SubscribeAugust 11th, 2011
pain, pleasure, belief, Charles Taylor and Brian Brett
Shortly after I wake in the mornings I’ve taken to walking the dog. I wait until at least civil twilight is far advanced because I want to avoid dog-skunk interactions, but once the striped ones are gone to bed, the dog and I start moving around outside. The dog loves it of course and early in the day, for a city that never quiets, there are at least a few quieter moments where I can at least imagine silence, so I love it too.
On our rounds today we met a new cat that is probably less than a year old. Pretty, ginger. She was wary (tail tip twitching, shoulders tensed) as my (rather big) dog came bounding up to say hi. The cat didn’t run though and I have to say I have mixed feelings about that. There are some dogs that do not like cats, even if mine does.
I got thinking about the cat’s behaviour. Is the cat brave? Stupid? Probably something else of course, but what does one say about a creature that remains sitting against an oncoming potential danger?
When we made it home I went to my computer to find a clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson at a Beyond Belief conference. It’s the one where he talks about the 15% of scientists that still believe in a god and deGrass Tyson’s thinking about that. He uses Newton as an example: here is a super-duper smart dude, who (in his lunch break) created differential calculus so he could answer a question posed by another. But faced with a question he can’t (or doesn’t want to) face—it’s a Mystery. Essentially deGrass Tyson seems to think that, for some people, there is a place where they are willing to use any convenient answer – and often a god does the trick, but once we have the answer to the question, we push the god-frontier back. So there are far more atheist scientists than believer scientists, but those 15% exist and the chances of that number diminishing to 0% is probably remote.
Might be so. I hear a lot about the need for comfort, the need for a belief in a god to stave off the night terrors. I don’t deny the need for comfort. I love extremely high fat pasta dishes when I’m getting irritated or overwhelmed, for example — I totally get the need for comfort. It’s just that some comforts do more damage than good and one can learn to trade in one comforting activity for another. We are not stuck with the ones we’ve always used.
One thing I find interesting is that some of us also seem to need pain as much as comfort. My continual voluntary exposure to thinkers like Charles Taylor is an example. My occasional attendance at my local Philosopher’s Cafe, is another. I go in knowing I’m at risk, and that nice friendly dog is going to come wagging its tail, but the teeth, dripping with doggy slobber, are going to arrive first. I’m not sure which is worse the gross-out facts of intellectual slobber or the (admittedly small) risk of an actual argument for the importance of continued religious belief in human society.
I suppose I do it because despite the slobber Taylor, like all brilliant thinkers, offers gifts. It is unfortunate that to get the insights, you have to go through the risk of being drenched in slime. So, like the cat, I await the dog’s arrival, but since I’m human I carry with me a metaphorical soapy wash cloth to clean up afterwards.
Today that is Brian Brett. I feel totally slimed (but no teeth) by The Malaise of Modernity, so I’m going to read Trauma Farm today. Here’s the opening sentence:
A farm is both theory and worms.
Hah! Wonderful. I bought it, and based on just that sentence, I have no regrets. I feel cleaner already.
August 9th, 2011
more on Charles Taylor / the golden past
So I did run out and pick up a copy of Charles Taylor’s Malaise of Modernity from the library. I’m reading it now but I just wanted to share with you a single paragraph from the book and my response to it.
He’s been outlining the modern sources of worry. The first is individualism. He says that “people used to see themselves as part of a larger order. In some cases, this was a cosmic order, a “great chain of Being,” in which humans figured in their proper place along with angels, heavenly bodies, and our fellow earthly creatures.” This sense of being has been replaced by a sense of individual freedom “to be ourselves.” The “worry” part is related to a Taylor’s sense of loss of purpose that goes along with the loss of our place in the chain of Being. (My worry would have been around the definition of “our proper place.”)
The second issue is the “primacy of instrumental reason.” Here is the paragraph in question:
No doubt sweeping away the old orders has immensely widened the scope of instrumental reason. Once society no longer has a sacred structure, once social arrangements and modes of action are no longer grounded in the order of things or the will of God, they are in a sense up for grabs. They can be redesigned with their consequences for the happiness and wellbeing of individuals as our goal. The yardstick that henceforth applies is that of instrumental reason. Similarly, once the creatures that surround us lose the significance that accrued to their place in the chain of being, they are open to being treated as raw materials or instruments for our projects.
