Coming to See and Starting to Believe

A Discussion Of Epiphany

I must again recommend

Stefan Vereen

. His recent writing on Epiphany, which can be found here, inspired this. I do not think I am disagreeing with Stefan here, but drawing attention to a feature of Epiphany I worry he neglects. This does not come from a place of animosity, but profound respect—and I am sure a positive discussion will ensue.

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In ‘Leaving Womb for Thought,’

Stefan Vereen

explores epiphany quite beautifully (and, my god, what a good name). However, throughout the article, he describes epiphany in the following way:

When the intellect reaches an impasse, we tend towards resolution or avoidance. Aristotle’s Metaphysics makes use of this kind of conundrum and paradox and we say that when confronted with this impossible image the aporetic moment births a new perspective. Where there is a wall, we find a door.

It is so often the case that I stumble upon a string of thought-words that take on the immediate quality of well-versed or built-for-print.

These moments of clarity, hard to pin down in the abstract, but probably known to us all in some form or another, make their appearance in psychotherapy. Under the rubric of insight, the patient develops their role as a steward of their own realizations. Within the relational context of the working alliance, they develop an equanimity that recognizes the inner-creative’s process as mysterious and non-linear.

For Stefan, Epiphanies are things we find, things we stumble upon. Notice, in the first quote, the use of physical metaphor. We are lost in trying to answer a question, and suddenly, like an adventurer stumbles upon a secret passage way, we stumble upon a door. Or, like we might find a wad of cash on the ground, in the second quote, we ‘find’ or ‘stumble’ upon a string of words that fits our idea perfectly.

Stefan’s picture is perhaps most vivid in his description of psychotherapy. The patient is cast as a steward of their own realizations. The work of therapy is to, in a certain sense, evoke or bring out such realizations in themselves.

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I worry that this picture of epiphany, and perhaps even psychotherapy, is missing something crucial. Or, at the very least, it is lacking in emphasis.

Stefan rightly focuses on a key feature of our experience of an epiphany. Namely, when we have one, it is as if we have stumbled upon something. “My god, Eureka!” we say to ourselves.

Yet, this is something of a lie. And this is what I think Stefan fails to put in bold. We have not stumbled upon something. The metaphors we use to get at our experience of epiphany are often just that: metaphors. We are not explorers in caves looking for secret entrances and stumbling upon them, but, often, realizing things about ourselves and our minds.¹

How are they different? Well, for starters, our ideas and epiphanies aren’t things we find, but our ideas. Take the example of psychotherapy. Stefan uses the metaphor of a steward—as if we are a sort of manager or uncoverer. But, crucially, this is a position we could take with respect to anyone’s realizations. If I was a particularly manipulative person, I could act as a manager for my friends, feeding them the right information at just the right time so that they would have epiphanies.

When we are doing psychotherapy, our position is quite different. We are not merely treating ourselves like we might treat anyone, but doing something special.

Similarly, when we ‘stumble upon’ an idea, it is not as if we are stumbling upon something that just anyone could stumble into, but an idea that only we can have. Other people, after all, can’t have epiphanies for us. And, to go one step further, stumbling upon an idea is different from stumbling upon a relic in cave because an idea can be a good idea or a bad one.

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We’ve just hit on something quite important—what I take to be the key thing that Stefan is missing. Namely—that while the language of ‘stumbling’ of ‘stewardship’ does capture an important part of the experience of epiphany, the experience of finding and uncovering, it just as well obscures an equally important part: the experience of seeing and believing.

Imagine I am in a therapeutic setting and I have an Epiphany. Suddenly I realize that I am not afraid, as I had previously thought, of facing the next part of my life, of getting a job and settling down, but that I actually want to do it. I want to go get a job. I realize, then, that I have transformed that desire into fear, perhaps out of my unwillingness to accept it as my desire. Perhaps, for instance, I am embarrassed, or I am worried that I will lose out on the connections I made in college, or, most trivially, I believe that I should want something else, like graduate school.

Now, when I have the epiphany, I might experience it as a stumbling. I might, initially, feel quite proud of myself. Like a perfectly good steward. But not for long. After all, I have not found an object that anyone else could find, but a hidden belief or emotion of my own. And, crucially, now that I’ve realized my fear of the future is actually a desire for the future, I can feel that desire in all its glory. Similarly, the fear I once felt will melt away.

But this subsequent feeling of the new desire and crumbling of the fear is not something I am passive to. Rather, it is the result of my coming to see the future as no-longer-to-be-feared.

Notice the contradiction here. On one reading, I have stumbled upon something. I’ve stumbled upon a hidden desire or belief. On the other, the reading I am foregrounding here, rather than stumbling on a desire, I am finally starting to see the truth about what is really desirable, or about what I really feel. And, now that I see the truth, I can believe it.

