Table of Contents
The Loneliness and Anxiety of Modern Man
In Man’s Search For Himself Rollo May writes about a feeling of emptiness common to all. But what does it mean to feel emptiness?
A human being is not empty in a static sense, as though he were a storage battery which needs charging. The experience of emptiness, rather, generally comes from people’s feeling that they are powerless to do anything effective about their lives or the world they live in.
When an individual feels powerless in directing his own life, or change what people think of him, he feels empty. He gets a deep sense of despair and futility.
And soon, since what he wants and what he feels can make no real difference, he gives up wanting and feeling. Apathy and lack of feeling are also defenses against anxiety. When a person continually faces dangers he is powerless to overcome, his final line of defense is at last to avoid even feeling the dangers.
Erich Fromm saw this coming. He observed that people no longer live under moral laws or the authority of the church.
The authority is the public itself, but this public is merely a collection of many individuals each with his radar set adjusted to finding out what the others expect of him.
The corporate executive is on top because he and his wife were successful in adjusting to public opinion. The public is just made up of individuals who are slaves to the authority of public opinion.
Riesman makes the very relevant point that the public is therefore afraid of a ghost, a bogeyman, a chimera. It is an anonymous authority with a capital “A” when the authority is a composite of ourselves, but ourselves without any individual centers. We are in the long run afraid of our own collective emptiness.
The danger of this situation is that it leads sooner or later to painful anxiety and despair, and then futility and blocking off one’s most precious qualities. The person is then psychologically impoverished.
Loneliness
Another reason for feeling lonely is that society emphasizes the importance of being socially accepted. It is how we stave off anxiety, and our chief mark of prestige.
Thus we always have to prove we are a “social success” by being forever sought after and by never being alone. If one is well-liked, that is, socially successful—so the idea goes—one will rarely be alone; not to be liked is to have lost out in the race. In the days of the gyroscope man and earlier, the chief criterion of prestige was financial success: now the belief is that if one is well-liked, financial success and prestige will follow. “Be well-liked,” Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman advises his sons, “and you will never want.”
What if being alone made us lose self-awareness? If people think of being alone for very long, with no people or radio, they fear losing the ability to orient themselves. They wouldn’t know the difference between waking life and sleep, between the subjective self and the objective world around them. And the worst fear is that one becomes psychotic as a result.
Social acceptance, “being liked,” has so much power because it holds the feelings of loneliness at bay. A person is surrounded with comfortable warmth; he is merged in the group. He is reabsorbed—as though, in the extreme psychoanalytic symbol, he were to go back into the womb. He temporarily loses his loneliness; but it is at the price of giving up his existence as an identity in his own right. And he renounces the one thing which would get him constructively over the loneliness in the long run, namely the developing of his own inner resources, strength and sense of direction, and using this as a basis for meaningful relations with others.
Anxiety
Those years in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Europe was inundated with anxiety in the form of fears of death, agonies of doubt about the meaning and value of life, superstition and fears of devils and sorcerers, is the nearest period comparable to our own. All one needs to do is read fears of atomic destruction where historians of that twilight of medievalism write “fears of death,” loss of faith and ethical values for “agonies of doubt,” and one has the beginning of a rough description of our times. We too have our superstitions in the form of anxiety about flying saucers and little men from Mars, and our “devils and sorcerers” in the demonic supermen of the Nazi and other totalitarian mythologies.
In each age, it seems, we have our bogeymen and different sources of anxiety. The names may change, but the feeling remains the same. Divorce and suicide rates continue to go up, and so do mental and emotional disturbances. It is without question that we live in the age of anxiety.
We shall live amid upheavals, clashes, wars and rumors of wars for two or three decades to come, and the challenge to the person of “imagination and understanding” is that he face these upheavals openly, and see if, by courage and insight, he can use his anxiety constructively. It is a mistake to believe that the contemporary wars and depressions and political threats are the total cause of our anxiety, for our anxiety also causes these catastrophes.
We are anxious because we are not sure what roles we should pursue or what principles we should believe in.
Shall a man strive competitively to become economically successful and wealthy, as we used to be taught, or a good fellow who is liked by everyone? He cannot be both. Shall he follow the supposed teaching of the society with regard to sex and be monogamous, or should he follow the average of “what’s done” as shown in the Kinsey report?
Anxiety is the feeling of being caught or overwhelmed, it dulls or blurs our senses rather than sharpens them.
