Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2078

Pencil notes for a review of a work by Dudley Zuver commis­sioned by the Franklin J. Matchette Foundation and intended to be a popular presentation of the philosophy of the late Franklin J. Matchette. William H. Matchette, Foundation president, asked Heath to critique the finished work.

1951 or 1952 (?)

Dear Mr. Matchette:

I have read the manuscript, Retreat to Reality, with considerable care. I cannot recognize it as a “popular version” of the F.J. Matchette Absolute-Relative philosophy or as any version at all, but rather the inversion of the Absolute-Relative philosophy, as it seems to me, through renunciation of all human attempt and aspiration towards the Absolute, and this for no reason stated other than the failure and frustration alleged to be ultimately and inexorably involved (page 195).

Where the Matchette philosophy sets out the good life as progression towards the Absolute — a diminishing divergence therefrom, this writer counters with, “The Devil is man play­ing that he is God.” He shows no consciousness of man as a creature in being, yet a creator in his becoming, as an animal on the way towards becoming a god.

The central precept of this volume, it seems to me, is that men should cease all attempts to be creators, to be masters and /builders/ of the world in which they live, and be supinely content with mere existence as such and as the animals presumably are. For its proposed “Retreat to Reality” seems to be a regression from all that most distinguishes the human from the merely animal, back in the direction and to the sole practice of those primal affections and modes of living that are most common to both and beyond which the unique spirit of man has measurably, yet insufficiently, advanced.

The ideation is paradoxical, even avowedly so, both within itself and in relation to its author. For Dudley Zuver, as I know him, is a most genial companion and friend with no trace of the bitter iconoclasm with which his writ­ing assails almost every great and high thing that men have attempted, either in sincerity or by pretense but with less than perfect and absolute results, towards their infinite and absolute ideals. He writes as though obsessed by the medieval theological dogma of human total depravity, that the peculiarly human nature of man is not divine but totally depraved, leaving only his animal elements undefiled. He thus identifies hypocrisy with spirituality, pretense with the thing pretended, the counterfeit with the genuine, and blasts all positive virtues, all human stirrings and aspirations, all finite achievements, as doomed to frustration and defeat because perforce they fall short of the Absolute and the Infinite. He would have man hunger-strike against the spirit merely because he cannot ingest its ultimate totality. He eschews the wine and spirit of life because the heavenly vine­yard cannot be gulped.

Throughout the whole manuscript it is rare to find anything commended. The only tolerant references point towards mere existence — existentialism — which is somehow vaguely assimilated to a kind of instinctive animal morality. Even love, as it rises above mere animalism and aspires towards the Absolute and Ideal, is but a futile and self-defeating play-game, and in its most intimate manifes­tations,

“making sex a plaything of the mind impairs it as a physical function. Love has been so enshrined in song and story that it proves disappointing when attempted in bed. The body cannot keep pace with the expectations of the spirit. Spiritual people read and talk inces­santly about sexual love, but when it comes to action they turn out to be homosexuals, celi­bates or physically unsatisfactory as mates.” (64)

Hence it seems that in the “morale” of his merely “existential” world, sex can be only a blind tropism and mere animal sensuality must suffice.

Just about all the things that men do purposefully, whether good or bad, he rates cynically as merely vacuous play games. And the cynic reflects himself in his own words, to wit: “The cynic is simply a play man standing on his head. From that inverted position he glimpses the purpose of life as the discovery that life has no purpose. Normal perception, however, discerns no purpose whatsoever.” (8) There is a whole chapter — IV — in total derogation of any idea of purpose in human life. “The moral attitude is an acceptance of reality, just as it is, as final, to embrace the present actuality without question or explanation.” (106) There is no way “whereby purpose can avoid ending in futility,” and “All purposes are doomed to frustration.” (111 and again 115) Purposelessness is offered as the antidote (sic) to boredom. (116) “To devote oneself to an ideal good is to petrify into an ideal corpse.” (123) “The human will is inescapably evil.”  “Why be good?” “Because you enjoy it.” (130) But per contra, “Virtue is always unpleasant, it cuts across the grain.” (132)

