Shame And The Meaning Of Being Human – Shame & Guilt By Ernest Kurtz

AA teaches that there is a wholeness in limitation. This understanding echoes an ancient tradition of wisdom, which saw being human as being caught in the middle, containing a contradiction. To be human, according to this tradition, means to sustain the tension of always being pulled in two opposite directions: to be more than human and to be less than human.

This vision has haunted many thinkers. You can hear this description detailed at virtually any meeting of AA. Their vision posits an image: man, located on the scale of reality between “beast” and “angel”, contains within himself both “beast” and “angel”. To be human, then, is to experience from within the contradictory pulls to be both angel and beast, both more and less than merely human. Because of these contradictory pulls, to be human is to live in a tension: because one is pulled to both, one can exclusively attain neither. Yet the tension pinches and strains; and some humans strive to resolve it by becoming only one or the other, beast or angel.

Over three hundred years ago, the French mathematician and mystic Blaise Pascal observed of one such effort: “He who would be an angel becomes a beast.” That is, the attempt to be more than human leads to being less than human. Early in the present century, the Spanish-born Harvard philosopher George Santayana utilized the same image to make his complimentary point: “It is necessary to become a beast if one is ever to be a spirit.” To attain the heights of human existence one must also understand its depths.

Together these understandings and their point – as both angel and beast, one cannot be only either – embrace the core perception and process of Alcoholics Anonymous. In the AA understanding that can be heard paraphrased, at any AA meeting, the alcoholic drank in the attempt or claim to be one or the other, angel or beast; the essence of sobriety resides in the acceptance that one is both – that because one is both – that because one can be only both, the effort to be only one or the other dooms one to insatiable frustration.

This vision of the human as both angel and beast thus captures well the descriptions of drinking experience heard within AA – the vivid portrayal of the heights and the depths reached for and even attained, only to have their opposites relentlessly and inevitably recur. This understanding of the meaning of being human emphasizes the essential incongruity – the inherent conflict , contradiction, antinomy – at the very core of the human condition. Much literature explores this theme of inherent incongruity, sensitively delineating the painful paradox of human aspiration conjoined with human finitide, human hope subverted by human limitation.

Yet, the paradox need not be only painful. One of its modern students, the anthropologist Ernest Becker in his Pulitzer Prize-winning study of The Denial of Death, has captured its essence in a striking phrase that not only can further our appreciation of the paradox but can reveal the humor that lies on the other side of the pain. And that insight into humor can deepen our understanding of how AA heals shame. In Becker’s vivid and memorable image, to be human is to be “a god who shits”.

Humor, in a definition that reflects itself, “arises from the perception of the juxtaposition of incongruity.” We find funny placing together of things that do not belong together: the portly, top-hatted distinguishably, pompous gentleman slipping on a banana peel, for example. Humor and laughter may , of course, be aggressive and even cruel – especially when the other is objectified rather than identified with. But when humor’s incongruity is recognized as inherent – a reflection of the essential contradiction of being human with which one identifies – there can be a no more healing, whole-in, experience than the laughter that marks acceptance of that paradoxical incongruity.

Such laugher characterizes meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, revealing much about AA’s healing power. The stories told at these meeting exquisitely demonstrate the essential incongruity of the human condition, the humor inherent in being human.

Such humor and the laughter that greets it are never aimed at others as objects, but at the contradictions within self illumined by the human experience described. AA laughter expresses appreciation of the insights into self garnered from the experience of others with whom one identifies. Thus, humor with Alcoholics Anonymous witnesses to AA members’ acceptance of the paradoxical nature of the human condition – essentially limited but inherently striving for the unlimited. In attempting and claiming to attain transcendence by their use of alcohol, alcoholics come to touch – even to wallow in – the depths of their finitude.

Recognizing the incongruity between the endeavor and its result frees from both. Such humor is neither veiled aggression nor mere compensation; it rather manifests the central animus of AA’s understanding of human nature. The human essence resides in the human condition’s conjunction of infinite thirst with essentially limited capacity. Acceptance of this reality comes easily to the alcoholic who understands her alcoholism; the phenomenon of alcoholism replicates the essence of the human condition.