Examining the
Roots of Ethical
Degeneration, and
of Its Healing
Ivan A. Il’in
Equilibrium, justice and self-respect, three decisive factors
in philosophy
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
A 2016 Editorial Note
After being
largely ignored for decades, Ivan
A. Il’in has
emerged in the 21st century as one
of the main
Russian philosophers of all time. His
book “On the Essence of Legal Consciousness”,
from which the
following text is reproduced, can
be seen as a study
in the awakening of Antahkarana,
the line of
communication between higher self and
lower self - one
of the main tenets of modern theosophy.
(Carlos Cardoso
Aveline)
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
A person unaware of
his own spiritual worth, that is, not experiencing it, leads a deformed,
degraded, sick life; and its diseases are deeply instructive: they can be
described as the diseases of spiritual self-affirmation.
At the foundation of spiritual respect for oneself must
lie a true perception of oneself, and
not an illusion and not an unhealthy self-conceit; an authentic spiritual worth, and not a spent
external sign of obsolete privileges; a personal
act of self-affirmation, and not someone else’s perhaps mistaken or mendacious
pronouncement. Perceiving oneself as a force for the good must be not
accidental and not ephemeral, but an authentic
and objective self-perception. It cannot and must not be replaced by any
kind of surrogate whatever: neither by a dreamy imagining of one’s supposed
virtues and of one’s “historical destiny”, nor by an empty pride or a
cultivation of formal “honor”, nor by the accidental and changeable verdict of
“social opinion”, nor by the self-seeking and capricious “ripples of public
opinion”. The perception of one’s own spiritual worth has at its base
experience which is independent, personal, and at the same time objectively valuable. A legal subject [1] must be a living, self-sufficient
depository of spiritual worth; and any deficiency in this experience - a defect
in self-sufficiency or a defect in objectivity - makes this legal
consciousness [2] unsteady, rickety,
weak in vitality, and unstable.
A person respecting himself only because and to the
extent that others respect him strictly speaking does not respect himself : his spiritual health depends upon
others’ secondary impressions, that is, on the ignorance and incompetence of
others; in actual fact a feeling of his own inferiority, vanity, and a lust for
external success gnaws at him; and if this success and popularity betray him,
then he ceases to feel his own spiritual worth, and his personality loses its
form. Similarly, a person who respects himself only for his supposed, or purely
external, or empirically accidental, qualities, that is, for what does not constitute his spiritual essence (for strength, for beauty, for wealth),
practically respects not himself :
his spiritual health depends on that which may belong to him, but is not him himself, that is, on the
accidental and non-essential, on what does not have its own value, on
transitory accidents of his personality; in actual fact he amasses a supposed
wealth and multiplies his power or his property, but does not affirm the inner
worth of his spirit.
Still more deplorable is the state of that person who
is completely unable to respect himself, and is so accustomed to it that he
does not experience his own spiritual worth at all. Once, perhaps in childhood,
the soul of such a person could not endure some trial, placing a heavy burden on
his sense of selfhood; it could not stand the pressure of external
circumstances or of its own instinctive inclinations, could not cope with some
vital task and responsibility. It gave into it, yielded, and in that very
subjection found the poison of a certain enjoyment. The act of spiritual
self-affirmation did not succeed; the soul did not stand its ground in the
struggle and consented, dispirited and humbled, to its humiliation. It did not
succeed in asserting itself as a force;
rather, having consented to humiliation, it shook its belief in itself and in its beneficent
nature. Once having submitted to its passions or to another will, and having
discovered the sick sweetness in subordination and humiliation, the soul turns
out no longer to have the strength to forge for itself a personal form of
spirit. It does not see its own worth and does not respect itself; and since to
conceal such a perception of oneself is impossible, others imperceptibly become
accustomed not to respect it and in this way strengthen its disrespect for
itself. The person gradually acquires the psychic make-up of a slave, accustomed not to respect
himself. And the tragedy of his situation is revealed with particular force
precisely when he attempts to free himself through an external rebellion or an
uprising; this rebellion does not free him, for his shackles have an internal nature; this rebellion reveals
only what a person deprived of the feeling of his own worth is capable of,
while the burden of disrespect for oneself drags the rebel back to a state of
abjection. Such, for example, is precisely the consequence of corporal
punishment, particularly when endured in early childhood, and only spiritual
blindness could have created the folk saying concerning the superiority of one
who has been beaten over the one who has not.
