One of the most fascinating questions that is frequently debated by sociologists and historians is whether human societies, cultures, nations, are in any way comparable to biological organisms. I suppose most of you know that this is one of the basic thoughts underlying Oswald Spengler’s theory of history, where he likened the growth, maturation, and decay of cultures to a biological process, and felt that, because of the analogy between the two, that one could predict the growth and decay of the great cultures of the world. And in many ways it does seem an entirely reasonable idea that human communities should be considered as biological entities, as organisms, because after all they’re made up of biological entities; they’re made up of organisms.

And the arguments on either side are in many ways equally plausible. You can take, for example, what I would call a nominalist point of view—nominalism being the point of view that the real substance, the real factor, in any sort of collective is the individual. They would say, for example: there is not such a thing as “mankind.” That’s an abstraction, just as the “United States of America” or “France” is an abstraction. It only exists in our minds, and what actually is there is people; individuals. And therefore a realistic thinker must always recognize that what he has to work with is the individuals, that nations as such do not do anything, they have no opinions—contrary to the sort of often-repeated remark that “Russia thinks this” and “the United States thinks that.”

And also, I think this nominalistic point of view has its greatest strength when we come to comparing the effectiveness of individuals on the one hand, and groups and committees on the other, in arriving at decisions and in planning action. I always remember that you can always recall how to spell committee: it has two M’s, two T’s and two E’s because it always discusses everything at least twice. And any imaginative person, any active person, is always hopelessly frustrated when he has to work in terms of organizations and committees—even though organizations and committees may curb his rashness and make him take into consideration points of view which he might otherwise ignore.

But then, on the other hand, let us look at (what we call in opposition to the nominalist point of view) the realist point of view—although this is a rather archaic use of the word “realist.” It doesn’t mean the person who faces facts, it means rather: the point of considering that mankind—that in other words the general—is a reality, and that the individual is a kind of specific instance of this reality. I don’t think today we would hold this doctrine in its supposedly platonic form, its old-fashioned way of thinking that every man is a sort of instance of an ideal and sort of spiritual category: “mankind.” But rather we would tend to think of the collective as an actual working organism. In the same way, for example: the human body is composed of cells, and these cells are in turn composed of molecules, and these in turn of much smaller entities. And there are enormous, vast spaces between these tiny components, so that if we look at them at that level of magnification, we should be confronted by things that were clearly individuals because of their great separation in space. Why could we not argue that a human society is an organism in just exactly that sense as the human body is an organism—although built up of many, many tiny and widely separated centers? We have, after all, the most complex relationships between one another—systems of communication, of government, of law—and could not these be held to be analogous to the kinds of communication that exists between the organs, the cells, and other individual components of the human body?

The argument seems to me to have a strength and a weakness, and I would first refer to the strength of it. The strength of it is that the individual is quite undoubtedly conditioned by the matrix of communication in which he lives. And this is a factor which is very often ignored. Our most private thoughts, for example, are carried on by means of symbols (such as language) which we have learned from other people. And therefore, when we think all alone by ourselves, there is an enormous public element in our thinking. There is, therefore, a whole system—of ideas, of social institutions, of habits, of thought, and action—which every one of us derives from our human environment. And this system of communication determines the way in which each one of us acts. And in this sense the individual is a sub-member of a group.

But the weak side of this point of view (if, that is to say, we are comparing the totality of human society with the totality of an organism) is that the systems of human communication—including not only the actual means of communication, such as speech and mass media, newspapers, books, radio, television, all that kind of thing—the whole complex of human means of communication which tie us together, both verbal and non-verbal, are far less complex in their structure than the nervous system of the individual. In other words, the organization pattern of a society is much more mechanical in its structure than the pattern of the human organism itself—even though we try to understand the pattern of the human organism, when we study it neurologically, by analogy with machines. And the psychologist is always talking about, say, unconscious mental mechanisms. But it’s widely recognized that this is only a model, and that it would be very unsafe indeed to say that the human organism is a very complicated machine.

I have very frequently discussed the disparity between organic organization and mechanical organization, and I don’t for the moment want to go into this here. The point is, however, that the communication system, the organization system, of a social group is something that we can quite readily comprehend, because we ourselves have invented it and structured it. For example, if you are a member of a complex organization—whether it be a corporation or a government agency of some kind—you are able to write down, assimilate, and understand all the procedures which the organization carries out. In other words, you work in accordance with a very complicated system of rules. But these rules are knowable, they are reducible to definite instructions. And these definite, knowable, readable instructions are far less complex than the procedures, the patterns, which govern the individual human body. And in this sense, then—since we know what the patterns of a big organization are—the big organization is much closer in its resemblance to a machine than the human body. And in this sense, then, there is a very, very important disparity between a human community and a biological organism.

