There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.
The threat, thus, in anxiety is not necessarily more intense than fear. Rather, it attacks us on a deeper level. The threat must be to something in the ‘core’ or ‘essence’ of the personality. My self-esteem, my experience of myself as a person, my feeling of being of worth – all of these are imperfect descriptions of what is threatened.
But, as is obvious to any observer, many people are thrown into anxiety by situations which are not objectively threatening either in kind or degree. The person may very often state himself that the occasion of his anxiety is a relatively minor event, that his apprehension is ‘silly,’ and he may be angry with himself for letting such a minor thing bother him; but he still feels it.
Just as the poet is a menace to conformity, he is also a constant threat to political dictators. He is always on the verge of blowing up the assembly line of political power.
Whether we are ‘Freudians’ or not, as I am not, we are surely all post-Freudian. He set the tone for vast changes in our culture.
Much self-condemnation, thus, is a cloak for arrogance. Those who think they overcome pride by condemning themselves could well ponder Spinoza’s remark, ‘One who despises himself is the nearest to a proud man’. In ancient Athens, when a politician was trying to get the votes of the working class by appearing very humble in a tattered coat with big holes in it, Socrates unmasked his hypocrisy by exclaiming, ‘Your vanity shows forth from every whole in your coat’.
The cultural past is rigidly deterministic to the extent that the individual is unaware of it. An analogy, of course, is found in any psychoanalytic treatment: the patient is rigidly determined by past experiences and previously developed patterns to the extent that he is unaware of these experiences and patterns.
Suppose the apprehension of beauty is itself a way to truth? Suppose that “elegance” – as the word is used by physicists to describe their discoveries – is a key to ultimate reality?
The “stuffed men” are bound to become more lonely no matter how much they “lean together”; for hollow people do not have a base from which to learn to love.
In anxiety, however, we are threatened without knowing what steps to take to meet the danger. Anxiety is the feeling of being “caught,” “overwhelmed”; and instead of becoming sharper, our perceptions generally become blurred or vague.
Countless times a week, furthermore, he receives proof in his consulting work that when men at last accept the fact that they cannot successfully lie to themselves, and at last learn to take themselves seriously, they discover previously unknown and often remarkable recuperative powers within themselves.
But no values are effective, in a person or a society, except as there exists in the person the prior capacity to do the valuing, that is, the capacity actively to choose and affirm the values by which he lives. This the individual must do, and in this way he will help lay the groundwork for the new constructive society which will eventually come out of this disturbed time, as the Renaissance came out of the disintegration of the Middle Ages.
It takes a strong self – that is, a strong sense of personal identity – to relate fully to nature without being swallowed up.
A young man came for psychotherapy because, though he was intellectually very competent and seemed superficially to be very successful, his spontaneity was almost completely blocked.
If, when he first begins tentatively to say “No,” his parents beat him down rather than love and encourage him, he thereafter will say “No” not as a form of true independent strength but as a mere rebellion.
Norman Cousins, endeavoring in his essay Modern Man Is Obsolete to express the deepest feelings of intelligent people at that staggering historical moment, wrote not about how to protect one’s self from atomic radiation, or how to meet political problems, or the tragedy of man’s self-destruction. Instead his editorial was a meditation on loneliness. “All man’s history,” he proclaimed, “is an endeavor to shatter his loneliness.
It is easier in our society to be naked physically than to be naked psychologically or spiritually – easier to share our body than to share our fantasies, hopes, fears, and aspirations, which are felt to be more personal and the sharing of which is experienced as making us more vulnerable.
The odd belief prevails in our culture that a thing or experience is not real if we cannot make it mathematical, and somehow it must be real if we can reduce it to numbers. But this means making an abstraction out of it – mathematics is the abstract par excellence, which is indeed its glory and the reason for its great usefulness.
Hence Kierkegaard and Nietszche and Camus and Sartre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.
It is the seeming contradiction that we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong.
Eros is the center of the vitality of a culture – its heart and soul.