It is obvious that the legal consciousness of such
people who do not respect themselves, or respect their “not-selves”, suffer
from profound diseases. Their personality is, as it were, deprived of root and
trunk; it leads a ghostly, dependent existence; strictly speaking it possesses
only a figuratively-human semblance of existence. It is only a medium for its
passions and the influences of others, individual and social; these influences
at each given moment enter into a compromise among themselves, which determines
its behavior. For that reason it is not in a condition to be determining its
life through independent decisions, to be building its future, and to be
struggling for the goals it has set for itself. Having lost its spiritual
center, it weakened or even destroyed the center of its own volition in that
way, and replaces the will by stubbornness, respect for oneself with pride, the
feeling of one’s own worth with vainglory. The soul experiences spiritual degeneration
or even corruption.
The sense of one’s own worth unasserted and
unstrengthened, or once wounded and not healed, undermines a person’s faith in himself and in his powers. In the
depth of his personal spirit is formed a certain emptiness and hollowness,
robbing his life activity of strength, and rendering him incapable of firm and
courageous resistance to the forces of things and people. Any trial arouses in
him dismay, doubt in himself, and fear; trepidation and cowardice take hold of
his soul and lead him down the path of unworthy pliancy and passivity. Such a
person turns out to be capable neither of spiritual
self-assertion, because he converts it into an outburst of passions; nor of
psychic self-denial, because he does
not possess a living relation to the highest value, to the sacred object. True
self-denial is not a denial of spirit, but of the soul, in the name of spirit;
and for that reason it presupposes a true respect for spirit and for oneself,
and leads not to humiliation, but to the assertion of personal worth.
Not to respect oneself means to experience one’s own weakness in the good. And one who
accepts this weakness and becomes reconciled to it nurtures in himself a
diminished well-being and stands perpetually on the threshold of new
humiliations; once having “washed one’s hands” of oneself, one dwells
constantly on the verge of a new spiritual collapse, always more easily
overstepping the bounds of the moral and the legal. And one who does not become
reconciled with his weakness, but also cannot assert himself for the good,
tries to assert his power apart from the good or counter to it, and converts
his life into a mixture of cynicism and hypocrisy.
And if, to crown it all, in the soul of a person there
stirs a consciousness of his own
unworthiness or badness, while pride
is elevated and exacerbated, there arises a so-called underground character, in all its misery and deformity. A person
begins to experience his own lack of respect for himself as the disrespect of
others toward him; the feeling of his own original misfortune gives him no
peace; every advantage of another is for him, as it were, an insult, and his
life is gradually converted into a continuous, galling and unforgivable injury.
His soul is tormented by meagre
self-regard, which it sometimes is not even aware of; this self-regard
cannot be satisfied by any external success whatever, cannot be sated by any
flattery, for its redemption cannot in general come from without. Reassurance
can come only from a turning inward of the soul, only from a healing act of
spiritual self-affirmation; and this
act cannot be realized by a conscious, arbitrary decision, for the soul flees
from the unbearable sight of its own emptiness, unworthiness and deformity, and
conceals its disease and its suffering in the deep underground of the
unconscious; and forcing out its own disease[3], it loses access to it and power over it, becoming entangled in
a tragic hopelessness.
And amid all these outcomes the person does not find
an objective basis for life and wanders through sufferings and humiliations,
depraved and miserable, rejected by himself, unjustified and unreconciled.
