There is a strange phenomenon about the Vietnam war. It lies in the fact that the photographs from this war—the movies for TV, the stills for the newspapers and magazines—are different from those of any other war. No more the pictures of victory, no more the planting of the flag atop a mound as at Iwo Jima, no more the triumphant marches through the streets. Amid the announcements in this war of the dead and wounded each day, the counting of bodies because there is nothing else to count, there comes something else: not a planned effect, or one consciously decided by someone’s brain. It comes from the photographers—those journeymen who represent the unconscious of all of us, whose stand on the war is irrelevant, who get one picture rather than another due to a stance of the body or a use of muscles, whose sole concern is human interest. From these photographers come pictures of wounded caring for each other, of soldiers taking care of the injured, of a marine with his arm around a wounded comrade, the wounded one crying out in pain and bewilderment. What comes back in the photos is, on this elemental level, care.

In a Vietnamese village, as reported in a recent TV program, gas bombs had been thrown into holes and huts to drive out of hiding any remaining Viet Cong. Only women and children came out of the holes. One child, about two, routed out with his mother, sat on her lap looking up at a large Negro marine. The side of the child’s face was dirty with the smoke and soot from the smoke bomb; he had been crying. He looked up with an expression of bewilderment, now beyond crying, not knowing what to make of such a world. But the camera shifted immediately to the black American marine looking down at the child, commanding and somewhat hideous in his battle uniform. He had exactly the same expression: bewilderment, his eyes wide as he stared down at the child, his mouth slightly ajar; but his stare did not move, remaining fixed on that child. What should he make of a world in which he does this? While the announcer of the program rattled on about how the gas is harmful for only ten minutes and then leaves no deleterious effects, the cameraman kept his camera focused on the face of the marine. Was the marine recalling that he too had once been a child in some Southern state, driven from caves and huts were he had been playing, recognizing that he too was of a race held to be “inferior”? That he too was once a child in a world at which he could only look out and up, a world causing pain for reasons no child can begin to fathom? Does he see himself in this child, see his bewilderment as a black child?

I do not think he ponders these things consciously: I think he only sees there another human being with a common base of humanity on which they pause for a moment in the swamps of Vietnam. His look is care. And the cameraman happens to see him—happens almost always now to see them so—and keeps his camera trained on his face; a subconscious reaching-out only for human interest, rendering to us an unconscious expression of the guilt of us all. And while the broadcaster gives in a bland voice the interminable lists of figures of wounded-dead-dead-wounded, the cameraman, anonymous at this moment and forever, representing only an outreach of our own blind and unconscious muscles, our own bodies, keeps his camera pointed at the face of the large black man staring down at the crying child, nameless in the whole sad quicksand of modern war.

This is a simple illustration of care. It is a state composed of the recognition of another, a fellow human being like one’s self; of identification of one’s self with the pain or joy of the other; of guilt, pity, and the awareness that we all stand on the base of a common humanity from which we all stem.

CARE IN LOVE AND WILL

Care is a state in which something does matter; care is the opposite of apathy. Care is the necessary source of eros, the source of human tenderness. Fortunate, indeed, is it that care is born in the same act as the infant. Biologically, if the child were not cared for by its mother, it would scarcely live out the first day. Psychologically, we know, from the researches of Spitz, that the child withdraws to his bed corner, withers away, never developing but remaining in a stupor, if as an infant he does not receive mothering care.

For the Greeks, Eros could not live without passion. Having agreed with that, we can now say Eros cannot live without care. Eros, the daimon, begins physiologically, seizing us and whirling us up into its vortex. It requires the necessary addition of care, which becomes the psychological side of Eros. Care is given power by nature’s sense of pain; if we do not care for ourselves, we are hurt, burned, injured. This is the source of identification: we can feel in our own bodies the pain of the child or the hurt of the adult. But our responsibility is to cease letting care be solely a matter of nerve endings. I do not deny the biological phenomena, but care must become a conscious psychological fact. Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.

