Biological and Cultural Needs

In attributing to needs a large share in the genesis of artistic
and religious experiences and moral judgments, we are prone
to overestimate their importance and assume that all ideals
we know or cherish are projections of our own needs, that
acts of justice, creations of beauty are crystallizations of inter-
ests—just as ashtrays, shoestrings and fluorescent lamps—and
that their value consists in their being desirable.
      Looking more closely at our problem, it becomes obvious
to us that there is a structural difference between biological
and cultural needs. In the first case the need—or the demand—
creates the supply, in the second the supply creates the need.
The “interest” society takes in creative art may afford the
artists the physical possibilities to produce, but that “interest”
itself does not produce art. Did Van Gogh accomplish what
he did in answer to the call of would-be purchasers or to the
enthusiasm of admirers? Has our own eagerness to see a new
Shakespeare, who would express the tension of our age, given
birth to genius? Yet, we continue to cling to the theory that
art is the product of a need, the artists’ need for self-expression
or society’s need for the enjoyment of art.

The Myth About Self-Expression

Analyze the process of our enjoyment of art. You might mis-
take it at first as being motivated by the need to find expression
for feelings latent in our soul. Yet this would imply that a
work of art could not produce an emotion in us if we had not
already experienced it in real life; that we would not be capa-
ble of responding to a motive if we had not already registered
it, though vaguely, in our own heart.
      The fact is that we do not turn to art in order to gratify,
but in order to foster interests and feelings. A work of art
introduces us to emotions which we have never cherished
before. It is boring unless we are surprised by it. Great works
produce rather than satisfy needs by giving the world fresh
craving. By expressing things we were not even aware of,
works of art inspire new ends, unanticipated visions.
      Or does the creative act of the artist originate in a need for 
self-expression? It is obvious that an artist who is engaged in
satisfying their personal need is of little concern to society. Their
work becomes relevant to the world when in the process of
expression they succeed in attaining ends which are relevant to
others. If Honoré de Balzac were solely interested in satisfying
his desire for money and prestige, his achievements would
have been pertinent to no one else but him. His significance
became universal when he succeeded in creating types and
situations, the relevance of which had little to do with his own
private needs.
      It is not the blind need for self-expression that is the secret
of a creative personality. Only one who has nothing to say
boasts of their urge for self-expression. There must be something
to be expressed, an emotion, a vision, an end, which produces
the need for expressing it. The end is the basic number, the
need is but the coefficient.

Ends and Needs

Human life consists of needs as a house consists of bricks, yet
an accumulation of needs is no more a life than a heap of bricks
is a house. Life as a whole is related to a purpose, to an end.
True, unlike a house, a person is more than a means to an end, yet
it is in their relation to ends, their ability to realize that life without
ends is not worth living, that seems to indicate the peculiar
status of their existence. It is the distinction of a human to be con-
cerned with ends not only with needs.
      Needs are co-relative: they are strivings to achieve or main-
tain ends, functions of purpose rather than mere outpourings
of causes. To define needs without reference to the ends or
values upon which they are intent is like assuming that there
are normal perceptions with no objects perceived. Needs are
a person’s relation to values and ends. To take an interest is to be-
come aware of such a relation.
      Ends are requirements which are often independent of
needs. Just as our sense perception does not create but only
registers the perceived things, so is feeling of need merely
an inner response to an objective end. Feelings, perceptions
are ours; ends, things are the world’s; and the world is the
Lord’s.      
      Morality and religion do not begin as feelings within a person
but as responses to goals and situations outside of a person. It is
always in regard to an objective situation that we judge and
assert it is right or wrong; and it is in answer to what is beyond
the ineffable that a person says yes to God.
      A free person does not look upon themself as if they were a repos-
itory of fixed needs, but regards their life as an orientation
toward ends. To have a goal before one’s eyes, to pursue it
and to keep on extending it, seems to be the way of civilized
living. It is typical of the debauchee to adjust their ends to their
selfish needs. They are always ready to conform to their needs. In-
deed, anybody can be taught to have needs and to indulge in
costly food, dress or anything which satisfies the appetites or
tastes. Yet, free people are not blind in obeying needs but, weigh-
ing and comparing their relative merits, they will seek to
satisfy those which contribute to the enhancement and enrich-
ment of higher values. In other words, they would approve
only of those needs that serve the attainment of good ends.
They do not say: “Needs justify the ends,” but on the con-
trary” “Ends justify the needs.” To be able to forego the grat-
ification of one need for the sake of another, or for the sake
of moral, esthetic or religious principles, they must be, to
some degree, independent of needs.
      Psychological fatalism which maintains that there is only
one way, an animal way, is a paralyzing fallacy to which the
spirit of humanity will never surrender. The mind is not a reposi-
tory of fixed ideas but rather an orientation toward or a
perspective from which the world is apprehended. Nor is the
soul a thrall of interests, living under the mesmeric spell of
predetermined needs.
      There is more than one end on the itinerary of every per-
son’s life, some are stations on the road, while others diverge,
confusing our ways. Blind to the main goal, we usually stray
after selfish or parochial ends, imitating patterns that happen
to please us, weaving the web of needs by thoughtlessly inter-
lacing habits and desires.
      Much in civilization serves to give stability to, or even to
enhance, competitive goals rather than to help the search after
spiritual ends. We whitewash murder with our will to live and
do not recoil from doing injustice in our zeal to satisfy selfish
ambitions.

