Forever Becoming: Fromm

Showing posts with label Fromm. Show all posts

The Preoccupied Mind

Fast - Slow

Shallow - Deep

Emerson's “work and live” keeps us from scaling up; from indulging in the kind of “low curiosity” - the “culture of criticism” - that precipitates technological and cultural change.

There is a tendency, seen in Marx, to think of work as a drudgery that ultimately should be overcome, but this fails to differentiate between the alienated wage-slavery of large scale society and the more integrated and meaningful notion of work that prevailed in bygone, simpler cultures.

It is the mind which is tranquil and free from care which can roam through all the stages of its life: the minds of the preoccupied, as if harnessed in a yoke, cannot turn round and look behind them.

So their lives vanish into an abyss; and just as it is no use pouring any amount of liquid into a container without a bottom to catch and hold it, so it does not matter how much time we are given if there is nowhere for it to settle; it escapes through the cracks and holes of the mind.

And so the preoccupied are concerned only with the present, and it is so short that it cannot be grasped, and even this is stolen from them while they are involved in their many distractions.

[Seneca]
On the Shortness of Life, p.16

Action preserves a sense of self-identity that reflection dispels. When we are at work in the world we have a seeming solidity.

It is not the idle dreamer who escapes from reality. It is practical men and women, who turn to a life of action as a refuge from insignificance.

In thinking so highly of work we are aberrant. Few other cultures have ever done so. For nearly all of history and all prehistory, work was an indignity.

... the work and prayer of medieval Christendom were interspersed with festivals. The ancient Greeks sought salvation in philosophy, the Indians in meditation, the Chinese in poetry and the love of nature.

[John Gray]
Straw Dogs, p.194, 195

[...] with the new tools of observation that psychoanalysis offers, we can recognize that so-called rational behaviour is largely determined by the character structure. In our discussion of the meaning of work for modern man we have dealt with an illustration of this point.

We saw that the intense desire for unceasing activity was rooted in aloneness and anxiety.

This compulsion to work differed from the attitude towards work in other cultures, where people worked as much as it was necessary but where they were not driven by additional forces within their own character structure.

Since all normal persons to-day have about the same impulse to work and, furthermore, since this intensity of work is necessary if they want to live at all, one easily overlooks the irrational component in this trait.

[Erich Fromm]
The Fear of Freedom, p.242

As this is written, a sow bug crawls across a desk. If he is turned over on his back, one can observe the tremendous struggle that he goes through to get on his feet again.

During this interval he has a “purpose” in his life.

When he succeeds, one can almost see the look of victory on his face. Off he goes, and one can imagine him telling his tale at the next meeting of sow bugs, looked up to by the younger generation as an insect who has made it.

And yet mixed with his smugness is a little disappointment. Now that he has come out on top, life seems aimless.

[Eric Berne]
Games People Play, p.71

The East is grateful to the West for progress in medecine and increased life expectancy. These are things everyone appreciates. But on the other side, a civilization oriented almost exclusively toward that form of action on the world clearly lacks something essential that material progress can never bring - indeed, it's not what it's designed to do.

That lack appears clearly in the confusion so many minds are plunged into, in the violence that reigns in the inner cities, in the selfishness that governs so many human relationships, in the sad resignation of all those spending their last years in old people's homes, and in the despair of suicide.

If spiritual values stop being an inspiration for a society, material progress becomes a sort of facade that masks the pointlessness of life.

[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.158

Has it been observed to what extent a genuine religious life […] requires external leisure or semi-leisure, I mean leisure with a good conscience, inherited, by blood, which is not altogether unfamiliar with the aristocratic idea that work degrades - that is to say, makes soul and body common?

And that consequently modern, noisy, time-consuming, proud and stupidly proud industriousness educates and prepares precisely for ‘unbelief' more than anything else does?

Among those in Germany for example who nowadays live without religion, I find people whose 'free-thinking’ is of differing kinds and origins but above all a majority of those in whom industriousness from generation to generation has extinguished the religious instincts: so that they no longer bare any idea what religions are supposed to be for and as it were merely register their existence in the world with a kind of dumb amazement.

They feel they are already fully occupied, these worthy people, whether with their businesses or with their pleasures, not to speak of the 'fatherland and the newspapers and ‘family duties’: it seems that they have no time at all left for religion […]

[Friedrich Nietzsche]

Beyond Good and Evil, 58

Tocqueville repeatedly points out how busy Americans are, and he stresses that Americans make themselves busy. They “feel pushed by an irresistible need for action.”

Their activity, he argues, has the character of a flight from something. That something seems to be the contemplation of their own demise.

In America, he remarks, “you feel existence less,” and “you arrive at the great abyss without having had the time to notice the road you followed.”

Leisure becomes viewed as a break from paid work, which is regarded as the serious business of life. With the downgrading of leisure comes the demotion or loss of respect for the intellectual and artistic pursuits that people once used leisure to pursue.

Americans thus tend to see leisure as a problem to be solved, as time to be filled.

[Dana Jalbert Stauffer]
‘“The Most Common Sickness of Our Time”: Tocqueville on Democratic Restlessness’, The Review of Politics 80 (2018), p.450, 458

Whereas in volume 1 [Tocqueville] emphasized the efficiency and productivity that resulted from democracy’s unleashing of man’s energies, in volume 2 he points to a different consequence of social and economic mobility: no one has the time or the inclination for “meditation,” the kind of sustained attention that allows for in-depth study of a difficult subject.

[…] when confronted with literary and artistic productions, democratic peoples find it hard even to pay attention. The thought that they ought to be doing something more practical and productive is a constant drain on their focus. Moreover, democratic peoples are always in a hurry. They can give but little time and attention to each thing they pursue. “Habitual inattention,” he reflects, “is the disease of the democratic mind.”

Democratic habits of mind thus discourage people from deriving meaningful experiences from the artistic creations with which they fill up their leisure time. And yet they want to find meaning in them.

Tocqueville notes that, for the most part, Americans live orderly, productive, one might say bourgeois lives. They are practical, prudent, and focused on their work. “It is impossible to imagine anything as insignificant, dull, or encumbered with petty interests - in a word, as antipoetic - as the life of an American.”

