A few years ago I wrote a couple of posts presenting an ethical, metaphysical, and spiritual paradigm which I called 'situational ethics' titled "The Person and Her Situation" and "Situational Ethics". For a time, these posts were quite popular. In tonight's post, I want to revisit the ideas I expressed in those posts; I also want to discuss free will again. I am painfully aware that the openings to the posts I have written recently have been a little boring - I want to apologise for this. The openings have simply been blunt statements of what I intend to talk about in the forthcoming post. The best writers however put a 'hook' right at the beginning of a particular essay or article, start with an anecdote or something provocative to grab the reader's attention, as Slavoj Zizek does at the beginning of his essay "What our fear of refugees says about Europe" when he references Jaques Lacan's claim that if a man believes his wife to be serially unfaithful, his belief is still pathological even if it happen to be true. Alas, I am too lazy to work out a provocative hook that will capture your interest immediately. You'll just have to bear with me. I promise that in future posts I will attempt a little more craft, or a little more flair, but for now, you'll just need a little patience as I roll gradually into the subject.
The topic I wish to expatiate on tonight is what I have called "Situational Ethics". I need to say straight away that this term already exists – this piece of intellectual real estate was seized and has been occupied by thinkers, often Christian thinkers, since the mid-twentieth century, the most prominent of them being Joseph Fletcher. I won't summarise this philosophical position here because, if the reader is interested, he or she can learn about it online. Suffice it to say, here and now, that although I am using the same term, I am using it with a different sense. I am interested in the metaphysical implications of 'situations' as much as, perhaps even more than, the ethical implications. Possibly a better name for the philosophical position I am proposing is "situational metaphysics". I will come back to an appropriate label for the position I am defending later in the post.
Every person is fixed, situated, within a situation. The situation a person occupies is the material, environmental, social, and interpersonal circumstances in which a person finds oneself. We are constantly finding ourselves in the world, a world that is always already present. Consider the following hypothetical scenario. Bob has recently been laid off from his job at the saw mill; he has a wife who is an alcoholic and spends a large portion of their shared income on brandy; he has one surviving parent who has recently been diagnosed with the early signs of dementia; he has a child who is severely autistic. All of these circumstances constitute important aspects of his situation. He has no control over any of them. Suppose I know Bob a little and, talking with him one day, find him disagreeable, hostile. I might blame him – but perhaps, unbeknownst to me, a couple of hours before encountering me he had seen a doctor who has informed him of his parent's diagnosis. His unfriendly attitude has a proximate cause. If I understand his situation, I can excuse him his bad behaviour. This is the ethical dimension of the situational theory. If I understand, fully understand, the other person's situation, I can empathise with him or her because I can imagine how I would behave if I was in the same situation – I can understand it and forgive it.
It is not just the outer world that constitutes a person's situation. His or her own physical body is part of his or her situation. Consider Bob again. Suppose Bob catches Covid. Suddenly he has trouble breathing, a fever, and general fatigue. He is not responsible for these symptoms although he can hope that they will go away if his immune system overcomes the virus. Suppose furthermore that Bob has scoliosis and has suffered from this since early adolescence. Again this physical defectiveness is beyond Bob's control, it is again part of his situation. Now imagine that because of his social and somatic problems, Bob has issues with anxiety and approaches a psychiatrist who diagnoses him with generalised anxiety disorder and prescribes benzodiazepines. Suppose that Bob becomes addicted to the anti-anxiety meds. The anxiety and subsequent addiction now also constitute part of his situation. Bob's own brain is part of his situation. Furthermore, he is now labelled 'mentally ill'. I don't believe that it stretches the term 'interpellation', a term coined by Louis Althusser, to say that he has become subject to a discourse, psychiatric discourse in this case, that he cannot control, and that seeks to place him within a generic pigeon hole. Bob's diagnosis is something else that is part of his situation.
