Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences
Abraham H. Maslow
Chapter VI. Science and the Religious Liberals and Non-Theists
Nineteenth-century objectivistic, value-free science has finally
proven to be also a poor foundation for the atheists, the agnostics,
the rationalists, the humanists, and other nontheists, as well
as for the "liberal" religionists, e.g., the Unitarians
and the Universalists. Both of them, orthodox science and liberal
and non-theistic religion, leave out too much that is precious
to most human beings. In their revolt against the organized, institutionalized
churches, they have unwittingly accepted the immature and naive
dichotomy between traditional religion (as the only carrier of
values), on one hand, and, on the other, a totally mechanistic,
reductionistic, objectivistic, neutral, value-free science. To
this day, liberal religionists rest heavily, even exclusively,
on the natural sciences which seem to them to be somehow more
"scientific" than the psychological sciences upon which
they should base themselves but which they use almost not at all
(except in positivistic versions).
Thus, average, liberal religionists try to rest all their efforts
on knowledge of the impersonal world rather than on the personal
sciences. They stress rational knowledge and are uneasy with the
irrational, the anti-rational, the non-rational, as if Freud and
Jung and Adler had never lived. So they know nothing officially
of a subrational unconscious, of repression, or of defensive processes
in general, of resistances to insight, of impulses which are determinants
of behavior and yet are unknown to the person himself. Like positivistic
psychologists, they feel much more at home with the cognitive
than they do with the emotional and the impulsive and volitional.
They make no basic place in their systems for the mysterious,
the unknown, the unknowable, the dangerous-to-know, or the ineffable.
They pass by entirely the old, rich literature based on the mystical
experiences. They have no systematic place for goals, ends, yearnings,
aspirations, and hopes, let alone will or purpose. They don't
know what to do with the experiential, the subjective, and the
phenomenological that the existentialists stress so much, as do
also the psychotherapists The inexact, the illogical, the metaphorical,
the mythic, the symbolic, the contradictory or conflicted, the
ambiguous, the ambivalent are all considered to be "lower"
or "not good," i.e., something to be "improved"
toward pure rationality and logic. It is not yet understood that
they are characteristic of the human being at his highest levels
of development as well as at his lowest, and that they can be
valued, used, loved, built upon, rather than just being swept
under the rug. Nor is it sufficiently recognized that "good"
as well as "bad" impulses can be repressed.
This is also true for the experiences of surrender, of reverence,
of devotion, of self-dedication, of humility and oblation, of
awe and the feeling of smallness. These experiences, which organized
religions have always tried to make possible, are also common
enough in the peak-experiences and in the B-cognitions, including
even impulses to kneeling, to prostration, and to something like
worship. But these are all missing from the non-theisms and from
the liberal theisms. This is of especial importance today because
of the widespread "valuelessness" in our society, i.e.,
people have nothing to admire, to sacrifice themselves for, to
surrender to, to die for.[1] This
gap calls for filling. Perhaps, even, it may be an "instinctoid"
need. Any ontopsychology or any religion, it would seem, must
satisfy this need.
The result? A rather bleak, boring, unexciting, unemotional, cool
philosophy of life which fails to do what the traditional religions
have tried to do when they were at their best, to inspire, to
awe, to comfort, to fulfill, to guide in the value choices, and
to discriminate between higher and lower, better and worse, not
to mention to produce Dionysiac experiences, wildness, rejoicing,
impulsiveness. Any religion, liberal or orthodox, theistic or
non-theistic, must be not only intellectually credible and morally
worthy of respect, but it must also be emotionally satisfying
(and I include here the transcendent emotions as well).
No wonder that the liberal religions and semi-religious groups
exert so little influence even though their members are the most
intelligent and most capable sections of the population. It must
be so just as long as they base themselves upon a lopsided picture
of human nature which omits most of what human beings value, enjoy,
and cherish in themselves, in fact, which they live for, and which
they refuse to be done out of.
The theory of science which permits and encourages the exclusion
of so much that is true and real and existent cannot be considered
a comprehensive science. It is obviously not an organization of
everything that is real. It doesn't integrate all the data.
Instead of saying that these new data are "unscientific,"
I think we are now ready to turn the tables and change the definition
of science so that it is able to include these data. (See Appendixes
D and I.)
Some perceptive liberals and non-theists are going through an
"agonizing reappraisal" very similar to that which the
orthodox often go through, namely a loss of faith in their foundation
beliefs. Just as many intellectuals lose faith in religious orthodoxy,
so do they also lose faith in positivistic, nineteenth-century
science as a way of life. Thus they too often have the sense of
loss, the craving to believe, the yearning for a value-system,
the valuelessness and the simultaneous longing for values which
marks so many in this "Age of Longing" (6). (See also
Appendix E.) I believe that this need can be satisfied by a larger,
more inclusive science, one which includes the data of transcendence.[2]
Not only must the liberal religions and the non-theisms accept
and build upon all of these neglected aspects of human nature
if they have any hope at all of fulfilling perfectly legitimate
human needs, but also if these value systems are to do the ultimate
job of any social institution, i.e., to foster the fullest actualization
and fulfillment of the highest and fullest humanness, then they
will have to venture into even stranger fields of thought. For
instance, such purely "religious" concepts as the sacred,
the eternal, heaven and hell, the good death, and who knows what
else as well are now being nibbled at by the encroaching naturalistic
investigators. It looks as if these, too, will be brought into
the human world. In any case, enough knowledge is already available
so that I feel I can say very confidently that these concepts
are not mere hallucinations, illusions, or delusions, or rather,
more accurately, that they need not be. They can and do have referents
in the real world.