Unfortunately, this is often overlooked—especially in a time like the present, when we seem to be putting more and more trust in organizations, and less and less trust in the individual. I mean, we’ve heard an awful lot recently about the organization-man, and group thinking, and teamwork in industry, and so on and so forth. And, of course, in the academic world, more and more, the individual has to fit in with purely organizational requirements. I mean, it’s not enough to accept a man in any important academic position because he’s obviously intelligent, and his execution of his work is intelligent. He has to be recognized—that is to say, he has to have received certain types of organizational stamping or approval. And, for example, more and more great foundations dispose of their money by benefiting organizations rather than individuals, and they leave the responsibility of conveying the work to the individual, to universities, corporations, and other organizations. And this, more and more, encourages the individual to fit in with organizational patterns, because it is in these patterns that the trust (and therefore the power) resides.

And this seems to me, fundamentally, to be an absolutely ghastly mistake, because it is putting our faith in something qualitatively inferior to the human being himself. In other words, anything that we ourselves can consciously create and understand is always going to be less complexly structured. That is to say, when I use the word “complex,” I mean something that is not simply an awful lot of bits, but these bits have to be integrated in a pattern. And I would call such a highly integrated pattern of elements intelligence. Intelligence seems to me to be just that.

Well, if we put our trust in patterns of this kind, we are trusting things that are qualitatively inferior to ourselves. This, of course, is one of the fundamental ideas of Confucian philosophy. When Confucius refused to define humanness—in Chinese: ren—and when he said that a man who has the virtue of ren (or human-heartedness) is superior to a virtuous man, he was saying that it’s very unintelligent to guide one’s action entirely by mechanically understandable principles.

I mean, for example, it’s a mechanically understandable principle of ethics that one should be honest. And if, therefore, a person goes ahead and is always mechanically, automatically, and rigorously honest under every possible circumstance, he’s a fool and a great troublemaker. Because honesty is not a mechanical virtue, it’s a very, very subtle art. And always to tell the truth and express frankly one’s opinions to everybody may be honest, but is an extraordinarily crude form of behavior. I mean, it’s like saying to an artist: “One should always use blue,” or to a cook: “One should always use salt.” Yes, indeed, salt is very fundamentally involved with cooking. But how much salt, and when to stop using salt is equally important. And so in the art of ethics honesty is, as it were, one of the condiments, or one of the ingredients, of behavior. But how it’s used is a very great art, and there is no way of writing down or explaining in detail in a series of step-by-step instructions just exactly how honesty should be used. It depends on a kind of subtle sensibility in just the same way that the making of paintings, the writing of poems, or the composition of music depends on subtle sensibility over and above anything that can be taught in any sort of technical manual.

And, of course, it is the possession of this subtlety that constitutes the great artist. And the possession of this subtlety is a property of the organism of the artist himself, the organism of his mind. And he himself doesn’t understand how he manages to do it. It’s like the story of the wheelwright in Zhuangzi, where there’s an old, old man, 70 years old, who’s a marvelous maker of wheels. And he says: “Of course, the whole art of making a wheel is that you mustn’t have it too tight at the hub, or it’ll bind on the axle. Or you mustn’t have it too loose, or it will wobble.” And this is a very great skill, getting it just exactly right. And he says, “You know, here I’ve been doing it for 70 years, and I still have to go on working because I can’t teach this to my son.” And he can’t teach it because he himself doesn’t really know how he does it. That is to say: he cannot translate his skill into procedural instructions.

And in this sense, then, the man—and the organization of the man—is infinitely superior to anything that the man himself can explain, construct, or think out. Because the form of organizations which man can create outside himself—that is to say, the forms of words or the forms of interrelationships between people—are always going to be almost infinitely less complex than the organization of man himself.

And so in this way, then, one might say that the communications created by human beings—societies and organizations—are not really biological organs. They are much nearer to mechanical organs. There is, however, one exception to this, and that is when we have a very small group of people who are related to each other not by intelligible—that is to say, explainable—procedures, but by that kind of osmosis (that kind of mutual, wordless understanding) that arises between people who have been in association for a long time, and who know each other very well. Here we do have something that looks very much like a real biological organism composed of more than one human individual, because, you see, the pattern of communication that exists between them is not one which they have planned and mapped out and understood. They have, in a way, you might almost say “plugged into” each other: they catch all sorts of cues from each other by means of which they are not conscious.

