Rewards, Penalties and Plato

Platonism, by Paul Elmer More. Princeton University Press. $1.75.

T

HROUGH the storms

of centuries the philosophy of Plato has stood out as a beacon by the light of which all kinds of mariners-mystics, sceptics, theologians, mathematicians, communists, eugenists-have steered their diverse courses. But men are not as a rule satisfied with the light and the vision of beauty which minds like Plato radiate in all directions. They must claim exclusive ownership. Hence different schools and sects all endeavor to annex Plato as one of their own. Mr. More tries to make of Plato an orthodox Calvinistic moralist. I do not mean to accuse Mr. More of wilfulness. He has read Plato long and carefully-more carefully than the hasty reader can well appreciate. But, as Xenophanes remarked twenty-five centuries ago, men always make their gods in their own image, the Greeks like Greeks, the Ethiopians like Ethiopians. Does not Milton make the Lord argue - like a theologic logician, of the school of Peter Ramus? And does not Renan make Christ a sympathetic but disillusioned romanticist? while Tolstoi paints him as a nonresisting Russian peasant. It is therefore quite natural that Mr. More, apparently more interested in Calvinistic theology than in Greek life and science, should represent Plato as a somewhat softened and more urbane Jonathan Edwards. No account, however, of Plato can be historically accurate which considers Plato's ethics entirely apart from any of the conditions of Greek life, which considers Plato's theory of art, education and politics as merely "subsidiary," which entirely rejects the light on Plato thrown by his great successors, and deliberately ignores Plato's relation to the mathematical philosophy of the Pythagoreans. Did not Plato inscribe over the portals of his academy "Let none ignorant of geometry enter here"? Historical accuracy, to be sure, may be a secondary matter. The value of a man's view of life may be independent of the historical peg on which he hangs it, but surely it is a pity that an accomplished literary critic like Mr. More should fall a victim to the ruthless temper of philosophic controversy, and treat the dialogues of Plato not as works of art to be admired like the statuary of Praxiteles, but as clubs with which to hit the heads of contemporary philosophers who have a little more sympathy with the frail throbbing flesh that enters into our human nature.

Mr. More's own philosophy, which underlies his Shelburne Essays and comes to clearer light in this book, deserves greater attention than it has generally been accorded. It is true, as Mr. More with admirable courage admits, that the current of the day is against it. But it is still most powerfully entrenched. Its conception of morality is still taught in all our Sunday and week-day schools, and in most of our colleges. Its basic distrust of man's natural impulses still dominates our legal if not our theologic thought-since the framers of our national constitution of checks and balances were thoroughly imbued with Calvinism. If, then, this philosophy is losing ground among intellectual men, it is of some importance to know why. Mr. More himself does not suggest any adequate cause for this general falling away from grace; but the history of Calvinism in Europe, as well as in this country, makes it clear that its decay was due to the fact that it could not stand the light of that mode of thought which we call modern science, but which has its roots in ancient Greece. The spirit of free inquiry has no room for that reliance on

Mr. More, it is true, begins by recognizing scepticism as one of the sources of philosophy. However, the manner in which he attempts to refute hedonism, his dislike of the term "probable," and the ready way in which he falls back on unproved dogmatic assertions ("spiritual affirmations") show how far Mr. More is from the robust scepticism of science. It is true, of course, that absolute suspension of all judgment is unattainable, that we are all forced by the de.. mands of life to make some affirmation or choice. But this only proves that our knowledge is not always adequate for action, that life consists largely of hazardous leaps in the dark. Scientific honesty, however, makes us admit that where demonstrative knowledge ends only guessing begins. The fact that we must guess does not prove our guess true. Our brief lives are but momentary gleams between two eternities of total darkness, and we can gather but little as to the unknown and tempestuous seas of being wherein we find ourselves tossed. Only a little of the structure of our frail boats and something of the waters immediately about us is revealed by science. For the most part we must sail into the unknown without any absolute guarantee of safety. Mr. More has the right to stake his life on his own guess. He might, if he had chosen, have sought to show that in the light of history and science other boats are more likely to be shipwrecked than his own. But anyone who stands up and says, My spiritual affirmation is the truth because I have an "invincible assurance," shows a pathetic confusion between knowledge and guesswork. The resorting to epithets, the calling of our own guess superrational intuition" and the guess of others piggish or emanating from a plane below the reason," is a pitiable display of intellectual impotence, just as the poor pedagogue stamps and raises the voice of authority when he cannot give a satisfactory explanation. Even as a consolation these epithets are rather thin, since our opponents are always free to return the service in kind.

