Flight over Convenience Store
One of my favourite times of the year is when UofT colleges have their annual book sale.
First-Order Confession: One of my least-guilty guilty pleasures is buying old books (–I wish I’m the type of person who uses the library!). Second-Order Confession: One of my more-guilty guilty pleasures is bookshelf-virtue-signalling.
To prevent the descent of my better guilty pleasures to its lesser form, I tell myself upon purchasing such books that I must read them all. I am maybe 20% successful; and even less if you include the books from last year’s book sale that I haven’t started.
This blog post will be a reflection on the dominant themes in four books of such books:
- Psychoanalysis and Religion, Erich Fromm (1950)
- Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata (2016) [1]
- Flight to Arras, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1942)
- Theology and Culture, Paul Tillich (1959)
Flight to Arras is Saint-Exupéry’s recount of a completely futile death mission he was sent on during in the WWII interlaced with reflections on the meaning of war (or lack thereof). Convenience Store Woman follows a 36-year-old convenience store worker, Keiko Furukura, who suppresses psychologically aberrant thoughts in an honest attempt to navigate a social world that has seemingly arbitrary expectations of her.
Paul Tillich’s Theology of Culture is a compilation of essays addressing the intersection of religion and culture. In particular interest for this blog post, he addresses the value of existential philosophy and psychoanalysis to theology. If Tillich approaches psychoanalysis from a theological lens, Erich Fromm’s Psychoanalysis and Religion approaches the topic from the opposite direction and outlines the value of religious attitudes in psychoanalysis [2].
[1] Technically, Convenience Store Woman was not from the UofT cohort of books and actually from the library, yay me!
[2] In fact, Paul Tillich and Erich Fromm often make references to each other’s work.
From Absurdity to Adjustment:
Flight to Arras x Convenience Store Woman
Flight to Arras shows absurdity in an extreme situation (war), Convenience Store Woman shows absurdity in society in general. Saint-Exupéry must overcome the sheer meaninglessness of the mission he is sent on. Furukura who is seen as problematic by fellow humans for being an unmarried 36-year-old woman who has worked at a convenience store for 18 years, considers creating a façade of “normal” human existence (socially acceptable career, marriage, children) that she personally finds meaningless.
Saint-Exupéry and Furukura both see through the conventions imposed on them for their vanity: “splendid caricature of a war” and “fictitious character of an ordinary person” respectively.
| Flight to Arras (Saint-Exupéry) | Convenience Store Woman (Murata) |
| We know [the orders] are absurd. They know It at HQ. But orders are given because orders must be given. There’s a war on, so HQ gives orders … then war might be willing to look like war. So that it may look like war, crews are being sacrificed to no clear purpose. No one will admit that no part of [this war] has any meaning
The villages are burning so that war may look like war … The man blowing up a bridge … is not holding up the enemy: he is creating a ruined bridge. He is wrecking his country to turn it into a splendid caricature of war! The meaning of burning a village must be equal to the meaning of the village. But in truth the function of the burnt village is only a caricature of a function. |
In other words, you play the part of the fictitious creature called ‘an ordinary person’ that everyone has in them. Just like everyone in the convenience store is playing the part of the fictitious creature called ‘a store worker’ |
From the unwritten conventions of war in Flight or Arras to the unwritten social conventions of society in Convenience Store Woman, conventions are normative and policed by the members of society themselves.
| Flight to Arras (Saint-Exupéry) | Convenience Store Woman (Murata) |
| Anarchism remembers the cult of Man but applies it rigorously to the individual. …Others took hold of those powerless … and with their sum total they made a State. And this State too fails to transcend men. It too is the expression of a total. … it is the reign of one …, which claims identity with the others, over the sum …. The faithful to this new religion will not accept that several miners should risk their lives to rescue one buried miner, for that would do damage to the pile of stones. They will finish off a wounded man if he is a hindrance … the good of the Community will be calculated arithmetically, and their arithmetic will be their governor. .. They will have no power of absorption | The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. That’s why I need to be cured. Unless I am cured, normal people will expurgate me. |
It is true that when you really think about the conventions dictating individual actions, they are meaningless at best and vain at worst. However, they remain prevalent because the principles behind the conventions are the ways by which a society/group perpetuates itself. Arguably, war (and by extension death and destruction) is necessary for the perpetuation of a state. Career, marriage and children are necessary for the perpetuation of the capitalist mode of production.
