THE SELF-ACTUALIZING MAN – III

The attaining of a high level of authentic impersonality strengthens in a man his independence of culture and environment. A fourth characteristic of the self-actualizing man is his very real enjoyment of a sense of autonomy. The notion of autonomy is a part of our inheritance from the Socratic concept of the individual, and it has been transmitted since the seventeenth century in modern presuppositions concerning man as a rational moral agent. But although this notion is embedded in the vocabulary of liberal, democratic theory, it has been considerably undermined by the prevailing tendency to see men as intersubstitutable, to view most acts as predictable, and to explain most human responses mechanistically in terms of instinctual drives or the functioning of systems and subsystems. It is therefore against very great odds that the self-actualizing man gives existential authenticity to the abstract notion of individual autonomy as an agent, a knower, and an actor. He fully enjoys the activity of being a spectator, a knower, an actor, and a moral agent.

He has a sharp sense of his own individuality and of the boundaries of himself. Having boundaries is essential to the notion of self-actualization, but these boundaries will not coincide with the contours of self-hood reflected in the totality of culture-bound responses. The self-actualizing man may choose to express his individuality in the language and symbols provided by his cultural and social context, but these modes of expression will not obscure his sense of transcendence of his environment. This sense of inner space enables him to recognize more alternatives than appear on the surface and to feel himself capable of choosing meaningfully among them. He is aware of an open texture within his mind and his personality that helps him to be open to the world outside him. This awareness will take the form of a freshness that he brings to bear on his appreciation of persons and situations and of particular moments. This quality of freshness is all too rare in our everyday encounters. Particularly in our highly individualistic and competitive society, men are starved from a lack of authentic and generous appreciation of each other. The self-actualizing man would distinguish himself by his constant readiness to give unqualified appreciation and praise to other people. This does not mean that he is not capable of discrimination. The more he discovers some new and subtle facet of life that draws out his rich and free-ranging appreciation, the more he is able to bring freshness and joy to every situation. The enthusiasm that goes with freshness generates a sense of self-expansion that goes with what Freud called the oceanic feeling and what Maslow calls a peak experience. It is a sense of losing oneself in the vastness and richness of the world around us.

The self-actualizing man is, paradoxically, so secure in his efforts to find himself that he is also able to forget himself. He becomes a universal man who emancipates himself from the prison house of his personality and enters into the kingdom of mankind. The more he actualizes himself, the more he can transcend himself. In place of the sense of being “acculturated” in the stifling way associated with the localization of one’s allegiances, the self-actualizing man experiences the exhilaration, the grandeur, and the nobility of being truly human. He embodies the spirit captured by Whitman in his poem “Song of the Open Road.” He becomes an “encloser of continents.” This will have a profound bearing on all his relationships. He will be able to relate to many different types of persons and react to a wide variety of situations with humour and compassion. He will show a shrewd perception of the relation between means and ends. His creativity will enable him to recognize opportunities for growth where other men see only limitations. He is so absorbed in what has yet to be tried and yet to be accomplished that he will have no time to brood over his past achievements and failures. He lives in that dimension of the present which points to the future.

All of this may seem rather Utopian and irrelevant to our contemporary situation, although we can see little increments of the qualities of a self-actualizing man in certain moments in our lives, and we know only too well the effects of the opposite kinds of attitudes in our daily experience.

Given this portrait or model of the self-actualizing man, we might ask how this contemporary concept differs from the classical ideal of the man who has attained to the fullness of self-knowledge. In Platonic thought, the attainment of this ideal involved a deliberate mastery of the dialectic. In the classical Indian tradition, the ideal of spiritual freedom cannot be reached without a deliberate voiding of all limited identifications and allegiances, a persistent endeavour to recapture the self-sustaining activity of an unconditioned consciousness. For the mystical quest, this means the recovery of an inward center which is full of creative potential but around which there are fluctuating boundaries. Such a rebirth is impossible without a preliminary process of dying, a dissolution of the sense of false identity, and the gaining of confidence in a new mode of awareness. The distinction between being a separate knower and having an external world to be known is gradually weakened, without sinking back into a state of mindless passivity.

It would be appropriate here to take two statements of the classical ideal. The stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote:

This, then, remains: Remember to retire into this little territory of thy own, and above all do not distract or strain thyself, but be free, and look at things as a man, as a human being, as a citizen, as a mortal. But among the things readiest to thy hand to which thou shalt turn, let there be these, which are two. One is that things do not touch the soul, for they are external and remain immovable; but our perturbations come only from the opinion which is within. The other is that all these things which thou seest change immediately and will no longer be; and constantly bear in mind how many of these changes thou hast already witnessed. The universe is transformation: life is opinion.

