THE MOOD OF THE OBSCENE MAN: ALIENATION

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The mood of much of our civilization is one of apathy and of preoccupation with trivia. There are many among us who seem to go happily about their lives with only a concern for the problems of the moment, without any impelling sense of direction or any deeply felt concern over the significance of what they are doing. Theirs is, in essence, a life without a religious focus, and they go on from day-to-day without the experience of greatness.

There are men, however, who are spiritually separate from this great outward flux. There are men who are broken off from it, who do not personally identify themselves with it, and who feel a primary emotion of despair, ennui, alienation and meaninglessness as they confront it. This, indeed, would seem to be the natural reaction of the "obscene man" I have described. His vitality and sensibility knows no habitation in the world. It is contained secretly within himself. Most of his relations with his fellows give no expression to it, but rather pretend that he, as a man of mind and unique feeling, does not exist. How can he avoid pausing to see the emptiness of so much that is going on around him? How can his reaction be anything other than one of separateness and despair?

The Existentialist sense of alienation is a primary mood of modern life among serious men. It is a genuine mood springing from the actual fact of separation; it is the reaction of a man who has no stomach for shallow occupations, but who is largely trapped by them. To my own thinking, the Existentialist mood isan extremely valid one which must be known and appreciated before anyone can hope to understand the spiritual condition of contemporary human beings. It is a mood that I would think few serious men can ever totally avoid so long as they live surrounded by the milieu of extroversion.

There have been many reasons given for the Existentialist feeling. One of them centers on the fact of our mortality and points to the gnawing inner-knowledge deep within each serious man that he is going to die and become a nothingness, leaving nothing permanent behind him. Certainly those of us who have taken death seriously and who have no real faith in a personal, conscious immortality must, at bottom, feel a good measure of the emptiness that comes from this realization.

Another of the reasons points to the facticity of the life we must necessarily lead. Everything we do is by its intrinsic nature a limitation on the realm of possibility. We can only do so much, and by doing one thing we are making an irrevocable choice that precludes doing an infinity of other things at the same time. An excellent example of this has been given by Edmund Cahn in an article in the Yale Law Journal, where he points out that the ego of a man yearns to possess womankind in general. This ego can never be satisfied, because it is a physical fact, with potent spiritual consequences, that women cannot be possessed in general: the facticity of life demands that they be possessed, if at all, singularly. The unlimited pretensions of the human spirit find an insurmountable limitation in the finiteness of our bodies and in the confusion and inabilities of our minds. Although I have not been myself struck very strongly by this emotion, I have sensed it enough from time to time to know that it is present as a valid poetic perspective that could under certain circumstances lead to, or enhance, a sense of overall limitation and meaninglessness.

Still further, the alienation has been said to result from the non-vital , purely cranial, anesthetic quality of intellectual pursuits. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno has gone so far as to state that everything that is rational is anti-vital and everything that is vital is anti-rational. Although this expression of the perspective is subject to much criticism, as I myself will make clear later here, there is no doubt in my mind but that a man who is preoccupied with a purely conceptual, analytic approach to life will often come to feel cut off from reality, as if though he were living in a sterilized world that somehow fails to reach into the center of his awareness and grasp it firmly. He lives on the outer fringe of existence, and only sees its reflection, in much the same way that only the shadows of men were seen by the men chained to the wall in Plato's Allegory of the Cave. A purely intellectual life is not itself spiritually, complete, and the lack of completeness can easily augment the Existentialist mood of separateness.

No doubt the list of reasons for the alienation could be endless. There could be as many reasons given as there are causes of frustration and of disappointment. The length of the list would depend solely on the degree of our generalization.

For individual men, of course, any one of these reasons might assume a place of leading importance, with the others being only secondary or even insignificant. The Existentialist mood may be for him the product of his own highly individualized disappointments and disillusionments.

