Illusion and Reality, by David Smail (1984)

As with The Origins of Unhappiness, I found this as outstandingly profound as it was bleak. Neither book is likely to put a smile on your face, but these are the two books from which I have gained the most in my understanding of my experience.

While words alone cannot convey the nuances of subjective experience, to read this book is to be taken out of your world and into the author’s; to see through new eyes a deeper, sharper, more carefully considered view of the nature of human experience along with a profound understanding of its implications that remains with you long after you have returned to your own.

At the heart of the book is a struggle between the objective outlook impressed upon us by the world and the naturally subjective nature of our experience of living. To experience life subjectively is to do, to experience it objectively is to be. David Smail argues convincingly that objectivity (the focus on what we are rather than what it is that we do) is at the root of the anxious suffering experienced by almost everyone.

Were we able to live our lives focusing only on the values of what we did, unaware of ourselves as certain kinds of objects in the eyes of other people, engage bodily with the world in order to realise our projects within it, relating to each other in 'ethical space' rather than in terms of an objective struggle for relative power or status, we should be unlikely to be suffering the kinds of psychological malaise to which our current society gives rise.

To objectify ourselves, to see ourselves as being one way or another rather than seeing our conduct as such, is to lose trust in our subjective experience, to hand over responsibility for our predicament to forces outside of ourselves, and to be at the mercy of those who look and act upon us as objects.

But what possible sense can it make to endow a person with, for example, the characteristic 'affectionate'? People are not affectionate, though their conduct might be.

Our false belief that words are capable of accurately describing the reasons why we behave the way we do leads us to draw inaccurate conclusions about our own nature which we take to be objectively true. Words make objective that which otherwise might be subjective. The stories we tell ourselves about our character and our intentions are learned in our formative years, and have no more claim to accuracy than any other story we might tell ourselves or be told by others.

It seems clear that small children act unself-consciously and unreflectively in the sense that they do not attach words to what they are doing, and depend for their ability to learn how to give such verbal accounts on linguistically more mature people telling them why they act as they do. After a time they begin to be able to tell themselves what others have told them, but not necessarily with any greater accuracy.

This leads to the sensible conlcusion that our conduct is the only reliable indicator of our intentions, and that our deliberations and justifications serve only to deceive ourselves and to hide from us what we subjectively experience to be true.

Technology plays a significant part in perpetuating objective myths and provides us with a haven from our own painful subjective experience so comforting that we are happy to exchange effort and understanding for passive consumption and mindlessness.

Quite apart from television, which hynotically [sic] draws people out of interaction with each other, there seem to be endless ways in which we become plugged into machines which render us oblivious to our human surroundings.

With our willing connivance, the machines, and of course the professionals and experts whose interest it is to tend them, have taken over and objectified the subjectivity of 'ordinary people', who have become emptied-out objects unable to reintegrate what is rightfully theirs, but who can, for a price, effortlessly consume what once they might have been able effortfully to create.

Our objectification, through our own words and false appraisals as well as those of others, through our interactions with an increasingly objectifying world, steals from us a deeper connection with, and intuitive understanding of, our actual lived experience. We understand the world only in our bodily engagement with it, but have been conditioned not to trust in what our experience tells us and cling instead to the myths that objectivity readily provides.

To trust in our subjective experience is to know that the anxiety and sorrow we feel is an appropriate response to the world we find ourselves in, to choose objective myths is to believe our suffering to be a flaw of our own.

Anxiety, I believe, tells us that the world is a place of real terrors which we ignore only at our greater peril. We mythify anxiety precisely because we do wish to ignore the terrors to which it points.

Our subjective experience of the world tells us the truth about it, even if the language it has to use to do so is cast in forms we have come to see as 'symptoms'. We live in anxiety, fear and dread because these constitute a proper response to the nature of our social world.

Psychological distress and anxiety are thus not indications of illness or abnormality, but the inevitable experiences of anyone who begins to become aware, however dimly, of the disparity between myth and reality.

To recognise our subjectivity, to see our conduct as the only driving force of our experience, as uncertain as its outcome may be, is to take on responsibility for improving it. Awareness of the chasm between the objective myths that grip and govern human interactions and our subjective experience of them comes at a great cost:

As always, however, the cost of becoming free from marketed illusions is the possibility of exposure to real pain, i.e. pain which is instantly identifiable as stemming from the injuries inflicted on embodied individuals by a far from perfect social environment. In other words, 'disillusionment' is a precondition for true experience.

The world which is revealed to the subjective gaze is in almost all aspects the opposite of how it seemed under the rule of objectivity, and to confront it unflinchingly may at first be a vertiginously frightening experience. Where before one had a defined role in the articulated social structure which operated largely automatically and mechanically, where one was more or less a cog in the machine, suddenly now one finds oneself in a fluid, evolving world of untagged, unarticulated meaning, in which one's own conduct may alter the course of of events in unpredictable ways, in which one has no feeling for what kind of an object one is, and which seems to present undreamed of threats and dangers.

The most harrowing conclusion is that in becoming aware of and accepting our subjective experience as the truth, we can no longer maintain our false hopes of a cure. For a true experience there is no cure, only the responsibility and often unwanted agency to do something about it, which comes with great risk and without guarantees.

A sensitive, subjective appraisal of the world in which we live, as well as of our own nature, uncovers misery which cannot be escaped, risks which cannot be sidestepped.

Whatever crumbs of comfort may be gleaned from breaking free of objective mythology, the immediate consequences seem not at first sight devoutly to be wished. Among other things, thus, the person finds him- or herself vulnerably adrift with no more guidance than his or her own convictions in a world full of pain and danger, isolated in a standpoint which most seem unwilling to share, and faced with having to do something about it.

To accept the true nature of our experience is to embrace and endure the pain it bears. To assert our subjectivity requires facing the dangers inherent in our interactions with the world with courage and acceptance. And to view the pains of lived experience as a faithful indication of the current state of affairs is to be free from pathologising the experience of the subjective self.

Though it may be frightening to penetrate the myth, to do so may be preferable to spending an entire lifetime in fruitless pursuit of mythical goals.

To make proper use of the opportunities opened up by the acknowledgement of distress is to take one of the few paths open to us to develop and assert our subjectivity. It is those for whom the myths are not working, the unsuccessful and painfully self conscious (as opposed to the successful image-makers) who, paradoxically, perhaps stand one of the better chances of becoming aware of the real world around them.

There are no ways that we ought to be, other than those which we determine for ourselves. The abandonment of our myths, even though it may free us of the anxiety which arises from self-deception, will not bring us peace of mind, but it may enable us to engage with the real world which we have allowed to get dangerously out of hand.

This is a hard book to recommend to people; it’s an emotionally difficult read. An honest appraisal of the terrible nature of the world we must engage with every day is less than inspiring, and its blunt acknowledgment of anguish and suffering as an inextinguishable part of human experience only worsened by a deeper awareness of your predicament, as admirable as it is in a landscape otherwise filled with quick-fixes and false promises, stamps a sense of hopelessness on the reader unlike that of any other book I’ve read.

The payoff is a profoundly deeper and more self-affirming outlook on suffering, and an appreciation for your own subjective experience as a true and proper response to the world with which you engage.

Highlights