Forgiveness

If we do not speak to machines, then we cannot accept causal explanations from interlocutors. If someone has become abusive because they have been abused, I can accept this as an explanation but not as a reason. A reason is a justification for a behaviour, not an explanation of how the behaviour arose. We can confuse these – and sometimes it is harmless to confuse them. But sometimes it is not.

For me to forgive someone, I must understand their reasons for their behaviour, and not just its ‘causes’. They must tell me why it felt right to them, at least at the time, to do what they did. If they are unable to do this, I can have no grounds for forgiveness.

I may even feel compassionate towards them, but only in the way one might feel compassion for a dangerous beast that must be controlled to prevent it doing harm. I do not forgive the beast – it cannot ask for forgiveness!

Forgiveness is something that takes place within a conversation, where choices are attributed and reasons are given. If the conversation is impossible, then what can ‘forgiveness’ mean?

I might say to you ‘I forgive my parents’, but what does this mean about my relationship with them? If I ‘say’ it to them, if I mouth the words, what can these 'words' mean if we cannot have a real conversation about what they did – a conversation that includes recognition, reasons, truth.

Perhaps it can be comforting to imagine such a conversation, to have a private talk with oneself. But how can we know what we are doing here? Where would such 'private' talk find its meaning?

Agency

The 'metaphysics' of a mechanical reality don't seem to leave room for 'free will' - the ability to choose.

On the other hand, we must attribute free will to honest and competent interlocutors - people with whom we can have a conversation. This is because we have to regard them as choosing what to say. We cannot have conversations with machines.

This is a puzzle - not least because it is only within real human conversations that we can explore any metaphysical theories, including mechanistic ones!

Apart from contributing to my feeling that we only find ourselves doing metaphysics when we've made some kind of mistake, this puzzle tells us something important about agency in a counselling context.

When I think about the objects of counselling - in so far as these can be formulated without presumption - I think of  the restoration of agency and of the possibility of constructive relationships. And these are not two separate things: it is within our conversations with one another that we attribute and experience agency. Where these conversations go dark, become infected with emotional manipulation, our experience of agency is similarly corrupted.

These is where semantic and emotional conceptions of 'meaning' converge - where the link between being able to talk to one another, and living meaningfully, becomes viscerally apparent.

Introjection

Accommodating introjections is a coping strategy. It may even become a model of coping strategies, so that cognitive/behavioural (rather than phenomenological) approaches, seem to be the ‘right’ way to go about things when we are threatened with incoherence and incongruence.

 

It may even be the case that our investment in these strategies is a what makes introjections so hard to relinquish. When we have had to work hard to achieve a delusional state, it is humiliating, galling, to find that the simple and obvious interpretations we were taught (as children) to reject were actually closer to being correct. We can become convinced that the very essence of adulthood is adherence to damaging shibboleths.