As valid as these sources of feeling may be, however, I am not myself satisfied with their multiplicity. Emptiness and despair may be emotionally justifiable on many grounds, but it becomes necessary to ask oneself why they persist as a dominating mood in the face of the many counter-balancing forces that are to be found in life. There is as much to sustain a perspective of meaningfulness and of joy as there is to sustain the Existentialist mood. Why should a man feel indefinitely a persistent sense that what is going on about him and with him is meaningless? Is it merely a self-imposed perversity, a spiritual masochism, that makes the alienation real as more than a passing phase? I am compelled by these questions to look further for an explanation. And, having looked further, it seems to me that all of the explanations just mentioned are insufficient to explain the spiritual predicament of serious men today.

Rather, the explanation would seem to lie elsewhere, in the fact that, because of the shallowness and sterility of our outer, extroverted reality, and because of the enforced repression of the most meaningful and personal subjective aspects of a man's life, there are so few really satisfactory human relations today. There is no vitally significant interpersonal cartharsis for our frustrations, and no way really to share our pleasures and our triumphs in the everyday contact we have with each other. I cannot help but feel that alienation could not persist as a mood in a man if there were this catharsis. This lack of meaningful contact among human beings is the cement that binds together a man's disappointments, deprives him of the fullest benefit of his satisfactions, and itself adds probably the most potent sources of dissatisfaction. Without this division between a man's "obscene" soul and his everyday contact with other people, the natural healing balm of life would take effect to cure most of our spiritual sores. Where there is a feeling so widespread and so fundamental, I think it is called for to look for a cause that is itself sufficiently widespread and fundamental as to provide more than merely a series of ad hoc explanations. And this central cause would seem to exist in the repression of the modern soul in a context of extroversive shallowness. If anyone should doubt this, he should note, the next time he gets a chance, the exhilaration that comes from good conversation. And then he should ask himself whether he would feel alienated from his fellows if he were more often able to enjoy that warmth and stimulation that was to be found in the good conversation. I would think the answer would almost certainly be "no". The serious man feels like an outsider primarily as a legitimate response to the insignificance and dullness of virtually all of our present-day relations with others.

Thusfar I have given no examples, out of life or literature, of the Existentialist mood I am discussing. I have assumed that the reader is acutely aware of it, if not from his own feeling, at least from the vast literature that has expressed it. It is to be found in the writings of, among others, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Jean Paul Sartre, Miguel de Unamuno. Indeed, even Bergman's recent motion picture "Wild Strawberries" is an artistic expression of the Existentialist mood.

An accurate summary of the mood may be found in William Barrett's Irrational Man (Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1958, page 99), where the following passage illustrates its perspective:

‘The natural misfortune of our mortal and feeble condition,’ Pascal says, ‘is so wretched that when we consider it closely, nothing can console us.’ Men escape from considering it closely by means of the two sovereign anodynes of ‘habit’ and ‘diversion.’ Man chases a bouncing ball or rides to the hounds after a fleeing animal; or the ball and fleeing game are pursued through the labyrinth of social intrigue and amusement; anything, so long as he manages to escape from himself. Or, solidly ensconced in habit the good citizen, surrounded by wife and family, secure in his job, need not cast his eye on the quality of his days as they pass, and see how each day entombs some hope or dream forgotten and how the next morning wakes him to a round that becomes ever narrower and more congealed. Both habit and diversion, so long as they work, conceal from man ‘his nothingness, his forlornness, his inadequacy, his impotence and his emptiness.’

This is as good a summary as I have been able to find of Existentialism and its central criticisms of today's human milieu, though a great many delightful passages of literature could be cited that convey the same ideas. I say "delightful" because that is what they are, at least to one who shares the perspective and finds an intellectual kinship when he reads the thoughts of another man who is disturbed by the same problems. What existentialist, for example, could fail to be delighted by Jonathan Swift's bitterest satire, A Voyage to the Country of Houyhnhnms? The reader will recall this as being a story about Gulliver's travels to the land where horses are the civilized beings and human beings are barbarous Yahoos.

