Everyone who was raised within a culture that believed something important about human life runs the risk of coming to a time in their life where they proclaim that they are “disillusioned.” I was raised in a conservative Christian culture, so most of the people I hear or read saying that they have been disillusioned, are people who believe they have finally discovered and escaped the illusions of their childhood. I am in a somewhat different place myself. I believe that I have finally discovered the truth about “disillusionment.” Here’s the bad news. Disillusionment is an illusion.

This is a peeling the onion kind of problem and the outer layer is the notion that truth and illusion are at war with each other in principle. The idea is that I was told that X attitude toward life and meaning was “true” but now I know that it is not true. The Recently Disillusioned Person (hereafter RDP) need not say that something else actually is true; only that what they were taught is not. They are free, of course, to say that they have discovered that Y is true instead of X or they are free to say that the whole idea of “true” is fallacious.

But this is a precarious position to take. Let’s move on to the next layer of the onion. Let’s say that I have a progressive form of dementia and I have, in my currently sound mind, the conviction that I do not want any heroic measures taken to prolong my life. I sign a paper to that effect. I have it notarized. Then, dementia having taken its course, I come to the medical decision to take heroic measures and at that moment, it seems like a good idea. “I,” the person I am then, say,s “Wait, I have changed my mind. I do want those measures taken.”

I, the self who signed the paper, see things in a certain way and “I” (note the quotation marks) see things in a different way. There is no reason that “I” could not claim that I have, at long last been disillusioned. The family will very likely believe that the current view of things, the demented view, is the illusion and that the earlier view, taken with full command of their facilities, was the authentic view.

It is not true that the later person, the one I can been calling “I,” now knows the truth and that the “truth” they once believed was always an illusion. In fact, neither of these positions about what to do at the end of a physical life can be said to be “true.” They can be said to proceed authentically from a functioning self, an agent. Or not. The reason the person who discovers that their mind will not continue to be under their control signs the paper in the first place is that they know they will become increasingly dominated by an illusion. In fact, dementia may be thought of as a web of illusions, some stable, some transitory. What the agent believes will, in this case, be counted as authentic; what the patient believes will be discounted as illusory and that is true even if the patient declares that he has at last been disillusioned.

We have time for one more layer of onion. I can see that this is going to require more than one post. Let’s consider martyrdom next. Etymologically a martyr is a witness. The word comes from Greek and has been adopted into most Germanic languages, including English. The common representation is that a belief is proclaimed over many years. Then there is a time of reckoning. The believer can continue to hold to the belief or practice that is now in disfavor and suffer grievous harm or they can declare it to have been an illusion, to declare further that they are now “disillusioned” and have adopted the new required view. They have become a RDP.

Traditionally the “grievous harm” in prospect is death, often a painful and humiliating death, but for our inquiry there is no reason it needs to be that. It needs to be bad enough that it requires that the RDP learn to sing a new song. [2] It could be being forced to leave your home; it could be being forced to take a menial and low paying job; it could be having all public facilities made off limits to you. Any of those might, in some circumstances, cause a person to say that their early teaching was all an illusion and that they are now disillusioned.

But really, is the view they first adopted an illusion? None of the causes we have surveyed says so. And is the new view being taken on the grounds that is wholeheartedly accepted? Does that mean that they have been disillusioned and no longer hold the old view? None of these scenarios asks the question of what is true, imagining that “illusion” is taken to be the opposite. Is a view which still makes sense to someone, but that increasingly costs them a price they are unwilling to pay, suddenly an illusion? Really? Would it require more of something to continue to affirm the original view? More stubbornness? More data? More courage?

I’d like to pick that dilemma up next and we will look also at C. S. Lewis’s classic case, Prince Rilian of The Silver Chair.

[1] Interestingly,Norse used a native formation pislarvattr, literally “torture-witness”—one who suffers death or grievous loss in defense or on behalf of any belief or cause” (love, etc.)
[2] Just kidding. The canto = “to sing” root suggested “recant” to me. I know it means other things in other settings.