Cary, Joyce

From Philosopedia

Cary, Joyce (1888—1957) Cary, a British novelist who studied art in Edinburgh and Paris, took part in the Balkan War (1912—1913) and served with the Nigerian regiment in the Cameroons campaign, 1915—1916. His early novels about Africa described the relations between Africans and their British administrators. The Horse’s Mouth (1944) was chiefly concerned with the life of Gulley Jimson, the artist. Art and Reality (1958) was a study in aesthetics. The Captive and the Free (1959) was an unfinished novel which had a religious theme. Asked about humanism, Cary responded to the present author:

I don’t know what kind of a humanist I am. My position is roughly and very shortly: (1) The world is finally one unity: “nature” includes “human nature”; (2) In the unity we find altruistic as well as aesthetic values, good will, and also evil will; (3) Values obtain only in a personal free will. Therefore, you have to fit a person, and values, into your unity; (4) This means that the unity is ultimately personal and free but it contains a complex mass of evil; (5) Daily experience makes us know the battle between good and evil in which the good is often beaten; the dilemma is always charged with tragedy, in justice, every kind of cruelty; (6) Some of the evil is pure evil–wicked evil; some derives from chance–the unity is shot through with luck. It is always bedevilled by deterministic causation. The two often work together; i.e., a child is born to tubercular parents (luck) and inherits a physique (determinism) which is open to tuberculosis, and so he dies young; (7) Any answer proposed to this complex situation must account for (a) the freedom of the moral and immoral will; (8) the determination of the “material” world [an illegible word here is possibly “governed”] at the least by statistical laws which, I should say, are good evidence of a fixed consistency in spite of Planck’s views as I understand them. The only answer I can propose which is, of course, purely conceptual is that since the world is “so” and not “otherwise,” it must have a permanent character. That is, a real and actual free will requires a consistent form in actuality. Such a dual existence is known to [illegible words] in our bodies. It is therefore not beyond imagination. It is, no doubt, something a good deal larger than our imagination and probably of a quite different order. Yet we know what we know.

{WAS, 28 February 1951}