Like all people of democracies, when they turn to literature and theater, they want to be transported. They want “deep emotions of the heart”; they long to be moved. But they are ill-equipped to be transported, because they are “impatient in their desires.” They want every moment to be profitable.

“They insist on facile beauties that yield of their own accord and can be enjoyed immediately. ... They have need of intense and rapid emotions, sudden illuminations, and glaring truths or errors to wrench them out of their own lives and plunge them instantly and almost violently into the heart of the subject.”

Needless to say, a certain skepticism about the depth of such experiences is detectible in Tocqueville’s characterization of the democratic experience of art.

[Dana Jalbert Stauffer]
‘“The Most Common Sickness of Our Time”: Tocqueville on Democratic Restlessness’, The Review of Politics 80 (2018), p.458-9

Carlyle's Puritanism discloses itself in the reminder that labor is the human lot; that the age-old dream of paradise, “where the the brooks should run wine, and the trees bend with ready-baked viands,” is an "impossible dream"; that labor alone, necessarily the “interruption of that ease, which man foolishly enough fancies to be his happiness," provides him with such ease as he ever enjoys; and that “what we call Evil” - the “dark, disordered material out of which man's Freewill has to create an edifice of order and Good” - will exist as long as humanity exists.

Work is our lot; and our works, indeed, bring order out of chaos - as long as they are carried out in good faith, with the understanding that the creative power that makes them possible comes to us as a gift of the gods.

In works lovingly and loyally conceived and carried out, we triumph over necessity, though not by surrounding ourselves with technologies that eliminate the need for labor. (Here again, the ideology of progress reveals its kinship with the nostalgic dream of a lost Eden; modern abundance, according to the myth of progress, will eventually relieve us of the need to work.)

Our triumph lies in our ability to transform labor, a necessity, into an act of faith and free will.

The illusion of self-sufficiency […] stands in the way of genuine insight and the heroic actions that issue from it. In the modern world, this illusion finds its characteristic expression in the machines by means of which mankind seeks to liberate itself from toil - that is, from the inescapable constraints of human existence.

The power and majesty of the sovereign creator of life; the inescapability of evil in the form of natural limits on human freedom; the sinfulness of man's rebellion against those limits; the moral value of work, which at once signifies man's submission to necessity and enables him to transcend it - these insights represented the heart of Calvinist theology, along with its analysis of religious experience, the psychology of despair and conversion; and they represented the heart of Carlyle's work as well, or at least of the work that continues to matter.

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.238-40

"Work and live," Emerson exhorts his reader; but honest work is hard to come by. The more we need it, the more it eludes us.

An honorable calling, which Emerson regards, in effect, as the everyday form of heroism, helps to reconcile us not merely to everyday disappointments but to the metaphysical terror and pain of existence. We are oppressed by the disparity between our oceanic desires and our satisfactions, which are measured out in "drops"; between our longing for immortality and the certainty of death; between our need to know what will happen to us after death and the impossibility of finding out.

In a faithless age, Emerson seems to suggest, the religious spirit lingers on chiefly in the "low curiosity" that makes us demand definitive answers to everything, or again in the nagging speculation about the "origin of evil” that he compares to mumps, measles, and whooping cough - adolescent diseases to which the "simple mind" is immune.

"The only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions of the senses," Emerson says, "is to forego all low curiosity, and, accepting the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature, work and live, work and live."

[Christopher Lasch]
The True and Only Heaven, p.277

The compulsion of work erodes life's durability. The time of work is a time that passes, that runs out. If the time of life fully coincides with the time of work, as is the case today, then life itself becomes radically transient.

For Hölderlin, the festival is a 'bridal festival', an exalted time humans spend with the gods. During festivals, humans come close to the gods. A festival founds a community among humans and between humans and gods: it allows humans to participate in the divine. It brings forth intensities. The gods embody precisely the intensities of human life.

Life that exhausts itself in work and production is an absolutely atrophied life.

[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.41

The question of what the work does to the worker is hardly ever asked, not to mention the question of whether the real task might not be to adapt the work to the needs of the worker rather than to demand that the worker adapt himself to the needs of the work - which means, of course, primarily to the needs of the machine

[...] we may derive the three purposes of human work as follows:

First, to provide necessary and useful goods and services.

Second, to enable every one of us to use and thereby perfect our gifts like good stewards.

Third, to do so in service to, and in cooperation with, others, so as to liberate ourselves from our inborn egocentricity.

[E.F. Schumacher]
Good Work, p. 3-4

Question Everything?

To begin with this approach can be characterized by the motto: de omnibus dubitandum; everything must be doubted, particularly the ideological concepts which are virtually shared by everybody and have consequently assumed the role of indubitable commonsensical axioms.

To 'doubt' in this sense does not imply a psychological state of inability to arrive at decisions or convictions, as is the case in obsessional doubt, but the readiness and capacity for critical questioning of all assumptions and institutions which have become idols under the name of common sense, logic, and what is supposed to be 'natural'.

This radical questioning is possible only if one does not take the concepts of one's own society or even of an entire historical period - like the Western culture since the Renaissance - for granted, and furthermore if one enlarges the scope of one's awareness and penetrates into the unconscious aspects of one's thinking.

Radical doubt is an act of uncovering and discovering; it is the dawning of the awareness that the Emperor is naked, and that his splendid garments are nothing but the products of one's fantasy.

Radical doubt is a process; a process of liberation from idolatrous thinking; a widening of awareness, of imaginative, creative vision of our possibilities and options.

All this means that humanist radicalism questions every idea and every institution from the standpoint of whether it helps or hinders man's capacity for greater aliveness and joy.

The importance of [these thoughts] is that they have a liberating effect on the mind by showing entirely new possibilities; they make the reader more alive because they open the door that leads out of the prison of routinized, sterile, preconceived notions.

[Erich Fromm]
Introduction to 'Celebration of Awareness', by Ivan Illich, p. 9-11

One Love?

Love is not primarily "caused" by a specific object, but a lingering quality in a person which is only actualized by a certain "object".

