I asked my good friend and philosopher, Andrew Clark to engage with me in a discussion on some philosophical questions relating to the Tarot. The aim that both of us share in conducting this interview, is to highlight the relevance Philosophy has with Tarot, and mysticism in general. This interview will be conducted through email and as the interview progresses I will update this page regularly. Below, Andy gives a brief introduction before attempting to make some philosophical links with reading Tarot cards.
Introductions
Hello readers! My name is Andrew Clark. Douglas and I have been friends from the beginning of our days as philosophy students at the University of Dundee over ten years ago (ten years… where does time go!). The impression that Doug gave me when we spoke on the phone about this ‘interview’ is that he wanted to give people who come across his website an informed account of philosophy and the relationship that it has with mysticism in general; and more specifically the way a certain knowledge of philosophy can help to de-mystify the mysticism of the Tarot cards and giving Tarot readings. What I mean by ‘de-mystify’ here I will discuss towards the end of my account of philosophy, before the interview takes place.
First, let me give you just briefly some of my credentials before saying something about the type of philosophy that I am trained in, about philosophy itself, and about the relationship that it all has with reading Tarot cards. Once I have done this I am sure that Doug will have some questions for me that he would like me to give my opinion on. Since completing my Honours Degree in Philosophy in 2002, I have since received my Masters Degree in Critical Theory from the University of Nottingham in 2003 (which I passed with Distinction), and in 2006 I was awarded a scholarship from the University of Portsmouth to study for my PhD, of which I am now, in 2009, in the finishing stages. My Dissertations, in both my Honours and Masters Degrees, focussed on the work of the twentieth-century French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004). My research for my PhD has also been focused on his work. Derrida is known mostly for what is called ‘deconstruction’.
In short, deconstruction is a way of reading books or texts with a critical eye – books that can be philosophical, religious, literary, scientific, cultural, etc: the point is that the topic of the book says something about the nature of what it is to be a ‘human being’. I say ‘way of reading’: here the word ‘method’ comes to mind. However, deconstruction is not a method in either the classical or the contemporary sense: i.e., of adhering to rules that lie outside of the phenomena that one is analysing. For these ‘rules’ would then form the bias of one’s own perspective. Rather, if there is a rule of deconstructive reading, it is that one must form a critique of what one is reading via the textual resources that lie inside the pages of the book that one is reading. That is, at all times one must be attentive to the words and the language that is used.
From the perspective of deconstruction, there are, then, biases contained within the traditions of both philosophy and mysticism that need to be articulated and questioned. The most dominant bias that one comes across regarding the nature of the ‘human being’ is that, before we even begin to live our lives, we are given ‘free will’ – and indeed, that this is gift from God Himself. The idea of ‘free will’ is important in that, without it, an individual human being cannot be held responsible for their actions. However, the problem with this idea, from the perspective of deconstruction, is that it has a tendency to understand the human being at the height of their adult powers. Can one be said, in one’s younger years, to possess this freedom of one’s own will? And indeed, if one does not completely possess it as a child and an adolescent, then when one finally makes it to adulthood, what is the relation between one’s adult present and one’s non-adult past? Does the irrationality of the past simply disappear, or does it still impinge upon one’s ability to make ‘rational’ decisions later on in life?
Here, we are equating the idea of ‘free will’ with the idea of being ‘rational’. The bias of classical philosophy and mysticism would have it that we are mystically endowed with free will at the very inception of our lives. Indeed, without this bias, it is thought, there would be no ethics; for people would not be able to be held responsible for their actions. But this bias presupposes that God already exists, and that the world is cosmically organised around His existence. Deconstruction at this point draws upon the thinking of existentialism (Nietzsche and Heidegger) and psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan), and instead attempts to understand the ethics of being ‘human’ in relation to life itself. The argument here is that life itself is fundamentally temporal; and human existence is limited by the fact of its death.