Though Mr. More is not an academic philosopher and writes with the easy grace and correctness characteristic of the courtly manner, the substance of his book is concerned with that most academic question, the rewards and penalties of the moral life. He will not question the view that the universe must be conceived like a Sunday school or penitentiary, where none of us would be "good or moral unless we were promised some reward or threatened with pun-ishment. Now there are few doctrines so intellectually dishonest as doctrines concerning the rewards and punishments of the moral life. They may be well-intentioned people who say that virtue always leads to success and vice to misery. But it is an obvious and monstrous falsehood in a world where we profit by the good deeds of our parents and where millions are suffering unutterable tortures because of the deeds of foreign potentates. That those who suffer must have been wicked, and that those who triumph must have been virtuous, is one of the most inhuman beliefs in history. As to the doctrine that the reward of virtue is to be found in a clear conscience or high satisfaction-that is an even more violent falsehood. The people who suffer most from their conscience are obviously the sensitive and high-minded, while self-approbation comes most easily to the complacent and fortune-favored Jack Horners. The doctrine that the reward of moral life is a feeling of satisfaction or happiness (pages 74, 80, 89, 90, 116, etc.) is not only contrary to moral experience, but is intellectually sterile. The natural variation of individual feeling leaves us without any means whereby to tell what is the good or the moral. Indeed, though Mr. More constantly speaks of justice as the good, he never makes any attempt to tell us how to determine what is just. How can one possibly determine the justice of a labor dispute or the just claims of Ireland to self-government by means of conscience or his feeling of happiness?

It is indeed a sad irony of fate to find in a book on Plato the subjectivist doctrine that the reward of the moral life is to be found in a feeling. Did not Plato write the Republic to show that the problem of morality or justice is not soluble unless we tackle it in terms of social organization? It seems a fact that modern subjectivistic or conscience" theories of morality confine themselves to certain personal virtues and leave the larger questions of social morality either untouched or subject to external authority. But to do so is simply to perpetuate the prevailing standard based on past experience, ignorance and prejudice. To make morality always synonymous with the maintenance of the status quo is indeed to commit the great treason against the intellectual life and to make philosophy procuress to the lords of hell.

The nearest Mr. More comes to throwing light on the concrete problems of the moral life is in his insistence that all true moralists or Platonists say No to our natural impulses. Taken literally and absolutely, this is arrant nonsense. Moral life would be impossible without generous impulses. But I suppose Mr. More simply wishes to insist on the eternal necessity of discipline and self-control. But even this, it seems to me, cannot be set up as the supreme good of life. The temptation of the flesh, like the instinct of the moth, may lead us straight into the flame; but it does not follow that it is worth while to struggle pitiably for the preservation of an existence devoid of all warmth and light. Discipline and self-control are undoubtedly great goods. Without self-restraint there can be no mastery, no worthy achievement. But to make self-control the end of life is as absurd as the position of those who would make good administration or the saving of money the end of government. People do not grow rich by mere saving, and self-control is not worth a farthing unless we build up a great self worth controlling. It is the merit of genuine philosophies that they paint for us some great object with which we can identify ourselves and thus make us worth while. Mr. More's negative song in the minor scale does not do so.

Mr. More has written a serious book hoping to touch the minds of a few of our generous college youth. In this I think there is little likelihood of his being very successful. The minds of youth cannot be stirred by eternal don'ts and warnings against the temptations of the flesh. Some great positive and generous faith, some great outlook on life, is necessary to arouse their energies. Historical Calvinism was effective, not because it preached restraints and supported them with the fear of hell, but because it gave men a vision of the glory of God. Mr. More's philosophy may not unfairly be called Calvinism without the glory of God. If the history of religion has any teaching, it is that the glory of God is not visible except to those who are profoundly moved by compassion for their fellow men.

