Meanwhile, the precious days of my life go by, unlived or incompletely lived, while I am telling myself, “What does the moment matter when I am here for eternity? I will tell my children I love them tomorrow; I will correct the problems between myself and my spouse some time in the future; I will begin my most important work next month or next year. Why hurry? Have I not all the time in the world?” And when I finally do approach the end, when I can no longer evade the fact of my mortality, I cry out, “Wait! It’s not fair! I’m not ready! I haven’t lived yet! When my life was happening, I wasn’t there!”
An important implication of these observations is that problems that people present in therapy or complain about to others whether or not they enter therapy are often several steps removed from the core difficulty, and if this is not recognized, a good deal of time can be wasted. If, for example, a client fails to grow up emotionally and intellectually, attacking the problem at the level of self-responsibility may yield limited success at best, if the client’s deepest secret belief is that to grow up is to die. While obviously there are any number of problems from which people suffer that do not relate to death anxiety, I often find it useful to check out the possibility of such a connection, and when I discover that a connection exists, I find that working at the level of death anxiety is the most rapid way to generate growth.
Strange as it may sound, a good deal of effort is sometimes needed for a client to accept the fact that he or she really is going to die, so powerful is the mechanism of denial. But the consequence of doing so is a change in the client’s values and priorities in life, a greater willingness to participate in life.
If someone had tried to persuade me, when I was younger, that I had never adequately confronted and integrated the fact of human mortality, I doubt that I would have believed it. I am sure I would have said all the appropriate and realistic things. Did I not teach people that one should always live with an acute appreciation of one’s own mortality as well as the mortality of those one loves? But when I began exploring these issues in the context of therapy, then conducting seminars and workshops on the subject of our attitudes toward time and death, I began to realize how subtle and insidious the denial of death can be, and my own life began to change in the direction of increased thoughtfulness about my priorities.
I began to see how often I had been reckless about time and how I had permitted myself to defer important goals. I revised my will. My wife and I made funeral arrangements so that no one else would ever have the burden of having to handle such matters. When considering any work or activity, I asked myself, “Am I confident that this is the way I want to invest my time and life?” Not that I do not slip on occasions or that I am not subject to the same fits of blindness as most other people, but I do my best to stay connected with my mortality and that of those I love, and I find that it is not a morbid thought but an enriching one. It is an awareness that increases my appreciation of the preciousness of life.
If we are to live fully in the present, we need the context of our mortality. We need to remember that we do not have unlimited time. The ticking of the clock is not a tragedy. It is essential to the meaning and excitement of life, to the intensity of love—indeed, to the intensity of any joy. The glory of life is inseparable from the fact that it is finite.
Our fear of death is intimately tied to our fear of the loss of individuality, that very individuality whose emergence we may have dreaded and resisted. Evidence for this may be found in the small comfort we derive from being told, “Your body never really dies. It merely decomposes into its various elements and becomes reintegrated with nature. In this sense, the body is immortal.” The complete irrelevance of such a viewpoint lies in the fact that when my body decomposes and becomes reintegrated with nature, it will no longer be my body. My body will cease to exist.
It is no greater comfort to be told: “Your consciousness never really dies. It merely becomes reintegrated into the great cosmic pool of consciousness from which it came. Consciousness is actually immortal.” When (and if) my consciousness becomes reintegrated into the great cosmic pool of consciousness—even assuming that such a concept has validity—it will no longer be my consciousness. Everything that made it mine will have ceased to exist.
If I choose to draw comfort from such explanations, it can only be because they help me avoid the fact that I, as a unique biological entity with a unique history and a unique set of experiences and a unique perspective on the world, am alive for only a limited time.
Paradoxically, it is those least able to live in and enjoy the moment who seem most preoccupied with longing for eternity.
These are people in whom death anxiety appears to be conscious; they are obsessed with thoughts of death. But on the basis of my own experience, I am inclined to think that this is an illusion—that a morbid and highly verbal preoccupation with death is more often than not a reflection of fear of life (although some fear of death is obviously also present). These people transform the secret knowledge that they are not living now into concern for the brevity of their existence. They become extreme examples of procrastinators who endlessly complain about the swift passage of time.
But these speculations are somewhat academic. The fact of the matter is, a fear of life and a fear of death co-conspire against growth, individuation, love, creativity, and evolution. An unresolved fear of life or of death equally obstructs the emergence of healthy self-esteem.
In this context it is actually irrelevant whether or not there is any sense whatsoever in which individual consciousness might prove to be eternal. If we do not know how to live in the moment, we will not know how to live in eternity.
To accept the reality of death and to love life is one of the meanings of heroism as I understand it.
