Ernest Becker
The Birth and Death of Meaning
(1970)
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Chapter Twelve
WHAT WOULD A SCIENCE
OF MAN THEN BE?The Merger of Social, Psychological, and
Political Theory
"The real possibility is one which can materialize, considering the
total structure of forces interacting in an individual or in a society.
The real possibility is the opposite of the fictitious one which
corresponds to the wishes and desires of man but which, given the
existing circumstances, can never be realized."
Erich Fromm
(1964, p. 140)
One thing that right away lightens the burden of our inquiry into the real is that all of human evolution and history has been a search for the true interrelationships of things; we have been probing reality for hundreds of thousands of years. When man found that certain ways of doing things worked to bring him satisfaction and survival, these ways became true and right; ways that didn't work became false and wrong. And so moral codes grew up around the interrelationships of things, theories of good and evil that tried to separate the real from the illusory.
The curious thing about this long search for reality, as
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anthropologists have long known, is that a large part of it was accidental. Primitive man did not know the interrelationships of things in many areas of his life, and he thought these interrelationships were primarily invisible and spiritual. As a result, when something important did not work, he looked for any clues he could get, any kind of chance hints and associations. ...
... The second curious thing about accidental causal explanations is that they did not vanish from the earth with prehistoric evolution, but remained an intimate part of human beliefs all through human history, right up to yesterday, so to speak. The Athenian civilization that we so much admire for its noble reason began to expire in the blood of its soldiers on the beaches of Sicily, while its admirals cut open chickens to try to get a good entrail reading for a propitious time of departure. ...
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...
...these are basic lessons in history... , and they would hardly be worth mentioning except for one striking thing: that the burden of illusion, of folkloric conscience, still weighs just as heavily over society... ...democracy is in as much or more trouble today as it was when it first emerged in modern times: the firm scientific platform on which it was to stand was not placed under it, sober reason could not be worked into its fabric, into its laws and social life. In order even to begin to do this you had to find out something that mankind had up until the twentieth century not known: you had to find out scientifically what caused people not to be able to see the true interrelationships of things. ...
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...
The Task of Social Science
As we have been able to see from our whole discussion the thing that prevents whole societies from seeing reality is the fictional nature of their hero-system. ... The whole thrust of the rich tradition in sociology, called the "sociology of knowledge," is the analysis of the social determinants of illusion. ...Franklin Giddings... set the whole task of American sociology in no uncertain terms: To find out how much restraint, liberty, conformity, and variation are conducive to the general well-being of a society. In other words, the continuing reassessments a society has to make of its own basic institutions in order to flourish.
...
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...we can already suspect that the standard for this assessment is not going to be delivered into our hands like a simple yardstick. ... While we can agree that the task of social science is nothing less than the uncovering of social illusion, we must also right away admit that we understand that man can never securely know what absolute reality is. ...we have to rephrase our problem to put it in the more pragmatic terms proper to our talents. We cannot ask in any ultimate sense, What is Real? but we can ask experientially, What is False? —what is illusory, what prevents the health, the coping with new problems, the life and survival of a given society? What are its real possibilities within the web of fictions in which it is suspended? ...
The Task of Psychology
...
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... Fromm has taken as his life-work the task of merging the sociological and the psychological approaches to human illusion and defeat, and he very early saw with Reich that this merger is largely summed up as one of Marx (sociology) and Freud (psychology). What has to be done in such a merger is, essentially, to show how social fictions and personal fictions intimately reinforce and mutually influence one another, how certain types of social structure and social ideologies create certain types of people who perceive the world in ways that sustain and reinforce those ideologies, and who in turn pass them on to their children. ...
... For Fromm there are three basic sources of human regression, or blindness, slavery, stupidity, and fear:
1. What he calls the "pre-Oedipus incestuous tie" with the mother. ... Each of us cuts this psychological umbilical cord to varying degrees...
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... Fromm's point is that at the extreme, many people never overcome the easy merger with a source of protection and power, and this gives rise to a genuine pathology of perception. The person mistrusts himself, his judgment and decisions; he fears initiating action, standing alone; he has a sense of always being less than those around him, of needing the strong hand of the trusted leader on his shoulder to point him at what to do, to steady him, to give his life the mandate that it needs. ...
...
2. A second crippler of reality-perception is the phenomenon of narcissism which we mentioned earlier as the will
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to power. In its benign form it is a healthy self-confidence and urge to heroism, but in its destructive and exaggerated forms it becomes an invertedness upon oneself, an unresponsiveness to the world, an identification with one's little group, his race, class, nation, the powers of authority—against all outsiders, all those who would threaten to weaken that narcissistic nourishment, even if they weaken it with goodness and with love. ...
