Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  This is strange talk from an analyst. (It is perhaps stranger still that Fromm should try to link up his diagnosis with Marxian economic theory and make no mention of the existentialists.) What is being called in question is nothing less than the fundamental concepts of psychiatry. Responsible social scientists are suggesting for the first time that human existence must be evaluated by standards quite different from those which the analyst abstracts from his “data.” The existential criteria apply to analyst and data alike. Fromm suggests, for example, that the brilliant American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan was himself alienated, because he looked upon the lack of self in American life as a normal state of affairs.

  Why does the biological method fail to comprehend man? Perhaps it is because the scientist will invariably allow a double standard: one for his data, one for himself. Freud, for instance, tried to derive all human activity from various expressions of libidinal energy; but what account can Freud give of his own lifelong quest for the truth? How an “interaction of forces” can be sublimated into a search for truth is never explained.

  Carl Gustav Jung quite frankly declares that as a scientist he has no interest in the truth value of his patients’ beliefs; his only concern is the discovery of the workings of the psyche, the requirements for mental well-being, whatever they may be. Thus, Jung approves of the Catholic dogma of the Assumption, not because it is true, but because it happens to validate the “anima archetype.” Yet Jung himself is, one presumes, searching for the truth. What account can he give, in terms of his theory, of his own lifelong project? It would be easy to list others like Freud and Jung, but common to all is the posture of the spectator questioning his data in search of the real, the hidden motivations behind the various illusory goals by which man deceives himself.

  Fromm implies that scientists, too, share our common humanity and can fall victim to the “pathology of normalcy” as easily as the next man.

  The next question is inevitable. If Fromm’s “normative humanism” does not derive its norms from biological categories, then where do they come from? Is there a goal of human living beyond that of adjustment to society and consumption of its goods? If there is such a goal, does this mean that psychiatry is dependent upon religion for its orientation? What justification, from a purely psychiatric point of view, can be offered for an abandonment of the biological method?

  II

  THE QUESTION NOW BEING raised in psychiatry is whether there is not a “true estate” of being human, and whether the objective-biological concept of human life not only fails to apprehend it but may actually worsen man’s predicament in the world. It may seem farfetched to cite Freud and Jung and others as practitioners of the biological method; but both of them have a double standard under which “instinct mechanics” or “myth-mongering” is attributed to the patient while truth seeking is supposed to be peculiar to the doctor.

  Erich Fromm’s “normative humanism” frankly implies that there are norms other than the biological and the cultural. Viktor E. Frankl’s “medical ministry” is an attempt, not to probe the unconscious, but to correct the conscious worldview of the patient. Leslie Farber writes in a recent issue of Psychiatry that we are becoming uneasily aware that objective scientific knowledge is “the wrong viewpoint, the wrong terminology and the wrong kind of knowledge—ever to explain the human being.”

  The radical departure of these new points of view lies in their tacit recognition of a standard of human existence wholly different from that by which we judge the flora of Australia or the ape population of the Congo. It means that there is being proposed as the central criterion of man’s well-being the very thing most detested by the biological method: a value scale of rightness, authenticity; in short, a concept of human nature and what is proper to it.

  An empirical scientist might reasonably ask at this point: By what right do you drag in the very value judgments which we have spent the last three hundred years getting rid of? Next you’ll be suggesting that we go back to Aristotle’s physics and say that the apple falls to the ground because it is seeking its rightful place.

  That is a good question. One does not lightly go beyond the objective method, which has proved so fruitful at the inorganic and lower organic levels. No one is suggesting, of course, that the biological method is not valid as far as it goes. What is being suggested is that a man who has satisfied every biological and cultural need that can be abstracted by the scientific method may nevertheless be desperately alienated from himself—that, in other words, there are goals beyond the biological. There is no use pretending that “humanistic psychoanalysis” can be viewed as a variety of Freudian theory. This is not just another Freudian “heresy.” This is apostasy.

  What possible scientific justification can be offered for the proposal by responsible social scientists that the objective method of the sciences is inadequate for treating man as man?

  The answer can only be that there are certain human needs quite impervious to the biological approach. As Fromm puts it, there are no physiological substrata to the needs of relatedness and transcendence. In the language of the existentialists, there are certain traits of human existence which are utterly different from the traits of the world; and not only does the existing self fail to understand itself by objective science, but in so doing it falls into an unauthentic existence.

  This brings us close to the Scholastic view that, while human beings share certain characteristics with other creatures, they are capable of higher perfections peculiar to themselves. But however one chooses to say it, it is a far cry indeed from the usual language of American sociology and psychology.

  The new theme, then, is the inkling that it is possible, entirely apart from religious convictions, to speak of the sickness of Western man. We all know perfectly well that the man who lives out his life as a consumer, a sexual partner, an “other-directed” executive; who avoids boredom and anxiety by consuming tons of newsprint, miles of movie film, years of TV time; that such a man has somehow betrayed his destiny as a human being.