The Error of Pan-Psychology

Just as in the Middle Ages sciences were regarded as ancillae
theologiae, it is claimed today that the problems of meta-
physics, religion, ethics and the arts are essentially problems
of psychology. There is a tendency which we should like to
call pan-psychology. It proclaims psychology as capable of
explaining the origin and development of the laws, principles
and values of logic, religion, and ethics by reducing both form
and content of thought and conduct to subjective psychical
processes, to impulses and functions of psychical development.
      The error of this view lies in its confounding values, laws or
principles with the psychical setting in which they come to
our attention. It is fallacious to identify the content of knowl-
edge with the emotional reactions which accompany its acqui-
sition, or concepts with mental functions. Our affirming or
denying a conclusion, our saying yes or no to an idea, is an act
in which we claim to assert the truth on the basis of either
logical cogency or intuitive certainty. It is precisely the im-
munity to emotion that enables us to entertain a claim to
knowing the truth.
      Such a claim is entertained by the pan-psychological themselves.
Laws must be applied by them to the vague, manifold and
chaotic psychological processes if they are to be classified,
interpreted and made intelligible. But such laws, to be univer-
sally valid, must be capable of being logically and epistemo-
logically defended; they must be categories, not psychical
processes themselves. Otherwise they would be merely addi-
tional subject matter for psychological analysis without any
cognitive value. Are we not, then, compelled to admit that
there are cognitive acts the validity of which is independent
of impulses?
      From the point of view of pan-psychology we would have
to deny it. Yet we have no more right to say that logical
categories are the offspring of impulses than to say that im-
pulses are the offspring of categories. Categories are facts of
human consciousness which are just as undeniably given as
impulses. We seem, in fact, to be more dependent on cate-
dories in trying to understand impulses than we are in need
of impulses in developing our categories.

The Consciousness of Good and Evil

Good and evil are not psychological concepts, although the
ways in which they are understood are affected by the psycho-
logical conditions of the human personality, just as the partic-
ular forms in which they are realized are often determined by
historical, political and social conditions. However, good and
evil as such do not denote functions of the soul or society but
goals and ends and are, in their essence, independent of the
psychical chain of causation.
      In a person’s consciousness of good and evil or in complying with
religious precepts even at the price of frustrating personal
interests, a person does not regard their attitude as a mere expression
of a feeling: they are sure of reflecting objective requiredness, of
arriving for a goal which is valid regardless of their own liking.
Should we, against the empirical fact of such consciousness,
condemn it as wishful thinking or rather say that our theories
about the relativity of all moral goals result from a time-
conditioned decline of attentiveness to ultimate goals?
      A person’s consciousness of requiredness is, of course, no proof
that the particular forms in which they try to attain their moral
or religious ends are absolutely valid. However the fact of
such consciousness may serve as an index of their being com-
mitted to striving for valid ends. A person’s conception of these
ends is subject to change; their being committed endures forever.
      Moral actions may, of course, be explained on selfish
grounds. As a social being the welfare of an individual de-
pends upon the welfare of all other members of the group.
Any service, therefore, that extends beyond the confines of
my direct needs would be an investment in my own personal
welfare. Altruism would be egoism in disguise, and moral
deeds not different from the generous service any intelligent
merchant extends to their customers. Sacrificing my own inter-
ests for the sake of another person would be merely another
example of the kind of self-denial I exercise in regard to my
own interests, denying to myself the satisfaction of some needs
in order to attain the satisfaction of others. To adjust my
conduct to the interests of other people as far as it would
ultimately suit me would be all I am morally bound to
do.
      Yet what constitutes the consciousness of good and evil, of
right and wrong is the requiredness to act not for my own
sake, to do the right even if no advantage would accrue to
myself. The expediency of a good deed may serve as an incen-
tive to carry out a moral obligation, yet it is certainly not
identical with it.