Some have taken to offering almost exactly this as a definition of populism. In a community's demand for self-determination they can see only invertedness upon oneself, an unresponsiveness to the world , although so much of today's "populism" is quite transparently (to "both sides") a "response" precisely to a sudden and unwished-for encounter with the entire "world." So, uh...stay safe out there kids.
3. Finally there is the anal-sadistic character... , who in his exaggerated form Fromm calls the "necrophile"...
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... He loves order, routine, mechanical things, and he fears openness, spontaneity and living things. So he prefers things to persons, order over freedom, and ultimately, death over life. The pathology of his perception is to see beauty in that which is frozen and not fluid, that which is possessed and controlled rather than that which is free and surprising,...
If we study the marvelous distillation of these three "syndromes of human decay" carefully, openly and honestly, I don't see how we can fail to agree... how much and how intimately the findings of a mature psychology support the ideal of democratic man and reveal to him the causes of his failure. If he is to be a self-reliant perceiver of the interrelationships of things, he has to shake himself loose from precisely those influences which are found in the dead weight of the Oedipus, especially in its extreme forms. ...easy adaptability to new choices and challenges. ...is the first resource that democratic man needs. The Oedipus complex, understood simply, is the gulf that exists between one's early training, one's basic perceptions, one's primary sense of self, and the choices, opportunities, experiences and challenges of the adult world. If the Oedipus is heavy this gulf can be great enough to completely cripple the person's ability to live in a changing adult world. But democracy needs adults more than anything, especially adults who bring something new to the perception of the world, cut through accustomed categories, break down rigidities. We need open, free, and adaptable people precisely because we need unique perceptions of the real, new insights into it so as to disclose more of it. In a democracy the citizens are the artists who open up new reals. The genius of the
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theoreticians of democracy is that they understood this, that we must have as many different individuals as possible so as to have as varied a view of reality as possible , for only in this way can we get a rich approximation of it. Twisted perspectives then get corrected easily because each person serves as part of a corrective on the others. Totalitarianism is a form of government that inevitably loses in the longer run because it represents the view of one person on reality ,... When the pressure of reality becomes too much, all go down together. ...
The Great Contemporary Debate on Human Nature
At this point we might ask why, if psychology and democratic theory have in our time so beautifully been able to complement each other,... —why has this merger not been hailed and called to everyone's attention? The reason is already obvious from many of the things we have discussed in this book,... ...one of the most mature findings of modern psychology accuses the parents and society of being the "perverters" of the child—unwitting, well-intentioned, even loving perverters, which is all the more awful to admit. People don't want to admit that one large source of evil lies in what society has taught them,... Much easier is to seek the source of evil, disharmony, tension, failure, in persons; especially to seek it in the heredity of persons, even in the species. And so we have the great popularity in our time of those who see evil as inborn in man...
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... This has given rise to a great debate between two approaches to man: on the one hand, those who see evil in society, and who call the other side cynics, opportunists, and antihumanists; and on the other, those who see the evil in man, in evolution, and who call the other side romantics, wishful dreamers. Imagine, they say, claiming that the child is born neutral and potentially good, when all around us we see the most horrendous forms of evil:...
The curious thing about this bitter argument in the contemporary theory of human nature, is that it never need have taken place. ...
...responsible research has in our time disposed of the idea that the child brings into the world with him a destructive aggressive drive. Yet, the problem remains of how to explain the real aggression that we see
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all around us? On the most elemental level we get a picture like this: a human organism in its skin that has to get along in the world, and that does this by taking what it needs from the environment. It uses energetic initiative, manipulates, incorporates, destroys or banishes objects, and expresses anger in response to frustrations; these are all part of an organism's way of surviving whether it has an innate destructive drive or not. ... Some quiet peoples who seek minimum interference by the organism with the world around it avoid eating meat, or killing insects—... But even Jains crunch leaves and mash fragile plant stalks—which are surely alive and (who knows?) might even feel pain,...
The point is that most human self-affirmation is in the service of the well-being of the organism, and so it is as natural as the feeding of a lion, and not an extra, uncontrolled viciousness that nature has unleashed on the world in primate form. ... Erich Fromm, in his important discussion of aggression
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(1964), expresses similar views. He understands aggression on a whole continuum, with life-enhancing aggression in the service of the organism on one end, and life-destroying forms of aggression in the service of no one, on the other end. ... Anger for most people is an alternative to fading away. Researchers have long understood that aggression was basically a reaction to frustration of the organism (Dollard, et al., 1939), and this frustration can take many forms. ...
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The aggression that we see in children is sometimes, too, a matter of mere clumsiness: they simply don't know how to take hold of a fragile thing, and they don't yet know their own strength. ... People generally read viciousness into these kinds of aggressions since they see only the violent end result, but the components in the process are sheer ineptitude mixed with the most excruciatingly good intentions. ...
...
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...