| Flight to Arras (Saint-Exupéry) | Convenience Store Woman (Murata) |
| The conflict between the West and Nazism is compressed here into the scale of my actions, my actions on handles and levers. … just as the sexton’s love for God becomes the love of lighting candles | To stay in a convenience store, you have to become a store worker … just wear a uniform and do as the manual says. …. It was the same in the Stone Age society too. … You’re a slave to the village …You either get married an have kids or go hunting and earn money, and anyone who doesn’t contribute to the village in one of these forms is a heretic. … As long as you wear the skin of what’s considered an ordinary person and follow the manual, you won’t be driven out of the village or treated as a burden. |
The feeling of alienation and meaninglessness comes hand in hand when social reproduction is an end in itself. Saint-Exupéry further questions the purpose of the system itself, whether it serves humanity at all. When the “machine” is no longer the means to an ends, but the “end” is the machine it itself. However, Furukura–without any evaluation of the moral character of the society she is part of–is satisfied with social adjustment to the system regardless the cost to herself.
| Flight to Arras (Saint-Exupéry) | Convenience Store Woman (Murata) |
| We are living in the eyeless belly of an administrative system. The system is a machine. The more perfect the machine becomes, the more it can eliminate the arbitrary human element. … for the machine to be adapted to a purpose, a man would have the right to pull it apart. But in a system designed to rule out the disadvantages of the arbitrary human element, the cogs would not accept human intervention. They reject the Watchmaker. | For the first time ever, I felt I’d become a part in the machine of society. … That day, I actually became a normal cog in society. |
The reader of Convenience Store Woman is left with the question whether “social adjustment” is really the kind of psychotherapy that oddballs like Furukura need.
| Flight to Arras (Saint-Exupéry) | Convenience Store Woman (Murata) |
| Defeat is expressed, certainly, by individual failures. But men are shaped by a civilization. If the civilization I claim as my own is threatened by the failures of individuals, I have the right to ask myself why it did not shape those individuals differently. | This is a dysfunctional society. And since it is defective, I’m treated unfairly. |
From Adjustment to Acceptance:
Theology of Culture x Psychoanalysis and Religion
Both Tillich and Fromm identify two approaches to psychoanalysis: (1) therapeutic psychology/social adjustment, and (2) depth psychology/cure of the soul.
| Theology of Culture (Tillich) | Psychoanalysis and Religion (Fromm) |
| There are two words that indicate something about [psychoanalysis] itself … “therapeutic psychology” … and “depth psychology“. | The difference between that psychoanalyst which aims primarily at “social adjustment” and psychoanalysis which aims at the “cure of the soul“ |
The treatment of Furukura in Convenience Store Woman is a textbook example of the first approach, (1) therapeutic psychology/social adjustment. Both Tillich and Fromm would consider this approach controlling.
| Theology of Culture (Tillich) | Psychoanalysis and Religion (Fromm) | Convenience Store Woman (Murata) |
| “Therapeutic psychology” shows clearly that here something that contradicts the norm, that must be healed, is expressed. It shows the relation between disease–mental, bodily, or psychosomatic–and man’s existential predicament. | One can always recognize the irrational ritual by the degree of fear produced by its violation in any manner | The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. That’s why I need to be cured. Unless I am cured, normal people will expurgate me.
You eliminate the parts of your life that others find strange–maybe that’s what everyone means when they say they want to “cure” me |
| Moral systems, because of their intimate connection with a cultural system, have the tendency to become oppressive if the general cultural scheme changes. … Even the criminal shows morality, although he follows a moralistic code which contradicts the accepted moralism of a society. … The moral law is more oppressive than the severest positive law, just because it is internalized. It creates conscience and the feeling of guilt. | In dissolving repression, we permit ourselves to sense the living process and to have faith in life rather than in order. | [Furukura’s sister] is far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, then she is [happy] having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine. Normality–however messy–is far more comprehensible |
Fromm and Tillich theorize that issues of social adjustment (including Furukura’s) are pointers to deeper concerns for meaning. According to this perspective, the therapeutic outcome of psychotherapy being “social adjustment” rather than “cure of the soul” is downright unhealthy and inhumane as it encourages the repression of a person’s attempt to find meaning.
| Theology of Culture (Tillich) | Psychoanalysis and Religion (Fromm) |
| The basic difference between [existentialism and depth psychology]: existentialism as philosophy speaks of the universal human situation which refers to everybody healthy or sick. Depth psychology points to the ways in which people try to escape the situation by fleeing into neurosis and falling into psychosis | Is the drinking only a symptom of his real problem, his failure to lead a meaningful life? Can a man live with this degree of alienation from himself … without being disturbed? … [in fact] those who develop an overt symptom show that their human powers are not completely stifled. Something in them protests … they are not sicker than those whose adjustment has been successful. … In a human sense they are healthier… [they are] striving for a more humane way of living. … It is not easy to determine what we consider to be the sickness and what we consider to be the cure. |
That said, both Fromm and Tillich recognize that the overlap between psychoanalysis and religion come from psychotherapy’s healthier aim: (2) depth psychology/cure of the soul.
