THE POLITICS OF THE "TRUE SELF"

...For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court & the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War...

...Now Marshall Berman, who is another psycho-political prophet, says in The Politics of Authenticity that "the search for authenticity...

...According STEPHEN MILLER to them, it is the narrow conceptions of poli tics that have made the United States the way it is...

...In Life Against Death, Brown exhorts us to embrace and affirm "instinctual reality—Dionysian consciousness," which is another way of saying that we should let our id rule us instead of our ego...

...Yet it would be wrong to dismiss completely such intangible things as feelings from political discourse, since any complex society that is not held together solely by fear must be cemented by the feeling of trust...

...Both fervently hope that by doing so they will create a new man...

...Preoccupied with psychological liberation, they tend to gloss over distinctions between different societies, different political regimes...

...As one adept wrote: When a man has truly reached the great and high knowledge he is no longer bound to observe any law or any command, for he has become one with God...

...Reduced to believing only in the reality of their private worlds, they dismiss the public realm as a world of lies where everyone says one thing and does another, where everyone is out to get what he can get...

...Thus even for Brown psychology is intimately connected with politics...

...it vitiates the political impulse...

...Discussing Sartre and Fanon in her book, On Violence, Hannah Arendt notes that both writers have revived the Sorelian interpretation of Bergson's Creative Evolution, whereby man expresses his "elan vital" by being violent...

...The countless anonymous young men and women Berman mentions presumably seek authenticity by themselves, isolated from any social or political group...

...He shall take from all creatures as much as his nature desires and craves, and shall have no scruples of conscience about it, for all created things are his property....'" Blake would have been horrified by the gnostic elitism of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, and he would not have accepted the idea of the genius as murderer...

...He did say that "Active Evil is better than Passive Good"—better because the person is expressing, not repressing, his energy...

...18-22] They do not know themselves because they do not know where they stand with regard to others...

...And they may even come to prefer the "honest" extremist whether of the Left or the Right—who, they think, at least says what he means...

...The politics of happiness is not only a contemporary phenomenon...

...In many of his aphorisms Blake implies that a genius is anyone who knows how to express his energy...

...He doesn't make distinctions among these groups, some of whom don't believe they are outside the democratic process, despite their unemployment...

...Many of Blake's proverbs can be used to justify an evil but therapeutic release of energy...

...Although Blake never uses the words "true self" or "authenticity," he would have agreed, I think, to the notion that the expression of one's energy is the ex pression of one's true and authentic self...

...is bound up with a radical rejection of things as they are...

...In his introduction to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre says that "irrepressible violence...

...In his famous poem "London" the city becomes a symbol of all the social forces that—to use Blake's word —"charter" us in life...

...The psycho-political prophets are aware of the malaise that affects contemporary American society, the loss of trust in the political realm, but their remedies are the wrong medicine for the disease, even though it is hard to say what the right medicine is for such an intangible feeling as a loss of trust...

...there are many good reasons to feel that way...

...In this essay Marcuse seems to separate himself from those who advocate psychological liberation, while still implying that in the long run, once his politcal goals have been realized, there can be such a radical psychological change...

...TO RAISE the specter of violence as a form of authenticity one need not go back as far as the late Middle Ages...

...In some ways the worshipers of authenticity are like the Skinnerians: both want to do away with society as we know it 92 —the one through behavioral control, the other through therapeutic release...

...What are we supposed to do about this chartering...

...We have no way of observing our own authenticity or, of course, anyone else's...

...In fact, the remedies themselves are symptoms of the disease...

...In a recent essay, "Art and Revolution," he says that "the mixture of Marxism and mysticism, of Lenin and Dr...

...Even Marcuse is not clear about how we begin to work for political change...

...About one hundred and eighty years ago Thomas Paine said the following: "But what we now see in the world, from the Revolutions of America and France, are a renovation of the natural order of things, a system of principles as universal as truth and the existence of man, and combining moral with political happiness and national prosperity...

...The Marcuse of "Art and Revolution" would, I imagine, dislike the work of Norman O. Brown, the psycho-political prophet who is most heavily indebted to Freudian conceptions...

...Yet the worship of an undefined standard of energy as the only authentic quality of the self makes it possible for someone to be or suppose himself to be authentic by expressing his energy * Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 179...

...they are private achievements...

...He wants to find someone else he can trust, so that he can know where he stands with regard to others and consequently know him self...

...When Keats and Coleridge speak of genius they are clearly speaking of artistic genius, whereas Blake is not...

