All over the 80s to the 90s there were a pretty hectic philosophical debate going on in some British journals about aesthetics and art. The fight surrounded Colin Radford and his Paradox of fiction, the thesis that the emotional reactions we have towards fiction are irrational. They are irrational on the basis that the only rational feelings are the ones that we feel toward real things and when we are consciously aware that what we are witnessing is fiction then all real rational feelings are excluded. I will develop this point further down the line, but for now you only need to know that one of Radford’s analogies that he uses to defend his point is the one comparing the emotion of fiction to that of phobia. He says that as a phobia is the uncontrolled emotion that works counter-productive it can easy be parallel to how a person emotions felt for fiction works counter-productive to your actual situation in life. This analogue has been severely criticized by people like Richard Joyce whom point out our clear human intention of indulging in fiction for the sake of emotional catharsis and therefore the lack of counter-productiveness in the uncontrolled emotion. Basically Joyce argues that the Paradox of fiction have fatally missed that when a human thought moves according to the laws of fiction the rational paradigm changes from the one concerning belief, the doxastic rational that any emotion in reality have to validate itself again, to the instrumental rational that validate the emotion over it’s usefulness and effectiveness.
But to me this way of looking can oversimplify the picture as this paradigm shift that Joyce suggest can in my experience be so viciously elusive in real life. Especially for certain mind sets like the one I usually have. I often find myself when I’m watching or reading anything of horror that I am trying tell myself that the horror in the movie can also happen to me. It’s completely automatic. When I watched the first Insidious movie I kept telling myself that you actually could travel mentally to the astral plane and there be possessed by the demonic spirits of “The Further”. The danger of dreaming was real. I had trouble sleeping for week. Now to fear dreaming is a great example of a very counter-productive feeling, but what I’m wondering is counter-productive for whom? According to the paradigm of instrumental rational a feeling is per definition productive if I have produced it with the intention of making myself scared. If I before reading Jerusalem’s lot knowingly pick the book up because I want to feed into my fear of vampires then isn’t there a part of me that gets pleased by this? And isn’t it instrumentally rational to want to please impulsion of your psyche? Is it not? That dilemma is one of the reason that this (perhaps) destructive need in me persists. Now I just want to understand why a part of me want that need at all.
How to make Demons
But first I have to go through some more material of when this attraction to the spooky manifest in me. Lately I have been looking into Christianity. I have been wondering what they are actually saying there in church, 4-a-clock every Sunday. I have been wondering why people are so endlessly possessed by these symbols, the incarnation, the holy trinity, the paschal mystery, the cross. So I started to read the Bible, got through the Genesis but could not bare the boredom that was Exodus. At the mean time I was going to church, listened to some choirs and had some coffee with some elderly believers. Twas pretty comfortable, even if I sometimes dreamed about snakes at night. Then I started to listen to some pretty hardcore preachers from America. They very much believed in the reality of angels and demons. But I could not tell if that was because they were so royally brainwashed by the idea or if they actually understood it as a part of reality that I had missed. I thought that they probably just used the characterization as an anthropomorphic psychological dynamic. When you feel happy for no reason it can feel like it’s not coming from you, but that have always been registered as simple brain chemistry to me, not an guardian angel.
Maybe these religious people, instead of rationally being open to the knowledge of the world that we had, wanted to force into it the idea of angels and demons? A forcefully in it’s most brutal sense. That’s an idea that sounds suspiciously alike my compulsion of making horror movies to a reality, if not exactly alike. But I kept looking into it, listened to a very serious esoteric podcast about the history of ideas. I started to be introduces to all sorts of esoteric traditions, the Kabbalah theories, the Hermeticism, the Antic Egyptian Mythology. The old maxim “As Above, So Below” got a hold on me. And suddenly it seemed like there was a bunch of people out there vowing for the actual reality of the demons. Apparently reality could open up into the Underworld. A place were demons lived. Actual scary, insane demons.
But was this conclusion derived from a doxastic rational or an instrumental one? Or if I reformulate myself like this, is there in human nature a strange compulsion to force nightmarish fantasy into existence that is just a symptom of an eternal self-hate? Do we just lash onto the worst ideas possible to torment ourselves when we start to go down a certain thought pattern? Is that the reason for all these tales of ghosts and demons haunting this earth, or are these people actually seeing a reality that truer then the strictly functional material realm? I don’t know but I think it’s a question that I have been lacking from the debate when confronting this material.
Last week I spoke about schizophrenia. One of the many reasons that I wanted to study schizophrenia a bit was just because it’s usually one of the explanations that people give for seeing demons. And for good reasons. Schizophrenia have a ton of symptoms that could very well be interpreted as a visit by the demons. We have scary voices, often negative and destructive that seems split from your own personality talking too you. We have the hallucinations, usually ghoulish faces that comes from nowhere and for some people a full blown world changing experience. So, is schizophrenia the name we have give the mental state that now go under the name Underworld? Or could it be that schizophrenia is the path to the underworld and the underworld itself is the psychotic episodes? If that’s true then my notion that this thought pattern can be largely self produced by letting your fantasy run amok while you’re indulging in scary fiction does not quite fit. Because that’s is clearly not the cause for schizophrenia. Schizophrenia has a biological factor, first and foremost. People are born with it. People get traumatized into it. People have extremely psychedelic drug induced state that causes it. I have not heard of one that simply thought themselves to it. And if it really was something that you can just think yourself into then how come there is only such a small population that has schizophrenia?
So, maybe the juxtaposition does not quite hold, but of course there is evidence out there that the states are interlocked in some ways, like the documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Paranoid schizophrenia could be thought about as an overly exaggerated phobic state with some extra side effects. People in more New Age groups romanticize all the time the mentally ill for their sincerity and experiment with dissociate states all the time to find their “inner child” with LSD or DMT or whatever else. People claim that they have to open themselves up to the possibility of seeing an alien before the aliens actually show themselves. What comes first, the wish or the reality?
The Paradox changes shape
Now I’m stumbling awfully close to the question of what is true, but let us instead end on something to be said about the Paradox of fiction. If really all these visions people have, of God, Krishna and dead relatives, are only just our human fantasy then we are definitely in the instrumental rational realm. We have fooled ourselves completely and, maybe, feed into a status quo self-hate that we all bear. Now the reality of a fundamental part of ourselves that hate ourselves unconditionally is something that we all could picture as the devils true nature. He who want to see us suffer for the sake of suffering. Which makes devils nature strictly irrational in a pragmatic sense, but very rational in an instrumental. Which feeds into the old Catholic idea that you should be careful what voice you are following.
But maybe there is some treasure here to be had. For If I did not imagined the possibility of the astral plane then I would have maybe missed the reality of it? Maybe there is some truth too that you need to open yourself up to the magic before you can feel the magic! I mean, that truism has popped up in every religion, cult, conspiracy theory that ever was. Couldn’t the notion that it’s so well-spread mean that this is a true process? The idea does have a strong doxastic rational that way. Or is there a human flaw in us all, closely connected with the capability of fantasy, that want us to develop a reality apart from what it seems. If you are a self-destructive person you see demons and if you are a positive person you see angels. Maybe just because that part gets bored otherwise. Then what should you do? Should you keep yourself bored or keep yourself occupied?
Or what do you say Neil? https://open.spotify.com/track/4RI2XoSY5KiiDshVhA9Khe
References
Books
The Bible (1999 )
Carl Jung - Psychology and religion (1958)
Podcasts
Myter och Mysterier
Documentaries
The Devil and Daniel Johnston