| Theology of Culture (Tillich) | Psychoanalysis and Religion (Fromm) |
| You cannot help people who are in psychosomatic distress by telling them what to do. You can help them only be giving them something-by accepting them. This means help through the grace which is active in the healing relationship whether it is done by the minister or the doctor. | Two professional groups .. concerned with the soul: the priests and the psychoanalysts. …The aim of psychoanalytic cure of the soul is to help the patient attain the attitude which I describe as religious (to relate to himself and man lovingly, know the difference between good and evil, etc.) |
Still, there are ways which with religion fails to achieve its potential to invoke and embrace contemplation on the meaning of life, or “ultimate concern” (as Tillich would put it). Not only does religion often regress to its own forms of “social adjustment”, it often creates new conventions to control people and reproduce its own power.
| Theology of Culture (Tillich) | Psychoanalysis and Religion (Fromm) |
| The law brings us into a paradoxical situation: It commands, which means that it stands against us. But it commands something which can be done only if it does not stand against us, if we are united with that which commands. Only the “good tree” brings “good fruits”. Only if being precedes what ought-to-be can ought-to-be be fulfilled. Morality can be maintained only though that which is given and not through that which is demanded … through grace and not through law.
Without the reunion of man with his own essential nature no perfect moral act is possible. Legalism drives either self-complacency (I have kept all commandments) or to despair (I cannot keep any commandments). … Moralism necessarily ends in the quest for grace |
“By their fruits shall ye know them”. If religious teachings contribute to growth, strength, freedom… we see the fruits of love. If they contribute to the constriction of human potentialities… they cannot be born of love, regardless of what the dogma intends to convey. |
| Psychotherapy is definitely antimoralistic. … the only help is to accept him who is unacceptable, to create a communion with him, a sphere of participation in a new reality. Psychotherapy must be a therapy of grace or it cannot be therapy at all. … Psychotherapy can liberate from one special difficulty. Religion shows to him who is liberated, and has to decide about the meaning and aim of his existence, a final way.
|
The psychoanalytic approach to religion aims at the understanding of human reality behind thought systems. It inquires whether a thought system is expressive of the feeling which it portrays or whether it is a rationalization hiding opposite attitudes….
Just as a parent’s consciously felt or expressed concern for a child can be an expression of love or can express a wish for control and domination. A religious statement can be expressive of opposite human attitudes… |
| This is perhaps the greatest temptation in an industrial society in which everybody is brought into the process of mechanical production and consumption, and even the spiritual life in all its forms is commercialized and subjected to the same process. | It is a tragedy of all great religions that they violate and pervert the very principles of freedom as soon as they become mass organizations governed by a religious bureaucracy |
Ultimately a religion about grace is superior to religion about morality; and a psychotherapy about acceptance is superior to psychotherapy about adjustment.
From Acceptance to Existentialism:
Theology of Culture x Flight to Arras
In Theology of Culture, Tillich has a high regard for the contribution of existentialism to theology.
The common root of existentialism and psychoanalysis is the protest against the increasing power of the philosophy of consciousness in modern industrial society
The risk of faith is an existential risk, a risk in which the meaning and fulfillment of our lives are at stake… A morality which plays safe, by subjecting itself to an unconditional authority, is suspect. It has not the courage to take guilt and tragedy upon itself. True morality is a morality of risk. It is a morality which is based on the “courage to be” the dynamic self-affirmation of man as man. This self-affirmation must take the threat of non-being, death, guilt, and meaninglessness into itself. It risks itself, and through the courage of risking itself, it wins itself.
I’d like to imagine this being a reassuring pat on the back for Saint-Exupéry who expressed many, many existential thoughts in Flight to Arras, haha.
| Flight to Arras (Saint-Exupéry) | Theology of Culture (Tillich) |
| A heart is a fragile thing, with long service to do. To endanger it for such crude work is an absurdity. Like burning diamonds to bake potato. | [Existentialism] is an expression of the courage to face meaninglessness as the answer to the question of meaning … He who can bear and express guilt shows that he already knows about “acceptance-in-spite-of”. He who can bear and express meaningless shows that he experiences meaning within his desert of meaninglessness. |
Although he admits he often fails, Saint-Exupéry has the capacity to finding meaning by seeing the “Essence”: people/things in terms of relationship rather than “caricatures”, conglomerates beyond the sum of their parts. Tillich recognizes the condition where one does not have the capacity to experience this “Essence” as sin.
| Flight to Arras (Saint-Exupéry) | Theology of Culture (Tillich) |
| The Spirit does not consider objects, it considers the significance of the links between them. It sees through the face of things. A country is not the sum total of regions, customs and building materials that [intellect] can grasp. It is an Essence.
