‘It is not the critic who counts; not the man
who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could
have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the
arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly;
who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without
error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows
great enthusiasm, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who
at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the
worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.’
Brené
Brown’s Daring Greatly, is titled
after the last two words of Theodore Roosevelt’s The Man in the Arena speech. She begins the book with the quote and
returns to it as she wraps the book up. Perhaps at this point your pupils are
darting from one side to the other or your brow is furrowed in an attempt to
reconcile daring greatly with being ordinary; intuition would put these very
far apart on the continuum of being. But I see them essentially communicating
the same message: That of showing up in your life in the way only you can. And
that requires a lot of courage because we are inundated with a lot of things
that would make showing up difficult and sometimes debilitating.
The
title of this blog is inspired by Paul Tillich’s seminal work The Courage to Be. Tillich writes
extensively of how we are in the grips of an anxiety crisis and how this anxiety
threatens our ability to BE in this world. He differentiates it from fear
because fear can be faced, analysed, overcome and even endured. Fear always
appears as a definite object and therefore in a way makes room for you to
participate in it; you have agency and while it may not be easy facing the
objects of your fears; it is entirely possible through courage. Whereas,
anxiety is a pernicious thing in that it permeates everything, the very air you
breathe and therefore it cannot be faced as you would fear. As a result it
threatens your very agency; because how do you begin to fight that which you
can’t even point out or localize? Tillich writes ‘Anxiety is finitude, experiences as one’s own finitude… it is the
anxiety of nonbeing, the awareness of one’s finitude as finitude… it expresses
itself in loss of direction; inadequate reactions, lack of intentionality… the
reason for this sometimes striking behaviour is the lack of an object on which
the subject (in the state of anxiety) can concentrate. The only object is the
threat itself, but not the source of the threat itself, the source of the
threat itself is ‘nothingness’.’ This ‘nothingness’
is where courage is really needed. It is quite easy to be courageous in the
face of things that affirm your being, perhaps courage is not even needed there
but courage is necessary in the face of things that threaten your being; the
nonbeing. Which is why Tillich’s writes ‘courage
is the affirmation of one’s essential nature, one’s inner aim or entelechy, but
it is an affirmation which has in itself the character of ‘in spite of’.’
This ‘in spite of’ comes in many
different forms and Tillich elucidates on these forms which basically mark the
human condition today; what the modern man is facing. ‘There are three types of anxiety according to the three directions in
which nonbeing threatens being. Nonbeing threatens man’s ontic self-affirmation
relatively in terms of fate, absolutely in terms of death. It threatens man’s
moral self-affirmation, relatively in terms of shame, absolutely in terms of condemnation.
It threatens man’s spiritual self-affirmation, relatively in terms of
emptiness, absolutely in terms of meaninglessness.’ In the words of the
Apostle Paul, ‘we are hard pressed on
every side’ and with depression being the leading cause of ill health and
disability in the world; some of us are crushed.
In
W. H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety, he writes: ‘We would rather be ruined than changed/ we would rather die in our
dread/ Than climb the cross of the moment/ And let our illusions die.’ One of
the reasons that some of us are crushed is because we have clung to the
illusions that do not work for us anymore or we refuse to face the crisis that
we are in. John Vervaeke in his Awakening
from the Meaning Crisis series defines courage in a very specific Tillich- inspired
way. He says courage is not just bravery (the facing of danger) nor is it just
fortitude (the enduring of difficulty); courage is facing the meaning crisis head-on
and rejecting anything that responds to the crisis in any way that is not
good. Courage is a virtue; it involves the wisdom to see through the illusions
and the distortions of fear or distress to what is truly good and to act
accordingly.
One
of the uncourageous ways that history has responded to the meaning crisis is
through the adoption or implementation of pseudo-religious ideologies such as Nazism,
Fascism, Marxism, Fundamentalism etc. which tried to resuscitate religion
apropos Nietzsche’s death of God. Tillich writes ‘The anxiety of emptiness is aroused by the threat of nonbeing to the
special contents of the spiritual life. A belief breaks down through external
events or inner processes: one is cut from creative participation in a sphere
of culture, one feels frustrated about something which one had passionately
affirmed, one is driven from devotion to another to another because the meaning
of each of them vanishes. The contents of the tradition, however excellent,
however praised, however loved once lose their power to give content today. And
present culture is even less able to provide the content. Anxiously one turns
away from all concrete contents and looks for an ultimate meaning, only to
discover that it was precisely the loss of a spiritual centre which took away
the meaning from the special contents of the spiritual life. But a spiritual
centre cannot be produced intentionally; and the attempt to produce it only
produces deeper anxiety’ or as Vervaeke puts it ‘has drenched our world in blood’. Akwaeke Emezi in Dear Senthuran: A black spirit memoir,
writes ‘Illusions are the best things to
burn, I think, but some people consider such fires to be threats, and those who
start them even worse’. Tillich himself courageously incinerated illusions
against the Third Reich through more than 100 radio addresses that implored
Germany, to recognize and reject the horrors of Hitler. Courage is always on
the side of the good, and acts out against any illusions that detract from the
good. The courageous dare greatly. Maya Angelou addressing Cornell University
in 2008 said ‘Courage is the most
important of the virtues, because without it no other can be practiced
consistently, you can be kind and true and fair and generous and just, and even
merciful, occasionally but to be that thing time after time, you have to really
have courage.’ Angelou, Tillich, Vervaeke all have illustrated how courage is
a virtue that points to other virtues, pointing to the true and the good i.e.
