....the truly basic things about man, the things that really drive him . . . .man’s creatureliness (his appetite) on the one hand, and his ingenuity on the other.
At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling life, has a mouth, digestive tract, and anus, a skin to keep it intact, and appendages with which to acquire food. Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed -- a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh.
Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each person’s life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all the he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening. To paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.
Beyond the toothsome joy of consuming other organisms is the warm contentment of simply continuing to exist -- continuing to experience physical stimuli, to sense one’s inner pulsations and musculature, to delight in the pleasures that nerves transmit. Once the organism is satiated, this becomes its frantic all-consuming task, to hold onto life at any cost . . . . this absolute dedication to Eros, to perseverance, is universal among organisms and is the essence of life on this earth.
Man is cursed with a burden no animal has to bear: he is conscious that his own end is inevitable, that his stomach will die. [Herein we have the origins of civilization] As soon as you have symbols you have artificial self-transcendence via culture. Everything cultural is fabricated and given meaning by the mind, a meaning that was not given by physical nature . . . . [but] the terror of death still rumbles underneath the cultural repression. What men have done is to shift the fear of death onto the higher level of cultural perpetuity . . . . men must now hold for dear life onto the self-transcending meanings of the society in which they live . . . a new kind of instability and anxiety are created.
In seeking to avoid evil [(death)], man is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is man’s ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate.
One of the main motives of organismic life is the urge to self-feeling, to the heightened sense of self that comes with success in overcoming obstacles and incorporating other organisms. Man can expand his self-feeling not only by physical incorporation but by any kind of triumph or demonstration of his own excellence. He expands his organization in complexity by games, puzzles, riddles, mental tricks of all types; by boasting about his achievements, taunting and humiliating his adversaries, or torturing and killing them. Anything that reduces the other organisms and adds to one’s own size and importance is a direct way to gain self-feeling . . . . in man we find that he is in an almost constant struggle not to be diminished in his organismic importance.
To be outshone by another is to be attacked at some basic level of organismic durability. To lose, to be second rate, to fail to keep up with the best and the highest sends a message to the nerve center of the organism’s anxiety: "I am overshadowed, inadequate; hence I do not qualify for continued durability, for life, for eternity; hence I will die." As William James put it:
Failure, then failure! So the world stamps us at every turn.
We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities,
with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation.
And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out!
Envy is the signal of danger that the organism sends to itself when a shadow is being cast over it, when it is threatened with being diminished. The "fear of being reduced . . . almost seems to have a life of its own inside one’s being" (Alan Harrington)
The primitive genius . . . sets up society as a continuing contest for the forcing of self-feeling, provides ready-made props for self-aggrandizement . . . status forcing and similar types of behavior, in which people try to come out of social encounters a little bigger than they went in, by playing intricate games of oneupmanship.
Society almost everywhere provides codes for such self-aggrandizement, for the ability to boast, to humiliate, or just simply to outshine in quiet ways -- like displaying one’s superior achievements. If Hocart says that man cannot impart life to himself but must get it via ritual from his fellow man, then we can say even further that man cannot impart importance to himself; and importance, we now see, is just as deep a problem in securing life: importance equals durability equals life.
For most men faith in spirituality is merely a step into continued life, the exact extension of the organismic stomach project..
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