bell - a verbalization of consciousness

Trouble In Vegas

Here’s your one look into my weekend in Las Vegas. You can infer the rest…

Left to Right: Freshy K, Werby-Werbs, Bell Tron, Jammer (in the red tie), Mr. A (in the blue hoody), and Mouton 2020 (in the P.i.m.p. Game hat, aka, “the Pizzle Gizzle Hizzle”). Conspicuously, in the background you’ll find a sign that reads: “DO NOT ENTER“….

Psych: Theory of Mind Final (12/9/05)

Running head (Short Title): REPRESSION AND THEORY OF MIND

Title:
A Longitudinal Analysis of ToM Development in Children,
Whose Parents Display Repressive Tendencies

Aaron M Bell - University of Oregon, 2005

Abstract

This study investigated whether mothers with repressive tendency, those that regulate the experience of negative affect, are more likely to raise children with deficits in theory of mind development. The 144 infant-mother pairs were categorized as either a repressive-mother pair (70) or a nonrepressive-mother pair (74), based on median splits of responses on the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale and the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale. Infant-mother pairs were then observed for two months during in-home, free-play contexts beginning at 6 months of age. Interactions were coded for (a) mother’s use of mental state language that commented appropriately on the infants’ mental states, and (b) mothers’ use of mental state language that did not appropriately reflect their infants’ minds. Performance on a battery of ToM tasks and emotion understanding measures at 48 months was positively correlated with (a), but not related to (b). A regression analysis showed that repressive-mothers’ made significantly less mental state references in infant talk, and further, the use of appropriate mental state comments independently predicted overall ToM performance, accounting for 12% of the variance. Children’s emotional understanding was the only other independent predictor of ToM performance, accounting for 16% of the variance, which again may result specifically from the lack of emotional cues provided by their mothers.

A Longitudinal Analysis of ToM Development in Children,
Whose Parents Display Repressive Tendencies

Over the last twenty years, psychological debate has continued to reveal more about the very human specific cognitive ability to construct a ‘theory of mind’ (ToM), a rich network of mentalistic concepts that adults use to interpret human action and interaction. This ability is thought to be essential for successful social interaction as it specifically enables one to understand and interpret other people’s thoughts, feelings, actions, intentions, and meaning (Baron-Cohen, 2000). Research has found that most young children have developed a basic ToM, enabling them to attribute independent mental states to themselves and to others, by around four years of age (Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001; Flavell, 2000; Cutting & Dunn, 2002). It is also apparent, however, that there are marked differences in social understanding at age 4, with some showing advanced understanding of the intentions, feelings and mental states of other people, and some showing general ToM deficits (e.g., Bartsch & Estes, 1996; Cutting & Dunn, 1999). Additionally, Carpendale and Lewis (Chap 6; in press) present research showing that some children pass the false belief tests at 3 yrs of age, and others at 5ys. Given these large individual differences in ToM ability, a large body of research has sought to understand the factors related to the development of ToM.

One key indicator of ToM development is the ability for a child to attribute false beliefs to oneself and to others, as this implicitly implies that the child has a representational concept of mind and that s/he understands mental states to be subjective representations of the world, which may or may not be congruent with reality (Astington & Gopnik, 1991; Joseph & Tager-Flusberg, 2004). Thus, in ToM research, one social-cognitive milestone has been the performance of children on the false-belief task. This task is designed to make children distinguish between their own and another person’s beliefs, and to differentiate between other people’s false beliefs that do not match their own knowledge (Baron-Cohen, 1995, 2000; Brune, 2005; Joseph & Tager-Flusberg, 2004).

