From Soul to Self to Annihilation of Self.1

We all say we want to be happy. We take happiness to be ultimate goal
of life. All that we do or refuse to do can in one way or another be
attributed to this most natural target and aim of what we convince
ourselves to be our most legitimate desire. Yet everywhere we cast our
eyes, we find unhappy people. There is little doubt that there is much that is wrong with our lives. Often we blame others for the unhappy state we are in. We blame our genes, our parents, our mates, our relatives, our friends, our enemies, our "teachers", our "guides", our "leaders" or those whom we think owe us a "duty". Or we blame "society", its systems,its culture, its dominant ideology, its religion etc. In short, we blame "the others" whether we mean by that a person, a group, or a system (educational, economic or social or moral or religious). We blame everybody and everything except our "self". Why are we unhappy?

There are probably many more reasons why people are unhappy than the number of unhappy people around. As Tolstoy once said, happy people everywhere are the same but each one is unhappy is his or her own way. I will not be foolish or presumptuous enough to try to list out all the specific reasons why people are unhappy. I will not because I cannot. It is beyond the ability of any one man or even all the wise men and philosophers put together.  All that I can do is offer some of the findings of my researches and reflections upon this question.

I shall rely on the ideas of one of the most thoughtful monks there is in the modern world. He is Matthieu Ricard  (b. 1946).  He wrote a little book with a foreword by Daniel Goleman, the author who "invented" the term "emotional intelligence" which is constantly on the lips of many educators and management "experts". Ricard used to be a brilliant biologist in molecular genetics in France with a Ph D in that subject at the Institut Pasteur. His father is the  late Jean-François Revel (born Jean-François Ricard) (1924-2006), who used to a philosopher and editor of the French weekly magazine "L'Express" (the equivalent in France of Time magazine), best known for his book Without Marx nor Jesus (1972) The Flight from Truth : The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information (1992) and The Monk and the Philosopher : A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life (1999) which became a world best seller translated into 21 languages. He was one of the ghost writers for François  Mitterand, the ex Socialist President of France. Ricard is now a Tibetan Buddhist monk living in Nepal.Since 1989, he has been the Dalai Lama's French interpreter during his trip to Europe. In 2003 , Ricard wrote another best seller called Plaidoyer pour le bonheur, translated into English in 2006 as Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life's Most Important Skill. I heard him when he came to Hong Kong to promote his book. There I saw what a wonderful photographer of Tibetan monks and the landscape of Himalayas he was. He exuded a kind of calm joy in his person that made it impossible to doubt that he is more than qualified to talk and write about the subject of happiness. 

According to Ricard, there are many ways to be happy for ordinary people: starting a family, having kids, building a career, seeking adventures, helping others, finding inner peace etc. Henri Bergson, a French philosopher once said that the term "happiness" is deliberately left vague and ambiguous so that each individual may interpret it in his own way. A sociologist Ruut Venhoven has defined happiness as "the degree to which a person evaluates the overall quality of his present life as a whole positively" i.e. how much a person likes the kind of life he/she is leading. For some, happiness is "just a momentary fleeting impression. whose intensity and duration vary according to the availability of the resources that make it possible." For the philosopher Robert Misrahi, happiness is "the radiation of joy over one's entire existence or over the most vibrant part of one's active past, one's actual present and one's conceivable future." Another philosopher André-Comte-Sponville said that happiness is "any span of time in which joy would seem immediately possible." For St. Augustine, happiness is "a rejoicing in the truth." For Immanuel Kant, "happiness must be rational and devoid of any personal taint" but for Karl Marx, happiness is about growth through work but Aristotle says that "What constitutes happiness is a matter of dispute and the popular account of it is not the same as given by the philosophers."

Ricard asks: "What about the simple happiness we get from a child's smile or a nice cup of tea after a walk in the woods?" But he says that happiness cannot be limited to a few pleasant sensations, to some intense pleasure, to an eruption of joy or a fleeting sense of serenity, to a cheery day or a magic moment that sneaks up on us in the labyrinth of our existence. " To him, happiness is "a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind", not "a mere pleasurable feeling, a fleeting emotion or a mood but an optimal state of being." Whilst we may find it difficult to change the world, it is always possible to change the way we look at it."