Another category of aggression that is more subtle is what I would call "aggression over esthetic upset." ... If we hear words and ideas that clash with what we expect to hear, want to hear, and need to hear, we often find it intolerable and lash out violently. ... We are balanced on a very finely intermeshed web of thoughts and images that sustain our self-esteem;... It is thus a direct and vital blow to our whole balance in the world when wrong words, tones, and images are thrown in the scale of meaning. Say,... when we are trying to give the image of a dedicated and concerned thinker emerging from his study to greet a visitor, and our spouse says (however well-intentioned), "Did you take another nap?" ...the environment is not reflecting the proper sense of ourself in a world of meaning, and this makes us feel weak and undermined. ...
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Part of the problem, too, is the simple continual presence of another organism on our horizon, an organism with its own needs, noises, foibles and schedules: its very being is a demand on us, its proximity a limitation of us; it interferes with and casts a shadow on the primacy of our heroism. ... I think here of how the great Tolstoy toward the close of his life felt he had to flee his wife and lifelong companion and helper. Perhaps it has something to do with the "social space and distancing," that the ethologists study, but for an animal who lives in an esthetics of heroism in addition to a mere physical space, it would have to draw more on symbolic frictions . Certainly it has something to do with narcissism and the feeling that one's own life is the measure of human value; one chafes at impediments to his will to glory. ...it is man's tragedy that he has to live the paradoxes of his nature, as Paul saw: that he can't help doing what he knows he should not do, like lashing out at another human being simply for taking up space, or for saying something innocent in a relaxed moment. ...
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...
Finally, among these benign forms of self-preservation we would want to note "aggression as a reaction to someone else's weakness." One of the things that most people take with them out of their early experience is a dependency on others for their sense of self, a rooting in the powers of someone else;... This power-dependency in most people causes them to rely on others especially to cope with unusual or demanding situations. And if the other person shows himself to be weak, threatened, or otherwise insecure, then the person who depended on him feels threatened too. ...
A reverse variation of this same dynamics is when a person feels a surge of anger and extreme annoyance at another who is dependent on him. ...
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... Since most of us do not understand why we would feel a surge of hostility at the approach of a helpless friend in need of avowing something to us, we chalk it up to the viciousness of human nature and feel self-reproach.
So far we have been talking about everyday aggressions, self-assertive behaviors that are in the interests of the organism... But now let us look at the darker side of the picture, at what Fromm calls "compensatory aggressions"... These are a reaction to severe deprivations of long standing: to a severe cheating of life-experience, to a lack of basic fulfillment;... For Fromm they result typically in the necrophilic character,...
The message of this chilling transformation of a psychic cripple is at the same time the dénouement of our brief sketch of the spectrum of aggression. The necrophile takes revenge on life for what it did to him, he allies with death over life. And so we are led to understand that the most terrible form of life-negation is not something that man brings into the world from his heredity, from evolution. It is the result of the
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life experiences of his organism. ... It is impossible to be exact about these things... But existentially we can recapture a feeling for that inner world and psychoanalytically we can sketch an impressionistic landscape of the forces that influence it. It would go something like this: that you cripple the person when you continually repress his spontaneity, his natural appetite, his joy in self-discovery and in the unfolding of his world; when you continually violate his self-protection by imposing your manipulations and your standards; when you make his own body a territory forbidden for him to take pleasure in, to feel at home in. ... Is he routinely punished for dirtying a tablecloth, for spilling on the floor, for losing a sock: the message he gets is that he is less valuable than these things, that things are truer than subjectivity, that order takes priority over spontaneity, that outsides and surfaces are more vital than insides and depths. ...
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...
Human Nature as an Ideal
And so we draw the second large circle on our discussion: there is no inherent evil in man that would subvert the ideal of democracy. The phenomenon of aggression in man is not a phylogenetic mystery that has to be approached by studying baboons in their natural habitat; it is as transparent as the problem of neurosis that we discussed in its several aspects. And when you take these aspects one by one, or together, you can see that neurosis for man is unavoidable. Usually the child's action has been too much blocked, and he is forced to give up large parts of himself to the control of others,... Or, at the other pole, the child's action has been made too easy for him, he was not frustrated enough. In which case he does not have enough independence, he is "spoiled," deprived of self-governance. ...
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...even with the wisest, best-intentioned trainers in the world, the child still cannot win free self-governance,... And the reason is that he must delude himself about the world in order to act with equanimity in it:... Finally, the basic condition of his limitations, his de-centering, his neurosis, is that he has no awareness of all this: ..., of what he gave up to become what he is, to get the kind of equanimity he needed. ... As Kierkegaard already taught us, part of man's drivenness is to flirt with his very anxieties: today we are beginning to pay attention to this phenomenon under the label of "stress-seeking" behavior. ...one tugs with the object of his anxieties to test the extent of his ability to be free of it, to taste the thrill of freedom: but most of the time ever just not quite. In the social world one continually pushes against death in sport-car driving, mountain climbing, stock speculation, gambling. but always in a more-or-less controlled way, so as not to give in completely to the sheer accidentality and callousness of life, but to savor the thrill of skirting it. Probably at its most creative this dialogue with one's basic anxieties lies in art, science, and discovery, where one pushes, in a controlled way, into the realm of the wondrous, the mysterious;... overwhelming.