It may be a mild tension before meeting some important person; or it may be apprehension before an examination when one’s future is at stake and one is uncertain whether one is prepared to pass the exam. Or it may be the stark terror, when beads of sweat appear on one’s forehead, in waiting to hear whether a loved one is lost in a plane wreck, or whether one’s child is drowned or gets back safely after the storm on the lake. People experience anxiety in all sorts of ways: a “gnawing” within, a constriction of the chest, a general bewilderment; or they may describe it as feeling as though all the world around were dark gray or black, or as though a heavy weight were upon them, or as a feeling like the terror which a small child experiences when he realizes he is lost.
The threat of death is the most common symbol for anxiety, but of us don’t face the threat of death very often. There are other causes.
Tom, the man who will go down in scientific history because he had a hole in his stomach through which the doctors at New York Hospital could observe his psychosomatic reactions in times of anxiety, fear and other stress, gave a beautiful illustration of this. In a period when Tom was anxious about whether he could keep his job at the hospital or would have to go on relief, he exclaimed, “If I could not support my family, I’d as soon jump off the dock.”
Failing at earning a wage threatens one’s sense of self-worth.
Every human being experiences normal anxiety in many different ways as he develops and confronts the various crises of life. The more he is able to face and move through these “normal crises”—the weaning from mother, going off to school, and sooner or later taking responsibility for his own vocation and marriage decisions—the less neurotic anxiety he will develop. Normal anxiety cannot be avoided; it should be frankly admitted to one’s self.
The Roots of Our Malady
The pursuit of competitive enterprise was a magnificent and courageous idea in its heyday. But in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries considerable changes occurred. In our present day of giant business and monopoly capitalism how many people can become successful as individual competitors? There are very few groups left who, like doctors and psychotherapists and some farmers, still have the luxury of being their own economic bosses—and even they are subject to the rise and fall of prices and the fluctuating market like everyone else. The vast majority of workingmen and capitalists alike, professional people or businessmen, must fit into broad groups such as labor unions or big industries or university systems, or they would not survive economically at all. We have been taught to strive to get ahead of the next man, but actually today one’s success depends much more on how well one learns to work with one’s fellow workers. I have just read that even the individual crook cannot make out very well on his own these days: he has to join a racket!
May describes the new world as interdependent and individualism must now take a different guise than “every man for himself.”
As this hostility has come closer to the surface in recent decades, we have tried to cover it up by various devices—by becoming “joiners” of all sorts of service organizations, from Rotary to Optimist Clubs in the 1920’s and 30’s, by being good fellows, well liked by all, and so on. But the conflicts sooner or later burst forth into the open. This is pictured beautifully and tragically in Willie Loman, the chief character in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Willie had been taught, and in turn taught his sons, that to get ahead of the next fellow and to get rich were the goals, and this required initiative. When the boys steal balls and lumber, Willie, though he pays lip-service to the idea that he should rebuke them, is pleased that they are “fearless characters” and remarks that the “coach will probably congratulate them on their initiative.” His friend reminds him that the jails are full of “fearless characters,” but Willie rejoins, “the stock exchange is too.”
Willie tries to cover up his competitiveness, like most men of two or three decades ago, by being “well liked.” When as an old man he is “cast into the ash can” by virtue of the changing policies of his company, Willie is caught in great bewilderment, and keeps repeating to himself, “But I was the best-liked.” His confusion in this conflict of values—why does what he was taught not work?—mounts up until it culminates in his suicide. At the grave one son continues to insist, “He had a good dream, to come out number one.” But the other son accurately sees the contradiction which such an upheaval of values leads to, “He never knew who he was.”
The second central belief in our modern age (other than individual success) has been the faith in individual reason.
This belief, ushered in at the Renaissance like the belief in the value of individual competitiveness which we have just been discussing, was magnificently fruitful for the philosophical quests of the enlightenment in the seventeenth century, and served as a noble charter for the advances in science and for movements toward universal education. In these first centuries of our period, individual reason also meant “universal reason”; it was a challenge to each intelligent person to discover the universal principles by which all men might live happily. But again a change became apparent in the nineteenth century. Psychologically, reason became separated from “emotion” and “will.” The splitting up of the personality was prepared by Descartes in his famous dichotomy between body and mind—which will dog our tracks throughout this book—but the full consequences of this dichotomy did not emerge till last century.
For the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century man, reason was supposed to give the answer to any problem, will power was supposed to put it into effect, and emotions—well, they generally got in the way, and could best be repressed. Lo and behold, we then find reason (now transformed into intellectualistic rationalization) used in the service of compartmentalizing the personality, with the resulting repressions and conflict between instinct and ego and superego which Freud so well described.
When Spinoza in the seventeenth century used the word reason, he meant an attitude toward life in which the mind united the emotions with the ethical goals and other aspects of the “whole man.” When people today use the term they almost always imply a splitting of the personality. They ask in one form or another: “Should I follow reason or give way to sensual passions and needs or be faithful to my ethical duty?”
