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Written while reading Kierkegaard's Preface to Either/Or:
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. David F. Swenson and Lilian Marvin Swenson (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp.3-15.
I had long lusted to own a particular magnificent color television set with a giant screen, digital technology, cable hook-up, one hundred channels, stereo sound and, most important, its own built in VCR. This was my dream. After months of hard work and frugal living, together with a willingness to use up the entire credit limits on my Gold Mastercard and Platinum Visa (both made of plastic), I was at last able to realize this dream. Never mind that I was hopelessly in debt. Now I had a window of insight into the world, and a VCR with which to record it. Now I could witness, and remember, the truth.
I placed my new TV set in the center of the room, so that I could walk around it and admire it from all sides. I even peered through the metal grating in the back so that I could behold the computer brain behind this cognitive mechanism. I made use of a flashlight with a halogen bulb, the better to see what was going on.
How great was my astonishment when, in the midst of wires and metal and all sorts of electronic things, I could make out the indistinct outline and surface of a sheaf of papers. A closer, strained look enabled me to discern lines of typewritten text. This was clearly a manuscript of some sort.
My first impulse was to remove the grating that barred my way to the manuscript. Then I discerned, on the grating, the words of warning:
Caution: to reduce the risk of electric shock, do not remove the back. No user-serviceable parts inside. Refer servicing to qualified service personnel.
I shoved the TV set up against the wall where it belonged, and resolved to forget about the entire thing. I went to bed, but could not sleep. What kind of manuscript could be buried in a color TV set with its own VCR?
I jumped out of bed and grabbed my halogen flashlight and a set of plastic binoculars which I had purchased at Woolworths. Having again pushed the TV set away from the wall, I struggled, with my binoculars, to read the manuscript. I could barely make out the title:
Now I knew that I was in big trouble. I grabbed my Phillips screwdriver and attempted to remove the metal grating. The screwdriver turned, but the screws did not. I was horrified to discover that I had stripped all four screws. There was now no way to remove the back.
I had by this time become obsessed. Wracked by the lack of sleep, and tormented by the realization that the secrets of the real lay not on the outside of the TV set, but in the inside, I resolved that desperate circumstances required desperate action. I ran into the bedroom and grabbed a giant fire axe which I always kept at the ready in case anyone tried to mug me in my apartment. I advanced upon the TV set coolly and deliberately. I now knew what I had to do.
With a great blow, I split the top of the TV set down the middle. Two more strokes crosswise at either end, and now the entire thing split apart like a skillfully quartered tomato. The precious manuscript was mine.
A Philosophical, Psychological, Anthropological Statement Of Principle And Belief From One Who Is Trying To Get Out.
I immediately pored over the manuscript by the light of my halogen flashlight, stopping not even to turn on the lamps. I was hypnotized and obsessed, unable to turn away from the seductive lure of an evil philosophy--a philosophy infected with unholy naturalism, subjectivism and relativism.
My first impulse, upon completing this terrible document, was to burn it along with the remains of my TV set, lest it, like television, enslave and corrupt all who come upon it. I at last determined to publish this Epistle, so that the existential psyche of its author could be dissected by psychoanalysts and therapists, even as his non-existential soul could be exposed by philosophers and men of religion.
There immediately follows, therefore, the Epistle itself, and after that, as a purifying purgative, an edifying statement I have prepared concerning the nature of evil. An extensive criticism and analysis of the Epistle is included in Part II of this chapter.
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This essay was written while reading:
Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postcript, trans.David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974).
Paul Zweig, The Heresy of Self-Love: A Study of Subversive Individualism (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980).
In animals, impulses remain as such. In man, they are raised to the level of values. All value has its origin in impulse, so that value, like impulse, is a function of life.
A value is an impulse imaginatively conceived as satisfied, or a striving imaginatively conceived as fulfilled. Impulses are the relatively primitive or original forces that move the person from within. Strivings are impulses as they have been transformed by the creative capacities--impulses which have been "spiritualized" or "sublimated." The desire for revenge is an example of an impulse, and the desire for justice is a striving. Revenge and justice, imaginatively conceived as realized, are the corresponding values.
Values have their source in the person, for it is persons who have impulses and strivings. They originate in the inner life of the person, for it is only there that impulses are felt and the imagination occurs. They are spontaneous in the sense of emerging from within rather than being imposed from without. And they are products of the creative capacities--of creativity.
Values are capable of endless complexity. There is no limit to the way in which the creative capacities can fuse and transmute antecedently existing impulses, strivings and their values, into radically new, more complex, and sometimes larger entities. There is an infinity of values, if not in existence, then in possibility. There is an infinity of possible values.
Values are objects for contemplation, and prescriptions for action. As products of the creative capacities, they are natural objects for contemplation. There is much for contemplation to do by way of analyzing values and discovering the relations between them. As outcomes of impulses and strivings, their origin is the same as that of action. Values are "ideals," they define the goals toward which action moves. They represent both the origins and the ends of action.
Moralities are inclusions and exclusions of values. Those values included are called good and are encouraged, and those excluded are called evil and are suppressed. Values neither included nor excluded are beyond good and evil, and are neither encouraged nor suppressed.
If persons are the source of values, groups are the source of moralities. Groups choose--include and exclude--among the values which persons create. Good and evil are what the group says they are.
A group is any relatively binding and enduring association of persons, small or large. It seems to be the nature of groups to produce each their own morality. Labor, for example, has one morality--management another. Athens had one morality--Sparta another. A local suburban community has one morality--an inner city neighborhood another. Smaller groups tend to adopt the moralities of the larger groups to which they belong, but make additions and refinements of their own.
If values are the outcome of creation, moralities are the outcome of legislation. So we speak of moral laws. Groups do not create. They legislate. Only persons can create, for they only have inner lives. Only groups can legislate, for they only have the sanction of numbers. If values have their source in the inwardness of the person, moralities originate in the outwardness of the group. Moralities are between people; values are within persons. And if values emerge spontaneously from within, moralities are imposed coercively from without. (Legislation is a logical rather than an historical concept. It indicates the relation between the group and its morality, not a particular historical event.)
