Like all polemical movements, existentialism is one-sided. In their laudable protest against systematic philosophers, like Hegel or Marx, who would reduce all individual existence to general processes, the existentialists have invented an equally imaginary anthropology from which all elements, like man's physical nature, or his reason, ahout which general statements can be made, are excluded.
A task for an existentialist theologian: to preach a sermon on the topic The Sleep of Christ.
One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.
All the existentialist descriptions of choice, like Pascal's wager or Kierkegaard's leap, are interesting as dramatic literature, but are they true? When I look back at the three or four choices in my life which have been decisive, I find that, at the time I made them, I had very litde sense of the seriousness of what I was doing and only later did I discover that what had then seemed an unimportant brook was, in fact, a Rubicon.
For this I am very thankful since, had I been fully aware of the risk I was taking, I should never have dared take such a step.
In a reflective and anxious age, it is surely better, pedagog- ically, to minimize rather than to exaggerate the risks involved in a choice, just as one encourages a boy to swim who is afraid of the water by telling him that nothing can happen.
D
Under the stress of emotion, animals and children "make" faces, but they do not have one.
So much countenance and so little face, (henry james.) Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack oЈ sensibility—the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.
More than any other people, perhaps, the Americans obey the scriptural injunction: "Let the dead bury their dead."
When I consider others I can easily believe that their bodies express their personalities and that the two are inseparable. But it is impossible for me not to feel that my body is other than I, that I inhabit it like a house, and that my face is a mask which, with or without my consent, conceals my real nature from others.
It is impossible consciously to approach a mirror without composing or "making" a special face, and if we catch sight of our reflection unawares we rarely recognize ourselves. I cannot read my face in the mirror because I am already obvious to myself.
The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.
Most faces are asymmetric, i.e., one side is happy, the other sad, one self-confident, the other diffident, etc. But cutting up photographs it is possible to make two very different portraits, one from the two left sides, the other from the two rights. If these be now shown to the subject and to his friends, almost invariably the one which the subject prefers will be the one his friends dislike.
We can imagine loving what we do not love a great deal more easily than we can imagine fearing what we do not fear. I can sympathize with a man who has a passion for collecting stamps, but if he is afraid of mice there is a gulf between us. On the other hand, if he is unafraid of spiders, of which I am terrified, I admire him as superior but I do not feel that he is a stranger. Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality. If my friend takes up Vedanta, I can accept it, but if he prefers his steak well done, I feel it to be a treachery.
When one talks to another, one is more conscious of him as a listener to the conversation than of oneself. But the moment one writes anything, be it only a note to pass down the table, one is more conscious of oneself as a reader than of the intended recipient.
Hence we cannot be as false in writing as we can in speaking, nor as true. The written word can neither conceal nor reveal so much as the spoken.
Two card -players. A is a good loser when, holding good cards, he makes a fatal error, but a bad loser when he is dealt cards with which it is impossible to win. With B it is the other way round; he cheerfully resigns himself to defeat if his hand is poor, but becomes furious if defeat is his own fault.
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
But if the seed of a genuine disinterested love, which is often present, is ever to develop, it is essential that we pretend to ourselves and to others that it is stronger and more developed than it is, that we are less selfish than we are. Hence the social havoc wrought by the paranoid to whom the thought of indifference is so intolerable that he divides others into two classes, those who love him for himself alone and those who hate him for the same reason.
Do a paranoid a favor, like paying his hotel bill in a foreign city when his monthly check has not yet arrived, and he will take this as an expression of personal affection—the thought that you might have done it from a general sense of duty towards a fellow countryman in distress will never occur to him. So back he comes for more until your patience is exhausted, there is a row, and he departs convinced that you are his personal enemy. In this he is right to the extent that it is difficult not to hate a person who reveals to you so clearly how litde you love others.
Two cyclic madmen. In his elated phase, A feels: "I am God. The universe is full of gods. I adore all and am adored by all." B feels: "The universe is only a thing. I am happily free from all bonds of attachment to it." In the corresponding depressed phase, A feels: "I am a devil. The universe is full of devils. I hate all and am hated by all." B feels: "I am only a thing to the universe which takes no interest in me." This difference is reflected in their behavior. When elated A does not wash and even revels in dirt because all things are holy. He runs after women, after whores in particular whom he intends to save through Love. But B in this mood takes a fastidious pride in his physical cleanliness as a mark of his superiority and is chaste for the same reason. When depressed A begins to wash obsessively to cleanse himself from guilt and feels a morbid horror of all sex, B now neglects his appearance because "nobody cares how I look," and tries to be a Don Juan seducer in an attempt to compel life to take an interest in him.
A's God—Zeus-Jehovah: B's God—The Unmoved Mover.
BALAAM AND HIS ASS
Am I not thine ass, upon -which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day?
numbers: xxii, 30
Friend, I do thee no -wrong: didst thou not agree -with me for a penny?
matthew; xx, 13
I
The relation between Master and Servant is not given by nature or fate but comes into being through an act of conscious volition. Nor is it erotic; an erotic relationship, e.g., between man and wife or parent and child, comes into being in order to satisfy needs which are, in part, given by nature; the needs which are satisfied by a master-servant relationship are purely social and historical. By this definition, a wet nurse is not a servant, a cook may be. Thirdly, it is contractual. A contractual relationship comes into being through the free decision of both parties, a double commitment. The liberty of decision need not be, and indeed very rarely is, equal on both sides, but the weaker party must possess some degree of sovereignty. Thus, a slave is not a servant because he has no sovereignty whatsoever; he cannot even say, "I would rather starve than work for you." A contractual relationship not only involves double sovereignty, it is also asymmetric; what the master contributes, e.g., shelter, food and wages, and what the servant contributes, e.g., looking after the master's clothes and house, are qualitatively different and there is no objective standard by which one can decide whether the one is or is not equivalent to the other. A contract, therefore, differs from a law. In law all sovereignty lies with the law or with those who impose it and the individual has no sovereignty. Even in a democracy where sovereignty is said to reside in the people, it is as one of the people that each citizen has a share in that, not as an individual. Further, the relationship of all individuals to a law is symmetric; it commands or prohibits the same thing to all who come under it. Of any law one can ask the aesthetic question, "Is it enforceable?" and the ethical question, "Is it just?" An individual has the aesthetic right to break the law if he is powerful enough to do so with impunity, and it may be his ethical duty to break it if his conscience tells him that the law is unjust. Of a contract, on the other hand, one can only ask the historical question, "Did both parties pledge their word do it?" Its justice or its enforceability are secondary to the historical fact of mutual personal commitment. A contract can only be broken or changed by the mutual consent of both parties. It will be my ethical duty to insist on changing a contract when my conscience tells me it is unfair only if I am in the advantageous position; if I am in the weaker position I have a right to propose a change but no right to insist on one.