The necessary submission: The paradox of the part and the whole in collective achievement

“ So, testing your weakness by their strength, Your meagre charms by their rounded beauty, Measured by Art in your breadth and length, You learned—to submit is a mortal’s duty. —When I say “you”, ‘tis the common soul, The collective, I mean: the race of Man That receives life in parts to live in a whole, And grow here according to God’s clear plan. ”

“ After thus observing that even an inferior creature is ruled by a hierarchy of feelings so constituted that general welfare depends on a certain subordination of lower to higher, we saw that in man, as he passes into the social state, there arises the need for sundry additional subordinations of lower to higher: co-operation being made possible only by them. ”

“ Subordination, in human affairs, is well understood; but, when it is attributed to the universal system, its meaning grows less certain, like the petty distinctions of locality, which are of good use upon our own globe, but have no meaning with regard to infinite space, in which nothing is high or low. That, if man, by exaltation to a higher nature, were exempted from the evils which he now suffers, some other being must suffer them; that, if man were not man, some other being must be man, is a position arising from his established notion of the scale of being. ”

“ Righteousness in an individual, then, consists in having each part of one's nature devoted to its specific function: in having the appetites obey, in having the spirit steadfast in difficulty and danger, and in having the reason rule supreme. Thus righteousness, that subordination and coordination of all the parts of the soul in the service of the soul as a whole, includes each of the other three virtues and comprehends them all in the unity of the soul's organic life. ”

“ Any collective human enterprise, institution, movement, party or state, is to be judged as a whole and completely, as it conduces more or less to wholesome and hopeful births, and according to the qualitative and quantitative advance due to its influence made by each generation of citizens born under its influence towards a higher and ampler standard of life. ”

“ Given a proper array of instruments, the preservation of balance of tone is due chiefly to the conductor, though it is also necessary that the players should not be troubled with individual ambition. The occasional solo affords the individual player an opportunity to display his powers, but at all other times he should be content to sacrifice his glory for the general result. A good orchestra is in this respect like a perfect boat-crew; every man in it should be part of a machine to produce a single effect. ”

“ To attain in the execution the highest possible and widest expanded effect of light, with equal depth and transparence in the shade, brilliancy of colour is less required than unison: a sovereign tone must pervade the whole, [280] which, though arbitrary and dependent on choice, decides all subordinate ones, as the tone of the first instrument in a regular concert tunes all the rest ”

“ Then the powerful, instead of oppressing, would be obliged to support the weak; and idleness would become concerned in the reward of industry. The whole fabric of the civil economy would become compact and connected in all its parts; it would be formed into a well-organized body, where every member contributes to the support of the whole, and where even the lazy stomach secures the vigor of the active arm. ”

“ Death of the whole comes, as we now know, whenever some essential part of the body gives way—sometimes one, sometimes another; perhaps the brain, perhaps the heart, perhaps one of the other internal organs may be the first in which the change of cytomorphosis goes so far that it can no longer perform its share of work, and failing, brings about the failure of the whole. ”

“ Sometimes an orchestra’s tone is not solid because there are too few players for the demands of the auditorium. Sometimes it is because the instrumentalists are not playing exactly together, and the vibrations of each tone of the melody, as caused by say a dozen violins, are not isochronous. Again, tone lacks solidity at times because the individual performers are not capable, and it is frequently, like want of quality, due to poor instruments. ”

“ We have no solo-players like Brod in Paris or Harper in London; but even these [Pg 144] cities can scarcely boast such fine, united playing. And this results from the nature of circumstances. Our musicians here form a family; they see each other and practise together daily; they are always the same, so that they are able to play a Beethoven symphony without notes. Add to these a concert-master who can conduct such scores from memory, a director who knows them by, and reveres them at, heart, and the crown is complete. ”

“ This is seldom the case in a regularly maintained concert orchestra, yet it does happen sometimes even there. The New York Philharmonic Society suffers a good deal from this cause. The orchestra is the society, and many of its members never play in any artistic concerts except those of the organization. They have poor instruments, which do not aid in the production of a noble tone, such as should come from an orchestra of this kind. Again, there are individual players whose peculiar faults are displayed to the general disadvantage of an orchestra. ”

“ A conductor of cold temperament will not give highly colored readings, nor will he excite enthusiasm in his orchestra. A conductor of poetic feeling will conduct poetically and he will make his orchestra play so. But neither of them accomplishes his result suddenly and spontaneously at the performance. All that a conductor does at a performance is to remind his players of what he told them at rehearsal. It could not be otherwise, for the beat of the baton and the utterance of the sound by the instruments is almost simultaneous. ”