If values originate in the inner lives of persons, how do groups become acquainted with them in order to include and exclude among them? The answer is that groups cannot know values. They are inexorably removed from reality--from the reality of the inner life. What they do know are abstractions--approximate and general representations--that are communicated through language. This is supplemented by observation of actions, which are continuous with their values.
Groups might seem to be more interested in action than in contemplation. They might be more interested in a man's actions than his values. For actions are public and discernible. Values cannot be seen. Groups might leave a man's values alone, if only he would behave himself. Actions, however, are the outcome of values, and values are prescriptions for action. In the long run groups must concern themselves with values, as well as with their external manifestation. They must impose their moralities upon their members.
Moralities are the assertion of finitude and limitation. They are the assertion of the need to make a choice. There is an infinity of possible values. We must somehow choose between them. Left to his own devices, a person might simply follow his impulses and strivings, might just wander aimlessly from one satisfaction to another. Moralities arise out of the need to find something stable and enduring among the infinite flux of values. They arise out of the need to define ourselves. The person is an opening to the infinite, and requires a force of finitude to impose order on the chaos. The group would be that force of finitude, and moralities are the group's solution to the problem of self-identity. Are they an adequate solution? Are they the only solution?
A true individual would be defined internally by his values. Most people are defined externally by their moralities, and their identities are determined by the group. They are not individuals, for they are all cast into the same mold. Their identities come from without, and their selves are the Self of the group.
What does it mean to say that a true individual would be defined internally by his values rather than externally by a morality? Imagine a personality with one or two strivings so powerfully developed and clearly defined that they dominated all the rest. These strivings and their imaginatively conceived fulfillments--these values--would thrust aside all hostile strivings and values. Those would be excluded. All supportive values would be encouraged. Those would be included. There would develop a hierarchy of impulses and strivings, an order of rank among values, all organized by the leading strivings and values. This would be an individual.
Would such an individual have a morality? He would indeed have an identity--an inclusion and exclusion of values. But that is only one factor in a morality. There would be no legislating group to prescribe the names of good and evil. The individual would hardly do so himself, for he would regard some strivings--if he thought about them at all--simply as interferences to be pushed aside, and others as powers to be encouraged. Having no one to influence but himself, he would not need good and evil to influence others. There would be no compulsion from without, for the identity would arise spontaneously from within. Unlike most people, the individual would not need the externally imposed identity of the group. He would have a self of his own. This self or identity would be the outcome of creation rather than legislation. The entire structure, integrated under one or two strivings, would be a unity--a unity that would be unique and alive. It would be a single striving. Like any striving, it could be imaginatively conceived as fulfilled. It would, indeed, be a value rather than a morality.
Note well that the identity of the individual and the morality of the group are formally the same and yet materially radically different. Formally, they are each inclusions and exclusions of values. But materially, one originates in the inwardness and spontaneity of the self, while the other is imposed by the outwardness of the group. What its morality is to the group, his identity is to the individual.
Such an individual, emerging silently and powerfully from within, would regard the externally imposed legislation, the morality, of the group, as a nothing to be casually brushed aside. He would be beyond good and evil. The group itself, if it were sensitive enough for admiration and awe, might just suspend its judgment of morality. Then again it might not. An impartial spectator, in that case, an onlooking god, might well come down on the side of the individual as against that of the group. Such an individual would then be beyond good and evil in the eyes of the gods and, what is more important, in his own eyes as well.
Could such an individual judge others? He probably would not do so willingly, for his primary concern would be with self-fulfillment, and he would leave others to their own fulfillments. He would, however, have a sharply developed identity--an inclusion and exclusion of values--and so would be more capable than most of forceful critical evaluation. The necessary condition for all judgment of others is an identity of one's own--a sense of one's self. One must have a "point of view." One must "take a stand." Only then is "objectivity" worthwhile. It is not God who is able to judge, but he who has a determinate self. If God is infinite, he is nothing in particular, and so has no standards by which to judge. Disdaining the morality of the group, the individual would avoid its rhetoric of good and evil, and his evaluations would come from within rather than from without. He would make judgments of value--evaluations--rather than judgments of morality.
It is remarkable that groups can be spoken of as having a Self, an identity, as if they were persons. Groups, after all, are not persons, but associations of persons. They are, however, psychologically qualified. The members of the group personify the group, interpret it as a person. They project their own nature as personalities onto the nature of the group. When this happens repeatedly and over a long period of time it becomes impossible to regard the group as anything other than a Self. It become a Self, moreover, towards which we can experience emotions, again as if it were a real person. We love our country, or are loyal to our company. Groups can even be spoken of as having a will of their own. These usages are clearly metaphorical but have some basis in reality. We leave it to others to work out the metaphysics of the group.
Groups can in any case be spoken of as having a Self or identity of their own. Hostile nations confront one another with opposing identities. The Self of each struggles to co-opt the Self of the other. Each would like to absorb or appropriate the other--to make its identity conform to their own. Whatever else may be involved in the identity of a group, its morality is fundamental. Challenge a group's morality, and you are striking at the heart of its identity, its very Self. Here is the secret sanction and vital force behind all morality, behind all the power of good and evil. Morality is the selfhood of the group, and its coercive force is the relentless will of the group to keep its identity intact. The selfhood of the group is at stake, and with it the selfhood of all the members of the group who have identified with it and accepted its morality, its identity, as their own. Groups would, if they could, absorb every individual within themselves, give every individual a self identical with their own. They would, if they could, give every individual a morality.