To lose the objective basis of life means to lose the spiritual dimension of things and deeds,
to lose any criterion of objective value. The life of such a person becomes a
true realm of vulgarity, for
vulgarity is a blindness of the soul
toward the objective significance of objects. A spiritually blind soul lives by wretched contents
and scant measures of a personal way of life; it perceives everything on the
plane of its needs and passions
and measures life in terms of interest
and power. And precisely for that reason its life is converted into a
bog of confusion, weakness and vice. But its principal confusion is in the
non-recognition of spirit, its objectivity and unconditional value. The person
dwells in a naive, immediate certainty that “the main thing in life is
himself”; and in himself the most important thing of all is the purely
personal, the “intimate”, the empirically-singular, the subjective; and from
this it is already not far to preferring one’s own needs, flaring up on the
instant, to everything else. Precisely
in this lies the spiritual root of all corruption
whatsoever.
At the base of all corruption - bribes, public
corruption, every sort of demagogy and mercenary international treason - lies a
spiritual blindness and an absence of
one’s own spiritual worth. Blindness gives rise to an incapacity for
gradation of ends according to value, and a defect of spiritual worth creates a
seriously impaired will, an unprincipled readiness to give up the spiritual,
the objective, the universal, for personal interest and acquisition. That is
why a political regime not nurturing in the people a feeling of its own worth is
doomed to disintegrate eventually from the triumph of private self-seeking over the common interest and vulgarity over spirit.
From this is already clear that a person deprived of
the feeling of his own worth can maintain the guise of humanity only under the
pressure of an alien power -
landowners, State power -and personal
advantage; with the collapse of both factors he easily loses the form of
humanity, and passions draw him into downfall and chaos. Spiritual disability
can always plunge him into a condition of irresponsible weakness of will and
mental deficiency. And in the political sense he is not a legally competent
being. Neither a sound legal consciousness, nor true loyalty, nor a political
form of thought, nor patriotism are accessible to him: for all of this
possesses a spiritual nature toward which he is blind and indifferent.
Therefore he cannot intelligently carry public authority or build a social
organization. Not respecting himself, he also does not respect the citizen in himself; not understanding
his own spiritual worth, he fails to
see spiritual worth either in other
citizens, or in the State, or in
State power. He perceives others’ worth as an alien power, and sees in it either an instrument for himself or a danger for himself. Standing face to
face with State power, or at least with its representatives, he draws from the
soul not respect, not trust and not a feeling of vital unity, but a covert submissiveness which manifests
itself, depending on circumstances, either in cunning flattery or in a daring threat.
Such a person does not maintain his own worth either before superiors or before
inferiors. With superiors he is ingratiating, obsequious, and servile; in the
best case he serves them as a true lackey; in the worst case he conceals behind
servility a spiteful readiness to humiliate his master just as he was
humiliated before the master. With inferiors he is contemptuous, crude, and
despotic; in the best case he uses them as his own instruments; in the worst
case he vents on them all the insults of his own meagre self-respect and
transfers to their shoulders the entire burden of his own slavery. The range of
his psychic alternations is defined by the groveling of a Caliban and the
daring of a Ham, the disrespectfulness of a Thersites and the ferocity of a
Pugachev.[4] And if such a psychic
structure turns out to be typical of people in a certain epoch, or even
dominant, then the life of the people is a picture of true degeneration: a
benighted trepidation is replaced by a benighted rebellion, “senseless and
merciless”; and there where ruled the “yoke and the lash”, arises a profanation
of sacred things, and a snatching of the inviolable.
A people unable to respect its own spiritual worth
creates a diseased ruling power,
brings forth a sick sense of self and
a sick ideology.