For Heidegger, care (Sorge) is the source of will. This is why he practically never speaks about will or willing, except when he is refuting other philosophers’ positions. For will is not an independent “faculty,” or a department of the self, and we always get into trouble when we try to make it a special faculty.¹ It is a function of the whole person. “When fully conceived, the care-structure includes the phenomenon of Selfhood,” writes Heidegger.² When we do not care, we lose our being; and care is the way back to being. If I care about being, I will shepherd it with some attention paid to its welfare, whereas if I do not care, my being disintegrates. Heidegger “thinks of care as the basic constitutive phenomenon of human existence.”³ It is thus ontological in that it constitutes man as man. Will and wish cannot be the basis for care, but rather vice versa: they are founded on care.⁴ We could not will or wish if we did not care to begin with; and if we do authentically care, we cannot help wishing or willing. Willing is caring made free, says Heidegger⁵—and, I would add, made active. The constancy of the self is guaranteed by care.

Temporality is what makes care possible. The gods on Mount Olympus do not care—we here have our explanation for this fact which every one has patently seen and wondered about. The fact that we are finite makes care possible. Care also, in Heidegger’s concept, is the source of conscience. “Conscience is the call of Care,” and “manifests itself as Care.”⁶

Heidegger quotes an ancient parable of care, which Goethe also used at the end of Faust:

This fascinating parable illustrates the important point brought out by the arbiter Saturn, Time, that though Man is named Homo after the earth, he is still constituted in his human attitudes by Care. She is given charge of him in the parable during his temporal sojourn in this world. This also shows the realization of the three aspects of time: past, future, and present. Earth gets man in the past, Zeus in the future; but since “Care first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives,” i.e., in the present.

This excursion into ontology makes it clearer why care and will are so closely related, indeed are two aspects of the same experience. It also gives us a distinction between wishing and willing: wishing is like “a mere hankering, as though will stirred in its sleep,” as Macquarrie writes, “but did not get beyond the dreaming of action.”⁸ Will is the full-blown, matured form of wish, and is rooted with ontological necessity in care. In an individual’s conscious act, will and care go together, are in that sense identical.

This gives us, indeed requires of us, a clear distinction between care and sentimentality. Sentimentality is thinking about sentiment rather than genuinely experiencing the object of it. Tolstoy tells of the Russian ladies who cry at the theater but are oblivious to their own coachman sitting outside in the freezing cold. Sentimentality glories in the fact that I have this emotion; it begins subjectively and ends there. But care is always caring about something. We are caught up in our experience of the objective thing or event we care about. In care one must, by involvement with the objective fact, do something about the situation; one must make some decisions. This is where care brings love and will together.

Paul Tillich’s term, concern—used normally with the adjective “ultimate”—I also take to be a synonym for what we are now discussing. But I prefer for our purposes here the simpler and more direct term, care. I could also use the term compassion, which may connote to many readers a more sophisticated form of care. But compassion, a “feeling with” someone, is already an emotion, a passion which may come and go. I choose the term care because it is ontological and refers to a state of being.

Care is important because it is what is missing in our day. What young people are fighting, in revolts on college campuses and in the sweep of protests about the country, is the seeping, creeping conviction that nothing matters; the prevailing feeling that one can’t do anything. The threat is apathy, uninvolvement, the grasping for external stimulants. Care is a necessary antidote for this.

As open as the methods of the student revolts are to criticism, they still boil down to a struggle to preserve the “right below rights.” The struggle is for the existence of the human being in a world in which everything seems increasingly mechanical, computerized, and ends in Vietnam. The rubric “Do not staple, mutilate, or fold” is, though unknown to the student, an acting out of Heidegger’s statement that man is ontologically constituted by care. It is the refusal to accept emptiness though it face one on every side; the dogged insistence on human dignity, though it be violated on every side; and the stubborn assertion of the self to give content to our activities, routine as these activities may be.

Love and will, in the old romantic and ethical sense, are dubious concepts and, indeed, may be both unavailable and unusable in that framework. We cannot support them by the appeal to romance in this day when romance is on the way out, or by the appeal to “ought.” Neither of these carry cogency any longer. But there remains the old, bed-rock question, Does something, or some person, matter to me? And if not, can I find something or someone that does matter?

