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Subjective is not real?
- Thread starter LOVEthroughINTELLECT
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- Jul 30, 2005
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From Power, Responsibility and Freedom, by David Smail:
"What makes the 'inner world' so important to us is that that is where we experience our lives. There is, of course, no 'world' there at all, but a wonderful confusion of feeling and imagination, thinking, dreaming and memory that furnishes our personal idea of what it is to be human and to be alive. It constitutes our subjectivity.
It is, I believe, a profoundly ironic paradox that modern psychology has done more than anything else to divert us from an understanding and appreciation of the subjective experience of self. Instead of a delicate, modest, tentative, respectful consideration of the unfathomably chaotic, sometimes extraordinarily beautiful, sometimes horrifically frightening, always wildly idiosyncratic interior which is to be found within each one of us, psychology has tried to unpick us with a kind of fastidious distaste that has nothing to do with love and everything to do with discipline.
At least in part because of the success of the psychological enterprise, we are as individuals largely unable to celebrate and rejoice in the experience of self, but rather, when we have to, turn our gaze inward with deep apprehension for what we may find there. What we find, certainly, is a person like no other - and that is one of the principal causes of our misery."
"What makes the 'inner world' so important to us is that that is where we experience our lives. There is, of course, no 'world' there at all, but a wonderful confusion of feeling and imagination, thinking, dreaming and memory that furnishes our personal idea of what it is to be human and to be alive. It constitutes our subjectivity.
It is, I believe, a profoundly ironic paradox that modern psychology has done more than anything else to divert us from an understanding and appreciation of the subjective experience of self. Instead of a delicate, modest, tentative, respectful consideration of the unfathomably chaotic, sometimes extraordinarily beautiful, sometimes horrifically frightening, always wildly idiosyncratic interior which is to be found within each one of us, psychology has tried to unpick us with a kind of fastidious distaste that has nothing to do with love and everything to do with discipline.
At least in part because of the success of the psychological enterprise, we are as individuals largely unable to celebrate and rejoice in the experience of self, but rather, when we have to, turn our gaze inward with deep apprehension for what we may find there. What we find, certainly, is a person like no other - and that is one of the principal causes of our misery."
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