We can win a fight, win favor, win disapproval—and we can just win. What is there in common between winning a fight and winning disapproval, winning favor, and just winning, as in the phrase “my good self is winning”?
When a person wins, he takes something to himself. The idea of winning is a stretching out of the self, resulting in a new inclusion. In winning a fight, what really has happened is that a person has gone through an action with the result that there has been an enlargement of the person.
The meaning of win can be seen in the sentence: “They won ground.” Here is clearly advance and taking. It is true that everything we meet is a kind of opposition. For whatever is not a person says to that person: “Do something to me if you can. Take from me what is best for you, if you can.” And so, since the meeting of different things implies a fight of some kind, we are always winning or losing. The question is, What do we do with the things we meet?
When a person “wins” disapproval, what has happened is that through some action or event, he has taken to himself disapproval. There is underneath the phrase “wins disapproval” the notion that the getting of disapproval where it is just, is something that can be good for the getter.
A self takes things; and what it takes them from is resistant. Persons do not operate in flaccid, yielding, impotent space. Therefore, whatever becomes ours, we win.
Winning implies chance and it implies struggle. A person choosing a number wins, and a person fighting a bear wins. In someone’s winning in a game of chance, chance as containing opposition, is what is fought. We can see a person trying to win at cards with the determined ferocity of a person trying to strangle a wolf.
In the phrase “her winning smile,” there is the notion that there is some resistance when it comes to having people like you or want to be affected by you. “Winning” in the phrase carries with it the idea of a fight, however faintly. The phrase “her winning smile” could be changed to “her taking smile” where the idea of struggle is even less apparent.
The world as we meet it is a duality of cooperation and resistance. The clay or stone of the sculptor, the wood of the carpenter, the words of a person writing, permit and resist. Being born is a matter of permission and resistance.
If we live through the next moment, it can be said that we have won through to the next moment. The fact that we live at all can be seen as a winning.
The idea of winning as a matter of encouragement and resistance can be seen in the sentence, “He won the girl.” When a person woos, he struggles to persuade. Persuasion is a struggle for permission. And in the words “won the girl,” there are fight and sweetness. The word win has space and matter in it: that which doesn’t impede and that which does. When we have a feeling of resistance and advance, opposition and space, there is the feeling of winning. The self is added to while it adds to. This is so because when we truly take, we are, as I have said, also of what we take.
A person wants to fight, and he wants to please. He wants to be fought, and he wants to be pleased, encouraged. Winning as to objects represents the fight aspect of persons and things generally. So, in the words “her winning smile,” it can be said that something in the girl with the winning smile is fighting for the being pleased of others. We can fight to please. For we know that along with a desire to be pleased in a person there is that in him which works against the being pleased.
The relation of fighting and pleasing is what brings together the winning smile of little Alice, age one, and the winning, profound determination of the great Napoleon.