The Mysteries of Intimacies
The Darkness and Light of the Existential Limits of Love (Vol.6; Issue 17)
Expanding upon the intricacies of intimacy explored in a recent essay, I dive deeper into the limits of fully seeing, knowing, or understanding an “other.” Individuals in emotionally close relationships need the capacity to empathize with and, more importantly, to recognize their friends, lovers or relatives. Recognition is always difficult because it requires more than just empathy. One must retain a sense of the other’s history, moods, thought patterns and behavioral styles, to hear, see and feel them, to fully recognize them.
And yet, despite our best efforts, natural boundaries prevent full understanding. Barriers on introspection, knowledge and language prevent achieving “complete” closeness. But we shouldn’t allow these frontiers to prevent us from striving for love. Ironically, they can actually add to intimacy’s magical quality.
Consider an idealized example of a heterosexual couple, two years into a romantic relationship. By then, they have become familiar with each other’s temperaments; they’ve heard personal histories; they’ve shared their value systems, political stances and fears and ambitions; they’ve met each other’s closest friends and family members; they’ve enjoyed an active sexual life leading to close familiarity with one another’s bodies; and they’ve successfully navigated their way through some arguments.
Despite their familiarity, these persons have only so much capacity for self-understanding. Intimacy requires the capacity to access our inner selves, to assess our needs and wants, and, crucially, to communicate them. Such a degree of introspection is arduous enough. The fact that most of our subjectivities are unconscious makes matters worse. In other words, it’s difficult enough to find out what you want, and then tell an “other,” even before you encounter the level of the unconscious mind.
These same limitations apply to the other parties in our lives. They can hopefully express desires clearly and negotiate well, but they, too, hit the boundary posed by the unconscious, and the typical blocks to conscious experience (like secrets we dare to tell ourselves). Even if the “other” enjoys high self-awareness and communication skills, they face the restraints imposed by language itself. Certainly, people communicate nonverbally, but much resides in the realm of the woefully inadequate spoken word. They can never fully express our thoughts and feelings. If you feel hurt by the other, whatever words you use can never capture the entirety of the emotion. A gap always remains. Even thoughts can only be partially spoken. Naturally, these same language limitations apply to the “others” in our lives.
Yet another constraint emerges from the nature of knowledge itself. In creating the most significant change in Western philosophy since Plato, Immanuel Kant (1788/2015) identified a fundamental limit to our understanding of the world. He described what many now consider obvious: that all knowledge comes through our five senses, filtered by our central nervous systems. Who knows the actual nature of “reality”? No one can tell whether or not we’re living in a simulation or whether, as the Hindu’s think, our entire lives consist of the Hindu God Vishnu’s dream.
And if that restraint proves insufficient, consider the profound interconnectedness suggested by Buddhists like the ancient Mahayana Buddhist monk Nāgārjuna. Not only is the self a delusion, as the Buddha suggested, but we also struggle to experience ourselves as context rather than as persons. How bizarre that we identify ourselves as existing within a sac of skin when, in truth, the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat are more important than our own limbs. Surgeons can amputate an arm, and you’d be fine. But no air? You’d die within a minute. In truth, our consciousnesses, nothing more than a variety of daydreams or narratives, only exist within the nest provided by the Earth and the universe beyond it.
Those hypothetically enamored lovers need not feel the least despair at the limits of self-knowledge, of capacities to communicate, of understanding the nature of knowledge itself, of the delusional nature of the self or of the mysterious ways that all phenomena are connected. Not only can we strive to understand and express ourselves better, and to recognize our loved ones as fully as possible, but we can also enjoy the possibility of gaining ever more knowledge of ourselves and others. And, how exciting to surrender to the uncharted, the unknown, the mysterious that, in truth, always dominates our worlds.
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And check out my book, Lover, Exorcist, Critic: Understanding Depth Psychotherapy, available on Amazon.
References
Kant, I. (1788/2015). The Critique of Practical Reason [Kritik der Praktischen Vernuft]. Trans. M.Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.