The fourth major component of Adlerian theory is Gemeinschaftsgefühl, communal feeling or social interest.So when we ask Adler one more time, what does the soul want? What is its innate intention? We now hear him reply: it wants community. It wants to live with reason in a world that reflects cosmic meaning, then, now, and forever, where the soul as the potential of this order strives with purpose and gives meaning to each act 'contributed' to life, moving it toward communal and cosmic perfection. "Contribution is the true meaning of life."
But - and the but is big indeed - "the realm of meanings," says Adler, "is the realm of mistakes", so that each meaning we attribute to what the soul wants, and he says there are as many meanings as there are human beings, "involves more or less of a mistake." Hence, what the soul wants must be a fictional mistaken understanding of every meaning it proposes. This can be the only way that allows human community the very perfection Adler envisions.
We cannot answer the soul's wanting by any certainty, any goal, without realizing at the same moment that this goal is a fiction and that to literalize it is a mistake - even if a necessary mistake.
Certainty is an identification with a single meaning, one posits one's own private meaning as a "position of finality," which serves only to isolate oneself, defeating our innate altruism and alienating us from the community of humankind.
Gemeinschaftsgefühl cannot answer what the soul wants or present its goal; it can serve only as an instrument for reflecting all our goals. Do they contribute, do they embody feeling for others? Gemeinschaftsgefühl thus offers a mode of discovering our isolating fictions and our mistakes.
If we commune at all, it is in the empathy of our mistakes and the humorous tolerance given by the sense of fiction. We are human less by virtue of our ideal goals than by the vice of our inferiority. So the sense of imperfection, Jung's shadow, is the only possible base for Adler's goal of Gemeinschaftsgefühl. Jung said the same: "Relationship is not based on ... perfection ... it is based, rather, on imperfection, on what is weak, helpless ... the very ground and motive for dependence."
The shadow of weakness is not only moral, it is also humorous. The best entry into imperfection is humour, self-irony, dissolving into laughter, the acceptable humiliation that requires no after-compensation upwards. The sense of imperfection may be one way into communal feeling: another surer one is the all-too-human bond of the sense of humour.
[James Hillman]
Healing Fiction, p.106-9
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A man will not obtain demonstrations of genuine philanthropy from others as long as he is well off in every respect.The lucky man can, of course, frequently experience the good will of relations and friends; but the expressions of that pure, disinterested, objective participation in the lot and condition of another, which are the effect of loving-kindness, are reserved for him who in any way suffers.
For the lucky man as such we feel no sympathy; on the contrary, as such he remains a stranger to our hearts [...]
[...] misfortune is the condition of compassion, and this is the source of philanthropy.
[Arthur Schopenhauer]
On the Basis of Morality, p.174
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The disabled person.We are all, in a sense, "disabled"; only some of us are able to hide our wounds better than others. The disabled person has little choice other than to show theirs, and in doing so they draw from us a natural response: compassion.
Because the disabled person cannot hide their wounds, we cannot help but see them, and must, as a collectivity, come to terms with what we see.
We see the ways in which they are disabled - the ways in which they need to be carried - and we must mould ourselves to them. This process is made easier because the disabled person is a "known commodity"; we know collectively how we are meant to approach them - the interaction has been culturally coded. Because their needs are known, it is easier, and more acceptable, to attend to them.
They force a certain type of interaction from us and in doing so teach us what it means to be wounded: a lesson in interdependency. With a disabled person we are allowed to cross a boundary that we may otherwise hesitate at.
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Related posts:-
Per-Fiction
The Shadow & Projection
Imperfect Relationships
Carry Each Other
The Creation of Meaning, pt.2
Positive Space
Living with Roughness
Salvation through Suffering
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