For many, happiness is the momentary disappearance of inner conflicts: "the person feels in harmony with the world and herself." Some one enjoying an experience of walking through a serene wilderness has no particular expectations beyond the simple act of walking. As Ricard says, "She simply is, here and now, free and open. For a few moments, thoughts of the past are suppressed, the mind is not burdened with plans for the future and the present moment is liberated from all mental constructs"  and such a moment of respite from which all sense of emotional urgency has vanished, is experienced as one of profound peace. Ricard says: "For someone who has achieved a goal, completed a task or won a victory, the tension they have long carried with them relaxes. The ensuing sense of release is felt as a deep calm, free of all expectation and fear." To me, this should not be confused with what Eric Fromm, (on whose socio-psychological analysis I shall also heavily rely) describes in his book "To Have or To Be" (1976) as a "being" mode of existence, not a "having" mode of existence.


To Eric Fromm, it was the common dream of capitalism, socialism, communism to promise domination of Nature, material abundance, the greatest happiness for the greatest number and unimpeded personal freedom and such a dream has sustained the hopes and faith of the generations since the beginning of the industrial age. From the substitution of mechanical and then nuclear energy for animal and human energy to the substitution of the computer for the human mind, we could say that we were on the way to unlimited production and hence unlimited consumption; that technique made us omnipotent and science made us omniscient. We were on our way to becoming gods: supreme beings who could create a second world, using the natural world only as building blocks for our new creations. For a time, men and women experienced a new sense of freedom: they became masters of their own lives. But even socialism and communism quickly changed from a movement whose aim was a new society and a new man into one whose ideal was a bourgeois life for all and the achievement of wealth and comfort for all was supposed to result in unrestricted happiness for all. We shall build a new earthly City of material Progress to replace Augustine's City of God. But this turned out to be a broken dream, a false hope and a true illusion. More and more people are becoming aware, according to Fromm that:
   --unrestricted satisfaction of all desires is not conducive to well-being, nor it is a way to happiness or even to maximum pleasure
   --the dream of being independent masters of our lives ended when we began awakening to the fact that we have all become cogs in the bureaucratic machine,
      with our thoughts, feelings and tastes manipulated by government and industry and the mass communications that they control
  --economic progress has remained restricted to the rich nations, and the gap between rich and poor nations has been ever widening
  --Technical progress itself has created ecological dangers and the dangers of nuclear war, either or both of which may put an end to all civilization and possibly all
     life.

The dream and the great promise of the Enlightenment and our industrial and financial revolutions have failed, according to Fromm, and apart from the inherent internal contradictions built into the capitalist system, the reason is that that whole system is built upon two main psychological premises:
 1. that the aim of life is happiness ie. maximum pleasure, defined as the satisfaction of any desire or subjective need a person may feel (radical hedonism)
 2. that egotism, selfishness and greed, as the system needs to generate them in order to function, lead to harmony and peace.
Hedonism has often been equated with Epicurianism. To Fromm, this is not entirely right. "While for Epicurus, 'pure" pleasure is the highest goal, for this pleasure meant "absence of pain" (aponia) and stillness of the soul (ataraxia) and to Epicurus, pleasure as satisfaction of a desire cannot be the aim of life, because such pleasure is necessarily followed by unpleasure and thus keeps humanity away from its real goal of absence of pain. None of the great Masters had ever taught that the factual existence of a desire constituted an ethical norm.  They were all concerned instead with man's optimal well-being (vivere bene). They distinguish between those desires and needs which are only subjectively felt and those whose satisfaction leads to momentary pleasure and those which are rooted in human nature and whose realization is conducive to human growth and produces eudamonia ie. well-being". They were concerned with the distinction between purely subjectively felt needs and objectively valid needs--some of the former being harmful to human growth and the latter being in accordance with the needs of human nature.

Modern life is based upon a strange and contradictory combination: the concept of unlimited pleasure is opposed to the idea of disciplined work, analogous to the contradiction between the acceptance of an obsessional work ethics and the ideal of complete laziness during the rest of the day and during vacations: the endless assembly line belt of production and bureaucratic routine against television, car and sex make the contradictory combination possible. Obsessional work alone would drive people just as crazy as complete laziness. However, this conforms to the needs of 20th century capitalism based on maximum consumption of the goods and services produced as well as for routinised teamwork. Whatever may have been justification of this kind of logic, the observable data certainly show that our kind of "pursuit of happiness" does not produce well-being and that we are "a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent--people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save."