It should be noted that there is no clear consensus on what should or should not be included in the notion of a fully developed ToM. Some experiments use a battery of False-Belief tasks, while others combine children’s understandings of emotions (e.g., Cutting & Dunn, 2002; Ruffman et at., 2002, etc). Research has found distinct correlates to suggest that both aspects of social understanding are meaningful to the development of ToM (e.g., Astington, 1993, 2001). For example, false-belief and emotional understanding have both been found to be related to the quantity and quality of pretend play (Astington & Jenkins, 1995; Hughes & Dunn, 1997), to children’s friendship interactions (Dunn & Cutting, 1999), to social skills (Cutting & Dunn, 2002), and to their moral sensibility (Dunn, 1995; Dunn & Cutting & Demetriou, 2000). Additionally, false belief tasks been shown to demand understanding of emotions such as surprise, regret, guilt, shame and embarrassment (Carpendale & Lewis, Chap. 9, in press). In general, an understanding of beliefs and emotions is required in making sense of many social situations. As Wellman and Banerjee (1991) suggest, “understanding the nature and causes of emotions is part and parcel of acquiring a ToM, and understanding internal states of mind is part and parcel of acquiring an understanding of emotion.” Furthermore, Carpendale and Lewis (Chap. 9; in press) will insist that children must care about others’ differing perspectives, and give them equal weight in reaching a solution, hence some notion of caring or valuing others’ perspectives must be considered (Sutton et al., 1999b; Arsenio & Lemerise, 2001; Carpendale & Lewis, Chap. 9, in press).

Carpendale and Lewis (Chap. 9; in press) remind us that researchers cannot simply focus on beliefs and neglect emotion. We need to seriously consider the role of emotions and its relationship to understanding and representing other minds (Dunn, 1996; Harris, 1989; Carpendale & Lewis, Chap. 9, in press). A number of authors have criticized the “theories of mind” literature for neglecting emotions and have argued for the importance of emotions in the development of social understanding (e.g., Banerjee, 2004; Dunn, 1996; Hobson, 2002, 2004; Thompson & Raikes, 2004; Carpendale & Lewis, Chap. 9, in press). Carpendale & Lewis (Chap. 9; in press) claim that some emotions are inextricably linked to thinking about others’ views of the self, and are therefore closely connected to children’s social understanding. ToM and emotion have even been linked physiologically, as both seem to share similar domains in the brain, the prefrontal lobe - though this is based on a small sample (Dunn, 1995; Cutting & Dunn, 1999; Hughes & Dunn, 1998). It has also been thought that our false-belief abilities build onto our emotional understanding. Researchers have found that children largely use desire terms first, with little to no use of belief terms, and as the child ages, the use of belief terms increase to become equal to and eventually exceed desire terms at 4 years of age. This leads researchers to believe that the concept of desire not only develops first, but that one’s understanding of belief builds onto a ‘theory’ of desire.

The origins of individual differences in said ToM and emotion are not fully understood, but research has found many genetic and environmental influences, such as verbal ability (Happe, 1995; Jenkins & Astington, 1996), family background (Cutting & Dunn, 1999), and family talk about inner states (Dunn, et al., 1991; Ruffman, Perner, & Parkin, 1999). It is important to note that children’s real-world social behavior occurs in familiar settings that have huge emotional significance to them (Astington, 2003), and any further research on child development must take into consideration the combination of emotional and belief abilities that constitute one’s social understanding.

Carpendale and Lewis (Chap. 7; in press) give us many instances where mother’s language influences the development of their children’s social understanding. They cite one longitudinal study by Judy Dunn and her colleagues (Dunn, Brown, Slomkowski, Tesla & Youngblade, 1991) who followed a sample of 50 children and their families with in-home observations of family interaction beginning when the children were 33 months of age. The children were given tests to assess their understanding of belief and emotions when they were 40 months old. In this ground-breaking study, Dunn et al. (1991) found that families in which there was more talk about feelings and more use of causal mental state language had children who were more advanced in understanding beliefs when they were tested 7 months later. This clearly raised the issue that parental speech might be at work as an influence on the child’s developing ToM.

A recent wave of research has explored the transmission of ToM skills from parent to child has been implicated as a possible factor of individual difference in ToM. However, trying to determine the causal direction of influence is difficult. Among the reasons for this difficulty is the fact that even longitudinal studies (e.g., Dunn et al., 1991) generally assess social interaction during the months immediately preceding the ToM assessments for 4-year-old children. This is problematic because 4-year-olds have already acquired a vocabulary of mental and emotional state words, and thus may themselves be the driving force behind conversations using psychological language (Meins, et al., 2002). As Carpendale & Lewis (Chap. 7; in press) point out, the direction of influence could be (1) the way mothers talk influences the child’s social cognitive development, or it could be (2) that mothers of children who are advanced in their social understanding somehow pick up on this from the child’s language and thus talk more about mental states than other mothers, or that (3) a third factor could be involved, such as IQ: brighter children.