The passage quoted above voices the alienation. We should notice the approach taken, however. It is essentially that the extroverted world of "bouncing balls" and "riding to hounds," which quite properly is taken to be the shallowness it is, is a veneer to hide a forlornness and emptiness that exists underneath. Here, I think, despite its otherwise valid mood, Existentialism reveals an unfortunate depravity of its own. What I have said sharply conflicts with its view at this point. The extroversion may cover deadness where deadness is all that is present in the human soul, but as well -- and this the Existentialism many times overlooks -- it is life that the extroversion covers and suffocates. The Existentialists commit catastrophic error when they fail to see, or at the very least fail to stress, the great pulsating force of vibrant life that exists in so many human beings, even though it is often buried alive, repressed by the external mechanisms of mediocrity. Forlornness may exist, but it is only a part of what is covered by "habit" and "diversion"; most significantly it is joy itself that is blanketed thus. While spiritual poverty, so to speak, may in fact exist in the obscene "underworld" of thought and feeling, so also does the great residue of expressiveness, joy, pride, creativity and fascination. How brutally insensible it is not to hear the unspoken rhetoric of the human spirit which in its silence shouts so loudly! Underneath the unnatural deadness one can hear the rising music of Beethoven and Mendelssohn.

Existentialism is, therefore, itself far from satisfactory even though it expresses a valid alienation against the dullness and mediocrity of most of human life. By merely being alienated without expressing an alive philosophy of its own, it adds to the emptiness. I am reminded of the doctrinaire labor unionist in America, who characteristically talks of the "poor working man" but who rarely does other than place impediments in the way of trade and productivity, which are the keys to his ultimate progress, and keeps a consistently poor attitude. Far more is needed than an awareness of the void of which Existentialism speaks. What is needed are men who are themselves alive and vital, providing through their own generation of energy and love of life the human stimulation that is now so lacking.

Mr. Barrett ties modern art into the alienation when he says (Irrational Man, page 40): "Modern art thus begins, and sometimes ends, as a confession of spiritual poverty. That is its greatness and its triumph. ..." Whether or not this is a correct understanding of the so-called "modern art" I do not know, since for the most part this art is unintelligible, communicating nothing by way either of ideas or impressions. And when communication is not included as an ingredient, how am I, the viewer, to know what the art imports? Perhaps the fact that it does not communicate anything, though, is itself a manifestation of spiritual poverty and a confirmation of Mr. Barrett's thesis. There is corroboration, too, in such of the modern art as does communicate. I would refer you particularly to Edvard Munch's black and white painting of a naked old man with sunken eyes. The spiritual poverty may easily be seen there. But if this is its "greatness and its triumph," we might well pause to reflect on what these words have come to mean. Surely it is not enough decade after decade to dwell on spiritual poverty. An art with more to say ought to move on more quickly after making known its dismay and begin to show the reasons, artistically, why life should consist of more than mere poverty. Poverty itself is not greatness; nor is the harping on poverty without oneself taking steps to provide wealth.

Modem art and Existentialism are not the voice of life. They are the voice of death reflecting upon itself.

Because of this lack of a positive element, this contemporary philosophy offers several destructive criticisms of what are creative forces. It would not make these criticisms if it better understood the mainsprings for the resurgence of meaningfulness in life. In the first place it criticizes rationality and declares it an enemy, something to be opposed. In the second place it disparages our material well-being, referring unsympathetically to the "gadgets and refrigerators" of today. Great danger lurks in such criticisms, with their implicit threat against both intelligence and economic abundance.

As we have seen, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno suggests that "everything rational is anti-vital, and everything vital is anti-rational." This is true in a way, but only in a very limited sense. Bloodless reason, the concepts existing within the mind that can themselves do no more than just mirror the real world of the senses, can seem to the thinking man to be an awful anesthetic which becomes a measure substitute for living itself. And when such a man does become involved in the activity of the real world, he senses that this conceptualism has robbed him of his spontaneity, his innocence and his childlike enjoyment. The thinker feels himself to be a man "who sees too deeply," since he sees the ultimate worthlessness of much that we do in ordinary life. And, of course, this perception keeps him from accepting the frivolous activity at its face value. Because of all this, the thinker in a moment of weakness and of introspective inner-gnawing will sometimes blame the rationality itself for being the bearer of this unpalatable truth or as being the cause of his loneliness and his disconnection from a truly significant relation with his fellows.

