Concerned for the interests of the many, nobody thought of his own in the sense preached by Christ: “Love your neighbor as yourself” That is, love yourself so much that you respect in yourself the supra-personal, divine principle, which forbids you to pursue your acquisitive, selfish interests and tells you to give yourself, without reasoning or talking about it; to love others. This requires a true sense of your own dignity: an acceptance of the objective value and significance of the ‘I’ at the center of your life on earth, as it grows in spiritual stature, advancing towards the perfection in which there can be no egocentricity. In the fight for your own soul, fidelity to yourself demands unceasing, single minded effort. It is so much easier to slip down than it is to rise one iota above your own narrow, opportunist motives. A true spiritual birth is extraordinarily hard to achieve. It is all too easy to fall for the ‘fishers of human souls’; to abandon your unique vocation ostensibly in pursuit of loftier and more general goals, and in doing so to by-pass the fact that you are betraying yourself and the life that was given to you for some purpose. The pattern of social relationships has formed in such a way that it is possible for people to ask nothing of themselves, to feel exempt from all moral duty, and only to make demands of others, of humanity at large. They can invite others to be humble and sacrifice themselves, to accept their role in the building of society, while they themselves take no part in the process and accept no personal responsibility for what is happening in the world. A thousand ways can be found to justify this non-involvement and the fact that they don’t want to give up their narrowly selfish interests in order to work for the nobler goal of their true vocation; nobody wants, or can bring himself, to look soberly into himself and accept that he is accountable for his own life and his own soul. On the premise that we are all ‘together’, in other words that mankind is in the process of constructing some kind of civilisation, we constantly turn away from personal liability and, without realising that we are doing so, shift on to others all responsibility for what happens. As a result, the conflict between the individual and society becomes increasingly desperate, and the wall of estrangement between the person and humanity grows ever higher. The point is that we live in a society that has been structured by our ‘concerted’ efforts and not by the efforts of anyone in particular, in which the personality claims its rights of other people rather than of itself. Consequently the individual either becomes the instrument of other people’s ideas and ambitions, or else he himself becomes a boss who shapes and uses other people’s energies with no regard for the rights of the individual. The idea that everyone is responsible for himself seems to have vanished, to have fallen victim to a misconceived ‘common good’, in the service of which man acquires the right to be treated with a total lack of responsibility. From the moment when we entrusted to others the solving of our own problems, the rift between the material and the spiritual has been growing. We live in a world governed by ideas which other people have evolved, and we either have to conform to the standards of these ideas or else alienate ourselves from them and contradict t h e m ‚Äî a position which becomes more and more hopeless. A bizarre and grim situation. I am convinced that the conflict can only be resolved through a true balance between the spiritual and the material. What is meant by ‘sacrificing yourself to the general good? Surely it betokens a tragic clash between the personal and the general? If a person’s sense of responsibility for the future of society is not based on an inner conviction of the part he has to play, if he merely feels entitled to make use of other people, directing their lives for them and indoctrinating them with the idea of their role in the development of society, then the discord between the individual and society can only become more bitter. Freedom of will must mean that we have the capacity to assess social phenomena as well as our relationships with other people; to make a free choice between good and evil. But freedom is inseparable from conscience. And even if it is true that all the ideas developed by the social consciousness are the product of evolution, conscience at least has nothing to do with the historic process. Conscience, both as a sense and as a concept, is a priori immanent in man, and shakes the very foundations of the society that has emerged from our ill-conceived civilization. Conscience works against the stabilization of this society; its manifestations are often at variance with the advantages‚ Äîor even the survival‚ Äîof the species. In terms of biological evolution conscience has no meaning as a category; but for some reason it nevertheless is there, accompanying man throughout his existence and development as a race. It is obvious to everyone that man’s material aggrandizement has not been synchronous with spiritual progress. The point has been reached where we seem to have a fatal incapacity for mastering our material achievements in order to use them for our own good. We have created a civilization which threatens to annihilate mankind. In the face of disaster on that global scale, the one issue that has to be raised, it seems to me, is the question of a man’s personal responsibility, and his willingness for sacrifice, without which he ceases to be a spiritual being in any real sense. I mean that spirit of sacrifice which must constitute the essential and natural way of life of potentially every human being: not something to be regarded as a misfortune or punishment imposed from without. I mean the spirit of sacrifice which is expressed in the voluntary service of others, taken on naturally as the only viable form of existence.
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The East was closer to the truth than the West; but Western civilisation devoured the East with its materialist demands on life. Compare Eastern and Western music. The West is forever shouting, ‘This is me! Look at me! Listen to me suffering, loving! How unhappy I am! How happy! I! Mine! Me!’ In the Eastern tradition they never utter a word about themselves. The person is totally absorbed into God, Nature, Time; finding himself in everything; discovering everything in himself. Think of Taoist music. . . . China six hundred years before Christ . . . But in that case, why did such a superb idea not triumph, why did it collapse? Why did the civilisation that grew up on such a foundation not come down to us in the form of a historic process brought to its consummation? Did they come into conflict with the materialistic world that surrounded them? Just as the personality comes into conflict with society, that civilization clashed with another. Perhaps it perished not only for that reason, but also because of its confrontation with the materialist world of ‘progress’ and technology. But that civilisation was the final point of true knowledge, salt of the salt of the earth. And according to the logic of Eastern thought, conflict of any kind is essentially sinful. We all live in the world as we imagine it, as we create it. And so, instead of enjoying its benefits, we are the victims of its defects. Finally, I would enjoin the reader‚ Äîconfiding in him utterly‚ Äîto believe that the one thing that mankind has ever created in a spirit of self-surrender is the artistic image. Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God?
Andrei Tarkovsky (1986)
