Immutable Volitions & Knights of Faith

[apolliana]

"We're so vulnerable to being hurt that we're given the capacity to distort, as a gift" (End of Radiolab on Deception, about self-deception.)

"Fools and young people talk about everything being possible for a human being. But that is a great mistake. Everything is possible spiritually speaking, but in the finite world there is much that is not possible" (Fear & Trembling, 72-3).

I don't think ego-identifying commitments are ever really comprehensible to anyone else, except through analogy. There's a modern bias to present the self as infinitely malleable and adaptable--we don't want to think there are limits, for anyone. Having a hard time? Just change yourself! Change what you love! It's a lovely source of optimism, and sometimes it's true. But not always. It's not just an inability to see some new path that prevents change in longstanding depression. Any failure to see another path looks pathological to someone else. But there are parameters; and "it is a contradiction to forget the whole of one's life's content and still be the same." Why are we vulnerable to being hurt? Because we are committed to things. Perhaps we don't even want to admit that other people have these kinds of vulnerabilities, let alone ourselves; the immutabilities of others make us sigh. What is open to change for one person is not for another, so others' immutabilities never strike us as convincingly immutable. (Compare the truism about foreign policy: "America can never quite remember what others can never forget.") Self-deception is perhaps most necessary in relation to these unchangeable features of ourselves, since we have no other way out of them.

The Knight of Faith (princess variation) both believes that he won't get the princess, because he's not an idiot, and that he will. He takes two perspectives simultaneously: one that is responsive to the facts, and one that is independent of them. The latter he's learned from being a Knight of Infinite Resignation., wherein it is discovered that the love can continue in the absence of its object. Infinite resignation is resilient, insulated, but still defiant, as the Knight does not give up his wish. I'm not sure whether the simultaneous adoption of two perspectives ought to count as self-deception. My inclination is that it shouldn't; it's a careful balance between two views of things, of both of which the Knight is aware. "Self-deception" is biased towards the correctness of one of those viewpoints.

To Be Continued....