Aristotle had founded philosophy on the idea of ‘being qua being’: that is, on the idea that we must understand the human being insofar as it is a being that has ‘being’; insofar as it is a being that has existence. However, where the idea of ‘life’ designates ‘existence’, in contrast ‘death’ designates ‘non-existence’. So Aristotle’s idea of ‘being qua being’ attempts to understand human life, but does so to the exclusion of the idea that human beings die. This, then, is philosophy’s main bias or prejudice: the exclusion of the idea of the death of human beings. For the idea of death would be in complete opposition to the idea that human beings have ‘free will’. Hence, Heidegger instead argues not for the idea of philosophy as ‘being qua being’, but rather as the ‘Being of beings’: that is, that takes into account that the nature of the human being is one that, before anything else, is born, lives, grows old, dies, and decays. Human beings are fundamentally limited by the time of their existence; and this limitation calls into question the very idea of humanity’s ‘free will’ that philosophy founds itself upon.
What, then, of ethics? If the idea of free will is called into question, what does this mean for the weight we have placed upon this idea as a ground for moral action? In sum, in existentialism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, there is a move away from the idea of morality as ‘moral action’, and instead a move towards the idea of morality as ‘moral interpretation’. That is, the issue is one of how we go about interpreting (or ‘reading’) actions. Where, on a more classical view of free will, one would interpret an individual’s action by way of appealing to the individual’s capacity for free will, and therefore to their capacity to make rational decisions – in contrast in deconstructive thinking this way of thinking is argued, in fact, to be immoral. The reason for this is that it removes the individual from the historical context within which they are acting, and therefore misunderstands the way in which this context may or may not have constrained the freedom of their will. For in deconstructive thinking, one ‘acts’ within a context that is more powerful than oneself. Therefore, there are limitations imposed on one’s own ability to act that must be taken into account in the interpretation of the action. Deconstruction therefore argues itself to be more ‘moral’ insofar as it takes these limitations into account.
So how does this account that I have given of philosophy relate to reading Tarot cards? I have already alluded to the ‘contemporary cultural image’ of Tarot cards, in quite a derogatory tone, as ‘New Agey’. By this I am referring to a dominant fashion that is associated with Tarot cards in which people use them not to sort out their own psychological problems, but rather in order to confirm their own unfounded beliefs. Here, Tarot cards are but a symptom of a broader message of the New Age clique; something along the lines of: ‘Think positive thoughts and positive things will happen’. Now, while this message might work for some people, I have two problems with it. First, it buys into the very old idea of ‘free will’ by suggesting that one can simply ‘think positive thoughts’. However, thinking positive thoughts is much easier to do if one has had positive living circumstances within one’s own life. As such, the suggestion to ‘think positive thoughts’ does nothing to aid one to think outside one’s own little bubble of a life that one lives, while simultaneously prescribing it as a message for others.
This comes to the second problem I have with it: in prescribing it as a message for others, like the idea of free will itself, it does not take into account the context that is unique to the other person themselves. Whereas in deconstructive thinking, in order to understand the other person, it is necessary to take into account this context that is unique to them. The New Age message, ‘think positive thoughts and positive things will happen’, is, in short, airy-fairy; for it actually avoids the particular contexts of different people’s lives. Not taking anything away from those who seem to get something out of this message, but as such, this avoidance is therefore also the avoidance of the psychological problems that one would think is the reason for getting a Tarot reading in the first place. The reason that the message avoids these problems is because these problems are not themselves ‘positive’. If one wants to sort out psychological problems, one must instead go straight to the heart of these problems as problems; i.e., as problems that are potentially difficult to sort out and that take time to sort out.
The message of merely ‘thinking positive’ is a useless one to give to someone who has problems that transcends the way in which that person thinks. To suggest that the problem can be solved by thinking differently is to suggest that the person is in complete control of their ability to solve their problems. Deconstruction emphasises, instead, that just as we cannot control death, or the future itself, so it is impossible to be in complete control of our psychological problems.
