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At a counselling seminar a few years ago, I heard the facilitator offer the words: "There are no 'oughts'". To me this thought summed up something of the essence of what philosophy calls our 'post-modern' age.
The above phrase would not have fallen easily on the ears of previous generations, who believed that reason could provide trustworthy norms for ethical behaviour.
This confidence in the power of reason can be traced back to Frenchman Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650), often considered the founder of what has been called the Enlightenment period of Western history. He established what he held to be the basis for the reliability of human reasoning: "Cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am). He argued that because this statement could not be doubted, then there was a solid foundation on which to base rational systems for living, including ethical living. It was because of this reliability of human reason that our more recent forbears were able to advance their advocacy of 'values' and 'rights' especially for individuals, ideas that have been so much a hallmark of the 'modern' age.
However, philosophers have proposed that we are no longer living in a 'modern' or Enlightenment era, but rather in a 'post-modern' period that has its own characteristics. Here the reliability of human reason is questioned, and it is held that earlier statements of rational 'truth' were at best attempts to persuade, and at worst statements of power, designed to advance or protect positions of control, rendering others less powerful.
With little or no basis on which to advance a structured principle to ascertain the 'truth' of things, it has become harder for people, individually and collectively, to find assurance or certainty. The upside of all this…? -- freedom! The downside…? --anxiety!
One view sees that counselling centred on the client's values and aspirations comes into its own in a post-modern age. Included is the idea of promoting an autonomous individuality that is robust enough to enable the individual to face the precarious nature of existence and so learn to live a healthy and prosperous life. We offer clients the opportunity to make their own choices, to assert their own unique identity, to establish, where desired, freedom from the influence of parent, institution, tradition, history and culture.
But what of the downside to the promise of individual liberty -- namely, anxiety –with its often accompanying depression, pain of broken relationships, isolation, ennui? Is the assertion of individual freedoms a necessary or sufficient cure for fragmentation? Does freedom, when considered primarily as the freedom to choose, enable the enhancement of the post-modern man or woman, or lead to an initially subtle but eventually devastating loss of existential moorings?
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the development of the 'information age' has accompanied the rise of the post-modern perspective. It is tempting to think that if I can source relevant information I will be able to come to well-made decision. And yet people like to speak of being burdened by ‘information overload’ and as a result find decision-making harder rather than easier.
We might however, think of freedom differently. Rather than considering freedom as a range of options, no one of which is more compelling than any other, (because no longer is there a truthful substrate that ultimately obliges us in some way), we could instead think of freedom as the opportunity for 'meeting'. That is, freedom can be seen as the capacity to encounter another, in the sense of entering into presence with another.
Freedom is therefore more to do with the relational rather than the rational aspects of living. This means that we place Love at the centre of human striving, and our ‘failures’ in love are as instructive of the importance of this quality as are our ‘successes’. Freedom stands as both the cause and consequence of mutual transparency and receptivity. And this reminds us that to achieve freedom we will need other qualities like effort, trust, respect, willingness to give and receive, and the like.
Jacques Derrida, perhaps the most highly influential writer within the post-modern perspective, is doubtful about the possibility of gifting. He calls gift an ‘economy’: that is, anything you offer me obliges me to offer to you in return (much like sending Christmas cards, or exchanging money for goods). And where is the freedom in that? However, Jean-Luc Marion, a former pupil of Derrida, suggests otherwise. Gift is something real, and is the very nature of existing. Personhood is the outcome of the exercise of freedom and is experienced more deeply in gracious acts of giving and receiving.
There was more than a glimpse of this in a film I watched recently, "Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont". An older woman, Mrs Palfrey, adopts a young man, Ludovic, as her grandson, and loves him into the capacity to really meet and be-present-to another person, Gwendolyn, and the three of them together render each other capable of even deeper love.
In this view, person-centred counselling offers exactly what it says it does: the client is offered the opportunity to find the freedom to make connection, establish trust, offer love, where these may have been so difficult to offer in the past.
And am I not, as the counsellor, obliged by the imperatives of love, to freely offer the opportunity of personhood to another, a ‘person’-ality which was first offered to me by those who loved me into being? So, are there no oughts? None whatsoever…?
by Denis Bunbury
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