...A massive loss of trust together with self-pity—"Every public figure lies and no one understands my problems"—can be an explosive mixture, dangerous to a democratic society...

...Genius cannot be Bound...

...It is one thing not to obey the laws of neoclassicism, another thing to express contempt for all law...

...This approach to politics, I think, is full of dangers...

...In The Politics of Experience, R. D. Laing says that we are "strangers to our true selves," and he calls for "the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self...

...But it is not easy to know exactly what their ideas are, since their definitions of the true self are not precise...

...THE POLITICS OF THE "TRUE SELF" in violent ways...

...Which social and political structures...

...Loss of trust is dangerous because it leads men to have faith in only one person—themselves...

...Yet Paine's idea of happiness is clearer than the idea of happiness implied in the work of the psycho-political prophets, for Paine qualifies the noun with two adjectives, implying that the happiness he is speaking of is a public happiness, the tangible result of political freedom...

...Although Blake's writing does not contain any political program, we see in it the beginnings of a politics of the true self, a politics inseparable from a new notion of morality preaching that the greatest good is the expression of one's energy...

...We are not very far from what Keats and Coleridge say about genius and poetry...

...These writers insist that it is the self that is in chains—not the American migrant worker, the Brazilian peasant, the Czechoslovakian intellectual...

...Of which society...

...they also want people to be happy—happy because their true self flourishes...

...In Macbeth, where we see a society whose members have lost their trust of each other, Ross says: But cruel are the times when we are traitors And do not know ourselves...

...A key word in Blake's writing is "energy...

...Malcolm is not striving for authenticity...

...Unlike Freud, however, they think that there can be a civilization without discontent...

...Perhaps they cannot help but be vague, for the true self is a concept that can never be adequately defined...

...The psycho-political prophets, by contrast, are not especially interested in public happiness...

...A good case can be made for calling the last 25 years the Age of Freud, for his thought has reached everywhere, reached especially to a kind of contemporary writing I would like to call—to coin an ungainly phrase—psycho-political prophecy...

...However, the boredom of such seekers could prove dangerous because it might turn into rage against the limitations inherent in every individual life...

...A radical rejection of things as they are in the name of authenticity, therefore, can easily become a destructive antipolitics that cares less about particular goals than about "being oneself," no matter what the cost is to others...

...In Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse speaks of his hope for a future in which the "autonomous personality, in the sense of creative `uniqueness' and fullness of its existence," will be realized not by a few but by all...

...Blake's remarks are not very clear as a guideline for political action...

...I'm not suggesting that we should dismiss all such feelings because they cannot be measured...

...Yet we can't so easily confine Blake to the house of art and literature...

...Yet fragments of Blake's are continually quoted out of context in this way...

...it cannot be tested or measured...

...It is not clear, though, from Berman's book just how this pursuit of authenticity is related to politics...

...From there it is one step to suggesting that the government should THE POLITICS OF THE "TRUE SELF" control us in order to make us happy...

...Pascal said that "Man is neither an angel nor a beast, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act like an angel acts like a beast...

...I am suggesting that these feelings have little place in politics...

...The assumption that there can be radical political change goes against the grain of Freud's thought...

...And political freedom makes man morally happy because he no longer has to lie, no longer has to assent to doctrines of the state that he thinks are false or pernicious...

...Authenticity is a feeling one has about oneself...

...If authenticity is a political question, then we would expect some discussion of how we are to go about creating the social and economic conditions that would enable authenticity to flourish...

...And if the quest for authenticity is such a displaced religious quest, then confusing it with political problems will inevitably cause disappointment and despair...

...In The Making of a Counter Culture, he asks for a "new culture in which the nonintellective capacities of the personality—those capacities that take fire from visionary splendor and the experience of human communion— become the arbiter of the good, the true, and the beautiful...

...Boredom with democratic politics is not necessarily a bad thing...

...Theirs is a millenarian politics based on conceptions found in the work of Freud...

...The Declaration of Independence speaks of our inalienable right to "the pursuit of happiness," but it does not say that we can all attain happiness or that the government is responsible for our happiness...

...They become cynical and more than usually apathetic about politics...

...we enter the world of benevolent totalitarianism...

...In such a climate of feeling, political discourse would break down...

...Moreover, their preoccupation with the politics of a private liberation of the self is dangerous because it implies that our private happiness is connected with the doings of the government...

...it may be Renderd [sic] Indignant & Outrageous...

...And, taken out of context, these fragments seem dangerously antinomian...

...And when Blake says that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," he is referring to a road that goes in the opposite direction not only from neoclassical art and poetry but also from neoclassical morality...