  What Fromm is saying was perhaps said more plainly by Pascal three hundred years ago when he spoke of the man who comes into this world knowing not whence he came nor whither he will go when he dies but only that he will for certain die, and who spends his life as though he were not the center of the supreme mystery but rather diverting himself (and, we might add, adjusting himself). Such a man, said Pascal, is worse than a fool.

  What does it mean to say that a man may become alienated, fall prey to everydayness, become unauthentic? Fromm provides us with a close analysis of the pathology of Western man, the “marketing personality” who regards himself as a commodity, who consumes goods, not to use them, but to have them.

  Central to Fromm’s analysis is the thesis of alienation, “that man does not experience himself as the active bearer of his own powers and richness, but as an impoverished ‘thing.’” He gives to alienation a Marxist reading, attributing it to the capitalistic mode of production, in which man’s productivity becomes a commodity through its money value.

  The existentialists, it is hardly necessary to add, view man’s plight not as the by-product of a particular economic system but rather as the perennial condition of human existence, a condition necessarily entailed by man’s freedom. It is indeed hardly credible that the alienation of Western man is due to capitalism, as Fromm suggests, or that tinkering with economics will cure the disease. However serious the situation of the mass man of the West, it seems hopeful in comparison with that of the Soviet consumer.

  There is surely a much larger problem, as Henri Bergson and José Ortega y Gasset and Gabriel Marcel have seen it, of man’s increased responsibility in the technical age. He is free to use his inventions in a human way or to “fall prey to them,” as the existentialists put it.

  Fromm revives the biblical idea of idolatry. A new car is a great good, but it brings with it the threat that it can alienate the possessor. The danger in owning a new car is not tha
t in it we may run over somebody: what is far more likely to happen is that we may fall prey to our possession, that we will look upon it, not as a means of getting from place to place, but as a sort of fetish object to be acquired for its own sake. But, after offering us an exciting glimpse of man’s freedom, freedom to live authentically, freedom to fall prey to idolatry, Fromm then disappoints us by proposing economic formulae by way of solution. After excoriating the sin of abstraction for two hundred pages, he falls victim to the greatest abstraction of all: man conceived as Homo economicus.

  If it does not suffice to construe man as an organism responding to its environment by maintaining itself, adapting itself and reproducing itself, how, then, shall we conceive him? In what new frame of reference? This is not an academic question. Anxiety—according to Sullivan, the chief subject matter of psychiatry—is, under one frame of reference, a symptom to be gotten rid of; under the other, it may be a summons to authentic existence, to be heeded at any cost. Clearly, it is a matter of some importance to know which it is.

  Moreover, the ultimate role of psychiatry itself is very much at issue. Should psychiatry supplant religion and set itself up as a sort of secular priesthood? Should it give way to religion? Or if, as most would undoubtedly agree, each has its proper domain, then where is the line to be drawn between the “medical ministry” and the religious ministry? The lines are fluid indeed at present, but it is a hopeful sign that men on both sides now appear to recognize that there are lines to be drawn and legitimate areas of cooperation marked out.

  One or two questions suggest themselves in connection with Fromm’s “normative humanism.” His picture of the alienated consumer is quite vivid. But what about the other end of the scale? What is the opposite of alienation? What is the goal of mental health?

  Mental health, in the humanistic sense, is characterized by the ability to love and create, by the emergence from the incestuous ties to family and nature, by a sense of identity based on one’s experience of self as the subject and agent of one’s powers, by the grasp of reality inside and outside ourselves, that is, by the development of objectivity and reason.

  If biological standards no longer suffice, then our criterion of mental health must derive from the unique traits of human existence. These are, according to Fromm, creativity, productivity, and love, which go to make up the “productive orientation,” instead of the “marketing orientation.”

  There is something curiously vague about Fromm’s normative goals as compared with his concrete picture of man’s plight. The goal of life is to “live productively,” he says. This sounds very much like the mental-hygiene recommendations of the Overstreets—that the goal of life is to achieve “emotional maturity”; that the secret of Socrates, Jesus, and Buddha was that they achieved emotional maturity.

  Now, this may even be true in a weird, abstractive fashion—although to characterize Him who said “I am the way” as a psychologist of emotional maturity is, to say the least, a strange description. But what of the alienated man of the twentieth century who reads this vast library of popular mental hygiene and dutifully sets out in quest of “emotional maturity,” “productive orientation,” “cultural integration,” and suchlike? To the degree that a man stakes everything on a goal isolated by the scientific method, to this same degree is he destined to despair.

  Somewhere there has occurred a fatal misplacement of the real. To hold out to a man lost in the abyss of anxiety and anonymity the solution of a “productive orientation” is like telling a man who has fallen into a pit that the answer to his troubles is a pitless orientation.

  What has gone wrong? A clue is perhaps to be found in Fromm’s ambiguous treatment of transcendence. If there is any one feature which all existentialists agree upon as an inveterate trait of human existence, it is transcendence. Some, like Gabriel Marcel, may regard it as the true motion of man toward God; others, like Jean-Paul Sartre, may regard it as an absurd striving, the “useless passion.” But, atheistic or theistic, they would all agree that transcendence is the one distinguishing mark of human existence. In Friedrich Nietzsche’s words, man is he who must surpass himself.