When we tell this sort of story, the passive language of finding seems almost out of place. I’ve seen that I am not really scared of getting a job, because I’ve seen there’s nothing to be scared of! It’s not that I ‘stumbled into the fact’ that I am not really scared, no, it was much more active than that. I didn’t stumble at all: I found my way to it.

It is this feature of epiphany and therapy I worry is missed out on in Stefan’s article. I want to now say a little bit more about how we could capture it. To do it, I’m going to turn to moral philosophy.

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Expulsion from the garden of eden. Yes, a name for a beautiful Thomas Cole painting (see above), but also a name for our condition. We are not like the lower animals. For us, there is a distance between perception and reality, between feeling a desire and lurching to satisfy it. We are, as philosopher Christine Korsgaard says, condemned to action and evaluation.

“Human beings are condemned to choice and action. Maybe you think you can avoid it, by resolutely standing still, refusing to act, refusing to move. But it's no use, for that will be something you have chosen to do, and then you will have acted after all. Choosing not to act makes not acting a kind of action, makes it something that you do” (Page 1, Self-Constitution).

When Korsgaard says we are condemned to choice, she means that for whatever we ultimately decide to do, we will have made a decision to do that thing. And even if we decide not to decide, we will have still decided.

When an animal, say a dog, sees a treat, it goes to eat it. For the dog, treats are to-be-eaten. End of story. The dog does not decide to eat the treat or that the treat is to be eaten.

For us, however, treats are not necessarily to-be-eaten. And I don’t just mean that we’re full sometimes, or that the smell of another treat distracts us, but that when we see a treat, rather than being faced with an action we are faced with a choice, or, perhaps, a question. Shall I eat this treat? Is now a good time to eat it? Will my friends think me a glutton? Will this treat be good for me? Do I want to be the sort of person who eats those treats?

Lots of rhetorical questions, but anyone who has struggled with dieting knows what I’m talking about. Humans are able to, as Korsgaard says, “step back” from a desire to eat a treat and ask whether they want to be the sorts of persons to act on such a desire. Whether such a desire is worth acting upon. And, if they do decide to act, then they will have made a decision. They will have decided to act upon that desire, to take it as a reason.

But, because of this, our decisions are not just decisions. I mean by this that decisions aren’t just predictive tools—they aren’t just the things-that-precede-me-acting-on-a-desire. They’re something more: they’re evaluations. Evaluations that one desire or another is worth acting upon.

Korsgaard, of course, puts it in much better words than I can:

“When you are aware that you are tempted, say, to do a certain action because you are experiencing a certain desire, you can step back from that connection and reflect on it. You can ask whether you should do that action because of that desire, or because of the features that make it desirable. And if you decide that you should not, then you can refrain. This means that although there is a sense in which what a non‐human animal does is up to her, the sense in which what you do is up to you is deeper” (Self-Constitution, 19)

We are not only condemned to action, then, but to evaluation. Because we are condemned to decide, we are condemned to choose which desires or feelings of ours will count as reasons to act, and which ones will not. In a sense, we ‘sign-off’² on them. We ask ourselves whether their objects—for example, the treats we desire—are really desirable. If they are, then we act. If they’re not, then we don’t. But we can’t avoid that evaluation because we can’t avoid action. We’re condemned to the two together.

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That we are condemned to evaluation might explain why epiphanies are, for us, often more than mere stumbling into the truth.

Epiphanies, like decisions, often come in the form of answers to questions. A decision involves us ‘signing off’ on a candidate answer: “Should I eat the treat?” I ask. “Well,” I say to myself, “what reasons do I have for and against doing so?” If I decide there are more reasons in favor, then the desire is signed-off on.

Yet, Epiphanies are often also answers to questions: What should I write? Do I love her? Why am I so scared of getting a job?

What is perhaps so confusing about epiphanies, then, is that they lack that in-between step. We do not weigh the reasons in favor of what we should write, rather, we are struck with, we stumble upon, what to write. Yet, once we have been struck, once we have our answer, it is not unlike an answer to a question about what to do. Just like deciding that a desire is worth acting upon gives it force, an epiphany—for instance, that we really do want the job, that we really do love her—is not some object that anyone could find, that we could have just as well brought about in someone, but ours in the same way that decision is.

To really get at it: the sense in which the ‘Epiphany’ is ours seems to be the same sense in which the decision is ‘ours.’

But how could this be? The decision is ours, after all, because we weigh the reasons. Because we found the desire to be a good one, because we signed off on it. Well, perhaps Epiphanies come to us ‘signed-off-on.’

Maybe epiphanies are so peculiar because we feel responsible for them in the same way we are responsible for action—they receive the same ‘signing off’—but we lack access to the reasoning which led us to them. In this way, having an Epiphany is more like coming to see.

1. This style of argument is inspired by the seventh chapter of The Exchange of Words.

2. I really do not like this word as it feels seriously managerial. That said, I can’t think of a better one.