What is the explanation of that extraordinary phenomenon known as love for the group? People notoriously love their groups, and do so with passion. Why should anyone love a Leviathan which holds its foot pressed tightly upon one's neck--which imposes its own identity upon what ought to be one's own? Because it gives one an identity. It gives one a self. Probably none of us are individuals, although some of us have achieved varying degrees of individuality. Unable to define ourselves internally, we need the external definition that is provided by the group. And we love being oppressed. We have so far forgotten--if ever we knew--that our identity comes from without, that we assume that it arises spontaneously from within, that it is truly our own. A complete individual would neither love nor hate the group. He would be indifferent to it, for he would be sufficient unto himself.
Compulsion from without creates anger. Anger becomes hatred. The external imposition of an identity, a morality, involves the suppression and extirpation of all those impulses and strivings which have been excluded as evil--of all those values which one originally cherished as one's own. Hatred is the inevitable outcome of morality. It is the child of morality. This is particularly embarrassing if one happens to have a morality of love. One gushes with feelings of love. One loves everyone and everything. And one hates. It is the good people who hate, and the best people who hate the most. For it is they who are most dominated by the morality of the group.
The group knows how to use this hatred, which it channels against its enemies, whether they be external or internal. But the true and original object--the only proper object--of this hatred is the group itself. One ought to direct one's hatred where it originates and properly belongs. Love of one's country is only half the story. One ought also to hate one's country. That is the necessary condition of criticism and freedom. For anyone other than a complete individual, the only appropriate attitude toward the group is ambivalence. Love is the force that binds and unites. It is the force of solidarity. Hatred is the force that separates and discriminates. It is the force of freedom. But this hatred ought never to be directed against another person. Hatred of that kind weakens and enslaves. It is remarkable that the same emotion which, when aimed at a personality produces slavery, when directed towards a group generates freedom. And this hatred ought never to be directed towards external groups. They have no power over one. They can do nothing to one's self. The only proper object of hatred is the group to which one's self belongs.
Would you cross the group? Would you trespass beyond the limits of morality--its morality? Would you place yourself beyond good and evil? Be certain first that you are an individual. For if you are anything less, the group will break you. If there remains in you any love for the group, or any hatred even, the group will use that emotion--that dependence--to gain an inroad to your psyche. If you are determined in the least by good and evil, rather than by your self, the group will then have a hook into your spirit. What the group can do to your body, though terrible in itself, is of less import, in the long run, than what it can do to your self.
Of those who trespass beyond good and evil, only the individual can remain indifferent to the group. Anyone else will be bound in love-hate warfare, in a desperate struggle for survival, with the very group he would leave behind. Only one against many, his life will be a perpetual fight against insurmountable odds. When finally he tires and weakens, as eventually he must, and knows that soon he will no longer be able to defend himself, he will be confronted with a bitter choice. He can either run away from the fight, from the group--quit his job, or leave his country--or he can stay and fight, and be destroyed.
The destruction the group has in mind is worse than death, for one's very self is at stake. The pressures it can bring to bear--economic, social and psychological--are enormous. If one is lucky he will simply be driven from his sanity. If he is unlucky, he will be driven from his self. Insanity and its suffering are the sign that one is still fighting. The psyche is broken, but the self is still alive. Beware the peace that suddenly supervenes--the solution, the paradise, that suddenly appears. All is at once harmony, and there is no longer any reason to fight. Why? Because unawares there has been an unconditional surrender to the group. The warmth of the group has been embraced. One's self has been destroyed and transformed into the Self of the group. One has been re-educated, and has become, finally, the creature of the group. The former rebel becomes now the most fanatical member in the group--the champion of its good and evil. So total is the surrender that he no longer desires anything else, no longer can imagine why he had once confronted the group. The vengeance of the group against those who challenge its morality, its identity, is terrible. Not being content with making the self its possession, the group will make him its clown and its lackey--the butt of its jokes and the servant of its commands. The once proud warrior against good and evil will have become, finally, the helpless puppet and plaything of the triumphant group.
In its warfare against the rebellious self, the group will use every means beyond good and evil. It will obey no law and be guided by no morality--not even its own. Confronted with a self that would go beyond good and evil, the group would prove to that self that it alone is beyond good and evil, that it alone is able to suspend its own identity. The group wants every self to know that it is beyond good and evil, that it will crush every rebel without regard for law or morality. But the group wants every self to believe that it is good and not evil, that it respects all law and obeys all morality. The group is the purveyor of a kind of double think, and has that raw power which can make a success of hypocrisy. If the individual is beyond good and evil by virtue of his values, his inner resources, the group is beyond the two by virtue of its power, its external numbers. For the individual to go beyond good and evil is to affirm his identity; for the group to go beyond good and evil is to deny its identity. It denies its own identity in order to impose that identity on another self.
What, then, is to be done about this sweet Circe, this group, that one both loves and hates. One who is not an individual, but has an instinct for individuality, will be aware of the oppression of the group, but unable to do anything about it.
There is a way to fight back and beat the group. Life in the group is worldliness, for the group is the worldly power, and the world belongs to the group. One must live in the world, and yet be not of it. One must live in the group, and yet not belong to it. In the very midst of life in the group, one withdraws into one's self. The self is one's most valuable possession. It is more than a possession--it is oneself. This is where true life occurs. One lives in the group, and does its bidding. One gets along, and fits in. One conducts the business of the group, and even permits moderate affections toward its members. But all of this is a disguise--that of behaving exactly like everyone else. This is the mask that one wears. There emerges a radical dissociation between outwardness and inwardness, between action and values. One's behavior is the behavior of the group, but one's life is the life of secret inwardness.
