© Columbia University Press
Fear of Freedom
Paper, 176 pages, 13 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-13997-7
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April, 2008
Cloth, 176 pages, 13 illus.
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Chapter 1: Ab Jove Principium
Ab Jove principium —everything begins with Jupiter. And we too must begin there, at this non-existent point from which all things are born. Our Jupiter, however, we need not seek in the skies, but where he is wont to stay, in places most dark and earthly, in the maternal dampness of the deep. He is more akin to the worm than to the eagle; but soon enough, he will find his own heraldic eagles, and extol them above every badge or emblem, for only thus will he avoid being devoured, once and for all, by the true eagles of the heavens.
Beyond metaphors, we cannot grasp anything human, unless we start from the feel of the sacred: the most ambiguous, deep-seated, double-edged of all feelings and senses, worm and eagle alike; a continuous dark denial of freedom and art, and—conversely—a continuous creation of art and freedom. And again, we cannot understand anything social, unless we start from the meanings of religion, this disrespectful heir of things sacred.
What is the process of every religion? To change the sacred into the sacrificial: to deprive it of its main feature—inexpressibility—by transforming it into deeds and words; to create the ritual out of the mythical; to substitute a sacramental bird for a shapeless turgidity, and marriage for desire; to turn sacred suicide into consecrated slaughter. Religion is relation and relegation. Relegation of a god into a web of formulas, conjurations, invocations, prayers, so that he may not, as is his way, elude us. Sacredness, the very appearance of terror, shapes itself into law, in order to escape its own self. Pure anarchy becomes pure tyranny. Man, as a free being, is thus bound by the selfsame bonds of the sacred, and relegated into a common reciprocal nexus before the deity. There is no rabble without a king, there are no masses without God. It may be false to claim that every society grows out of a religious tie; but it is certainly true that every monarchy is religious. Every king, great or small, every petty prince and clan chieftain is a sacred majesty: a being divinely ambiguous, having no true name, except a name symbolic and heraldic (a number); a being that lives hidden or perhaps may not live at all; a being the less existent the more it appears to be. With good reason the most ancient kings—true kings—were beasts or indeterminate powers of nature; and thus China was ruled by dragon-kings, by tiger-kings, by demon-kings,—and Egypt, by dog-faced and falcon-headed royal gods.
The nearer the formless sense of sacredness swims up to the surface of men’s consciousness, the less certain, the more earthly and manifold are the religious shapes into which it flows and ends. The deeper the sacred sinks into our inner recesses, the higher the gods soar into the cloudless sky; and when the sacred in ourselves is reduced to a disappearing center, to a single point, fiery but extremely remote—then the One God hides beyond the clouds, out of time, out of space, shrouded in total transcendence. But when even this vanishing point is forgotten, and the mass grows into person, God himself loses existence, while the blue skies of day and the black skies of night cease to watch us like open eyes and change into fields of serene contemplation, or into wastes tempestuously human, aerial mirrors of the soul.
So, too, the kings and the idols. In times of sacred lore they must be monsters, stones and trees, and ambiguous terrors of darkness; in times when religion prevails, they are shepherds, patricians, animals, and thereafter monarchs and images—until the day when a red Phrygian cap1 on the head of a Louis crowns constitutional kings, dead kings, worshipped guillotines. But in the short interludes of liberty the kings are forgotten, the idols entombed. These interludes, like the others (needless to say), do not form an historical progression: they are subjective, they coexist. Everybody is born from chaos, and to chaos may revert; every man leaves the mass in a process of differentiation, and in this shapeless mass may lose himself again. But the only vivid moments in an individual life, the only periods of higher culture in history are those in which the two contrary processes of differentiation and undifferentiation find a common point of equilibrium and are coexistent in the creative act.
What is undifferentiation and how is it related to sacredness? The myth of creation out of chaos is truly full of sense. There is a primeval indistinctness, common to all men, flowing in eternity, inherent to every aspect of the world, spirit of every being in the world, memory of all time of the world. All individuals start from it, urged by an obscure freedom to break loose and gain their own individual forms, and perpetually drawn back by an obscure necessity and compelled to merge again in this same indistinction. This twofold endeavor stretches from one death to another: from prenatal chaos to the natural fading away and extinction. But only a total detachment from this everlasting indefinite flow, only a void and egoistic reasoning, only the abstraction of liberty are really and truly death—as are their opposites: complete lack of self-differentiation, mystic brutish darkness, the bondage of the inexpressible.
The flow of indistinction is nature itself, obscure beyond utterance, whose sighs are earthquakes and volcanoes, storms and constellations—and the unerring unconsciousness of the insect. Action, on the contrary, is the outcome of complete differentiation: the individual, severed from the whole, moves on to find his own shape, and his motion has a meaning only to himself. And again, action must be distinguished from achievement, which results from creative human activity, and blends at the very same moment individual riches and the treasures of universality—differentiation and undifferentiation: an activity most individual when soaring above the individuals, and most universal when intensely singular; born of freedom and necessity at once: understood by all men through man’s common indistinct nature; transcending everyone, inasmuch as every man is a distinct, single self; but shared by everyone in the free process of individuation and consciousness.
The feeling of a transcendent indistinctness and the terror of it, the dread of indetermination which dwells in those who are in the very act of giving birth to themselves, of severing themselves from the mass—this is the sacred.
The way of religion is to substitute that which is undifferentiated and inexpressible with concrete images and symbols—so that the sacred may be cast out of our consciousness and replaced by finite, and therefore liberating, objects. That which is common to man and wolf is, through sheer indistinction, a boundless terror—until a totemic image turns it into bearable worship. That which is common to man and man is a mysterious original sin never committed, the transgression of a limit, of all limits, and the agony of the unlimited; until a god man comes to free us, by substituting himself for sin, by burdening himself with sin.