When the body cracks apart, the essence is revealed. Man is purely a knot of relationships. Only relationships are significant for man. …True love is a network of bonds in which being grows. |
Sin is separation, estrangement from one’s essential being. |
| Yet the Spirit alternates between total vision and absolute blindness. A man loves his country property, yet the time comes when he finds no more in it than a collection of disparate objects. A man loves his wife, but the time comes when he sees in love only worries, vexations, constraints. … and now the time has come when I have lost all understanding of my country. | Sin is to make the other person into object, into a thing. |
I guess a take-away I get from this exercise is that existential expressions (be it philosophical contemplation, resistance of power/authority, or psychological maladjustment) are pointers to sin (separation, objectification, alienation). Therefore, repression of these expressions prevents a human from confronting sin (or even worse, re-framing collective sin as individual sin); this is probably one of the greatest disservices that man can do to man.
From Separation to Oneness
Instead of sin/separation/objectification/alienation, Tillich, Fromm, and Saint-Exupéry call for a identification with Ultimate Concern (Tillich), All (Fromm), and the Essence (Saint-Exupéry).
| Theology of Culture (Tillich) | Psychoanalysis and Religion (Fromm) | Flight to Arras (Saint-Exupéry) |
| Religion in its largest and most basic sense of the word, is ultimate concern… if religion is present in all functions of spiritual life, why has mankind developed religion as a special sphere among others? … because of the tragic estrangement of man’s spiritual life from its own ground and depth. … religion opens up the depth of man’s spiritual life which is usually covered by the dust of our daily life and the noise of secular work
The criterion of every concrete expression of our ultimate concern is the degree to which the concreteness of the concern is in unity with its ultimacy. It is the danger of every embodiment of the unconditional element, religious and secular, that it elevates something conditioned, a symbol, an institution, a movement as such to ultimacy. |
Analytic therapy is essentially an attempt to help the patient gain or regain his capacity to love. The human reality behind the concept of man’s love for God in humanistic religion is man’s ability to love productively, to love without greed, without submission or domination, to love from the fullness of his personality, just as God’s love is a symbol for love out of strength and not out of weakness
[Paul Tillich’s] ultimate concern …necessarily excludes division between holy and secular because the secular is molded [by the holy]. [ultimate concern] is an attitude of oneness not only with oneself not only with one’s fellow men, but with all life and the universe. It comprises the painful awareness of one’s self as separate and unique entity and the longing to break through the confines of this individual organization and to be one with the All. Religious attitude is the fullest experience of individuality and of its opposite … it is.. Experiencing oneself as a thread in the texture of the universe. |
There is in [Man] all Being. [A cathedral] is not defined by its stones, but rather the stones are enriched by its distinctive meaning, and ennobled in that they are cathedral stones. The cathedral absorbs all, even the most grotesque of gargoyles, into its hymn of praise. … We must restore Man. … The greatness of my civilization is that a hundred miners feel it in their duty to risk their lives in the rescue of a single miner trapped in the earth. They are saving Man.
What surge of love would compensate my death? A man dies for his home, not for objects and walls. He dies for a cathedral, not for stones. For a people, not a crowd. … He dies for that by which he is enabled to live. For we convert Man into himself not by amputating him, but by expressing him to himself. .. To convert is to set free. The cathedral can absorb the stones which take on meaning within it. But the pile of stones can absorb nothing. I shall be fighting for the primacy of Man over the individual–as the universal has primacy over the particular. |
Convenience Store Woman fixates around people hoping Furukura would have a normal attitude about being in a “dead end” job; the reader, on the contrary, is challenged to accept her for who she is: as a person who genuinely loves being a convenience store worker. It is a tragedy that in striving for Furukura of Convenience Store Woman’s social adjustment over accepting her as she is, her civilization has failed to bring out her greatest human potential. No, this human potential has nothing to do with the superficial indicators of success (ie. not being a convenience store worker, single, or childlessness), but rather experiencing oneself in relationship with All: Man, Life, God.