There is just so much wrong with this but really all of it stems from the golden-age fallacy. That last sentence, for example. The laws surrounding the protection of animals are present in this instrumental modernity. In Taylor’s golden past they didn’t exist; bear baiting was considered a fun entertainment. How many morally based vegetarians existed in Taylor’s golden West? How many today in this instrumental world? Come on dude.
This secular rise Taylor is so worried about goes along with the rise in things like social safety nets. Public education, public health clinics, childhood inoculations, unemployment programs, welfare provisions: just look at what used to happen to unwed mothers in Catholic countries if you want an education in how well this “order of things” functioned for those on its margins. And those human things like guilt, shame and desperation that kept the order intact? And slavery—enabled in some places because that order of things decided that those people of a different color had no souls (like other animals) and so could be treated as owned objects. I would have thought this the very definition of instrumental reason and so I think there is great doubt about the rise of instrumental reason in modernity.
Anyway, if the whole thesis of Taylor’s malaise is going to be based on this faulty assumption then his argument is going to drown in the Slough of Ridiculous.
July 20th, 2011
cognition, poetry, metaphor and meaning
I got a copy of Jane Hirshfield’s Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. I can’t remember where I heard about it first but it may well have been one of Shawna Lemay’s sites. I both love it and am irritated by it.
What I love is her deep insight into the workings of poetry. What I hate is the way she conceives of the mind. When she speaks to the importance of rhetoric, narrative, image and music in the creation of poetry (whether when a poem is being written or read), her authority rings simply yet strongly. When she speaks to the workings of the mind, especially in the section on images, I feel like I am in a bag of metaphors, roughly tossed, and not yet settled to the ground.
Then my (borrowed) copy of Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. arrived. It’s called The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. In the introduction he addresses the horror of “figurative” thought – those old lessons about not mixing one’s metaphors; instead presenting information simply and literally and how misplaced this reaction is – how worn out the underlying objectivist assumptions. So I had to think a bit more about my reaction to Hirshfield.
I suppose part of it is that old gripe about Humanities’ use of scientific things as one uses a tin of paint. The context that gave that empirical insight birth is lost, and only the gloss remains. Not that I am accusing Hirshfield of this. I’m not. What I am saying is that this tendency to utilize a shiny bauble out of context prepares me for irritation when I run across these shiny metaphors that rain feeling down on one without even a drizzle of sensible context. Listen:
Image is taken up by the reaching mind, but also within the welcoming ears, the tongue’s four recognitions, the muscle’s familiar surge of kinship.
You can tell Hirshfield is a poet no? You can feel that sentence. It has sensuality, a movement through the body, a suggestion of meaning if one reads ears, tongues and muscles as metonyms. But what does that sentence actually say? How can one ground that in the mind that actually functions inside the skull, through the hands?
There’s a bunch more like this but it doesn’t outweigh the usefulness of Hirshfield’s deep knowledge of the workings of poetry. So I’ve decided to read a chapter of Hirshfield followed by a chapter of Gibbs to even out the approaches and give my self time to work through my irritation to some (hopeful) understanding.
What I am going to have to do is think about the consequences to the claim (well founded) that human thought is fundamentally metaphorical. I accept this, since the evidence is there. At what point, though, does something become so metaphorical that it loses touch with content communication? Is it that old shiver when one mixes metaphor? Does this known bad thing point to a place where communication breaks down? Is it that once a metaphor loses touch with its bodily/living origin is also loses its ability to feed back to the mind that living creates? Is that the problem with mixing metaphors – that the link between body and image is lost and one trips lightly across some airy-fairy imaginative realm, skipping from puffy cloud to cloud without even touching down to where the feet remain planted?
I suspect something of the sort. Imagistic thought will always evoke feeling, and that is enough to suggest there should or could be communication or idea present as well, but I don’t think it is necessarily so. One can swim in a sea of feeling – of lions that evoke suns, that evoke roses, that evoke golden rain – without out actually communicating anything attached to the mundane reality of a body moving through its day. At some point there has to be a person to which this all applies, because although we are hardly at the center of the universe, our minds are constructed so that we can be nothing other than at the center of meaning.