Care is a particular type of intentionality shown especially in psychotherapy. It means to wish someone well; and if the therapist doesn’t experience this within himself, or doesn’t have the belief that what happens to the patient matters, woe unto the therapy. The common, original meaning of “intentionality” and “care” lies in the little term “tend,” which is both the root of intentionality and the meaning of care. Tend means a tendency, an inclination, a throwing of one’s weight on a given side, a movement; and also to mind, to attend, to await, to show solicitude for. In this sense, it is the source of both love and will.

THE MYTHOS OF CARE

I shall now refer to an episode in history very much like our own period, which may help us to understand the myth of care. After the Golden Age of classical Greece, when the myths and symbols gave the citizen an armor against inner conflict and self-doubts, we come down to the third and second centuries B.C. We find ourselves in a world with a radically different psychological mood from the time of Aeschylus and Socrates. On every side we find anxiety, inner doubts, and psychological conflict rampant in the literature. And this world is not unlike our own. As one student of that Hellenistic Age puts it:

Now and in the period immediately following, the writers are indeed aware of angst. Plutarch paints a graphic picture of an anxious man with the telltale symptoms of dread such as palm-sweating and insomnia.¹⁰ Epictetus has one chapter entitled “Concerning Anxiety,” in which he gives his diagnosis of the state of anxiety and the rules for conquering it. “This man is disordered in the will to get and the will to avoid, he is not in the right way, he is feverish, for nothing else changes the complexion and causes a man to tremble and his teeth to chatter.”¹¹ Lucretius bemoans the fact that anxiety is everywhere—dread of death, dread of the plague, dread of punishments which will occur after death, dread of superhuman spirits. In the midst of his poem The Nature of the Universe, he looks up into the heavens, “studded with flashing stars,” and “then in hearts already racked by other woes a new anxiety begins to waken and rear up its head. We fall to wondering whether we may not be subject to some unfathomable divine power, which speeds the shining stars along their various tracks.”¹²

This source of anxiety which Lucretius mentions reminds us again of the anxiety nowadays concerning flying saucers, night lights that people fear may be visitations from other planets, gremlins, and so on. Some perceptive psychotherapists, like C. G. Jung, are convinced that modem man’s change in relation to space produces much more hidden anxiety in the middle of the twentieth century than is generally admitted.¹³

There is more similarity between our modern age and this anxiety-ridden Hellenistic period than just these projections and hallucinations. Lucretius looked back at this third century and wrote a description which, apart from its poetic style, could be taken out of a contemporary newspaper as a portrait of the Great Society:

Lucretius followed this up with an interesting effort at diagnosis. He concluded “that the source of this illness was the container itself.” That is, man himself, or man’s mind, was at fault. Epicurus believed, and Lucretius followed him with the devotion of a full believer, that if the natural world is explained to people in a completely rational way, they will be freed from their anxiety.

I propose, rather, that the source of this illness was that man had lost his world. The great change that had occurred was the loss of communication with this world, with others, and with himself. That is to say, the myths and symbols had broken down. And the human being, as Epictetus was later to phrase it, “does not know where in the world he is.”¹⁵

A number of schools flourished during this Hellenistic period, which included not only the Stoics and Epicureans, but Cynics, Cyreniacs, and Hedonists, together with the traditional Platonists and Aristotelians. What is significant about these diverse schools is that they are no longer endeavors to discover moral reality like the Socratic school, or to construct systems of truth like Platonic and Aristotelian schools. They are rather methods of teaching people how to live in a world filled with psychological and spiritual conflicts. The teachings of these schools now take on the character of overt psychotherapy, good or bad as it may be.

Several of the schools saw people’s problem centrally as how to control their passions, how to remain above the conflicts of life. The Stoics and Epicureans developed the doctrine of ataraxia, an attitude of “unshakability” toward life, a passionless calm attained, especially in the case of the Stoics, by an effort of strong will, and by a refusal to let one’s self be touched by the ordinary emotions of grief, hardship, and loss of life. You should assert your mastery over outward events, or, if you could not do that, at least you should be unaffected by them. Great individual strength—vide the Roman legionnaire and governor—was often produced by the beliefs and practices of Stoicism.

