Today's soundtrack is Ringo Deathstarr: God's Dream.
This morning, I'm reading the second half of the second chapter of Maslow's The Farther Reaches of Human Nature.
Maslow says that it is important to consider the physical base of discussions about human growth. Use of the right language - the fusion-words - can help us to consider the whole picture. For a person to move toward being fully human, he must "become aware of what [he] is, biologically, temperamentally, constitutionally, as a member of a species, of one's capacities, desires, needs, and also of one's vocation, what one is fitted for, what one's destiny is" (p. 31). So self-awareness is one of the steps of personal growth. A person can only "transcend one's own personality" (31) if he realizes what his inner desires and drives are.
In people who suffer from human diminution, their inner signals "become weak or even disappear entirely" (p. 32). To return to the path of growth toward full humanness, we must regain the ability to identify what we want and don't want, what we like and don't like, etc. WIthout these inner signals, people with human diminution turn to external cues: "clocks, rules, calendars, schedules, agenda, and [...] hints and cues from other people" (p. 32).
Forgive the long quote here, but I don't want anything to be lost in a paraphrase; Maslow certainly says it best:
"[Human diminution] is a falling short of what one could have been, and even one could say, of what one should have been, biologically speaking, that is, if one had grown and developed in an unimpeded way. Human and personal possibilities have been lost. The world has been narrowed, and so has consciousness. Capacities have been inhibited. [...] The cognitive losses, the lost pleasures, joys, and ecstasies, the loss of competence, the inability to relax the weakening of will, the fear of responsibility--all these are diminutions of humanness" (p. 33). Some kinds of human diminution is reversible; some isn't.
The ineffectual graspings at improvement that we see in those with human diminution is actually a sign of hope; it means that even though they have not found the way to self-actualization, they are still reaching for it. Even conflict is a good indicator of someone holding on to their beliefs. Apathy is the saddest thing to see. To reverse diminution, meeting the needs of the person can often be effective. If they have been abandoned by their loved ones, give them love. If they have lived a life of instability, give them routine and stability. If they feel worthless, show them their worth.
Here, Maslow again comes back to the question: what blocks so many from becoming fully human, if all of us have the innate drive to do so? Maslow identifies one culprit as what he calls the Jonah Complex: it's a fear of being great, an evasion of one's own destiny, and running away from one's best talents. None of us have reached our true potential; all of us could be more fully human than we are right now. We are afraid of reaching our peak, though, because even while we are excited by the prospect of doing great things, we are afraid of failing at those same things - after all, the higher one rises, the further he falls. To avoid this, we must not plan to be run-of-the-mill at anything we set our minds to - we should strive to be the best at what we do. This is the only way to happiness, to avoid being dissatisfied and unhappy when we think of our achievements.
When we think of great men and women, we honour and maybe even idolize them, but at the same time, we exhibit countervaluing: they make us feel inferior, jealous, and anxious. "[T]he greatest people [...] make us feel aware of our lesser worth" (p. 36), and if we haven't yet learned our own self-worth, we might even think that they are doing so intentionally, whether or not that is true! If, however we can learn to love the good we see in others, we might be less scared of achieving that good ourselves. There is, of course, a difference between awe and fear; the former is good and should not be seen as something to cure; the latter, however, is an impediment to our personal growth.
We must recognize that no person can bear a very large dose of greatness. We are made to experience peaks and valleys. The ecstacy of greatness must give way to serene self-assuredness. So there is some justification to the Jonah Complex: we are scared of being overwhelmed by greatness. But instead of avoiding it, we should learn to control it, to turn it into something sustainable. Instead of striving to do something ridiculous like write a book superseding the greatest philosopher, we should strive to write a great book about philosophy, or else we will swing between hubris and self-doubt. Maslow says that the "evasion of one's own growth, setting low levels of aspiration, the fear of doing what one is capable of doing, voluntary self-crippling, pseudostupidity, mock-humility are in fact defenses against grandiosity, arrogance, sinful pride, hubris" (p. 38). Maslow refers to Aldous Huxley as a good example of someone who did it right: he wasn't afraid to make himself small by being amazed by the world around him, then he fearlessly set upon himself great tasks.
There are many Values of Being, and each one we simultaneously desire and reject. We want truth, but some truths we are afraid of knowing; we want knowledge, but we are afraid of the responsibilities given to us if we have knowledge; we want beauty, but we don't want to become vain through our beauty. But if we are to improve our characters, if we are to become more fully human, we must accept our smallness, recognize the potential side effects of any good thing, and not run away from the good because of the possibilities.