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...we now have to add to this thumbnail view of neurosis the evil—or at least the unethical, uncritical, and driven—action that ordinarily goes with it. How can we expect an organism that has had long experience of unfair frustration to be large, mellow, confident and generous? How could it be ethical since by ethical action we mean that action which is unique, responsible, daring and unpopular,... ...the weak and deprived organism is the one who needs the support and nourishment of the world more than any other, which is why he is continually trying to manipulate it and coerce and control others. So too, the "spoiled" organism who has not been able to develop the sense of independence in a self-contained body, who cannot let others be. Ethical action needs strength and self-control, the sense of plenitude and power that can only come with a secure seating in a rich and roundly experienced body. This basic comfort in one's own fullness makes it natural to be generous to the pleasure of others,... ...it makes security routine, and so one is not always on his guard against strange and unexpected performances by others. Basic respect for persons and for their uniqueness can come only from strength and self-governance and not from weakness and dependency.
We could raise and educate more citizens who perceive the world with a minimum of bottled-up frustration, distortion, dependency and fear. The formula is the easiest of all theoretically, although it is hard enough in practice. Let the child learn by doing, by the development of his own strengths, perceptions, capacities; let him experiment on his own, learn the confidence that comes with repeated triumph over frustrations and problems. This makes him flexible about the external
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world , not easily put off by it,... He will tend to see things as they present themselves on their terms and not as he wishes them to be or fears that they might be . This is crucial for the problem of democracy because only self-reliant people see their leaders as they are, and not as projections of their own fond hopes or foolish fears; they need others less for support, and so do not automatically see gray temples as fatherly wisdom...
The phenomenon of aggression in man is not a phylogenetic mystery that has to be approached by studying baboons in their natural habitat;...
Can we hold out the same hope regarding all scientific studies of the "grey temples" variety? "The phenomenon of voting for the squarest jaw or mating with the richest man-ape is not a phylogenetic mystery..." It would indeed be great if we could heap all of that baggage onto "society's" back, if all we needed to do was to make people feel more "secure." But indeed,
How can we expect an organism that has had long experience of unfair frustration to be large, mellow, confident and generous?
If "symbolic" self-expansion inherently spirals into unboundedness, i.e. if our eyes are inherently bigger than our stomachs, then we can only be frustrated and insecure, and we will always work "evil."
When all is said and done there is only one definition of power that has any authentic meaning for man. We have seen all through these pages that man is the animal in evolution who lives a series of paradoxes on which his distinctive humanity is based. ... For an animal with such fate, what would his distinctive strength be? It would have to be the ability to support contradictions, ambiguities, since his
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own distinctive nature is based on them and is rife with them. Power for man, as the genius of Hegel saw, is the ability to support contradictions, nothing less. ... We think we see power in the people with sure beliefs, unshakable convictions, smug self-confidence. Yet these are psychological weaknesses on a planet which is fluid and full of surprises. We think we see power in the ability to dominate and coerce others. Yet history has taught us that such power inevitably makes a slave of and destroys the manipulator whether it be a man or a nation. We think we see power in numbers, in the deafening chorus of mass enthusiasms and the solid wall of shared opinions. Yet history daily teaches us that nature has no respect for even unanimous misperception of reality, and she has the coldest equanimity for the enthusiasms that carry whole populations into rapture. ...
Such power for man must be, of course, an ideal, and an unattainable one—yet the whole sense of a human life is a struggle in that direction. Human nature is, in a word, an ideal. This is what makes the argument between the "romantics" and the "cynics" or "realists" so difficult and so sticky: it can never really be settled on empirical grounds alone: it all depends what you want to build toward and can achieve. And this is what gives the "cynics'" case such weight: that no matter what man tries to do he is still saddled with his body, with all the needs that it has for self-affirmation, protection, satisfaction. ... Can we imagine any kind of quietude and balance between the urge to cosmic heroism and the dribbling, pink-orificed body of a primate life? We need the paintings of a Hieronymus Bosch to keep our idealism in
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corporeal perspective, which is why the theological idea of "The Fall" still serves to describe the human condition and its limitations. ...even idealists must be realists about what human nature might achieve in the conditions of organismic life on this planet; but my conclusion is that we can't rest content with this. We are after all striving organisms who must follow out the directives of our aspirations. And one of our central, historical and human aspirations is to help bring to birth a better world by pursuing the ideal of democracy; the empirical data of a mature psychology tell us that this pursuit is logical.
