18. The Problem of Needs

From Wonder to Piety

While a person is attached to the ultimate at the root of their being,
they are detached and uncurbed in their thoughts and deeds, free to
act and free to refrain; they have the power to disobey. Yet a
tree is known by its fruits, not by its roots. There are no ugly
trees but there are wormy fruits. Only one question, there-
fore, is worthy of supreme anxiety. How to live in a world
pestered with lies and remain unpolluted, how not to be
stricken with despair, not to flee but to fight and succeed in
keeping the soul unsoiled and even aid in purifying the world?
      Such strength, such guidance cannot be wrested from the
stars. Nature is too aloof or too old to teach confused humanity how
to discern right and wrong. The sense of the ineffable is neces-
sary, but not sufficient to find the way from wonder to wor-
ship, from willingness to realization, from awe to action.
      Western philosophy has suffered its tragic defeat as a
consequence of the fondness of its great masters for the prob-
lem of cognition. Guided by the assumption that they who 
know how to think will know how to live, philosophy has,
since the days of Socrates, been primarily a quest of right
thinking. Particularly since the time of Descartes, it concen-
trated its attention on the problem of cognition, becoming
less and less aware of the problem of living. In fact, the less
relevant to living a problem was, the more respectable and
worthy of exploration it appeared to philosophers.
      However, thinking about ultimate problems is more than a
particular skill. It is an act of the total personality, a process
which all faculties of mind and soul are thrown in, and is
necessarily affected by the personal climate in which it comes
to pass; we think the way we live. To think what we sense,
we must live what we think. If culture is to be more than the
product of a hothouse, then it must grow out of the soil of
daily living, and in turn affect the inner stronghold of the
human personality. Culture has to grow from within out-
ward, from the concrete existence, conduct and condition of
humanity.

The Problem of the Neutral

The problem of living does not arise with the question of how
to take care of the rascals or with the realization of how we
blunder in dealing with other people. It begins in the relation
to our own selves, in the handling of our physiological and
emotional functions. What is first at stake in the life of a human
is not the fact of sin, of the wrong and corrupt, but the natural
acts, the needs. Our possessions pose no less a problem than our
passions. The primary task, therefore, is not how to deal with
the evil, but how to deal with the neutral, how to deal with
needs.

The Experience of Needs

The will would remain dormant in human nature if not for
the fact that there is a way in which it is constantly aroused.
The way is the experience of needs, the feeling of pressure
and urgency arising from internal or external causes, for the
satisfaction of which a person must bring their latent forces into
action.
      Needs, then, are humanity’s system of communication with their
inside and outside world. They report to the consciousness the
necessities of living, but they also determine the aims they se-
lect for planning and action. Things in the world around them
often, though not always, remain outside their ken, until they
become objects of their needs.
      Engrossed in their thoughts and feelings, a person may shut them-
self out of their environment, and it is their needs in which they
meet the world again. They are the crossroads of internal
and external life. It is, therefore, through an analysis of needs 
that we should approach the problem of living.
      Specifically, need denotes the absence or shortage of some-
thing indispensable to the well-being of a person, evoking
the urgent desire for satisfaction. Psychologically, wherever
there is a need, there is a desire to satisfy the need, and where
a desire is not felt, the need has not been expressed. Ignoti
mulla cupido. “There is no desire for what is unknown.” (Ovid
Ars Amatoria, iii.i.397) We yearn only for that of which 
we know.
                   The jewel that we find we stoop and tak’t
                             Because we see it; but what we do not see
                             We tread upon, and never think of it.
                                                            (Shakespeare, Measure for
                                                             Measure, Act II, Scene 1)

Life—A Cluster of Needs

Every human being is a cluster of needs, yet these needs are
not the same in all people nor unalterable in any one person. There 
is a fixed minimum of needs for all people, but no fixed maximum
for any person. Unlike animals, humanity is the playground for the
unpredictable emergence and multiplication of needs and in-
terests, some of which are indigenous to its nature, while
others are induced by advertisement, fashion, envy, or come
about as miscarriages of authentic needs. We usually fail to
discern between authentic and artificial needs and, misjudging
a whim for an aspiration, we are thrown into ugly tensions.
Most obsessions are the perpetuation of such misjudgments.
In fact, more people die in the epidemics of needs than in the
epidemics of disease.
      If a human’s biological evolution may be explained as adaptation
to their environment, the advancement of civilization must be
defined as the adjustment of environmental conditions to hu-
man needs. There are no material wants that science and
technology do not promise to supply. To stem the expansion
of humanity’s needs which in turn is brought about by technologi-
cal and social advancement, would mean to halt the stream on
which civilization is riding. Yet the stream unchecked may
sweep away civilization itself, since the pressure of needs
turned into aggressive interests is the constant cause of wars
and increases in direct proportion to technological progress.
Morality, trying to sit in judgment and to distinguish between
just and unjust interests, appears too late on the stage to be
effective. When interests have become entrenched, no max-
ims can drive them away. The soul is slippery, filled with a
mob of desires and resentments, unruly, fickle and loath to
accept the hegemony of reason.

