On Kindness - Hardcover

Phillips, Adam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241144337 ISBN 13: 9780241144336

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2009

Synopsis

Kindness is the foundation of the world’s great religions and most-enduring philosophies. Why, then, does being kind feel so dangerous? If we crave kindness with such intensity, why is it often the last pleasure we permit ourselves? And why—despite our longing—are we often suspicious when we are on the receiving end of it?

Drawing on intellectual history, literature, psychoanalysis, and contemporary social theory, this brief and essential book will return to its readers what Marcus Aurelius declared was mankind’s “greatest delight”: the intense satisfactions of generosity and compassion.

About this title

About the Author

Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and the author of twelve books, all widely acclaimed, including On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored; Going Sane; and, most recently, Side Effects.

Barbara Taylor has published several highly regarded books on the history of feminism, including the award-winning Eve and the New Jerusalem.

She and Adam Phillips both live in London.

Reviews

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Michael Dirda "On Kindness" is just a little over 100 pages long, but those pages are tightly packed with insights into our riven human heart. More accurately, I should say "the human psyche," because one of the authors, Adam Phillips, is a distinguished psychoanalyst who has written about his work in scores of elegant essays collected in a dozen slender volumes, among them "Side Effects," "On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored" and "Going Sane." The other author, Barbara Taylor, is an award-winning historian whose books include "Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination" and "Eve and the New Jerusalem." How the pair actually worked together isn't explained, but the resulting text -- an essay in five chapters -- is seamless and a pleasure to read, though it does demand close attention. "Most people, as they grow up now, secretly believe that kindness is a virtue of losers." But Phillips and Taylor show that kindness -- "the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself" -- is essential to our humanity. "Indeed it would be realistic to say that what we have in common is our vulnerability; it is the medium of contact between us, what we most fundamentally recognize in each other." What kindness does is "open us up to the world (and worlds) of other people in ways that we both long for and dread." I'll come back to that "dread." In their second chapter, the authors offer a short history of kindness. According to the philosopher Seneca, the Epicureans believed that a man sought friends for purely instrumental reasons, "for the purpose of having someone to come and sit beside his bed when he is ill or come to his rescue when he is hard up or thrown into chains." But the wise man, countered this Roman Stoic, wanted friends "so that he may have someone by whose sickbed he himself may sit, or whom he may himself release when that person is held prisoner by hostile hands." In other words, kindness isn't simply some kind of duty; it is needed for our own inner fulfillment. "No one," concluded Seneca, "can live a happy life if he turns everything to his own purposes. Live for others if you want to live for yourself." Later, Christianity emphasized the obligation of charity to others -- while viewing much of humanity as sinful and damned and sometimes promulgating a highly sectarian view of fellow feeling: "Brotherly love must embrace only brethren," declared one English bishop. In the 17th century the influential philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously concluded that life was "warre of alle against alle." Only the oft-maligned Jean-Jacques Rousseau recognized that our natural impulses are good and generous toward others and that, in Phillips and Taylor's words, "the human self is no isolate but a social entity, formed through relations with others," so that "kindness is part of the fabric of human subjectivity." Rousseau emphasized that people needed to be kind to be fully human, but Freud sexualized and darkened the whole dynamic. To a Freudian "the very thing that draws people to each other (sexual desire) also generates insupportable rivalries and antagonisms." As Phillips and Taylor neatly observe, "Whatever else it is, psychoanalysis is an account of how and why modern people are so frightened of each other." To begin with, our interior lives are battlefields. "There is not going to be any consensus inside us about what we want and what we need; there is only going to be a coexistence of competing claims, the conflict of rival pleasures." Chapters 4 and 5 of "On Kindness" then examine more closely the kindness-aggression dialectic promulgated by Freud and English psychiatrist D.D. Winnicott. At its heart lies the mother-child relationship. As an infant grows up, he or she settles into a balancing act between kindness and ruthlessness. Children require the affection and attention of their mother to feel secure, yet for their