The beliefs in individual competition and reason we have been discussing are the ones which in actuality have guided modern western development, and are not necessarily the ideal values. To be sure, the values accepted as ideal by most people have been those of the Hebrew-Christian tradition allied with ethical humanism, consisting of such precepts as love thy neighbor, serve the community, and so on. On the whole, these ideal values have been taught in schools and churches hand in hand with the emphasis on competition and individual reason.
Henrik Ibsen in literature realized what was happening, Paul Cézanne in art, and Sigmund Freud in the science of human nature. Each of these men proclaimed that we must find a new unity for our lives. Ibsen showed in his play A Doll’s House that if the husband simply goes off to business, keeping his work and his family in different compartments like a good nineteenth-century banker, and treats his wife as a doll, the house will collapse. Cézanne attacked the artificial and sentimental art of the nineteenth century and showed that art must deal with the honest realities of life, and that beauty has more to do with integrity than with prettiness. Freud pointed out that if people repress their emotions and try to act as if sex and anger did not exist, they end up neurotic.
And he worked out a new technique for bringing out the deeper, unconscious, “irrational” levels in personality which had been suppressed, thus helping the person to become a thinking-feeling-willing unity. So significant was the work of Ibsen, Cézanne and Freud that many of us used to believe that they were the prophets for our times. True, the contribution of each is probably the most important in their respective fields. But were they not in one respect the last great men of the old period rather than the first of the new? For they presupposed the values and goals of the past three centuries; important and enduring as their new techniques were, they coasted on the goals of their time. They lived before the age of emptiness.
It seems now, unfortunately, that the true prophets for the middle twentieth century were Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Franz Kafka. I say “unfortunately” because that means our task is that much more difficult. Each one of these men foresaw the destruction of values which would occur in our time, the loneliness, emptiness and anxiety which would engulf us in the twentieth century. Each saw that we cannot ride on the goals of the past.
We shall quote these three frequently in this book, not because they are intrinsically the wisest men in history, but because each foresaw with great power and insight the particular dilemmas which almost every intelligent person faces now. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, proclaimed that science in the late nineteenth century was becoming a factory, and he feared that man’s great advances in techniques without a parallel advance in ethics and self-understanding would lead to nihilism.
The Loss of the Sense of Self
Another root of our malady is our loss of the sense of the worth and dignity of the human being. Nietzsche predicted this when he pointed out that the individual was being swallowed up in the herd, and that we were living by a “slave-morality.” Marx also predicted it when he proclaimed that modern man was being “de-humanized,” and Kafka showed in his amazing stories how people literally can lose their identity as persons. But this loss of the sense of self did not occur overnight.
Those of us who lived in the 1920’s can recall the evidences of the growing tendency to think of the self in superficial and oversimplified terms. In those days “self-expression” was supposed to be simply doing whatever popped into one’s head, as though the self were synonymous with any random impulse, and as though one’s decisions were to be made on the basis of a whim which might be a product of indigestion from a hurried lunch just as often as of one’s philosophy of life. To “be yourself” was then an excuse for relaxing into the lowest common denominator of inclination. To “know one’s self” wasn’t thought to be especially difficult, and the problems of personality could be solved relatively easily by better “adjustment.”
The Experience of Becoming a Person
To undertake this “venture of becoming aware of ourselves,” and to discover the sources of inner strength and security which are the rewards of such a venture, let us start at the beginning by asking, What is this person, this sense of selfhood we seek? A few years ago a psychologist procured a baby chimpanzee the same age as his infant son. In order to do an experiment, such as is the wont of these men, he raised the baby chimp and baby human being in his household together. For the first few months they developed at very much the same speed, playing together and showing very little difference.
But after a dozen months or so, a change began to occur in the development of the little human baby, and from then on there was a great difference between him and the chimp. This is what we would expect. For there is very little difference between the human being and any mammal baby from the time of the original unity of the fetus in the womb of its mother, through the beginning of the beating of its own heart, then its ejection as an infant from the womb at birth, the commencing of its own breathing and the first protected months of life. But around the age of two, more or less, there appears in the human being the most radical and important emergence so far in evolution, namely his consciousness of himself.
Self-Contempt
Let us consider the latter objection first. To be sure, one ought not to think too highly of one’s self, and a courageous humility is the mark of the realistic and mature person. But thinking too highly of one’s self, in the sense of self-inflation and conceit, does not come from greater consciousness of one’s self or greater feelings of self-worth. In fact, it comes from just the opposite. Self-inflation and conceit are generally the external signs of inner emptiness and self-doubt; a show of pride is one of the most common covers for anxiety.
