Book Annotation 1: The Courage to Create — Rollo May
Commentary Series 2
The book ‘The Courage to Create’ are May’s serious ponderings about to what he considered ‘the mystery of creation’. This article is a series of annotations, chunking and highlighting different key-points from the book. Thus, this serves as a commentary unveiling its first chapter ‘The Courage to Create.’ Further, the following points that are drawn and are deeply discussed are:
- Authenticity and the centeredness to our being
- Courage as a non-virtue but the foundation to all the virtues
- The Variations of Courage: Physical, Moral, & Social
- 3.1 The Layers Between Physical Courage and Social Courage
- 3.2 Social Courage and Its Fears
- On Courage, Growth, Doubts and Commitment
- Creative Courage
- 5.1 Creativity and Death
- Artist and Rebellion: Wrestling with the gods
Rollo May offered profound questions that I believe led him to the quest of expounding, if not essential answers, at least vivid suppositions to creativity and the courage that comes along it — the inseparable truths about creativity and courage; henceforth, to the reasons why we need the courage to create. He also posed key-points about beauty and the truth, ‘suppose, the apprehension of beauty is itself a way to truth? Suppose, that ‘elegance’ — as the word is used by physicist to describe their discoveries — is a key to ultimate reality?’
Here’s how he begins his inquiries:
- Why does an original idea in science and in an art ‘pop up’ from the unconscious to a given moment?
- What is the relation between talent and the creative act, and between creativity and death? Giving classic examples of the occurrences of beauty and the art by asking, ‘How did Homer, confronting something as gross as the Trojan War, fashion it into poetry which became a guide for the ethics of the whole Greek civilization?’
‘Is it not the distinguishing characteristic of the human being that in the hot race of evolution, he pauses for a moment to paint on the cave walls of Lascaux or Altamira, those brown-and-red deer and bison which still fills us with amazed admiration and awe?’
Further, he stated:
We are living at a time when one age is dying and the new age is not yet born. We cannot doubt this as we look about us to see the radical changes in sexual mores, in marriage styles, in family structures, in education, in religion, technology, and almost every other aspect, of modern life. And behind it all is the threat of the atom bomb, which recedes into the distance but never disappears.
To live with sensitivity in this age of limbo indeed requires courage.
A choice confronts us. Shall we, as we feel our foundations shaking, withdraw in anxiety and panic? Frightened by the loss of our familiar mooring places, shall we become paralyzed and cover our inaction with apathy? If we do those things, we will have surrendered our chance to participate in the forming of the future.
We will have forfeited the distinctive characteristic of human beings — namely, to influence our evolution through our own awareness. We will have capitulated to the blind juggernaut of history and lost the chance to mold the future into a society more equitable and humane. Or shall we seize the courage necessary to preserve our sensitivity, awareness, and responsibility in the face of radical change? Shall we consciously participate, on however small the scale, in the forming of the new society? I hope our choice will be the latter.
Rollo highlighted that the human race is called to do something new! This includes to confronting a no man’s land, to pushing into a forest where there are no well-worn paths and from which no one has ever returned to guide us. The existentialists, according to May, called this the ‘anxiety of nothingness.’ Hence, to live into the future means to leap into the unknown, and this requires a degree of courage for which there is no immediate precedent and which few people realize. (p.9)
Before I even begin unfolding how Rollo variates courage on different aspects, let me first present how he defined courage. He highlighted that ‘the courage to create will never be the opposite of despair.’ He quoted that just as the famous Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre proclaimed, courage isn’t the absence of despair; it is rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.
Here are the saturated points about creativity that I want to present along this annotation.
1. Authenticity and the centeredness to our being.
A chief characteristic of this courage is that it requires a centeredness within our own being, without which we would feel ourselves to be a vacuum. The “emptiness” within corresponds to an apathy without; and apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice. That is why we must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic. (p.10)
In human beings, courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible. An assertion of the self, a commitment, is essential if the self is to have any reality. This is the distinction between human beings and the rest of nature. The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage. This is why Paul Tillich speaks of courage as ontological — it is essential to our being.
2. Courage as a non-virtue but the foundation to all the virtues.
Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism. (p.10)
The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word coeur, meaning “heart.” Thus, just as one’s heart, by pumping blood to one’s arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.
3. The Variations of Courage: Physical, Moral, & Social
Chunking the varied types of courage, Rollo asserted that physical courage is the simplest and most obvious kind. Moreover, he said that physical courage is defined by our culture in a form chiefly from the myths of the frontier. Our prototypes have been the pioneer heroes who took the law into their own hands, who survived because they could draw a gun faster than their opponent, who were, above all things, self-reliant and could endure the inevitable loneliness in homesteading with the nearest neighbor twenty miles away. But the contradictions in our heritage from this frontier are immediately clear to us.
Regardless of the heroism it generated in our forebears, this kind of courage has now not only lost its usefulness, but has degenerated into brutality. (p.11)
Boys were expected to fistfight; time and again, men who had been sensitive as boys and who could not learn to pound others into submission; consequently, they go through life with the conviction that they are cowards — are only few of the examples of this frontier masquerading as physical courage.
