When psychoanalysis frees a patient from the tyranny of his inner compulsions, it gives him a power to choose that is not otherwise his [...] yet without a parallel range of god-terms from which choices may be derived and ordered, choice itself may become a matter of indifference or man will become a glutton, choosing everything. There is no more feeling more desperate than that of being free to choose, and yet without the specific compulsion of being chosen. After all, one does not really choose; one is chosen. This is one way of stating the difference between gods and men. Gods choose; men are chosen. What men lose when they become as free as gods is precisely that sense of being chosen, which encourages them, in their gratitude, to take their subsequent choices seriously. Put in another way, this means: Freedom does not exist without responsibility.
So writes Philip Reiff in The Triumph of the Therapeutic as part of his account of how the therapeutic ethos comes to serve as the dominant moral framework within contemporary society. The question of how psychoanalysis comes to have the influence it does – particularly as to the causal question of whether psychoanalytic theories are taken up in a vulgar form in the popular understanding, or whether such theories represent a particularly articulate attempt to come to terms with modern secular life – is an interesting one but it’s an issue for another (longer) post. The reason I’ve posted the above passage is that it summarises rather eloquently, albeit in the irritatingly grandiloquent language of a 60s cultural critic, what’s arguably the basic premise of my PHD: the affirmation of our absolute freedom to choose is inimical to our deriving meaning and purpose from the choices we make with that freedom. An outlook that celebrates absolute freedom of choice can ultimately only sustain the value of choice itself and to choose is, in itself, meaningless. What determines the meaning our choices hold for us is the wider framework of values, ideas and understandings that shapes the very way we comprehend our choices. These are what Charles Taylor calls horizons of significance and they are largely external to any individual human life.
The affirmation of our absolute freedom to choose seeks to secure the means by which we might choose while leaving our ends off stage. The ends of our choices, as a category rather than in terms of any particular choice we might make, cannot ultimately be themselves the product of human choice. Somewhere there is a point at which we’re moved to choose because of something that extends beyond choice itself. If the only answer we can give to the question “why do you choose x?” is “because I want x” then, I’d argue, our choice of x is devoid of meaning. At this point one might offer a naturalistic explanation i.e. that our desire for x can be explained by offering a causal account of our psychological development. Yet this just leaves us with the fact of our desire and a commitment* to the sheer contingency of this fact. For most things this is absolutely fine. Yet the fact of our experiencing significance as a whole, that some of our choices are meaningless whereas others are deeply meaningful, cannot itself be contingent. The content of those experiences, the particular significances certain choices hold for us, is susceptible to the sort of reductive explanations just discussed but the fact of significance itself is not. The fact of our having desires about desires, our enmeshment in a framework of meaning and significance that extends beyond the vagaries of momentary inclination, is necessary for us to experience any meaning and purpose at all.
Why, to use Reiff’s phrase, would we take our subsequent choices seriously when they have no value beyond that of choice itself? The fact we do experience meaning and significance, that we do take some of our choices very seriously, necessarily entails that the choices we make are framed by a wider sense of the significance those choices hold for us. Yet the therapeutic ethos denies this dimension of moral experience through (a) its ethical affirmation of the right to choose as the only value (b) its causal claims about the choices we make. These wider structures of significance and meaning are a necessary feature of human agency but the therapeutic ethos dissolves our understanding of those domains. Our lives are still shaped by these structures but we increasingly lose the ability to understanding and talk articulately about them. In the individuals life this diminishes our moral experience and in society’s life this restricts political possibility, simply because it’s increasingly difficult to engage in political projects when (a) the language of morality is impoverished (b) the collective values on which such projects are predicated are increasingly understood as aggregates of arbitrary individual value judgements.
*Because that’s what it is. There’s no value-neutral theorising that can be done about these sorts of matters. We can’t seperate ourselves and our own lives from the conclusions we draw about the nature of human existence more generally.
