Far more modest in size and limited in scope is the last book written by the late William S Haas, The Destiny of the Mind, East and West (New York, Macmillan; 319 pages). Professor Haas does not attempt to formulate or even suggest a philosophy of history, but he does isolate and identify a phenomenon that will have to be taken into account in formulating a valid theory of history.
Professor Haas attacks — and I believe, demolishes — an assumption that underlies almost all modern theories of history: that the minds of all human beings, if not defective or disordered, work in essentially the same way.
I suspect that Haas's work will instantly convince every Westerner who has made a really intensive study of an Oriental culture. He will find in the book a sudden clarification of his own disconcerting experience. Reading it, he, like the heroine of one of Edith Wharton's best stories, "will say, long after, that was it!"
I should suppose that no one begins serious study of an Oriental culture without a certain romantic enthusiasm, for nothing less is required to surmount the very formidable linguistic barriers. It takes a long time to surmount them, and during that time the student's studies seem to bring him ever nearer to a fundamental unity of mankind underlying the diversity of regional cultures. But when language has ceased to be an obstacle, there inevitably comes, sooner or later, a day when the student has to admit to himself that the more he learns, the less he understands. He is confronted by minds whose operations he can glimpse from time to time, but cannot follow. He realizes, for example, that to the Hindu mind it simply does not matter whether George Washington lived earlier than Christopher Columbus or later. And then he realizes that he cannot himself really understand how it is possible to think about events without considering the sequence in which they occurred. While pondering that enigma, he will perceive that he has been translating Hindu doctrines into the terms of Western thought, assuming that each proposition has logical antecedents or consequences of which there is usually no trace in the original texts, and so he comes to suspect that his understanding of a specific doctrine, such as Vedantic karman or the Buddhistic skhandas*, is no more a reproduction of what the doctrine means to a Hindu mind than Puccini's Madame Butterfly is a reprod uction of life in Japan. He can learn a great deal about such doctrines, to be sure, but only so long as he remembers that he is an observer standing outside a barrier that he can never cross.
Professor Haas went through this common experience, but he resolved to ascertain precisely what the barrier was. In the book that he wrote as the conclusion of many years of study, he identifies and by copious illustration demonstrates the existence of two generically different mentalities. The Occidental mind, which appears fully formed in the earliest Greek philosophers and has not since changed, is the mind of conceptual thought — of thought directed from the mind toward an object. So completely are we dominated by this mentality that the only way in which we can think about ourselves is by placing ourselves momentarily in the position of an outside observer looking at us — we must try (as best we can) to make an objective study of ourselves. The Oriental mind, which appears fully formed in the earliest Upanishads, does not think conceptually; its thought is never directed away from itself. The Oriental mind cannot separate what it is thinking about from itself.
The capacity for objective thought is peculiar to the philosophical mind of the West. For the Oriental mental configuration, Haas coins the term philousian.
One consequence of this distinction is that there is, and can be, no Oriental philosophy; for when we apply the word "philosophy'' to an Oriental doctrine, we misrepresent it as grossly as though we were to call a woman's intuition "logic". It also follows that there is no Oriental mysticism. Mysticism is the term by which the philosophical mind designates what is for it a leap over the logical steps of conceptual thinking; the term therefore misrepresents a mental process which is not conceptual and in which, therefore, there can be no leap.
The Western mind simply cannot understand the Eastern mind without disowning itself. And not even then, unless it destroys its own capacity for the only kind of thinking that it recognizes as rational.
Professor Haas, as a conscientious scholar, warns us that his conclusions concerning the Orient are based on his own observations in the two fields in which he is specially competent. Thus he is primarily concerned with India and secondarily with China.
The use of India as the primary source of data greatly simplifies the problem: it shows that the difference in mentality cannot be a result of linguistic structure and suggests that it may not be racial. When we study a language of radically different grammatical structure and basic metaphors, such as Hebrew or Japanese, we realize that persons who think in those languages must do so in a way that seems very strange to us, though not necessarily by a different process; but Sanskrit (with its derivative, Pali) is an Indo-European language. Although it is more complicated, it does not differ from English or German or Greek in its basic way of expressing thoughts. And if the philousian mentality appears in the Upanishads, it is noteworthy that most students are inclined to believe that the earliest of those "mystic" rhapsodies were written before the Aryan blood was absorbed in the teeming masses of polyphyletic India, which would make it seem likely that the authors were Aryans themselves.
Professor Haas's analysis may need to be refined or elaborated, and it is entirely possible that there are more than two kinds of thinking. But by showing that there is a difference so fundamental - a difference more elemental and deeper than Spengler's idées maîtresses - the author has, I believe, done for the study of comparative history what Böhr did for atomic physics.
Although Professor Haas in his concluding chapters reveals a certain pessimism, as though he shared the fashionable view that our only future is liquidation, he and Professor Voegelin agree in regarding the unique civilization of the West as a unity — a single continuity that runs, with fluctuations but no break, from the ancient Greeks to ourselves. How crucial this conception is may be seen from the two books to which I now turn which deny such a continuity.
* So called skhandas are phenomenal descriptions of various aspects of experience and as such are universal. Inability to understand the meaning of these descriptions is caused only by lack of intellectual capacities.
Oliver Revilo
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