Self-abasement

“ To be your own destroyers is to sin against the deepest principle in your natures, even the principle of self-preservation. Every thing naturally desireth or inclineth to its own felicity, welfare, or perfection. And will you set yourselves to your own destruction? When you are commanded to love your neighbours as yourselves, it is supposed that you naturally love yourselves. But if you love your neighbours no better than yourselves, it seems you would have all the world be damned. ”

“ In the first place, according to the evidence, there developed a tendency in what we have called the rebellious complex to take on independent activity, or an automatism after the nature of an obsession, outside the domain of the will and self-control. ”

“ I had imagined, and indeed I had convinced myself, that I was so schooled in adversity I could defy fortune. I thought that mere bodily privations and sufferings could never seriously affect me, and that, with the freedom of my own thoughts unfettered, no real slavery could oppress me. In this calculation I had forgotten to take count of those feelings of self-esteem which are our defences against the promptings of every mean ambition. ”

“ But am I not still unrestrained from declaring myself the entitler, the mediator, and the own self? Then it runs thus: My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I myself, and through it am I my property. ”

“ The yoke of serfdom, of sovereignty, of aristocracy and princes, the dominion of the desires and passions; yes, even the dominion of one's own will, of self-will, for the completest self-denial is nothing but freedom—freedom, to wit, from self-determination, from one's own self. And the craving for freedom as for something absolute, worthy of every praise, deprived us of ownness: it created self-denial. ”

“ You will remain master of the situation indeed, but the situation will become poorer and narrower every day. If you never commit yourself, you never express yourself, and yourself becomes less and less significant and decisive. Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self. ”

“ Think not to escape save on one condition."
"Name it," said De Vessey.
"Self-preservation is the great, the paramount law of our nature; the most powerful impulse implanted in our being. All, all obey this impulse; and who can control or forbid its operation? Will not the most timid, the most scrupulous, if no alternative be afforded, slay the adversary who seeks his life ”

“ Bitter experience teaches that the imprisoning net clings too tightly to be stripped from our limbs by our own efforts. Nay rather, the net and the captive are one, and he who tries to cast off the oppression which hinders him from following that which is good is trying to cast off himself. The desperate problem that fronts every effort at self-emendation has two bristling impossibilities in it: one, how to annihilate the past; one, how to extirpate the evil that is part of my very self, and yet to keep the self entire. ”

“ It exists for the sole purpose of making possible the perfect development of individual ‘over-men,’ and of satisfying their most extravagant needs. [387] But the ‘splendid beast of prey’ is pernicious to itself; it rages against itself, it even annihilates itself, and yet that cannot possibly be a useful result of highly-trained qualities. The biological truth is, that constant self-restraint is a necessity of existence as much for the strongest as for the weakest. ”

“ It was contrary to common sense and human experience to expect that a royal statute should have prevailed over what really was an inevitable necessity, and the abuses that followed were only such as might have been anticipated in a society where the borrowers were many and needy, the lenders few and greedy, and the two classes were impelled to deal with each other by the strongest of motives—the motive of self-preservation. ”

“ LULU. That's why, too, I give myself to you alone quite without reserve. From you I have nothing to fear.
ALVA. I assure you there are moments when one expects to see one's whole inner self cave in. The more self-restraint a man loads onto himself, the easier he breaks down. ”

“ But, if we watch the influence upon the will itself, of its own wrong decisions, its own yielding to temptations, we shall discover that the voluntary faculty may be ruined from within; may be made impotent to good by its own action; may surrender itself with such an intensity and entireness to appetite, passion, and self-love, that it becomes unable to reverse itself, and overcome its own wrong disposition and direction. ”

“ Hence our wants are few; they are generally most courteously supplied without our asking; [pg II-126] or, if we happen to be momentarily forgotten, we can quickly secure anything in the neighbourhood by a little judicious squalling. Why, then, should we whirl as bubbles or scurry as rabbits? Our conquering self-possession gives a masterful charm to life that the victims of perpetual locomotion never seem to attain. ”

“ Belike what they have told you is good, is bad; and this cast mould of goodness, a vile prison-house. Learn to decide your own measure of restraint. Value for yourself the merits of selfishness and unselfishness; and strike you the balance between these two: for if the first be all accredited you make slaves of others, and if the second, your own abasement raises tyrants over you; and none can decide the matter for you so well as you for yourself; for even if you err you learn by it, while if he errs the blame is his, and if he advises well the credit is his, and you are nothing. Be yourself ”

“ In these considerations we have throughout laid the Autonomy should come about gradually principal emphasis upon the desirability and necessity of the acquirement of self help and self guidance on the part of the individual. ”

“ To seek self-preservation merely, is the expression of a state of distress, or of limitation of the true, fundamental instinct of life, which aims at the extension of power, and with this in view often enough calls in question self-preservation and sacrifices it. ”

“ To attack, one by one, so many incoherent sophisms which sometimes clash, although more frequently one runs into the other, is to condemn one's self to a disorderly, capricious struggle, and to expose one's self to perpetual repetitions. ”

“ I live independently. I answer in fear to no living being. I don't have to worry about job security because I'm not paying rent. I'm expecting to become more emotionally self-sufficient without losing my capacity for warmth and love. ”

“ I know that I, too, am a slave to my own formula. I say to myself that I am an average man,—that, given a problem of action, I will do under given circumstances just what the average man will do; that, if I am better or worse, it is all in the quality of opportunity. I am influenced largely by the judgment my neighbors would pass on me—by a desire to maintain my own self-respect, or to return to it—and yet I am conscious of but a distant and imperfect acquaintance with this self which is my court of last judgment. ”