The Inadequacy of Ethics

The most pressing and most ignored of problems—how to
live—will not be solved through teaching sagacious rules.
Knowledge of ethics is as far from being identical with vir-
tue as erudition in musical theory is from making one an
artist. One may be learned and wicked, an authority on ethical
theory and a scoundrel, know how to condemn anger and be
unable to curb it. Life is not lived in the form of a debate
among member faculties of the soul, in which the most per-
suasive wins the argument. Life is often war, in which dis-
orderly forces of folly, fancy and passion are thrown into
battle, a war which cannot be won by the noble magic of
merely remembering a golden rule. How should a wise ab-
straction be expected to compete with rage, cunning, insa-
tiability and favoritism of the ego to itself?
      It is true that our reason is responsive to reasonable argu-
ments. Yet, reason is a lonely stranger in the soul, while the
irrational forces feel at home and are always in the majority.
Why bear hardship on behalf of virtue? Why act against na-
ture and choose the right when pleasure abounds on the side
of vice? Why forgo that which one naturally should prefer
or voluntarily endure that which one naturally should avoid?
      Ethics expects a person to consult their power of judgement, de-
cide what action to take in the light of general principles and
faithfully carry out the wise decision. Thus, it not only un-
derestimates the difficulty in applying general rules to par-
ticular situations, which are often intricate, perplexing and
ambivalent, but also expects every person to combine within
themself judicial and executive powers. Moreover, while telling
us what we are fighting for, ethical theory fails to tell us how
to win the struggle; while telling us that we ought to, it does
not tell us how to achieve mastery over folly and madness.
It is true that ethics demands the acquisition of good habits,
not only learning. However, no amount of habits can embrace
the totality of living.

The Peril of Living

Grave emergencies we mostly meet unprepared, in spite of our
education that aims to prepare us for challenges to come. No
one is able to rive the future and to see the exigencies it holds
in store for them. No one can calculate the coils and whorls in
which the spiral nebula of life will turn, or predict to what
depth envy, passion and desire for prestige may carry a per-
son. What should we do beforehand to ward off a sudden sub-
conscious urge to avenge, to insult, to hurt? A single vicious
thought may spread like canker at the roots of all other
thoughts, and one person with evil becomes quickly a majority
against a multitude of people impartial to evil. Humanity is not
made for neutrality, for being aloof or indifferent, nor can
the world remain a vacuum, unless we make it an altar to God,
it is invaded by demons.
      With a capacity to hurt boundless and unchecked, with
the immense expansion of power and the rapid decay of com-
passion, life has, indeed, become a synonym for peril. Upon
whom shall we rely for protection against our own selves?
How shall we replenish the tiny stream of integrity in our
souls? Countless are the situations in which we witness how
the power of judgment wanes in vagrant minds, how integrity
collides with a contemptible desire that comes out of the way.

             O, what men dare do! What men may do!
             What men daily do, not knowing what they do.
                              (Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing,
                                      Act IV, Scene 1, 1.19) 
      One of the lessons we have derived from the events of our
time is that we cannot dwell at ease under the sun of civiliza-
tion, that a human is the least harmless of beings. It is as if every
minute were packed with tension like the interlude between
lightning and thunder, and our moral order were a display of
ancient oaks with ephemeral roots. It took one storm to turn
a civilization into an inconceivable inferno.
      Trees do not die of age, but because of barriers that pre-
vent the rays of the sun from reaching them, because of
branches that lose self-restraint, spreading more than the roots
can stand. We today may rarely gaze at the sky or horizon,
yet there are lightnings that even overbearing trees do not 
cease to dread. Only fools are afraid to fear and to listen to the
constant collapse of task and time over their heads, with life
being buried beneath the ruins.

Needs Are Not Holy

Needs are looked upon today as if they were holy, as if they
contained the quintessence of eternity. Needs are our gods,
and we toil and spare no effort to gratify them. Suppression
of a desire is considered a sacrilege that must inevitably avenge
itself in the form of some mental disorder. We worship not
one but a whole pantheon of needs and have come to look
upon moral and spiritual norms as nothing but personal de-
sires in disguise.
      It is, indeed, grotesque that while in science the anthropo-
centric view of the earth as the center of the universe and of
humanity as the purpose of all being has long been discarded, in 
actual living an egocentric view of humanity and its needs as the
measure of all values, with nothing to determine their way of
living except in their own needs, continues to be cherished. If
satisfaction of human desires were taken as the measure of all
things, then the world, which never squares with our needs,
would have to be considered an abysmal failure. Human na-
ture is insatiable and achievements never keep pace with
evolving needs.