Pride was a chief characteristic of the famous roaring 1920’s, but we know now that this period was one of widespread, suppressed anxiety. The person who feels weak becomes a bully, the inferior person the braggart; a flexing of muscles, much talk, cockiness, an endeavor to brazen it out, are the symptoms of covert anxiety in a person or a group. Tremendous pride was exhibited in fascism, as everyone knows who has seen the pictures of the strutting Mussolini and psychopathic Hitler; but fascism is a development in people who are empty, anxious and despairing, and therefore seize on megalomaniac promises.
The less aware you are of how to drive a car, for example, or of the traffic conditions you are driving through, the more tense you are and the firmer hold you have to keep on yourself. But on the other hand the more experienced you are as a driver and the more conscious you are of the traffic problems and what to do in emergencies, the more you can relax at the wheel with a sense of power.You have the awareness that it is you who are doing the driving, you in control. Consciousness of self actually expands our control of our lives, and with that expanded power comes the capacity to let ourselves go. This is the truth behind the seeming paradox, that the more consciousness of one’s self one has, the more spontaneous and creative one can be at the same time. To be sure, the advice to forget the childish self, the infantile self, is good advice. But it rarely does any good.
Separate From The Body
The impersonal, separated attitude toward the body is shown also in the way most people, once they become physically ill, react to the sickness. They speak in the passive voice—“I got sick,” picturing their body as an object just as they would say “I got hit by a car.” Then they shrug their shoulders and regard their responsibility fulfilled if they go to bed and place themselves completely in the hands of the doctor and the new medical miracle drugs.
Thus they use scientific progress as a rationalization for passivity: they know how germs or virus or allergies attack the body, and they also know how penicillin or sulfa or some other drug cures them. The attitude toward disease is not that of the self-aware person who experiences his body as part of himself, but of the compartmentalized person who might express his passive attitude in a sentence like, “The pneumococcus made me sick, but penicillin made me well again.” Certainly it is only common sense to avail one’s self of all the help science can give, but that is no reason to surrender one’s own sovereignty over one’s body.
When one does surrender autonomy one opens oneself to psychosomatic ills of all sorts. Many disturbances of bodily function, beginning in such simple things as incorrect walking or faulty posture or breathing, are due to the fact that people have all their lives walked, to take only one simple illustration, as though they were machines, and have never experienced any of the feelings in their feet or legs or rest of the body. The correcting of the malfunction of one’s legs, for example, often requires that one learn again to feel what is happening when one walks. In overcoming psychosomatic ills or chronic diseases like tuberculosis, it is essential to learn to “listen to the body” in deciding when to work and when to rest.
Choosing Oneself
“Choosing One’s Self” Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained at a single bound; it must be achieved each day. As Goethe forcefully expresses the ultimate lesson learned by Faust: “Yes! to this thought I hold with firm persistence; The last result of wisdom stamps it true: He only earns his freedom and existence Who daily conquers them anew.” The basic step in achieving inward freedom is “choosing one’s self.”
This strange-sounding phrase of Kierkegaard’s means to affirm one’s responsibility for one’s self and one’s existence. It is the attitude which is opposite to blind momentum or routine existence; it is an attitude of aliveness and decisiveness; it means that one recognizes that he exists in his particular spot in the universe, and he accepts the responsibility for this existence. This is what Nietzsche meant by the “will to live”—not simply the instinct for self-preservation, but the will to accept the fact that one is one’s self, and to accept responsibility for fulfilling one’s own destiny, which in turn implies accepting the fact that one must make his basic choices himself.
We can see more clearly what choosing one’s self and one’s existence means by looking at the opposite—choosing not to exist, that is to commit suicide. The significance of suicide lies not in the fact that people actually kill themselves in any large numbers. It is indeed a very rare occurrence except among psychotics. But psychologically and spiritually the thought of suicide has a much wider meaning.
The Religious Person
But the attitude of “the divine right to be taken care of” is quite something else. It is one of the greatest blocks to the development of these persons toward maturity in therapy as well as in life in general. It is generally difficult for such people to see their demand to be taken care of as a problem to be analyzed and overcome, and they often react with hostility and a feeling of being “gypped” when their “right” is not honored. Of course they have been told, “God will take care of you,” from the early days when they sang the song in Sunday school to the present vulgarized form of the same idea in many movies. But on a deeper level, the demand to be taken care of—particularly since hostility arises so quickly when it is frustrated—is a function of something more profound. I believe it gets its dynamic from the fact that these persons have had to give up so much.
They have had to relinquish their power and their right to make moral judgments to their parents, and naturally the other half of the unwritten contract is that they then have a right to depend entirely on parental power and judgment, as a slave has a right to depend upon his master. So they are being gypped if the parent—or more likely the parental substitutes such as the therapist or God—does not extend them special care. They have been taught that happiness and success would follow their “being good,” the latter generally interpreted as being obedient. But being merely obedient, as we have shown above, undermines the development of an individual’s ethical awareness and inner strength.