the transcendentals. Tillich writes that courage does not eliminate anxiety, the
existential nature of anxiety not allowing its removal, but courage can subsume
the anxiety of nonbeing into itself. In order for this courage to be to not be
threatened by nonbeing then the courage has to be powered by something that
transcends both being and nonbeing. Vervaeke suggests that one of the ways you
can face the meaning crisis is by moving from a horizontal teleological
narrative (where you are caught in your personal history and future) into a
vertical ontology where you ascend in terms of virtue; where you become more
and more of yourself i.e. Platonic atonement or Aristotelean
self-actualization. All these point to transcendence.
One
of the ways the meaning crisis has reared its ugly head is in our culture’s
obsession with purpose. People have been rendered catatonic by the need to live
meaningfully or by the weight of feeling they are living purposeless lives. We are
bombarded by cataracts of social media images and celebrities who seem to be
killing this life thing and making a killing while at it; who seem to know what
they are here for and meet every day with a vitality we crave and that
exsanguinates the life out of us in comparison; that embroils us in the drama
of the narcissism of small differences. Always trying to find the thing that
makes us unique in comparison to others; that makes us believe we should be
simply adored for who we are. Brown writes, ‘when I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see
shame-based [shame lying between relative guilt and absolute condemnation] fear
of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong
or to cultivate a sense of purpose… I see through the cultural messaging
everywhere that says that an ordinary life is a meaningless life… I know the
yearning to believe that what I’m doing matters and how easy it is to confuse
that with the drive to be extraordinary. I know how seductive it is to use the
celebrity culture yardstick to measure the smallness of our lives. And I also
understand how grandiosity, entitlement, and admiration-seeking feel like just
the right balm to soothe the ache of being too ordinary and inadequate.’
Meister
Eckhart writes, ‘People should not worry
so much about what they do but rather about what they are. If they and their
ways are good, then their deeds are radiant. If you are righteous, then what
you do will also be righteous. We should not think that holiness is based on
what we do but rather on what we are; for it is not our works which sanctify us
but we who sanctify our works.’ Let us not get caught up in the world’s insistence
that our works should produce insta-money or insta-fame. Emezi calls this
necessary work, The Spell. ‘The spell is clear: face your work. I inhale
it like a meditation sometimes, to counter the panic of a life mutating too
fast, when I wake up every day as a different person inside a different world. Everything
else can shift however it wants, but the work will always be the work. No matter
what changes, that instruction is still the same.’ We should also not buy
into over-consumptive culture’s ideas about having something to show for our
lives beyond actually showing up for our lives. As Phil Ford writes in his
essay What was blogging?, ‘Hoping You’ll have something to show for
your life is a mug’s game. What we want is something to show we’re living.’
In
his book, Tillich evokes the image of a knight in full armour riding his steed
through the valley with death and the devil on either side of him. ‘Fearlessly, concentrated, confident. He looks
ahead. He is alone but he is not lonely. In his solitude he participates in the
power which gives him the courage to affirm himself in spite of the presence of
the negativities of existence.’ Brown makes use of the man in the arena who
stumbles, with a face marred with blood and sweat and dust. Both of these
examples illustrating people showing up to the task or work at hand, in spite
of. Emezi writes, ‘Even when seized by a
thousand fears we can make strange and wonderful things simply for the sake of
the strange and the wonderful, we can create without permission, we can [work]
into the unknown.’
In
light of being stared down by what Tomas Bjorkman calls the meta-crisis: the interlacing of ecological,
spiritual, existential, socio-economic, mental health crises of our time tied
with the cultural pressures mentioned above; to be ordinary is itself a
courageous act. To show up in spite of is to dare greatly. To decide for
yourself what the meaning of your life will be (Viktor Frankl vibes) or to
decide that life is meaningless (as Tillich says that the act of accepting
meaninglessness is in itself a meaningful act). You can still show up in your
life and in the lives of others, regardless what you choose to do with your
life. Emezi writes, ‘The manual stays the
same: to try until you can, to be bold and patient.’ To be excellent, to be
good, to be courageous. To dare greatly with our eyes cast upwards. To say yes to life in spite of everything
as Frankl’s recently released collection of essays is titled. Or as he puts it
originally: Trotzdem ja zum leben sagen.
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