing philosophies, religions, and sciences, as a man should write—with the enjoyment of one who finds the life of man and of mind a continual adventure. Philosophy was to him neither the arid figurings of the pedant nor the doctrines and dogmas of religion, but rather an affirmation that no “thusfar-and-no-farther-shalt-thou-go”can ever circumscribe. The great currents of Platonic thought, so imperfectly grasped by Western culture, come alive again in his words, and the ideal of the quest for truth and beauty emerges as the only goal worthy of man’s vast potentialities. And, finally, the index points of thought are in The Human Situation freed from the confining categories of “historical periods” and returned to the province they should occupy—the province of each man’s present thinking. What Dixon really did was to take the soul away from theology and give it back to man.