My hypothetical protagonist, Bob, might fight back against the powerful and oppressive forces, the malignant Fate, that is holding him hostage. He could say, "I am not my job, I am not my wife's husband or child's father, I am not my body, I am not my brain, I am not what other people think I am. I am something else." What is the something-else that he claims to be? Considering everything I've said, what lies outside (or inside) a particular situation? It seems that everything taken together constitutes a person's situation, that there is nothing else except the situation. But surely there must be? For Jean-Paul Sartre, the something-else is the nothingness of absolute freedom. To deny this fundamental freedom is to act in bad faith. An example Sartre gives is the man who ostentatiously identifies as a waiter even though he knows he could be something else, perhaps anything else. According to Sartre, this man, in his unwillingness to accept the dictum "Existence precedes Essence", is exhibiting 'bad faith'; Sartre would say that Bob, insofar as he accepts his situation as inalterable, is also demonstrating precisely this kind of 'bad faith'. I do not agree with Sartre but another term from his Existentialist philosophy is relevant here. Sartre does not believe that people are absolutely free, and terms the restrictions on a person's freedom "facticity'. However, he thinks it is usually possible to transcend a particular situation. In reading up about Sartre for the purposes of writing this post, I found he uses the word 'situation' in a roughly analogous way to the way I have been using it, and I would like to quote from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy on Sartre in this connexion: "we are always beings “in situation,” but the precise mixture of transcendence and facticity that forms any situation remains indeterminable, at least while we are engaged in it." In my own theory, I am emphasising facticity very much over transcendence.
The reason I cannot agree with Sartre is because, like Sam Harris, I do not believe in free will. Is it possible to have Existentialism without free will? I don't think so. This is where I plunge into mysticism. I would like to argue that the something-else is the soul. (Yes, I admit I am a dualist.) The soul is like a passenger in a self-driving car. It experiences and is affected by the world but is perhaps incapable of acting on the world. It grows and develops like a plant. John Keats memorably said, "“Call the world, if you please, "the Vale of Soul Making". Then you will find out the use of the world....There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions -- but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. [...] Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways...." The soul is cleverer than the brain but acts through the brain. I attend a weekly pub quiz and often have the experience of knowing that I know, at some level, the answer to a question, but being unable to retrieve it from my memory banks. In this case, my situation, neurological and social (because I am part of a team) impedes my ability to recall the relevant fact. But perhaps my true self does know; the soul knows everything that the brain can potentially know and perhaps much more besides. In Hinduism, the Atman is the eternal, indestructible Self outside time, "not the same as body or mind or consciousness, but... something beyond which permeates all these", a self which is obscured from us by maya. the veil of ignorance and illusion. In some Hindu traditions (non-dualist ones) the Atman is identical with Brahman, ultimate reality. I am not wholly sold on Vedic teachings and find much of value in Gnosticism and Manichaeism when trying to work this out for myself my own theory. For the Gnostics, the physical, material world (the soul's 'situation' to use my terminology) is evil, the creation of a malevolent demigod, the Demiurge, often identified with Jehovah; through a process of achieving spiritual and esoteric insight into one's true nature and the True God, a person can escape the material world and return to the realm of Light. For the Manichaeans, the world is a battleground between Good and Evil. I'll quote Wikipedia: "Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process that takes place in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came." Thus the world is like a factory, producing some spark-like souls that ascend back to the realm of light. (Other souls are reincarnated.) It is interesting that Keats, although he was probably unfamiliar with Manichaeism, also described the soul as being like a spark. Finally, in presenting something of a hodgepodge of religious ideas that have influenced me, I should mention Calvinism. The Calvinists also don't believe in free will, believing instead that some people are born predestined for salvation while the rest are doomed to damnation. I can't agree with Calvinism either but it has influenced my thinking.
If I were to attempt to draw a syncretic picture of spiritual reality, I might do it as follows. The world is like a machine that has the purpose of creating souls. If a soul has been purged of its illusions, has attained insight into spiritual reality, become itself, at death it escapes its situation and ascends into a higher plane of existence. If it is still imperfect, it is born again in another body in the process known as metempsychosis. History, as the Manichaeans said, is the process of returning souls to their true home; this life is preparation for the next. I sometimes feel that life for me has been a battle between Good and Evil and that I have received support from spiritual entities in this battle – but it is difficult to reconcile this conception of the world with an absence of free will. A couple of years ago, it occurred to me that I could picture the world of people as a garden in which spiritual agents protect and aid people the same way gardeners tend to the plants, watering them, providing compost, preserving them from blight, and ensuring that they grow strong and true. People are like plants, in this sense, except that people are being prepared for another kind of Being while the plants are being helped to survive and flourish in this world. Needless to say, plants don't have free will. But it is possible for the gardeners to love their plants even if the plants (and the gardeners themselves) lack free will.
