Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences
Abraham H. Maslow
Chapter I. Introduction
Some time ago, after the Supreme Court decision on prayer in the
public schools, a so-called patriotic women's organization—I
forget which one—bitterly attacked the decision as antireligious.
They were in favor of "spiritual values," they said,
whereas the Supreme Court was destroying them.
I am very much in favor of a clear separation of church and state,
and my reaction was automatic: I disagreed with the women's organization.
But then something happened that set me to thinking for many months.
It dawned on me that I, too, was in favor of spiritual values
and that, indeed, my researches and theoretical investigations
had gone far toward demonstrating their reality. I had reacted
in an automatic way against the whole statement by the organization,
thereby implicitly accepting its erroneous definition and concept
of spiritual values. In a word, I had allowed these intellectual
primitives to capture a good word and to put their peculiar meaning
to it, just as they had taken the fine word "patriotic"
and contaminated and destroyed it. I had let them redefine these
words and had then accepted their definitions. And now I want
to take them back. I want to demonstrate that spiritual values
have naturalistic meaning, that they are not the exclusive possession
of organized churches, that they do not need supernatural concepts
to validate them, that they are well within the jurisdiction of
a suitably enlarged science, and that, therefore, they are the
general responsibility of all mankind. If all of this is
so, then we shall have to reevaluate the possible place of spiritual
and moral values in education. For, if these values are not exclusively
identified with churches, then teaching values in the schools
need not breach the wall between church and state.
The Supreme Court decisions on prayer in the public schools were
seen (mistakenly, as we shall see) by many Americans as a rejection
of spiritual values in education. Much of the turmoil was in defense
of these higher values and eternal verities rather than of the
prayers as such. That is to say, very many people in our society
apparently see organized religion as the locus, the source, the
custodian and guardian and teacher of the spiritual life. Its
methods, its style of teaching, its content are widely and officially
accepted as the path, by many as the only path, to the
life of righteousness, of purity and virtue, of justice and goodness,
etc.[1]
This is also true, paradoxically enough, for many orthodoxly positivistic
scientists, philosophers, and other intellectuals. Pious positivists
as a group accept the same strict dichotomizing of facts and values
that the professional religionists do. Since they exclude values
from the realm of science and from the realm of exact, rational,
positivistic knowledge, all values are turned over by default
to non-scientists and to non-rationalists (i.e., to "non-knowers")
to deal with. Values can be arbitrarily affirmed by fiat only,
they think, like a taste or a preference or a belief which cannot
be scientifically validated, proven, confirmed, or disconfirmed.
Therefore, it appears that such scientists and such philosophers
really have no argument either for or against the churches; even
though, as a group, they are not very likely to respect the churches.
(Even this lack of respect is, for them, only a matter of taste
and cannot be supported scientifically.)
Something of this sort is certainly true for many psychologists
and many educators. It is almost universally true for the
positivistic psychologists, the behaviorists, the neo-behaviorists,
and the ultra-experimentalists, all of whom feel values and the
life of value to be none of their professional concern, and who
casually renounce all consideration of poetry and art and of any
of the religious or transcendent experiences. Indeed, the pure
positivist rejects any inner experiences of any kind as
being "unscientific," as not in the realm of human knowledge,
as not susceptible of study by a scientific method, because such
data are not objective, that is to say, public and shared. This
is a kind of "reduction to the concrete," to the tangible,
the visible, the audible, to that which can be recorded by a machine,
to behavior.[2]
The other dominating theory of psychology, the Freudian, coming
from a very different compass direction winds up at a similar
terminus, denying that it has anything much to do with spiritual
or ethical values. Freud himself and H. Hartman (28)[3]
after him say something like this: "The
only goal of the psychoanalytic method is to undo repressions
and all other defenses against seeing unpleasant truth; it has
nothing to do with ideologies, indoctrinations, religious dogmas
or teaching a way of life or system of values." (Even Alan
Wheelis (89), thoughtful and probing though he may be, comes to
a similar conclusion.) Observe here the unwitting acceptance of
the unexamined belief that values are taught, in the traditional
sense of indoctrination, and that they must, therefore, be arbitrary,
and also that they really have nothing to do with facts, with
truth, with discovery, with uncovering the values and "value-hungers"
that lie deeply within human nature itself.
And so official, orthodox, Freudian psychoanalysis remains essentially
a system of psychopathology and of cure of psychopathology. It
does not supply us with a psychology of the higher life or of
the "spiritual life," of what the human being should
grow toward, of what he can become (although I believe
psychoanalytic method and theory is a necessary substructure for
any such "higher" or growth psychology (70)). Freud
came out of nineteenth-century, mechanistic, physical-chemical,
reductionistic science; and there his more Talmudic followers
remain, at least with respect to the theory of values and everything
that has to do with values. Indeed this reductionism goes so far
sometimes that the Freudians seem almost to say that the "higher
life" is just a set of "defenses against the instincts,"
especially denial and reaction-formation. Were it not for the
concept of sublimation, that is what they would have to be saying.
Unfortunately, sublimation is so weak and unsatisfactory a concept
that it simply cannot bear this huge responsibility. Thus, psychoanalysis
often comes perilously close to being a nihilistic and value-denying
philosophy of man. (It is fortunate that any really good therapist
in practice pays no attention to this philosophy. Such a therapist
often functions by an unconscious philosophy of man which may
not be worked out scientifically for another century. It is true
that there are interesting and exciting developments in psychoanalysis
today, but they are coming from the unorthodox.) It must be said
to Freud's credit that, though he was at his poorest with all
the questions of transcendence, he is still to be preferred to
the behaviorists who not only have no answers but who also deny
the very questions themselves.