Hatred is a passionate wish for destruction; love is a passionate affirmation of an "object"; it is not an "affect" but an active striving and inner relatedness, the aim of which is the happiness, growth, and freedom of its object. It is a readiness which, in principle, can turn to any person and object including ourselves.

Exclusive love is a contradiction in itself.

To be sure, it is not accidental that a certain person becomes the "object" of manifest love [...] The important point, however, is that love for a particular "object" is only the actualization and concentration of lingering love with regard to one person; it is not, as the idea of romantic love would have it, that there is only the one person in the world whom one can love, that it is the great chance of one's life to find that person, and that love for him results in a withdrawal from all others.

The kind of love which can only be experienced with regard to one person demonstrates by this very fact that it is not love but a sado-masochistic attachment.

The basic affirmation contained in love is directed towards the beloved person as an incarnation of essentially human qualities.

Love for one person implies love for man as such.

Love for man as such is not, as it is frequently supposed to be, an abstraction coming "after" the love for a specific person, or an enlargement of the experience with a specific "object"; it is its premise, although, genetically, it is acquired in the contact with concrete individuals.

From this it follows that my own self, in principle, is as much an object of my love as another person. The affirmation of my own life, happiness, growth, freedom, is rooted in the presence of the basic readiness of and ability for such an affirmation.

If an individual has this readiness, he has it also towards himself; if he can only "love" others, he cannot love at all.

[Erich Fromm]
The Fear of Freedom, p.98-100

................................................................................................................................................................................

Love between men and women, and love for family and friends, is often possessive, exclusive, limited, and mixed with selfish feelings. There's an expectation of getting back at least as much as one gives.

Such love might seem quite deep, but it easily vanishes if it doesn't live up to expectations. What's more, the sort of love we feel for those close to us is often accompanied by a feeling of distance, or even hostility toward 'strangers', those who could pose a threat to ourselves and to those we love.

True love and true compassion can be extended to our adversaries, while love and compassion mixed with attachment can't include anyone we see as an enemy.

[...] true love can't be polarized, restricted to one or two specific beings, or contaminated with partiality. What's more, it should be completely disinterested and not expect anything in return.

Love, here, means total, unconditional love for all beings without any distinction or partiality.

One of the principal topics for meditation is to begin by thinking of someone you love deeply, and letting that feeling of love and generosity fill your heart and mind. Then you break out of the cage that restricts that love to a particular person and extend it to all those for whom your feelings are neutral or indifferent. Finally, you include in your love all those you consider as enemies. That's true love.

[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.193-4

................................................................................................................................................................................

Related posts:-
Everything is Connected
True Love
Positive Space
Giving and Receiving
Alone Together
What are the people saying?
Communal Benefits
Firm Foundations
Everything is alive
Selfishness and Self-love
Rights and Responsibilities
Love Your Self
Playing the Art Game | Erich Fromm: Spontaneity

Love Your Self

Selfishness is not identical with self-love but with its very opposite.

Selfishness is one kind of greediness. Like all greediness, it contains an insatiability, as a consequence of which there is never any real satisfaction. Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.

Close observation shows that while the selfish person is always anxiously concerned with himself, he is never satisfied, is always restless, always driven by the fear of not getting enough, of missing something, of being deprived of something. He is filled with burning envy of anyone who might have more.

If we observe closer still, especially the unconscious dynamics, we find that this type of person is basically not fond of himself, but deeply dislikes himself.

Selfishness is rooted in this very lack of fondness for oneself.

The person who is not fond of himself, who does not approve of himself, is in constant anxiety concerning his own self. He has not the inner security which can exist only on the basis of genuine fondness and affirmation. He must be concerned about himself, greedy to get everything for himself, since basically he lacks security and satisfaction.

The same holds true with the so-called narcissistic person, who is not so much concerned with getting things for himself as with admiring himself.

While on the surface it seems that these persons are very much in love with themselves, they are actually not fond of themselves, and their narcissism - like selfishness - is an overcompensation for the basic lack of self-love.

[Erich Fromm]
The Fear of Freedom, p.98-100

................................................................................................................................................................................

To be concerned for another is to be present to them in the form of an absence, a certain self-forgetful attentiveness. If one is loved or trusted in return, it is largely this which gives one the self-confidence to forget about oneself, a perilous matter otherwise.

We need to think about ourselves partly because of fear, which the assurance which flows from being trusted allows us to overcome.

[Terry Eagleton]
After Theory

................................................................................................................................................................................

Related posts:-
One Love?
True Love
Positive Space
Talk Up, Feel Down
Firm Foundations
Forget Your Self

Young and Free

The suppression of spontaneous feelings, and thereby of the development of genuine individuality, starts very early, as a matter of fact with the earliest training of a child.

This is not to say that training must inevitably lead to suppression of spontaneity if the real aim of education is to further the inner independence and individuality of the child, its growth and integrity.

In our culture, however, education too often results in the elimination of spontaneity and in the substitution of original psychic acts by superimposed feelings, thoughts, and wishes. (By original I do not mean, let me repeat, that an idea has not been thought before by someone else, but that it originates in the individual, that it is the result of his own activity and in this sense is his thought.)

Feeling

... most children have a certain measure of hostility and rebelliousness as a result of their conflicts with a surrounding world that tends to block their expansiveness and to which, as the weaker opponent, they usually have to yield. It is one of the essential aims of the educational process to eliminate this antagonistic reaction.

... early in his education, the child is taught to have feelings that are not at all "his"; particularly is he taught to like people, to be uncritically friendly to them, and to smile.

What education may not have accomplished is usually done by social pressure in later life. If you do not smile you are judged lacking in a "pleasing personality" - and you need to have a pleasing personality if you want to sell your services, whether as a waitress, a salesman, or a physician. Only those at the bottom of the social pyramid, who sell nothing bit their physical labour, and those at the very top do not need to be particularly "pleasant".

Friendliness, cheerfulness, and everything that a smile is supposed to express, become automatic responses which one turns on and off like an electric switch.

