This is a profound point, which I witness in my brother. The medicalisation of his “illness,” and its treatment, gives him a sense that, with help and medication, he can navigate it. His constant question — “Who is Archie Linklater when he’s well?” — is more comprehensible as a result. He is, somehow, capable of conscious action and moral agency, and the question, who am I, is intimately bound up with that. I used to think his belief in his ability to understand, and even combat, his own nature was a contradiction in terms — a sort of psychotherapeutic intervention sneaked in through a back door of militant biological determinism. After your comment, I see that it’s not a contradiction. To understand and accept what cannot be changed in the broad view, bestows power on what can be changed in the more limited one. (A version of putting your own house in order even if you can’t change the world.) Conversely, if you take the psychotherapeutic view, which conceives the person as a realm of memories to be plucked out, of narratives that can be rewritten or re-interpreted, may be — for a certain type of person — a paralysing vision of endless possibility, in which the opportunity to take small steps may be lost in a miasmic search to make fundamental ones.
It’s like the paradox of catholic and puritan migration to the Americas. Why did the Presbyterians and Calvinists, who were predestinarian by conviction, end up being the can-do entrepreneurs of North America, while the Spanish and Portuguese, who believed in good works, got locked in the economic and cultural fatalism of South America? A crude formulation, I know — with climactic and political considerations ignored — but there’s something in it all the same.
I also think of the pragmatic behavioural ethics of old Norse mythogology. It’s a celebration of fearlessness in the face of fate. Or, more interestingly, fearlessness BECAUSE of fate. The puzzle is described by Kevin Crossley-Holland: “No Viking believed he could change his destiny, ordained as it was by the Norns who wove the fates of gods and men alike but, for all that, the way in which he lived his life was up to him. As Skirnir says, ‘Fearlessness is better than a faint heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors. The length of my life and the day of my death were fated long ago.’” Skirnir chooses fearlessness because he can’t choose anything else.