In creating its ruling power, such a people are unable
to convey to it either a feeling of personal worth or respect for oneself. It
establishes a ruling power which does not believe in the spiritual mission of
the State, does not see its own
spiritual tasks, and does not observe the forms of life necessary for spiritual
culture; a ruling power which does not understand in what consists the essence
of the State idea and for which a self-active legal consciousness is necessary;
which does not respect its own people and does not nurture them; which pampers
itself by its own despotic absolutism and perverts the idea of the State into
an empty form of submissiveness and order. It does not understand that
domination over a slave diminishes and corrupts the master himself, and does
not notice how the disease of enslaved legal consciousness corrupts its own
will and its political creativity. Such a ruling power recognizes the
appearance of political submission and political flattery as a true and
sufficient manifestation of its worth and harbors behind that appearance a
public venality, the corruption of morals, and a politics directed against the
State; it takes flattery and groveling for respect, formal discipline for obedience to law, a frightened
submissiveness for legal consciousness, absence of will for loyalty, the
absence of a political sense in the people for a guarantee of legal order. But,
clearest of all, it will discover its insolvency when the people’s dissatisfaction
begins to threaten its existence. Then it, deprived of respect for itself, will
place its self-preservation higher
than its worth and will prefer
utterly to destroy the legal consciousness of the people, to degrade its
purpose and its status, to unravel the foundations of the State, its powers and
its international position, in order simply to preserve its structure, its form
and its direction of will. Following the rule, fatal in politics, of “divide et impera”, it begins to arouse
and intensify discord among citizens, kindling artificial differentiation and
hurling nation against nation, class against class, children against fathers.
The lie and oppression, political investigations and provocations, graft and
terror it spreads open-handedly throughout the country, undermining what is
most important in the population - the
will to political unity. And all this is unsurprising and clear: such a
ruling power respects neither itself nor its mission; and in the struggle for
its existence it betrays what is unable to value: the deepest link of its
State, squandering this most precious spiritual achievement in outbursts of
personal and group despotism or in party interests.
It is natural that such a people, in composing their
national sense of self and their political fate, proceed along false paths and
prepare for themselves a heavy historical ordeal. In particular, it is
precisely out of this that arise all tyrannies
and especially the worst of them: the tyranny of the totalitarian State.
The totalitarian State, even in its less severe
version (Italian fascism), is not inclined to attribute any particular
significance to the feeling of personal spiritual worth. There where the
individual respects this feeling, as its fundamental condition of life, a totalitarian
regime does not arise. It is necessary for this feeling to have wavered, for a
people to have damaged or lost it, for a totalitarian regime to arise. This is
precisely how it was with the Italians at the end of the First World War (the
battle of Caporetto), with the Germans (after the defeat and demoralization of
1918), in Russia after the defeat of 1915 and during the revolution, and
finally, in China after a protracted revolution and endless external and civil
wars. A sharp sense of one’s own helplessness and the public shame brought
about by it, distrust in one’s own good forces, a wrenching feeling of
impending doom, humiliation, and most important, the absence of a lively and
deep religious feeling - all of this prepares in the people that particular feeling of dishonor on which
all demagogues and tyrants build their success. This dishonor leads to the
degeneration of legal consciousness: there arises disillusionment with
discipline and loyalty and responsibility in people’s souls - a readiness for
any sort of disloyalty, for a scorning of prohibitions, for treachery and
violence; people seek an authority which would give them permission for
dishonorable conduct, and convey power to them. It is noteworthy that Mussolini
succeeded in the beginning in creating a new, authoritarian power which not
only did not grant permission for dishonorable conduct, but advanced an ideal
of a new fascist honor.
From its side, the totalitarian power builds the whole
of its regime on the suppression and perversion of the feeling of personal
spiritual worth. It demands blind and humiliating obedience, including
voluntary and compulsory political espionage on one another by the citizens. It
demands boundless adulation and humiliating public sham-confessions from the insufficiently
loyal; it strives to involve in its political crimes the largest possible
number of citizens, to force everyone to their knees and break their spiritual
backbones. Born itself of dishonesty and dishonor, it creates a new, previously
unprecedented regime of dishonesty and dishonor, and unfolds shocking pictures
of ethical degeneration. After the political experience given to us by the
history of the first half of the twentieth century, scarcely anyone could bring
themselves to dispute the significance of the first axiom of legal
consciousness.[5]
It is impossible to grant that a people’s feeling of
mutual belonging to a national and political order could remain in a confused,
immature, helpless condition; that a people did not experience its unity, did
not seek it, did not desire it, and was unable to create it; its instinct for
self-preservation must not only maintain a personal
form, but also rise to a national
form. Then it will learn to struggle for its own political existence, to see
dangers threatening it, and will never abandon the cause of public salvation
for private desire and profit. Experiencing itself as spiritually unified, it
will see its spiritual worth, will respect itself, and turn out to be capable
of an active, enterprising self-affirmation; then it will be able to maintain
its political unity not only in the form of institutions,
and not become scattered in the transition to a corporative order. A great war
will not present itself as a trial beyond its strength, and great historical
humiliations will not be needed by it for the stimulation and strengthening in
it of the capability for spiritual and political self-affirmation.