To be sure, in many instances the person is aware of merely making a gesture; in most cases, however, he loses that awareness and thereby the ability to discriminate between the pseudo feeling and spontaneous friendliness.

Thinking

From the very start of education original thinking is discouraged and ready-made thoughts are put into people's heads.

How this is done with young children is easy enough to see. They are filled with curiosity about the world, they want to grasp it physically as well as intellectually. They want to know the truth, since that is the safest way to orient themselves in a strange and powerful world. Instead they are not taken seriously, and it does not matter whether this attitude takes the form of open disrespect or of the subtle condescension which is usual towards all who have no power (such as children or sick people).

Although this treatment by itself offers strong discouragement to independent thinking, there is a worse handicap: the insincerity - often unintentional - which is typical of the average adult's behaviour towards a child.

This insincerity consists partly in the fictitious picture of the world which the child is given ... Besides this general misrepresentation of the world there are the many specific facts which, for various personal reasons, adults do not want children to know.

From a bad temper, which is rationalized as justified dissatisfaction with the child's behaviour, to concealment of the parents' sexual activities and their quarrels, the child is "not supposed to know" and his inquiries meet with hostile or polite discouragement.

--

... [Small children] have an ability to feel and think that which is really theirs; this spontaneity shows in what they say and think, in the feelings that are expressed in their faces.

It appeals profoundly to everyone who is not so dead himself that he has lost the ability to perceive it. As a matter of fact, there is nothing more attractive and convincing than spontaneity whether it is to be found in a child, in an artist, or in those individuals who cannot thus be grouped according to age or profession.

Most of us can observe at least moments of our own spontaneity which are at the same time moments of genuine happiness. Whether it be the fresh and spontaneous perception of a landscape, or the dawning of some truth as the result of our thinking, or a sensuous pleasure that is not stereotyped, or the welling up of love for another person - in these moments we all know what a spontaneous act is and may have some vision of what human life could be if these experiences were not such rare and uncultivated occurrences.

[Erich Fromm]
The Fear of Freedom, p.208-10, 213, 224

Related posts:-
Spontaneous, Intimate and Aware!
Silent Violence
Learn, to be mindless
Life in (Spontaneous) Action
Creative Living
Be Yourself
A Fresh Challenge

Information / Knowledge

Information - Knowledge

Quantity - Quality

Data - Narrative

Separate - Connected

I want to mention briefly some of the educational methods used to-day which in effect further discourage original thinking. One is the emphasis on knowledge of facts, or I should rather say on information.

The pathetic superstition prevails that by knowing more and more facts one arrives at knowledge of reality.

Hundreds of scattered and unrelated facts are dumped into the heads of students; their time and energy are taken up by learning more and more facts so that there is little left for thinking.

To be sure, thinking without a knowledge of facts remains empty and fictitious; but "information" alone can be just as much of an obstacle to thinking as the lack of it.

[Erich Fromm]
The Fear of Freedom, p.213-14

In the spectacular society, knowledge is not used anymore to question, analyze, resolve contradictions, but to assuage reality.

Taken from Wikipedia page on Situationist International: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International

Because of the long hysteresis of the mode of acquisition, the same educational qualifications may guarantee quite different relations to culture - but decreasingly so, as one rises in the educational hierarchy and as more value comes to be set on ways of using knowledge and less on merely knowing.

[Pierre Bourdieu]
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, p.80

J.F. - Yes. Thanks to the emergence of science, the conviction that something exists that we can call objective became more widely accessible. This was knowledge open to everyone, not only the sage.

M. - Spiritual knowledge is open to everyone willing to take the trouble to explore it. That's how you become a sage. Otherwise, 'objective' knowledge, immediately accessible to anyone without them putting any effort into it themselves, can only be knowledge's lowest common denominator. You could call it a quantitative approach rather than a qualitative one.

[Jean-Francois Revel & Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.327

It's true that biology and theoretical physics have brought us some fascinating knowledge about the origins of life and the formation of the universe. But does knowing such things help us elucidate the basic mechanisms of happiness and suffering?

It's important not to lose sight of the goals that we set ourselves. To know the exact shape and dimensions of the Earth is undeniably progress. But whether it's round or flat doesn't make a great deal of difference to the meaning of existence. Whatever progress is made in medicine, we can only temporarily treat sufferings that never stop coming back, and culminate in death.

We can end a conflict, or a war, but there will always be more, unless people's minds change.

[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.17

Science covers such a vast field of discovery that it's captivated the interest and energy of many of the brightest minds of our times. It's like a never-ending gold rush.

The risk of science, real science, is that it gets too carried away by its analytical momentum and goes too far, so that knowledge gets too horizontally spread out. There's an Arab proverb that says once you begin counting you'll never be able to stop.

[Matthieu Ricard]
The Monk and the Philosopher, p.218

Information is not knowledge.

It is of no importance whatsoever that one should remember the date of Caesar's death or the date of the Battle of Waterloo. One might be able to answer every question in the encyclopedia and yet have no knowledge.

A student who received a low intelligence rating because he could not remember the name of the river which flowed into the Caspian Sea, and the capital of Finland, might be consoled by the probability that Shakespeare or Dickens might also not be able to answer those questions.

[...] To remember and repeat, through experimentation, reasoning and assembling other brain recordings of observed effects, does not constitute knowledge. It but indicates cleverness.

This highly technical world of many skills is very much more the result of great cleverness in the assembling of observed effects of motion than it is the result of knowledge.

[Lao Russell]
God Will Work With You But Not For You, p. 57

When the world begins to acquire knowledge it will show the effects of it in human relations instead of chemical and metallurgical relations.

The human race has not yet acquired sufficient knowledge to know the law which makes it possible for man to live with man - or to know the relation of woman to man. It is too concerned with the application of the many physical laws to the relation of physical matter to give thought to God's one and only law which governs spiritual relations.

[Lao Russell]
God Will Work With You But Not For You, p. 57-8

DEFINITION of 'Fiat Money'

Currency that a government has declared to be legal tender, but is not backed by a physical commodity.

The value of fiat money is derived from the relationship between supply and demand rather than the value of the material that the money is made of. Historically, most currencies were based on physical commodities such as gold or silver, but fiat money is based solely on faith.

