If someone said to me that the variety of
human experience, even of a shared event or phenomenon, was unlimited I
would very likely assent, having some understanding of their sense. But
I would just as likely watch to see if there might arise opening for a
sophistication to this, an adjustment that might seem either a trivial
quibble or an argumentatively subtle distinction: however large the number
of variants there might be, I would require that another aspect be
attended to, by which I mean acknowledged and valued as salient; in all
its wonderous variety human experience is bounded and constrained by what
it experiences. Since you and I are human and not fish, we will not experience
water as something to breathe, though the fish cannot be expected to experience
it as otherwise, if it experience at all.
The astronomical but finite is fundamentally
different than the unlimited and infinite. If such distinctions are of
no interest then we are willful in our misapprehension and therefore perforce
irresponsible in our activities; to any who are not so flippantly cavilier
with their beings this is presented by every instance of the mundane
moment.
| "I have been forced to recognize
that the most important ingredient in creating [a psychological climate
in which the client could undertake these functions himself [sic]
-- exploring, analyzing, understanding, and trying new solutions] is that
I should be
real. I have come to realize that only when I
am able to be a transparently real person, and am so perceived by my client,
can he discover what is real in him. ... The essence of therapy ... is
a meeting of two persons in which the therapist is openly and freely
himself and evidences this when he can freely and acceptantly enter into
the world of the other." |
Two Divergent Trends
Chapter V of Existential
Psychology
edited by Rollo May |
I can see no reason why we cannot generalize
this understanding and apply it as the standard of healthy community, where
each gains directly from authentic presence while benefitting from that
authenticity's effect on others. Only in a commoditized public and private
realm would what we see so routinely take over: adversarially engaged in
a zero-sum game where one gains by the other's loss, we deny ourselves
in order to deny others; for the other to be weakened, needy, and dependent
is seen as adventageous ... all of this at the level of common sense. That
the conventional is quite mad is evidenced by the fact that this self-destructive
cynicism, while contradicted by such old saws as "cutting off one's nose
to spite one's face", is not likely conscious, and is defended as though
sanctified if ever it becomes so. What should quite reasonably be the role
of the social has been abstracted and displaced into the therapists' chambers,
ensuring a steady trade for those few and an ongoing generalized degredation
for all.
| A side-note: those who would
see themselves empowered as leaders are careful not to enter into relations
that would empower or enable those they see themselves leading; the personas
they develop and adopt serve, on one hand, as uniforms that distinguish
them from mere groundlings (also useful for identifying themselves to those
with similar inclinations) and, on the other, as scripts that diminish
the likelihood of their straying into authenticity under the influence
of benevolent circumstances. |
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