But it was a strength gained at the price of suppression of all emotions, negative and positive alike. As attempts to give a kind of psychotherapy, the Epicurean and Stoic schools were much the same. “Both schools would have liked to banish the passions from human life,” writes Dodds; “the ideal of both was…freedom from disturbing emotions, and this was to be achieved in the one case by holding the right opinions about man and God, and in the other by holding no opinions at all.”¹⁶

The Epicureans sought to achieve tranquillity of mind and body by rationally balancing their pleasures, with special value placed on intellectual pleasures. This seemed to open the door to a life of gratification and to welcome in the joys of the senses. Epicurus “set bounds to desire and fear,” Lucretius tells us, for “he made it clear that, more often than not, it was quite needlessly that mankind stirred up stormy waves of disquietude within their breasts.”¹⁷ But whatever the intentions of this control by setting bounds to fear were (which, interestingly enough, meant also setting bounds to desire), this method, in actual practice, led to an emasculation of the person’s dynamic urges. One writer of the period even refers to the Epicureans as eunuchs.

The Hedonist tradition emphasized finding pleasure in sensual satisfaction. But these Hedonists were to discover, as Hedonists of other periods including our own were to learn, that sensual satisfaction sought for its own sake turns out to be strangely unsatisfying. One teacher in this school, Hegesias, despairing of ever attaining happiness, became the philosopher of pessimism; and his lectures in Alexandria had to be prohibited by Ptolemy because they resulted in so many suicides. This is the beginning of the time when the teacher or philosopher “conceives his lecture-room as a dispensary for sick-souls.”¹⁸

Now the most impressive of all these endeavors to help man meet his anxiety is Lucretius’. Sensitive to human sufferings and poet that he was, he could not simply steel his feelings to the psychological and spiritual desolation around him. However much he might have yearned for ataraxia, his poet’s nature did not permit him the detachment and capacity for repression necessary to achieve it. “The fears and anxieties that dog the human breast,” he wrote, “do not shrink from the clash of arms or the fierce rain of missiles. They stalk unabashed among princes and potentates. They are not awe-struck by the gleam of gold or the bright sheen of purple robes.”¹⁹

He knows that some of this anxiety is due to the meaninglessness of people’s lives. “Men feel plainly enough within their minds a heavy burden, whose weight depresses them. If only they perceived with equal clearness the causes of this depression, the origin of this lump of evil within their breasts, they would not lead such a life as we now see all too commonly—no one knowing what he really wants and everyone forever trying to get away from where he is, as though mere locomotion could throw off the load.”²⁰ Perceptive psychologist as well as poet, Lucretius adds concerning this bored rushing around, “In so doing the individual is really running away from himself.” He continues:

Lucretius throws himself with religious devotion into explaining the faith he had inherited from his master, Epicurus. He believed the deterministic understanding of the natural universe would cure us of our fears and anxieties.

Lucretius believed that if he could do away with the gods and the myths and help men to be enlightened, empirical, and rationalistic, he would have taken the necessary step to free people from their anxiety. Epicurus, seeing about him all the images of gods on coins and in statues, had made the error of many an empiricist, naive as the error may seem to be, of believing that the gods were actually objects. He had cut the Gordian knot by exiling the gods way off to the interspaces between the worlds, safe from contact with the human species (little suspecting we would by now be getting ready to travel to those very spaces!). “For it is essential to the very nature of deity that it should enjoy immortal existence in utter tranquillity, aloof and detached from our affairs. It is free from all pain and peril, strong in its own resources, exempt from any need of us, indifferent to our merits and immune from anger.”²³

Lucretius goes further than his master and tries to do away with the myths altogether, hoping thus to free people from the “unfounded fear of the gods.”²⁴ “There is no wretched Tantalus,” he proclaims, “as the myth relates…. There is no Tityos lying in Hell forever probed by birds of prey…. But Tityos is here in our midst—that poor devil prostrated by love, torn indeed by birds of prey, devoured by gnawing jealousy or rent by the fangs of some other passion. Sisyphus too [is not a divine figure but] is alive for all to see, bent on winning the insignia of office…. As for Cerberus and the Furies and the pitchy darkness and jaws of Hell belching abominable fumes, these are not and cannot be anywhere at all….”²⁵ There is no Prometheus anymore. For the “agent by which fire was first brought down to earth and made available to mortal man was lightning.”²⁶