“ A similar grouping of notes is made in the performance of bowed instruments by the movements of the bow. All violin-players know that there is a difference in the results produced by the up-stroke and those by the down-stroke. Phrasing in the orchestra, then, is the technical treatment of the natural groups of tones which form the component parts of a melody in such a way that they shall come out clearly and symmetrically and in a vocal style. Here again we come upon the technical part of a conductor’s work. It is he who regulates the phrasing. ”

“ If the players of an orchestra are not at all times absolutely at one in their work, there can be neither precision nor unanimity. Precision is keeping absolutely together in beginning and finishing, whether it be a detached chord or tone, or a phrase. Unanimity is keeping together, in time and force and all other requirements, between the beginning and the end. The act of commencing a tone is called the attack. ”

“ In singing, phrasing means the division of the melody into groups of notes, so that breath can be taken. Now, phrasing is obviously quite as vital to wind-instrument players as to singers, because the former, too, must have intervals to take breath. Obviously, if the several players stop to take breath, they should cease to sound their instruments at the same instant, and begin again with equal precision. ”

“ You feel to the marrow of your bones how each loyal member contributes to the salvation of all the others by holding the conception of the whole play so firmly in his mind as to enable them to hold it, and to participate in his single-minded determination to see it carried out. You have intimate experience of the ways in which individual members contribute to the team and of how the team, in turn, builds up their spiritual nature. ”

“ The solidarity, in the association of living cells, then takes the triple form of a solidarity of extension, of emotion, and of reaction. We could summarize this mutual communication of the organs with the words sympathy and synergy. We think we make a metaphor when we say, "I am suffering all over my body"; but we are only expressing the exact truth: when a part of the organism is suffering, all the other parts feel it by rebound, each according to its importance and its degree of organization. ”

“ The organic force which resides in the whole, and on which the existence of each part depends, has also the property of generating, from organic matter, the parts necessary to the whole.’ Life, he adds, is not merely a harmony of the 219 parts. On the contrary, the harmonious action of the parts subsists only by the influence of a force pervading all parts of the body. ‘This force exists before the harmonizing parts, which are in fact formed by it during the development of the embryo.’ And again ”

“ Quite true, but these writers do not see that the crowd is not the only form of association, that man may belong to a group rather than to a crowd, and that a group fulfils, not wipes out his individuality. The collective action of the group not only allows but consists of individual initiative, of an individual initiative that has learned how to be part of a collective initiative. ”

“ When each part is itself potentially the whole, when the whole can live completely in every member, then we have a true society, 78and we must view it as a rushing of life—onrush, outrush, inrush—as a mobile, elastic, incalculable, Protean energy seeking fitting form for itself. ”

“ From the analysis of the group must come an understanding of collective thought and collective feeling, of the common will and concerted activity, of the true nature of freedom, 22the illusion of self-and-others, the essential unity of men, the real meaning of patriotism, and the whole secret of progress and of life as a genuine interpenetration which produces true community.
All thinking men are demanding a new state. ”

“ The history of the world right up to the present time has shown the futility of dividuality as against individuality both in politics and religion. The greater part of our Christian teaching is against separateness, and towards mutual love, consideration, and help. For this reason I have tried to write so that all may grasp the hope and possibility of a longer and more effectual life. Co-operation is the watchword of the future, isolation the disease and explanation of the past. ”

“ Life is always harder as one mounts the heights—the cold increases, responsibility increases. A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity. The handicrafts, commerce, agriculture, science, the greater part of art, in brief, the whole range of occupational activities, are compatible only with mediocre ability and aspiration; such callings would be out of place for exceptional men; the instincts which belong to them stand as much opposed to aristocracy as to anarchism. ”

“ Art is with us to prevent the bow from snapping.
The individual must be consecrated to something impersonal—that is the aim of tragedy: he must forget the terrible anxiety which death and time tend to create in him; for at any moment of his life, at any fraction of time in the whole of his span of years, something sacred may cross his path which will amply compensate him for all his struggles and privations. This means having a sense for the tragic. And if all mankind must perish some day—and who could question this! ”

“ In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: ”

“ The whole of human life is deeply immersed in untruthfulness; the individual cannot draw it up out of this well, without thereby taking a deep dislike to his whole past, without finding his present motives—those of honour, for instance—inconsistent, and without opposing scorn and disdain to the passions which conduce to happiness in the future. Is it true that there remains but one sole way of thinking which brings after it despair as a personal experience, as a theoretical result, a philosophy of dissolution, disintegration, and self-destruction? ”