48 pages • 1 hour read
Alan W. WattsThe Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1951A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 8 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Creative Morality”
Again using St. Augustine to introduce his subject, Watts states that the ultimate good is to love. The problem is determining how to love. He criticizes the moralists who act as technicians attempting to articulate the precise ways people ought to live from a pulpit. While there is a place for the precision of rulemaking, moralists, especially in the form of the preacher, scold people for their bad behavior, and this is worse than useless.
Watts uses the notions he’s developed (the divided mind, the problem of the separate self, etc.) to articulate a moral position. He distinguishes between true freedom and choice, which we mistakenly take for freedom. The illusions of choices are a way for the divided mind to differentiate pleasure and pain for the benefit of another illusion: the separate self, the “I.” Since “you cannot plan to be happy” (113), a moral philosophy built on the free choice for happiness is a façade.
Similarly, he criticizes ethical theories that are overly concerned with the production of a good, worthy self. Such a person does not love but rather aggrandizes the self, even in seemingly selfless behavior: “The urge is ever to make ‘I’ amount to something. I must be right, good, a real person, heroic, loving, self-effacing. I efface myself in order to assert myself, and give myself away in order to keep myself. The whole thing is a contradiction” (129).
While free will and determinism are equally problematic in Watts’s view, the feeling of freedom is real, and this feeling can play a productive role in creative morality. When the undivided mind senses its participation in the organic unity of all things, it enters into creative freedom in its identity with the perceptions, sensations, and emotions of experience. Watts provides examples of the family man trapped by financial responsibilities and the alcoholic dealing with bouts of depression. He claims that the “conventional moralist” does not provide any useful guidance on these situations. Such a moralist may try to encourage a person in the right direction or scare him away from the wrong direction. In either case, though, the moralist does not provide a new vision of life, does not reach into the non-dual core of reality.
Watts’s subjects are fated to be as we are, but so long as they embrace this, there is nothing to be afraid of. The undivided mind removes temptation not by overcoming it with a sturdy will, but by providing a sense of life and love that does not make the flights into temptation attractive. The unvarnished, unmediated, “authentic warmth of love” is the truth of a moral life: “Love is the organizing and unifying principle which makes the world a universe and the disintegrated mass a community. It is the very essence and character of mind and becomes manifest in action when the mind is whole” (131). Love, then, is much more than an emotion. It is the heart of the undivided mind and thus the core of Watts’s entire philosophy.
Chapter 8 Analysis
Chapter 8 is the lone chapter explicitly about the moral dimension of Watts’s philosophy, though the upshot of a theory of organic unity indicates that the morality of the worldview is inextricably interwoven with its other components. The central elements of Watts’s moral theory are antithetic to static rulemaking; its emphasis on love and on morality as a creative force is inseparable from free expression.
Watts’s criticism of Western philosophy extends to the domain of ethics. In this chapter, Watts describes a moral position at odds with the fundamental premises of Western philosophy. Morality is not about rules, duties, moral calculations to determine maximally good consequences, or achieving a morally superior virtuosity. Instead, it is about community participation, authentic love, and the transcendence of the ego into a realm of united beings. Whereas Western philosophy has focused on the nature of the self for millennia (for example, Cartesian philosophy begins with the assertion that the “I” exists more fundamentally that anything else), Eastern philosophy, especially Buddhism, advocates for a view of no-self. Turning away from the self, for Watts, entails turning toward the beauty and majesty of the world.
When turned to such beauty and majesty, one experiences love, “the organizing and unifying principle which makes the world a universe and the disintegrated mass a community. It is the very essence and character of mind, and becomes manifest in action when the mind is whole” (131). Here, Watts is making a bold claim that fundamentally, love and the mind are one and the same. This positions the experience of unity as the core element of metaphysical reality, which is obtained through proper perspective (attention to the present) and realized through creative moral action. The three dominant, and somewhat separate domains of classical Wester philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics—are all united in this one experience. Here, we see Watts merging Christianity and Zen Buddhist training.
The phenomenology of freedom and its relationship to creative morality is another key component here. Vision of life is linked to a transformative morality, not a prescriptive account. One should be careful not to confuse Watts on this point. The avoidance of rule-making or theorizing does not entail a nihilistic moral attitude wherein all behavior is equally legitimate. Rather, insight into the organic unity of reality is the catalyst for a morality of love, which in turn guides the experiencer. This insight, as the book has made clear earlier, is cultivated through silent, dedicated attention to the present moment. If, then, we can emerge from Watts’s chapter on morality, and all of The Wisdom of Insecurity, with a single ethical imperative it would be to be aware of the present moment.