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Chapter Thirteen
RELIGION: THE QUEST FOR
THE IDEAL HEROISM
"Man is not free to choose whether or not he wants to develop [an
idea of the absolutely real] . . . Man, necessarily and always,
consciously or unconsciously, has such an idea, such a feeling acquired
by himself or inherited from tradition. All he can choose for himself
is a good and reasonable or a poor and unreasonable idea of the
absolute . . . Man can, of course, artificially exclude a clear
consciousness of this realm by adhering to the sensory shell of the
world . . . Even without being quite aware of it, man can fill this
sphere of absolute being and of highest good with a finite content
and good which, in life, he treats 'as if' it were absolute. Money,
country, a loved one can be so treated. This is fetishism and idol
worship. If man is to transcend this spiritual position, he must learn
two things. First, through self-analysis, he must become conscious
of the 'idol' which, for him, has replaced absolute being and good.
In the second place, he must smash this idol, i.e., put the overly loved
object back into its relative position in the finite world."
Max Scheler
(1958, pp. 2-3)
One of the strange new characteristics of our time is that it is logical, too, to talk seriously about religion between the covers of a scientific book. In fact, we can't avoid it because we have just seen that the heart of a science of man in society would be half empirical and half ideal-and this is
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precisely the point at which it merges logically with religion. ...there was a great weakness in Giddings' view, and that was that he tended to want to make an assessment of a hero-system from within its own premises. As he put it, what it costs a society to produce the kind of person that it deems adequate, its idea of a normal, desirable type. Right away we see the fallacy. If science is half empirical and half ideal, the cultural ideas of what is normal must also stand under criticism. ...
... As the noted sociologist Peter Berger reminded us, religion and social science meet in their judgment of the social fictions. The scientific analysis of the social structure and psychology of a society would tell us why it is strangling itself with the best of intentions. The religious critique would join in to tell us why a society was not realizing its fuller humanity. The astonishing thing about mankind's religious geniuses is that about two-thousand years ago they had already understood the problem, and several of them emerged at approximately the same time, at various places in the world, to make the same general critique. ...
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... Again and again the prophets of the Old Testament had to emerge and remind the people that they were re-fetishizing, that they were debasing themselves and had "to turn" their gaze away and back to higher realities. Finally Christ, the last of the great Biblical prophets, made the strongest appeal to turn away from the mad inversion on the fictions of everyday life: the preoccupations of the Gentiles about what to eat, what to wear, how to succeed in society, preoccupations that had seemed to utterly debase them. ...
The religious assessment of madness is remarkably like the psychological one. The universal geniuses began a critique of narcissism, of loyalty to the loved ones, the family, the tribe, the nation, to the detriment of the stranger, the fellow-man wherever he came from, the whole of humanity. ... They hated the tyrant, the power-leader, the one who tried to stamp all humanity out of a mold and turn human beings into manipulated objects... ...; by saying that each individual had a divine soul they meant that he was not to be reduced to earthly measures, which is what men of power have almost always tried to do to their human chattel.
Most of all, to say that each person was a sacred center meant that he was a pure perceiver , that his own, unique perceptions of reality and his relationship to it was not to be
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violated, not to be averaged into the statistics of masses . ... It was a breath-taking and ancient ideal that existed in Oriental religions like Zen, and that in the West was introduced into modern times by the great Boehme, the Reformation spiritualists, the German Idealist philosophers, and recently brought up to date by the illustrious Paul Tillich. In their view, anything less than the emergence of New Beings in the world spells the stagnation of mankind. We can see how much this ideal is in harmony not only with the ideal of modern psychology of personality, but also with the theory of democracy ...
We might say that very early in human history religious geniuses already saw what was at stake in the problem of evolution, just as the sciences are now seeing empirically what is at stake,... The first great break-through in human evolution... was the development of language that gave man a precise identity, a consciousness of himself. ... None of the other great "revolutions" that we are familiar with—the agricultural, the scientific, the industrial, the political ones of our time—brought with them a change in structure. Yet, it was already apparent to religious geniuses a few thousand years ago that a change in the basic structure of man was needed ; and it has become scientifically clear in modern times what this second structural change would have to be.
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... The great promise of symbolic modes was that they would infinitely extend the range of this animal's action and perception, ... But the fact that the symbolic modes were built into an animal with man's peculiar weaknesses gave rise to a paradox: that instead of remaining free and broadly adaptive, the new symbolic animal immediately became "symbolically re-instinctivized" almost as solidly as the other animals were physio-chemically instinctivized. ... The anxiety-prone higher primate overcame animal instincts only to fall slave to the symbol-reflexes of his trainers and his social group. He lives out the answers to the six common human problems as reflexively and uncritically, for the most part, as a cat tenses to pounce on a mouse.