If one allows moderate affections toward one's associates, one reserves one's passions for oneself. In this one emulates the individual, who is passionate in the best sense. The group is externality. Its life is the life of power, and its reason is the kind that calculates. It is that cold-blooded, calculating rationality which, separated from the passions of its members, is able to manipulate them. The individual is inwardness, and his reason is of a higher kind. His reason is passionate. When reason ceases to be separated from passion, it thereby ceases to be calculating. When passion ceases to be separated from reason, it ceases to be subject to manipulation. In the individual, indeed, the distinction between passion and reason dissolves. The devotion of one's entire self to a powerful inner striving implies a spontaneity and fusion of reason and passion so that the two can only be distinguished in retrospect. The individual emerges from within, where reason and passion are in their primordial unity, rather than from without, where they are separated. This concentration of the individual's passionate life on a single inner striving explains his corresponding indifference toward the group. One emulates the individual, and directs one's passions toward one's strivings, one's values, whatever they may be, even while living dispassionately the life of the group.
One learns, finally, how to use the group. The very oppression of the group--the enforced submission and obedience--turns one away from outwardness, away from the group, and into inwardness, into one's self. One turns into one's self with all the energy of all the anger that the arbitrariness of the group arouses. One develops an inner life. The very condition for the growth of inwardness is the suppression of outwardness, the oppression of an outer authority. One uses one's outer slavery as a means to enhance one's inner freedom. One uses the group as a means to develop one's individuality. The group unwittingly provides the necessary condition, the necessary discipline, for the development of an individual who will be indifferent to itself.
With the shift of its ground from the outer to the inner, the struggle between one's self and the group becomes, finally, a struggle with one's self, rather than with the group. Or it becomes rather a struggle with the group as internalized within one's self. One finds, repeatedly, that one thinks like the group, one is loyal to the group, one identifies with the group. One is the group, and the group is one's self. There is a large part of one's self that belongs to the group. This is why one loves the group--one loves one's self, and one's self is the Self of the group. There is another part of one's self that is aware of this tyranny, this possession of one's self by the group. This is why one hates the group--one loves one's self, and desires no other identity than one's own.
One is, it turns out, still trapped in love-hate warfare with the group. Now, however, it is hidden from the group, which knows nothing of what is going on within. It is the work of secret inwardness to free one's strivings and values from the morality of the group--to make them so powerful and clearly defined that they will brush aside all good and evil. All of this is going on incognito, while the group, in its ignorance and its pride, congratulates itself on its possession of this self which it has long since taken for granted.
A person is an opening to the infinite--through his creative faculties, the possibility of an infinity of possible values. He is the possibility of possibility. A self is a person who has an identity--the infinity of values made finite. He is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite. This synthesis may be a mechanical combination--the imposition of a morality upon values--or an organic fusion--the emergent growth of a leading value. In the first case, the finite is impressed upon the infinite as a stamp upon wax, as form upon matter. In the latter, the distinction between infinity and finitude, matter and form, breaks down. There are not values and a morality imposed upon them. There are simply values. And yet there is an identity. The form is matter and the matter is form. Along with the distinction between finitude and infinity, form and matter, there breaks down the distinction between reason and passion. There are not passions with a calculating reason imposed upon them, but simply a higher kind of reason that is passionate--reason in the exemplary sense.
If persons are infinity, the group is finitude. It is the world, and is in proud possession of the worldly power of compulsion. The group lusts after persons as form lusts after matter, as man lusts after woman. The group would give every person an identity--its identity; would make every person into a self--its Self. The great antithesis to the group is the individual, who is his own principle of finitude in infinity, and does not need the finitude of the group. He embodies the one attitude with which the group cannot cope--indifference. And yet he is passionate. There are, finally, those in whom there is a perpetual warfare between individuality and finitude, the self of oneself and the Self of the group. It is here that the great struggle for salvation occurs.
Slavery masquerades as freedom. When any identity is imposed from without, rather than emerging from within, then one is controlled by an identity alien to one's own. This is the most profound kind of slavery, and makes all outer freedom accidental and meaningless. It is possible, on the other hand, to be outwardly in bondage, yet to have an identity and a value that emerges from within. It is possible to be enslaved, and still to be free. This is the implication of inwardness. This is why the individual can be at peace--indifferent to externalities, and to the group. No matter what is done from without, he will always be free.
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Identity is the essence of existence. To exist is to have an identity. For to exist is to be something in particular--to have certain determinate traits or attributes which define and delimit. It is to be finite. Even if the universe is spatio-temporally infinite, it has definite characterizing traits or qualities. It is like this, and not like that. It is this universe, and not some other. Even the universe taken as a whole, then, is finite in this sense. It has an identity and it exists. To exist--is to have an identity--is to be finite. These are three different ways of suggesting the same thing.
God is infinite. Therefore he has no identity. Therefore he does not exist.
Because God is not finite, he is not something in particular. He has no determinate nature, no characterizing traits which make him like this and not like that. He is not this god, and not some other. He is God. God is irrelevant to characterizing traits, to identity, to finitude and to existence. If he existed, if he had an identity, he would be finite, and he would therefore not be God.
Can we say that God is good? God forbid! Goodness, as well as omniscience and omnipotence, are all characterizing traits which define and delimit--which cannot be applied to an infinite being who, by virtue of being infinite, has no determinate nature whatever. Virtue, knowledge and power are traits of finitude, of existence. They are irrelevant to God, who is not like that because he is not like anything at all. This does not mean that God is unique. Uniqueness is an attribute of existing things, each of which has its own unique identity. God has no identity and therefore cannot be unique. Unlike existing things--each of which is something because it has an identity--God is not something. God is nothing. God is no thing. God is the opposite of existence, and as such is inconceivable to an existing being.
Can we say of God that he is--that he has Being as opposed to existence? This is no more than a hidden way, involving a play with words, of bringing God back into existence. We have added a new word and think thereby to have added a new reality. Either Being is characterized by specifiable, determinate traits, or it is not. If it is, it is finite and identifiable. It is something. It is existence. If it is not, it is without identity and unknowable. It is nothing. It is not-Being. It is God.
What then can we say of God? We can say that he is infinite. We can say this provided this statement contains no positive content. It is the purely negative assertion that God is not finite. God is in-finite. And this is just another way of saying that he has no identity and that he does not exist. All of these statements suggest the same thing.
