Man's Search for Himself

by Rollo May

“I treat my enemy well in order ‘to heap coals of fire on his head.’”

It is thus crucial that we be able to confront our hatred openly. And it is even more essential that we face our resentment, since that is the form hatred generally takes in polite and civilized life.

“ . . . ressentiment is at the core of our morals,” and that “Christian love is the mimicry of impotent hatred. . . .”* Anyone in our day who wishes an illustration of so-called “morality” motivated by resentment need look no farther than gossip in a small town.

Hatred and resentment should be used as motivations to re-establish one’s genuine freedom: one will not transform those destructive emotions into constructive ones until he does this.

Hatred and resentment temporarily preserve the person’s inner freedom, but sooner or later he must use the hatred to establish his freedom and dignity in reality, else his hatred will destroy himself. The aim, as one person put it in a poem, is “To hate in order to win the new.”

Freedom means openness, a readiness to grow; it means being flexible, ready to change for the sake of greater human values.

society which gives the maximum opportunity for each person in it to realize himself, to develop and use his potentialities and to labor as a human being of dignity giving to and receiving from his fellow men. The good society is, thus, the one which gives the greatest freedom to its people—freedom defined not negatively and defensively, but positively, as the opportunity to realize ever greater human values. It follows that collectivism, as in fascism and communism, is the denial of these values, and must be opposed at all costs. But we shall successfully overcome them only as we are devoted to positive ideals which are better, chiefly the building of a society based on a genuine respect for persons and their freedom.

Freedom is man’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves. Freedom is the other side of consciousness of self:

Freedom is cumulative; one choice made with an element of freedom makes greater freedom possible for the next choice. Each exercise of freedom enlarges the circumference of the circle of one’s self.

Freedom is involved when we accept the realities not by blind necessity but by choice.

The man who is devoted to freedom does not waste time fighting reality; instead, as Kierkegaard remarked, he “extols reality.”

Through his power to survey his life, man can transcend the immediate events which determine him.

freedom is not just the matter of saying “Yes” or “No” to a specific decision: it is the power to mold and create ourselves. Freedom is the capacity, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, “to become what we truly are.”

Freedom does not come automatically; it is achieved. And it is not gained at a single bound; it must be achieved each day.

“Yes! to this thought I hold with firm persistence; The last result of wisdom stamps it true: He only earns his freedom and existence Who daily conquers them anew.”

The basic step in achieving inward freedom is “choosing one’s self.” This strange-sounding phrase of Kierkegaard’s means to affirm one’s responsibility for one’s self and one’s existence. It is the attitude which is opposite to blind momentum or routine existence; it is an attitude of aliveness and decisiveness; it means that one recognizes that he exists in his particular spot in the universe, and he accepts the responsibility for this existence. This is what Nietzsche meant by the “will to live”—not simply the instinct for self-preservation, but the will to accept the fact that one is one’s self, and to accept responsibility for fulfilling one’s own destiny, which in turn implies accepting the fact that one must make his basic choices himself.

Since one is free to die, he is free also to live.

When one has consciously chosen to live, two other things happen. First, his responsibility for himself takes on a new meaning. He accepts responsibility for his own life not as something with which he has been saddled, a burden forced upon him: but as a something he has chosen himself. For this person, himself, now exists as a result of a decision he himself has made.

in his choosing himself, he becomes aware that he has chosen personal freedom and responsibility for himself in the same breath.

The other thing which happens is that discipline from the outside is changed into self-discipline. He accepts discipline not because it is commanded—for who can command someone who has been free to take his own life?—but because he has chosen with greater freedom what he wants to do with his own life, and discipline is necessary for the sake of the values he wishes to achieve. This self-discipline can be given fancy names—Nietzsche called it “loving one’s fate” and Spinoza spoke of obedience to the laws of life. But whether bedecked by fancy terms or not, it is, I believe, a lesson everyone progressively learns in his struggle toward maturity.

We saw in an earlier chapter that man’s anxiety, bewilderment and emptiness—the chronic psychic diseases of modern man—occur mainly because his values are confused and contradictory, and he has no psychic core. We can now add that the degree of an individual’s inner strength and integrity will depend on how much he himself believes in the values he lives by.

Difficult as the task is, we must accept ourselves and our society where we are, and find our ethical center through a deeper understanding of ourselves as well as through a courageous confronting of our historical situation.

Indeed, like freedom and the other aspects of man’s consciousness of self, ethical awareness is gained only at the price of inner conflict and anxiety.

For the Greeks and Hebrews knew that when a man tries to leap over his human limitations, when he commits the sin of overreaching himself (as David did in taking Uriah’s wife), or commits hubris (as did the proud Agamemnon when he conquered Troy), or arrogates to himself universal power (as in modern fascist ideology) or holds that his limited knowledge is the final truth (as does the dogmatic person, whether he be religious or scientific), then he becomes dangerous.