In the classic Indian text on self-knowledge, Atmabodh, the true nature of the Self is depicted by Shankara in the following way: “I am without attributes and action, eternal and pure, free from stain and desire, changeless and formless, and always free . . . I fill all things, inside and out, like the ether. Changeless and the same in all, I am pure, unattached, stainless and immutable.”

Clearly, the concept of self-sufficiency given by Marcus Aurelius presupposes a particular theory about the mental processes through which the eternal transformations of the universe are reduced to static opinions. This theory is bound up with a certain view of the relation between the distorting mind and the indwelling soul, both of which are consubstantial with different dimensions of cosmic reality. Without deliberate reflection on such premises, a man cannot become a true philosopher or attain a fundamental equanimity of soul. On the other hand, our contemporary humanistic psychologists do not concern themselves with presuppositions about human nature. They do not hold any definite or formulated concepts about human essence and human potentiality or the processes involved in attaining any stated goal of human perfectibility. Instead, it is assumed that human beings act out what they think they are and thereby find out more about themselves.

Similarly, we can readily sense the vast difference in conceptual content between the contemporary model of the self-actualizing man and the classical formulation in Atmabodhof supreme self-affirmation. There are several complex and abstract presuppositions implicit in building a mental framework which enables a man to feel that he is essentially attributeless and beyond all conditions, while he is also partially embodied in attributes and conditions. If the contemporary model of the self-actualizing man seems to be conceptually less demanding, this is merely because it is assimilated to our everyday picture of psychological health as the absence of known forms of pathology. Humanistic psychologists like Maslow do not wish to pronounce about how the process of self-actualization takes place, partly because it could happen in many more ways than could be put in a paradigmatic scheme. It is important in its way to protect this diversity of paths and to maintain the greatest possible tolerance in regard to processes of human growth that we can hardly claim to understand. We must preserve a necessary agnosticism here

The model of the self-actualizing man should not be seen as a static, textbook typology with which we can readily identify, thereby gaining some form of vicarious satisfaction – some form of compensatory consolation in our own current preoccupations with the varieties of human sickness. Nor should we mistake it for a model that could be elaborated by more empirical research. There is, in fact, no substitute either for the philosophical task of confronting alternative presuppositions or for the practical endeavour of singling out visible examples of maturity in the quest for self-awareness. The former is needed to stimulate our intellectual imagination, and the latter is indispensable in stirring our emotions and canalizing them in a worthwhile direction. The two functions are interrelated to a greater extent than we may suppose. By daring to unravel our presuppositions and to confront them with those derived from the classical philosophical and mystical traditions, we are in a better position to find an underpinning for that continuity of consciousness which, at some level or the other, is essential to the exemplification of a critical distance in our day-to-day encounters with the world around us.

In our attempts to move away from the treadmill of conformity and from much that is unnatural in our contemporary society, the model of the self-actualizing man could be a valuable starting point in formulating a feasible ideal for ourselves. The self-actualizing man seeks to know what to do now, and at the same time to see sufficiently beyond the present to enjoy a wider sweep, a larger perspective than what we constantly use in our competing concerns. If most pathological cases are persons with either a fixed stare or a wandering gaze, then a man who uses both eyes steadily is, by contrast, wholesome and healthy. The sense in which the self-actualizing man is using both his eyes is best understood in the context of an old tradition. The Theologia Germanica, for example, refers to the eye of time and the eye of eternity. It is no small thing to find any man in our society who is willing to use both these eyes “to see life steadily and as a whole.”

There is indeed an even more distant yet inspiring ideal in the classical traditions of East and West. Many a mystical text refers to “the mysterious eye of the soul,” which is capable of a synthesizing vision that enables the fully awakened man to use the eye of time and the eye of eternity without becoming dependent either on the ideal or on what seems real here and now. For such a man, as for the poet, “the Ideal is only Truth at a distance,” but he is not infatuated with his image of the ideal to such an extent that he loses contact with the concerns of other men who need, in some sense, the illusions to which they cling at any given time.

We could honor the classical ideal without devaluing the contemporary model of the self-actualizing man. Is the difference between them simply a matter of belief, or a variation of technique, or a question of successive levels and processes of awareness? Without proposing to answer these questions, it is in the hope that the model of a self-actualizing man will not become yet another modish fad that it has here been put in the broader perspective of a hoary tradition that we have still to recover. We are perhaps now in the early stages of a long exploration that, fortunately, cannot be charted at present. What is surely more important is that as many of us as possible should share in the excitement of taking the first step, of commencing the journey inward so that we may enrich each other and respond with sympathy to those who seek our support.

Hermes, January 1976
Raghavan Iyer