This review of a scholarly and charmingly written book is probably somewhat unfair, perhaps grossly so; but if so it is not from any bias in favor of those against whom Mr. More is battling. I share Mr. More's distrust of vague beliefs in social service and "benumbing trust in mechanical progress," and above all I share his aversion for sentimental romanticism. But all of us have the defects of our

qualities, and Mr. More's philosophy illustrates the danger of intellectual anaemia which threatens all closet philosophers. We must, to be sure, get out of the tumult of the market place to gather our thoughts. But if we get up too high on the mountain or stay there too long, our thoughts lose the substance and the strength which comes from immediate contact with the brute facts. The recovery of the Greek world, and of Plato in particular, meant to the modern world liberation from the mediaeval dogma that nature is sin and intellect the devil. This liberation, however, has never been completed. The rationalists wish us to recover reason, but they lose contact with nature. The romanticists wish us to recover nature, but alas, they lose contact with reason. The significance of modern science is that it is an organized attempt to keep reason wedded to the facts of nature. And no one can adequately interpret life or Plato who does not avail himself of its help. PHILONOUS.

Human Nature in Industry.

The Works Manager Today, by Sidney Webb. New York: Longmans Green & Co. $1.00.

Welfare Work, by E. Dorothea Proud. London: G. S. Bell & Sons. $2.00.

IF

as

Mr. Graham Wallas has suggested, The Town Labourer is a model piece of research writing, The Works Manager Today is a model of what effective propaganda among employers should be. And Miss Proud's Welfare Work, despite the introductory acclamations of Mr. Lloyd George that her book "bids fair to become the standard work on the subject," is an example of what to avoid. Steering a moderate course between the too-easy and predigested pabulum with which American employers have been fed in periodicals like Factory and System and his own more formidable interpretation of Industrial Democracy, Mr. Webb has produced a short, incisive and wise book on the relation of management to men. For the present his volume will stand as the best single exposition of the new humanism in industry. And Miss Proud, fresh from a reading of the Factory Reports, leads us through a maze of anecdote and illustrative matter arranged with no discoverable logic, to some conclusions which she shares with Mr. Webb and to others about which she is herself in doubt. The one is the book of a cogent analyst and realist; the other is the collected notes of a conscientious but befuddled investigator.

Fundamentally there is only one serious point of difference between Mr. Webb and Miss Proud. He is clear that professional managers are charged with a distinct function which all of you have in common, namely, the function of handling human nature in conjunction with machinery and materials with a view to its perfect cooperation in an industrial enterprise." "The function of management, which is needed as soon as two or three are gathered together in a common task is recognized as indispensable when we come to enterprises in which num

bers are engaged." But to Miss Proud no such clear issue presents itself. No further realignment of functions appears necessary to her than is represented by the selection of a "welfare secretary" of indeterminate powers and influence, who while presumably removing from the manager a part of his irksome task of understanding human nature, must still give way to him when his practical knowledge is at odds with the secretary's humane impulses

"

"One of the most important duties of a Welfare Secretary," says Miss Proud, "may be to watch the effects of any modification attempted by the employer and to advise him in respect to them. But in many cases so-called Welfare Secretaries are not allowed any voice in discussions

about wages. The whole question presents great difficulty. If the Welfare Department is 'the conscience of the factory,' the situation is apt to be strained when the conscience becomes really troublesome."

Here we see the whole issue clearly joined. Are the human considerations to have determining weight in the management or are they to have merely the force of interjected, unwelcome and timidly advanced advice? Is the labor problem a central one for which the management itself should assume full responsibility and come to expert competence? Or is the administration of relations with employees an accessory, a luxury and a fad to be left to well-intentioned but unconvincing welfare secretaries so long as these placate and soothe the workers and to be rudely snatched from them when wages or other important questions are causing dispute?

•

Clearly Mr. Webb's answer is in the direction of the best experience and the soundest common sense. His dictum: "What the management has principally to handle is human nature (and) will," sets the face of the new generation of executives toward the key problem of Twentieth century industry. And only as this problem is faced and taken in hand by the top men will factory affairs show any tendency to come out of the muddle into which they are cast by the present division of control and power over the "personnel" policies and practices. Assuming then, with Mr. Webb, that personnel management is a staff function comparable to the sales, financial and producing functions, we can then proceed as both books do proceed without regard to their differences over administration, to discuss the technique of " voluntary efforts on the part of employers to improve, within the existing industrial system, the conditions of employment in their own factories."

