My mind and what she remembers
When I can't figure out what something means, I give the problem to my mind.
During times of turbulence in politics, culture, and religious life, it’s tempting to hold tightly to current convictions. Allowing a change of one’s mind or heart can be difficult work. With this in mind, we have resumed a Century series published at intervals since 1939, in which we ask leading thinkers to reflect on their own struggles, disappointments, and hopes as they address the topic, “How my mind has changed.” This essay is the fifth in the new series.
It feels to me as though my mind changes while my self remains the same—or is, at least, continuous with itself, as if it has not changed and will not. This seeming immutability makes the self stand apart from the mind, that assimilator of experience that builds the small model of reality mind and self inhabit, changing and being changed as it does so. Yet there are real limits to the degree to which the mind can be said to change through its encounter with experience. Notoriously, we find ways to conform what we learn to our expectations and to exclude whatever tends to put them in doubt.
It gratifies me that an account of felt life sounds like a problem in theology—mind and self are of one substance, yet distinct. Being human, they are little known to each other, frequently at odds. It is impossible to say which one proceeds from the other or in what their unity and distinctiveness consist.
