Who Cares? Part II
David P. Levine is a contributor to the On Caring Blog
“In the as-if world, not knowing our own minds is how we live and what we live for. In this sense, the as-if world requires significant limits on inner freedom. Because the limitations of living in an as-if world places on self-knowledge, to the extent that they live in such a world people do not really know what they care about.”
Part II: Inner Freedom
I do not mean (see Part I blog) to imply by my argument that people do not feel that they ought to care about certain things, such as, for example, the welfare of others. They may also, given the conviction that they ought to care about something, decide that they do care, even though they do not. They may respond to questions that raise the issue with the expected or approved answer; of course, unlike Donald Trump, I do care that hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from covid-19. But, so far as we treat caring as an emotional reality and emotional capacity, insistence that they care need not provide conclusive evidence that someone does in fact care. It can as easily represent a defense against the reality that they do not. It is not so much that they care as that they fear being perceived by themselves and others as someone who does not care.
Instilling in people the conviction that they ought to care when, in the depths of their psyches, they do not, may seem an appealing goal. After all, by doing so we might assure that people act as if they care, and that might seem to be enough, or, at least the best we can do. But creating an as-if world for individuals to inhabit brings with it some significant problems having to do with its inconsistency with inner freedom. Too often, claims about rights turn out to be part of an effort to take control of the as-if world and force people into it. When this is the case, the language of rights becomes part of an attack on inner freedom. As this link between caring and inner freedom became clearer, and because I think inner freedom is important in itself, I changed the title to my new book, and to some degree the focus, from “who cares” to the connection between caring and inner freedom (new title is Depending on Strangers: Inner Freedom, Memory, and the Unknown Self (2021).
The term “inner freedom” refers to the ability to have our thoughts and to think about them, and through thinking about them to come to know them. The stronger our capacity to know our thoughts, the less powerful the impulse to disavow them especially through attributing them to others. This includes knowing thoughts that are in some way taboo. Thus, when Donald Trump was accused of being responsible for the length and depth of the pandemic in the US, his response was to blame the Democrats for it thereby dismissing from his mind the idea of his failure in responding to the pandemic. Similarly, whenever he is accused of making false statements, he immediately attacks his accuser as the purveyor of “fake news” thereby countering any internal presence of the thought that he may himself be the purveyor of untruths. Perhaps more than anything else, Trump is engaged in the emotional work of not having his thoughts but locating them outside, in other words of not knowing his own mind. In the as-if world, not knowing our own minds is how we live and what we live for. In this sense, the as-if world requires significant limits on inner freedom.
Because the limitations of living in an as-if world places on self-knowledge, to the extent that they live in such a world people do not really know what they care about. This means, among other things, that they are easily swayed by those who use aggression to force them to adopt certain beliefs including beliefs about their own state of mind regarding the matter of care and to act in accordance with those beliefs. What is, perhaps, most notable in the absence of inner freedom is the resulting susceptibility of the individual to aggression or the threat of aggression mobilized against thoughts deemed unacceptable. Because of this, in the as-if world, aggression plays an elevated role in both public and private life. Compliance with prevailing judgements regarding what thoughts are acceptable expresses the mobilization of aggression against the self and against knowledge of the self. This is consequential not only because it induces psychic distress and unhappiness, but also because the dominance of compliance in the inner world produces a powerful impulse to enforce it on others, which can only be done through use of aggression.
Rigidity characterizes the configuration of the inner world we associate with compliance. The need to banish unacceptable thoughts is expressed in rigid adherence to the thoughts that substitute for them, for example the thought that the unacceptable thoughts exist outside, in others. Where thought processes become rigid, all thoughts are predetermined in the sense that they come to mind fully formed rather than emerging out of a process whose outcome is not yet known.
If we are to know ourselves, we must be able to have our thoughts. Knowing that develops out of the free movement of thoughts and the process of thinking about them is inseparably linked to not knowing because this form of knowing is a process of coming to know through thinking about. Empathy in the psychoanalytic sense of the term (Bolognini) is a form of knowing that depends on a process of coming to know. There is no empathy when we always find in others what we already know must be there. It is even possible to consider caring about someone as respecting their unique life experience rather than attempting to remake their life experience fit presuppositions based on our own experience.
If (psychoanalytic) empathy is a process of coming to know another person, it need not imply caring about them either in the sense of making them matter to us or taking care of them, though it might. The capacity for empathy can, however, be considered a necessary condition for taking care of another person (providing care) when doing so means securing for them, so far as possible, a way of being that includes emotional existence or presence. We can only care for another in this sense if we respect their separate and unique being.
It is our experience of inner freedom that makes external freedom matter to us. It is, therefore, our experience of inner freedom that makes the inner freedom of others matter to us. If what we mean by “welfare” is the presence in the individual of the capacity I refer to as inner freedom, then it is inner freedom that leads us to care about the welfare of others and about the institutions within which welfare is secure so far as it can be. If there is little or no inner freedom for the individual, there will be little in the interpersonal world, which means that our welfare does not matter to others. In such a world, being “alive” in Winnicott’s sense of the term (emotionally alive) does not matter, so that neither the individual nor, by extension, the interpersonal world is marked by caring. If being alive does not matter to us, securing that state for others will not matter to us either. On the contrary, we are more likely to be dominated in our thoughts and actions by the desire to assure that it does not.
References
Bolognini, S. (2004) Psychoanalytic Empathy. Translated by M. Garfield (London: Free Association Books)