“ Who is this ‘Self’ for whom Ibsen demands the right of autonomy? Who is this free individual? That the entire notion of a Self opposed to the rest of the world as something alien and exclusive is an illusion of consciousness, we have already seen in the chapter on the ‘Psychology of Ego-mania,’ and I need [409] not, therefore, dwell again on the subject in this place. We know that man, like every other complex and highly developed living being, is a society or state, of simpler, and of simplest, living beings, of cells and cell-systems, or organs, all having their own functions and wants. ”

“ However when the distinction between individuals makes itself felt, due to the rise of comparative reflection, self-assertion (amour de soi) , in itself free and noble, becomes egoism (amour propre) . Dependence, discontent, vanity, envy and lust for power manifest themselves. And to this must be added the division of labor which social life evolves. ”

“ As "nourishment" is something secondary, the original impulse being simply the will to close in on whatever is at hand, so self-division or propagation is equally derived—where one will does not suffice to organize what has been appropriated, another arises. ”

“ In proportion to the self-abandonment and personal abnegation, the degree to which the will is vacated, do such persons become good mediums. The more immersed in the theurgic studies and novelties they are, the more they lose themselves, and their value ceases to be individual, but only representative. ”

“ If self-renunciation has so many claims for you, who prevents your carrying it into private life? Society will be grateful to you for it, for some one, at least, will receive the benefit of it; but to wish to impose it on humanity as a principle is the height of absurdity, for the abnegation of everything is the sacrifice of everything—it is evil set up in theory. ”

“ It is only within the last three or at most four thousand years that we have any clear evidence that voluntary self-abandonment to some greater end, without fee or reward, was an acceptable idea to men, or that anyone had propounded it. ”

“ If anything more is required in order to establish this consequence of the system we are examining, I would call attention to the inquiry, whether after a contingent self-determining will there remains any theory of action except fatalism? A contingent self-determining will is a will which is the cause of its own volitions or choices—a self-conscious power, self-moved and directed, and at the moment of its choice, or movement towards a particular object, conscious of ability of choosing, or moving towards, an opposite object. ”

“ Such as I am, I want a soft, clinging element around me, in order to feel gladly inclined for work. This eternal need of self-condensation for the purpose of self-defence supplies me with obstinacy and contempt, but not with the love of expansion and production. ”

“ The eccentric individualist argues that to accept control, to defer to some centre as the classicist demands, is to cease to be himself. But are restrictions upon temperament so fatal to a man’s being himself? The reply hinges upon the definition of the word self, inasmuch as man is a dual being. If a man is to escape from his isolation he must, I have said, aim at some goal set above his ordinary self which is at the same time his unique and separate self. But because this goal is set above his ordinary self, it is not therefore necessarily set above his total personality. ”

“ Self-interest and a criminal avarice have fomented and kept alive the seeds of division between the inhabitants of the towns and those of the country, between the farmer, the mechanic, and the trader— the like has happened between adjoining towns and districts—an universal selfishness, in short, has prevailed. ”

“ Is this the man that is sinning—when tempted to steal some trifle to satisfy hunger? Self-preservation is the first law throughout organic nature. This poverty-stricken individual occupies the lowest strata of civilized life. ”

“ Sometimes, indeed, he is trapped by the ambiguity of 'self-realisation,' and speaks of "the instinct and necessity, which urges every living being to the fuller development of all the germs, the faculties, the forces, the life within it." ”

“ If we instanced the self-restraint in which so many pass their lives from day to day, it might perhaps be answered that there is a persistent idea of duty, or love of reputation, or fear of social stigma, the repression of which would be more painful than the restraint it puts upon other impulses. ”

“ Thus the impulse of self-preservation in the group produces, not alone in case of existing contrasts, a tendency to stability of life forms; but, in case this impulse directly calls these contrasts into existence, growing social differences attach themselves to the impulse, and thus afford evidence of the essential relationship here asserted. ”

“ He is not yet free from self, but still clings, though with less tenacity, to the love of personal existence, and to the idea of exclusive interest in his personal possessions. And when he at last realizes that those selfish elements must also be abandoned, there appears before him the third Gate—the Gateway of Surrender of Self. ”

“ His dominant failing was a self-dependence, which, in a weaker nature, would have degenerated into self-sufficiency, but just stopped short of that complacent, puerile egotism, which narrows the mind, and rears its own opinions upon a judgment-seat to pronounce verdicts upon the rest of the world. ”

“ It is important to observe that, at least in the two eminent biologists just alluded to, the doctrine of the individual self—of the relation between self-assertion and self-restraint—is altogether of an uncivilised and anti-social type. Biological categories do not, in their case at least, appear to have afforded any suggestion for the treatment of the social self as more and greater, in a positive sense, than the self which is less bound up with social obligations. ”

“ The circulation of substance through causality and reciprocity therefore only expressly makes out or states that self-subsistence is the infinite negative self-relation—a relation negative, in general, for in it the act of distinguishing and intermediating becomes a primariness of actual things independent one against the other,—and infinite self-relation, because their independence only lies in their identity. ”

“ Whether he had called it 'self-realisation' or any less ambiguous name, he would have come to the position that a man feels that he owes it to himself to strive for the best he knows, to 'do his duty for duty's sake,' that he must justify his thoughts and actions to himself—his unsophisticated self,—that, if not, he will feel remorse and guilt. ”