Socrates was right: the beginning of wisdom is the admission of one’s ignorance, and man can creatively use his powers, and to some extent transcend his limitations, only as he humbly and honestly admits these limitations to begin with.

the child’s “opening his eyes,” and gaining self-awareness, always involves potential conflict with those in power, be they gods or parents.

The emergence of new vitality always to some extent breaks the existing customs and beliefs, and is thus threatening and anxiety-provoking to those in power as well as to the growing person himself.

And those who represent the “new” may find themselves in deadly conflict with the entrenched powers

within the creative person himself there is fear of moving ahead.

To be sure, every society must have both sides—the influences which bring new ideas and ethical insights into birth, and the institutions which conserve the values of the past.

No society would survive long without both new vitality and old forms, change and stability, the prophetic religion which attacks existing institutions and the priestly religion which protects the institutions.

But our particular problem in the present day, as we have seen, is an overwhelming te...

Christ’s mistake, says the Inquisitor, was that “in place of the rigid ancient law,” he placed on man the burden of having “with free heart to decide for himself what is good and what is evil,” and “this fearful burden of free choice” is too much for men. Christ respected man too much, argues the Inquisitor, and forgot that actually people want to be treated as children and be led by “authority” and “miracle.” He should have merely given them bread, as the devil suggested in the temptation, but “thou wouldst not deprive man of freedom and didst reject the offer, thinking, what is that freedom worth if obedience is bought with bread? . . . But in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, ‘Make us your slaves, but feed us.’ . . . Didst thou forget that man prefers peace and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?”

The person in our day, therefore, who seeks values around which he can integrate his living, needs to face the fact that there is no easy and simple way out.

He cannot merely “return to religion” any more than he can healthily return to his parents when the freedom and responsibility of choice becomes too great a burden.

For there is a double relation between ethics and religion, the same double relation we find between parents and offspring. On one hand, the ethical prophets throughout history ...

Thus it is always: the ethically creative persons, like Socrates, Kierkegaard and Spinoza, are engaged in finding new ethical “spirit” as opposed to the formalized “law” of the traditional system.

Jesus and Socrates were executed as “threats” to moral and social stability.

It is amazing to note how often the saints of one period have been, in historical fact, the so-called atheists of the previous period.

“The best among them . . . are more genuinely religious, in the best sense of the word religion, than those who exclusively arrogate to themselves the title.”

“Christians have expressed their piety in bows, fawnings and prostrations—gestures that are symbolic of servility and humiliation.” As has every ethical prophet in history, Berdyaev remarks that he would “fight against God in the name of God,” and adds that it is “impossible to revolt, except with reference to and in the name of some ultimate value by which I judge that which I resolve to oppose; that is to say in the name of God .

Freud was in error when he held that religion is per se a compulsion neurosis. Some religion is and some is not. Any area in life may be used as a compulsive neurosis: philosophy may be a flight from reality into a harmonious “system” as a protection from the anxiety and disharmonies of day-to-day life or it may be a courageous endeavor to understand reality better. Science may be used as a rigid, dogmatic faith by which one escapes emotional insecurity and doubt, or it may be an open-minded search for new truth.

These impressions are that people from religious backgrounds are apt, first, to have a more than average “zest” in wanting to do something with themselves and their lives. But, secondly, they are apt to have a particular attitude which I would call “the divine right to be taken care of.” These two attitudes of course are contradictory.

But the attitude of “the divine right to be taken care of” is quite something else. It is one of the greatest blocks to the development of these persons toward maturity in therapy as well as in life in general. It is generally difficult for such people to see their demand to be taken care of as a problem to be analyzed and overcome, and they often react with hostility and a feeling of being “gypped” when their “right” is not honored. Of course they have been told, “God will take care of you,” from the early days when they sang the song in Sunday school to the present vulgarized form of the same idea in many movies. But on a deeper level, the demand to be taken care of—particularly since hostility arises so quickly when it is frustrated—is a function of something more profound. I believe it gets its dynamic from the fact that these persons have had to give up so much. They have had to relinquish their power and their right to make moral judgments to their parents, and naturally the other half of the unwritten contract is that they then have a right to depend entirely on parental power and judgment, as a slave has a right to depend upon his master. So they are being gypped if the parent—or more likely the parental substitutes such as the therapist or God—does not extend them special care.

They have been taught that happiness and success would follow their “being good,” the latter generally interpreted as being obedient. But being merely obedient, as we have shown above, undermines the development of an individual’s ethical awareness and inner strength. By being obedient to external requirements over a long period of time, he loses his real powers of ethical, responsible choice.

happiness is not the reward of virtue, as Spinoza remarked, but virtue itself,

in our day “early to bed and early to rise” may make a man healthy, but there is no guarantee that it will make him wealthy and wise. Ben Franklin’s precepts, tithing and daily fidelity to routine work, no longer ensure success.

when he has the courage to stand alone, he can then speak as one with authority.

the love of God is its own reward,

beauty and truth are to be loved because they are good, and not because they will redound to the credit of the artist or scientist or philosopher who loves them.