Erich Gutkind : as prophet of the New Age

cutting it up into little bits, giving each aname, and demanding that once we have named something it should always stay the same, fixed in existence. Bergson in Creative Evolution compared this to the way in which a cinematograph cuts real motion into a series of still shots, which, when they are put together in quick succession, can simulate motion, but never reproduce it. So our logical and scientific intellect can indeed take the whole to pieces, but it can never comprehend that wherein lies the life and wholeness of the whole, which is more than the sum of its parts. This thinking that invented matter and force, and all the other fictions that science has had to use, is the same thinking as turned God and ego into ‘things’, for it cannot deal with anything at all unless it can reduce it to a standstill and fix it within definite bounds.

Gutkind takes the co-relativity of subject and object in the act of perception as the prototype of the new way of looking at life. ‘In this process’ he says, ‘it “selfs” and it “things” is only one single act, even as the convexity and concavity of a surface are one and not two, for I cannot have one without the other. Self and thing are completely interwoven.’ And from this he derives what he calls the final wisdom of our time, that ‘everything is relative and is related to something else’ and hence ‘all things are interwoven one with another.’ For then we see that motion precedes any idea of a thing that moves, relationship precedes any things that are related, and the whole precedes any parts into which it can be dissected. And Gutkind speaks of the complete revolution in someone’s development when he realises the transcendent character of all sense experience and suddenly perceives that everything depends on what is beyond itself, so that all worldly reality dissolves into insubstantiality. ‘In earlier stages,’ he says, ‘everything we came upon seemed immovably firm, cradled in the certainty of the thing-like. And then comes the most mysteriously stupendous event in human history, more mighty even than the maturing and liberating influence of science, and a counterpart to its work of fixing : the dissolution of certainty and the appearance of world no longer as something eternally ordained, but rushing by as a momentary state of tension, till finally we cannot even grasp or hold anything in thought or word . . . Our sense experience is no longer what is most certain, but has become wholly problematic. . . Andas we leave behind the lower reality of being, we reach beyond

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