As evidencing a new understanding of the elements and factors which influence the attitude and efficiency of the workers, both books are hopeful indices. Since this understanding is the preliminary condition of the reorganization of shop methods, the inclusion in the discussion of every item from lunch rooms to trade unionism marks a distinct step ahead. Not that either book offers a complete list of factors which can determine for good or ill the attitude of men toward management; but between the two a fairly satisfactory impression is to be gained of the complexity of the problem. Miss Proud emphasizes the more immediately material aspects of industrial relations. She discusses doctors, nurses, vacation homes, recreation clubs, lunch rooms, baths, gymnasia, housing, factory schools, libraries, insurance and a thousand other activities which she has found in one or another English factory. But because of restrictions she has set upon herself, or perhaps because she has not made up her mind, Miss Proud does not consider the relative value of these multifarious activities in doing the one thing needful-namely, helping to maintain self-respecting and progressively sound industrial relations.

Mr. Webb, on the other hand, considers more convincingly a different set of problems, because in his thoroughly mature approach to the subject he knows the truly vital items in the labor contract. He discusses "appointments and dismissals," " the recognition of trade unionism," "the standard rate," "the manners of management," discipline, scientific management and so forth. He shows with com

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plete lucidity how and in what ways managerial ineptitudes of all those problems clog the industrial machine and raise up barriers, physiological and psychological, in the way of more wholesome and amicable operation. And his estimates gain weight and validity because they are made in relation to two touchstones-" human nature and "efficiency." It is the absence of these, or any other similar criteria by which it can evaluate the welfare proposals it discusses, which constitutes the major limitation of Miss Proud's book. There still remains, therefore, the serious task of analyzing with complete thoroughness the items, material and psychological, which exert a modifying influence upon workers' relation to their work. These two books make a beginning, but neither is an inductive study with this enumeration as its primary purpose. Both, nevertheless, furnish a sound point of departure for such study. For both are also cognizant in a general way at least of the inevitable relation of sound management to a knowledge of human nature.

Happily this dependence upon an understanding of human nature carries with it a sense for the more modern "behavioristic" conception of human beings rather than for some subjective or utilitarian notion of human nature. The recurrence of words like "happiness" and ality" marks an effort to see the industrial struggle in personal and intimate terms. Both books are dominated by the assumption that each human being is an end in himself and is not to be construed as the means toward the fulfillment of other people's plans or abstruse ideals. Both books assume that we are on the way to a fairly accurate knowledge of the essential character of human beings. This new and more generous sense of the real nature of

people is for example responsible for the following practical hint thrown out by the author of Welfare Work: "In such matters," she says, as the prevention of petty theft within a factory, much might be accomplished. Instead of employees being liable to be searched on leaving the premises, and demanding that 'searching' be carried out 'in the firm's time,' it might be possible by a diffusion of responsibility to prevent theft, rather than to punish it." Particularly does Mr. Webb's book have an insistence upon the original nature of man which is new in his writings. Of profiteering he says that it is now seen by economists to be, "because of the bad psychological reactions that it creates, in the long run, incompatible with maximum production." We shall not manage-human nature being what it is to get the maximum production possible until we are wise enough, and well-mannered enough, in the words of Menander, to "choose equality." To be sure, neither writer has examined carefully all the implications of accepting the human-nature criterion of institutions and activities. Neither writer has a clear idea of the types of behavior and response which the psychologist has taught us to look for under the various circumstances of life. And by neither has the idea been applied from the realm of psychoanalytical psychology that repression of human impulses and desires leads to abnormal states of mind and to activities which cannot be corrected short of a more thorough expression of a conscious redirection of pent-up energies.

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The reader, nevertheless, comes away from these books with a new regard for personality and for the necessity of considering proposals less in relation to justice" or a narrowly conceived efficiency" than to our growing knowledge about man's native endowments and equipment. For this purpose, therefore, these studies and more especially Mr. Webb's-may well serve as primers for a psychological interpretation of the successful control of industrial relations.