As irritating as that is, it appears to be the case. The humanities are going to have to catch up because we simply cannot do without them.
July 12th, 2011
magic, tradition and the golden age myth
I picked up a copy of Arthur Verluis’ The Philosophy of Magic sometime ago but apart from the first few pages, haven’t put any real effort into reading it until last night. I’m a person that reads in fits and starts and some books just have to wait until my mood is right. I keep a stock of funny books for when I need a mood lift, for example.
Not that Versluis is a comic, although he can be comical. I’ve written about Versluis before and you may be wondering why I keep reading his stuff since I sometimes appear to have a “hate-on” for him, at least according to an email I received from a Tailfeather reader. The thing is I adore magic, the way magical belief systems work, the power of magical narrative in human life, and especially, the way magical systems are transforming themselves in the contemporary West. And yes, I am an atheist, but that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize the power that the concept of magic has on the human mind. And remember, like all art forms, this power is not a bad thing. It’s only when narrative is confused with empirical reality that it gets hairy.
So I keep reading Versluis (and others like him) because he is a magician, and one that clearly that has some deep knowledge of his chosen path. Reading him is instructive with respect to how such belief systems work; how true believers function conceptually to enable magical systems in their life and world.
Having said that, the other reason I read Versluis is because he is also an academic. That I find particularly engaging because I have always associated academia with intentional rationality and Versluis just blows that fucking right out of the water. I mean how cool is that to get blown away and reminded that all is not what you expect. At least for me this disturbance pushes me to attempt understanding, to read, to think, to reason.
The thing is though, that this book is actually a little scary. Or at least, reading it because I couldn’t sleep last night, at 2 AM and 3 and 4, the book took on a kind of horror, like the thought of one of the current batch of mad-dog Republicans becoming the US president and devastating the sanctuary of Western democracy.
Why so scary? It’s not the overall stated purpose of the book. He just wants to say that magic (alchemy, et al.) can only really be understood and practiced properly from within the tradition that gave it birth. OK. His idea is that magic, ripped from the larger tradition (belief system) is like a sick person dealing with symptoms and not the root cause of the illness. That’s just going to cause more problems. Health – in this case spiritual – comes from walking a hermetic path and using magic when appropriate to that path. The assumption, of course, is that walking a hermetic path is synonymous with working for spiritual development and with that bringing on emotional and behavioural adulthood. Of course the biographies of such seekers in history tends to undermine the veracity of such assumptions, but that is something Versluis doesn’t seem to address. (At least in my readings so far. If you have a reference or two that contradicts this, I would absolutely love to follow it up.)
Where it starts to get scary is what he considers to the true path, which, of course, is hermeticism for those of us in the West. What is scary is the disdain, the anger and fear, and the apparently concomitant severe lack of factual historical knowledge or analysis that underlies such a belief in the existence of “true”.
Although it is difficult for us – bound as we are to the dualistic, Cartesian view of existence as consisting in the purely physical and in external series of coincidence – to rightly understand the more organic and unified vision of the traditional cultures, reflected in the West by the Hermetic tradition, it is precisely this which is most necessary, for it is only within such a tradition that magic and alchemy arose, and through which they can be understood.
(As if, even were it true, that a “more organic” understanding of our ancestors resulted in better behaviour with respect to the earth, its indigenous peoples, or non-human animals. I mean what does he think this “organic” understanding really achieved in the functional lives of the society?)
He’s just as mad at modern manifestations of magical religion as he is at the church and science. He names, for example, neo-shamanism. Versluis feels that without the “protective shell” of hermetic tradition, Westerners who practice magical technologies like shamanic drumming and alchemy are in danger. What danger?
For this reason, to the extent that magic and alchemy exist outside a tradition they are – as is the traditional orthodoxy – increasingly subject to malevolent and infernal influences, manifested in greed in the former case and hatred in the latter.
In other words, the fact that we have left behind the traditional belief system of Hermeticism has caused us to be at risk for what the Christians would call the devil and his lesser demons.
I shit you not.
…because the modern era has consisted in a ‘hardening’ against the Divine protection which traditional cultures afforded those within their sphere – in the ‘unchaining’ of the inferior or infernal forces against which modern man has virtually no higher protection, having cut himself off from the traditional.
Dude.
