God and subjectivity

God and subjectivity

 
God has been a short cut to thought. In ancient times, whatever couldn't be explained spawned a god, the God of the Sun, the Sea and all other elements. Indeed the future could be assuaged by a sacrifice and a God would ensure the future was as was wanted.
As emerging talent and skill arrived so the gods departed, and was replaced by singular Gods of Christianity, Islam and the like. Here the difficult questions were still answered those of the purpose of life, of morality and the future and personal power. Isn't prayer a great thing?
God died in the seventeenth century, slain unwittingly by Kant's transcendental arguments, that were then picked up by later thinkers. As much as God was being driven out of the temple by post Kantians so Science came along to put a nail in its coffin.
Science still has some deific tendencies, with its presumption to explain everything in terms of the true, even if we haven't yet got there, it even attempted to provide some purpose for humanity in terms of genetics and evolutionary theory which both put a mild purposeful direction on human life.
God and to some extent now science provided answers to the individual, to the self, to make life more certain and to remove the effort that would be needed to reinterpret everything. God then stood as the inversion of the self, everything that was needed within the self, together they were beautiful.
With God came morality, its foundation and its tablets, that would instruct humans in the good life. Much happiness was derived from this as the good was achieved and the heart was warmed. Now as science takes it place, the science of utility and creation, now consuming, and owning become things that we worship and give us the good feeling that a pious life once yielded.
The self then is the necessary correlate of God, the biological self the necessary correlate of science. But as God is dead shouldn't we bury the self in the same motion?
Oh that that were the case. As a large rock falling into a pond has many ripples so has god, it has been impossible to reduce him to nothingness as his impact has been so widespread.
Within psychotherapy we can see him alive, within existential subjectivism we can see him alive. The authentic self, be it by end point or by process, is the rediscovery of God. For the self to find its true authentic self, or to be involved in its true authentic process, is a spectacular collapse of the intricacies, the ambiguity and indistinction that colour life. It reinstates the certainty that god provided, truth.
Whilst language is going to hold me back to a subjectivist view point, we are embedded in the world in a complex horizon that encompasses everything, all other people and all other things. Whilst there might be a unique perspective on this, there is no definitive end point that can be arrived at. The myriad of colours and shades and textures that illuminate this relationship make it so. It is a difficult thing to engage with as it has no definitive answer. To think that there is an end point is an easy shortcut to this difficulty and a reinstatement of God.
Likewise in psychotherapy an end point can be assumed. Notions of empathy, I You relationships trade in this space, that there is in some sense a fixed place where the other is, that with some magical projection, or bracketing of myself that I can access and together we can be. The most the therapist can offer is as a tool for the client to unpick and explore their world. The most the therapist can offer is a care of the unique perspective that the client may find, in the full knowledge that this is an unrelenting dynamic thing.
CBT offers the scientific equivalent. The client has objective distortion that with the therapist they will correct to get to the true position. Thus through believing the mantra of the independence of thought, emotion, behaviour and situation and their relatedness you will have a solid life.
There are certain key things that are tied up with the ego which can be responsible and therefore available to punishment and reward. Without values the ego would wither as there would be no point to it. As we say good and bad, then we can say pride and shame, and we can talk about punishment and reward. The ego thrives on this structure and some people can seek to be very good to further their individuation and some can be very bad to do likewise. The prisons are full of people who have made a bad name for themselves, Charles Bronson being one.
As much as values support the self, so does meaning. Frankl was right that it is meaning that constitute the life of the self. We are inveterate meaning makers, requiring personalised number plates, looking for patterns in random strings of numbers that we put there in the first place and conjecturing\requiring there to be alien life forms as a universe without meaning would be a scary place to be. The ability to find meaning, is that which underpins purpose, and purpose is the end point of action, which the self is responsible for. Take meaning away and action becomes pointless, and the self withers further as it cannot act and be praised or blamed.
Without the self there would be no psychotherapy. The common malaises are sicknesses of the self, depression, anxiety and psychosis. The self is depressed, through having suffered and seeing nothing else. The self is anxious through the fear of I know not what to itself. The self is psychotic and sees things that no-one else sees.
I fear that most strains of psychotherapy are merely a confessional to reinstate the holes in the armour of the self that have been left since God died. Is there another way?
I think there is but it's not pretty and I'm not sure the NHS is going to pay for it. It can arrive from many of the thinkers that underpin the existential tradition who take subjectivity as a start that gets dissolved into inter-subjectivity, into a unique perspective of the interconnected whole that we are part of. I dare say this will not be useful or make people feel better in the short term due to how embedded we are in individuation, but in time my friend, in time....