Moral Courage.
Rollo stated that people who have great moral courage, generally abhorred violence. (p.12)
It is highly significant, and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in such identification through one’s own sensitivity with the suffering of one’s fellow human beings. He calls this “perceptual courage” because it depends on one’s capacity to perceive, to let one’s self see the suffering of other people. If we let ourselves experience the evil, we will be forced to do something about it. It is a truth, recognizable in all of us, that when we don’t want to become involved, when we don’t want to confront even the issue of whether or not we’ll come to the aid of someone who is being unjustly treated, we block off our perception, we blind ourselves to the sufferings of others, we cut off our empathy with the person needing help. Hence, the most prevalent form of cowardice in our day hides behind the statement “I did not want to become involved.”
The third kind of courage is the opposite to the just described apathy; Rollo calls it social courage. It is the courage to relate to other human beings, the capacity to risk one’s self in the hope of achieving meaningful intimacy. It is the courage to invest one’s self over a period of time in a relationship that will demand an increasing openness. Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us? The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves be fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected.
3.1 The Layers Between Physical Courage and Social Courage
A common practice in our day is to avoid working up the courage required for authentic intimacy by shifting the issue to the body, making it a matter of simple physical courage. It is easier in our society to be naked physically than to be naked psychologically or spiritually — easier to share our body than to share our fantasies, hopes, fears, and aspirations, which are felt to be more personal and the sharing of which is experienced as making us more vulnerable.
For curious reasons we are shy about sharing the things that matter most. Hence people short-circuit the more “dangerous” building of a relationship by leaping immediately into bed. After all, the body is an object and can be treated mechanically.
But intimacy that begins and remains on the physical level tends to become inauthentic, and we later find ourselves fleeing from the emptiness. Authentic social courage requires intimacy on the many levels of the personality simultaneously. Only by doing this can one overcome personal alienation. No wonder the meeting of new persons brings a throb of anxiety as well as the joy of expectation; and as we go deeper into the relationship each new depth is marked by some new joy and new anxiety. Each meeting can be a harbinger of an unknown fate in store for us but also a stimulus toward the exciting pleasure of authentically knowing another person.
3.2 Social Courage and Its Fears
Early psychoanalysts, Otto Rank described social courage confronting two different kinds of fear. The first he calls the “life fear.” This is the fear of living autonomously, the fear of being abandoned, the need for dependency on someone else. It shows itself in the need to throw one’s self so completely into a relationship that one has no self left with which to relate. One becomes, in effect, a reflection of the person he or she loves — which sooner or later becomes boring to the partner. This is the fear of self-actualization, as Rank described it.
The opposite fear was what Rank called the “death fear.” This is the fear of being totally absorbed by the other, the fear of losing one’s self and one’s autonomy, the fear of having one’s independence taken away. All our lives we oscillate between these two fears. They are, indeed, the forms of anxiety that lie in wait for anyone who cares for another. But the confronting of these two fears, and the awareness that one grows not only by being one’s self but also by participating in other selves, is necessary if we are to move toward self-realization.
4. On Courage, Growth, Doubts and Commitment
Rollo highlighted that there is a curious paradox characteristic of every kind of courage. It is the seeming contradiction that we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong. This dialectic relationship between conviction and doubt is characteristic of the highest types of courage, and gives the lie to the simplistic definitions that identify courage with mere growth.
People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one are dangerous. Such conviction is the essence not only of dogmatism, but of its more destructive cousin, fanaticism. It blocks off the user from learning new truth, and it is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt. The person then has to double his or her protests in order to quiet not only the opposition but his or her own unconscious doubts as well.
Some dishonesty was being perpetrated by the telltale sign of overemphasis.
It is infinitely safer to know that the man at the top (leadership) has his doubts, as you and I have ours, yet has the courage to move ahead in spite of these doubts. In contrast to the fanatic who has stockaded himself against new truth. Yet the person with the courage to believe and at the same time to admit his doubts is flexible and open to new learnings (p.15).
The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt. To believe fully and at the same moment to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment. To every thesis there is an antithesis, and to this there is a synthesis. Truth is thus a never-dying process. We then know the meaning of the statement attributed to Leibnitz: “I would walk twenty miles to listen to my worst enemy if I could learn something.”
5. Creative Courage
Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, Rollo believed that creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built. Every profession can and does require some creative courage. In our day, technology and engineering, diplomacy, business, and certainly teaching, all of these professions and scores of others are in the midst of radical change and require courageous persons to appreciate and direct this change. The need for creative courage is in direct proportion to the degree of change the profession is undergoing.
But those who present directly and immediately the new forms and symbols are the artists — the dramatists, the musicians, the painters, the dancers, the poets, and those poets of the religious sphere we call saints. They portray the new symbols in the form of images — poetic, aural, plastic, or dramatic, as the case may be. They live out their imaginations.
If these symbols are to be understood by us, we must identify with them as we perceive them.
