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The Importance of How
Nov. 8th, 2008 02:52 amThe importance of 'how' questions in and of themselves, has to do with the governance of the self. In the domain of clinical psychology, I have little faith in third personal approaches to therapy. If they work, their success may not besomething the patient can come to again on her own. (Of course the same argument can be used against drugs, which can be helpful. But they seem to help primarily by changing the weather in one's mind so that whatever needs to occur can occur.)
The origination of action, phenomenologically, is mysterious. It just happens. Even the most thoughtful, planned action feels spontaneous--even impulsive--at the moment it begins. I may be more prone to notice this than some because it always feels to me, when I'm on stage or in front of a class, like the controlled, thoughtful parts of my brain are off limits; I'm swept up in whatever I'm talking or emoting about. (The benefit of this diminution of consciousness is that I'm never nervous while I'm doing something. The drawback is that it makes adjusting or improving my technique difficult.) My peculiarity aside, I'm willing to venture that impulsiveness is crucially important to the beginning of action; otherwise, it might never begin at all.
If this is true, there's a strange dynamic going on in us whereby we make it the case that we give ourselves over at the crucial moment to the very thing we want to do. The impulsiveness I mean here may only be a seed, but it's a seed that brings something about. This is a deep fact (if it is a fact) because it points to the limits of the self in precisely the domain for which it's known--the domain of what it can do.
The origination of action, phenomenologically, is mysterious. It just happens. Even the most thoughtful, planned action feels spontaneous--even impulsive--at the moment it begins. I may be more prone to notice this than some because it always feels to me, when I'm on stage or in front of a class, like the controlled, thoughtful parts of my brain are off limits; I'm swept up in whatever I'm talking or emoting about. (The benefit of this diminution of consciousness is that I'm never nervous while I'm doing something. The drawback is that it makes adjusting or improving my technique difficult.) My peculiarity aside, I'm willing to venture that impulsiveness is crucially important to the beginning of action; otherwise, it might never begin at all.
If this is true, there's a strange dynamic going on in us whereby we make it the case that we give ourselves over at the crucial moment to the very thing we want to do. The impulsiveness I mean here may only be a seed, but it's a seed that brings something about. This is a deep fact (if it is a fact) because it points to the limits of the self in precisely the domain for which it's known--the domain of what it can do.