By being obedient to external requirements over a long period of time, he loses his real powers of ethical, responsible choice. Strange as it sounds, then, the powers of these people to achieve goodness and the joy which goes with it are diminished. And since happiness is not the reward of virtue, as Spinoza remarked, but virtue itself, the person who surrenders his ethical autonomy has relinquished to the same degree his power to attain virtue and happiness. No wonder he feels resentful. We can see more concretely what these people have had to give up when we look at how the “obedience morality,” the emphasis on “being good by subordinating one’s self,” got its power in modern culture. It takes its modern form largely from patterns copied from the development of industrialism and capitalism in the last four centuries. Now the subordination of the person to mechanical uniformity, the arranging of one’s life to fit the requirements of work and parsimony, did bring financial and, as a result, social success during the major part of the modern period.
One could argue persuasively that salvation follows obedience, for if one was obedient to the demands of work in an industrial society, one tended to accumulate money. Anyone who has read of the business acumen of the early Quakers and Puritans, for example, knows how well these economic and moral attitudes worked together. The “Quaker dollar” was a concrete solace for the great resentment engendered in the middle classes because of the emotional privations they suffered in this obedience system. But times change, as we have indicated in earlier chapters, and in our day “early to bed and early to rise” may make a man healthy, but there is no guarantee that it will make him wealthy and wise.
Ben Franklin’s precepts, tithing and daily fidelity to routine work, no longer ensure success. The religious person, furthermore, particularly if he is a minister or otherwise engaged in professional religious work, has had to give up a realistic attitude toward money. He is not supposed to require that he be paid such and such a salary. In many religious circles it is considered “undignified” to talk about money, as if being paid, like toilet activities, is a necessary part of life but the ideal is to act as though it doesn’t really occur. Labor groups, adapting to the changing economic times of mass industry, have recognized that God does not send the pay check by raven’s mouth as food was sent to Elijah of old, and they have learned through their unions to bring pressure to bear to get adequate wages.
But people in religious professions cannot strike for higher wages. Instead the church is supposed to “take care of” the minister financially and otherwise; he is given discounts on the railroad and in department stores; tuition in seminaries is lower than in other graduate schools—all of which is not calculated to increase the minister’s self-respect or others’ respect for him in our particular society. The fact that the religious person is not supposed to take active steps to ensure his financial security is another evidence of the underlying assumption in our society that material security will somehow come automatically if one is “good,” an assumption closely connected with the belief that God will take care of you.
Thus it is easy to see why the person in our society who is taught to be good by subordinating himself, and only discovers sooner or later that he does not even get economic rewards for doing so, let alone happiness, should have so much resentment and anger. It is this buried resentment which gives the dynamic to the demand to be taken care of. It is as though the person were silently saying, “I was promised I would be taken care of if I was obedient: look how obedient I have been, so why am I not taken care of?”
The belief in “the divine right to be taken care of” often brings with it the feeling that one has a right to exercise power over others. That is to say, if one believes that persons should be under the power of others, he will not only submit himself to some more powerful person for the purpose of getting care, but he will feel it his “duty” to take care of—and to exercise power over—some person below him on the scale. This tendency is illustrated in its more sadistic form in the statement of one man, when questioned about his practice of controlling the younger man with whom he lived even to the extent of taking the latter’s pay check every Saturday and putting him on an allowance, “Am I not my brother’s keeper?”
We shall not endeavor to explain the reasons for the fact that dominating and submissive tendencies go hand in hand, and that masochism is always the reverse side of sadism. Erich Fromm has classically discussed these points in his book Escape from Freedom. We wish only to point out that the person who demands to be taken care of is generally endeavoring in a variety of subtle ways to get power over others at the same time. Goethe well expresses this psychological truth: . . . for each, incompetent to rule His own internal self, is all too fain to sway His neighbor’s will, even as his haughty mind inclines.
Purify Your Heart
Dr. Tillich has stated that “the principles which constitute the universe must be sought in man,” and the converse is true, that what is found in man’s experience is to some extent a reflection of what is true in the universe. This can be clearly illustrated in art. A picture is never beautiful if it is not honest, and to the extent that it is honest, that is, represents the immediate, deep and original perceptions and experience of the artist, it will have at least the beginnings of beauty.