It is clear that these and similar diseases inevitably
find expression in the spiritual
creativity, and in particular, in
the ideology of a people.
To be separated from one’s spiritual worth means to
lose either the self-sufficient form of spirit, or its unconditional content,
or, both one and the other together. A people not yet having realized its spiritual
self-affirmation does not respect spirit either in itself or in the object, or
in the idea of the State; therefore it develops morbid forms of spiritual life
and produces morbid phenomena of spiritual culture. These forms and phenomena
may be apparently lacking mutual correlations, but in substance they reveal a
single organic spiritual disease.
Not being able to find a fitting mean between
self-abasement and self-exaltation, such a people forever oscillates between
these two extremes, and often combines
them in the most bizarre fashion. Its religiosity proceeds either from a
feeling of personal insignificance, and then feeds on fears and superstition;
or from a feeling of seductive all-permissiveness, and then preaches the sanctity of sin and takes the form of a
collective perversion (Khlysty) [6],
or from a feeling of the feebleness of spirit, and then preaches the sinfulness of the flesh and transforms
human beings into monsters (Skoptsy).[7]
Its art either repudiates the independent service of the beautiful, and
becomes an instrument of socio-political struggle and advocacy; or suddenly
falls into a spiritual blindness, lyrically celebrating the insignificant
trivialities of life, or idealizing spiritual collapse and vulgarity; or turns
into a cult of sick passions, assuming all aesthetic form can be comfortable
with any content whatever; and then it destroys the very form of the beautiful
and the worth of art, converting it into a delight for blind or sick souls
(“modernism”).
These diseases also pervert the national ideology of such a people. On one hand,
the failed or not yet successful spiritual self-affirmation undermines its
faith in its own capabilities and violates the integrity of its self-respect.
This hinders it from approaching its shortcomings and vices with a feeling of
its own worth: it views them in an exaggerated, caricatured, at times
nightmarish form, perceives them as something exceptional and incurable, as a
kind of national curse. And then its ideology is filled with a feeling of
national insignificance and impending doom; it gives itself over to an
excessive and therefore fruitless self-flagellation, implanting in souls a
dejection and depression of spirit. From this sense that “we are rotten” flows
an exaggerated evaluation of other nations, historically more advanced; there
arises a faith in the foreign teacher, in “Varangians” [8], and this faith feeds and strengthens lack of faith in one’s
own powers, passivity, lack of will, a readiness to submit to other peoples and
to serve them. However, the presence of
such a sense and such an ideology does not hinder it from indulging in its own
condemned vices, indulging with provocative frivolity and self-satisfied
posturing.
On the other hand, meagre self-esteem and self-respect
instill in the national consciousness, which is creating the ideology of the
country, an extraordinary self-certainty and self-satisfaction. A healthy need
for self-respect, not finding proper satisfaction for itself, arouses an
irresistible inclination to self-idealization, to isolating in the national
character solely the bright qualities, and beyond that to an exaltation of
national shortcomings. Consciousness discovers a sentimental tenderness toward
its offended sense of self and affectionately rewards itself with the incense
of reverence. There is formed a doctrine of the “greatest among nations”, of a
nation-messiah, the chosen leader; there is advanced an ideology of
self-glorification, intoxicating the mind and enfeebling the will; there
emerges an ideology of national infirmities, demonstrating the moral advantage
of spiritual backwardness and ignorance (Tolstoianism) [9]; ideologists who perceive in immaturity and the deformity of
public legal consciousness the key to the resolution of the social problem
(anarchists). There arises a blind and ruinous nationalism advocating contempt
for foreigners, deadening the national conscience [10], and corrupting the roots of true patriotism. Objective
self-consciousness falls silent, and ideologists turn out to be the blind
leaders of the blind.