His bipolarity is between the distinctively human, which he rates as wholly perverse, and the merely animal, which he commends as “moral” and complacent — “existential.” The moral pole is not to be ignored…” Yet, “To elucidate the moral life is to obscure it. To know God is to kill God.” (66)     “Thus the stormer of the citadel of heaven finds himself inside the portals of hell.” (101)

He does not see the animal man as the background, the subsoil out of which the human, the creative, the spiritual man emerges and evolves, even unawares. “Man discovers an insuperable disharmony in the universe .. environment repugnant to him if not downright hostile.” (53) And “The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is delicious but poisonous. Humanity is doomed to eke out its existence in a hostile environment.” (56) “Jesus,” he tells us, “calls for a Retreat to reality, prin­ciples be damned.” (170) Yet “Jesus had no purpose or motive.” (172) And “God is never an object of human experience.” (173)

 

His “retreat to reality” seems to involve regression to animalism, repudiation of all other ideals, renouncing the dream and the quest, the abdication of all dominion and a so-called “moral” existentialism that finds its consumma­tion only in a complacently amorous cronyism towards fellow creatures and sensuous submission to whatever may be.

Such are the dicta that lead up to the final nine pages under the heading, “The Absolute and the Relative.” In this, what the writer calls the Perennial Philosophy is extolled as “a system proper to the human mind.” (193) Here he abandons his denial of all purpose and plan with the statement, “The purpose of all change is to acquire such being as does not change,” and plumps us right into the heart of a teleological and therefore an evolving universe. (194) And despite all his excoriation of man’s spiritual stirrings towards the Absolute and Ideal, he now allows that “whatever reality the relative can lay claim to, is borrowed and derived from the self-consistent Absolute.” (194)

Yet after this concession to a reality in terms of the Absolute and Ideal, the nimble cynic reverts to his métier ironically in,

“Far be it from me to despoil any man of such treasure, or to despise such a feat as scaling the ramparts of heaven. All I have essayed to do is to point out the perils involved, the ease of falling from the heights and landing in the very opposite of what was intended.”

 

It is only fair to recognize that he speaks of the Absolute as in all respects infinite and perfect and there­fore beyond actual embodiment in finite affairs. He thus rightly warns one and all against the mundane powers and pretensions of those who arrogate to themselves either identity with or commission from the Absolute and Infinite. But he fails to recognize that the Absolute is not sought as anything that can be objectively possessed or attained as a goal or an end. It is, rather, the endless Direction in which the Universe, with all that it contains, creatively evolves.

To some minds this is not yet apparent, but most men acknowledge a profound intuition that there is a Direction towards the Perfection of virtue, knowledge and beauty, all the steps in which lead to points less divergent and ever more approximate to the Infinite and thus never wholly attainable.

This progression for most men and for all societies of men is almost wholly empirical. Their advances are not clearly if at all foreseen. The evolution of man and of society is seen only in retrospect because the rationale of infinite nature — of the Absolute — in that field is not yet clearly explicit to the rational mind. Until its modus operandi becomes clear, only the fact and not the form of future advance can be predicted. But once that knowledge is attained, once the ineluctable ways of the Absolute in its positive polarity are grasped and knowingly employed, then, here as elsewhere, can the Creative Will of man come ever more and joyously into its own.

With all its cynical inversions, confusion of opposites and self-contradictions, and its final four pages of utter and unsupported dogmatism on what God is and is not, does and does not, Mr. Zuver’s Retreat to Reality is most engag­ingly well written. His style is at once learned and familiar and flashes with a lightsome wittiness here and there that imports grace to the mordant mockeries that so well befit the grim and gruesome content.

 

 

Retreat to Reality

Sub-titles proposed:

Repudiation of Ideals

Renouncing the Dream and the Quest

Regression to Animalism

 Apologetic for Failure and Frustration

Apotheosis of Defeat

 Sour Grapes