If we were to accept this picture, even if only provisionally, it suggests a couple of implications. I have noticed over the years, thinking about my life and the lives of others, that a life often pivots around an ironic twist in which a person is forced to reappraise everything he or she formerly believed. I think this happened with Oscar Wilde and Kurt Cobain. TS Eliot underwent a spiritual crisis in the twenties (during which he wrote The Waste Land, in 1922, and The Hollow Men, in 1925) then converted to High Anglicanism in 1927. These life-changing crises suggest the Calvinist ideas of regeneration and Irresistible Grace. However, in practice, a life-changing crisis does not lead a person to any one particular religion or denomination (such as Calvinism); rather, deliverance can take many forms. It depends on the religions a person is exposed to and the peculiarities of the person's personality. For TS Eliot, who knew a lot about a lot of different religions, Anglo-Catholicism was the best fit, but for others a different religion might be more appropriate. A second implication is that, if Gnosticism has any persuasive appeal, we might expect to find a thread of Gnosticism in the modern world. And I think we do. Woke politics and Critical Race Theory see the world as inherently and irredeemably evil is the same way that Gnostics thought the material world was evil – but, unlike Gnosticism, the Woke revolution and Critical Race Theory envisage no way out. The Woke movement and Critical Race Theory can be considered a degenerate, misdirected expression of the same impulse that gave birth to Gnosticism, but it is a Gnosticism that is all darkness, without spiritualism, without any light at all.
Of course, the picture I have presented here might not be true at all. It might just be wishful thinking on my part.
At this point in the post, I wish to switch topics a little. I still wish to discuss free will but in a different context. Readers may have noticed a contradiction or aporia in my thinking. I have agreed with Sam Harris that there is no such thing as free will – but I have several times suggested that homosexuality is a choice. This apparent contradiction can be resolved in the following way. At a scientific, metaphysical level, perhaps even at a spiritual level, there is no such thing as free will. But at an ordinary, quotidian level, at the level of everyday discourse, people still make decisions, choose from among various options: the word 'choice' is meaningful at the level of everyday speech. Even Sam Harris, when he dines out at an Italian restaurant with friends, has probably said sometimes, "What have you chosen to order?" Similarly, at the level of ordinary discourse, homosexuality must be regarded as a choice. A man chooses to sleep with other men; a man chooses to fantasise about men when he masturbates; a man chooses to tell his friends and family that he's gay. There may be biological and social, perhaps even spiritual, reasons why a person turns homosexual but these reasons lie behind a veil through which it is almost impossible to penetrate. My beliefs about this issue have completely changed over the course of my life – a volte-face that occurred as a result of the crisis that happened to me. When I was younger, I thought that the only people who could believe homosexuality to be a choice were themselves closet homosexuals. Now I believe that we must believe homosexuality a choice because it is the only moral option. The alternative would be to suppose that a person can be gay even if he or she doesn't want to be. I think, now, that a person can only be gay if he or she wants to be gay. This is the only ethical route out of this moral quandary.
Early in this post, I said that I was searching for a name to describe the philosophical position for which I am advocating. Perhaps I will simply name it "Situational Metaphysics". Accordingly, this is the title I shall give to this post.
Before I finish up, I wish to clarify something. I have often talked about my life in this blog and have several times stated that the childhood trauma that made me vulnerable to psychosis later in life was my parents' divorce when I was seven. The first thing I wish to say is that I had, until around six years ago, always subconsciously believed that my father had left my mother because he thought I was gay (at seven). I have some evidence that I subconsciously believed this when I was twenty-one, some six years before my first psychotic episode. I know that I still believed this when I was more or less well in 2008 when I was twenty-eight. The psychiatrists have never recorded this in their notes and in fact have never even once enquired about the divorce. The second thing I wish to say about it is that the reader may have assumed that the period before the divorce was marked by parental conflict. This wasn't true in my case. My father had met someone else and one day just left. One day he was there and the next day he wasn't. At the time I found his sudden disappearance inexplicable, which is why I thought I was responsible for it. When I was a child I used to believe that he had left because he loved my step-mother more than he loved me. When I grew older, the story that I told myself was that he had left because he had fallen in love with Jan and a stressor that partly fed into my first psychotic episode was that I sensed that the marriage between my father and Jan was on the rocks. If my father's relationship with Jan wasn't real, why had he divorced my mother? The explanation for my illness, for those who have read this blog, not only the posts about my first episode but those that talk about my time studying at the University of Auckland, is simple. It is testament to the corruption and criminal ineptitude of the psychiatric profession that they haven't been able to see what is right in front of their face.
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