My life is barely comprehensible to me at the moment. I'm doing plenty, but I am in a situation that it is impossible to see clearly in; I am simply still too close to the matters. Time will give me distance and understanding will come with that distance.
I have written down three words to guide my thinking: Choice, Change, and Attention.
I am so preoccupied with my life's difficulties that it feels difficult to pursue the thoughts implied by those words. I am just feeling so much, my body is aching with stress. I'm struggling.
I had hoped to write some reflections on two authors that I have been very impressed by: Iris Murdoch and Eric Voegelin. And it occurs to me now just what terribly different sorts of writers they are, what different worlds they come from. Murdoch was a peculiar figure, both an accomplished novelist and a gifted philosopher trained at Oxford and Cambridge in the analytic circles closely associated with Wittgenstein. Her writing that I have read (The Sovereignty of the Good and the first chapter or so of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals) belongs obviously to the climate of 20th century, English, analytical philosophy.
Whereas Voegelin was an Austrian political refugee who lived in Louisiana for many years before eventually returning to Germany. He belongs to that incredible generation of German scholars who could deal with the whole of literature from antiquity to the present. This collection of scholars I think of the big names: Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Arendt, Voegelin. Just such monumental learning.
I am more familiar with Voegelin's overall project. I have read his Autobiographical Reflections as well as Anamnesis. I am halfway through The New Science of Politics. His magnum opus was a five volume work known as Order and History. I just order Volume V of Order and History today, called In Search of Order. I am interested in it because it is where Voegelin tries to directly address the theme of transcendence, or takes up the 'meditative movement' that is present in his work.
And perhaps this is where Voegelin and Murdoch meet. Voegelin, after all, was working on a philosophy of consciousness (as a way of doing political philosophy, among other things). And what I have been drawn to in Murdoch, especially Sovereignty, is her emphasis on practices of refining consciousness. Her writings on goodness often concern the nature of action or choice. We want what is good, and we must make choices about what we think is good. Thus goodness and choice are naturally nearby concepts for us.
Murdoch offers a very sophisticated image of choice. Her account is contrasted to the view prevalent in her intellectual community, what she calls the 'existentialist-behaviorist' view of the will or self. By this she means that moral thought of her world had an incoherent blending of these two philosophies. On the one hand, choice is seen as the sudden assertion of the will in a critical moment. This is the existentialist piece; as existentialism relies on the distinction between 'free will' as distinct from 'determined nature'. This is why things are but humans exist. On the other hand, English philosophy was also chiefly concerned with external descriptions of action, eschewing introspection or phenomenological description. Choice is discussed primarily in its behavioral dimensions.
The existentialist-behavioral view of choice is thus in which we rely on the notion of 'the will' as a source of sudden assertion, but we bypass experiential reflection for behavioral descriptions of goals or goods.
Murdoch claims this is not a viable description of choice and I agree (and of course this is a very brief gloss on something she describes more thoroughly. MacIntyre's After Virtue has a similar account). Choice is a much extended affair, Murdoch believes. It is not about a sudden fork in the road where we choose left instead of right. Sometimes it is like this. There are real moments of decision. Do I make this phone call or not? I made a phone call on November 17th that felt like that. I'm glad I made the call, no matter how horrified I am by the outcome. But what felt decisive in making that phone call? What allowed me to make that choice?
Murdoch thinks that the single most important factor in choose is the quality of our seeing. She is adamant that we think seriously about the metaphors we use in these matters. The existential-behaviorist account often relies on metaphors of the hand, of grasping or asserting. Murdoch thinks that metaphors of vision and seeing are much more appropriate to questions of choice. I would agree in my own experience: I made the phone call I made because I have come to see the situation in a certain way.
I have been working for many years on my capacity to see the situation. It is not an easy situation to see, and there are many things that I am missing or excluding in my current ways of seeing it. But I have done much work on myself and my seeing. Last year, when these troubles were just beginning, I wrote a blog post called 'When things are out of hand what good is it to see?'. I quite like the post, and the sentiment remains. The single most important thing is working on seeing clearly. Action will follow from clear seeing.
Murdoch therefore argues that choice is not about moments of assertion but about practices that we can undertake to 'purify' or 'clarify' or 'refine' consciousness. Purify is a fine term, but has rings of sin. Clarify is good, especially if I think about ghee, or clarified butter. Refine has a similar connotation, like refining oil.