Thus, he first treats the mythological figures as though his readers believed them to be real objects located in some place (which it is surely impossible to imagine Aeschylus believing). Then he psychologizes them—the myths are merely figurative expressions of subjective processes within each person. He was arguing here what every intelligent man knows—that the myth does indeed have one pole in the subjective dynamics of the individual’s experience. But this is only a half-truth. It omits all the vast implications of the myth as man’s way of trying to make sense of, and come to terms with, the troublesome fact that he does live in a finite universe in which the phenomenon of Sisyphus is objectively present for the normal as well as the morbidly anxious man. It is not merely that every workman toils over and over again at the same job (“and his fate is no less absurd than Sisyphus’,” as Camus points out). It is that we are all engaged in eternal going and returning, laboring and resting and laboring again, growing and disintegrating and growing again. The myth of Sisyphus is present in my very heartbeat, in every change in my metabolism. The recognition of the myth as our fate is the beginning of finding meaning in an otherwise meaningless fatalism.²⁷

But in his passion to explain away the myths, Lucretius himself is forced to fall into new myth-making. Ironic as this is, it is the fate of all those who engage in “mythoclasm,” to borrow Jerome Bruner’s phrase; they find themselves, in secret ways, constructing new myths again.²⁸ Time and again, Lucretius proclaims that if the reader can let himself be convinced of the natural “causes” in life, he will be relieved of his anxiety. And if one cannot find adequate causes, it is better to assign fictitious causes! For we cannot relinquish the belief that “Whatever the senses may perceive at any time is all alike true.”²⁹ And when perceptions seem deceiving, “it is better, in default of reason, to assign fictitious causes…than to let things clearly apprehended slip from our grasp. This is to attack belief at its very roots—to tear up the entire foundation on which the maintenance of life is built.”³⁰

This is the myth of the technological man. It is a set of assumptions postulating that the human being is governed by what he can rationally understand, that his emotions will follow this understanding, and that his anxiety and dread will thus be cured. It is a myth with which we are exceedingly familiar in our day.

Since a myth must always have its aesthetic “form,” we may think of Lucretius’ whole poem as the embodiment of this myth. Lucretius himself is a Promethean figure in his brave defiance of what he felt to be superstition, ignorance, and the religions which play upon fears and anxiety. The fact that his own myth has inner contradictions and that the very existence of his myth disproves his thesis, namely, that it is possible to construct a “myth of life without myths,” make him particularly important for our inquiry.

He is dedicated to the denial of the daimonic and the irrational. It is ironic, indeed, that his own death is said to have come from his participating in a magic act: “the traditional story (immortalized by Tennyson) is that he died by his own hand after being driven mad by a love philtre.”³¹ Whether this is a factual truth or a legend, it amounts to the same thing—an interpretation by history of the death which “round [ed] out his life” by the most irrational and daimonic symbol of all, a love philtre.

Lucretius’ endeavor is brave indeed, and on the wings of his superb poetic art, it seems to move nobly down the royal road to enlightenment. But when we examine it more closely, we find the road runs into an abyss, a sudden void. That is the simple fact of death. Time and again, Lucretius brings up death in his poem, and he tries to explain to his readers that if they will accept his proof that there is no hell in the hereafter and no demons to burn them or in other ways give them eternal punishment, they will not need to be afraid of death. But these “explanations” of the supposed causes of people’s anxiety do not do justice even to Lucretius himself. For he is continually concerned with death because of his own deep human feelings and his own active sympathy for human kind, including himself.

It turns out that this conflict about death, which will not let him go, is like that of most men, not at all a question of locations of a future hell, but has its source in human love and loneliness and grief. The very last pages of his poem are unforgettably vivid pictures of a plague in Athens to which Lucretius returns and show death as close and horrifying as it ever was at the beginning of his poem,

These very last lines of the poem—this picture of human beings in the violence of their grief, preferring to “shed [their own] blood…rather than abandon their dead,” trying vainly to hang on to their loved ones—are the most powerful symbol that man’s life transcends all the natural explanations. It is a vivid proof that the meaning of life is in the human emotions of pity, loneliness, and love. We end the poem with the conviction that this is the real evil, horror, and inevitable source of anxiety, which neither Lucretius nor anyone else can deny or negate or mitigate.

