The Denial of Death (38 page)

The whole thing seems very logical, factual, and true to nature: man peels away his armor and unfolds his inner self, primal energies from the ground of his being in which he takes root. The person is, after all, not his own creator; he is sustained at all times by the workings of his physiochemistry—and, beneath that, of his atomic and subatomic structure. These structures contain within themselves the immense powers of nature, and so it seems logical to say that we are being constantly “created and sustained” out of the “invisible void.” How can one be betrayed by therapy if he
is being brought back to primary realities? It is obvious from techniques like Zen that the initiation into the world of the “It” takes place by a process of breakdown and reintegration. This process is much like Western therapy wherein the mask of society is peeled away and the drivenness is relaxed. In Zen, however, it is the primal powers that now are supposed to take over, to act through the person as he opens himself up for them; he becomes their tool and their vehicle. In Zen archery, for example, the archer no longer himself shoots the arrow at the target, but “It” shoots; the interior of nature er
upts into the world through the disciple’s perfect selflessness and releases the string. First the disciple has to go through a long process of attuning himself to his own interior, which takes place by means of a long subjection to a master, to whom one remains a lifelong disciple, a convert to his world-view. If the disciple is luc
ky he will even get from the master one of his bows, which contains his personal spirit powers; the transference is sealed in a concrete gift. From all Hindu discipleship too, the person comes away with a master without whom, usually, he is lost and cannot function; he needs the master himself periodically, or his picture, or his messages through the mail, or at least the exact technique that the master used: the headstands, the breathing, and so on. These become the fetishized, magical means of recapturing the power of the transference figure, so that when one does them, all is well. The disciple can
now stand on “his own” feet, be “his own” person.

The fusion of psychology and religion is thus not only logical, it is necessary if the religion is to work. There is no way of standing on one’s own center without outside support, only now this support is made to seem to come from the inside. The person is conditioned to function under his own control, from his own center, from the spiritual powers that well up within him. Actually, of course, the support comes from the transference certification by the guru that what the disciple is doing is true and good. Even reconditioning body-therapies like that of the once-noted F. M. A
lexander today liberally sprinkle their therapy with ideas from Zen and cite their affinity to people like Gurdjieff. There seems no way to get the body to reintegrate without giving it some kind of magical sustaining power; at least, there is no better way to win full discipleship to a religion than by making it frankly religious.
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It is no wonder that when therapies strip man down to his naked aloneness, to the real nature of experience and the problem of life, they slip into some kind of metaphysic of power and justification from beyond. How can the person be left there trembling and alone? Offer him the possibility of mystical contact with the void of creation, the power of “It,” his likeness to God, or at the very least the support of a guru who will vouch for these things in his own overpowering and harmonious-appearing person. Man must reach out for support to a dream, a metaphysic of hope that sustains him and ma
kes his life worthwhile. To talk about hope is to give the right focus to the problem. It helps us understand why even the thinkers of great stature who got at the heart of human problems could not rest content with the view of the tragical nature of man’s lot that this knowledge gives. It is today well know
n how Wilhelm Reich continued the Enlightenment in the direction of a fusion of Freud with Marxist social criticism, only to reach finally for Orgone, the primal cosmic energy. Or how Jung wrote an intellectual apologia for the text of ancient Chinese magic, the
I Ching
. In this, as Rieff has so bitingly argued, these men are of lesser stature than their master the great Stoic Freud.
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The Limits of Human Nature

In our earlier discussion of what is possible for man, we said that a person is stuck with his character, that he can’t evolve beyond it or without it. If there is a limit to what man can be, we now also must conclude that there is a limit even to what religious therapy can do for him. But the psychotherapeutic religionists are claiming just the opposite: that the life force can miraculously emerge from nature, can transcend the body it uses as a vehicle, and can break the bounds of human character. They claim that man as he now is can be merely a vehicle for the emergence of
something totally new, a vehicle that can be transcended by a new form of human life. Many of the leading figures in modern thought slip into some such mystique, some eschatology of immanence in which the insides of nature will erupt into a new being. Jung wrote such an argument in his
Answer to Job;
the answer to the laments of Job was that man’s condition would not always be the same because a new man would break out of the womb of creation. Erich Fromm once lamented
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that it is a wonder that more people are not insane, since life is such a terrible burden; and then he went on to write a book with the title:
You Shall be as Gods
. Gods verging on insanity, one must assume.