The word education is widely used and highly valued in American society, but it is suspect in Amish society.

Education to them signifies self-advancement, independence, obtaining power over others, and disregard for the simple life.

True education, by Amish standards, is "the cultivation of humility, simple living, and submission to the will of God."

[John A. Hostetler]
Amish Society, p. 171

The Amish are committed to the assumption that learning should be practical, related to life, and should lead to social responsibility. They hold that schooling that is committed primarily to abstract and analytical learning is useless to them.

Social cohesiveness, rather than intellectual creativity or critical analysis, is the goal of Amish schooling.

Amish education emphasizes cooperation, responsibility, and humility. Facts that are learned, are learned thoroughly.

Study, reasoning, exegesis, and record-keeping lead to a way of thinking that is primarily linear in emphasis. Instead of collective unity there is a multiplicity of thought, which leads to individualistic revelations and knowledge.

[John A. Hostetler]
Amish Society, p. 377, 390

Education really meant the teaching of town things to country people who did not want to learn them. I suggest that education should now mean the teaching of country things to town people who do want to learn them.

[G. K. Chesterton]

The Outline of Sanity, p. 104

That which is simply ‘learned’ from the outside is quite valueless in the former case, however great may be the quantity of the notions accumulated (for here too profane ‘learning’ shows clearly the mark of quantity); what counts is, on the contrary, an 'awakening’ of the latent possibilities that the being carries in itself (which is, in the final analysis, the real significance of the Platonic ʻreminiscence’).

[René Guénon]

The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, p. 59

This, then, is the state of affairs: Modern science has led to a prodigious increase of information about phenomena in formerly unexplored or neglected fields, but in so doing it has not brought man any closer to the depths of reality, but has rather distanced and estranged him from them; and what nature “really” is, according to science, escapes any concrete intuition.

From this point of view, the latest science has no advantage over earlier, materialistic science. The atoms of yesteryear and the mechanistic conception of the universe at least allowed one to represent something, in however primitive a fashion; but the entities of the latest mathematical physics serve to represent absolutely nothing.

They are simply the stitches of a net that has been fabricated and perfected not for the sake of knowing in a concrete, intuitive, and living sense—the only sense that would matter to an undegenerate humanity—but in order to gain an ever greater power, yet still an external one, over nature, whose depths remain closed to man and as mysterious as ever.

Nature's mysteries have simply been covered over, and attention diverted from them by the spectacular successes of technology and industry, where one no longer tries to know the world, but to change it for the purposes of an earthbound humanity - following the program explicitly laid out by Karl Marx.

After it has been said that energy, not matter, exists, that we live not in a Euclidean, three-dimensional space but in a curved space of four or more dimensions, and so forth, things remain as they were; my actual experience has not changed a whit, and the significance of what I see-light, the sun, fire, seas, sky, flowering plants, dying beings—the ultimate significance of every process and phenomenon is no more transparent to me.

One cannot begin to speak of transcendence, of a deepened knowledge in spiritual or truly intellectual terms. One can only speak of a quantitative extension of notions about other sectors of the external world, which aside from practical utility has only curiosity value.

[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p. 137-8

If you asked me to describe the rising philosophy of the day, I'd say it is data-ism.

We now have the ability to gather huge amounts of data. This ability seems to carry with it certain cultural assumptions - that everything that can be measured should be measured; that data is a transparent and reliable lens that allows us to filter out emotionalism and ideology; that data will help us do remarkable things - like foretell the future [...]

[David Brooks]
'The Philosophy of Data', New York Times, 4 February 2013

Statistics and Enlightenment are one and the same for Voltaire. Statistics means setting objective knowledge founded on, and driven by, numbers in opposition to mythological narration.

[Byung-Chul Han]
Psychopolitics, p.57

Nested in Tradition
Knowing your place
Life amongst the rubble
Welcome to La-La Land
The Tyranny of Novelty
Tasteful Distance

Explain Away

A System of Control

Constellating

Ideas with Weight

Character in the dynamic sense of analytical psychology is the specific form in which human energy is shaped by the dynamic adaptation of human needs to the particular mode of existence of a given society.

Character in its turn determines the thinking, feeling, and acting of individuals.

To see this is somewhat difficult with regard to our thoughts, since we all tend to share the conventional belief that thinking is an exclusively intellectual act and independent of the psychological structure of the personality.

This is not so, however, and the less so the more our thoughts deal with ethical, philosophical, political, psychological or social problems rather then with the empirical manipulation of concrete objects.

Such thoughts, aside from the purely logical elements that are involved in the act of thinking, are greatly determined by the personality structure of the person who thinks. This holds true for the whole of a doctrine or of a theoretical system as well as for a single concept, like love, justice, equality, sacrifice. Each such concept and each doctrine has an emotional matrix and this matrix is rooted in the character structure of the individual.

... [An example would be] the emotional roots of early Protestantism.

The fact that ideas have an emotional matrix is of the utmost importance because it is the key to the understanding of the spirit of a culture. Different societies or classes within a society have a specific social character, and on its basis different ideas develop and become powerful.

Thus, for instance, the idea of work and success as the main aims of life were able to become powerful and appealing to modern man on the basis of his aloneness and doubt; but propaganda for the idea of ceaseless effort and striving for success addressed to the Pueblo Indians or to Mexican peasants would fall completely flat. These people with a different kind of character structure would hardly understand what a person setting forth such aims was talking about even if they understood his language.

In the same way, Hitler and that part of the German population which has the same character structure quite sincerely feel that anybody who thinks that wars can be abolished is either a complete fool or a plain liar. On the basis of their social character, to them life without suffering and disaster is as little comprehensible as freedom and equality.

Ideas often are consciously accepted by certain groups, which, on account of the peculiarities of their social character, are not really touched by them; such ideas remain a stock of conscious convictions, but people fail to act according to them in a critical hour.

The vast majority of German workers before Hitler's coming into power voted for Socialist or Communist Parties and believed in the ideas of those parties; that is, the range of these ideas among the working class was extremely wide. The weight of these ideas, however, was in no proportion to their range.