This relation to the future, as a future that is essentially unpredictable and uncontrollable, seems, therefore, to be in conflict with the idea of the ‘divinatory’ aspect of Tarot reading. And this brings me to the point I began with: namely, that of ‘de-mystifying’ the mystical side of the Tarot. On a strict or literal reading, the mystical side of the Tarot would have it that the future can be predicted or prophesied or ‘divinized’. In short, that it can be known. By contrast, in deconstructive thinking, the future is essentially unknowable. However, it is also the case in deconstruction that this unknowability is also the place at which faith occurs. In other words, mysticism is not given up completely in favour of some base materialism or atheism; rather, mysticism, or religion more generally, is re-thought differently. Classical mysticism would take faith as knowledge; faith in God as knowledge of God’s existence. The deconstructive move towards faith as that which is unknowable might, on the one hand, be against a certain religious thinking; but it is also, on the other hand, against a certain atheistic thinking. Both religion and atheism are called into question. We are left, then, with the conflict between the deconstructive idea of the future as essentially unpredictable, and the ‘divinatory’ side of Tarot reading as an impossible attempt to predict the unpredictable.
The attempt to predict the unpredictable is an impossible attempt. The question, then, is how do we relate to this impossibility? We can relate to by saying, ‘it is impossible, and therefore pointless’. Or we can relate to it by saying, ‘it is impossible, and therefore forms an adversity to be overcome’. Impossibility, in deconstructive thinking, most often takes the latter form. The reason for this is because life itself often creates adversities, which lie outwith one’s own control, that one oneself must learn to grapple with. In other words, the idea of impossibility is not merely unique to a certain relation to classical religious thinking, but also comes in relation to everyday life. Everyday life often seems impossible; and the impossibilities of everyday life form problems that most often than not form psychological problems. This is where, I would argue, the Tarot still has a place: not as an effect of New Age thinking that merely tells us to ‘think positive’, but rather as one way among others to help us understand the problems of the psyche. The next question then becomes: how does the Tarot help us in this respect?
On his website Doug has referred us to the Trump cards, the Court cards, and the Pip cards. The division of the cards into these three types Doug himself explains. The point that I would like to make is that each card – whether Trump, Court, or Pip – has a meaning, or perhaps has several meanings, behind it. These meanings relate to different aspects of everyday life, and therefore to different aspects of the human psyche and relationships. The way in which Tarot reading can aid in the understanding of the human psyche is therefore by bringing together the meanings of different cards in order to tell a story. The hope is that the story that is told by the Tarot ‘expert’ relates in some way to the ‘layperson’ who asked for the reading. If it relates in some way to the layperson, helping them to think about their problems in a different way, then the expert has done their job – much like a therapy session.
This, then, is what I believe it means to ‘divinize’ when reading Tarot cards: to learn to relate the story of the cards, the story of a specific reading, to the story of the everyday lives of the laypeople for whom the reading is done. It is not fortune-telling according to the classical image of a fortune-teller as someone who ‘knows the future’, with the cards holding the key to this knowledge. Rather, it is someone who is trained in the imagery of the cards, of the meaning of each individual card, and of the way in which the meaning of an individual card can tell a story when it comes in relation to the different meanings of the other cards, in such a way that the story that is told can be related to the individual circumstances for whomever the reading is done. That is, it is as much technique as it is mysticism; there is method in the madness, as they say.
To conclude, let me say that, it is precisely these ‘individual circumstances’ that matter. What I have found through my own experience over the years of Doug’s way of reading Tarot cards is that it is not a point of assimilating the circumstances of the individual to a pre-given mystical version of the world; rather, the reverse is the case. That is, it is a point of saying that the ‘world’ that is at stake is the world according to the way in which it is perceived within the specificity of these ‘individual circumstances’. As a reader of Tarot cards, one is always up against the individual circumstances for whomever the reading is done. If the Tarot reading that is given does not relate to the individual circumstances of the receiver of the reading, then the reading will have only been fluff and hot air. It is that sense of getting straight to the heart of the problem that is unique to the individual that I have found over the years marks out Doug’s way of reading Tarot cards as effective.
Thank you for reading. Having said my piece I am sure that Doug will now have some questions for me.
If you have any thoughts or suggestions, let me know through the comment section below.
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