The second psychological premise is false because according to Fromm, being an egotist is not just a matter of our behavior but is also a matter of our character. What this means is that: we want everything for ourselves; that possessing, not sharing, gives us pleasure; that we must become greedy because if our aim is having, then the more we have, the more we am; that we must feel antagonistic towards all others: our customers whom we want to deceive, our competitors whom we want to destroy, our workers whom we want to exploit. We can never be satisfied, because there is no end to our wishes; we must be envious of those who have more and afraid of those who have less. But we have to repress all these  feelings to represent ourselves to others as well as to ourselves as the smiling, rational, sincere, kind human being everybody pretends to be. The passion for having must lead to never ending class war. Greed and peace simply preclude each other. The aim of the capitalist system is not" What is good for Man" but "What is good for the growth of the capitalist system." One tries to hide the sharpness of this conflict by claiming that what was good for the growth of the system or even that of a big corporation) was also good for people as a whole.  In addition, our spirit of conquest and hostility has blinded us to the facts that natural resources have their limits and can eventually be exhausted and that Nature will fight back against human greed.

To Fromm, the "having" and the "being" modes of existence indicate two fundamentally different kinds of orientation towards self and the world, two different kinds of character structure which determine how we think, feel and act. In the "having" mode of existence, we want to make everybody and everything including ourselves, our own property( exemplified by the way we talk e.g we say" I have a problem", "I have insomnia"; "although I have a beautiful house, nice children, a happy marriage, I have many worries" , "I have a great love for you" etc, instead of saying, "I am troubled", "I cannot sleep", "I live in a beautiful house, my children are nice to me, I am happily married, I do not feel peaceful", "I love you very deeply"). By so talking and thinking, we reduce ourselves into either the "owner" or the passive "recipient" of certain kinds of property or "possessions.". In the "being" mode of existence, I am related to the world and to others in a real, authentic way and not to mere deceptive appearances. The word "being" connotes implies process, activity,, movement, change and "becoming".  In traditional Western philosophy "being" implies a permanent, timeless and unchanging substance in contrast to "becoming", as expressed by Parmenides, Plato and the scholastic "realists". But such a concept makes sense only on the presumption that thought (idea) is the ultimate reality. Thus if the idea of love is more real than the experience of the act of loving, then only can we say that love is permanent and unchangeable . When we start out with the reality of human beings existing, loving, hating, suffering etc., then there is no being that is not at the same time, becoming and changing. Living things can only "be" if  they "become" and they can exist only if they change. The truth is that our "life" is not a noun, but a verb: life is not a substance, an idea, an essence, something static but is an endlessly dynamic process! Change and growth are inherent qualifies of the life process, as another ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus. thought. This is also the view of Buddha, of Jesus, of Laotzu, of Meister Eckhart  in whose thought, as in Ricard's, there is no room for the concept of any enduring, permanent substance: neither things nor the self. This is also paralleled by the contemporary discovery of quantum physics which now thinks no longer of the Newtonian "particles" but more in terms of "waves" and "wave forms" and "wave functions"  as also by the thoughts of some contemporary philosophers like A. N Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze.

According to Fromm, in contemporary world, the "having" mode of existence has taken on a culturally influenced social psychological form: consumerism, which to him is a special form of "incorporation" in more or less the same way that at a certain point in the development of an infant, it tends to take the things it wants into its mouth: (this is the infant's form of taking possession, when its bodily development  does not yet enable it to have other forms of controlling possessions). We find the same connection between incorporation and possession in many forms of cannibalism: by eating the heart of a brave man, I acquire his courage; by eating a totem animal, I acquire the divine substance the totem animal symbolizes. Freud thinks that if the relevant person believes that he has incorporated a god's, a father's or an animal's image,
it can neither be taken away nor eliminated and he explained the
super ego as the introjected sum total of the father's prohibitions and
commands. An authority, an institution, an idea and an image can be introjected the same way: I have them,eternally protected in my bowels, as if were. By buying and consuming a product, I acquire the prestige, the courage, the beauty and other desirable traits of the model displayed on the poster or television screen in the relevant advertisements. To Fromm, the consumer is the eternal suckling crying for the bottle and as pathological as alcoholism and drug addiction. I am what I consume e.g specific types of cosmetics, fashion, cars, houses, snacks, drinks, television, films, video games, holiday packages, even faith in God which  instead of being our authentic relationship with some transcendent phenomena as in the "being" mode, has become in the "having" mode, merely a faith ( some beliefs "invented" by others (usually some professional and bureaucratic priestly class) for which there is no sufficient rational proof in an idol the possession (having) of which will give certainty about some purportedly unshakeable answers to certain of our "ultimate" questions which answers will pass for "knowledge" (which in the "having" mode means merely the possession of more "answers" , data or information but which in the "being" mode, would mean knowing more deeply and which involves productive thinking with data, so that one may penetrate beneath the surface to see reality in its nakedness and to strive critically and actively to fathom what one hopes may be the "truth" and so would include the "knowledge" that one does not know or cannot know), something made "believable" only because of the power and authority of those who promulgate and protect such a  "faith".

(to be cont'd)