I am myself uneasy, even jittery, over the semantic confusion
which lies in store for us—indeed which is already here—as
all the concepts which have been traditionally "religious"
are redefined and then used in a very different way. Even the
word "god" is being defined by many theologians today
in such a way as to exclude the conception of a person with a
form, a voice, a beard, etc. If God gets to be defined as "Being
itself," or as "the integrating principle in the universe,"
or as "the whole of everything," or as "the meaningfulness
of the cosmos," or in some other non-personal way, then what
will atheists be fighting against? They may very well agree with
"integrating principles" or "the principle of harmony."
And if, as actually happened on one platform, Paul Tillich defined
religion as "concern with ultimate concerns" and I then
defined humanistic psychology in the same way, then what is the
difference between a supernaturalist and a humanist?
The big lesson that must be learned here, not only by the non-theists
and liberal religionists, but also by the supernaturalists, and
by the scientists and the humanists, is that mystery, ambiguity,
illogic, contradiction, mystic and transcendent experiences may
now be considered to lie well within the realm of nature. These
phenomena need not drive us to postulate additional supernatural
variables and determinants. Even the unexplained and the presently
unexplainable, ESP for instance, need not. And it is no longer
accurate to accept them only as morbidities. The study of self-actualizing
people has taught us differently (59, 67).
The other side of the coin needs examination, too. One of the
most irritating aspects of positivistic science is its overconfidence,
I might call it, or perhaps its lack of humility. The pure, nineteenth-century
scientist looks like a babbling child to sophisticated people
just because he is so cocky, so self-assured, just because he
doesn't know how little he knows, how limited scientific knowledge
is when compared with the vast unknown.
Most powerfully is this true of the psychologist whose ratio of
knowledge to mystery must be the smallest of all scientists. Indeed,
sometimes I am so impressed by all that we need to know in comparison
with what we do know that I think it best to define a psychologist,
not as one who knows the answers, but rather as one who struggles
with the questions.
Perhaps it is because he is so innocently unaware of his smallness,
of the feebleness of his knowledge, of the smallness of his playpen,
or the smallness of his portion of the cosmos and because he takes
his narrow limits so for granted that he reminds me of the little
boy who was seen standing uncertainly at a street corner with
a bundle under his arm. A concerned bypasser asked him where he
was going and he replied that he was running away from home. Why
was he waiting at the corner? He wasn't allowed to cross the street!
Another consequence of accepting the concept of a natural, general,
basic, personal religious experience is that it will also reform
atheism, agnosticism, and humanism. These doctrines have, on the
whole, been simply a rejection of the churches; and they have
fallen into the trap of identifying religion with the churches,
a very serious mistake as we have seen. They threw out too much,
as we are now discovering. The alternative that these groups have
rested on has been pure science of the nineteenth-century sort,
pure rationalism insofar as they have not relied merely on negative
attacks upon the organized churches. This has turned out to be
not so much a solution of the problem as a retreat from it. But
if it can be demonstrated that the religious questions (which
were thrown out along with the churches) are valid questions,
that these questions are almost the same as the deep, profound,
and serious ultimate concerns of the sort that Tillich talks about
and of the sort by which I would define humanistic psychology,
then these humanistic sects could become much more useful to mankind
than they are now.
As a matter of fact, they might very well become very similar
to the reformed church organizations. It's quite possible that
there wouldn't be much difference between them in the long run,
if both groups accepted the primary importance and reality of
the basic personal revelations (and their consequences) and if
they could agree in regarding everything else as secondary, peripheral,
and not necessary, not essentially defining characteristics of
religion, they then could focus upon the examination of the personal
revelation—the mystic experience, the peak-experience, the personal
illumination—and of the B-cognitions which then ensue.
Footnotes
1. It should be noted
(because it may contradict my thesis) that these general criticisms
of the "liberal religions" apply also to the Quakers
even though they originally based themselves in principle on inner,
personal, quasi-mystic experience. Today, they, too, tend to be
only Apollonian and have no respectable place for the Dionysian,
for the "warm" as well as the "cool." They,
too, are rational, "simple," sober, and decent, and
bypass darkness, wildness, and craziness, hesitating, it appears,
to stir up orgiastic emotions. They, too, have built themselves
a philosophy of goodness that has no systematic place for evil.
They have not yet incorporated Freud and Jung into their foundations,
nor have they discovered that the depths of the personal unconscious
are the source of joy, love, creativeness, play, and humor as
well as of dangerous and crazy impulses.
Because I do not know enough about the Friends, I don't know why
this is so. Certainly it is not because of my great reliance on
nineteenth-century science. (back)
2. It was said of one man that "he could be at home neither
with the Catholic solution of the religious problem nor with the
rationalist dissolution of the Problem." The "liberals"
who gave up the illusion of a god modeled on a human father, who
revolted against a wish-fulfillment god against a churchly establishment
with political ambitions and power, against functionally autonomous
dogmas and rituals, also gave up, quite unnecessarily, the true
and deep and necessary purposes of all "serious" humanists
and humanistic religions overcoming the limitations of a self-limited
ego, relating in harmony to the cosmos, attempting to become all
that a human being can, etc. (To the thoughtful scholar, interested
in precursive answers to the same questions, I recommend an examination
of New England transcendentalism and its interrelations with Unitarianism.)
(back)