  To Fromm, transcendence means creativity, and creativity means biological reproduction. Man transcends himself by creating life (or by destroying life), things which other creatures do, to be sure, but only man does them in perfect awareness. This is, to say the least, a curious sort of transcendence. It is hard to see how the trait can be so secularized and flattened without losing its meaning. What Fromm wants is that transcendence should not be transcendent.

  We learn soon enough where the rub is. Where even the atheistic existentialists would be candid enough to admit man’s incurable God-directedness, Fromm seeks to secularize. This, he says, is what transcendence should be. Biological prejudice seems to be getting the better of an empirical insight. Someone has said that the besetting sin of the objective social scientist is his reformer’s zeal: having shown how society works and has to work, he always appends a last chapter on how to change all this.

  It remains only to remark how Fromm’s theoretical commitments limit and specify his “normative humanism.” He lays it down as an axiom that monotheism, like totemism, is a stage in cultural evolution, and is even now being superseded. Then, having ruled transcendent being out of court, he concludes that the worship of God is itself idolatry and alienation.

  If one were to suggest, as Martin Heidegger does, that modern man’s loss is his loss of being, that his homelessness is a homelessness from being, Fromm would probably reply that such metaphysical notions are also being superseded by cultural evolution. One can’t help thinking of what Marcel, in describing the spirit of the age, calls “ontophobia,” the dislike of being.

  It is not necessary at this point to adduce the serious objections which anthropologists currently raise to the dogma of cultural evolution. But I shall point out an inconsistency. Fromm makes a great point of man’s emergence from animal nature into freedom, of man as being the one creature who is capable of living authentically or of falling into idolatry and alienation. But once we have come into this new condition—in which living according to the biological standards of adaptation is cited as a lapse into an unauthentic existence—how can we possibly judge human existence by evolutionary criteria? Once we have transcended animal nature, as Fromm describes it, and discovered goals beyond the biological, by what right do we apply biological yardsticks to these superbiological goals?

  It does not seem to be asking too much to require social science to be “open” in its theoretical commitments, or, as Christopher Dawson would say, to be more empirical and less religious. If there is such a thing as transcendence in man’s nature, it would seem to be the proper function of psychiatry to take due note of it, not to change it according to some theoretical bias.

  God is absent, said Johann Christian Hölderlin; God is dead, said Nietzsche. This means one of two things. Either we have outgrown monotheism, and good riddance; or modern man is estranged from being, from his own being, from the being of other creatures in the world, from transcendent being. He has lost something—what, he does not know; he knows only that he is sick unto death with the loss of it.

  1957

  The Culture Critics

  THINGS LOOK BAD ALL right. The future is as black as can be, so black that people either have to talk about it all the time or else not at all, and who can blame them? A good deal has been said about the people who don’t talk about it at all, who take one look at the bad news on the front page and turn to Ann Landers and the puzzles. Psychiatrists, in fact, have a word for it: selective inattention. But not much has been said about the people who do talk about it.

  Some of those who talk about it are wise and responsible men, who are as worried as the rest of us but who know we’ll never get out of the fix we’re in unless somebody does some serious figuring. But there is also abroad in the land a spirit of what might be called the Weltschmerz of the Cocktail Party. Those possessed
by it sound as scared as we are, scareder, but they are betrayed by a telltale gleam in the eye and moistness of the lip. They just got in from Washington, where they have a friend who sits three chairs behind Max Taylor at the meetings of the Joint Chiefs. “I happened to see Jack right after the meeting and I said, ‘Good Lord, man, what’s the matter with you? Your face is as white as a sheet.’ All Jack would say was: ‘I can’t tell you, but I can say this much: I’m frightened.’” There are the tremblers, and there are the professional gravediggers of the West. Western civilization might have had its virtues in the past, but now, in their eyes, the jig is up.

  Thomas Griffith is one of the wise and responsible men. His The Waist-High Culture sounds at first like one more indictment of American culture. These indictments must be pleasant to write, and they make pretty good reading, too—many of the charges are true, and anyhow it is always salutary to see Hollywood and Madison Avenue and the exurbs get a well-executed comeuppance. The weaknesses of these books lie not so much in what is said, however, as in what is not said. The indictment is, to a degree, true. But if it occurs to the reader to ask: In whose name are you making the indictment? Now that you have annihilated suburbia, what do you propose in its place? the answers are noticeably muted. Riesman’s analysis of the other-directed man may be offered as a piece of objective sociology which steers clear of norms, but certainly no other-directed man would want to remain other-directed after reading The Lonely Crowd.

  If it is not “good” to be tradition-directed, inner-directed, or other-directed, what is the “good” category? Who is the fourth man? He is, of course, the mature man. The fact is, however, that the mature man of Riesman and Fromm and the Overstreets is a somewhat shadowy fellow himself. We don’t, to tell the truth, hear too much about him.