Has he read any actual history? Any idea of what women (or any other power-minority) suffered under those “traditional” cultures? The devastation done to the earth because of the assumptions of such belief systems. The idea of “purity” for example. The horrendous and morally bankrupt idea that error equals “deformity”. Has he read anything at all about the position of the disabled in our history? Is he really suggesting that “infernal” dangers are something worse than what was done exactly because of those traditions? Does he not understand that those traditional horrific acts were in fact the infernal and malevolent forces he perceives as endangering us today?
This text is a manifestation of a golden-age longing, apparently completely divorced from any real understanding of how those traditions functioned in the real economic, political and ethnic worlds.
I understand why neo-Platonism, Hermeticism and Pythagorian systems hold on to the spiritual movements today. They provide a sense of rootedness, a belief system that is deeply Western and therefore feels like home. The problem is that they are just wrong. Empirically wrong. It’s like holding on to the ideology of the celestial spheres because you just know you are the center of the universe and that damn Copernicus is placing you in infernal danger.
I am not sure I can be said to worship anything, but if I were to have to name something it would be the earth. It is, after all, my life blood, my source, my future. The thing is that exactly because it is so important to me I would rather actually come to know it. Not what my 2600 year old ancestors thought of it (although that is also valuable in a narrative way), but what reality is like from the point of view of the Other, from the Now.
So I balance narrative and science. Currently it is the only way to access something close to the truth, in particular a workable truth for the contemporary world and the world of our children. Traditions won’t cut it. Belief systems alone won’t do. The earth is not the center of the universe. Neither is the sun. It’s better to know this than pretend otherwise. I suspect we’ll live longer as a species if we can come to grips with this.
So, again, why keep reading Versluis and others like him? Because at some point, some academic (believer or not) will find a way to honour his or her “spiritual” tradition in such a way as to not violate the actual facts of the case – whether empirical or narrative. I suspect this might come out of eco-spiritual traditions since many of them are also science majors. Someone, somewhere, will find a way to pull scientific reality and narrative together and then a new, workable, tradition will have had its birth. I hope I live long enough to see it, and am astute enough to recognize it when it happens.
July 1st, 2011
Images of self, poetry and the mind
Give me a little slack here if you would be so kind. This connection may be a bit tenuous.
I’ve been reading Reuven Tsur and I’m going to admit that it feels a bit like I’ve stuck my head in a whirlwind. I read a few pages and there is just so much that I have to go away and walk to let it settle a little. But it’s a wonderfully aromatic, soft-fingered twist of air and so I pick up the book again.
Pictures are by Natsumi Hayashi. Google her name, she’s a sensation. Brought to my attention (thankyou!) by peardg.
The little bit of Tsur I want to connect with Natsumi Hayashi’s “Levitating” pictures comes from the chapter “Composition of Place”, Experiential Set, and the Meditative Poem. How we compose space, he asserts, either helps us surrender that wonderful sense of control so as to achieve a more meditative state or it hinders. And it is surrender. We must voluntarily blur the edges of self so as to achieve the sense of connection that comes in meditative (or meditative like) states. Tsur’s chapter is about how words can do that.
Solidity of objects, of description, enable a sense of control. Edges are of immediate comfort to the rational aspect of mind. What blurs self is indeterminacy. Now that shouldn’t be a surprise given the last nearly 100 years of European history. What is really lovely about Tsur’s work is that he connects the way the human brain works with words and their power.
The brain orients us with a fork. The left-brain tine
is responsible for creating the mental sensation of a limited, physically defined body, while the right orientation area is associated with generating the sense of spatial coordinates that provide the matrix in which the body can be oriented. In simpler terms, the left orientation area creates the brain’s spatial sense of self, while the right side creates the physical space in which that self can exist. (Why God Won’t Go Away)
So, (way too simply) what you do with words is create the space in which the self can exist whilst suppressing things that lead to edges and to the self itself. Concentrate, for example, on “the surrounding space, but focus on thing-free and gestalt-free entities (such as abstractions) rather than on stable characteristic visual shapes.” (Tsur’s chapter has many examples of this at work.)
Have you ever had that experience where, traveling slowly through a sere landscape you can feel it pulling you apart, your sense of boundaries wavering, the land reaching in under the hem of your being? That’s those two orientation areas at work, and the continual flow of environmental clues necessary for the left hemisphere to continuously generate your sense of self stuttering.