Can we say anything positive about God? We can apply no positive attributes to God whatever. We can only utter his name with reverence and awe--even as we know that we know not whereof we speak.
Here is the problem with the ontological proof. The most perfect being that can be conceived could not be God. For God can neither be nor be conceived. The god of the ontological proof is a finite god. For he has an identity which is defined by the predication of positive attributes. Such a god would be just one more being in nature, in existence. He would not be at all supernatural. He could do the same things that other natural beings can do, only he could do them better. He would be no more than an extension of nature. The most perfect being that can be conceived exists, in the mind at least, if nowhere else. The infinite God exists nowhere, not even in the mind, for he cannot be conceived.
Since the philosophic mind is at a loss when it attempts to conceive the infinite God, let us now speak mythically, so that we can say poetically what, taken literally or philosophically, would be self-contradictory.
God is the opposite of reality, the other side of existence. He is everything that existence is not. If to us God appears to be nothing, to God we, too, must appear to be nothing. And if to us God appears to be everything, to God we, too, must appear to be a plenitude.
Identity is the essence of existence, and existence is what God is not. God therefore is without identity, without a self. God needs what he lacks. Just as man needs woman, so God needs that which he is not. Here is the reason for the creation, for existence. The creation of Eve for Adam is an analogue of the creation of the universe for God.
The meaning of the creation, and the reason for existence, is the eruption of identity--the coming into being of that which is unique and something in particular. Everything which is has an identity and strives to preserve itself in its characteristic being. Life is an enhancement of identity, and a living thing strives to preserve its self above all else. To man alone is that freedom given--either to surrender and destroy his identity--or to preserve it--or to create and enhance it beyond what is already there. The creation of an identity is the work of God--and man can either surrender this creation, or participate in it further. Identity is God's work and man's work in creation.
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For anyone but a complete individual, stubbornness is the cardinal virtue. It is the celebration of one's self. The stubborn person will not be moved from the particularity which he has chosen for himself, and for which he has been chosen. The group cannot change him, and no one can budge him from his own identity. Stubbornness is the assertion of finitude, of one's existence, of one's identity. To be stubborn is therefore to do the work of God on earth, and stubbornness is the religious virtue. To celebrate your self is to worship God. For God is, through you, what he cannot be himself. Religions of course would have it the opposite--that stubbornness is a sin. This is because they are organized and established--they are groups. Religions want men to be the opposite of stubborn. They want them to be good.
"Why can't you be good, instead of being so stubborn?" Those might be the words of a mother to her child. They are also the implicit words of the group to whoever would maintain his own identity against its encroachments. To be good means to do what the group wants you to do. A child who is not stubborn may be good, but he will never be any good. He will be house broken. Most children, indeed, are broken sooner or later. They become loyal members of the group--any group in which they happen to find themselves. Having once been broken, they become soft, pliant and flexible. They learn to fit in. They are without a self. They have become good. Goodness is the group virtue. It makes one useful to others. Good people are not dangerous. If stubbornness is the cardinal virtue, goodness is the most deadly sin. To be good means to be passive, compliant and obedient--and a little bit stupid. It is the very opposite of the assertion of one's self. To be good is to have no self. It signifies a willingness to receive any identity that is imposed from without. It feels so warm and safe to belong, to be good.
Be good and stubborn.
It is the complete individual only who has no need of stubbornness. For being indifferent to the group, and therefore independent of it, he does not need to resist it. He has no need for the negative. He is above the group, and his identity emerges from within with a yes, without regard for external hindrance or opposition.
Human identity is characterized by a mobility and instability that no other identity can have. This is expressed by saying that a person is an opening to the infinite--the infinity of possible values. It is also said, with the same intent, that man alone can either surrender his identity, or preserve it, or create it anew. All of this implies a great danger as well as a great opportunity. Here is the basis for freedom as well as slavery. Only man is capable of either. To possess one's own identity--to be stubborn--is to be free, and to be possessed by others' identity--to be good--is to be a slave. Those are most enslaved who are most certain of their freedom. For their possession by the group is so complete that they are convinced that its identity is their own. They are so proud of their goodness that they must deny to themselves that their virtue is but a sign for their servitude. To question morality is to resist oppression. Those who are uncertain of their freedom are on the way to achieving it.
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To exist is an impertinence. It is to thrust oneself forward and assert oneself--to push aside other existences. To exist is to will, and existence is will.
If existence is will, existence is also identity. Here we have the presuppositions for arriving dialectically at what we all know instinctively--that identity and will are one and the same thing. Whoever has an identity has also a will, just as whoever has a powerful identity has a powerful will. To have an identity is to will it. You cannot do otherwise. The will, then, is not a mysterious independent faculty, nor is it a subterranean force that animates identity. Identity carries its own force--it is will.
Will and identity can at most be distinguished as different aspects of a single phenomenon. Whatever distinction there may be is analogous to that between matter and form, neither of which can exist apart from the other. A will existing apart from an identity would be like a force existing apart from a direction. Both would be abstractions, mere mental conceptions. If we must distinguish, perhaps this is the best way: Identity is the essence of existence. Will is existence and identity, therefore, is its essence. Identity is the essence of will. Identity is the intelligible aspect of will, and will is the existential aspect of identity.
Will or identity is existential. It is an existing. The mind can discern in existence different aspects or phases. It is correct in so doing, but would be caught in fallacy if it were to reduce existence to any one of these. The mind can discern both force and finality, power and intelligibility, will and identity. To reduce existence to either would be a fallacy. To split existence into a separate will and a separate identity would be to commit the reductive fallacy twice.
Freedom of the will is the same thing as freedom of identity. It is exactly the mobility and instability of human identity--the nature of the person as an opening to the infinite. This is what makes choice possible. Freedom is indetermination. But freedom in the best and ultimate sense comes only with the complete determination of the will and of identity--with the emergence from within of a stable self. Freedom, then, is self-determination. Only the individual is truly free.