But it is a tribute to Lucretius’ courage and honesty that he never flinches from the problem of death even though he cannot solve it. According to rational “rules,” the end of the poem is exactly the wrong place to put such a description—one should conclude affirmatively! We see that Lucretius is governed not simply by “brain,” but by profound human sensibilities; in the end, his poetry triumphs over his dogma. It is the beauty of his art that enables him not to “solve” or evade death, but to face it up to the last minute. The anxiety of death—prototypically the basic source of all anxiety—still remains. All his life, Lucretius had his own share, and perhaps more than his share, of dreads and anxiety—a fact undoubtedly connected with the sensitivity and grace that made him such a superb poet.

But we cannot stop here. There is a sense in which Lucretius did transcend the problem of death. He transcended it by including in the picture both love and death, by reconciling the irreconcilables, uniting the antinomies, as we observe Aeschylus so nobly doing in his Oresteia. Lucretius does this by virtue of a new mythos³³ which emerges with particular clarity in the last pages of his poem.

It is not the dogma of his naturalistic explanations, to which we referred earlier, and what he consciously intended to get across. My psychoanalytic experience has made me dubious as to whether rational explanations ever quiet anxiety anyway; something else happens, namely, the explanation becomes the vehicle for a more profound mythos that does grasp people on levels deper than rationality. The explanation, for example, becomes part of the mythos that I, the one doing the explaining, care for you, that you and I can trust and communicate with each other. This implication may be, as it surely is in psychoanalysis, a good deal more important than whether my “explanation” or interpretation is, in itself, entirely accurate or “brilliant” or whatever. I often notice, when I give an interpretation to a patient in a psychoanalytic session, that what impresses him most at the moment is not the theoretical truth or falsehood of what I say, but the fact that my saying it shows my belief that he can change and that his behavior has meaning. These are aspects of a positive myth. The deeper myth in such explanations may be that we can trust the meaning of our interpersonal universe, and that human consciousness can, in principle, be in touch with that meaning.

After reading Lucretius, we arise from our chairs better able to face death and to love. We finish the poem with the conviction that, despite death, there is meaning and nobility in the fact that we can admit together that we are not reconciled to the severing of our love. For our human love is even more precious when seen in the light of those Athenians clinging to the bodies of their loved ones. Together in the poem we affirm our love for each other and our mutual stand against death. The poem has not solved the problem of death at all, but we find ourselves better able to encounter it and less lonely because we encounter it together.

This is an illustration of how the myth carries intentionality. The myth is the language by which intentionality is made communicable. The reader will recall our original definition of intentionality; the structure by which experience becomes meaningful. What happens at the end of Lucretius’ poem is that we are aware of a meaningful structure in the relationships of our lives to each other and to the universe in which death is an objective fact. We see here an illustration of how intentionality is to be clearly distinguished from conscious intention, which in Lucretius’ case, was to get across certain explanations, many of which turn out to be false and most of which turn out to be irrelevant. But in his total dedication to his task, a deeper dimension, of which he himself is by no means wholly aware, comes into the picture, more important than what he learned from his master Epicurus, more important than his well-thought-out philosophy, even more important than his voluntary intentions. This lies not in what he says, but in the poem in which, as a totality, a gifted man, feeling, intuiting, loveing, and willing, as well as thinking and writing, encounters the whole vast range of human experience.

This is the mythos of care. It is a statement which says that whatever happens in the external world, human love and grief, pity and compassion are what matter. These emotions transcend even death.

CARE IN OUR DAY

“In love every man starts from the beginning,” wrote Søren Kierkegaard. This beginning is the relationship between people which we term care. Though it goes beyond feeling, it begins there. It is a feeling denoting a relationship of concern, when the other’s existence matters to you; a relationship of dedication, taking the ultimate form of being willing to get delight in or, in ultimate terms, to suffer for, the other.