That’s what Natsumi achieves in her photographs. Brilliant.
So much of the self’s generation is dependent upon things remaining stable, and flying, well that’s not a stable reality for human beings. The specifics of what such a form of instability says about Natsumi’s culture and place within it, well that is also really interesting. It makes me think of my experience recently at the grocery store. One wonderful thing about all this angst-producing cultural deconstruction of the last 100 years is that it enables these moments of meditative seeking for new boundaries. And Wallace Stevens was right, there will be a new set of gods. They will take on the shapes of our new ideas about self, limits and purposes. We’re not there yet but there are moments in art when on the artist’s heels a new shape can just be glimpsed. That is so cool.
June 29th, 2011
identity, poetry and Shawna Lemay
Since I had that wonderfully interesting experience at the grocery store, I’ve been turning over the question of identity. In the comments I said something about all of us having multiple identities, and of course this seems to me obviously true. There are many Mary’s for example. There’s the one that does the dishes in the morning, the one making coffee and chatting with the crows, there’s the one that reads poetry, devours poetics, goes out to dinner… None of these Marys are the same. If I were to take a mental snapshot of each woman there would be real differences in thought, mental content, attitude, behaviour and the other categories by which we know who we are. Aren’t those differences the mark of difference? Is the Rez-Mary, the thrift-store Mary, the same Mary as the one who talks with friends about Reuven Tsur? They differ so much that even their relative vocabularies cannot reconcile.
Pondering these fun things, then, through one of those lovely internet connection moments, I come to hear of Shawna Lemay (Thanks Pat!). She’s a poet and essayist with a number of books available. I managed to fine Blue Feast in short order and I start to read the book this evening after dinner. It became quickly clear that, amongst other things, Lemay has some questions about what it means to be someone. I love it it when synchronicities like that happen.
Listen:
The Masterpiece Where are You? I woke up asking that to the ceiling. Is this blasphemous, I don't believe that god should be capitalized. It's not necessary. I know this much. The masterpiece is unsigned.
I have to tell you that got my attention. Apart from the question of some possible literal belief (which really isn’t a very important question, and can probably be answered by the simple act of more reading), there is the question of what constitutes the “masterpiece” and why it must be unsigned.
Since poetry works by linking single words to multiple possible concepts/feelings, the masterpiece is something with multiple forms and identities. It could be simultaneously the poet, the poem, the reader, the meaning generated in the interstices between the poet, the poem and the reader, and any number of other frames. OK. So multiple identities…why anon?
Is multiplicity finally anonymity? Does this unknown quality free up the dark to speak? to create? Is it good enough that the anon is a “You”? The fact that “You” is capitalized seems to suggest that the being isn’t god, since that capitalization isn’t necessary. So a “who” then and not a “what”. I guess for me sometimes I sense my self more in whats than whos. That is, a mountain, the space between ridges, a river, these are identifiers that carry some sense of “me”. But this is only one poem, so as I read more, this idea of the “You” and the anon will probably gain more depth, and possibly take on more solidity. But then perhaps not, because of multiplicity is a fact of life and it is tied with anonymity, identity is going to be more a shadow than a source of light.
One of the other themes I’m glad to come across in the book is that of dreaming. (If you’ve read in this blog before, you’ll know why.)
Here’s another poem that latched on hard:
Not Once But twice. I was emptied, shelled from a dream into the dead of last night. I had no questions. Was it more like being rolled into a ditch from a slow moving car? Or was it like falling out of an apple tree fruit untasted, hungry, plucked. These came later. Then, it was just the scraped out feeling sitting on my chest purring its otherworldly breath entering my open mouth. Knowing I had to quickly eat the curdled dream placenta or sleep would never come for me nor serenity.
So the shadow thing makes sense. If the world of “I” has its locus in the dream world, then it is in the dark and identity is a cipher whose meaning is multi-vocal and we — we have ears that hear only a fraction of the voices rung in the dark hills of night.
A concept of self like this feels like a woman gathering feathers in a wind storm. Identity such as this is a dark thing, a creature with a thousand legs that all walk in varying directions. It’s also an interesting thing. Actually, this is how I imagine Rilke felt, and other poets of similar mind and reactions to the problems of living.
