I felt a physical push, as though she had stretched out her two hands and laid them on my chest and tried to move me back from where I stood. Her face was engraved with a hostile beauty. She tossed her hair just slightly, let it stroke her cheeks. We have avoided the concept of faith in our description of the courage to be which is based on mystical union wit the ground of being as well as in our description of the courage to be which is based on the personal encounter with God. This is partly because the concept of faith has lost its genuine meaning and has received the connotation of belief in something unbelievable. However, this is not the only reason for the use of terms other than faith. The decisive reason is that I do not think either mystical union or personal encounter fulfills the idea of faith. Certainly there is faith in the elevation of the soul above the finite to the infinite, leading to its union with the ground of being. However, more than this is included in the concept of faith. And there is faith in the personal encounter with the personal God. However, more than this is included in the concept of faith. Faith is the state of being grasped by the power of being-itself. The courage to be is an expression of faith and what faith means must be understood through the courage to be. We have defined courage as the self-affirmation of being in spite of non-being. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

The power of this self-affirmation is the power of being which is effective in every act of courage. Faith is the experience of this power. However, it is an experience which has a paradoxical character, the character of accepting acceptance. Being-itself transcends every finite being infinitely; God in the divine-human encounter transcends mortals unconditionally. Faith bridges this finite gap by accepting the fact that in spite of it the power of being is present, that one who is separated is accepted. Faith accepts in spite of; and out of the in spite of of faith the inspire of of courage is born. Faith is not a theoretical affirmation of something uncertain, it is the existential acceptance of something transcending ordinary experience. Faith is not an opinion but a state. It is the state of being grasped by the power of being which transcends everything that is and in which everything that is participates. One who is grasped by this power is able to affirm oneself because one knows that one is affirmed by the power of being-itself. In this point mystical experience and personal encounter are identical. In both of them faith is the basis of the courage to be. This decisive for a period in which, as in our own, the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness is dominant. Certainly the anxiety of fate and death is not lacking in our time. The anxiety of fate has increased with the degree to which the schizophrenic split of our World has removed the last remnants of former security. And the anxiety of guilt and condemnation is not lacking either. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

It is surprising how much anxiety of guilt comes to the surface in psychoanalysis and personal counseling. The centuries of puritan and bourgeois repression of vital strivings have produced almost as many guilt feelings as the preaching of hell and purgatory in the Middle Ages. However, in spite of these restricting considerations one must say that the anxiety which determines our period is the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness. One is afraid of having lost or of having to lose the meaning of one’s existence. The expression of this situation is the Existentialism of today. Which courage is able to take nonbeing into itself in the from of doubt and meaninglessness? This is the most important and most disturbing question in the quest for the courage to be. For the anxiety of meaninglessness undermines what is still unshaken in the anxiety of fate and death and of guilt and condemnation. In the anxiety of guilt and condemnation doubt has not yet undermined the certainty of an ultimate responsibility. We are threatened but we are not destroyed. If, however, doubt and meaninglessness prevail one experiences an abyss in which the meaning of life and the truth of ultimate responsibility disappear. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Both the Stoic who conquers the anxiety of fate with the Socratic courage of wisdom and the Christian who conquers the anxiety of guilt with the Protestant courage of accepting forgiveness are in a different situation. Even in the despair of having to die and the despair of self-condemnation meaning is affirmed and certitude preserved. However, in the despair of doubt and meaninglessness bot are swallowed by nonbeing. The question then is this: Is there a courage which can conquer the anxiety of meaninglessness and doubt? Or in other words, can the faith which accepts acceptance resist the power of nonbeing in its most radical form? Can faith resist meaninglessness? Is there a kind of faith which can exist together with doubt and meaninglessness? These questions lead to the last aspect of the problem discussed in these lectures and the one most relevant to our time: How is the courage to be possible if all the ways to create it are barred by the experience of their ultimate insufficiency? If life is as meaningless as death, if guilt is as questionable as perfection, if being is no more meaningful than nonbeing, on what can one base the courage to be? #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