...In "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" the devil, who is good in Blake's mythology, says: "Energy is the only life," and "Energy is Eternal Delight...

...Roszak uses as an epigraph to his book a quotation from Blake that seems to be a political exhortation: "Rouse up, 0 Young Men of the New Age...

...It is one thing to express one's energy in poetry, another thing to express it in any way one wants to...

...Uninterested in anything but finding their true selves, these solitaries would be bored with the mundane questions of political change, bored with concrete discussions of particular social and political issues...

...Unlike Freud, however, these writers dwell on the need for radical psychological change...

...If we take them at their word and call their goal a political goal, then it is certainly an unusually vague one, for they want people not only to have jobs, food, political free dom, a decent standard of living, and all the other tangible goals we normally associate with political activity...

...I do not question this feeling of not being at home in American society...

...but the idea of thinking about politics in psychological terms comes from Freud who, as Philip Rieff says, "undermined the ancient concern of political philosophy and substituted for it the inquiry of a political psychology, asking in what manner and degree must the individual be constrained within his social relations...

...Authenticity may be such an angelic illusion, and those who seek the angelically authentic within themselves may end up as beasts who yearn for any kind of apocalyptic change in order to assuage their own failure to achieve their true selves...

...Marcuse's analysis is more traditionally political than the others, for he thinks that radical psychological change can come about only after radical political change...

...Many of his aphorisms are typically Romantic criticisms of neoclassical ideas about poetry and art: "One power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, The Divine Vision," and "He who Can be bound down is No Genius...

...The poem "London" is not a political tract but a nightmarish "Song of Experience...

...Whether this loss of trust is objectively justified or not is beside the point...

...At the end of One-Dimensional Man, he raises the possibility of a melodramatic "Great Refusal" by "the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and colors, the unemployed and the unemployable...

...IT MAY be objected that I've taken some ideas of these writers out of context in order to exaggerate their negative implications...

...they are reduced to living in a private world of fear and inactivity...

...All these seekers after authenticity are just beginning to learn a fact of life which our first seekers always knew: that whoever you are, or want to be, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you...

...Although Laing, Marcuse, and Roszak would place themselves on the left side of the political spectrum, their emphasis on the isolated individual who is trying to find his "true self" makes it difficult to assign them any such traditional political label...

...To be sure, both Fanon and Sartre are speaking about a violence that is directed toward particular political ends, but there is no reason why their psychological view of violence couldn't be used for causes they would abhor...

...For Blake this energy is a potential force in all of us, but in most cases it is a force that re mains repressed and thwarted because of the STEPHEN MILLER socializing process...

...Therefore in Act IV Malcolm, the son of the slain king, cautiously and desperately tries to see if he can trust Macduff, for Malcolm knows that if he doesn't find someone whom he can rely upon he is lost...

...The true self travels under a lot of names: the autonomous self, the creative self, the Dionysian self, the authentic self...

...For Pope and Johnson the mind must restrain its wayward energies and enthusiasms, whereas for Blake anyone who tries to suppress the energy in himself or in anyone else is evil...

...Any action may feel authentic and— five minutes later—inauthentic...

...But beasts may be too strong a word here, and I would rather not end on a note of easy condemnation...

...Even if some of these psycho-political prophets rarely refer to Freud, their basic assumptions reveal that they have been affected by Freudian modes of thought...

...Murder," he said, "is Hindering Another...

...Many people, not only young people, do not feel at home in American society, but what they yearn for is not authenticity, I think, but trust—the mutual trust that bound the ideal political community Rousseau set forth in The Social Contract...

...The "genius" who hates to be bound might become like the members of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a late medieval sect who believed and acted as if they were above all laws...

...For if people feel this way, then they will act on their feeling, will interpret what they hear and read according to this feeling...

...but Berman gives us no such discussion...

...Laing, Marcuse, and Roszak want politics to create the conditions that would enable man to undergo radical psy chological change, would enable man to assert that part of his self which has been suppressed by social and political norms—his "true" self...

...Blake is a poet, not a planner of revolution, and his writing does not contain a program for political change...

...It begins with an insistence that the social and political structures men live in are keeping the self stifled, chained down, locked up...

...when we hold rumor From what we fear, yet know not what we fear But float upon a wild and violent sea Each way and none...

...Rousseau however is not read much nowadays, at least not in the United States...

...Or, rather, it is we who charter ourselves in order to endure the experience of a meaningless life of routine...

