The person is not a body. It is not a mind. It is an unnoticeable sliver of the mind where all of our intentional actions, all our meditations, all of our human living takes place. Growth is to recognize a series of cages. Some of our cages are obvious. The drab office cubicle doesn’t try to hide the fact. Windows on our houses convince us that it is no enclosure at all, but it is. The distance you can walk or bike or drive, that is where most of your living will take place. Then, when you’ve travelled a bit too much and bit too fast and can see the marble of the world in your mind’s eye — well that’s when you realize that Earth itself is a cage. The vastness of the universe scoffs at our fleck of dirt we call home. And then the universe may have others outside it, or within it, or what have you.
In this recognition of the cages we inhabit, we would like to convince ourselves that there is a boundary, inside of which we are certainly in control. Perhaps it is my immediate environment. To a sculptor, this would be the marble in front of them. That is their domain. To the hunter, it could be whatever their bullet can penetrate. This is influence, and should not be confused with control. Just as it is wrong to say that a sculptor has no influence over their marble, it is wrong to say she controls it. She cannot will it to become the shape she wants. She must attack it. She must apply herself to the manipulation of this material.
I have been obsessed in my life with this question of what is in our control and what is outside. It may be a misunderstanding of the first entry in Epictetus’ Enchidrion. The benefit of this obsession has been that I have been effective at understanding my internal mechanisms — how my mind works, how I can push it, pull it, coerce it, convince it — and also has given me some help in identifying the aspects of the world outside of me that I cannot control. This usually helps avoid the feeling of helplessness that is the most sinister burden on a mind.
This in-control versus out-control framing has several drawbacks, some which do tend towards encouraging helplessness. It is the in between parts — between what is in our control and what is not — that much of the confusion of life takes place.
I can do nothing about a distant war causing terrible harm. I can perhaps petition those who can do something about it. Perhaps it will work. Perhaps it won’t. Either way, it is a salve on my conscience that an attempt was made. Here, we went from the thing that is outside of my control (the war) to the intermediary action (petitioning) to the return to the territory I control: my conscience, my mind. (I apologize for the clumsiness of my terminology. I will get better).
It is this intermediary part — action — that I believe is left out of much of the philosophies that I otherwise agree with. Action is the battleground between that which we control and that which is outside of it.
I see now the wisdom of loaning words from other languages that help encapsulate entire ideas. The phrases a priori and a posteriori are commonplace for the Latin XXXXX