There is an inclination in some Existentialists to answer these questions by a leap from doubt to dogmatic certitude, from meaninglessness to set of symbols in which the meaning of a special ecclesiastical or political group is embodied. This lead can be interpreted in different ways. It may be the expression of a desire for safety; it may be as arbitrary as, according to Existentialist principles, every decision is; it may be the feeling that the Christian message is the answer to the question raised by an analysis of human existence; it may be a genuine conversion, independent of the theoretical situation. In any case it is not a solution of the problem of radical doubt. It gives the courage to be to those who are converted but it does not answer the question as to how such a courage is possible in itself. The answer must accept, as its precondition, the state of meaninglessness. It is not an answer if it demands the removal of this state; for that is just what cannot be done. One who is in the grip of doubt and meaninglessness cannot liberate oneself from this grip; but one asks for an answer which is valid within and not outside the situation of one’s despair. One asks for the ultimate foundation of what we have called the courage of despair. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

There is only one possible answer, if one does not try to escape the question: namely that the acceptance of despair is in itself faith and on the boundary line of courage to be. In this situation the meaning of life is reduced to despair about the meaning of life. However, as long as this despair is an act of life it is beneficial in its negativity. Cynically speaking, one could say that it is true to life to be cynical about it. Religiously speaking, one would say that one accepts oneself as accepted in spite of one’s despair about the meaning of this acceptance. The paradox of every radical negativity, as long as it is an active negativity, is that it must affirm itself in order to be able to negate itself. No actual negation can be without an implicit affirmation. The hidden pleasure produced by despair witnesses to the paradoxical character of self-negation. The negative lives from the benefits it negates. The faith which makes the courage of despair possible is the acceptance of the power of being, even in the grip of nonbeing. Even in the despair about meaning being affirms itself through us. The act of accepting meaninglessness is in itself a meaningful act. It is an act of faith. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

We have seen that one who has the courage to affirm one’s being in spite of fate and guilt has not removed them. One remains threatened and hit by them. However, one accepts one’s acceptance by the power of being-itself in which one participates and which gives one the courage to take the anxieties of fate and guilt upon oneself. The same is true of doubt and meaninglessness. The faith which creates the courage to take them into itself has no special content. It is simply faith, undirected, absolute. It is undefinable, since everything defined is dissolved by doubt and meaninglessness. Nevertheless, even absolute faith is not an eruption of subjective emotions or a mood without objective foundation. An analysis of the nature of absolute faith reveals that following elements in it. The first is the experience of the power of being which is present even in face of the most radical manifestation of nonbeing. If one says that in this experience vitality resists despair one must add that vitality in mortals is proportional to intentionality. The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning. The second element in absolute faith is the dependence of the experience of nonbeing on the experience of being and the dependence of the experience of meaninglessness on the experience of meaning. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Even in the state of despair one has enough being to make despair possible. There is a third element in absolute faith, the acceptance of being accepted. Of course, in the state of despair there is nobody and nothing that accepts. However, there is the power of acceptance itself which is experienced. Meaninglessness, as long as it is experienced, includes an experience of the power of acceptance. To accept this power of acceptance consciously is the religious answer of absolute faith, of a faith which has been deprived by doubt of any concrete content, which nevertheless is faith and the source of the most paradoxical manifestation of the courage to be. This faith transcends both the mystical experience and the divine-human encounter. The mystical experience seems to be nearer to absolute faith but it is not. Absolute faith includes an element of skepticism which one cannot find in the mystical experience. Certainly mysticism also transcends all specific contents, but not because it doubts them or has found them meaningless; rather it seems them to be preliminary. Mysticism uses the specific contents as grades, stepping on them after having used them. The experience of meaninglessness, however, denies them (and everything that goes with them) without having used them. The experience of meaninglessness if more radical than mysticism. Therefore it transcends the mystical experience. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Absolute faith also transcends the divine-human encounter. In this encounter the subject-object scheme is valid: a definite subject (mortal) meets a definite object (God). One can reserve this statement and say that a definite subject (God) meets a definite object (mortal). However, in both causes the attack of doubt undercuts the subject-object structure. The theologians who speak so strongly and with such self-certainty about the divine-human encounter should be aware of a situation in which this encounter is prevented by radical doubt and nothing is left but absolute faith. The acceptance of such a situation as religiously valid has, however, the consequences that the concrete contents of ordinary faith must be subjected to criticism and transformation. The courage to be in its radical form is a key to an idea of God which transcends both mysticism and the person-to-person encounter. Dr. Freud has discovered the principle of free association. By giving up the control of your thoughts in the presence of a skilled listener, you can discover your unconscious feelings and thoughts without being asleep, or crazy, or drunk, or hypnotized. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