The great philosopher Henri Bergson wrote that the continuation of evolution was accomplished in the geniuses who broke out of the automatic cultural patterns of perception and renewed the life surge in a forward direction. The challenge of the modern theory of democracy is that more people than just the geniuses or gifted leaders will have to free themselves from cultural constraint in order for sufficient new energies to emerge from nature. ...
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...
The great contribution of modern psychology is that it gave these various stirrings toward the broadening of freedom an adversary, the Oedipus, and it also thereby pinpointed the problem of human evil in microcosm. A large part of the evil that man unleashes on himself and his world stems not from a wickedness in his heart, but from the way he was conditioned to see the world and to seek satisfaction in it. ... He is part of an objectified structure, an ant doing his small part reflexively in a huge anthill of delegated power and authority. He follows orders, keeps his nose clean, and gets whatever satisfactions his character structure has equipped him to seek. And so the best and most "natural" intentions work the great historical evil that we have seen in our time. Today we realize that these intentions are a scientific-religious-political-evolutionary problem. ...
Levels of Power and Meaning
It seems to me that we have, then, evolutionarily and historically, a common problem for men of good will in all fields to work on: in their own lives if they so choose, and in the
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social and political sphere. Basically,... it is a problem of the identification of idols. To what powers has a man given himself in order to solve the paradoxes of his life? On what kind of objective structure has he strung out his meanings and fenced off his own free energies? ...he lives his version of the real without knowing it, by giving his whole uncritical allegiance to some kind of model of power. So long as he does this he is truly a slave, and Scheler's point is that not only is he unconsciously living a slavish life but he is deluding himself too: he thinks he is living on a model of the true absolute, the really real, when actually he is living a second-rate real, a fetish of truth, an idol of power.
We might say that there were roughly four levels of power and meaning that an individual could "choose" to live by:
1. The first, most intimate, basic level, is what we could call the Personal one. It is the level of what one is oneself, his "true" self, his special gift or talent, what he feels himself to be deep down inside, the person he talks to when he is alone, the secret hero of his inner scenario.
2. The second or next highest level we could call the Social . It represents the most immediate extension of oneself to a select few intimate others: one's spouse, his friends, his relatives, perhaps even his pets.
3. The third and next higher level we could call the Secular . It consists of symbols of allegiance at a greater personal distance and often higher in power and compellingness: the corporation, the party, the nation, science, history, humanity.
4. The fourth and highest level of power and meaning we would call the Sacred : it is the invisible and unknown level of power, the insides of nature, the source of creation, God.
These levels, of course, are not discrete for most people:
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most of us live in several of them,... I said that the individual could "choose" the levels he would live by, and it is obvious why I put the word in quotation marks: usually the person doesn't ask himself this basic question: this is decided for him by the accidents of his birth and training and by the energies of his heredity, his constitution. ... The great tragedy of our lives is that the major question of our existence is never put by us—it is put by personal and social impulsions for us. ... Very few of us ever find our authentic talent—usually it is found for us, as we stumble into a way of life that society rewards us for. The way things are set up we are rewarded, so to speak, for not finding our authentic talent. The result is that most of our life is in large part a rationalization of our failure to find out who we really are, ... The question of what one's talent is must always be related to how he works it on the world: "Into what hero-system do I fit the expression of my talent?" It is worked on some combination of the four levels of power and meaning.
If you stay on the first or Personal level for any length of
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time you must lead a way of life of an eccentric or a hermit, which few can do; even then it is doubtful whether they can do it without the symbols of allegiance or the solid memories of some of the higher levels laid down in early years. The first level for man is unadulterated narcissism: it is pathological, and it invites or is already mental illness.
If you extend your allegiance to the power and meaning of the second level [i.e. the "Social"] you are still very narrowed down to a limited world : you would remain embedded in the family, live what the psychoanalysts so aptly call "the incestuous symbiosis" or some kind of "folie à deux" or a "folie" of a few more...
The process that we call "secondary socialization" takes people onto level three, and if you extend only that far you live as most people do today: you broaden out your identity to the full scope of the social world, make a solution of the problem of your career and your social self-esteem; if you give your allegiance to large, humanistic abstractions like science, the development of history or humanity, you transcend yourself sufficiently to give a rich meaning and support to your life.
Scheler, along with the religious geniuses of mankind would maintain that to remain on level three without proceding up to the highest one is to fall short of ultimate reality, to live in a world of idols. They would claim that true heroism for man could only be cosmic,... ...you take your authentic talent, what is deep down inside you, your depth and your subjectivity—which is invisible, personal, and a mystery to us, and you link it to the highest level—which is also invisible, often personal, and a mystery. By serving the highest power you serve the best power, not any second-rate one; by linking your
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destiny to that of creation you give it its proper fulfillment, its proper dignity, its only genuine nobility. Not only that, but you take the problem of your authentic talent and solve it even if you are not lucky enough to have any special talent , or to be one of the few who has been able to find it. By making your hero-system the service of your Creator, you have the distinction of making a gift of your life no matter what the special quality of that gift is:... Or it may be, as others have thought, that if man lives dedicatedly and well his part of the contract with his Deity, his life on earth somehow enriches and is necessary to the increase of power and beauty in another, invisible dimension behind everyday life: this is what many primitives already lived and believed.