Such are the spiritual diseases arising from the
violation of the first axiomatic basis of spirit and legal consciousness. To
lose one’s spiritual worth means to lose in oneself that vital center from
which spiritual life is created, which needs natural law, formulates it and
establishes a legal order; that means to be deprived of that vital root from
which legal consciousness grows [11], that is the will to law, the will to the end of law and the capacity to
motivate one’s deeds autonomously through the recognition of that end.
NOTES:
[1] “Legal subject”: a citizen. (CCA)
[2] “Legal consciousness”: the
consciousness of the Law of Life, including human laws, and of one’s ethical
duty. (CCA)
[3] At this point the editors of the
book “On the Essence of Legal Consciousness” (English edition) say in a footnote:
“Il’in was thoroughly familiar with the works of Freud and had daily sessions
of psychoanalysis with Freud himself in Vienna for a period of six weeks during
the spring and early summer of 1914. These were interrupted by the outbreak of
the First World War, at which point Il’in was declared an enemy and forced to
leave Austria.” (CCA)
[4] In Greek mythology, Thersites
was a soldier of the Greek army during the Trojan War. See the Iliad. Yemelyan Ivanovich Pugachev led a
great Cossack insurrection in Russia during the reign of Catherine II. (CCA)
[5] The first axiom of legal
consciousness is the law of spiritual
worth. It is referred to in various forms by Il’In. On p. 255 of his book,
he says: “The feeling of one’s own worth
is the essential and authentic manifestation of spiritual life; it is a sign of
that spiritual self-assertion without
which neither the struggle for law nor political self-governance, nor national
independence is thinkable. A citizen deprived of this feeling is politically
incapable of functioning; a people not moved by it is doomed to terrible
historical humiliation.” And on page 256: “The self-affirmation of the soul in the absolutely-precious object
always was and always will be the sole source of the feeling of one’s own
spiritual worth.” (CCA)
[6] Khlysty (flagellants), a Russian sect
in the 19th and early 20th centuries. (CCA)
[7] Skoptsy (castrated), another radical
Russian sect in the 19th and early 20th centuries. (CCA)
[8] A reference to the opinion of some Russian historians
according to whom Russia was in fact founded by Scandinavian citizens. (CCA)
[9] In idealizing poor Russian
peasants as if they were saints, Leo Tolstoy followed the steps of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. The French philosopher was right in denouncing the misuse of
knowledge, but failed in suggesting that the absence of knowledge was the best
alternative. Tolstoy made the same mistake. The right alternative to the misuse
of knowledge is combining knowledge and ethics, and realizing that to every bit
of knowledge there is a corresponding amount of ethical duty; otherwise,
knowledge will turn against the knower.
(CCA)
[10] National conscience: such a concept has a decisive importance as to
the planting of good karma and corresponds to a “collective antahkarana”. See
in our websites the texts “The Guardian Wall That Protects Mankind” and “The
Seven Principles of the Movement”. (CCA)
[11] Id est, in theosophical parlance, “to be deprived of that active Antahkarana, or bridge to the higher
self from which ethical consciousness grows”. (CCA)
000
The above text is reproduced
from the groundbreaking book “On the Essence of Legal Consciousness”, by
the Russian philosopher Ivan A. Il’in: Wildy, Simmonds & Hill Publishing,
UK, 391 pp., 2014. See chapter sixteen, “Diseases of Self-Affirmation”, pp.
266-274.
Ivan A. Il’in lived between
1883 and 1954. His surname is also spelled as Ilyin in Western languages. The book “The Singing Heart”, for instance, was published in the UK during
2016 under the name “Ivan Ilyin”.
See also the
two-volume work “The Philosophy of Hegel
as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity”, by Ivan A. Il’in. An article by N. Lossky on this
philosopher will be found in the February 2016 edition of “The Aquarian Theosophist”, pp. 7-9.
000
See here the 1m30s video “The Healing Chain Reaction”, with a
fragment from “The Fire and Light”:
000