But this is a misplaced ill-temper. Reason is not the cause of the difficulty. We should appreciate that reason is itself a great quest and that it is able to bring the thinker a varied and adventurous experience. One may find in it the complete absorption of fascination. It is active and fertilizing, not sterile. The anesthesia the thinker feels stems not from reason itself but from his misguided expectation that reason may, as a way of life, provide all the flesh-and-bone satisfaction that he, as a man, so naturally craves. Surely in this he is expecting too much.

If for example, as a man, he craves love, certainly a long period of thinking or writing about love will not fill the need: the man must find love itself. A failure to find love may leave him with no real recourse but to think about it, but this failure, which leads directly to the "impotent" thinking, is what he should blame. He is silly to blame the rationality.

And if he sees through things and finds them empty, is it the fact that he is able to see that is to blame, or is it not the emptiness itself with which he should find fault?

To blame reason is to tear at the very center of a man’s hope for greater personal happiness and to tear at the foundation of civilization itself. It is to advocate (whether one understands that he is doing so or not) barbarism and the attendant misery. When the Existentialist Kierkegaard wrote"it is intelligence and nothing else that had to be opposed," he was either speaking poetically and loosely, using "intelligence" as perhaps a poor symbol for a feeling of stale impotence, or he was speaking with utter foolishness and irresponsibility.

So also it is foolish to expound that "gadgets and refrigerators" are somehow blameworthy. This confusion may result from the close proximity of the "gadgets" to the source of the difficulty for which blame is a proper response. The gadgets (i.e., our material well-being, our comforts and relative lack of squalor) are the products of the commercial civilization that freedom begets. But unfortunately a commercial civilization is an extroverted one, which (though it has the great advantage of having all the gentle humaneness that is part of extroversion) contains all the dullness and sterility of which I have been writing here. Does this mean that we should reject our material conveniences or the freedom that encourages them? Even to suggest this is to reveal its absurdity. These "conveniences" are great positive goods, and -- as a part of the same thing -- they and the free civilization that gives rise to them are what reprieve us from the filth and deprivation of the past and from all that ac- companied such conditions. Indeed, most of us would not be alive today, never having been born, were it not for these very gadgets. It is irresponsibly stupid for any modern thinker to disparage our productivity and material advantages as such.

Doctrines with an anti-civilizational spirit and content must plainly be rejected. They offer no way out of the spiritual impasse in which contemporary man finds himself. Our impasse results from a lack of full cultivation of civilization; it does not result from civilization itself. The emptiness comes from failing to understand that material well-being, a high rate of literacy, and the like, are mere plateaus, from which men may get their start in their development as men, just as a college education must be just the beginning of scholarship and of the love of learning, not its end. These plateaus must be the impetus from which greater intellectual and emotional forces may come.

Existentialist writings reveal various suggested solutions to the impasse of emptiness. According to Barrett, religion was the "only possible cure" for Pascal; to Tolstoy "the meaning of life, if there is one, must be found in these ordinary souls (the millions of ordinary people who go on living, having children, continuing the race) and not in the great intellects of the race"; to Nietzsche, "the only value (he) can set up to take the place of these highest values that have lost their value for contemporary man is: Power."

The list would probably extend for as long as there are men to add to it. And the very multiplicity of suggestions itself reflects an important truth. This is that there can be no one, homogeneous, all-abiding answer. Men are so varied in their loves and their hates, in what thrills them and gives them warm pleasure, that these things may only be recognized generally and the budding fullness of their expression looked to as the "answer." This rich variety, like a garden in summer, may hardly be boiled down into a single category; one may only hope that it is appreciated for the very sake of its richness and its variety, and that totalitarian minds will not seek to distill the human spirit and the springs of its pleasure. Joy and passion and warmth and pride enter the human heart in infinite ways. Far better is it for us to know and to be pleased with this multiplicity as a multiplicity, to tolerate its extreme and facile heterogeneity and to reap the benefits of that fecundity, than to frame it narrowly and with less than the utmost liberality.