Religion is therefore, thus considered, a means in the process of individuation; but a means which, in order to liberate the spirit from the terrifying feeling of transcendency, tends to replace it by visible symbols, by idols.
Man does not stand alone before the sky and before his own self. Facing the “I” there is the other —all the others, mankind. Every human relation, before it becomes free, must be sacred and religious—for relationship is possible only through the “I” being also the “other,” to the point of identity. Closed in himself, the individual tends to separate and live an autonomous life: contact with others is allowed only through that which is common to all, only through the undifferentiated, whose perennial presence renders comprehensible every differentiation. Truly human intercourse, therefore, is always a return to the origins, and that is where shyness and bashfulness arise. The fear of the woman is a sacred horror, for in the act of love every personal memory is blurred—drowned in the universal indistinct memory of the waters of Chaos.
Each truly human relationship breeds, thus, the sense of sacredness, every temporary liberation must be religious in character, must mean the substitution of man by his own symbol, by the idol of his own person. Such is the origin of personal names, family names, coats of arms and banners. A man not free enough to establish communications with his fellows without getting lost, will choose, instead of the actual human intercourse, a purely symbolic relationship, enabling him to remain within himself; and even of his own self each man makes an idol, for fear of reaching, through intimate exploration, those mysterious depths where each self melts away.
That which holds true of the intercourse between individual men, applies equally to the relations of man, society and the state: not only because they, too, are human relationships, but also because society and the state, to those men who do not perceive them as embodiments of their own freedom, must appear as towering giants above understanding. The farther the state is removed from each individual, the mightier it grows in boundless leviathanic complexity, the more it breeds an all-pervasive sense of sacredness. And to relieve us from this sacred horror, society and the state must change into gods.
In the first social nucleus, in the primitive state of the clan, the father is the god. His deification suppresses every truly human intercourse with his kinsmen. He stays in his tent, his appearances are unfrequent; he has the power of blessing and cursing, and his is the right to kill—a right of heroes, not of men. Every attempt to enter into closer relationship with the father appears both anarchical and atheistic, and incest is therefore abominable. Incest deprives Lot of his divine authority, for—his ways being entirely those of nature—he cannot, like Jupiter, change into a bull, a cloud, a golden rain for his miraculous embraces of women. The greatest political offence is that of Ham, son of Noah, who discovers his father’s nakedness, because he wants to see his father as a human being.2 Ambiguity—the transition from the real father to the image of the father-god, and the feeling of profanation in seeing the former through the latter—this is the chief origin of the father-complexes. (As for the mother-complexes—whose mechanism is sometimes the same—conditions seem to be entirely reversed: mother and son continue almost physically to be one and the same; the attempted severance and glorification do not succeed, and the complex results from this failure.)
The deification of the father (and the complexes that ensue) last as long as the son’s infancy, until the son, peering into himself, perceives himself equal to the father, entirely a man. The deification of the state (and the resulting servitude) will last as long as social infancy, until each man examines his own self and finds in his own complexity the entire structure of the state, and in his own freedom—the necessity of the state. The act of Noah’s son is therefore a real sacrilege and political offence—Ham being still in his infancy and not yet seeking in his self the father and the state, but viewing them as gods and himself as son and slave: a rebellious son and slave, not a man free from bondage.
Thus, the state-idol marks at once the need of true human relations and the incapacity to establish them freely; it denotes both the sacred nature of these relations and the inability to differentiate them without drying them up and above all, it is the sign of man’s dread of man. This terror of self forms the deepest-rooted of all idolatries, for its fount is ever present, and the most monstrous of all, for it is entirely human. But this idolatry presupposes the sense of an absolute identity of men, and the fear of not being distinguished as persons: the sense of a mass, of a shapeless humanity, where every individual limit is arbitrary, because the individuals are not really defined. Its opposite is to be found in abstract individualism, wherein every sense of community is lost, while the state, far from being deified, does not even exist, because passions are non-existent. This atheism is no less deadly than the idolatry mentioned above. It is useless to be free from passions: we ought to be free in our passions. For passion is the place where each individual meets the undifferentiated universe; it is the fecundity of sleep everlasting, the eternal return to earlier indistinction—and the problem is to remain ourselves, to retain freedom, in this necessary return.
Abstract individualism, flight from passion, inability to sleep, are nothing but barrenness. But dread of passion, fear of sleeping, the feel of the darkness we are made of, the horror of night’s shadow without light—this is the black religion of the state. And, as no Faustian deed is either dream or passion—so, too, none of the thousand cries calling a people to “wake up” can free them from the weight of their slumber, and from the monsters they adore. Only the process of inner maturation will turn the totemic beast, the intangible father, the sacred majesty into the lovely adornments of the past; and then, the temples of Mars, of Vesta, of Janus, and the ceremonial antiquities of England, will remind adult nations that they, too, were infants in days of yore. Good care will be taken, then, of the memories and the myths, which will survive in customs and figures of speech—but so remote as to become incomprehensible. Every word we speak is saturated with religions past and spent; A flight of birds stirs us, because in a faraway time (faraway, though not by-gone) it used to be an omen.
This is true on a personal level as well as on the level of history: that which has been may return once more, that which has been hidden deep may crop out on the surface of our consciousness—like the sands which appear again with the turn of the tide.
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: First English edition of Of Fear and Freedom copyright © 1950, 1977 Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc.; Revised edition, introduction, notes, and English translation of "Fear of Painting" copyright © 2008 Columbia University Press; The Italian original of "Fear of Painting" "Paura della pittura." copyright © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. For more information, please e-mail us or visit the permissions page on our Web site.