Man has lost the courage and the faith without which he cannot be content to be "unseen." He is pitifully dependent on self-observation and self-assertion.
- Thomas Merton, The Inner Experience
As is often the case with many modern maladies, the roots were usually planted long before the effects came to complete and culture-wide fruition. Today’s preoccupation with identities, and with asserting and having those identities recognized, was already obvious to American Trappist monk Thomas Merton in 1959 while writing The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation (a book that he didn’t get around to revising before his death, but that was eventually published in 2003).
Of course, Merton is speaking from a religious perspective and lamenting that people can no longer recognize their own true inner “secret, invisible, and incommunicable” self in God. In his perspective, our dependence on “aggressive self-assertion” is because we are utterly exiled from God.
Whether such a perspective speaks to you or not, I believe the quote is apt in its insight that a contentedness to be “unseen,” or to not seek validation, requires courage. At the very least, it requires a sense of inner security that isn’t really promoted today.
Instead, people are encouraged to view the recognition of their identity not only as incredibly important but as a human right. Man, Merton writes, is now “dependent entirely on exterior and contingent things” and in a flight that takes him “further and further away from reality.”
His solution, of course, is a return to God. But, in my estimation, even those that don’t see a need to seek God could do with a little less dependence on external validation of their self-asserted identities.
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