...In this country the writer of the past who has become canonized as the chief saint in the gospel of authenticity is William Blake...

...man's profound need to feel at home in the world...

...See p. xix.] Berman, like the other psycho-political prophets, thinks that a radical political reordering of things would enable everyone to "be himself...

...Brown does not seem concerned with political change, but he does say that such a radical psychological change will enable us to avoid a repetition of the disasters of 20th-century history...

...Yet their new man does not look very attractive—either a behavioral zombie, programmed so that he would act like a kind of super Boy Scout, or a frustrated solitary, like those citizens of The Waste Land who are "each in his orison/Thinkine of the key...

...The happiness they envision would come about through the liberation of the self from society, not through the opening up of another realm of society—the political realm—to people who have not been in it before...

...For Sartre such violence is killing two birds with one stone: one destroys bourgeois society and at the same time one achieves one's authentic self...

...THERE ARE, however, distinctions to be made among these advocates of a true self...

...Theodore Roszak sees this new self as Dionysian and full of a profound and holy kind of irrationality...

...The answers to such questions, questions that must be raised in any discussion of politics, cannot be found in the work of these writers, for these distinctions don't seem important to them...

...Blake, in fact, is less interested in revolutionary politics than in revolutionary art and poetry—in an art that is radically different from the work of Joshua Reynolds and in a poetry that is radically different from the work of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson...

...There is no way for anyone to know if what he is doing or has done is authentic, creative, Dionysian—in other words expressive of his true self...

...Rousseau, as John Plamenatz has said, "understood...

...Laing, Marcuse, and Roszak accept the Freudian idea that society is a repressive force that causes tremendous damage to the self...

...It is easy to see how a politics that advocates authenticity could degenerate into a confusion of claims and counterclaims, of accusations and counteraccusations, each faction insisting that it alone possesses authenticity...

...I use the word "religion" advisedly: trying to find one's authentic self is a post-JudaeoChristian version of trying to have faith in God...

...life would be intolerable if everyone continually devoted himself to political questions...

...Without trust political action is impossible, and Macbeth will remain in power as long as mutual suspicion prevents people from forming political alliances...

...set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings...

...They call for a politics that will bring about the liberation of the "true self...

...Rather than a concern with ends, what we see in Sartre's introduction and in some, though not all, of Fanon's work is a mystique of means: political violence as therapy...

...These millenarian hopes were very common during the early days of the French Revolution, and they gave birth to notions of happiness that, like Paine's, seem hazy...

...I question the remedy offered by the psycho-political prophets, for their politics is an antipolitics that would intensify this feeling rather than lessen it...

...Yet these writers insist that their visionary theorizing is political theorizing...

...Most recently, in fact, Marcuse has become suspicious of any exclusive concern with psychological change...

...It is tendentious to examine Blake's writing as if it were doctrine, as if Blake were not a poet but a psychologist or a political scientist...

...There can never be a political remedy for a private loss of faith—whether in God or in oneself—unless, that is, one thinks of such secular religions as Nazism or Communism as political remedies...

...II Berman rightly devotes most of The Politics of Authenticity to Rousseau, who was the first writer to be especially interested in how man becomes "untrue" to himself when he enters society, how he "lives constantly outside himself, and only knows how to live in the opinion of others...

...who] exist outside the democratic process...

...Perhaps it is this malaise—usually associated with youth but visible in many different sectors of American society—that the psycho-political prophets are addressing themselves to when they speak of an authentic self...

...R. D. Laing does not work...

...is man re-creating himself," a remark not very different from Blake's comment that "violent passions emit the real, good & perfect tones...

...Brown would agree, I think, 88 with Marshall Berman, who ends his book with the following remarks: Our society is filled with people who are ardently yearning and consciously striving for authenticity, . . . countless anonymous men and women all over who are fighting, desperately and against all odds, simply to preserve, to feel, to be themselves...

...Those who strive for authenticity, on the other hand, want to know themselves inde 90 pendently of others, want to devote themselves to a private religion of self-realization...

...Violence becomes a kind of holy intuition, the opposite of the mechanical processes of the ego, and Fanon himself in The Wretched of the Earth speaks of the "creative madness" inherent in violent action...

...They may speak of the evils of capitalism or Stalinism, but when they use the word "liberation" they mean liberating ourselves from our "false" selves...

...STEPHEN MILLER...

...And when Laing, Roszak, and Brown ask us to dissolve our normal ego, to find our visionary splendor, or to embrace our Dionysian consciousness, they mean, I suppose, that we do these things by our own efforts...