own self-realization need to be cruel enough to break away from her. (Phillips and Taylor don't directly address the parental double-bind, which is inherently tragic: You give yourself emotionally to your children, but ultimately if they aren't able to leave home, you've failed them.) From here the authors segue into a riveting discussion of adult sexual desire and jealousy. Sexual jealousy results from our childlike need for security. "The fundamental threat to our survival is, for want of a better way of putting it, loss of love, the threatened or actual loss of what our lives depend upon, which begins most urgently in childhood." For the strict Freudian, though, love itself is a grim business: "Other people exist for the individual only insofar as they are the means, the instruments, of his own gratification. . . . Other people are there to populate our masturbation fantasies." Nonetheless, our libido is always balancing the tugs of love and hate. "Our sexual, sensual desire as adolescents and adults is guided by the affectionate desires of childhood. If we have sexual relations with people for whom we feel affection, it is as though, in our unconscious, so to speak, we are committing incest. So we do something that psychoanalysts call 'splitting': There are people we feel affection for, and there are people with whom we have sex, and ne'er the twain shall meet." According to Freud, explain Phillips and Taylor, when we seek sexual partners, "we either choose 'degraded' objects -- people well below our standards of what is appropriate -- or, more often, we degrade them ourselves in order to render them desirable. . . . It is our unkindness -- our lack of affection and regard -- that makes our desire possible; kindness is the way we stop ourselves desiring." This is because "kindness is what children and parents do with each other; sex is what parents and children must not do with each other. We associate kindness with frustration; unkindness with satisfaction. If we are to be sexually satisfied adults we have to learn to be unkind, to bear our unkindness." Thus, "in order to desire, men debase women; in order to desire, women keep their desires secret (even from themselves)." Following Winnicott, the authors then emphasize that genuine kindness must somehow accommodate hostility. "The thing that works, Winnicott says -- the thing that makes relations between parents and children 'feel real,' in his phrase -- is the hatred that is lived through without severing the relationship." In fact, "real kindness, real fellow feeling, entails hating and being hated -- that is, really feeling available frustrations -- and through this, coming to a more realistic relationship. This, one might say, is a more robust version of kindness, a kindness made possible through frustration and hatred rather than a kindness organized to repudiate (or to disown) such feelings. Kindness of this variety allows for ambivalence and conflict, while false, or magical, kindness distorts our perceptions of other people, often by sentimentalizing them, to avoid conflict. Sentimentality is cruelty by other means." We must value people for what they are, not for what we want them to be. In their last chapter, the authors look at modern kindness, noting that our contemporary " 'enterprise culture' means a life of overwork, anxiety, and isolation," one that "divides people into winners and losers" and breeds excessive heartlessness. Yet without a balancing kindness, our inner lives are disastrously lopsided. People often think that "they envy other people for their success, money, fame, when in fact it is kindness that is most envied, because it is the strongest indicator of people's well-being, their pleasure in existence." Kindness "makes life worth living; and . . . everything that is against kindness is an assault on our hope." "On Kindness" is, as I've said, a rich and provocative book, revealing the complexity of a simple-seeming virtue and showing it to be far more than institutionalized benevolence, ego-gratification or sentimental indulgence.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

To live the successful modern life, we are enjoined to become less kind and more selfish. That is this small but profound volume’s animating premise. Phillips and Taylor argue that in today’s fast-paced, anything-to-get-ahead culture, kindness “has become our forbidden pleasure.” Kindly behavior is perceived as both dangerous and suspicious, nothing less than empty sentiment and simplistic moralizing. Most of all, kindness is taken as a sign of weakness. Though written by a historian and psychoanalyst, On Kindness wears its erudition lightly and with great grace. It looks at attitudes toward kindness from a historical perspective, from the Stoics to Christian thought; to Hobbes, Hume, Adam Smith, and Rousseau; to Freud; and to the current day. For centuries, people thought of themselves as being naturally kind. Phillips and Taylor explore the various ways in which that attitude changed over the centuries and also comment on the often devastating and tragic consequences of that change, of “how in giving up on kindness, we deprive ourselves of a pleasure that is fundamental to our well being.” --June Sawyers