On one point alone will the hints which this elementary psychological approach to labor problems suggests be likely to lead astray. They may lead managers to assume a too static view of the workers' mind and will. While Mr. Webb says distinctly in his last chapter that there will be no diminution of industrial unrest until the profit system is replaced, he does not underscore the point. Miss Proud ignores it altogether. Yet the practical bearing of the idea is obvious. If employers set out to correct bad conditions and improve the terms of the labor contract, they are doomed to discouraging results in point of employees' interest and cooperation, unless they recognize that-human nature being what it is the workers will want progressively to share in, and perhaps soon to usurp, control. Carried through to the end our human nature criterion will reveal a will to more and more power on the part of the workers which will manifest itself as rapidly as all the surrounding conditions warrant. And laudable and desirable as they will be, efforts to construct rest rooms or even to pay the standard rate or to adopt a six hour day, will bring the employers no nearer to that stabilized and untroubled industrial régime for which they think they are desirous. And books, like these two, addressed to employers, should make that point plain. Only on the assumption by employers as well as workers that ours is a dynamic and evolving economic system can advice about the labor problem be soundly given or intelligently applied. The objection will be raised that neither of these books pretends to give special weight to utopian considerations. But that is not what is asked of them. It is simply that they are

less effective than they might be because they do not emphasize to the employers the fact that industry is in flux; that there is no immediate possibility of peace"; that efforts to ameliorate conditions will, generally speaking, serve only to make workers more self-assertive and collectively effective. That is of course no argument against such efforts. Quite the contrary. But there should be an attempt to have employers see the limits of the benefits to them of any methods which they initiate and to forewarn them against a disappointment which might turn themas it has already turned scores of employers-against the whole humanizing tendency of the times, simply because they have been cherishing a mistaken notion about the workers' "gratitude," "loyalty" and "cooperation."

In short, those who advise employers must in common honesty make explicit the truth that measures from above, whether conceived in generosity or justice, will not stand permanently as substitutes for the things which the workers come to desire on their own initiative. The task of management remains, but not as a work of conciliation. It is rather an effort at leadership toward a reconstruction which interprets and applies truly to industry the facts about the structure and nature of human beings.

The science of human management promises, therefore, to gain in its refinements whatever decisions we come to about the ownership, control or structure of industry. So long as there are human contacts to be made harmonious and cordial in the factory, there will be the chance for a truly human technique of industrial relations. But just because this is so, because this science has become possible with its broad outlines already in view, we must proceed slowly. For only as advances are made on the hypothesis of a dynamic industrial organization will results be valid because based on sound psychology. We shall only delay the formulation of right principles and methods if we allow a pseudo-scientific approach to labor problems to be used by employers as a stop-gap to discontent.

It is at once the strength and the weakness of these books that they make a beginning at formulating right procedure without completely safeguarding themselves from the accusation of putting a weapon of further autocratic manipulation into the hands of management.

A Freudian Lyricist

Ο. Τ.

The Lyrical Poems of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, translated by Charles Wharton Stork. New Haven: Yale University Press. $1.25.

M

as

R. STORK'S translation of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's lyrics throw a further if sometimes confused light on this poet as he has appeared to English readers. Von Hofmannsthal's plays have already found a small but interested audience outside of Germany. Versions of his Der Tor und der Tod (The Fool and Death) and Die Hochzeit der Sobeide (The Marriage of Zobeide) have been printed in America; operagoers know him the author of the Cavalier of the Rose and Electra, both of which have been put to music by Richard Strauss. From these dramatic works a fairly distinctive personality emerges; a nervous, intense and introverted talent. His "modern" recastings of the Greek classics show a mind that is both pathological and pedantic. It was undoubtedly his versions of Electra and Oedipus that made Rolland draw the portrait of Stephan von Hellmuth in the fourth book of Jean-Christophe;

"A most delicious comedy of manners. It is brief. Just right for an evening's readIng. The atmosphere is gloriously Spanish, the characters all live and the plot-well, we can't pass that plot with a phrase-that plot insists on being talked about!

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"We have this masterpiece now and the careless publishers who neglected it for so long are forgiven and duly punished for not having it on their list.

"Incidentally, 'The Three Cornered Hat' is exactly the right kind of book to send to your soldier—is he a sailor?—because it is short, because it is interest compelling and because it is honestly funny.”

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