Artists can portray these experiences in music or words or clay or marble or on canvas because they express what Jung calls the “collective unconscious.” This phrase may not be the most felicitous, but we know that each of us carries in buried dimensions of our being some basic forms, partly generic and partly experiential in origin. It is these the artist expresses. Thus, the artists — in which term I hereafter include the poets, musicians, dramatists, plastic artists, as well as saints — are a “dew” line, to use McLuhan’s phrase; they give us a “distant early warning” of what is happening to our culture. In the art of our day, we see symbols galore of alienation and anxiety. But at the same time there is form amid discord, beauty amid ugliness, some human love in the midst of hatred — a love that temporarily triumphs over death but always loses out in the long run. The artists thus express the spiritual meaning of their culture. Our problem is: Can we read their meaning aright? (p.17)
5.1 Creativity and Death
In our endeavor to grasp these symbols of art, we find ourselves in a realm that beggars our usual conscious thinking. Our task is quite beyond the reach of logic. It brings us to an area in which there are many paradoxes. Take the idea expressed in Shakespeare’s four lines at the end of Sonnet 64:
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
If you have been trained to accept the logic of our society, you will ask: “Why does he have to ‘weep to have’ his love? Why can he not enjoy his love?” Thus, our logic pushes us always toward adjustment — an adjustment to a crazy world and to a crazy life. And worse yet, we cut ourselves off from understanding the profound depths of experience that Shakespeare is here expressing. We have all had such experiences, but we tend to cover them over. We may look at an autumn tree so beautiful in its brilliant colors that we feel like weeping; or we may hear music so lovely that we are overcome with sadness.
The craven thought then creeps into our consciousness that maybe it would have been better not to have seen the tree at all or not to have heard the music. Then we wouldn’t be faced with this uncomfortable paradox-knowing that “time will come and take my love away,” that everything we love will die. But the essence of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons and some things, in spite of the fact that time and death will ultimately claim us all. That we yearn to stretch the brief moment, to postpone our death a year or so is surely understandable. But such postponement is bound to be a frustrating and ultimately a losing battle. By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death.
6. Artist and Rebellion: Wrestling with the gods
On the questions, ‘why is creativity so hard and why does it require so much courage’ — James Joyce, who is often cited as the greatest of modern novelists, drew a much more accurate metaphor. It is as difficult as forging in the smithy of one’s soul. We are faced with a puzzling riddle indeed!
Some help comes from George Bernard Shaw. Having attended a concert given by the violinist Heifitz, he wrote the following letter when he got home: My dear Mr. Heifitz, My wife and I were overwhelmed by your concert. If you continue to play with such beauty, you will certainly die young. No one can play with such perfection without provoking the jealousy of the gods. I earnestly implore you to play something badly every night before going to bed. Beneath Shaw’s humorous words there is, as there often was with him, a profound truth — creativity provokes the jealousy of the gods. This is why authentic creativity takes so much courage: an active battle with the gods is occurring. I cannot give you any complete explanation of why this is so; I can only share my reflections. Down through the ages, authentically creative figures have consistently found themselves in such a struggle. Degas once wrote, “A painter paints a picture with the same feeling as that with which a criminal commits a crime.”
The most obvious explanation is that the creative artist and poet and saint must fight the actual (as contrasted to the ideal) gods of our society — the god of conformism as well as the gods of apathy, material success, and exploitative power. These are the “idols” of our society that are worshiped by multitudes of people. But this point does not go deeply enough to give us an answer to the riddle.
The battle with the gods thus hinges on our own mortality! Creativity is a yearning for immortality. We human beings know that we must die. We have, strangely enough, a word for death. We know that each of us must develop the courage to confront death. Yet we also must rebel and struggle against it. Creativity comes from this struggle-out of the rebellion the creative act is born. Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one’s death.
IT’S A WRAP!
“We express our being by creating.”
This is the main idea of this first chapter of Rollo May’s ‘The Courage to Create’. By this, he meant that creativity is a necessary sequel to being. Not only that creativity must be essence-centered to our being, it also touches all the other foundations to it. For what is the being of a human, if not a whole galaxy of thoughts, experiences and complex emotions. Further, foundations like courage, authenticity, doubts, and commitments are integral to us. With equal significance, creating is akin to wrestling with the gods like death and conformity, exploitation and stronger forces like apathy, mundanity and conventionality.
This wraps this first article among the entire series commentary of Rollo May’s ‘The Courage to Create’. Provided the annotations, I desire to chunk all the sub-topics entailed in this first chapter ‘The Courage to Create’ in order to get some significant and interrelated key-points from the writings. Please follow the hyperlinks within this article and be guided by the headings and subheadings.
Thank you for reaching this far, and if inquiries emerge throughout the span of your reading, you may want to comment them here for some fruitful discussions to happen.
PS: I am trying to put hyperlinks in just the same article for you to easily navigate through while reading. While I’m still working on that, you may manually scroll down along all the headings and sub-headings. Your patience is appreciated.
Have a great day!