Me, if I were to wake from a dream like this, having lost the words, images, even the memory, I would just ask my body, because I would assume that my muscles know, or my fingers. I would bead and see what came out, or walk and pay attention to the cadence of my feet, and somewhere in there, somewhere in the world, the dream would be laid out, sunning itself and grinning.
Once I asked an elder to identify knickknick for me so I would know. She started to shake with laughter. I was bewildered at first, but it turns out I was standing on it. I was only in the dark as long as I kept my feet still.
So for me identity is like that – all laid out in the world, but some of it, I have to move to see.
Isn’t poetry wonderful? I have so many fun things to think about and I haven’t even finished the first book. Thanks Ms Lemay.
(From the first of these posts: I’ve read part 1 of Mark Johnson’s The Meaning of the Body. The first section is in 5 chapters starting with the basics of human meaning, movement, the way in which babies come to learn categories such as object and event, how this still underpins adult meaning making, feeling and how such aesthetic dimensions of life direct and choreograph the production of meaning.)
This is bit 4 of 4 bits.
the homunculus and discrimination
It is here that Johnson starts to build up from the pervasive feeling field to the part of us that abstracts, is capable of logic.
He is concerned to avoid the problem of the homunculus (the little knower within) and to show how our capacity for the apparently transcendent logical relations inherent in things like language and math are still born directly from the earlier fields of feeling. In other words, how does the capacity for logical and categorical discrimination get born out of an (apparently) indiscriminate gestalt of feeling?
Brain structure is one step. Johnson uses Don Tucker’s research (Mind from Body: Experience from Neural Structure) which shows the ways in which the brain has evolved structurally, and how that structure provides the basis for the way in which we monitor our bodily systems, sense the world and think about it. The piece of cerebral architecture on which Johnson focuses in the core-shell relationship.
To vastly oversimplify, our brain developed through evolution by adding new structures and layers on top of more primitive parts shared with some other animals. The present day result is a brain with core limbic structures (mostly responsible for body monitoring, motivation, emotions, and feelings) that are connected to “higher” cortical layers that have ever more differentiated functions, such as perception, body movement, action planning, and reasoning. One striking feature of this core-shell organization is that structures in the core regions are massively interconnected, whereas structures in the shell are more sparsely interconnected. An important consequence of this is that there is more functional differentiation and more modularity of brain areas in the cortical shell than in the limbic core.
Based on this, it is interesting to think about modular theories of thinking. It might be that our brain does have “modules”, but only because it hasn’t finished wiring itself to the same extent as the core (limbic, etc) systems have. It’s fun to think about what evolution might do to us as our “shell” structures become more and more interconnected both within the layers and between. I can’t help but think of the gender differences ascribed to the relative number of connections between hemispheres across the corpus callosum.
But back to the point, Johnson starts with architecture and then moves back to Dewey and on to James. What Johnson is going to say is that the neurologically well integrated core systems are what makes the “pervasive feeling” field possible and mandatory. Essentially, nothing totally by-passes the core areas of the brain. They are always involved in initial scans, sweeps, judgements of our ongoing movement through our varied environments. The less integrated shell systems can still work like more isolated modules because of the relative dearth of interconnections, but they can’t do it without the older “core” components. Nevertheless, the modular shell structure translates into the capacity to modularize (is that a word?) the environment. This is what we call conceptualization – or discrimination.
Neat huh?
Having said that, this chapter was the least successful of the ones I’ve read so far. It’s a bit undercooked, I think. That might be because much of the argumentative structure is yet to be introduced, so I am willing to wait to see more thinking on the relationship between the field of feeling and our capacity to conceptualize – to do math, argue formal logic.
Part of my response to the chapter is the narrow little section on the rather tumultuous problem of the universality of math. Johnson explains logic based on the concept of “patterns of inquiry”.
Logic comes from patterns of inquiry that have proved useful in dealing with the kinds of problems we encounter, given our biological and cultural makeup, our history, and our interests and purposes. What we call logical principles (such as the law of noncontradiction, the law of the excluded middle, modus ponens, and modus tollens) are based on habits of inquiry. They are summaries of habits of thinking that have moved inquiry forward and kept it more or less successful under certain perceived conditions. Following tin the footsteps of Charles Sanders Peirce, Dewey understands that habit of inquiry are characteristic modes of action in dealing with perceived problems: “But when it is found that there are habits involved in every inference, in spite of differences of subject-matter, and when these habits are noted and formulated, then the formulations are guiding or leading principles. The principles state habits operative in every inference that tend to yield conclusions that are stable and productive in further inquiries.”
