On Kindness - Hardcover

Phillips, Adam; Taylor, Barbara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374226504 ISBN 13: 9780374226503

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 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 a pleasure we often deny ourselves? And why—despite our longing—are we often suspicious when we are on the receiving end of it?

In this brilliant book, the eminent psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and the historian Barbara Taylor examine the pleasures and perils of kindness. Modern people have been taught to perceive ourselves as fundamentally antagonistic to one another, our motives self-seeking. Drawing on intellectual history, literature, psychoanalysis, and contemporary social theory, this book explains how and why we have chosen loneliness over connection. On Kindness argues that a life lived in instinctive, sympathetic identification with others is the one we should allow ourselves to live.

Bursting with often shocking insight, 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

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374226504
• ISBN 13: 9780374226503
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128