Fortunately, there is no need for us to take up the metaphysical aspects of this problem. It is now the center of a passionate and at the same time coolly intellectual review by some of our best critical minds: not only by Rieff, but also by Lionel Trilling and now John Passmore in an important historical-critical work.
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It can all be summed up in the simplest and sharpest terms: how can an ego-controlled animal change his structure; how can a
self-conscious creature change the dilemma of his existence? There is simply no way to transcend the limits of the human condition or to change the psychological structural conditions that make humanity possible. What can it mean for something new to emerge from such an animal and to triumph over his nature? Even though men have repeated such a notion since the most ancient times and in the most subtle and weightiest ways, even though whole movements of social action as well as thought have been inspired by such ideas, still they are mere fancy—as Passmore has so well reminded us. I myself have b
een fond of using ideas like the developing “spirit” of man and the promise of “new birth,” but I don’t think I ever meant them to conjure up a new creature; rather, I was thinking more of new birth bringing new adaptations, new creative solutions to our problems, a new openness in dealing with stale perceptions about reality, new forms of art, music, literature, architecture that would be a continual transformation of reality—but behind it all would be the same
type
of evolutionary creature, making his own peculiar responses to a world that continued to transcend him.
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If psychotherapists and scientists lapse into metaphysics so easily, we should not blame theologians for doing the same. But ironically, theologians today are often the most sober about immanence and its possibilities. Consider Paul Tillich: he too had his metaphysic of New Being, the belief in the emergence of a new type of person who would be more in harmony with nature, less driven, more perceptive, more in touch with his own creative energies, and who might go on to form genuine communities to replace the collectivities of our time, communities of truer persons in place of the
objective creatures created by our materialistic culture. But Tillich had fewer illusions about this New Being than most of the psychotherapeutic religionists. He saw that the idea was actually a myth, an ideal that might be worked toward and so partly realized. It was not a fixed truth about the insides of nature. This point is crucial. As he so honestly put it: “The only argument for the
truth of this Gospel of New Being is that the message makes itself true.”
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Or, as we would say in the science of man, it is an ideal-typical enjoinder.
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I think the whole question of what is possible for the inner life of man was nicely summed up by Suzanne Langer in the phrase “the myth of the inner life.”
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She used this term in reference to the experience of music, but it seems to apply to the whole metaphysic of the unconscious, of the emergence of new energies from the heart of nature. But let us quickly add that this use of the term “myth” is not meant to be disparaging or to reflect simple “illusion.” As Langer explained, some myths are vegetative, they generate real conceptual power, real apprehension of a dim truth, some kind of g
lobal adumbration of what we miss by sharp, analytic reason. Most of all, as William James and Tillich have argued, beliefs about reality affect people’s real actions: they help introduce the new into the world. Especially is this true for beliefs about man, about human nature, and about what man may yet become. If something influences our efforts to change the world, then to some extent it must change that world. This helps explain one of the things that perplex us about psychoanalytic prophets like Erich Fromm; we wonder how they can so easily forget about the dilemmas of the human condition th
at tragically limit man’s efforts. The answer is, on one level, that they have to leave tragedy behind as part of a program to awaken some kind of hopeful creative effort by men. Fromm has nicely argued the Deweyan thesis that, as reality is partly the result of human effort, the person who prides himself on being a “hard-headed realist” and refrains from hopeful action is really abdicating the human task.
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This accent on human effort, vision, and hope in order to help shape reality seems to me largely to exonerate Fromm from the charges that he really is a “rabbi at heart” who is
impelled to redeem man and cannot let the world be. If the alternative is fatalistic acceptance of the present human condition, then each of us is a rabbi—or had better be.