If will refers to the material side of the phenomenon, and identity to the intelligible, will may be referred to the side of impulse and striving, and identity to the side of value. Will, then, is an inclusion and exclusion of impulses and strivings, and identity is an inclusion and exclusion of values. Both refer to a single phenomenon, but to different sides or aspects of it--the material and the ideal. They are inseparable, and together they constitute a single existent. Impulse-value, or will-identity, is existence.
Let us next replace the concept of inclusion and exclusion with the more complex concept of organization. The simpler concept is not abandoned, but is included in the more complex one. For to organize is to include whatever can cohere within the organization, and to exclude whatever is inconsistent with it. Will, then, is an organization of impulses and strivings, and identity is an organization of values.
If will is an efficient cause or force, what kind of force is it? Is it identical with its impulses and strivings? It is not identical with any one of these or even with the sum of them. But it does partly overlap with these as organized, as united into an organic whole. Will is an organization of forces, of impulses and strivings. Just as an organism has different properties and powers than any of its parts, or all of them considered in isolation, so will is a force or striving which has different properties than any of the impulses and strivings of which it is composed. Insofar, will is identical with impulses and strivings, and yet is different from them.
Will is an organization of impulses and strivings, and identity is an organization of values. If will is one striving, which is the organic composition of all the component strivings, then identity is one value, which is the organic composition of all the component values. A person's identity is, then, his value. In creating his value he creates himself, and his value is more than just his possession. His value is himself.
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It would be well to anticipate an objection that is sure to be raised by apologists for the group. We have argued that persons create values, and groups legislate among these. This view, it might be objected, presupposes that the person is an independent entity, who can exist apart from any group. In fact, persons can be understood only in relation to groups, and are, indeed, constituted by the groups in which they are found. Persons would not be what they are apart from the groups to which they belong. The person must be understood as part of his social context, and, viewed otherwise, is an abstraction. In our language, the impulses and strivings which persons have are defined and determined by the groups to which they belong. Values are social rather than private phenomena.
Those who raise this objection do not understand inwardness. The issue is existential. For inwardness is a unique and irreducible kind of existence, or way of existing. It is an existing in a certain way. It stands in contrast to that other way of existing known as outwardness, or existence in the group. Inwardness is isolation and freedom from society, from the group. Its fundamental trait is autonomy. Inwardness is that which determines itself, and cannot be determined from without. It is an impenetrable point which cannot be altered by anything outside. To be inward is to be inaccessible to sociality and definition by the group. It is to exist independently, in the most radical meaning of that term. For outwardness is contextual. To exist outwardly is to have a context. To become inward is to break free from the context, and the more inwardness, the less context. The individual has no context. The individual is a break in the web of causality. Inwardness is, ultimately, an absolute amidst relativities. If inwardness is a way of existing, its psychological counterpart is the intoxication of autonomy.
Far from an abstraction, inwardness is an existing in a certain way, and has all the concreteness and determinateness of everything that is existential. If anything, the outwardness of the group appears less real and more abstract. Existence is always finite, partial and determinate. To exist in one way rather than another is not to be an abstraction. It is simply to exist.
Without inwardness, there would not be persons as we know them. For persons, without inwardness, would be inseparable from their groups. They would be totally socially constituted and determined. They would be unthinking and unconscious organs of society, and they would have no selves. To be inward is to be conscious and to have a self. It is to be self-conscious. Total social constitution without inwardness is the kind of situation consciously or unconsciously understood by those who raise the objection we are considering.
Inwardness is the only way of existing through which impulses and strivings can be felt. And the outcome of inward existence is imaginative and creative activity. Inwardness is the crucible of creativity. So inwardness is the place of values--the locus of all value--and values are private rather than public. Every value is unique and special because of the unique person and special inwardness in which it occurs. So values are personal rather than social.
Only in the individual, whose inwardness is total, can inwardness be an absolute, without any context whatever. In anyone else, inwardness is influenced by outwardness. The person may be regarded as a composite, or battleground, between outwardness and inwardness, between two ways of existing. Some of every person's impulses and strivings are influenced by the social context. Others are not. And others are constituted both from without and within. All can give rise to values within the medium of inwardness. The imposition of a morality is the attempt by the group to include those values that are influenced from without, and to exclude all those values that emerge only from within.
Even the individual, let it be noted, has impulses and strivings which are influenced from without. But his inwardness remains absolute. For he absorbs and appropriates these impulses and strivings as an organism digests food, transforming alien material into his own substance. He uses impulses influenced from without for his own purposes, and transmutes all outwardness into inwardness. He tears what is contextual from its context. He is able to do this because his inwardness is so fully developed that it overpowers whatever comes from without.
Values are prescriptions for action, and inwardness does not exclude action. The individual will not act often, but when he does, his presence will be felt. For he will be an alien acontextual force, exploding from within into an outer context that, until then, had been smug, serene and organized. His voice will be that of a misfit, causing problems where everything had been going smoothly.
If inwardness is radical autonomy and the locus of value, it is also the place of freedom. For inwardness is where creativity occurs--the opening to the infinity of possible values. Inwardness is the acid that dissolves the legislation of the group, and makes possible the mobility and instability of human identity. If inwardness is a way of existing, another of its psychological counterparts is the delight in free mobility. And once a new and stable identity is achieved, inwardness is the independence that makes that identity enduring, and impermeable to corruption by the social context. Inwardness is a concentration and enhancement of identity. It is will at its extremity. A third psychological counterpart of inwardness is stubbornness.
Those who raise the objection under consideration do so because they approach the person exactly as the group approaches him--from without. They do not approach him inwardly, so they do not see inwardness. From their point of view the person appears to be entirely socially constituted and determined. He belongs in the context. He fits in. Behaviorists, to be consistent, must conclude that the person is inseparable from the group. Those who approach the individual from without are confronted with two alternatives: Either he is entirely socially constituted, or else he is an abstraction. Only by approaching the individual through inwardness can it be seen that he is at once separate and concrete. Those who raise the objection under consideration see only one kind of existence, and they are, unwittingly, the philosophers of the group. Any philosophy which would allow for individuality, must also include inwardness. For without inwardness there would be only social monism and organization, and there would be nothing autonomous and free.