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Against Kindness

 

Kindness, or the lack of it, has been getting a lot of press recently. Media gurus lament the selfishness of our times, while newspapers regularly feature stories like the one about a wealthy stockbroker who, at the peak of his career, decided tospend his weekends doing volunteer work with deprived children. He was amazed at his own reaction. "Helping kids just makes me so happy, I feel like a different person." His astonishment is echoed in headline reports of studies of "what makes people happy," which show kindness registering much higher on the happiness scale than self-focused behavior. A recent report described an experiment carried out by the American psychologist Martin Seligman (author of Authentic Happiness), who recruited a group of university students to test out "philanthropy versus fun." "Guess which one gave them the bigger kick?" the reporter chortled. "I’ve felt that kick too, every time I buy someone a pint."

 

Reading these stories, we began to wonder why people today are so surprised by the blindingly obvious. Why do the pleasuresof kindness astonish us? And why are stories about kindness often so corny or silly, so trivializing of the things that matter most to most people?

 

The pleasures of kindness were well known in the past. Kindness was mankind ’s "greatest delight," the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius declared, and thinkers and writers have echoed him down the centuries. But today, many peoplefind these pleasures literally incredible or at least highly suspect. An image of the self has been created that is utterlylacking in natural generosity. Most people appear to believe that deep down they (and other people) are mad, bad, and dangerous to know; that as a species— apparently unlike other species of animal—we are deeply and fundamentally antagonistic to each other, that our motives are utterly self-seeking, and that our sympathies are forms of self-protection.

 

This book explains how and why this has come about. It shows how the kind life—the life lived in instinctive sympathetic identification with the vulnerabilities and attractions of others—is the life we are more inclined to live, and indeed is the one we are often living without letting ourselves know that this is what we are doing. People are leading secretly kind lives all the time but without a language in which to express this, or cultural support for it. Living according to our sympathies, we imagine, will weaken or overwhelm us; kindness is the saboteur of the successful life. We need to know how we have come to believe that the best lives we can lead seem to involve sacrificing the best things about ourselves; and how we have come to believe that there are pleasures greater than kindness. Kindness, we will argue in this book—not sexuality, not violence, not money—has become our forbidden pleasure. What is it about our times that makes kindness seem so dangerous?

 

In one sense kindness is always hazardous because it is based on a susceptibility to others, a capacity to identify with their pleasures and sufferings. Putting oneself in someone else ’s shoes, as the saying goes, can be very uncomfortable. But if the pleasures of kindness—like all the greatest human pleasures—are inherently perilous, they are nonetheless some of the most satisfying we possess. How have we come to repudiate them? In 1741 the Scottish philosopher David Hume, confronted by a school of philosophy that held mankind to be irredeemably selfish, lost patience. Any person foolish enoughto deny the existence of human kindness had simply lost touch with emotional reality, Hume insisted: "he has forgotten the movements of his heart." How do people come to forget about kindness and the deep pleasures it gives to them?

 

On Kindness seeks to answer this question. Written by a historian and a psychoanalyst, it reveals the cost and, froma historical point of view, the peculiarity of modern attitudes to kindness. For nearly all of human history—up to and beyond David Hume ’s day, the so-called dawn of modernity— people have perceived themselves as naturally kind. Thisbook shows when and why this confidence evaporated and the consequences of this transformation: how in giving up on kindness—and especially our own acts of kindness—we deprive ourselves of a pleasure that is fundamental to our sense of well-being. "We mutually belong to one another," the philosopher Alan Ryan writes, and the good life is one "that reflects this truth." Today this truth has gone underground. Independence and self-reliance are now the great aspirations; "mutual belonging" is feared and unspoken; it has become one of the great taboos of our society. Why?