When I speak of liberality in this sense I mean the tolerant, warm humanism that may be found in William James' little essay, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings." In this essay James quotes at length from Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Lantern Bearers," which is itself as humanistic a work as may be found anywhere. James tells Stevenson's story about some boys who carried lanterns "buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt" and hidden under a buttoned topcoat. The boys felt that "the essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night, the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public -- a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool's heart, to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge.”

After relating this, James quotes Stevenson as saying "to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action: That is the explanation, that the excuse." Certainly here, in this human capacity for joy in the most inexplicable ways, is the answer. It is an infinite answer, as infinite as life itself. And it is so even though the man's existence -- as Existentialism so rightly feels -- is finite and bound by death and full of commonplace facticity.

The "answer", then, is to reverse the morality of the ages. It is to make ones religion the worship of pride and creation and straining action and penetrating, questioning inquiry and a pounding, though tender, sensuality and the spirit of tolerant, non-predatory but heated controversy and of achievement and joy in all its forms. It is to encourage the rich fullness of life itself, to rise above the commonplace and to take on all of the natural humanity of giants and heroes. The answer is in the human will to live and in a strong morality that scorns all that would inhibit, all that would stress and promote the weakness, the depravity, the meekness, the simple-mindedness of man. The self-energizing man, realizing that all values, all great- ness and all mediocrity, well up from his own bowels, and that what exists there will determine the merit of his existence: this man, whether he is an astronaut shot to the moon or a half- invalid at a desk with seventy-five books piled up in front of him who can make fifty opposing lawyers struggle to find ways to overcome in court the force of his argument, this man, this living human being, is the answer.

Nietzsche's "power" is superficially akin to this. But power in the sense of coercive force is the very negation of such a morality of life. To the extent that the "power" meant is of this type, it is a force of anti-civilization and opposed to the morality I suggest.

Pascal's religion has elements of it. But religion, as a belief in God and in various other ways, is a mystical, irrational thing. This irrationality is unworthy. A morality that encourages full life must discard most of what we know as religion and replace it by human values that require no obscurity and appeal to unjustified faith.

Tolstoy's reliance upon common humanity is illustrated by the flux of continuing life that one finds in War and Peace. It comes close to Stevenson's own delightful view and to the answer I have suggested. But "common" humanity is really not it at all. It is the "humanity," not the "commonness," that offers the way out. If so-called ordinary people are to be looked to as a guide, it is because they tend to live spontaneously the process that is their existence and glean thereby many of the satisfactions that are to be had, just as with the boys in Stevenson's story. To adopt the common humanity today, though, would be to adopt also much that is mediocre and stale, extroverted and dull. The task is to learn the lesson of their delights, but to overcome this repressive incubus.

Innumerable fragments of sensibility may be found today that bear us closer to the philosophy and raw spirit that can provide a powerful new religious perspective. These fragments exist wherever the obscene soul of a man breaks loose for an invigorating run in the fresh air of its own expressiveness. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover is such a fragment. The beauty of that book's carnal warmth, which cuts to ribbons the anti-life view of sex, is hardly surpassable. I am sorry, though, that it is only a fragment. It is not a part of a cohesive philosophy that extends pervasively into all of experience and generates a powerful thrust of ecstasy on the one hand and quiet dignity on the other. It cuts away at the dead growth entangling man's sexual fulfillment, but it does not deal with problems of human joy and strength in other areas, where philosophies of denial and weakness may and do, so far as this book is concerned, go unchallenged. And unfortunately even this fragment, by its failure to discuss the adultery as adultery is weak and incompetent , involving moral suggestions that are destructive rather than creative.

A vital new philosophy, a new religion going to the deepest roots of the human need, encouraging life and energy in every conceivable aspect: it is through this that the alienation must disappear through the elimination of its causes. Alienation and active, purposeful, expressive life will not coexist. Alienation will not remain to find a place in the mood of a sensitive man where a creative obscenity is cultivated.