Math is explained as another habit of inquiry like logic. Its apparent universality, like the law of non-contradiction, stems from our embeddedness in the universe. What basic habits of inquiry that evolved as chemicals interacted in the larger chemical-electrical environment are still with us, just as the field of feeling, although often unconscious, underlies our reason. Johnson does not say this in the chapter, but the apparent universality of the relationships between numbers may be a reflection of this deeply material logic that comes to us via our deeply material nature. I think that’s a lovely thought – not an abstracted, transcendent reality, but an immanent one, one that comes from the deep structure/function of the base elements/forces of the universe. Material logic, as it were.
That’s going to have me smiling all day.
What Johnson actually says about math:
Mathematics (like logic) is just as universal as our environment and our cognitive equipment are stable and effective for cognizing situations. In other words, if our basic modes of understanding were to change, due primarily to changes in our bodies, our brains, or our world, then our mathematics would change also, and along with it the ways we would apply mathematics to our experience of nature and the universe. From the perspective of embodied cognition, mathematics remains as beautiful and amazing and stable as it always has been but it also remains dependent on our ability both to sustain it and to extend it creatively as part of processes if inquiry.
A bit wishy-washy don’t you think?
Post 1 Post 2 Post 3
June 21st, 2011
The Meaning of the Body, part 1 the body carries forward
(From the first of these posts: I’ve read part 1 of Mark Johnson’s The Meaning of the Body. The first section is in 5 chapters starting with the basics of human meaning, movement, the way in which babies come to learn categories such as object and event, how this still underpins adult meaning making, feeling and how such aesthetic dimensions of life direct and choreograph the production of meaning.)
This is bit 3 of 4.
the body carries forward
Johnson makes much use of Dewey and Gendlin in this section. The phrase “the body carries forward” comes from Johnson’s reading of Gendlin.
There you are standing in front of Nude Descending a Staircase (Number 2). You don’t much like Philly but you love the gallery’s collection. You’ve been there all day and your feet are starting to hurt in a way that will require (soon) a soft chair and a large coffee. The man standing near you forgot to stop pouring the patchouli he uses because he likes walking inside perfume. In the back of your mind are the three piles of blue notebooks that require grading sometime in the next two days. You are looking forward to the quiet of your hotel room but you are also missing the far-away coffee shop you would normally be at this time of day. You can’t decide how you feel about Duchamp. Clearly he was brilliant, but then so are a number of crazy people. I mean who sees this way? Really. It’s like being dislocated but never moving.
All of that stuff—the totality of filtered perceptual information as a gestalt whole—is the pervasive feeling that contributes to what you will decide that Nude means. Which is why one can never fully know the meaning of anything. Situations change, and so does the attendant meaning.
Every situation in which we move occurs initially as a field of pervasive feeling. That field of emotion is the ground from which feeling and conceptual thought resolves into awareness. Feeling (aware emotion) is some aspect or area of the gestalt field beginning to resolve itself into our awareness. What we experience (and can begin to articulate) becomes an “object” in that field – the nude for example.
Once the body has carried forward meaning into a situation by resolving specific meaningful objects and events (the painting, the perfumed man), the systematic components of mind can carry meaning forward into the linguistic/analytic. Only then can I entertain what the perfumed man means viz the painted nude.
One wonderful thing about understanding meaning in this way is the sheer enormity of the possibilities, but still contained within the biological limits of what it is to be human. Like any system there are a limited number of “terms” – we have specific kinds of hands so we “grasp” ideas in a limited numbers of ways. Yet, since any conceptual or symbolic system is a mixture of those “terms” in specific environmental situations, this complexity makes meaning itself endlessly creative and varied whilst being understandable (because we all “know” the “terms”) to the same kinds of creatures as the one creating the meaning.
