The Condition of Man by Lewis Mumford

Abstract

BOOK REVIEW The Condition of Man. By LEWIS MuMFORD. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1944. Pp. 467. $5.00. The experience of reading The Condition of Man is comparable to several days of conversation with an intriguing and forceful personality, one who startles by his epigrams and insights, one who ofttimes provokes by· his personalizations and generalizations, yet one withal whose underlying conviction is caught and shared because, and sometimes in spite of, the evidence that is presented. In this work, Lewis Mumford, Professor of Humanities at Stanford University, has sketched for himself a huge task: "to deal at length with the tangled elements of Western man's spiritual history. . . . The time has come for a new drama to be conceived and enacted. Each of us has his part to play in that renewal. And first of all, we must understand the formative forces that are still at work in our civilization: by such fuller and deeper knowledge of our own living past, we will refashion the actors themselves and give them new parts to perform. . . . We must recapture once more our sense of what it is to be a man ... " (p. 14) ." The Condition ofMan is the third volume in the series that opened with Technics and Civilization, a history of the machine and a critical study of its effects upon civilization; the second volume, The Culture of Cities, is a penetrating analysis of the new role of cities and regions in our modern civilization. In order of importance, the author ranks this volume first, since it deals with the purposes and ends of human development. Because it treats of human purposes and ends in an age when finality in human affairs is either denied or seriously controverted, the book is bound to arouse comment along the whole critical continuum from lusty condemnation to enthusiastic approbation. Approaching history as " a reservoir of human creativeness," the author opens his study with the Greek and Roman civilizations, for if we would understand our present selves, " we must understand the central core which formed the primitive Christian " (p. 17) . While the Greeks sought to achieve an organic society, they failed because they did not in their parochialism embrace all humanity, a failure to be concerned with the whole life of man and with every member of human society. Rome, seeking a greater universality failed because it lacked the inner logic to fulfill the powers of ubiquitous Roman law, Roman administration, Roman sani544 ~OOK REVIEW 545 tation, Roman engineering; " as life became mechanically disciplined it became spiritually incoherent " (p. 39) . In Chapter II on " The Primacy of the Person,'; Mr. Mumford introduces Jesus of Nazareth with the assumption that "much of his actual doctrine, perhaps part of the kernel, was misunderstood or rejected by his more simple-minded recorders" (p. 5~). The interest of Jesus was in "the redemption of man's very humanity, in the perpetual renewal andrededication of the living to the task of self-development: he sought to bring the inner and the outer aspects of the personality into organic balance by throwing off compulsions, constraints, automatisms " (p. 54) . Looking at Christ as the mystic llJld the psychologist, and mayhaps the psychoanalyst, the author considers him as one of the great prophets of emergent evolution, contributing to the gradual building up of personality and its extension in theory to every member of the community. "What was lacking in his creed was what was lacking ·in his native environment, the back countries, far from the big cities with their art' and learning " {p. 60). Mumford likens the Christian Church to the tomb in which Christ was interred. Doctrinal Christianity, from Paul to Augustine, was " essentially the product of an informal revolutionary committee of correspondence " (p. 65) , gathering, in the unverified opinion of the author, many things besides the sayings and deeds of Jesus, thus to build up what is known as Christian theology. Taking the Church as an example, Mr. Mumford describes the transition from personality to community which is essential to his main thesis. To him, only at the moment of formulation is an idea its very self; to survive, the idea must adapt itself to an impure medium, the mediun...