They had deep-seated respect and longing for established authority. The emphasis of socialism on individual independence versus authority, on solidarity versus individualistic seclusion, was not what many of these workers really wanted on the basis of their personality structure.

... [Protestant and Calvinist] ideas were powerful forces within the adherents of the new religion, because they appealed to needs and anxieties that were present in the character structure of the people to whom they were addressed.

In other words, ideas can become powerful forces, but only to the extent to which they are answers to specific human needs prominent in a given social character.

[Erich Fromm]
The Fear of Freedom, p.239-42

Related posts:-
Guiding Fiction
Who's steering the ship?

Be Yourself

................................................................................................................................................................................

Cohle: This place is like somebody's memory of the town, and the memory's fading. It's like there was never anything here but jungle.

Hart: Stop saying shit like that. It's unprofessional.

Cohle: Oh, is that what I'm going for here?

Hart: I just want you to stop saying odd shit, like you smell a psycho's fear or you're in someone's faded memory of a town. Just stop.

Cohle: Well, given how long it's taken for me to reconcile my nature, I can't figure I'd forgo it on your account, Marty.

Dialogue, True Detective

................................................................................................................................................................................

While spontaneity is a relatively rare phenomenon in our culture, we are not entirely devoid of it ... we know of individuals who are - or have been - spontaneous, whose thinking, feeling, and acting were the expression of their selves and not of an automaton.

These individuals are known mostly to us as artists.

As a matter of fact, the artist can be defined as an individual who can express himself spontaneously. If this were the definition of an artist - Balzac defined him just in that way - then certain philosophers and scientists have to be called artists too, while others are as different from them as an old-fashioned photographer from a creative painter.

There are other individuals who, though lacking the ability - or perhaps merely the training - for expressing themselves in an objective medium as the artist does, possess the same spontaneity.

The position of the artist is vulnerable, though, for it is really only the successful artist whose individuality or spontaneity is respected; if he does not succeed in selling his art, he remains to his contemporaries a crank, a "neurotic". The artist in this matter is in a similar position to that of the revolutionary throughout history. The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

[Erich Fromm]
The Fear of Freedom, p.223-4

................................................................................................................................................................................

I'm not always happy, but I'm always me. And they can like it or lump it. Life's too short to spend your time being something you don't want to be. Like the old saying, "To thine own self be true. "

I'm true to my self and my own nature. I think that's all anyone has a right to ask of me.

[Walter L. Williams, quoting an unnamed Mohave berdache]
The Spirit and the Flesh, p. 229

................................................................................................................................................................................

Related posts:-
Life in (Spontaneous) Action
Creative Living
Young and Free
Walter
Sell Out
Twist Your Melon
Wild Things
What do you think?
The Attainment of Autonomy
Leaving Home
Walk a Straight Line
Go Your Own Way
Do It Yourself

Life in (Spontaneous) Action

Spontaneous activity is the one way in which man can overcome the terror of aloneness without sacrificing the integrity of his self; for in the spontaneous realization of the self man unites himself anew with the world - with man, nature, and himself.

Love is the foremost component of such spontaneity; not love as the dissolution of the self in another person, not love as the possession of another person, but love as spontaneous affirmation of others, as the union of the individual with others on the basis of the preservation of the individual self.

Work is another component; not work as a compulsive activity in order to escape aloneness, not work as a relationship to nature which is partly one of dominating her, partly one of worship of and enslavement by the very products of man's hands, but work as creation in which man becomes one with nature in the act of creation.

The basic dichotomy that is inherent in freedom - the birth of individuality and the pain of aloneness - is dissolved on a higher plane by man's spontaneous action.

... the self is as strong as it is active. There is no genuine strength in possession as such, neither of material property nor of mental qualities like emotions or thoughts.

Ours is only that to which we are genuinely related by our creative activity, be it a person or an inanimate object. Only those qualities that result from our spontaneous activity give strength to the self and thereby form the basis of its integrity. The inability to act spontaneously, to express what one genuinely feels and thinks, and the resulting necessity to present a pseudo self to other and oneself, are the root of inferiority and weakness.

[Erich Fromm]
The Fear of Freedom, p.224-6

................................................................................................................................................................................

Related posts:-
Process vs Outcome
Some thoughts on creativity
Walter
Sell Out
Ahead of the pack

Obey Yourself

Analysis shows that conscience rules with a harshness as great as external authorities, and furthermore that frequently the contents of the orders issued by man's conscience are ultimately not governed by demands of the individual self but by social demands which have assumed the dignity of ethical norms.

The rulership of conscience can be even harsher than that of external authorities, since the individual feels its orders to be his own; how can he rebel against himself?

Instead of overt authority, "anonymous" authority reigns. It is disguised as common sense, science, psychic health, normality, public opinion. It does not demand anything except the self-evident. It seems to use no pressure but only mild persuasion.

Whether a mother says to her daughter, "I know you will not like to go out with that boy", or an advertisement suggests, "Smoke this brand of cigarettes - you will like their coolness", it is the same atmosphere of subtle suggestion which actually pervades our whole social life.

Anonymous authority is more effective than overt authority, since one never suspects that there is any order which one is expected to follow. In external authority it is clear that there is an order and who gives it; one can fight against the authority, and in this fight personal independence and moral courage can develop.

[Erich Fromm]
The Fear of Freedom, p.143-4

Well Adapted?

Most psychiatrists take the structure of their own society so much for granted that to them the person who is not well adapted assumes the stigma of being less valuable.

On the other hand, the well adapted person is supposed to be the more valuable person in terms of a scale of human values.

If we differentiate the two concepts of normal and neurotic, we come to the following conclusion: the person who is normal in terms of being well adapted is often less healthy than the neurotic person in terms of human values.

Often he is well adapted only at the expense of having given up his self in order to become more or less the person he believes he is expected to be. All genuine individuality and spontaneity may have been lost.

On the other hand, the neurotic person can be characterized as somebody who was not ready to surrender completely in the battle for his self ... from the standpoint of human values, he is less crippled than the kind of normal person who has lost his individuality altogether.