Who Knows Their Real Needs

We cannot make our judgments, decisions and directions for
actions dependent upon our needs. The fact is that humanity who
has found out so much about so many things knows neither
its own heart nor its own voice. Many of the interests and
needs we cherish are imposed on us by the conventions of so-
ciety, rather than being indigenous to our essence. While some
of them are necessities, others, as noted above, are fictitious, and
adopted as a result of convention, advertisement or sheer envy.
      The modern mind believes that it possesses the philosopher’s
stone in the concept of needs. But who knows their true needs?
How are we going to discern authentic from fictitious needs,
necessities from make-believes?
      As a rule, we become aware of our authentic craving sud-
denly, unexpectedly; not at the beginning of, but late in the
course of our careers. Since we rarely understand what we
want until it is almost too late, our feeling cannot be an
index of what is essential. We are all eager and ready to subdue
the inimical forces of nature, to fight what is hostile to our
physical survival, disease, enemies, danger. But how many of us
are eager and ready to subdue the evil within us or to fight
crime when it does not threaten our own survival, the decay
of soul, the enemy within our needs?
      Having absorbed an enormous amount of needs and having
been taught to cherish the high values, such as justice, liberty,
faith, as private interests, we are beginning to wonder whether
needs and interests should be relied upon. While it is true that
there are interests which all people have in common, most of our
private interests, as asserted in daily living, divide and antag-
onize rather than unite us.
      Interest is a subjective, dividing principle. It is the excite-
ment of feeling, accompanying special attention paid to some
object. But do we pay sufficient attention to the demands for
universal justice? In fact, the interest in universal welfare is
usually blocked by the interest in personal welfare, particu-
larly when it is to be achieved at the price of renouncing one’s
personal interests. It is just because the power of interests is
tyrannizing our lives, determining our views and actions, that
we lose sight of the values that count most.

Right and Wrong Needs

Short is the way from need to greed. Evil conditions make us
seethe with evil needs, with mad dreams. Can we afford to
pursue all our innate needs, even our will for power?
      In the tragic confusion of interests, in which every one of
us is caught, no distinction seems to be as indispensable as the
distinction between right and wrong interests. Yet the con-
cepts of right and wrong, to be standards in our dealing with
interests, cannot themselves be interests. Determined as they
are by temperament, bias, background and environment of 
every individual and group, needs are our problems rather
than our norms. They are in need of, rather than the origins
of standards.
      How could individual or national eagerness be the measure
of what is objectively required, if whole nations may be per-
suaded to cherish evil interests? If a universal state should ever
be established and humankind by a majority of votes should
decide that a particular ethnic group is to be exterminated,
because this would suit the interests of humankind, would that
decision be right? Or would the statement of a creditor nation
that 2 + 2 = 5 be correct? An action is right, a statement
is true, regardless of whether it is expedient or not.
      The true is not what is opportune, nor is that which we
desire for the satisfaction of urgent needs necessarily right.
What is right may correspond to our present interest, but our
interest in itself is not right. Right is beyond the feeling of
interest. It may demand doing things which we do not feel
the need of, things required but not desired.
      They who set out to employ the realities of life as means for
satisfying their own desires will soon forfeit their freedom and be
degraded to a mere tool. Acquiring things, a person becomes en-
slaved to them, in subduing others, a person loses their own soul. It is
as if unchecked covetousness were double-faced; a sneer and
subtle vengeance behind a captivating smile. We can ill afford
to set up needs, an unknown, variable, vacillating and even-
tually degrading factor, as a universal standard, as a supreme,
abiding rule or pattern for living.
      We feel jailed in the confinement of personal needs. The
more we indulge in satisfactions, the deeper is our feeling of
oppressiveness. To be an iconoclast of idolized needs, to defy
our own immoral interests, though they seem to be vital and
have long been cherished, we must be able to say no to our-
selves in the name of a higher yes. Yet our minds are late,
slow and erratic. What can give us the power to curb the
deference to wrong needs, to detect spiritual fallacies, to ward
off false ideals and to wrestle with inattentiveness to the un-
seemly and holy?
      Needs cannot be dealt with one by one but only all at once,
at their root. To understand the problem of needs, we must
face the problem of humanity, the subject of needs. Humanity is ani-
mated by more needs than any other being. They seem to lie
beneath its will and are independent of its volition. They
are the source rather than the product of desire. Consequently,
we shall only be able to judge needs if we succeed in under-
standing the meaning of existence.