Indeed, it is precisely the givens of existence, such as this book has been concerned with, that call on the heroic potentialities of our nature. We have seen that one such given is the fact that we are beings of volitional consciousness. Another is that our life depends on our thought and our effort. Another is that success is never guaranteed. Another is that some measure of suffering is virtually inevitable for every human being. We have no choice about the existence of such challenges; our only choice lies in how we will respond.
To be heroic is to persevere. To love the process and the struggle. To laugh without restraint and to weep without restraint. To remain open and vulnerable, which means to remain feeling. To allow the life-force to lift us as high as we can rise.
And to be able to say, at the end, “I loved the adventure of the journey.”
But if we are to make that journey successfully, we need a code of values to guide our actions. Which brings us finally to the ethical dimension: the morality of honoring the self.
III
Egoism
12
Rational Selfishness
“You mean it’s not immoral to be selfish?”
I have repeatedly encountered this question in one form or another throughout all of my professional life, whether I was engaged in psychotherapy, lecturing, or teaching at colleges and universities. The question does not mean, “Do I have permission to violate the rights of others?” Or “Is it appropriate to be indifferent to human suffering?” Or “Are kindness and generosity not virtues?” It means, “Do I have a right to honor my own needs and wants, to act on my own judgment, to strive for my own happiness?”
Ultimately it means, “Do I have a right to exist for my own sake?”
Strictly speaking, this question is tautologous. If my right to exist is contingent on services I render to others, I exist only by permission or favor. My life does not belong to me.
Respect for a human being’s right to exist for his or her own sake—the ethics of rational self-interest or enlightened selfishness—has been implicit throughout this entire book. It is implicit in the advocacy of autonomy, self-responsibility, a concern with the unfolding of our positive potentialities, and in my emphasis on the centrality of s
elf-esteem to psychological well-being. But it is now time to deal explicitly with the ethics of honoring the self.
It is not my purpose here to provide a comprehensive treatise on ethics, which would properly deserve and require a book in itself, but to provide an explicit ethical framework for the psychological vision I have been developing.
First, let us pause on the question, If my life does not belong to me, to whom does it belong?
Traditionally, human beings have received two answers to this query. The first, the religious answer, is God. The second, the social or tribal answer, is others—Pharaoh, Emperor, King, Country, Family, the Race, the State, the Proletariat, or Society.
This wider context is part of the world in which we live. It operates in our educational institutions no less than in our political institutions. It is present in the life of the family, where obedience to elders is the child’s first introduction to the meaning of the word good. The teaching that we belong to our parents, or to the family, is preparation for the belief that we belong to the company, to the community, to the nation-state, or to the globe.
Almost all ethical systems that have achieved any degree of world influence have been, at root, variations on the theme of self-surrender and self-sacrifice. Unselfishness is equated with virtue; selfishness is made a synonym of evil. In such systems, the individual has always been the victim, twisted against him or her self and commanded to be “unselfish” in service to some allegedly higher value. The simplest name for that allegedly higher value is “Others.”
Auguste Comte, the nineteenth-century advocate of collectivism and totalitarianism, coined a term for the modern-day version of this morality: altruism. So prevalent has this concept become that it is no longer regarded by most people as the name of a particular view of morality but rather as a synonym for morality. Furthermore, the average person takes altruism to mean simply benevolence, charity, kindness, or respect for the rights of others. But that is not the meaning Comte intended, and that is not the term’s actual philosophical meaning. Altruism, as an ethical principle, holds that a human being must make the welfare of others his or her primary moral concern, placing their interests above those of self; it holds that an individual has no right to exist for his or her own sake, that service to others is the moral justification of one’s existence, and that self-sacrifice is one’s foremost duty and highest virtue.
It is a curious paradox of human history that a doctrine that tells human beings to regard themselves as sacrificial animals has been accepted as a doctrine representing benevolence and love for humankind. One need only consider the consequences to which this doctrine has led to estimate the nature of its so-called benevolence. From the first individual who was sacrificed on an altar for the good of the tribe thousands of years ago, to the heretics and dissenters burned at the stake for the good of the populace and the glory of God, to the millions exterminated in gas chambers and slave-labor camps for the good of the race or of the proletariat, this morality has served as justification for every dictatorship and every atrocity, past or present, that we have known in the world. People have fought only over particular applications of this morality, over who should be sacrificed to whom and for whose benefit. They have expressed horror and indignation when they did not approve of someone’s particular choice of victims and beneficiaries. They have criticized “excesses.” Rarely have they questioned the basic underlying principle: that a human being is an object of sacrifice.
