Everyone Is Talented

Gábor Gaál

Published in 1929, From Material to Architecture contains the main features of László Moholy-Nagy’s teaching program at the Bauhaus

I read a book which radiates living wisdom.

The book was published in German. Its title, translated, From Material To Architecture, is quite forbidding. At first glance, one would think that the author is going to discuss details in depth. In the meantime, however, it becomes clear that what the author is speaking of is nothing else but the absolute whole. Professional secrets are the last thing which awaits the reader here, just the contrary: the author’s subject is a question which is anti-professionalist, claiming everybody’s interest, all–sided with the all–sidedness of a jack-of-all-trades, unbelievably new, the most ancient and simple and, at the same time, the most forgotten question. The problem lies herein: that contemporary man, working and active in thousands of various fields of life, is not whole. His education today, his professional training and a cluster of life now fragmented into thousands of diverse tightly structured forms make the individual man of one single calling, to such an extent that he no longer dares to venture outside the territories he has grown accustomed to. Today, by necessity, every man is a specialist. He is not the man for the whole of life, he is only a man of a peculiar part, a segment of life. He is the ‘segmental man’, the author says, and he is not the whole man, although in the depths of his healthy instincts there is a constant craving and desire for a completely whole humanity. According to the author this desire is so strong that it’s forcible suppression is the very source of that permanent depression and unhappiness which pervades the working man today, no matter what field he is working in. Nobody is satisfied with his work. This is only natural. The constant one-sided activity of the segmental man cannot satisfy the whole man. As a consequence, permanent dissatisfaction sets in. Man lives in the compartmentalised segments of his specialised profession just as he would in a maze of underground prison cells. Going against the grain of the biological and psychological desires of his youth, the chosen calling or profession will weigh down on him like a terrible burden all his life, thus the dissatisfaction he feels about his profession becomes permanent. Man is a prisoner of his work and his life and he is sick of it. This is the cause of that epidemic of neurasthenia which is neither diagnosed or treated by the doctors, although man clearly feels the innermost values of his life are being destroyed. Albeit…
Albeit, the much disparaged ancient primitive man was a totally different human being, he was a whole. Man living in a primitive environment remains whole even today, because, forced by the context of his life he is hunter, craftsman, builder and doctor in one person, in contrast to the frightening one-sidedness of modern man. For the all–sided primitive man everything represents a field of work, therefore the whole area of his activities is free. Every new field of work opens up for him a new field of experience which he explores the biologically invigorating good feeling of inner security. In contrast to this how different is the life of our contemporary man today. He lives in the prison of his profession, so stunted by it, so buried in it that his profession ceases to be a source of experience for him. He has no original experiences of alternate, different fields, he lacks a second orientation. His professional knowledge and specialisation have erased the possible brave approaches of his instincts and functions towards the other fields of application. His specialisation blocks the way to the expansion of all his energies. Man is a homo faber, that is an active being, is unable to live up to his potential as would be necessary to achieve a feeling of biological well-being. This is why our man is weak, insecure, and unhappy. He lacks organic security. He will never be able to reach down to the inner core of herself, so he will not be able to put to use those diverse, constantly tensing forces which are inherent in his organism. Throughout his life he sits in front of the same desk or lathe, prisoner of the same work, all the time, although a host of creative powers lie dormant in him. Therefore, he is really like a plant which has been uprooted from the life-giving soil. That vitality which makes a healthy life whole, through which he should have channelled the flow of his activities, has dried out of him.

Naturally, the author very clearly explains the reasons why this is so. But I’m going to skip this part of his reasoning, since this exposition is not the most important and original part of his book, and I will deal rather with the crucially significant deduction on which his ensuing chain of ideas is based. Namely, this is what the author says:
Everyone is talented because every healthy man has a capacity to develop the creative energies founded in his nature. Those otherwise unexpected achievements which occur in everyone’s life are the proof of this truth. This is demonstrated by the fact that originally everyone was able to absorb sensory experiences deriving from the objective world and to work an order out of these experiences. To explain a little bit further: this means that everyone could potentially become an active, practising musician, painter, sculptor or architect, just as everyone when speaking becomes an ‘orator’. In saying this of course, we do not mean to state that everyone could become an artist, but only that when he has a chance to do work which is in tune with his organic structure and flows from his inner self, then anyone is able to reach unexpectedly high levels of achievement. If the chance of his vitality, instincts and the outside world converging on one point were to offer itself to him.
What should we do about this, the reader asks.
And the answer is: since the specialised ‘segmental’ training of today’s man is unavoidable, it is important that even after having had this training, the whole man should not wither away. The segmental man should be rooted in the whole man who is, in turn, organically planted into the universality of life, and by this we also mean that man should not seek only those entities (money, power, and other trappings) which provide him with material security but should strive to attain his inner security too. This can only be achieved if not the object but man himself had a way of life based on his inner structures is the goal of the work.
And now, after having discussed the dominant idea of the book in very general terms, let us make some notes on its author. First of all we should tell you that although the book was published in German (by Albert Lange, Munich), its author is Hungarian. Second, he is a whole man truly after his book. He is an all-sided man, with a streak of the jack-of-all trades in him. When young he started out as a poet of some expressive power. But even then he used to draw. Then he disappeared for a while, just in order to re-emerge a few years later as a professor of the German state-supported Bauhaus in Dessau. From then on he appeared in the most various fields of art, working as a painter, architect, photographer, inventor, industrial designer, and in recent years pushed into the forefront of Europe’s wide recognition, he is working as a scenic designer. With this book he makes his debut as a philosopher.

His name is László Moholy-Nagy

Gábor Gaál (8 March 1891 – 13 August 1954) was a Hungarian sociologist, literary critic and aesthetician