I had reason to refocus on this idea on a recent trip to the dentist. I haven’t had much dental work in my life, but when I have, I am one of those people for whom the anaesthetic never really works properly the first or second (or sometimes third or fourth) time. I know this, having been taught it by repeated experience, but of course any dentist encountering me for the first time must learn it for themselves. As a rule, few are willing to learn who think they know better, and medical professionals tend to think they know better (quite reasonably). Which leads to the inevitable outcome that, when I travel around and see different dentists, I repeatedly meet with their disbelief and the consequences of their disbelief.
‘Can you feel that?’, they ask as they poke to check the area is numb. ‘Yes’, I say. They pause. They poke again: ‘and that?’ ‘Yes’, I reply. They look sceptical. ‘You will always feel pressure, but what I want is for you to not feel pain.’ I consider whether it’s worth entering into a philosophical discussion on the concept of pain but think better of it. I shrug to the effect of not knowing what else to tell them. Some dentists have, at this point, assumed the numbing has taken effect and I am just being silly: they start drilling. I go ‘ow’. They stop drilling and look at me as if I am making a fuss.
These are the experiences that have instilled a fear of the dentist in me. My body-mind remembers the pain and the judgement and braces for it even when it does not and will not come. It is simple conditioning, so deeply instilled that I expect no amount of counter-conditioning would eliminate the reaction. If I want to manage this fear, a higher approach is called for.
What I had learned as a younger person (all diet and discipline) was to carry on regardless. Try to ignore how you feel; certainly don’t show it. You are told things like ‘courage is not the absence of fear but the mastery of it’. The impression is that you overcome fear by attacking it, by facing it, by enduring it bravely. Feel the fear but do it anyway. That’s easy enough to do, with a willingness to subject yourself to suffering that we call ‘willpower’.
There is a time and place for that attitude, perhaps, and it certainly has some value, but I have come to think that it isn’t the final answer or the ‘ultimate condition to be aimed at’. I think I ought to feel no fear when there is no real threat of harm: and so if I do feel fear in such circumstances, then I have made a mistake. It is a failure to see things as they really are.
This is how a lack of courage is a failure of knowledge; a failure of vision; a lack of wisdom. If I understood things as they really are, here, then I would feel no fear. Which suggests a remedy: focus your attention on trying to understand the situation truly, see it as it is, and the fear will disappear. Whatever is left after that – pain, adrenaline, etc. – is natural and human. I doubt you will eliminate all of it, and so there will always be a need for ‘fortitude’ (another virtue and another kind of wisdom).
But I know the dentist is doing good work; I know the anaesthetic will work eventually (and how grateful we are to live in an age with effective anaesthesia); I know that any judgement on their part means nothing to me.
If you apply your understanding properly you will have no fear and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at.
Related posts: Attend to What Matters: Introduction, Willpower
Read more: Think Well, Live Well: A Free Introduction to Philosophy
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