And of course, you see, we can all do unconsciously an enormous number of things that we can’t do consciously. Consciousness requires that we attend, as we say, to one thing at a time or one area of focus at a time, whereas our unconscious activity can be aware of ever so many things at once. And therefore, a very closely knit team of people who know each other very well can sometimes be far more effective than the single individual. But, you see, this is what the artificially created organization is trying to copy. And it, of course, can’t do so unless it understands that a team works by other means than those that can be written down, because they are far more complicated than anything that can be written down.

Now, you may think it’s surprising—or perhaps not so much surprising as inconsistent—that I speak thus of the superiority of the individual to anything collective, when I’ve often said at the same time that, in a certain way, individuality is an illusion—or rather, that the wisdom consists in transcending individuality. Many people think, for example, that Hindu or Buddhist denial of the reality of the individual is a philosophical point of view that has something in common, say, with Marxism or with other types of collectivism. They are very, very disturbed by it and afraid of it as something that, if it got loose in the Western world and people got interested in this sort of Oriental way of thinking, that it would be just another trend in the direction of depersonalization of man. And I think that this is based on a great confusion of thought.

An old friend of mine, who is now at the Pacific School of Religion—Chris Becker—once made the observation that the scandal of the Christian religion is that it regards reality as a person—that is to say that God is a person for Christianity. And this is to say, then, that God is much more in the direction of what we regard as an individual than in the direction of anything impersonal, collective, and mechanical. And, in a way, I would entirely go along with this thought—not perhaps in the same way as Dr. Becker would have intended it, but I would say that if we go in one direction: say we take the individual as a central point. Alright, then we move to the left. And then, in comparison with the individual, we have collective organizations which are mechanical in their structure. Now, on the other hand, we move to the right, in the opposite direction to anything collective. And here we find types of organization which are still more complex than the human individual, ad in that sense you might say more personal.

Of course, I never have liked the use of the word “person” in relation to Man, or still less in relation to any reality beyond or higher than Man, because its etymological meaning is originally just a mask. “Person” seems to me properly to refer to the roles in life that an individual plays. But the individual himself is something behind the role, behind the mask, behind the person. But if we take a new use of the word “person” to mean “a more complex form of organization,” “a more subtle form of organization,” of order, then (lying deeper than the individual) we can see, for example, the order of nature which is studied by the ecologist, who studies the infinitely subtle relationships between biological organisms and the environment, of Earth and sky, and other organisms. And then, indeed, we begin to see a structure: a structure of the world which is still further away from the mechanical type of structure, which has so many variables in it as to be absolutely unthinkable. And if this is what we mean by a superior type of life to Man, it seems to me very proper to say that there is an order of nature which is higher than the order of the individual, but very remote indeed from the order of the collective, which surpasses our understanding—that is to say, our ability to explain it in words with their simple mechanical types of pattern—and that this might indeed be called God: the total pattern or order of the universe—which in Chinese Neo-Confucian philosophy is described with the word lǐ, which (as some of you know) originally meant “the markings in jade,” or “the fiber in muscle.” In other words, the complexity of markings in jade originally suggested a type of patterning or design which was very difficult to comprehend. It was difficult to describe, like the patterns of foam on water, or the patterns of clouds, or patterns in ferns and flowers—and of course much more in the human brain itself. And therefore, lǐ meant a kind of order, but nevertheless an order that could not be translated into simple verbal pictures.

And therefore, we rest upon—we are, as it were, elements in—sub-patterns in a structure of this kind, which scientific description can only render in very, very rudimentary models; useful as they may be. So if we look at order on those three levels, I think we can get away from certain confusions; get away from the confusion that, when Man’s individuality is transcended, it means that he tends more and more to become a cog in a social machine. On the contrary! What Buddhist and Taoist philosophy mean by the “transcending of individuality” is the increasing subordination of the order of the individual, not to the order of the collective, but to the underlying order of nature, of the whole physical universe—which is ineffable (to use a mystical term), or infinite (to use a mystical term) not because it is vast and vague and shadowy and mushy, but because it has a complexity, a multi-dimensionality, which escapes the very simple, very abstract patterns in which our thought is able to form itself.