God’s Secret Weapon

A person’s life is not only driven by a centripetal force revolv-
-ing around the ego, but is also impelled by centrifugal forces
outward from the ego-center. Their acts are not only self-
regarding but also self-surpassing.
      Even in the pursuit of private ends, a person is often compelled
to establish or to advance universal values. It is as if a person stood
under a command to employ their ability for unselfish stakes,
a command which they are obliged to listen to and suffers for
disregarding. That command is not the product but the origin
of civilization. Civilized living is the result of that urge, of that
drive to proceed in our efforts beyond immediate needs, be-
yond individual, tribal or national goals.
      The urge to build a family, to serve society or dedicate
oneself to art and science, may often originate in the desire
to satisfy one’s own appetite or ambition. Yet, seen from the
watchtower of history, the selfish usefulness of required deeds,
the possibility of regarding them as instrumental to the attain-
ment of one’s own selfish goals, is God’s secret weapon in its
struggle with humanity’s callousness.
      We often have the false joy of believing that others are
serving us, while, in truth, it is we who serve others. Our
individual mind is not the measure of meaning. For whom
do they plant who plants a tree? For generations to come, for 
faces they have never seen. Higher purposes are shrewdly dis-
guised as ends of immediate usefulness. It is as if a divine
cunning operated in human history, using our instincts as
pretexts for the attainment of goals which are universally
valid, a scheme to harness humanity’s lower forces in the service of
higher ends.
      Goodness does not consist in being an object of interest, in
being enjoyed or desired by some or most people. An action
is not good because we are pleased with it or because we think
it is good. As noted above, good and evil are relations within
reality. Good is that which God cares for, good is that which
unites a person with themself, which unites a human being
and a human being, a human with God.

Life is Tridimensional

Life is tridimensional, every act can be evaluated by two
co-ordinate axis’s, the abscissa is a human, the ordinate is God.
Whatever a person does to a person, they also do to God. To those
who are attentive to God who is beyond the ineffable, God’s
relation to the world is an actuality, an absolute implication of
being, the ultimate in reality, obtaining even if at this moment
it is not perceived or acknowledged by anybody; those who
reject or betray it do not diminish its validity.
      The right or the morally good is an end that surpasses our
experience of needs. It is beyond the power of an emotion to
sense adequately the supreme grandeur of the moral end; our
efforts to express it are conditioned by the limitations of
our nature. And still the vision of that absolute grandeur is
not always lost. In studying the history of humanity’s attempts to
implement the moral end, we must not confound their vision
with their interpretation. Humanity’s understanding of what is right
and wrong has often varied throughout the ages; yet the con-
sciousness that there is a distinction between right and wrong
is permanent and universal. In formulating laws, humanity often
fumbles and fails to find adequate ways of implementing
justice or to preserve all the time a clear grasp of its meaning.
Yet even when forfeiting its vision, humanity does not quite lose an
awareness of what was once in its sight. A person knows that justice
is a standard to which their laws must conform in order to
deserve the name of justice. We know of no tribe, of no code
that would insist that it is good to hate or that it is right to
injure each other. Justice is something which all people are able
to esteem.
      In order to retain that vision alive, we must try to preserve
and augment the sense of the ineffable, to remember con-
stantly the superiority of our task to our will and to keep
aflame our awareness of living in the great fellowship of all
beings, in which we are all equal before the ultimate. Con-
formity to the ego is no longer our exclusive concern, for we
become concerned with another problem—how to fulfill what
is asked of us.
      The universe is not a waif and life is not a derelict. Humanity is
neither the lord of the universe nor even the master of its own
destiny. Our life is not our own property but a possession of
God. And it is this divine ownership that makes life a sacred
thing.
      What we have said about justice applies to religion as well.
A person’s own heart is not the source of that light in which the
pious person sees their simple words becoming signals of eternity.
Hands do not build the citadel in which the pious person takes
shelter when all towers are tottering. The reality of the holy
is not dependent upon a person’s will to believe. Religion would not
rule the heart if it were simply an achievement of a person’s mind or
an outgrowth of their sentiments.