... there is a discrepancy between the aims of the smooth functioning of society and of the full development of the individual.

[Erich Fromm]
The Fear of Freedom, p.119-20

Related posts:-
Society, you need therapy
Status Quo
Silent Violence
Learn, to be mindless
The Inner Light

Ruptures

The rupture of the great man is a return of the primal energies which civilisation denies. The longer they are held at bay, the more they ratchet up. The great man is a catalyst, or focal point: he fuses existing "contradictions" into a "ruptural force."

A brutal rupture - of ecstatic, aggressive madness - laying waste to civilised man. An "initiation into a new kind of life." The return of the gods, of barbarian rites. "Spark." Renewal.

An integrated tradition has less repression, thus less need for course-correcting 'ruptures'.

Hillman: The madness wants to be let in the room that it has been excluded from. It wants to come in.

Ventura: No matter what the madness is - we're not only talking about love now - it wants to come in.

Hillman: Partly because -

Ventura: - it's been excluded.

Hillman: That's Freud: it's repressed.

Ventura: I think it's more than "repressed"; I don't buy that.

Hillman: Because that would suggest it would go away once it comes in?

Ventura: Right.

Hillman: You don't believe that.

Ventura: I think the madness is much stronger than that. It does not go away once it comes in. Freud may be right that we constructed civilization to keep the madness out, as a collective; and, with our nice little homes and lives, we try to do the same thing privately, keep it out; but it does not go away. It's right there, always, waiting, trying to get in. And once it comes in, it isn't easily appeased.

Hillman: In other words, you can't just give it a nice chair and a cup of tea and it sits down.

Ventura: You can't say, "I acknowledge you, I own you."

Hillman: "I respect you."

Ventura: " I respect you, I love that part of myself that is you ... as long as you don't make any fucking trouble."

Hillman: "Or even if you make a little bit of trouble, I acknowledge you because really you're part of my creativity."

Ventura: But the madness - at least my madness - doesn't care about being part of my creativity! Because in fact creativity is a fundamentally sane act, and the madness wants disruption.

Hillman: From its point of view, it's walking in the door with a message, but you sit in the room and it knocks the door down and you think, "Shit, this is only bringing me disruption," but what does it carry in its hand? I think what it's walking in the door with are the Gods. I think the madness is the messenger of the Gods. And that's Plato, not Freud. Different forms of what Plato called mania, each of them associated with a different God.

So the madness is calling us to the Gods, in one way or another either as a frenzy or as love or as a ritual initiation into a new kind of life. Something more important than usual life is going on. It is drawing us out of one thing and toward something else.

Ventura: ... it seems the starting place for any analysis of this culture seems to be the concept of a safe white slate. Anything that is not on this safe white slate is a "contributing factor" to evil and madness. Anything that disrupts a normal safe day - where this normal safe day ever was in history, I don't know - but anything that disrupts it is one of these contributing factors to madness. There's something wrong with that kind of thinking.

Hillman: I think in order to protect yourself against insanity, you must every day propitiate madness. You must take your steps toward madness, you must open the door toward the mania, let it in. That would account in my mind for a great many forms of what we call addiction. These are ways of trying to open the door and to let the madness in. Whether it's getting drunk on a Saturday night or sitting for hours drinking alone in a melancholy to let Saturn in, whatever - these are modes of letting the madness in. And in a sense they keep us from going insane, and we don't know that distinction.

Ventura (singing): "I've always been crazy but it's kept me from going insane." That's a Waylon Jennings song.

Hillman: Crazy means "cracked," the cracks that let things in. It's not smooth, it's not safe. So what do you do, then, to let the madness in? What do you do to keep from going insane?

Ventura: What do I do?

Hillman: Yeah, what do you do?

Ventura: You mean other than hard whiskey, fast women, and loud music? Or is it fast cars and loud women? Hard women and straight whiskey? Could you repeat the question?

Hillman: I think you do one more thing, and I think I do too, and I think that's part of what this book is about - that we try to go out on a limb.

Ventura: Oh yes.

Hillman: We try to go to unsafe places. We risk. With our minds, we risk.

It makes me most happy when I can go to the farthest out. Or as one writer said to me, it is not enough to go out on a limb, you've got to be willing to saw it off.

[James Hillman & Michael Ventura]
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse, p.167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172

It would seem the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed.

By this we do not refer to individual frustrations of this or that instinctive desire but to the thwarting of the whole of life, the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man's sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities.

Life has an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived. It seems that if this tendency is thwarted the energy directed towards life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed towards destruction.

The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive towards destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.

Those individual and social conditions that make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which the particular hostile tendencies - either against others or against oneself - are nourished.

[Erich Fromm]
The Fear of Freedom, p.157-8

Within a given collectivity, the collective shadow is the same. That is, in each individual it contains all that is not acceptable in the cultural milieu to which that individual belongs.

The collective shadow is the dark other side of the collective ideal.

During the anti-sexual era of Queen Victoria the collective shadow showed itself in the blossoming of pornographic literature.

The personal shadow works destructively against ego-ideals; the collective shadow tries to demolish collective ideals. Both these shadows have a very valuable function.

Both ego and collective ideals must be repeatedly subjected to attack, since they are false and one-sided.

Were they not continually being eaten into from the depths of the human soul, there would be neither individual nor collective development.

... only he who is capable of saying "No" to the world is also capable of affirming it. Only he who has the freedom to destroy can freely turn to the world with love.

[Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig]
Power In The Helping Professions, p.112-3, 116

That's the real reason for censorship, whether it's the direct censorship of the state or academia's censorship-by-dismissal: the less you allow to be expressed, the more alone and cut off people feel.

When certain feelings are unexpressed in the culture, people think those feelings are bad or crazy, and so they trust their feelings less; hence they're more vulnerable to pressure from above.

[James Hillman]
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse, p.87, 88

[…] soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the anti fragility, from children’s lives, move them away from the ecological and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. Good students, but nerds - that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity.

