The conclusion that emerges clearly from all this is that uniformity, in order that it may be possible, presupposes beings deprived of all qualities and reduced to nothing more than simple numerical ‘units’; also that no such uniformity is ever in fact realizable, while the result of all the efforts made to realize it, notably in the human domain, can only be to rob beings more or less completely of their proper qualities, thus turning them into something as nearly as possible like mere machines; and machines, the typical product of the modern world, are the very things that represent, in the highest degree attained up till now, the predominance of quantity over quality. From a social viewpoint, ‘democratic’ and ‘egalitarian’ conceptions tend toward exactly the same end, for according to them all individuals are equivalent one to another. This idea carries with it the absurd supposition that everyone is equally well fitted for anything whatsoever, though nature provides no example of any such ‘equality’, for the reasons already given, since it would imply nothing but a complete similitude between individuals; but it is obvious that, in the name of this assumed ‘equality’, which is one of the topsy-turvy ‘ideals’ most dear to the modern world, individuals are in fact directed toward becoming as nearly alike one to another as nature allows — and this in the first place by the attempt to impose a uniform education on everyone. It is no less obvious that differences of aptitude cannot in spite of everything be entirely suppressed, so that a uniform education will not give exactly the same results for all; but it is all too true that, although it cannot confer on anyone qualities that he does not possess, it is on the contrary very well fitted to suppress in everyone all possibilities above the common level; thus the ‘leveling’ always works downward: indeed, it could not work in any other way, being itself only an expression of the tendency toward the lowest, that is, toward pure quantity, situated as it is at a level lower than that of all corporeal manifestation—not only below the degree occupied by the most rudimentary of living beings, but also below that occupied by what our contemporaries have a habit of calling ‘lifeless matter’, though even this last, since it is manifested to our senses, is still far from being wholly denuded of quality.
The modern Westerner is moreover not content only to impose an education of that sort at home; he also wants to impose it on other peoples, together with the whole gamut of his own mental and bodily habits, so as to make all the world uniform, while at the same time he imposes uniformity on the outward aspect of the world by the diffusion of the products of his industry. The consequence, paradoxical only in appearance, is that to the extent that more uniformity is imposed on it, the world is by so much the less ‘unified’ in the real sense of the word. This is really quite natural, since the direction in which it is dragged is, as explained already, that in which ‘separativity’ becomes more and more accentuated; and here the character of ‘parody’, so often met with in everything that is specifically modern, makes its appearance. In fact the imposition of uniformity, while actually leading in a direction exactly opposite to that of true unity, since it tends to realize that which is most remote therefrom, takes shape as a sort of caricature of unity, and it does so because of the analogical relation whereby, as was pointed out very early in this book, unity itself is inversely reflected in the ‘units’ that constitute pure quantity. It is this inversion that justified the earlier reference to a topsy-turvy ‘ideal’, and it can be seen that these words must in fact be understood in a very precise sense; nevertheless, it is by no means suggested that a rehabilitation of that word ‘ideal’ is in any way desirable, for it serves indifferently almost any purpose nowadays, and particularly that of masking the absence of all true principle; it is indeed so misused that it has by now come to be almost devoid of meaning. It is tempting however to observe that, according to its actual derivation, it ought to denote a certain tendency toward the ‘idea’ understood more or less in the Platonic sense, that is to say toward essence and toward the qualitative, however vaguely these may be conceived, whereas most frequently, as in the case in question, it is used to designate their exact opposite.
The existing tendency to impose uniformity not only on human individuals but also on things has already been alluded to: indeed the men of today boast of the ever growing extent of the modifications they impose on the world, and the consequence is that everything is thereby made more and more ‘artificial’, for this is the very result that these modifications are calculated to produce, since all their activity is directed toward a domain as strictly quantitative as possible. Besides, as soon as the desire to produce a purely quantitative science arose, it became inevitable that the practical applications derived from that science should share its character; these applications as a whole are generally designated by the name of ‘industry’, and modern industry can be said to represent from all points of view the triumph of quantity, because its operations do not demand any knowledge other than quantitative, and because the instruments of which it makes use, that is to say machines properly so called, are developed in such a way that qualitative considerations come in to the least possible extent, while the men who work them are themselves limited to activity of an entirely mechanical kind — quality also being completely sacrificed to quantity in the actual products of industry. A few more observations can usefully be made in order to cover this subject adequately, but before proceeding with them, a question which will be returned to later may be interpolated: whatever may be thought about the value of the results of the action that modern man applies to the world, it is a fact, independently of any estimation of values, that this action succeeds, and that at least to a certain extent, it reaches the ends at which it aims; if the men of another period had acted in the same way (but this is a wholly ‘theoretical’ and unrealistic supposition, in view of the actual mental differences between these men and those of today) would the results have been the same? In other words, in order that the terrestrial environment may be suitable for such action, must it not be in some way predisposed thereto by the cosmic conditions of the cyclic period in which we now are; that is, must there not be something in that environment which, with reference to earlier periods, has undergone a change? It would be premature to go fully into the nature of that change at this point, or to do more than characterize it as being necessarily of the nature of a qualitative diminution, allowing a firmer hold to everything that springs from quantity; but what has been said about the qualitative determinations of time at least makes the possibility of a change of this kind conceivable and renders understandable the idea that the artificial modifications of the world, in order that they may come about, must presuppose natural modifications to which they merely correspond or conform in one way or another, by virtue of the correlation that invariably exists in the cyclical movement of time between the cosmic order and the human order.
8
Ancient Crafts and Modern Industry
There is a great contrast between what the ancient crafts used to be and what modern industry now is, and it presents in its essentials another particular case and at the same time a practical application of the contrast between the qualitative and quantitative points of view, which predominate in the one and in the other respectively. In order to see why this is so, it is useful to note first of all that the distinction between the arts and the crafts, or between ‘artist’ and ‘artisan’, is itself something specifically modern, as if it had been born of the deviation and degeneration which have led to the replacement in all fields of the traditional conception by the profane conception. To the ancients the artifex was indifferently the man who practised an art or a craft; but he was, to tell the truth, something that neither the artist nor the artisan is today, if those words are used in the modern sense (moreover the word ‘artisan’ tends more and more to disappear from contemporary language); he was something more than either the one or the other because, at least originally, his activity was bound up with principles of a much more profound order. If the crafts used to comprehend in one way or another the arts properly so called, since the two were not then separated by any essential characteristic, it is because the nature of the crafts was truly qualitative, for nobody can refuse to admit that such is the nature of art, more or less by definition. Nevertheless the moderns, for that very reason, narrowly restrict their conception of art, and relegate it to a sort of closed domain having no connection with the rest of human activity, that is, with what they regard as constituting ‘reality’, using the word in the very crude sense it bears for them; and they go so far as freely to attribute to art, thus robbed of all practical significance, the character of a ‘luxury’, a term thoroughly characteristic of what could without any exaggeration be called the ‘silliness’ of our period.