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 zuletzt bearbeitet: Sun, 05 Jul 2020 01:57:52 +0200
philosophie@labonneheure.ch
New York : Schocken Books, 1988, ©1966.

The insecurity of freedom (Book, 1988) [WorldCat.org]
Get this from a library! The insecurity of freedom. [Abraham Joshua Heschel]

 zuletzt bearbeitet: Sun, 05 Jul 2020 01:12:12 +0200
philosophie@labonneheure.ch
The original text treats also religion. Those text passages are left out here. The original text doesn't have highlighted passages.
[...]
Modern man continues to ponder: What will I get out of life? What escapes his attention is the fundamental, yet forgotten question, What will life get out of me?
Absorbed in the struggle for the emancipation of the individual we have concentrated our attention upon the idea of human rights and overlooked the importance of human obligations. More and more the sense of commitment, which is so essential a component of human existence, was lost in the melting pot of conceit and sophistication. Oblivious to the fact of his receiving infinitely more than he is able to return, man began to consider his self as the only end. Caring only for his needs rather than for his being needed, he is hardly able to realize that rights are anything more than legalized interests.
Needs are looked upon today as if they were holy, as if they contained the totality of existence. Needs are our gods, and we toil and spare no effort to gratify them. Suppression of a desire is considered a sacrilege that must inevitably avenge itself in the form of some mental disorder. We worship not one but a whole pantheon of needs and have come to look upon moral and spiritual norms as nothing but personal desires in disguise.
Specifically, need denotes the absence or shortage of something indispensable to the well-being of a person, evoking the urgent desire for satisfaction. The term “need” is generally used in two ways: one denoting the actual lack, an objective condition, and the other denoting the awareness of such a lack. It is in the second sense, in which need is synonymous with interest, namely “an unsatisfied capacity corresponding to an unrealized condition” that the term is used here.
Every human being is a cluster of needs, yet these needs are not the same in all men or unalterable in any one man. There is a fixed minimum of needs for all men, but no fixed maximum for any man. Unlike animals, man is the playground for the unpredictable emergence and multiplication of needs and interests, some of which are indigenous to his nature, while others are induced by advertisement, fashion, envy, or come about as miscarriages of authentic needs. We usually fail to discern between authentic and artificial needs and, misjudging a whim for an aspiration, we are thrown into ugly tension. Most obsessions are the perpetuation of such misjudgments. In fact, more people die in the epidemics of needs than in the epidemics of disease. To stem the expansion of man’s needs, which in turn is brought about by technological and social advancement, would mean to halt the stream on which civilization is riding. Yet the stream unchecked may sweep away civilization itself, since the pressure of needs turned into aggressive interests is the constant cause of wars, and increases in direct proportion to technological progress.
We cannot make our judgments, decisions, and directions for action dependent upon our needs. The fact is that man who has found out so much about so many things knows neither his own heart nor his own voice. Many of the interests and needs we cherish are imposed on us by the conventions of society; they are not indigenous to our essence. While some of them are necessities, others, as I pointed out before, are fictitious, and adopted as a result of convention, advertisement, or sheer envy.
The contemporary man believes he has found the philosopher’s stone in the concept of needs. But who knows his true needs? How are we going to discern authentic from fictitious needs, necessities from make-believes?
Having absorbed an enormous amount of needs and having been taught to cherish the high values, such as justice, liberty, faith, as private or national interests, we are beginning to wonder whether needs and interests should be relied upon. While it is true that there are interests which all men have in common, most of our private and national interests, as asserted in daily living, divide and antagonize rather than unite us.
Interest is a subjective, dividing principle. It is the excitement of feeling, accompanying special attention paid to some object. But do we pay sufficient attention to the demands of universal justice? In fact, the interest in universal welfare is usually blocked by the interest in personal welfare, particularly when it is to be achieved at the price of renouncing one’s vested interests. It is just because the power of interests is tyrannizing our lives, determining our views and actions, that we lose sight of the values that count most.
Short is the way from need to greed. Evil conditions make us seethe with evil needs, with mad dreams. Can we afford to pursue all our innate needs, even our will for power?
In the tragic confusion of interests, in which every one of us is caught, no distinction seems to be as indispensable as the distinction between right and wrong interests. Yet the concepts of right and wrong, to be standards in our dealing with interests, cannot themselves be interests. Determined as they are by temperament, bias, background, and environment of every individual and group, needs are our problems rather than our norms. They are in need of, rather than the origins of, standards.
He who sets out to employ the realities of life as means for satisfying his own desires will soon forfeit his freedom and be degraded to a mere tool. Acquiring things, he becomes enslaved to them; in subduing others, he loses his own soul. It is as if unchecked covetousness were double-faced; a sneer and subtle vengeance behind a captivating smile. We can ill afford to set up needs, an unknown, variable, vacillating, and eventually degrading factor, as a universal standard, as a supreme, abiding rule or pattern for living.
We feel jailed in the confinement of personal needs. The more we indulge in satisfactions, the deeper is our feeling of oppressiveness. To be an iconoclast of idolized needs, to defy our own immoral interests, though they seem to be vital and have long been cherished, we must be able to say No to ourselves in the name of a higher Yes. Yet our minds are late, slow, and erratic. What can give us the power to curb the deference to wrong needs, to detect spiritual fallacies, to ward off false ideals, and to wrestle with inattentiveness to the unseemly and holy?
This, indeed, is the purpose of our religious traditions: to keep alive the higher Yes as well as the power of man to say, “Here I am”; to teach our minds to understand the true demand and to teach our conscience to be present.
[...]
Yet freedom is not only the ability to choose and to act, but also the ability to will, to love.
[...]
We [the Jewish] are taught to prefer truth to security, to maintain loyalty even at the price of being in the minority. It is inner freedom that gives man the strength to forgo security, the courage to remain lonely in the multitude.
[...]
We all share a supreme devotion to the hard-won freedoms of the American people. Yet to be worthy of retaining our freedoms we must not lose our understanding of the essential nature of freedom. Freedom means more than mere emancipation. It is primarily freedom of conscience, bound up with inner allegiance. The danger begins when freedom is thought to consist in the fact that “I can act as I desire.” This definition not only overlooks the compulsions which often lie behind our desires; it reveals the tragic truth that freedom may develop within itself the seed of its own destruction. The will is not an ultimate and isolated entity, but determined by motives beyond its own control. To be what one wants to be is also not freedom, since the wishes of the ego are largely determined by external factors.
Freedom is not a principle of uncertainty, the ability to act without a motive. Such action would be chaotic and subrational, rather than free.
Although political and social freedom must include all this, even the freedom to err — its true essence is in man’s ability to surpass himself, even to act against his inclinations and in defiance of his own needs and desires, to sacrifice prejudice even if it hurts, to give up superstition even when it claims to be a doctrine.
Freedom is the liberation from the tyranny of the self-centered ego.
[...]
Although all men are potentially free, it is our sacred duty to safeguard all those political, social, and intellectual conditions which will enable every man to bring about the concrete actualization of freedom which is the essential prerequisite of creative achievement.
The shock of radical amazement, the humility born in awe and reverence, the austere discipline of unremitting inquiry and self-criticism are acts of liberating man from the routine way of looking only at those features of experience which are similar and regular, and opening his soul to the unique and transcendent. This sensivity to the novel and the unprecedented is the foundation of God-awareness and of the awareness of the preciousness of all beings. It leads from reflexive concern and the moral and spiritual isolation which is the result of egocentricity to a mode of responding to each new and unique experience in terms of broader considerations, wider interests, deeper appreciation and new, as yet unrealized values.
[...]
The meaning of freedom is not exhausted by deliberation, decision, and responsibility, although it must include all this. The meaning of freedom presupposes an openness to transcendence, and man has to be responsive before he can become responsible.
For freedom is not an empty concept. Man is free to be free; he is not free in choosing to be a slave; he is free in doing good; he is not free in doing evil. To choose evil is to fail to be free. In choosing evil he is not free but determined by forces which are extraneous to the spirit. Free is he who has decided to act in agreement with the spirit that goes beyond all necessities.
Freedom is a challenge and a burden against which man often rebels. He is ready to abandon it, since it is full of contradiction and continually under attack. Freedom can only endure as a vision, and loyalty to it is an act of faith.
There is no freedom without awe. We must cultivate many moments of silence to bring about one moment of expression. We must bear many burdens to have the strength to carry out one act of freedom.
Man’s true fulfillment cannot be reached by the isolated individual, and his true good depends on communion with, and participation in, that which transcends him. Each challenge from beyond the person is unique, and each response must be new and creative.
[...]
Refusal to delegate the power to make ultimate decisions to any human institution, derives its strength either from the awareness of one’s mysterious dignity or from the awareness of one’s ultimate responsibility. But that strength breaks down in the discovery that one is unable to make a significant choice. Progressive vulgarization of society may deprive man of his ability to appreciate the sublime burden of freedom. Like Esau he may be ready to sell his birthright for a pot of lentils.
A major root of freedom lies in the belief that man, every man, is too good to be the slave of another man.
[...]