Neither are the humanistic scholars and artists of any great help
these days. They used to be, and were supposed to be, as a group,
carriers of and teachers of the eternal verities and the higher
life. The goal of humanistic studies was defined as the perception
and knowledge of the good, the beautiful, and the true. Such studies
were expected to refine the discrimination between what is excellent
and what is not (excellence generally being understood to be the
true, the good, and the beautiful). They were supposed to inspire
the student to the better life, to the higher life, to goodness
and virtue. What was truly valuable, Matthew Arnold said, was
"the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known
and said in the world." And no one disagreed with him. Nor
did it need to be spelled out that he meant knowledge of the classics;
these were the universally accepted models.
But in recent years and to this day, most humanistic scholars
and most artists have shared in the general collapse of all traditional
values. And when these values collapsed, there were no others
readily available as replacements. And so today, a very large
proportion of our artists, novelists, dramatists, critics, literary
and historical scholars are disheartened or pessimistic or despairing,
and a fair proportion are nihilistic or cynical (in the sense
of believing that no "good life" is possible and that
the so-called higher values are all a fake and a swindle).
Certainly the young student coming to the study of the arts and
the humanities will find therein no inspiring certainties. What
criterion of selection does he have between, let us say, Tolstoy
and Kafka, between Renoir and DeKooning, or between Brahms and
Cage? And which well-known artists or writers today are trying
to teach, to inspire, to conduce to virtue? Which of them could
even use this word "virtue" without gagging? Upon which
of them can an "idealistic" young man model himself?
No, it is quite clear from our experience of the last fifty years
or so that the pre-1914 certainties of the humanists, of the artists,
of the dramatists and poets, of the philosophers, of the critics,
and of those who are generally inner-directed have given way to
a chaos of relativism. No one of these people now knows how and
what to choose, nor does he know how to defend and to validate
his choice. Not even the critics who are fighting nihilism and
valuelessness can do much except to attack, as, for instance,
Joseph Wood Krutch does (40, 41); and he has nothing very inspiring
or affirmative to suggest that we fight for, much less
die for.
We can no longer rely on tradition, on consensus, on cultural
habit, on unanimity of belief to give us our values. These agreed-upon
traditions are all gone. Of course, we never should have
rested on tradition—as its failures must have proven to everyone
by now—it never was a firm foundation. It was destroyed too
easily by truth, by honesty, by the facts, by science, by simple,
pragmatic, historical failure.
Only truth itself can be our foundation, our base for building.
Only empirical, naturalistic knowledge, in its broadest sense,
can serve us now. I hesitate to use the word "science"
here, because this itself is a moot concept; and I shall be suggesting
later in this essay an overhauling and redefinition of science
that-could make it capable of serving better our value purposes,
to make it more inclusive and less excluding, more accepting of
the world and less snobbish about its jurisdictions. It is in
this broader sense, which I shall be sketching out, that science—meaning
all confirmable knowledge in all its stages of development—begins
to look capable of handling values.
Especially will our new knowledge of human nature probably give
the humanists and the artists, as well as the religionists, the
firm criteria of selection, which they now lack, to choose between
the many value possibilities which clamor for belief, so many
that the chaos may fairly be called valuelessness.
Footnotes
1. As a matter of fact, this identity is so
profoundly built into the English language that it is almost impossible
to speak of the "spiritual life" (a distasteful phrase
to a scientist, and especially to a psychologist) without using
the vocabulary of traditional religion. There just isn't any other
satisfactory language yet. A trip to the thesaurus will demonstrate
this very quickly. This makes an almost insoluble problem for
the writer who is intent on demonstrating that the common base
of all religions is human, natural, empirical, and that so-called
spiritual values are also naturally derivable. But I have available
only a theistic language for this "scientific" job.
Perhaps I can get out of this terminological difficulty in another
way. If you look up the words "sacred," "divine,"
"holy," "numen," "sin," "prayer,"
"oblation," "thanksgiving," "worship,"
"piety," "salvation," "reverence,"
the dictionary will most often tell you that they refer to a god
or to a religion in the supernatural sense. Now what I want to
say is that each and all of these words, and many other "religious"
words, have been reported to me by non-theistic people in their
effort to describe particular subjective happenings in "non-religious"
(in the conventional sense) peak-experiences and illuminations.
These words are the only words available to describe certain happenings
in the natural world. This vocabulary is the language of a theory
which people have had about these subjective happenings, a theory
which is no longer necessary.
I shall, therefore, use these words, since I have no others to
use, to refer to subjective happenings in human beings without
necessarily implying any supernatural reference. I claim that
it is not necessary to appeal to principles outside of nature
and human nature in order to explain these experiences. (back)
2. This is an especially fantastic notion
in the context of this lecture because human behavior is so often
a defense against motives, emotions, and impulses. That is, it
is a way of inhibiting and concealing them as often as it is an
expression of them. Behavior is often a means of preventing the
overt expression of everything I'm talking about, just as spoken
language can also be. How then can we explain the quick spread
of that theory-bound, sectarian, question-begging phrase: "The
behavioral sciences"? I confess that I cannot. (back)
3. Numbers in parentheses refer to items in
the Bibliography.
(back)