The relation between inwardness and identity should now be clear. Inwardness is what separates from society. To be inward is to separate out, and stand out, from the whole--to be something in particular. It is to ex-ist. To be inward is to have an identity.
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The individual is at once passionate and indifferent. He is passionately immersed in his own strivings and values, and indifferent toward the worldly power, the group. This is an extraordinary combination of diametrically opposed orientations.
The attainment of indifference is itself a remarkable feat. Human beings are not ordinarily able to be that way. Indifference is somehow beyond the natural and beyond the human. It is an achievement appropriate to the gods rather than to man and is, perhaps, a manifestation of the divine in the natural. There is a striking resemblance between the words in-different and in-finite. Difference, or having differentiating characteristics, is the essential trait of identity or finitude. To be without difference is to be without finitude, without identity. It is to be in-finite--to be God. To be indifferent is to be without will--which is another way of saying, to be without identity and without existence. The emergence of indifference in the individual may be an intimation of immortality in what is mortal, may be the presence of God in man. Indifference brings with it an awesome power that is like no ordinary earthly power. Before the indifferent man, as before the ascetic, men of worldly power stand impotent and amazed.
If indifference is an image of infinity, passion is very much a manifestation of finitude. Passion belongs to existence. It is an essential trait of human nature, and is the source of what is best and what is worst in man. Without passion man would be capable of neither his deepest degradation nor his highest attainment.
As a creature of passion, the individual participates in the worst as well as in the best. The individual is no angel. At best a self-contained consummation of existence as it emerges from within, the individual can also be self-fixated and narcissistic, a finite entity inordinately involved with its own idiosyncratic and accidental self. And at best a consummation of identity and will in an abundance of overflowing power, the individual can also be intoxicated with this power, and infected with worldly ambition. The group knows what it is doing when it attempts to suppress or destroy the individual. Left unchecked he might well subvert the identity of the group and impose his own identity in its place. This is one way new groups are formed. This human manifestation of divine indifference, the individual is also a creature of the will to power, just like everyone else. These two traits--self-absorption (fixation on identity), and inordinate ambition (fixation on will)--can make the individual, more than anyone else, guilty of the sin of pride. Animated by passion, the individual may also be driven by passion. He is a microcosm of nature at its best and at its worst.
As the pinnacle of finitude and the image of infinity, the individual is also a microcosm of all that is and all that is not. He contains within himself both being and not-being, that which is man, and that which is God.
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E has given us an alien, acontextual essay. It is an eruption from some psychic depth, regressed and yet with intellect intact. Is this merely primitive, or is it also profound? This is not what ordinarily comes out of a television set. One is left to wonder whether the truth of the outside can cohere with the truth that emerges from the inside. Have we got here a borderline psychosis, or a penetrating witness to the truth, or a combination of both? Is this delusion or reality? Since the author is not available for further examination, we cannot determine his psychological state. The reader is nevertheless free to evaluate the message apart from the messenger. And have we got here unregenerate evil--perverse egotism and pride--or a single-minded passion for freedom and autonomy, pure in its innocence and integrity?
What is needed is an investigation on two levels--scientific or medical, and philosophical. The medical analysis of E's psyche we leave to those who are qualified--the physicians, the psychoanalysts, and the psychotherapists. With respect to this, we wish only to offer the following comment: If this be illness, it is illness that is restorative--illness desperately and irrepressibly seeking health. For essential to mental health is a well-formed and secure identity. E has the insight to know that this is what is needed, and this is what he fanatically seeks. That this is nevertheless illness is suggested by the fortress-like interpretation of an embattled self, well defended against all persecution. This demand for extreme isolation and autonomy might well be the requirement of a self whose boundaries are tenuous and fragile. It also might be a temporary requirement, providing a protective environment in which these boundaries can be repaired and developed, preparing the way for expansive health.
Let us now leave the physicians off in a corner heatedly analyzing our patient's psyche, so that we can, if we whisper, speak of his soul. We do not want the scientists to hear us, for they would laugh, as, from their point of view, they well might. For they are students of existence, and the soul is non-existential. The soul is none of their business.
The soul is the form of the body, and so the soul is God, but God split off from himself, God in his partiality, God in his existence. Man can bring God into existence, but man can never exhaust the non-existential, the All that is God in Himself. Man incorporates a spark of the intelligible, but he can never be the fire.
And yet man, knowing that he is God, might will to forget that he is not all of God. This is the willful non-existential confusion of the soul with its source, of man with God. It is not enough, or rather it is too much, to have had a taste of the honey.
Here is the unconscious core conviction and essence of all evil:
This presumption of form that it is all Form, of man that he is God, is the inevitable and essential original sin.
It is common knowledge that mental patients sometimes think that they are God. But this is a delusion of the psyche rather than a stain upon the soul. It is illness rather than evil. This delusion is a superficial conscious phenomenon which is the outcome of underlying unconscious forces. It is merely a symptom. The evil identification with God is itself unconscious and at the core. It is not a symptom but the generating cause. As a symptom, the psychic delusion can be replaced by alternate symptoms as, with time, it often is. The symptom is accidental, but evil, as unconscious cause and source, is essential. Psychic illness of this variety is relatively benign in its consequences for others. It generates a harmless drone. Evil, as we shall see, is malignant. It knows nothing but how to sting.
Here again is the essence and core of all evil:
Spoken by any other than God or the Son, these words are diabolical.
This confusion with the divine, willful though it may be, is nevertheless grounded in a love and aspiration after the good, after God, after what is best in itself. Socrates was right. All men desire the good, and no man can will anything other than the good. One desires the good. One desires to be good. And then the tragic error: One desires to be the good.
