All of us have more ability to shape the world that we experience than we commonly think. I don’t know what the ultimate limits of this freedom are. I don’t think we can know what they are. I suspect they are far less constraining than we suspect. I think there is far more weirdness as close to you as your jugular vein than most of us dare imagine. But I do know that the range and nature of the experiences that are possible for each of us are shaped by at least two kinds of controlling factors that we can learn to change. But before I tell you what they are we need some preliminaries.
Even before we are born we are in relationship. At birth we’re severed from our mother’s body and blood, but our autonomy is a fiction. From that moment on we are in relation, not only with our mother, but with everyone in the family and the society in which we are embedded. Right from the beginning we are shaped and guided by the behavior of those who care for us. But we are alive, and not inert lumps of clay, and we sometimes resist these influences, so the relationships are complex and dynamic from the beginning, becoming more so as we grow. Our early experience is dominated by process. And this process is an undifferentiated flow of physical and emotional dynamism. Out of this initial turbulent matrix we eventually learn to distinguish “persons” and “things” and “feelings”. But the boundaries and qualities of these are very much influenced by the people who are closest to us, by their behavior and their relationships, and by the language and culture they, and now we, inhabit. Languages and cultures are complex and interpenetrating systems of ideas and behaviors that give structure to our daily lives. Most of the time we pay little or no attention to these structures of ideas, behavior and experience. When we do, it is often because we discover that somewhere else “they” do things differently. They speak funny. They have weird ideas. They think foolish things. If we are alert, and lucky, we may then wonder why “we” think what we do, why we do the things we do. And in that moment we can see the glimmer of our freedom. There are other ways to be human!
In the modern technological world that developed out of Western Europe, we have learned to suppress our relational realities and think of ourselves as autonomous individuals with “personal experiences.” We then sub-divide our “mental” world into domains which are, respectively, studied by psychology on the one hand, and then a whole academy full of other disciplines, which think about “ideas” separately from the actual people who think them. So psychology studies pathological ideas, weird ideas, illusory ideas, delusions, illusions, psychoses, and wild and unruly emotions (which are apparently not ideas), plus a grab bag of other “personal traumas” (also not ideas). Then there is a group of other disciplines that study “proper” ideas, true ideas, useful ideas and so on, carefully avoiding mentioning the people who “had” these ideas. This, surprisingly, has worked rather well for a long time. Everyone knows that arguments ad hominen are bad, since perfectly horrible people can have very good ideas. So this is the realm of the sciences very broadly speaking. Where ideas ripped from their human sources are investigated and tested. It works quite well for the most part.
And then there is an entire grab bag of disciplines, or academic “subjects” that range from near-sciences to very-far-from sciences. From the Impersonal to the Really Personal. These are the Humanities. I put philosophy as one of the wanna-be-science and impersonal kind, and literature and the other arts at the personal end.
Now I can tell you what the two “controlling factors” we have some ability to change are. And now you will also maybe understand why they aren’t really two factors, but rather a complex system of related “factors” (which is a bad word but I don’t at the moment have a better one.) They are 1) the ideas and emotions that get studied by psychologists and “treated” by therapists, and 2) the “ideas” studied by science and philosophy (and theology by the way, insofar as it is philosophy+God).
And guess what? Probably the best place to study both together is in that grab-bag messy group of “subjects” called the Humanities. Particularly literature and the arts. But also philosophy, especially speculative philosophy, which is really one of the arts. This is because they are kind of in-between psychology and the sciences. Artists, musicians, poets and novelists are working in that murky creative place where the individual and subjective, and the objective and ideal, the personal and the impersonal, overlap. That is where creativity happens. In personal, relational acts. The acts can be with our bodies, with matter, sounds or language. That is where we can experiment with changing our ideas, altering our emotional and feeling life, doing therapy on our understanding and experiencing of ourselves, other people, and the world. It is complex, difficult, subtle, elusive and magical work. And anyone can do it. In the words of that master Imaginer Gaston Bachelard,
“Poetry is instant metaphysics.”
So is music. All the arts can be.
There are no disembodied abstract ideas. Ideas are Angels. Ideas have music, feeling, meaning. They can change your world.
Great post... So much to think about. So much to mull over.
Catherine Pickstock has written a bit on some of this in Repetition and Identity. And William Desmond is a philosopher you should read if you don't already know him. There is a porosity to Being that defeats the fictions of the "buffered Self" to borrow Charles Taylor's term. But if one is serious about the metaphysics you are proposing, that also means our language and our thoughts are never perfectly within the command of the western ideal of autonomy. The ideas you are entertaining, let us say they are angels (or shadows of light, demons), then thinking is not ever reducible to a kind of neutral metaphysical field where one can choose to opt in or out from mulling abstract conceptions. Sed contra, one is "always already" engaged in a dynamic and dramatic flux of ever present activity that tends to be personal, or depersonalizing, a kind of battle between flourishing or entropic, negative "energy." War in heaven, psychomachy, all those supposed medieval fantasies, might be closer to true than the Enlightenment legacy that proposes a certain notion of liberty at the cost of forgetting or dismissing the eschatological. The retreat from transcendence and the stipulation that reason is bound by the limits of the immanent frame is precisely the closure of the psyche to the infinite scope intimated by the imaginal realm.