... Obviously there is no sure way of knowing these things. As the illustrious William James put it, who himself believed in
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the desirability of extending one's allegiances up to the highest level: Anything less than God is not rational (given the miracle of creation);... We can't know, as we concluded at the beginning of Chapter Twelve, the nature of ultimate reality, since we are ourselves transcended by it. ...we have had to throw up our hands with Einstein and modern philosophy, and declare that all is relative to our perceptual equipment and to our transcended place.
Where does this leave us on a matter as vital as the discovery and unfolding of one's authentic gift? Again, obviously, in uncertainty: there is no sure way of knowing whether one has discovered his authentic talent, it is a risk and a gamble. We don't know if the hero-system we have chosen is an authentic one because we can't know the overall plan of creation,... Einstein once mused, evidently seriously, that if he had it to do all over again he would have been a plumber: atomic energy did not seem to be working out to the good of mankind. ...social and historical reality do not at all come out as anyone thinks they should,... no one is satisfied with the exact use that the world makes of his ambitions and talents.
But again, if we can't know the real in any objective way, we can at least know what is false to our lives,... This is a viable, relativist, pragmatic criterion in personal life just as much as it is for the life of a whole society. One hero-system can serve as well as the next only up to a point, the point at which it may be "shown up" by events. Then if the person who is following it cannot
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adapt to a new situation because of his rigid enslavement in a particular hero-system, his life grinds to a halt. If you stay on the heroics of the secular, social world, many things can happen to undermine your allegiances in that world; and then you may be in for a crisis of faith and hope of major proportions. ... From a pragmatic point of view there must be something false about a belief-system that stops short of all of man's empirical reality, and that fails when a segment of that reality fails . The religious hero-system, on the other hand, includes the level of the invisible, the possible multi dimensionality of reality, the problem of creation and the meaning of it: these, as Martin Buber instructed us, are real dimensions of man's existence. The religious hero-system is thus the most inclusive level of generality; theoretically, anyway, this would permit an organismic life to move forward almost no matter what the world did to it.
From a personal point of view the problem of life is how to grow out of fetishism, of idol worship, and continually broaden and expand one's horizons, allegiances, the quality of his preoccupations. This means that the person's main task is to put his self-esteem as firmly as possible under his own control;... ...he has to free himself from a slavery to things that are close at hand; he has to become less a reflex of his immediate social world . ... That is why the first task of psychotherapy is to free the person from
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other people's opinions; he learns not to be crushed because someone says his tie doesn't match, or he has ugly ear lobes, body odor, or is not a good mixer. This is why therapists often put such a low valuation on the mind, on thought processes: the mind is the social self, the ways we have learned of attuning our self-esteem to the expectations and valuations of others; the mind automatically channels our self-esteem into society's roles. Thought processes are mostly rationalizations that we use in order to keep our self-esteem in balance,... The value of deriving one's power and meaning from the highest level of generality is that it makes this task for the self-esteem easier: one can feel that he has ultimate value deep down inside just by serving in the cosmic hero-system: he has a sense of duty to the very powers of creation and not principally or only to the social world. ...
... Since aggression is a reaction to frustration, by remaining tightly bound to the successes of our social world we increase our aggressiveness, life inevitably frustrates us. As Scheler knew, the great increase in bitterness and frustration in the modern world is largely due to the eclipse of the sacred dimension, to the expectation that all satisfaction has to happen here, and now. ...
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...to draw one's power from the source of creation itself can't fail to give one more self-reliance in the world of men: one no longer needs to live in the power of others, of mere mortals, of acquaintances, friends, even parents and heads of state. ... This is why authentic religion has always been a threat to demagogues and bureaucrats.
Finally, too, extending one's horizon up to the highest level of power and meaning fights regression, fights fixation on body meanings. ... Physical aggression is the main problem of the sadist, the area that he works so dedicatedly in order to bend the complexity and mystery of reality to his will. He wants something solid to manipulate and hang on to, he wants to banish the vague and fleeting by calling experience back to primary things, to bodies and their processes, the basic coin of life. Behind it all, of course, he is burdened by fear as we all are, and tormented by the fragility of hope in the human condition. ...
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... Man's search to be relieved and stilled has to do with peculiarly human cares and not with baboon ones—as if we needed any reminding at this point. Whatever man does, no matter how elementally he does it, is a response to his total situation, and the main problem of his situation is how to blot out the despair of a self-conscious animal life. Our conclusion here is that if a man considers all the dimensions and levels of power and reality he has a chance of approaching hope from within the human condition.