This is why the art work of children, when it is an expression of their simple and honest feelings, is almost always beautiful: any line one makes as a free, spontaneous person will have in it the beginning of grace and rhythm. The harmony, balance and rhythm which are principles of the universe, present in the movement of stars as well as atoms, and underlying our concepts of beauty, are likewise present in the harmony of rhythm and balance of the body as well as other aspects of the self. But at the moment the child begins to copy, or to draw to get praise from adults, or to draw by rules, the lines become rigid, constricted, and the grace vanishes.
The truth in the “inner light” tradition in religious history is that one must always begin with himself. “No one has known God,” said Meister Eckhart, “who has not known himself—fly to the soul, the secret place of the Most High.” Relating this truth to Socrates, Kierkegaard writes, “In the Socratic view each individual is his own center, and the entire world centers in him, because his self-knowledge is a knowledge of God.” This is not the whole story of ethics and the good life, but certainly if we do not start there we will get no place.
The Courage to be Oneself
The courage to be one’s self is scarcely admired as the top virtue these days. One trouble is that many people still associate that kind of courage with the stuffy attitudes of the self-made men of the late nineteenth century, or with the somewhat ridiculous no matter how sincere “I-am-the-master-of-my-fate” theme in such a poem as “Invictus.” With what qualified favor many people today view standing on one’s own convictions is revealed in such phrases as “sticking one’s neck out.” The central suggestion in this defenseless posture is that any passer-by could swing at the exposed neck and cut off the head. Or people describe moving ahead in one’s beliefs as “going out on a limb.”
People lack courage because of their fear of being isolated, alone, or of being subjected to “social isolation,” that is, being laughed at, ridiculed or rejected. If one sinks back into the crowd, he does not risk these dangers. And this being isolated is no minor threat. Dr. Walter Cannon has shown in his study of “voodoo death,” that primitive people may be literally killed by being psychologically isolated from the community. There have been observed cases of natives who, when socially ostracized and treated by their tribes as though they did not exist, have actually withered away and died. William James, furthermore, has reminded us that the expression “to be cut dead” by social disapproval has much more truth than poetry in it. It is thus no figment of the neurotic imagination that people are deathly afraid of standing on their own convictions at the risk of being renounced by the group. What we lack in our day is an understanding of the friendly, warm, personal, original, constructive courage of a Socrates or a Spinoza.
To plan, dream, and imagine fine works is a pleasant occupation to be sure… But to produce, to bring to birth, to bring up the infant work with labor, to put it to bed full-fed with milk, to take it up again every morning with inexhaustible maternal love, to lick it clean, to dress it a hundred times in lovely garments that it tears up again and again; never to be discouraged by the convulsions of this mad life, and to make of it a living masterpiece that speaks to all eyes in sculpture, or to all minds in literature, to all memories in painting, to all hearts in music—that is the task of execution.
The hand must be ready at every moment to obey the mind. And the creative moments of the mind do not come to order. . . . And work is a weary struggle at once dreaded and loved by those fine and powerful natures who are often broken under the strain of it. . . . If the artist does not throw himself into his work like a soldier into the breach, unreflectingly; and if, in that crater, he does not dig like a miner buried under a fall of rock . . . the work will never be completed; it will perish in the studio, where production becomes impossible, and the artist looks on at the suicide of his own talent. . . . And it is for that reason that the same reward, the same triumph, the same laurels, are accorded to great poets as to great generals.* We now know through psychoanalytic studies, as Balzac did not, that one of the reasons creative activity takes so much courage is that to create stands for becoming free from the ties to the infantile past, breaking the old in order that the new can be born. For creating external works, in art, business or what not, and creating one’s self—that is, developing one’s capacities, becoming freer and more responsible—are two aspects of the same process. Every act of genuine creativity means achieving a higher level of self-awareness and personal freedom, and that, as we have seen in the Promethean and Adam myths, may involve considerable inner conflict.
Thus vanity and narcissism are the enemies of courage. We define vanity and narcissism as the compulsive need to be praised, to be liked: for this people give up their courage. The vain and narcissistic person seems on the surface to overprotect himself, not to take any risks and in other ways to act as a coward because he thinks too highly of himself. Actually, however, just the opposite is the case. He has to preserve himself as a commodity by which he can buy the praise and favor he needs, precisely because without mother’s or father’s praise he would feel himself to be worthless. Courage arises from one’s sense of dignity and self-esteem; and one is uncourageous because he thinks too poorly of himself.