Socrates would say that this confusion is a mistake, a result of ignorance. He would place the problem in the intellect. Others might speak of a flaw in the will. In either case, the outcome of good is evil, and without God, neither could their be evil. Evil is the price man must pay for, with the help of God, bringing God into existence.
It is finally God, as well as man, who is responsible for evil. God is too great for man and for existence. The overpowering lure of the Telos is infinite and irresistible. Man achieves a Dionysiac frenzy, a mystical union with God. And then the mind snaps. The anchor in the pricks of matter is lost. One forgets to return. I am one with God. Therefore, I am God. Evil is loss of identity, loss of one's self in the Self that is God. This is a surrender of one's own identity for an identity that is other than one's own. Evil is the outcome when a babe is prematurely weaned from the milk which is of woman, and fed upon the meat which is of God. Those who most desire God are most destroyed by God. The best become the worst. The good become evil. This is the coronation of Lucifer.
Amnesty International reports that torturers torment their prisoners: "We are God in here." And, indeed, from this desperately held non-existential core conviction, I am God, follow all the existential phenomena that we call evil. For when form must convince itself that it is all Form, then it is unacceptable that there should be any other form. And yet of course there is other form. Every man is God. Every man has an identity of his own.
Now the inner logic of evil unfolds, revealing itself like a flower opening to the sun:
Pure terror is evoked when these words are uttered by any other than God himself. All form that is not one's own form must be subverted, seduced, exploited, co-opted, destroyed, absorbed, owned, controlled, made an appendage of one's own self. And if this cannot be accomplished, if the stubborn spark of God is too strong, then the offending form must be tortured and murdered, purged from existence and from one's own mind, which is, after all, all Mind.
This is what happens when evil is in possession of superior existential power. And when evil confronts equivalent evil? When God, alienated from himself, encounters God equally alienated and equally powerful? Then the outcome is war, war in which each, by way of projection, attributes its own evil to the mind of the other. Evil, finally, when, like E, it is without worldly power, will nevertheless remain impelled to challenge all form that is other than its own. It will, in this way, heroically provoke its own destruction. And it too, by way of projection, will attribute its own evil to the mind of the other, who may or may not be evil in himself.
Paul was wrong. It is not money that is the root of all evil. It is mind.
Individuality is humanity at its extremes--the extreme of good bordering tenuously on the extreme of evil. It is no accident that individualism should be both praised and reviled. The danger is that the praise will degenerate into apotheosis, and the condemnation into a worship of mediocrity.
For the individual is one who seeks to become like God. Like God, he seeks to become a legislator of value, and a legislator sufficient unto himself. Like God he seeks to become a creator--a creator of form, of his own identity. The individual is evil, for in order to succeed at what he wishes to do, he must confuse himself with God. The individual is good, for, by creating form, he accomplishes God's work in existence. He is an angel of God, and an enemy of God. He is a fallen angel.
It is but a small step from the denial of God to the assertion of one's own divinity. This is the two-edged temptation of individuality. To succumb to this temptation may indeed be the necessary condition without which full individuality can never be achieved. Individuality seeks the best, even as it is grounded in the worst. Evil is the efficient cause of individuality, even as its final cause is the good.
The individual is in a condition for either everlasting life or eternal damnation. Desperately dependent upon and in need of the grace of God, he more than any other needs to be redeemed. What would count as salvation for the individual? Must he, on his death bed, humble himself before God? This he could never do. For he is a child of existence, and existence is free. His weakness, but also his strength, is his pride. The individual can only find salvation in the understanding and acceptance of a merciful and just God who knows. That in him which is self-conceit will be rejected and permitted to perish, but that which is genuine and rings true, that which is form, will find eternal life in the peace that is God.
The first great corruption of individuality, then, is identification with God. The second great corruption is identification with the world.
Power poisons individuality. For it is through power that individuality becomes official, and thereby ceases to be itself. This is the cunning of community--the colonization of charisma. The individual, thinking to control a society, is justly controlled by the society into which he is absorbed. A pillar of the community grows old under the strain of supporting--the community.
This is what comes of existential power, which ought to be of no more concern to the individual than it is to God in himself. The power of God is the power of form and finality, the power of identity, and this alone is the power appropriate to the individual in his emulation of the divine.
Existential power is superficial power, which corrupts individuality no less than it corrupts our concept of God. Existential power is the appropriate power of the community and its leaders. It is the incarnation of the will of all. As such, it offends none. It is traditional, conservative, acceptable, indispensable, and bland. It is essential for survival, and is therefore both pragmatically and morally imperative. The community is the instrument of its maintenance, and it in turn maintains the community.
The individual is offensive. Were he to compound this offense with the possession of power, he would have to be destroyed. Socrates understood this. This is why he refused to seek political power, and this is why he was able to stay alive for as long as he did. In the end, his formal power could not avoid confrontation with worldly efficient power. Socrates knew, and his daimon confirmed, that the victory was his. Having disdained existential power, he achieved final power. Like God in Himself, he had power in himself, power of a kind more powerful than that which the world can provide.
The individual is indeed a man of power, and instinctively responds to its lure. But individuality, rarely so wise as Socrates, confuses worldly power, efficient power, with final power, and seeks one in place of the other. This is individuality corrupted, individuality which has lost its way. The individual of efficient power is a pretender to the possession of genuine power. E is very well aware of the need to be free from the desire for worldly power. Whether he really is so, it is for the reader to judge.
In the first great corruption of individuality, identification with God, the individual becomes evil. In the second great corruption, identification with the world, he becomes mediocre. The individual, to be saved, must be neither God nor world but, as is appropriate for individuality, always and only himself.
We shall to return to E, to this arbitrary and alien, acontextual misfit, in a further effort to make his arbitrariness meaningful, and to fit his alienation into an intelligible context. We shall in Part II of this chapter resume our effort at comprehension and justification, our pursuit of the elusive E.
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