Homo Heroica
The religious position is that to strive for anything less than the ideal is illness. ...man must strive to transcend himself and he can only do this by opening his eyes to the reality of his situation. This is reality with a small "r," not a capital. And the reality of man's situation is that it is one of despair. Whatever idols man remains rooted to are idols designed precisely to hide the reality of the despair of his condition;... It is this fundamental falseness at the heart of human striving that makes our world dance so frenziedly to such drowning-out music. When one tries with all his heart and might to deny the obvious he renders himself grotesque. ...
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...
The ideal question for religion grows out of this reality of the human condition, a reality that psychoanalytic science also divulged and shocked our sensibilities with: Roheim said that culture, the marvelous pagentry of the human drama, was the fabrication of a child afraid to be alone in the dark. The ideal question for religion has always been a derivative of this: "What kind of fabrication would be proper to an adult who realized that he was afraid?" In this way religion questions the reality of the heroic task for man, in opposition to the cultural fiction of the heroic; it tears away the fundamental mask, as Kierkegaard taught us, the one that man has glued to his skin. ... It is a super-ideal, this admission of despair, because it requires courage and openness that are rare in man,... And it is an ideal that can only be formulated mythically because it encroaches on what man can never know: where the help for his despair is to come from, and how it is to come.
But we saw too, in Chapter Eleven, that the psychoanalytic view was not complete, that the child reacts not only to the threat of despair but also to the overwhelmingness of the miraculous . Both of these dimensions of experience dwarf him and threaten his power and sanity. And so we can understand why the religious ideal is potentially the most liberating for man: it reflects the twofold reality of his situation, the problem of despair as well as the problem of miracle; and it leaves man open to devise ever-new and creative solutions to that reality.
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... If reality is relative to perceptions, and the false is what limits and hinders human adaptability and growth, then truth for man must be the freedom to develop more unique, individual, and perceiving spirit. Because only thereby can more of reality be revealed. If the real is relative and not fixed, then it can only be unveiled as a dialogue between growing perceivers and a changing universe. Freedom is part of a philosophy of nature, as well as of science, democracy, and religion.
Yet these evolutionary abstractions can be of little immediate comfort to us, even though they represent ideals that seem grounded in hard empirical fact. If we talk about the highest level of meaning and the ideal of religion and science as one of openness, we get no automatic blessing for belief and no firm pedestal for hope. Our situation remains the same, torn by the same fundamental paradox: individuality-within-finitude, self-consciousness and emergence from nature, yet boundness to nature and to death. ...
Little wonder that the searching genius of man is driven again and again to this problem. ... The Greeks also saw that there was no easy way out of man's great burden, the fundamental paradox of his
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nature. They understood that man was a plaything of the gods, the events of his life a series of accidents that happen to him and which in themselves seem senseless. As the immortal Plato lamented in words that haunt us today more than ever: "Human affairs are hardly worth considering in earnest and yet we must be in earnest about them—a sad necessity constrains us." The Greeks knew the fictional nature of human meanings and saw the only dignified way out for man: it was up to man to take responsibility for the accidents of his life even though he was innocent of them; it was up to him to make his life a duty,... Only this way could he take command of it, rise above it, and attain his proper nobility in the animal kingdom: he becomes the animal who knows and who knowingly gives the gift of his life. ...
... No religion gives any easy resolution to its central myth, by which I mean that ideal religion is not for compulsive believers. As psychoanalysis has taught us, religion, like any human aspiration, can also be automatic, reflexive, obsessive. Authoritarian religion is also an idol. ... To believe that one has a higher reason to take human life, to feel that torture and murder are in the service of a divine cause is the kind of mandate that has always given sadists everywhere the purest fulfillment:...
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...
From all this we conclude that the contradictions of man's earthly situation cannot be resolved by easy belief or by reflexively relaying the meaning of it to God. ... The ideal critique of a faith must always be whether it embodies within itself the fundamental contradictions of the human paradox and yet is able to support them without fanaticism, sadism, and narcissism, but with openness and trust. ...
And so we may draw the full and final circle on our exploration of man. If we let our fancy play over the panorama of human evolution it almost seems like this: that nature created impossibly difficult conditions for an unstable animal, and then partly relieved these conditions and secured the advance. So, when the man-apes were burdened by highly charged emotions and appetites, and a continually threatening and complex power environment, they proceeded to simplify and order them by rules and symbols. When the new emergent symbolic man sensed despair and the burden of the miraculous he wove tight the denial of the Oedipus and reached for sure religious power. For a long time evolution seems to have allowed the creature to relax somewhat, to take possession of itself and its world. But whether or not these musings are so, it seems clear
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that comfortable illusion is now a danger to human survival; and closedness to the miraculous is an evasion of human sensibility; man now seems to have to move ahead with his own strength to the frontiers of anxiety. And who knows what would come of that.
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