Vanity and narcissism—the compulsive needs to be admired and praised—undermine one’s courage, for one then fights on someone else’s conviction rather than one’s own. In the Japanese movie Rashomon, the husband and robber fight with complete abandon when they themselves have chosen to fight. But in another scene, when the wife screams taunts at them, and they fight because of their compulsion to live up to her requirement of their masculine prowess, they fight with only half their strength: they strike the same blows, but it is as though an invisible rope held back their arms. When one acts to gain someone else’s praise, furthermore, the act itself is a living reminder of the feeling of weakness and worthlessness: otherwise there would be no need to prostitute one’s attitudes. This often leads to the “cowardly” feeling which is the most bitter humiliation of all—the humiliation of having co-operated knowingly in one’s own vanquishment. It is not so bad to be defeated because the enemy is stronger, or even to be defeated because one didn’t fight; but to know one was a coward because one chose to sell out his strength to get along with the victor—this betrayal of one’s self is the bitterest pill of all.
There are also specific reasons in our culture why acting to please others undermines courage. For such acting, at least for men, often means playing the role of one who is unassertive, unaggressive, “gentlemanly,” and how can one develop power, including sexual potency, when he is supposed to be unassertive? With women, too, these ways of gaining admiration militate against the development of their indigenous potentialities, for their potentialities are never exercised or even brought into the picture. The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one’s own convictions—not obstinately or defiantly (these are expressions of defensiveness not courage) nor as a gesture of retaliation, but simply because these are what one believes.
Man Does Not Live By The Clock Alone
We have seen that one of the unique characteristics of man is that he can stand outside his present time and imagine himself ahead in the future or back in the past. A general, in planning a battle next week or next month, anticipates in fantasy how the enemy will react if attacked here or what will happen when the artillery opens up there; and thus he can prepare his army as nearly as possible for every danger by going through the battle in imagination days or weeks before it occurs. Or a speaker in preparing an important address can—and if he is sensible he does—call to mind other times when he has given a similar speech. He reviews how the audience reacted, what parts of the address were successful and which were not, what attitude on his part was most effective and so on. By re-enacting the event in imagination, he learns from the past how better to meet the present.
This power to “look before and after” is part of man’s ability to be conscious of himself. Plants and animals live by quantitative time: an hour, a week or a year past, and the tree has another ring on its trunk. But time is a quite different thing for human beings; man is the time-surmounting mammal. In his works on semantics, Alfred Korzybski has insistently made the point that the characteristic which distinguishes man from all other living things is his time-binding capacity. By that, says Korzybski, “I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present. . . . I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity.”*
Psychologically and spiritually, man does not live by the clock alone. His time, rather, depends on the significance of the event. Yesterday, let us say, a young man spent an hour traveling on the subway each way to his work, eight hours on his relatively uninteresting job, ten minutes after work talking to a girl he has recently fallen in love with and dreams of marrying, and two hours in the evening at an adult education class. Today he remembers nothing of the two hours on the subway—it was an entirely empty experience, and he, as is the practice of many people, had closed his eyes and tried to sleep, that is to suspend time until the trip was over. The eight hours on the job made only a little impression on him; of the evening class he can recall a little more. But the ten minutes with the girl occupies him most of all. He had four dreams that night—one about his class, and three about the girl. That is to say, the ten minutes with the girl takes up more “room-space” than twenty hours in the rest of the day. Psychological time is not the sheer passage of time as such, but the meaning of the experience, that is, what is significant for the person’s hopes, anxiety, growth.
Or take a thirty-year-old adult’s memories of his childhood. During the year when he was five, thousands of events happened to him. But now at thirty he can recall only three or four—the day when he went to play with his friend and the friend ran off with an older child, or the instant that morning when he saw the new tricycle under the Christmas tree, or the night his father came home drunk and struck his mother, or the afternoon his dog got lost. This is all he can recall but, interestingly enough, he remembers this handful of events which occurred twenty-five years ago more vividly than ninety-nine per cent of the events that occurred just yesterday. Memory is not just the imprint of the past time upon us; it is the keeper of what is meaningful for our deepest hopes and fears. As such, memory is another evidence that we have a flexible and creative relation to time, the guiding principle being not the clock but the qualitative significance of our experiences.
This does not mean that quantitative time can be ignored: we have simply pointed out that we do not live by such time alone. Man is always part-and-parcel of the natural world, involved in nature at every point; we will rarely live over seventy or eighty years no matter what we think about it. We get old, or we get tired if we work too long at a stretch, and we cannot escape the necessity of being realistic about the clock and calendar. Man dies like every other form of life. But he is the animal who knows it and can foresee his death. By being aware of time, he can control and use it in certain ways.
The more a person is able to direct his life consciously, the more he can use time for constructive benefits. The more, however, that he is conformist, unfree, undifferentiated, the more, that is, he works not by choice but by compulsion, the more he is then the object of quantitative time. He is the servant of the time clock or whistle; he teaches such and such number of classes per week or punches so many rivets per hour, he feels bad or good depending on whether it is Monday and the beginning of a work week or Friday and the end; he gauges his rewards or lack of them on the scale of how much time he puts in. The more conformist and unfree he is, the more time is the master. He “serves time,” as the amazingly accurate expression has it for being in jail. The less alive a person is—“alive” here defined as having conscious direction of his life—the more is time for him the time of the clock. The more alive he is, the more he lives by qualitative time.