The psychoanalyst reads between your lines, one is capable of understanding you better than you understand yourself because you have freed your thinking from the limitations of conventional thought control. However, free association soon deteriorated, like freedom and happiness. First it deteriorated in the orthodox psychoanalytic procedure itself. Not always, but often. Instead of giving rise to a meaningful expression of imprisoned thoughts, it became meaningless chatter. Other therapeutic schools reduced the role of the analyst to that of a sympathetic listener, who repeats in slightly different version the words of the patient, without trying to interpret or to explain. All this is done with the idea that the patient’s freedom must not be interfered with. The Freudian idea of free association has become the instrument of many psychologists who call themselves counselors, although the only thing they do not do is counsel. These counselors play an increasingly large role as private practitioners and as advisers in industry. What is the effect of the procedure? Obviously not a cure which Dr. Freud ad in mind when he devised free association as a basis for understanding the unconscious. Rather a release of tension which results from talking things out in the presence of a sympathetic listener. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Your thoughts, as long as you keep them within yourself, may disturb you—but something fruitful may come out of this disturbance; you mull them over, you think, you feel, you may arrive at a new thought born out of this travail. However, when you talk right away, when you do not let your thoughts and feelings build up pressure, as it were, they do not become fruitful. It is exactly the same as with unobstructed consumption. You are a system in which things go in and out continuously—and within it is nothing, no tension, no digestion, no self. Dr. Freud’s discovery of free association had the aim of finding out what went on in your underneath the surface, of discovering who you really were; the modern talking to the sympathetic listener has the opposite, although unavowed aim; its function is to make a mortal forget who one is (provided one has still some memory), to lose all tension, and with it all sense of self. Just as one oils machines, one oils people and especially those in the mass organizations of work. One oils them with pleasant slogans, material advantages, and with the sympathetic understanding of the psychologists. The talking and listening to eventually has become the indoor sport of those who cannot afford a professional listener, or prefer the layman for one reason of another. It has become fashionable, sophisticated, to talk things out. There is no inhibition, no sense of shame, no holding back. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

When we are allowed to freely express ourselves, one speaks about the tragic occurrences of one’s life with the same ease as one would talk about another person of no particular interest, or as one would speak about the various troubles one has had with one’s video game. Indeed, psychology and psychiatry are in the process of changing their function fundamentally. From the Delphic Oracle’s “Know thyself!” to Dr. Freud’s psychoanalytic therapy, the function of psychology was to discover the self, to understand the individual, to find the truth that makes you free. Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of mortals. The specialists in this field tell you what the normal person is, and, correspondingly, what is wrong with you; they devise the methods to help you adjust, be happy, be normal. In the Brave New World this conditioning is done from the first month of fertilization (by chemical means), until after puberty. With us, it begins a little later. Constant repetition by newspaper, radio, television, does most of the conditioning. However, the crowning achievement of manipulation is modern psychology. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

