The Problem of Our Existence

There is no doubt that we are now passing through a critical generation of our history. And how could it not be critical, this generation in which we are trying to settle upon a certain state of true existence.

How many generations have turned over us in which we had no share, small or great, of existence: we were a lost people that could not make out its yesterday, could not distinguish its today, and did not know what it wanted of its tomorrow.

And if the proof that a people truly exists is the effective contribution it offers in the fields of science, art, and philosophy, then we, accordingly, did not exist. For we have offered, for generations, no contribution worth mentioning in any of these fields.

Today, however, we are trying to exist: we are building a new society that will leap us forward and make it easy for us to catch up with the caravan of the civilized peoples. And how this attempt has clashed with itself and branched apart! That is no wonder. And so we find ourselves divided into divergent camps, each cutting a divergent road for this attempt.

Perhaps the most important of these camps are three: a camp that inclines toward the West — all the West; a camp that inclines toward the East — all the East; and a camp that professes moderation and so strays, bewildered between the one camp and the other.

Which of them, one wonders, is in the right? Is it the camp which believes that our nonexistence, throughout these recent generations, resulted from the break into which we sank, step by step, under the force of the mental and spiritual circumstances that beset us — a break from the course of the original civilization that revealed itself most brilliantly in the life of the Western peoples and in the output of the minds of their geniuses? Or is it the camp which attributes our nonexistence to our neglect of the great heritage our forefathers left us — this heritage which they claim is self-sufficient, capable by itself of inspiring in us the foundations of the new society, qualified, by the truth and goodness and beauty latent in its essence, to achieve for us the true existence we long for? Or does rightness lie neither here nor there, but in what the third camp believes — the camp that clings to the fringes of moderation and calls for borrowing the best of the West and keeping the best of what is in the East, and for laboring to blend the two so that the sound foundations may be provided us for building a new society in which we express our existence in the most splendid expression possible...

In truth, the problem of our nonexistence is not on any such plane of ease: it is not solved by giving ourselves over to all the West, or keeping all the East, or resorting to some of the East and some of the West. The problem is incomparably more intractable. It reaches our whole being from its deepest roots. What we are attempting is nothing but a direction. And a direction needs guidance. And guidance, as we know, must rest upon principles.

Whether we set our direction toward the West, or set it toward the East, or set it toward moderation between East and West, we need final, permanent principles on which to rest in this guidance. What, then, are these principles?

Yes — what are these principles? Once we become conscious of them, define them, and believe in them, it will then be possible for us to rest upon them in choosing the direction which they themselves impose upon us and determine.

And so the problem of our existence is the problem of what principles we do not believe in, and what principles we ought to believe in...