Fame

Fame, which we have taken as a collective continuation of the artistic creative process, is not always, certainly not necessarily, connected with the greatness of a work; it often attaches to an achievement whose chief merit is not its high quality but some imposing characteristic, sensational either in itself or in its topical circumstances.

Rank defines fame as the community’s collective perpetuation of creative work, arguing that it correlates with sensational impact rather than supreme quality, thereby revealing the psychosocial dynamics underlying artistic recognition.

Rank, Otto, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932thesis

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This ‘misunderstanding,’ which the artist feels, is inevitable and the price at which fame is bought. While we have here an important motive of the struggle against fame, which is to him almost a depersonalization, we can trace in the artist an opposition to success which is perhaps still stranger.

Rank identifies fame as a form of depersonalization in which the artist’s work is wrested from individual ownership and transformed into a collective symbol, generating the artist’s characteristic resistance to recognition.

Rank, Otto, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932thesis

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There is always a distinct reaction of the artist not only against every kind of collectivization, but against the change of his own person, his work, and his ideology into an eternalization-symbol for a particular epoch. This resistance of the artist to his absorption into the community will show itself in more than his objection to success and fame.

Rank frames the artist’s resistance to fame as a defense of individual selfhood against the collective’s drive to convert personal achievement into an immortality-symbol for an entire epoch.

Rank, Otto, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932thesis

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‘Fame’ as here used by Milton corresponds to those fruits of the ego-life which are translated to the eternal realm and are deposited in the collective soul. Such a fame does not ‘grow on mortal soil,’ i.e., does not depend on being known by men, but exists in heaven, the archetypal realm.

Edinger, following Milton, redefines fame as the transfer of ego-achievements into the archetypal, eternal realm — an inner rather than social immortality that transcends collective recognition.

Edinger, Edward F., The Creation of Consciousness Jung’s Myth for Modern Man, 1984thesis

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He had an ambition to be recognized. In more contemporary language, the ‘passion for distinction’ becomes fame. Fame Is the Spur, as a novel of some years ago was called; fame, if even only for fifteen

Hillman locates fame within his typology of power as the contemporary expression of the drive for distinction, connecting it to ambition’s inherent impulse to exceed normal limits.

Hillman, James, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995thesis

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biographies and fame as an expression of its own eternalization. This partially explains the mysterious agreement between the great achievement and the prevailing general ideology — especially when we consider that this process always begins in the lifetime of the artist.

Rank argues that fame functions as a society’s mechanism of self-eternalization, explaining why the greatest works resonate with the dominant ideological needs of their historical moment.

Rank, Otto, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932supporting

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He is thus more and more deeply entangled in his creative dynamism, which receives its seal in success and fame. But along with all these expressions of the opposition of the artist to art-ideology, to the dynamism of creation and the final absorption of his individual immortality by the community, there must exist other, and even stronger, tendencies of surrender.

Rank shows how fame entangles the artist more deeply in creative dynamism, serving as the seal of a conflicted process between self-assertion and self-surrender to collective immortality.

Rank, Otto, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932supporting

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‘Boasts are a sign of no success; success once won faces overthrow; fame once won faces ruin.’ Who can rid himself of success and fame, return and join the common run of men? His Way flows abroad, but he does not rest in brightness; his Virtue moves, but he does not dwell in fame.

Zhuangzi presents fame as a spiritual liability — a source of ruin that the sage actively renounces in order to preserve the flow of Tao and avoid the dangers of self-advertisement.

Watson, Burton, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, 2013thesis

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Both Guan Longfeng and Prince Bi Gan were scrupulous in their conduct, bent down to comfort and aid the common people, and used their positions as ministers to oppose their superiors. Therefore their rulers, Jie and Zhou, utilized their scrupulous conduct as a means to trap them, for they were too fond of good fame.

Zhuangzi warns that attachment to a good reputation renders one vulnerable to manipulation and destruction, treating fame as a fatal attachment that compromises authentic virtue.

Watson, Burton, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, 2013supporting

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One of the paradoxes of fame is that people who have longed for fame and striven for many years to become famous, to have their picture on the cover page of weekly magazines, after achieving fame come to envy anonymous people like us.

Easwaran, reading the Gita, identifies fame’s central paradox: its achievement produces longing for its opposite, revealing that no finite goal — including fame — can satisfy the soul’s deeper desire.

Easwaran, Eknath, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975supporting

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Well before Homeric poetry reached its final form, fame could be perpetuated by the dedication of wealth in a temple: for example, the Phrygian Midas is remembered nearly three centuries after his death by Herodotus (1.14) for having dedicated at Delphi a throne that was still there for Herodotus to admire.

Seaford traces the archaic Greek mechanisms for perpetuating fame through material dedication and monumental display, connecting fame to the earliest structures of memory, wealth, and religious practice.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

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He was symbolically bringing immortality to the people and the republic and conquering death through his fame, his legend, which would continue to be remembered after his death.

Place interprets the Roman triumph as a ritual in which the hero conquers death through fame, making fame a mythological instrument of collective immortality enacted in ceremonial form.

Place, Robert M., The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005supporting

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That’s what we look for when buying biographies and reading the secret intimacies of the famous, their luck, their errors, their gossip. Not to pull them down

Hillman argues that the cultural fascination with the famous serves an imaginative function — the famous provide exemplars through which ordinary individuals perceive and enlarge their own potentialities.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting

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KAtO� [n.] ‘rumour, fame, renown, reputation’ (ll.). IE *kleu-s- ‘word, fame’

Beekes establishes the Indo-European etymological root of kleos — ‘rumour, fame, renown’ — as deriving from *kleu-s-, ‘word, fame,’ grounding the concept in the sonic and verbal perpetuation of heroic identity.

Beekes, Robert, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting

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The ‘great discovery’ was now his only chance of achieving fame. Freud’s sense that time and opportunity were slipping away no doubt explains his injudiciousness in the cocaine incident.

Yalom presents fame as an existential compensatory drive in Freud’s biography, demonstrating how blocked ambition and mortality anxiety intensified the pursuit of discovery as a route to posthumous recognition.

Yalom, Irvin D., Existential Psychotherapy, 1980supporting

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we have to study the particular relation of the artist to the world around and after him — though this study itself may of course provide another stone for the edifice of a future social psychology, which will have to take the relation of the individual to the group as its basic principle.

Rank situates the psychology of fame within the larger unresolved problem of a social psychology adequate to the individual-group relationship, framing the topic as foundational yet theoretically underdeveloped.

Rank, Otto, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932aside

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The name would then mean ‘Son of Seeker after Fame’. But our slightly more likely choice, ‘of Pythian fame’, i.e. having fame for victory at the Pythian Games, has a similar connotation: in either case the patronymic emphasizes civic prominence and renown.

Nussbaum’s etymological note illuminates how Greek civic identity encoded the pursuit of fame into personal nomenclature, treating renown as an inherited and publicly constituted value.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986aside

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