What the American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor did for industrial work when he started the Efficiency Movement, the psychologist does for the whole personality—all in the name of understanding freedom. There are many exceptions to this among psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts, but it becomes increasingly clear that these professions are in the process of becoming a serious danger to the development of mortal, that their practitioners are evolving into the priests of the new religion of fun, consumption and selflessness, into the specialists of manipulation, into the spokes person for the alienated personality. One wonders whether everyone has forgotten the fact that eros, according to no less an authority than St. Augustine, is the power which drives men toward God. Eros created life on the Earth, the early Greek mythology tells us. When the World was barren and lifeless, it was Eros who seized his life-giving arrows and pierced the cold heart of the Earth, and immediately the brown surface was covered with luxuriant verdure. This is an appealing symbolic picture of how love is a creative relationship. It is creative in the sense that something new or novel or important comes out of relating. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Eros then breathed into the nostrils of the clay forms of man and woman and gave them the spirit of life. The relationship, not how it is expressed or consummated, is the important thing. A friendship between two people, whether of the opposite sex or the same sex, is a love relationship when certain important qualities are present. Any love relation involves four elements: Knowledge, Care, Respect, Responsibility. Eros is the kind of energy that is a desiring, longing, a forever reaching out, seeking to expand. Eros is defined as ardent desire, yearning, aspiring self-fulfilling love. For eros is the power which attracts us. The essence of eros is that it draws us from ahead. This is revealed in our day-to-day language when I saw a person allures me or entices me, or the possibilities of a new job invite me. Something in me responds to the other person, or the job, and pulls me toward the individual or career. I participate in forms, possibilities, higher levels of meaning, on neurophysiological dimensions but also on aesthetic and ethical dimensions as well. As the Greeks believed, knowledge and even ethical goodness exercise such a pull. Eros is the drive toward union with what we belong to—union with our own possibilities, union with significant other persons in our World in relation to whom we discover our own self-fulfillment. Eros is the yearning in a mortal which leads one to dedicate oneself to seek arete, the noble and good life. #RandolpHarris 14 of 17

To love, to be in a true loving relationship, the involved people must know each other. True love at first sight is possible under the rarest of circumstances and occurs only in the same kinds of ultra-sensitive people who may also be called mind-readers or superb judges of character. The common feeling of falling in love at first sight is a product of one or more things: fascination, fantasy, intimacy, admiration, appreciation, attraction, identification, or just plain good vibes. If one defines love in any of those terms, then for all intents and purposes the individual loves you. However, love, for most people, and we must say in reality, is much more. It is really knowing another individual. To know someone you must experience that person. Not just on dates, and certainly not just by seeing him or her on a two-dimensional movie screen or on social media. In the typical dating experience, even in this modern, enlightened, up-to-date, anti-establishment World, people do unreal, phony and inauthentic things in an attempt to put their best foot forward, basically to impress another person. So many things are artificially hidden—complexion flaws, food preferences, less-than-acceptable traits-that one person may require a great deal of time to penetrate the masks of another or to become acquainted with the games he or she plays. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Mature, deep and satisfying love comes from real, intimate, intensive and extensive knowledge. It comes from wide and profound experiencing of the fullest self possible. Eros makes one want to stay awake and think of the beloved, remembering, savoring, discovering ever-new facets of the prism of what the experience of being around them is like. It is the urge for union with the partner that is the occasion for human tenderness. The source of love is tenderness. Eros is the longing to establish union, full relationship. To know more than intellectual insight. You do not know a girl simply because you know her name is Elle Woods, that she lives on the 4900^th Court of Regatta, that her phone number 817-4435, that her measurements are 35-22-36, that her age is 20, that she works at…, that her parents are…,that she has certain color eyes, hair, skin, etc. This is not the kind of knowledge we mean. This is Bureau of the Census information, almanac data. It is impressed on us that intimate, personal knowledge is fundamental and basic part of a close relationship. We must know each other—each of us must understand the other’s special uniqueness—before we consider our relationship one of love. The two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we all are heir as individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not made up of two isolated, individual experiences, but for a genuine union.  #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

True respect takes place as we come to develop our ability to love our fellow mortals as ourselves. A sharing takes place which is a new being, a new field of magnetic force. This is what is called chemistry of two people in love, and without it, a relationship will not last. Chemistry shakes us, it has within it the great wonder, tremendous and tremulous as it may be, it is when we know the other individual is the mate of our soul and the feeling is mutual. Chemistry is the moment of union of souls and realization that we have won the others. This is a symbolic way of communicating a basic truth of human experience, that eros always drives us to transcend ourselves. It is a truth which obtains our relationships in the objective World. “All these faded pictures I save in the corners of my mind. They call in waves to take me away. I will not be back tonight. And I breathe the sights that we left behind. Wen I dream, those nights will always be mine. I feel as years unfold that we are still connected to those days when we were young and you were my reflect. I still come back to you,” reports Emma Hewitt and Andrew Rayel (My Reflection). Respect is also synonymous with care and concern. We respect those we care about. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17