The main thing that needs to be purified, she claims, is selfishness or egocentrism. We are naturally self-centered, she openly stipulates. This is, in some sense, literally true in that I can only experience the world from my own body and gaze. But then there is the deeper sense of selfish meaning immorally egocentric, greedy, deceiving, et cetera. She points to beauty as an important antidote to this. She tells a story of sitting at her desk, fussing over a particular piece of writing, angry and in her head about it, and suddenly catching sight of a stork flying. For a moment all her petty problems are gone, its just the stork and her attending to the stork, seeing the stork. In moments of beauty we are able to see something as it is, something about reality stands out to us.
Murdoch claims that this was a function of prayer: a practice for attending to the larger context of god, a way to overcome our perhaps instinctual draw to self-centeredness.
I have been thinking about her as I go deeper into my practice as a psychotherapist (and as a client in therapy, and someone who participates in other therapeutic practices). It seems to me that psychotherapy is about learning how to see. A good therapist generally doesn't give advice, doesn't tell you what to do. They help you see things. And for a human being, seeing means naming. This is the strong sense of the word 'phenomenology' in which experience is structured so that naming something allows it to be seen even when you are no longer naming it. Once something has been named in a deep way it acquires experiential salience, it will appear in unreflective experience.
Careful, loving attention and patient, tentative naming are the main engines whereby we begin to see differently. We need to be able to go slow, to feel uncomfortable things, and to try out different ways of talking about things. This can really change people. Gendlin's Focusing is a good way of understanding how this changes people. I can't explore it now, I'm getting tired. But his "Theory of Personality Change" article is good on this. I'm wanting to connect this to Gendlin's understanding of change as real growth and not just rearrangement. But that feels hard to do.
I also want to connect it back to Voegelin. Because I can say more clearly what the connections are now that I've gotten to the relationship between seeing and naming. Put briefly, Voegelin is concerned with how the relationship between symbols and experience shifts over time. In the ancient world, he claims, they had a 'compact mythological' way of symbolizing experience. There were then periods of spiritual eruption, like when Laozi, Confucious, and Heraclitus were all contemporaries. During this period of spiritual eruption there was a great wave of 'symbolic differentiation'. We live in the epoch made by those great moments of symbolic differentiation.
That means that seeing has to have a historical component. We need to name to see. We need to know history to use our symbols. Voegelin is the philosopher who tracks the convergence and divergence of the relationship between symbols and experience. When symbols and experience are nearby things are going well. When symbols and experience become separated from one another we enter something like stuckness, second reality, or a world of ideology.
Again, psychotherapy is so centrally about finding the nearness of experience and symbols. When the right word comes up it can crumple someone's body, just tears and tears and tears.
Murdoch and Voegelin both have much to offer me.
For the core of my project is to understand why self-knowledge and well-being is so challenging in the world I live in, in the family I grew up in. My own journey has been a journey out of familial mythology into more differentiated symbolic experience. I have learned to name and see things that were very hard to see within the family, that still seem impossible for some people to see. My particular situation has had to navigate a highly complex set of symbols that define our situation, symbols like: Mental health, depression, chemical imbalance, 'sensitive', anxiety et cetera. This set of symbols is profoundly ideological in that it obscures a good deal about experience. More specifically, it obscures the political dimensions of experience and thereby the political dimensions of suffering. This is not incidental.
There's a lot that I'll need to figure out how to say about time, development, and symbolization. Once a moment of symbolic differentiation has occurred you cannot undo it. Once you look at something you've seen many times and you say abuse and it feels right, you can't unsee it. These moments of symbolic differentiation occur at historical scales and they occur at individual scales. There was a moment in which no one had ever spoken of psuche before. And there were moments in which these terms took on new meanings. The appearance of Christ is the appearance of a new set of symbols.
Symbols always belong to situations. My life has taken me in a direction that there are certain situations I can no longer be in. Being in those situations requires a particular, strict, obfuscating use of symbols. Those situations are 'ideological' situations in a certain sense, in that the symbols are frozen, the narratives are set, the questions are answered. I belong to situations of questioning and hopefully of healing.
Something monumental has occurred for me, a moment of differentiation unlike anything else before. What happens after here will bear its mark, and not like a bruise but like a halo. I am grateful for my wounds because I am grateful for my gifts. I wanted to share my gifts with some of my family and they told me I was wounding them.
Everything I've said here could be thought of as the pursuit of reality. In wanting to see I want to see what is real. It can be hard to be confident in the pursuit of reality when there can be such strong, conflicting, and discordant 'realities' (experiences).
But I find myself calm, if also in pain. I find myself able to stay present, if certainly in a more distracted tenor. And I find myself able to find the words I need. This writing is some evidence, even if the approach is oblique.