The new basis for care is shown by the interest of psychologists and philosophers in emphasizing feeling as the basis of human existence. We now need to establish feeling as a legitimate aspect of our way of relating to reality. When William James says, “Feeling is everything,” he means not that there is nothing more than feeling, but that everything starts there. Feeling commits one, ties one to the object, and ensures action. But in the decades after James made this “existentialist” statement, feeling became demoted and were disparaged as merely subjective. Reason or, more accurately, technical reason was the guide to the way issues were to be settled. We said “I feel” as a synonym for “I vaguely believe,” when we didn’t know—little realizing that we cannot know except as we feel.

The development of psychoanalysis has led to a resurgence of the primacy of feeling. And in academic psychology, a number of papers have come out lately which show the drift of psychologists and philosophers toward a new appreciation of feeling. Hadley Cantril’s paper, “Sentio, ergo, sum,” is one, and Sylvan Tomkins’ “Homo patens” is another. Susan Langer entitles her new book, Mind, An Essay on Feeling. And Alfred North Whitehead, Miss Langer’s teacher, in pointing out that Descartes was wrong in his principle, “Cogito, ergo sum,” goes on:

I have said that the romantic and ethical basis for love is not available to us any longer. We must seek to start from the beginning, psychologically speaking, with feelings.

To show how simply and directly feeling—care pointing toward love—comes into the therapeutic interview, I offer the following excerpt from a psychoanalytic hour. This happens to be Preston, about whom I reported in detail in a previous chapter.

This upsurgence of a genuine human feeling of sympathy, simple as it may be, is a critical point in psychotherapy. To appreciate what a step this is, we can see it against the background of modern drama. Drama gropes for this fundamental state of feeling. Our situation is that in our heyday of rationalistic and technicalistic episodes, we have lost sight of and concern for the human being; and we must now humbly go back to the simple fact of care. The critical issue presented by contemporary drama, for example, is the breakdown of communication. This is the theme of our most serious plays, such as those by O’Neill, Beckett, Ionesco, and Pinter. The mask is fully removed and we see apparent emptiness, as in O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. The nobility of man which is necessary for tragedy or for any genuine humanism is felt on the stage as the fact that greatness has fled from man—which means that it is there as a vacuum; it is present as a lack. This is the paradoxical state of the meaning of meaninglessness. The apparent vacuum, emptiness, and apathy are the tragic facts.

In Waiting for Godot, it is of the essence that Godot does not come. We wait forever and the problem remains, Was there a tree there yesterday? Will there be one there tomorrow? Beckett—not to mention the other dramatists and visual artists—shocks us into the awareness of our human significance, forcing us to look more deeply into our condition as men. We find ourselves caring despite the apparent meaningless of the situation. Godot does not come, but in the waiting there is care and hope. It matters that we wait and that we, like the characters in the drama, wait in human relationship—we share with each other the ragged coat, the shoes, the piece of turnip. Waiting is caring, and caring is hoping.

This is a paradoxical situation which is lucidly grasped by T. S. Eliot:

Many of the contemporary dramas, to be sure, are negations, and some of them tread perilously close to the edge of nihilism. But it is the nihilism which shocks us into confronting the void. And for the one who has ears to hear, there speaks out of this void (the term now refers to a transcendent quality) a deeper and more immediate apprehension of being. It is the mythos of care—and, I often believe, this mythos alone—which enables us to stand against the cynicism and apathy which are the psychological illnesses of our day.

This points toward a new morality not of appearance and forms, but of authenticity in relationship. That the vague outlines of such a morality are already upon us is shown in that segment of the younger generation which carries this problem as a genuine concern. These people are not interested in money and success; these things are now “immoral.” They seek an honesty, openness, a genuineness of personal relationship; they are out to find a genuine feeling, a touch, a look in the eyes, a sharing of fantasy. The criterion becomes the intrinsic meaning and is to be judged by one’s authenticity, doing one’s own thing, and giving in the sense of making one’s self available for the other. No wonder there is a suspicion of words in our day; for these states are determinable only by immediate feelings.

The error in this new morality is the lack of content for these values. The content seems present; but it turns out to be based to some extent on whim and temporary emotion. Where is the permanence? Where is the dependability and lastingness? To these questions we now turn.