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(From the first of these posts: I’ve read part 1 of Mark Johnson’s The Meaning of the Body. The first section is in 5 chapters starting with the basics of human meaning, movement, the way in which babies come to learn categories such as object and event, how this still underpins adult meaning making, feeling and how such aesthetic dimensions of life direct and choreograph the production of meaning.)
This is bit 2 of 4 bits.
feeling in the world - subjective
Feeling is not a subjective state. That’s what Johnson says. Aaaaaaargh! Of course it is. Of course it isn’t. (I argue with myself a lot.)
The problem isn’t that feelings are felt subjectively, but that we constrain the meaning of the word “subjective” in such a way as to make it not-of-the-world – i.e. not “objective”.
So wrapping this one -
step 1: emotions (as opposed to feelings) are those chemical/neurological/muscular states that result from an individual’s interaction with a specific situation.
a. Walking along the road, sunny, no pain, normal noises, a bit hungry and then
b. chocolate cookies come into view.
c. A cascade of chemical and electrical shit happens on top of the stuff that is already ongoing (i.e. the hunger and mild pleasure in the day) and as a consequence my mouth begins to water.
d. My feet move of their own accord. My hands reach into my bag, get the wallet and give the woman money.
e. The cookie makes its way from the bag to my mouth while my feet negotiate the doorway and the on-coming man with the I-want-food glazed look on his face.
OK so up to the point where I become conscious (post-chocolate ingestion), these are emotions. They are chemical responses to environmental situations. Feelings would be the wild ride after awareness gets generated (you know the guilt and the oh my god this is sooooooo good), but by them much of the “thinking” work is already done.
Situation(s) specify what will be significant to us and what objects, events, and persons mean to us at a pre-reflective level.
This never happens when it is broccoli in the window. That’s the specificity of the situation impinging on my part of the total system. A shorter way of saying that is “chocolate has meaning”. My body is changed by my environment in ways that are meant to guide my organism towards the good and away from the bad (yeah! chocolate is on the side of the righteous).
This is what Johnson means by saying emotions and feelings are not subjective states. They are not simply something that occurs internally completely free of the objective world.
…if we understood that what we call subjects and objects are really just abstractions from the interactive flow of organism-environment transactions…then we would find the locus of emotions in a complex arc of neural activation, chemical releases, changes in the viscera and musculo-skeletal state, marshaling of resources for action, and sometimes the feeling of these changes in the internal milieu. And all of this activity and processing would be specified in relation to our physical and social environments. In short, emotions are both in us and in the world at the same time.
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June 20th, 2011
The Meaning of the Body, part 1 objects and mind wrench
I’ve read part 1 of Mark Johnson’s The Meaning of the Body. The first section is in 5 chapters starting with the basics of human meaning, movement, the way in which babies come to learn categories such as object and event, how this still underpins adult meaning making, feeling and how such aesthetic dimensions of life direct and choreograph the production of meaning.
This is the first of four posts about this bit of the book.
objects and mind wrench
One of the first things to stand out in this section was the discussion on the nature of objects. Johnson, constantly involved in trying to keep the reader’s mind on the inter-relationship between action-in-environment and the production of meaning, uses “object” as a way to power the necessary mind wrench away from the felt experience of an object’s separation from self to the ways in which that felt experience comes to be.
It’s no easy task, since the ways in which we feel about how reality is are primarily accomplished prior to awareness, both in each moment (via the unconscious) and in each life (via age). We learnt these lessons as infants; it’s hard to see around them as adults.
For several paragraphs I struggled with his objections to the objectivist idea that objects and their qualities exist independently of their perceivers. He isn’t saying that grapes, once not viewed by human eye, disappear into some literary equivalent of a quantum field. (Silly, silly, silly.) It’s more like a green grape – where is the green? There are so many layers to this. The chemical substances that we perceive as green are certainly in the flesh of the grape but are the chemical substances therefore green? In fact, what it is to be green is a relationship between what it is to be a perceiving agent and a relatively stable environmental situation/pattern in which that chemical (a stable pattern of its own) interact. And don’t forget that the “perceiving agent” is also really just a stable pattern (even a set of stable patterns).
It’s so much easier to just say “it’s green”.
…to avoid objectivist interpretation, we might say that they (infants/babies) learn how to regard certain kinds of stable regularities in their environment as objects and other regularities as events.
A nice way to put that I thought. Still wrenching, but stuff like this is.
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