The Meaning of Happiness - Alan Watts

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as set forward in the Old Testament, and it is curious that though doctrinally both Lutheranism and Methodism are anything but legalistic, their standards of morality follow the rigid Puritan tradition. A similar inconsistency may be noted in Calvinism, for belief in predestination, in the doctrine that each man is irrevocably damned or saved from the beginning of the world, might easily encourage moral laxity, seeing that nothing that man can do can affect his ultimate fate. But the result was the very opposite, and nowhere were there more uncompromising moralists than the Calvinists.

      Such morality is rational in that it is an attempt to force mankind to conform in thought and action to a rigid and idealistic law. This may be giving a rather wide meaning to the term “rational,” but in essentials there is little difference between attempts to force man to be moral and attempts to make him reasonable. There may be differences between the moral ideal and the rational ideal, but as they were conceived in the Puritan and Humanist traditions they were ideals contrary to nature in that they ignored that aspect of man’s being which corresponds to “nature red in tooth and claw.” Indeed, prior to the twentieth-century rationalist and Puritan ideals had numerous points in common, especially among the Anglo-Saxon peoples. For the ideals of progress, of the rational society of liberty, equality, and fraternity, of pure communism, were not originated in the eighteenth century by the rationalistic philosophers of France. As important forces they first came to light in Puritan England of the seventeenth century.4

      Yet these ideals, especially the purely rationalistic, held within themselves the seeds of their own decay. It is interesting to note that, so far as science was concerned, in spite of its exaltation of human reason there arose, as in religion, an inconsistency between its doctrine and its psychology and practice. It removed man from nature and made him its master by giving him machines and by overestimating the potentialities of his reason; yet in theory it showed his essential connection with and subservience to nature. Man was evolved from animals and was not a special creation of the Deity; furthermore, he might think himself free, but the universal law of causality made it obvious that his every thought and deed was predetermined and that he was as helpless a tool in nature’s hands as a drifting cloud. But determinism is a doctrine which self-assertive man has never taken seriously (as witness the Calvinists); it convinces his head but not his heart, and in practice he has to temper it with what Vaihinger calls the philosophy of “as if,” for he behaves as if he were free. But in the glorification of human reason there was an appeal to his pride, and reason had something to show for itself in steam engines, factories, medicine, electric power, airplanes, and radio. But the god of reason had some serious reverses, one of the most important of which came out of science itself, as a result of the uncomfortable and searching inquiries of a certain Sigmund Freud into matters connected with the other aspect of scientific discovery—the inseparability of man and nature.

      Freud, Original Sin, and the Unconscious

      The rationalists of the nineteenth century were essentially optimists, and it was not surprising that they had no more taste for Freud than for the Church’s doctrine of original sin. Their faith in the ideal of progress and the certain triumph of reason was not at all in harmony with Freud’s contention that man’s highest aspirations had their origin in unconscious forces of a very different character, forces to which he gave such unpleasant names as “incest wishes,” “castration complexes,” “mother or father fixations,” and other phrases of bluntly sexual type. Nor did rationalism take kindly to so irrational an idea as that man’s unconscious goal might be to reenter the womb and revert to a condition of protected irresponsibility, floating blissfully in a warm, sleepy darkness. But Freud’s teaching was original sin in a new garb, for it showed the unregenerate Adam behind a thin shell of reason, and if man’s highest aspirations were just “rationalizations” of these dark, unconscious forces, did not this go to prove a fundamental doctrine of the Church? Did it not show that man’s efforts to save himself by exercise of his unaided will and reason are fruitless? For Humanism and rationalism had altogether neglected a mysterious factor called the Grace of God, believing that the human mind was sufficiently powerful to work out its own salvation. And by the mind they understood merely that aspect of the soul known as intellect.

      Now we have seen that intellect is the thinking machine; a power drives that machine, but whatever the character of that power the machine can only interpret it in a mechanical way. Therefore when it has to accept an irrational impulse it rationalizes it in the course of putting it into effect. When the unregenerate Adam desires blood just for the sake of blood, the reasoning machine has to find a reasonable purpose for shedding blood, however specious. And it finds it because in many ways the intellect has the most intricately subtle power of adaptation and an almost infinite capacity for self-deception. For it is of immense importance to the self-esteem of the ego that rationalizations should be convincing; otherwise man must admit his failure to stand above nature.

      Nevertheless, Freudian doctrine aroused little sympathy until after the Great War when it achieved sudden success, primarily through the ability of its method of psychological healing to cure cases of shell shock. But the outburst of the unregenerate Adam in the war itself made Freud’s ideas much more acceptable, though it is surprising how many intelligent people even today will refuse to admit that they have such a thing as an unconscious mind. They regard it as quite an impertinence for anyone to suggest that they do not always know why they want what they want and do what they do. Yet they are quite ready to admit that they do not know why their bodies produce such mysterious things as cancers and that they are quite unaware of what is going on in their kidneys, hearts, and bowels. Thus if there are unconscious realms and activities in the body, it seems reasonable to suggest, if only by analogy, that there is an unconscious aspect of the mind.5

      The Contribution of Jung

      Analogy might suggest even more than this. The physical body has intimate connections with the entire material universe, most of which are equally unconscious, and might it not be supposed that the unconscious mind extends its roots far beyond the individual, having begun long before he was conceived in the womb? With much more than analogy to support this idea, Freud’s pupil C. G. Jung propounded a theory of the unconscious which came close to the fringes of mysticism.6 For to him the unconscious mind is personal only on its surface; essentially it is collective, racial, and perhaps universal, for Jung found that in their dreams modern men and women spontaneously produced myths and symbols thousands of years old of which they had no conscious knowledge. Thus the infantile sex life of the individual was a comparatively unimportant factor in the unconscious, and Freud’s analysis was found to be just the first important step into this undiscovered realm.

      The significance of the idea of the unconscious is twofold, for it reveals a natural universe on the inside of man as well as on the outside. It also raises important questions as to the character of man’s real self. I have already suggested that this self lies much deeper than conscious reason and intellect, deeper even than man’s individuality which appears more and more to be an instrument animated by natural and universal forces. Now that we find the roots of the soul descending far below the personal level, we can understand why Jung describes the ego (which we ordinarily regard as our central self) as a complex of the unconscious. That is to say, it is a device employed by the unconscious mind to achieve certain results; in the same way the apparently self-contained human body is a device employed by nature to achieve certain results. But it must not be thought that this employment of a device is necessarily purposive in the same way that the reasoned actions of human beings are, for human purpose may be only a rationalization of natural impulse, as reason can only operate in terms of purpose.

      To us these ideas are very new. But I said that they bordered on mysticism because in fact they would have been well understood by many of the ancient peoples of the world. Thus to the Hindus man’s self was identified with his individual person only because of his limited vision; they knew that if this vision could be enlarged, he would discover that his true self was Brahman. In other words, man’s ego is a trick or device (maya)7 to assist the functions of life, for if life is to manifest itself it must do so in the form of separate things. Life as such is one and has no form; nobody has ever seen life without a form. Thus, according to the Vedic teaching of the Hindus, Brahman is one and has in itself no form, and hence Brahman as such cannot do anything,

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