Quelle: Abraham Heschel – The insecurity of freedom

philosophie@labonneheure.ch
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 zuletzt bearbeitet: Wed, 20 Mar 2019 18:44:23 +0100
philosophie@labonneheure.ch
she is the one
who said "fun"
sounded like a word
of German origin
she thought too much
like me
our time together
like summer
(concentration)
camp
emaciated possibilities
lie lifeless
o, this intellect burns

the crematorium below my nose
keeps life above my ears

silence is the star
that I shall wear
to mark my difference
yet we have so much in common
tonight
that the sun
has made light of it
while we contemplate
the weight of it all

it is we that are emaciated
our bodies subject
to our mind's propaganda
forgive the distinction
but intellect fares
moment's genocide
and we should have kissed
hours ago

you hold your breath
when you should hold your tongue
and hold your tongue
when you should hold my hand
and i should delegate
more authority to myself
but i can't help thinking
that you are thinking
thinking
what is she thinking?

In Saul Williams - She, S. 46f.

 zuletzt bearbeitet: Wed, 20 Mar 2019 18:43:43 +0100
philosophie@labonneheure.ch
intellect is like a major city
laden with concrete and metal
advanced modes of transportation
shining buildings and fenced in parks

spirit is the mountains,
forest, wilderness
and vast countryside
that surrounds it

too many people live in the city
struggling day to day
for mere existence

most have forgotten
how tho live off the land

they only experience nature
on class trips and short term vacations

for those that live in the country
cities are like amusement parks
with high prices and temporal satisfaction

at the end of the day
they are tired
ready to go home
to relieve their ringing ears

In Saul Williams - She, S. 48

 zuletzt bearbeitet: Wed, 20 Mar 2019 18:43:13 +0100
philosophie@labonneheure.ch
i am empty
in a non-buddhist way
my energies have gone
to the four directions

the river
never returns
to its source

i have always been empty
and i have always been filled

i must re member
i am not the source

i have overfed my ego
it sits slumped
on a couch
of its own making

it is now time
to call on the goddess

must i engender
divinity?

In Saul Williams - She, S. 49

philosophie@labonneheure.ch
Autor: Saul Williams
Titel: She
Pocket Books, 1999 New York
ISBN: 978-0-671-03977-6
She (Book, 1999) [WorldCat.org]
Leih es in einer Bibliothek aus! She. [Saul Williams]