Spencer Heath Archive

Item 434..

Random tape by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath

September 1955

Apart from human life and hope and destiny, there is no such thing as quality, value or beauty. The objective world itself contains itself and seeks no ends, or has no aims other than that aim which is expressed through the human consciousness and will. We may impute aim to the cosmos, as the source whence human aims are derived.  But for human purposes, there are no other ends to be desired than the maintenance, the advancement and the idealization of human life. Quality and value and beauty are human concerns, human conceptions.

It is interesting to know how dependent upon freedom mankind is. For the whole world of quality, value and beauty depends for its realization upon the freedom of the human will, the freedom to choose.  To choose creatively, to cherish ideally, one must be in a situation involving a large field, a wide range of pos­sible experience, a great variety of events. From such a field of quantitative experience will arise the greatest amount of diversity, or variety. And given quantity and diversity, and then given freedom of the individual to exercise choice among this great diversity of events, qualities, objects or whatnot, then there is a human reali­zation of quality as distinguished from that which is of less desirability, of value as distinguished from that which is less to be desired, and a discrimination of that which is inspiring, that which lifts the human personality out of its narrow self and gives it a cosmic sense, that which inspires, and for which the common name is beauty.

We cannot too often remember that freedom is the touchstone to the entire ideal world of man. With­out freedom, with only limited choices, he is less than human.  He is in the same condition as the humble world of the animals, whose only ideal is to continue to live, whereas the ideal of man is to transcend existence into a creative technology in which he can exercise his inherent divinity through dreaming a more beautiful, more perfect, world, and creating that world through cooperation in freedom with his fellow men.