 

To answer this we begin by looking back at ideas about kindness from the classical age onward. Kindness’s original meaning of kinship or sameness has stretched over time to encompass sentiments that today go by a wide variety of names—sympathy, generosity, altruism, benevolence, humanity, compassion, pity, empathy—and that in the past were known by other terms as well, notably philanthropia (love of mankind) and caritas (neighborly or brotherly love). The precise meanings of these words vary, but fundamentally they all denote what the Victorians called "open-heartedness," the sympathetic expansiveness linking self to other. "No less indiscriminate and general than the alienation between people is the desire to breach it," the German critic Theodor Adorno once wrote, suggesting that even though our alienation, our distance from other people, may make us feel safe, it also makes us sorry, as though loneliness is the inevitable cost of looking after ourselves. History shows us the manifold expressions of humanity’s desire to connect, from classical celebrations of friendship, to Christian teachings on love and charity, to twentieth-century philosophies of social welfare. It also shows us the degree of human alienation, how our capacity to care for each other is inhibited by fears and rivalrieswith a pedigree as long as kindness itself.

 

For most of Western history the dominant tradition of kindness has been Christianity, which sacralizes people ’s generous instincts and makes them the basis of a universalist faith. For centuries, Christian caritas functioned as a culturalcement, binding individuals into society. But from the sixteenth century, the Christian rule "love thy neighbor as thyself " came under increasing attack from competitive individualism. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651)—the urtext of the new individualism—dismissed Christian kindness as a psychological absurdity. Men, Hobbes insisted, were selfish beasts who cared for nothing but their own well-being; human existence was a "warre of alle against alle." His arguments were slow to gain ground, but by the end of the eighteenth century— despite the best efforts of David Hume and others—they were becoming orthodoxy. Two centuries later it seems we are all Hobbesians, convinced that self-interest is our ruling principle. (The French psychoanalyst Lacan suggested that the Christian injunction "love thy neighbor as thyself " must be ironic, because people hate themselves.) Kindly behavior is looked upon with suspicion; public espousals of kindness are dismissed as moralistic and sentimental. "It’s just human nature," we say of selfish behavior; what more can we expect? Kindness is seen either as a cover story or as a failure of nerve. Popular icons of kindness—Princess Diana, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa—are either worshipped as saints or gleefully unmasked as self-serving hypocrites. Prioritizing the needs of others may be praiseworthy, we think, but it is certainly not normal.

 

So is it time to give up on being kind? Or at least to drop kindness as one of the things we claim to value, and instead just enjoy the apparently spontaneous but fleeting moments of kindness in our lives while acknowledging that, for selfish creatures like ourselves, these moments are the exceptions that prove the rule?

 

Today it is only between parents and children that kindness is expected, sanctioned, and indeed obligatory. But before we condemn the mother who rages at her toddler in the street, we might stop to consider what it feels like to be a parent in a society where kindness is incidentally praised while being implicitly discouraged. Kindness—that is, the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself— has become a sign of weakness (except of course among saintly people, in whom it is a sign of their exceptionality). No one yet says parents should stop being kind to their children. Nonetheless we have become phobic of kindness in our societies, avoiding obvious acts of kindness and producing, as we dowith phobias, endless rationalizations to justify our avoidance. All compassion is self-pity, D. H. Lawrence remarked, and this usefully formulates the widespread modern suspicion of kindness: that it is either a higher form of selfishness (the kind that is morally triumphant and secretly exploitative) or the lowest form of weakness (kindness is the way the weak control the strong, the kind are only kind because they haven’t got the guts to be anything else). If we think of humans as essentially competitive, and therefore triumphalist by inclination, as we are encouraged to do, then kindness looks distinctlyold-fashioned, indeed nostalgic, a vestige from a time when we could recognize ourselves in each other and feel sympatheticbecause of our kindness—if such a time ever existed. And what, after all, can kindness ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241144337
• ISBN 13: 9780241144336
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 128