48 pages • 1 hour read
Alan W. WattsThe Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
Alan W. WattsNonfiction | 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 2 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Pain and Time”
Watts begins the second chapter, as philosophers often do, by noting the differences between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom. Whereas most animals are content with the simple pleasures of their immediate experience, humans are subject to a greater openness to time and therefore think more about their past and their future. Human beings have larger brains and correspondingly more expansive mental capacities, which, for Watts, is both a blessing and a curse. Our sensitivity adds to the “richness of life,” but it also makes us “liable to intense pains” (29-30).
For Watts there is a direct relationship between how much we value life and how troubled we are by death. Similarly, how intensely we feel pleasure corresponds to how intensely we feel pain. He writes of the “partial suicides” (31), or those who have, out of fear, made themselves insensible to most pleasures and pains. A complete human life requires the willingness to suffer. Since change, death, and the impermanence of all things are an integral part of life, they cannot be done away with.
The problem is not bound up with the fact of pain, but rather with “our consciousness of time” (31), which ensnares us in the past and future rather than the present. Watts believes that most of us spend most of our lives reminiscing about the past or planning for the future—effectively caught up in false realities, since both the past and the future are only part of the present moment. When our happiness is bound up with memory and anticipation, we are not properly aware of the fullness of the present. Watts believes this is a fundamental problem. The price of our consciousness is the willingness to accept pain, something we must embrace is we want true happiness: “If, then, we are to be fully human and fully alive and aware, it seems that we must be willing to suffer for our pleasures. Without such willingness there can be no growth in the intensity of consciousness” (31).
Watts concludes this short chapter by claiming that we ought to investigate our consciousness and our life. Though life seems to be in contradictory conflict with itself, we need to discover whether this is actually the case.
Chapter 2 Analysis
In this chapter, we see the development of a vitalist strain in Watts’s philosophy. In other words, the depth in life is directly related, for Watts, to the degree of its intensity, and intensity is something worth pursuing. Watts believes that there is a fundamental connection between the capacity for joy and the capacity for suffering. The problem of modern society is the tendency to avoid suffering at all costs, because this also avoids true joy.
Watts coins the term “partial suicide” to describe a person who deadens themselves to life. Typically, such a person has been a victim of intense suffering as a result of existential vulnerability and has since become a zombified individual who refrains from total engagement with the world, recoiling from the possibility of truth and joy. In doing so, the “partial suicide” also recoils from engagement with the present moment. Returning to the present moment, and one’s awareness of it, is the fundamental theme of the book.
A sub-theme of this chapter is the way that our basic relationship to time structures our access to real enjoyment. One’s orientation towards time, that is, where an individual turns his/her awareness, is the ground of access to joy. By fleeing to memories of the past or projects for our future, we escape the fullness of the present. When the present is painful, that may be the tendency, but this tendency can turn into an entire way of life that deadens the soul to its vital core.
One intriguing ethical upshot of Watts’s view is that the elimination, or even the reduction, of human suffering is not a priority or goal. In advocating for a life of intense consciousness of the present moment, Watts is certainly trying to open his reader’s mind to greater avenues of joy, but this is concurrent with great suffering. Watts thinks that suffering and joy are part and parcel of openness and receptivity to the present moment, as “consciousness seems to be nature’s ingenious mode of self-torture” (38). Counter-intuitively, this pessimism is not a call to retreat from life, but rather part of the insight that the only way to battle the torture of consciousness is to confront it head-on. He writes in conclusion: “We must go deeper. We must look into this life, this nature, which has become aware within us, and find out whether it is really in conflict with itself, whether it actually desires the security and painlessness which its individual forms can never enjoy” (38). Watts’s inclination is that it does not. The apparent contradiction between depth of consciousness and intense suffering is something that can be transcended but only at an even deeper, more fully present conscious state. In other words, the only way out is through.
This confrontational and dark perspective on the torment of modern consciousness sounds starkly antithetical to many of Watts’s other pronouncements, as well as the positivity and tranquility associated with many members of related New Age, Zen, and Eastern meditative schools of thought. His generally jovial lectures were punctuated with laughter, so was Watts here in an uncharacteristically pessimistic mode? Or are pain and suffering actually functionally related to his ultimate message of a joyful life steeped in consciousness of the present moment? The answer, it seems, is the latter. Watts is noting that experiencing life as suffering is a fundamental aspect of the nature of life—a foundational Buddhist insight. That said, this suffering can be dealt with and understood. On his view, there are two basic options: Kill the pain (but also oneself in the process) or deepen our connection to our world. Watts’s project is an experiment in what happens when we choose the latter option.
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