But once we say this, once we make a pragmatic argument for creative myth, it does not let us off the hook so easily about the nature of the real world. It only makes us more uncomfortable with the therapeutic religionists. If you are going to have a myth of New Being, then, like Tillich, you have to use this myth
as a call to the highest and most difficult effort—and not to simple joy. A creative myth is not simply a relapse into comfortable illusion; it has to be as bold as possible in order to be truly generative.

What singles out Tillich’s cogitations about the New Being is that there is no nonsense here. Tillich means that man has to have the “courage to be” himself, to stand on his own feet, to face up to the eternal contradictions of the real world. The bold goal of this kind of courage is to absorb into one’s own being the maximum amount of nonbeing. As a being, as an extension of all of Being, man has an organismic impulsion: to take into his own organization the maximum amount of the problematic of life. His daily life, then, becomes truly a duty of cosmic proportions, and his cour
age to face the anxiety of meaninglessness becomes a true cosmic heroism. No longer does one do as God wills, set over against some imaginary figure in heaven. Rather, in one’s own person he tries to achieve what the creative powers of emergent Being have themselves so far achieved with lower forms of life: the overcoming of that which would negate life. The problem of meaninglessness is the form in which nonbeing poses itself in our time; then, says Tillich, the task of conscious beings at the height of their evolutionary destiny is to meet and vanquish this new emergent obstacle to sentient lif
e. In this kind of ontology of immanence of the New Being, what we are describing is not a creature who is transformed and who transforms the world in turn in some miraculous ways, but rather a creature who takes more of the world into himself and develops new forms of courage and endurance. It is not very different from the Athenian ideal as expressed in Oedipus or from what it meant to Kant to be a man. At least, this is the ideal for a new kind of man; it shows why Tillich’s myth of being “truly centered” on one’s own energies is a radical one. It points to all the evasions of centeredness in man: alwa
ys being part of something or someone else, sheltering oneself in alien powers. Transference, even after we admit its necessary and ideal dimensions, reflects some universal betrayal of man’s own powers, which is why he is always submerged by the large structures of society. He contributes to the very things that enslave him. The critique of guru therapies also comes to rest here: you can’t talk about an ideal of freedom in the same breath that you willingly give it up. This fact turned Koestler against the East,
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just as it also led Tillich to argue so penetratingly that Eastern mysticism is not for Western man. It is an evasion of the courage to be; it prevents the absorption of maximum meaninglessness into oneself.
^40
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Tillich’s point is that mystical experience seems to be near to perfect faith but is not. Mysticism lacks precisely the element of skepticism, and skepticism is a more radical experience, a more manly confrontation of potential meaninglessness. Even more, we must not forget that much of the time, mysticism as popularly practised is fused with a sense of magical omnipotence: it is actually
a manic defense and a denial of creatureliness.
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Again, we are talking about the highest ideal things, which always seem most unreal—but how can we settle for less? We need the boldest creative myths, not only to urge men on but also and perhaps especially to help men see the reality of their condition. We have to be as hard-headed as possible about reality and possibility. From this point of view we can see that the therapeutic revolution raises two great problems. The first is how mature, critical, and sober these new liberated people will be. How much have they pushed in the direction of genuine freedom; how much have they avo
ided the real world and its problems, their own bitter paradoxes; how much have they hedged on their liberation by still holding on to others, to illusions, or to certainties? If the Freudian revolution in modern thought can mean anything at all, it must be that it brings to birth a new level of introspection as well as social criticism. We already see these reflected not only in academic intellectual awareness but also even in the popular mind, in the letters and advice columns of mass-circulation newspapers. Where, 35 years ago, could you read an advice to the lovelorn that cautioned a girl against h
er boy friend who refused for moral reason
s to make love to her as she asked him to, because he might be “projecting” onto her his own impotence?