“A man who lives intensely really lives,” as E. E. Cummings says, “but a man who lives to be 120 doesn’t necessarily live at all. You say ‘I lived a whole lifetime in a moment’—a cliché that’s true, and, vice versa, one takes a long train ride and it’s a stinking bore. You read detective stories to kill time. If time were any good why kill it?”
I think it was C. G. Jung who said, accurately enough, that a person is afraid of growing old to the extent that he is not really living now. Hence it follows that the best way to meet the anxiety about growing old is to make sure one at the moment is fully alive.
But, even more significantly, people are afraid of time because, like being alone, it raises the specter of emptiness, of the frightening “void.” On the everyday level this is shown in the fear of boredom. Man, as Erich Fromm has said, “is the only animal who can be bored”—and in that short sentence lies great import. Boredom is the “occupational disease” of being human. If a man’s awareness of the passage of time tells him only that the day comes and goes and winter follows autumn and that nothing is happening in his life except hour succeeding hour, he must desensitize himself or else suffer painful boredom and emptiness. It is interesting that when we are bored, we tend to go to sleep—that is, to blot out consciousness, and become as nearly “extinct” as possible.
In The Light of Eternity
On the superficial level there are assets or debits to living in any period. On the more profound level, each individual must come to his own consciousness of himself, and he does this on a level which transcends the particular age he lives in. The same holds true for one’s chronological age. The important issue is not whether a person is twenty or forty or sixty: it rather is whether he fulfills his own capacity of self-conscious choice at his particular level of development. This is why a healthy child at eight—as everyone has observed—can be more of a person than a neurotic adult of thirty.
The child is not more mature in a chronological sense, nor can he do as much as the adult, nor take care of himself as well, but he is more mature when we judge maturity by honesty of emotion, originality, and capacity to make choices on matters adequate to his stage of development. The statement of the person of twenty who says, “I will begin to live when I am thirty-five” is as falsely based as the one who, at forty or fifty, laments, “I cannot live because I have lost my youth.” Interestingly enough, one generally finds on closer inspection that this is the same person, that the one who makes that lament at fifty was postponing living also at twenty—which demonstrates our point even more incisively.
To him who had climbed the tower beyond time, consciously….The task and possibility of the human being is to move from his original situation as an unthinking and unfree part of the mass, whether this mass is his actual early existence as a foetus or his being symbolically a part of the mass in a conformist, automaton society—to move from the womb, that is, through the incestuous circle, which is but one step removed from the womb, through the experience of the birth of self-awareness, the crises of growth, the struggles, choices and advances from the familiar to the unfamiliar, to ever-widening consciousness of himself and thus ever-widening freedom and responsibility, to higher levels of differentiation in which he progressively integrates himself with others in freely chosen love and creative work.
Each step in this journey means that he lives less as a servant of automatic time and more as one who transcends time, that is, one who lives by meaning which he chooses. Thus the person who can die courageously at thirty—who has attained a degree of freedom and differentiation that he can face courageously the necessity of giving up his life—is more mature than the person who on his deathbed at eighty cringes and begs still to be shielded from reality.
The practical implication is that one’s goal is to live each moment with freedom, honesty and responsibility. One is then in each moment fulfilling so far as he can his own nature and his evolutionary task. In this way one experiences the joy and gratification that accompany fulfilling one’s own nature. Whether the young instructor eventually completes his book or not is a secondary question: the primary issue is whether he, or anyone else, writes and thinks in the given sentence or paragraph what he believes will “gain the praise of another,” or what he himself believes is true and honest according to his lights at the moment.
The young husband, to be sure, cannot be certain of his relation with his wife five years hence: but in the best of historical periods, could one ever have been certain that he would live out the week or month? Does not the uncertainty of our time teach us the most important lesson of all—that the ultimate criteria are the honesty, integrity, courage and love of a given moment of relatedness? If we do not have that, we are not building for the future anyway; if we do have it, we can trust the future to itself.
The qualities of freedom, responsibility, courage, love and inner integrity are ideal qualities, never perfectly realized by anyone, but they are the psychological goals which give meaning to our movement toward integration. When Socrates was describing the ideal way of life and the ideal society, Glaucon countered: “Socrates, I do not believe that there is such a City of God anywhere on earth.” Socrates answered, “Whether such a city exists in heaven or ever will exist on earth, the wise man will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any other, and in so looking upon it, will set his own house in order.”