As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning - actually I believe that one can be an intellectual without being a nerd, provided one has a private library instead of a classroom, and spends time as an aimless (but rational) flaneur benefiting from what randomness can give us inside and outside the library.

Provided we have the right type of rigour, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock.

It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life - with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]
Antifragile, p. 242

Civil wars and palace coups will always continue, but the spirit of man is broken by habituation to an overlong domestication, and nothing genuinely great in body or spirit takes place again after a while.

It is the very character of domestic life to present the world as an enclosed owned space, and, although mankind adapts itself on the whole to this condition, both biologically and culturally, yet there remains a glimmer of the opposite tendency in even the lowliest.

[Bronze Age Pervert]

Bronze Age Mindset, p. 96

Masculinity has an ideal that corresponds to it, of noncastration - someone who escapes lack, who is all-powerful, non-lacking […] This figure of the ideal is thus necessary to create the whole.

The great figure of this is […] John Wayne. John Wayne is perfectly non-lacking. Masculinity is always constituted in relationship to this ideal man. But, at the same time, there is an absolute prohibition against being the man.

All men measure themselves in relationship to the ideal man and come up short; but at the same time, they experience a prohibition, because this man is aggressive, violent, and doesn’t really belong in society.

We can see this nicely in the final scene from The Searchers. He rescues the niece, he brings her back, the family is constituted, its returned to its wholeness, civilisation is restored - he has to be exiled. The ideal man cannot exist within civilisation. This is a theme explored extensively by the Western.

[Todd McGowan]
Formulas of Sexuation, YouTube

We are the radical right, but put more precisely we are the Odinic right. We are both creator and destroyer. We are beyond the pale, here to raze a decadent civilization to the ground.

We are the Romulus here to clear a path for a healthy Numa to reign for a thousand years, and if we succeed, we will salt the earth around liberalism so completely that not a trace will be left.

[Imperium Press]
‘The Odinic vs. the Tyrrhic’, Imperium Press, Substack

“If this contradiction is to become ‘active’ in the strongest sense, to become a ruptural principle, there must be an accumulation of ‘circumstances’ and ‘currents’ . . . [that] ‘ fuse’ into a ruptural unity . . . [to launch] an assault on a regime [against] which its ruling classes are unable to defend . . . an accumulation of contradictions.”

When ‘contradictions’ converge into this unstoppable maelstrom they are said to be ‘overdetermined’. A single contradiction, or even multiple contradictions, alone are not enough to create these big moments of historical change or ‘ruptures’; there needs to be ‘a vast accumulation of “contradictions” . . . [at] play in the same court, some of which are radically heterogeneous’.

[...] under normal circumstances contradictions are ‘overdetermined’ into being neutralized and displaced, effectively lulled into banal ‘non-antagonism’, by the dominant ideology. The key is whether or not they are ‘fused’ together and activated – overdetermined by an exceptional set of historical circumstances – to become antagonistic towards the dominant power.

It is important to grasp this idea of ‘ruptural’ or ‘epistemic’ breaks in history to understand both Foucault, who takes it almost wholesale from Althusser, and the new historicists and cultural materialists who follow him.

History is not continuous, but a series of ‘ruptures’ […] In order for one of these ruptures to take place, the many contradictions between ISAs and in ideology must be ‘overdetermined’ by becoming ‘fused’ together to create an irresistible force against which the ruling class has no defence.

[Academic Agent]
‘Defining Ideology, Part 1’, The Forbidden Texts, Substack

[...] the danger of the homme fatal, as embodied in today’s boyish male hustler, is that he will leave, disappearing to other loves, other lands. He is a rambler, a cowboy and sailor.

The feminine is that-which-is-sought; it recedes beyond our grasp. Hence there is always a feminine element in the beautiful young man of male homosexuality. The feminine is the ever-elusive, a silver shimmer on the horizon.

The beautiful boy of the sonnets is asocial, selfabsorbed.

Shakespeare exhorts him to marry and beget heirs lest his patrician line end (Sonnets 1–17). Ironically, as I see it, if the youth were to make the social commitment of marriage, he would immediately lose his glamourous narcissistic beauty, which is produced by his removal from time and community.

I have stressed that the Apollonian mode is harsh, absolutist, and separatist. Apollonian beings are incapable of Dionysian participation: they cannot “take part,” since Apollonianism is coldly unitary, indivisible.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.15, 32, 206

The “great man” theory of history was not as simplistic as claimed; we have barely recovered from a world war in which this theory was proved evilly true. One man can change the course of history, for good or ill.

Marxism is a flight from the magic of person and the mystique of hierarchy. It distorts the character of western culture, which is based on charismatic power of person. Marxism can work only in pre-industrial societies of homogeneous populations.

[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.36

Nietzsche's portrait makes it clear that he who transcends is wanting in respect of both relationships and activities [...] if the account of the virtues which I have defended can be sustained, it is the isolation and selfabsorption of 'the great man' which thrust upon him the burden of being his own self-sufficient moral authority.

To cut oneself off from shared activity in which one has initially to learn obediently as an apprentice learns, to isolate oneself from the communities which find their point and purpose in such activities, will be to debar oneself from finding any good outside of oneself.

It will be to condemn oneself to that moral solipsism which constitutes Nietzschean greatness.

The concept of the Nietzschean 'great man' is also a pseudo-concept, although not always perhaps – unhappily - what I earlier called a fiction. It represents individualism's final attempt to escape from its own consequences.

And the Nietzschean stance turns out not to be a mode of escape from or an alternative to the conceptual scheme of liberal individualist modernity, but rather one more representative moment in its internal unfolding. And we may therefore expect liberal individualist societies to breed 'great men' from time to time. Alas!

So it was right to see Nietzsche as in some sense the ultimate antagonist of the Aristotelian tradition. But it now turns out to be the case that in the end the Nietzschean stance is only one more facet of that very moral culture of which Nietzsche took himself to be an implacable critic.

It is therefore after all the case that the crucial moral opposition is between liberal individualism in some version or other and the Aristotelian tradition in some version or other.

[Alasdair MacIntyre]
After Virtue, p.300

Heroism

Still Waters

Top-down / Bottom-up