In the course of everyday life we are bombarded in a thousand ways with messages to the effect that “service” is the highest mark of virtue, that morality consists of living for others. We are told that personal happiness, self-interest, and the profit motive are ignoble. We are told that the enlightened, the able, the competent, the strong must exist for those who lack precisely those traits, that those who suffer or are in need have first claim on the lives and energy of the rest of the human race, that theirs is the right superseding all other rights. We are told that the individual’s mind and effort are the property of the community, of the nation, of the globe.
Most people do not, of course, attempt to practice the doctrine of altruism consistently in their everyday lives. It is not a code to live by—only to die by. But because they have accepted it as right, they are left in a moral vacuum: they have no moral principles to guide their choices and actions in practical reality. In their human relationships, they do not know what demands they can permit themselves and what demands they must grant to others; they do not know what is theirs by right, what is theirs by favor, what is theirs by someone’s sacrifice. Under the guidance of conflicting social pressures and conflicting personal longings, they fluctuate between sacrificing themselves to others and sacrificing others to themselves, and in no case do they feel in rational control of their lives. They are forced into the position of being amoralists, not by desire but by default.
The doctrine that a human being has no right to exist for his or her own sake cannot be defended in reason, and few of its advocates have attempted a defense, knowing that reason and their morality are incompatible. But they have declared that faith is superior to reason, thereby submerging ethics in irrationalism. The pronouncement that morality is beyond intellect, the demands that human beings throttle their judgment in obedience to authority, the attacks on the efficacy of mind and senses, the claims to an “Aryan logic” or a “proletarian logic” that represents a special, higher form of knowledge above criticism from those outside its system—all have been used as substitutes for rational argument. “To those who understand, no explanation is necessary; to those who do not, none is possible.”
From the time we are children, our parents, our teachers, our employers—those in authority—assert that it is easy to be selfish and that it takes courage to practice self-sacrifice. But, as anyone who is engaged in psychotherapy knows, it takes courage to do the opposite: to cherish our own desires, to formulate independent values and remain true to them, to fight for our goals whether or not family or friends approve. To honor the self is anything but easy.
Most people begin practicing self-sacrifice almost from the day they are born. With each year they give away more and more of their desires and ambitions in order to “belong.” Predictably, the result of this self-sacrifice is that, in a kind of perverted rebellion, they often end up being petty, narrow-minded, and “selfish” over trivia. Trivia are all they have left to fight for, after they have surrendered their souls.
“Do you mean it’s not immoral to be selfish?” is a way of asking, “Do you mean I don’t belong to others? Do you mean my first obligation is not to live up to someone else’s expectations?”
Such a thought is both exhilarating and frightening. It promises liberation—but only if we are prepared to challenge the teachings of a lifetime and step forth into autonomy and self-responsibility.
If altruism holds that service to the welfare of others is the essence of the moral life, egoism, in contrast, holds that the pursuit of our own well-being and happiness is our proper moral purpose. If altruism maintains that we belong to others, egoism maintains that we have a right to exist for our own sake. As a moral principle, egoism regards every individual as an end in him- or herself, not as a means to the ends of others.
To rethink the whole issue of egoism versus altruism, of selfishness versus selflessness—to challenge the fundamental assumptions of our culture and of most of human history—we need to go back to the question of why human beings need a code of ethics or morality. We thus begin, not with ethics, but with meta-ethics—with the question of why we need a code of values and how we derive an ethical standard of value.
I do not know of any other philosopher who has addressed this issue with the skill, insight, and profundity of Ayn Rand. While I differ with her on a number of philosophical points and do not share her ethical theory in all details, I think the foundation of her ethics is an unassailable contribution.
Indeed, there is no way I can discuss my o
wn views of egoism, selfishness, and ethics in general without reference to Rand’s work. We were associated for many years, and I taught her philosophy to many thousands of students. Let me recapitulate, therefore, the essence of her argument concerning the foundation of values and the derivation of an ethical standard.*
We shall not begin by merely observing that human beings pursue various values and by assuming that the first question of ethics is, What values ought human beings to pursue? As I have indicated above, we shall proceed instead to a far deeper question: What are values, and why do human beings need them?
“A ‘value’ is that which one acts to gain and/or keep,” writes Rand.64 A value is the object of an action. Since human beings must act in order to live, and since reality confronts them with many possible goals and many alternative courses of actions, they cannot escape the necessity of selecting values and making value-judgments.
And: “ ‘Value’ presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? ‘Value’ presupposes a standard, a purpose, and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.” 63
An entity incapable of initiating action, or for whom the consequences would always be the same regardless of its actions—an entity, in other words, not confronted with alternatives—could have no purposes, no goals, and hence no values. Only the existence of alternatives can make purpose, and therefore values, possible and necessary.
There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or nonexistence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its form, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only living organisms that face a constant alternative: the issue of life or death. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of “Life” that makes the concept of “Value” possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.63
Honoring the Self Page 23
