From Soul to Self to Annihilation of Self.3

(cont'd)

Authority

Fromm thinks that there is a difference between "having" authority and "being" an authority. He observes that almost all of us do exercise some kind of authority at some stage or other of our lives e.g. we exercise and must exercise authority when we bring up children, whether we want to or not, so that we may protect our children from dangers they are not aware of and give them at least minimal advice on how to act in various social situations and in some patriarchal societies, like China, men exercise authority over women and in most hierarchically organized bureaucratic societies, officials exercise authority but people at the lowest rung of the social ladder have little choice but be the object of others' authority. Fromm distinguishes between two types of authority: rational authority (based on competence upon which the object of authority may lean in order to grow and develop) and irrational authority (based on power and serves only to exploit the person subjected to it). He thinks that with the development of societies more complex than the hunter-gatherer societies, organized on a hierarchical order, authority by competence has yielded to authority by social status (although competence may still be required, it is no longer obligatory). He says: "Whether we deal with monarchical authority-- where the lottery of genes decides qualities of competence--or with an unscrupulous criminal who succeeds in becoming an authority by murder or treachery or as frequently in modern democracy, with authorities elected on the basis of their photogenic physiognomy or the amount of money they can spend on their election, in all these cases, there may be almost no relation between competence and authority." He thinks that even if there is authority established on the basis of competence, a leader may be competent in one field but incompetent in another e.g. competent in war but not in peace, or honest at the beginning of office but become corrupted by power or became incompetent by reason of age or sickness towards the end of his office. Besides, it is always easier for the members of a tribe to judge the competence of their leader than for millions of people to judge the candidate whom they know only through the artificial image created by their public relations specialists. In such cases, the real or alleged initial competence is transferred to the uniform or to the title of authority. A king, a dictator or a minister may be stupid, vicious, evil and utterly incompetent to "be" an authority, yet he "has" authority and as long as he has the title, he will be "supposed" to "have" the qualities of competence. If so, those who have such authority must dull the critical faculties of their subjects by creating "myths" and "fictions" about them through propaganda and the control of information.

Faith and Happiness

All the great religious teachers and philosophers are one in thinking that only "knowledge" will liberate us from chronic unhappiness. According to Fromm, knowing begins with the awareness of  deceptiveness of our common sense perception of what human reality may be because most people are merely half-awake, half-dreaming and fail to realize that what they take to be self-evidently true is "illusion produced by the suggestive influence of the social world in which they live."Thus true knowledge begins with the shattering of illusions or with disillusionment. Knowledge does not consists of being in possession of what we think is "the truth" e.g the Buddha (the Awakened One) calls upon us to wake up and liberate ourselves from the illusion that craving for things leads to happiness and the Hebrew prophets appeal to the Jews to wake up and know that their idols are nothing but the work of their own hands. Jesus said that "The truth shall set you free". Meister Eckhart says that "Knowledge is no particular thought but rather it peels off [all coverings] and is disinterested and runs naked to God, until it touches him and grasps him. Marx thinks that we need to destroy illusions and wake up from the effects of the "opium of the masses" viz. religion to create the conditions needed to make further illusions unnecessary. Freud urges us to achieve self-knowledge by destroying the illusions(our "rationalizations') before we may become aware of the reality of our unconsciousness. To them all, the aim of knowing is not the certainty of "absolute truth", something one can feel sure about but with the self-affirming process of human reason. Unfortunately, our education generally tries to train people to have "knowledge" as a possession, more or less commensurate with the amount of private property or social prestige they are likely to fetch for us later in life. Our certificates, diplomas for "degrees" and "qualifications" are supposed to be "objective" acknowledgment of our acquisition of what Fromm calls our "luxury-knowledge packages. " Our schools are factories in which such overall knowledge packages are produced although schools claim that they mean to bring the students in touch with the highest achievements of the human mind. Many undergraduate colleges are particularly skillful in fostering such illusions.

For many, God, originally a symbol of the highest value that we can experience within us has become, in the "having" mode, an idol (a thing that we ourselves have made and into whom we project our own powers and values and thus impoverishing instead of enriching ourselves). We then submit to our own creation and by our own submission get in touch with ourselves in an alienated form. Fromm says: "While I can have the idol because it is a thing, by my submission to it, it simultaneously has me."   He elaborates on the evil of an idolatrous religion: "Once he has become an idol, God's alleged qualities have as little to do with my personal experience as alienated political doctrines do. The idol may be praised as Lord of Mercy, yet any cruelty may be committed in its name, just as the alienated faith in human solidarity may not even raise doubts about committing the most inhuman acts. Faith in the having mode, is a crutch for those who want to be certain, those who want an answer to life without daring to search for it themselves." But faith in the "being" mode is an entirely different phenomenon. He asks, "Must we all not have faith in other beings, in those whom we love, and in ourselves? Can we live without faith in the validity of norms for our life?" He answers:  "Indeed, without faith, we become sterile, hopeless, afraid to the very core of our being."  To Fromm, faith in the "being" mode is not in the first place, a belief in certain ideas (although it may be that too) but an inner orientation, an attitude. He prefers saying that one is in faith than saying that one has faith. In fact, even in religion, properly interpreted, there is a theological distinction between faith that is belief (fides quae creditur) and faith as belief (fides qua creditur), between the contents of faith and the act of faith. One can be in faith towards oneself and towards others or in faith towards God. In fact, the God of the Old Testament negates all forms of idolatrous worship of gods which one can have. Fromm says that although conceived in analogy to an Oriental king, the concept of God transcends itself from the very beginning: God must not have a name; no image must be made of him.To "Christian mystics like Pseudo Dionysius Areopagita, the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart, the concept of God tends to be the One, the "Godhead" (the No-thing), thus joining similar views in the Vedas, in Neoplatonic thinking and in Taoist thinking. This faith in God is vouched for by inner experience of the divine qualities within oneself; it is a continuous, active process of self-creation or as Meister Eckhart puts it, of Christ's eternally being born within ourselves.

(To be Cont'd)