Mein (1997a), who took this idea one step further, formulates the notion of ‘mind-mindedness,’ “the proclivity to treat one’s infant as an individual with a mind, rather than merely an entity with needs that must be satisfied” (Meins et al., 2002). To make stronger claims about the causal influence of social-interactional factors, it seems best to check for mother’s mind-mindedness at an age before the child has begun to acquire mental state language. If language is assessed after 28 months of age, results can be skewed by the children’s abilities to use mental state language themselves. Meins et al. (2002), however, assessed mothers’ mind-mindedness at 6 months, testing for mothers’ use of mental state language and overall infant-mother attachment security. They reported that mothers who used appropriate mental state language raised infants who had secure attachments and who performed better on ToM tasks at age 4 than did those children with insecure attachments. Such long-term longitudinal findings are encouraging, and provide greater confidence and reliability that this aspect of children’s social interactions facilitates the development of their ToM understanding.

Given the significant influence that mother’s talk has on children’s social development, the present study tests whether mothers’ repressive tendencies might influence children’s ToM performance. Repression, being an emotional defense mechanism, has both an emotional and a cognitive intentionally component, and may very well prove to influence the transmission of parental ToM to the ToM development in their children.

The perceptual world is riddled with components that causes adults to wrestle with unwanted and unpleasant thoughts, feelings and moods. To the emotionally sensitive onlooker, repressors appear to defend the self from unwanted thoughts and undesirable mood states and this ability precludes them from the capacity of fully experiencing negative emotion (Boden & Baumeister, 1997; Davis, 1987). Research has identified repressors as those who possess a frequent repressive coping tendency for a whole range of negative emotional stimuli, not just for severely traumatic experiences. In cases of shock, severe trauma, severe threat and severe pain nearly all people experience a sense of depersonalization. In fact, it is rare to see an adult emotion that is not regulated in some way or another (Richards & Gross, 2000). However, repression is a relatively common form of mental control - reported by normal individuals, depressed individuals, anxious and worried individuals, obsessive and compulsive individuals, obese individuals and posttraumatic stressed individual alike (Wenzlaff & Bates, 2000). Its commonality is reason alone for investigating its possible effects on mothers’ mind-mindedness, and any consequential influences on the developing ToM understanding in children.

The academic community agrees that repressors bear two particular qualities: patterns of low levels of distress/anxiety and high levels of defensiveness (Davis, 1987; Myers, 2000; Weinberger, 1995). Low trait anxiety scores and high defensiveness scores are determined by a variety of standardized tests. The most common measurements are the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale for defensiveness and the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale for anxiety (Baumeister & Cairns, 1992; Mikulincer & Orbach, 1995; Myers, 2000). The underlining assumption is that these individuals are vulnerable to anxiety but tend to deny and repress it. When compared to non-repressors, repressors have also been shown to significantly report less negative affect from the following emotions: sadness, remorse, regret, anxiety, fear, pity, and/or loss. Boden and Baumeister (1997) found that when prompted to recall a happy personal memory after watching an unpleasant mood inducing videotape, repressors were faster than non-repressors and, when asked to merely recall the first memory that comes to mind, repressors spontaneously evoked pleasant memories. This is consistent with the notion that repressors are quicker to remove negative thoughts from their consciousness and suggest that they are likely to replace those negative experiences with positive memories, as opposed to linking them with other negative thoughts (Mikulincer & Orbach, 1995).

As influences on developing minds, it is possible that mothers with repressive tendency might raise children who inherit a skewed emotional understanding, and this may or may not affect the rate at which a child’s ToM develops. The present research is a longitudinal study that examines both repressive and non-repressive mothers and their infants, from 6 months of age to 48 months. Mothers will be measured for repressive tendency and mind-mindedness (use of appropriate mental state references), and comprehensive assessments will be used to determine children’s ToM understanding, including false belief understanding, affective perspective-taking, and understanding of emotional causes and mixed emotions. We expect to replicate the same significant relationship between secure attachment and mother’s use of mental state language as found in previous research, and to further investigate if ‘repression’ is a learned model of emotion that potentially disrupts the development of one’s theory of mind. I predicted that (a) mothers with repressive tendency would predict deficits in children’s ToM performance, (b) mothers with repressive tendency would use less appropriate mental state language (mind-mindedness), and © that mother’s mind-mindedness would predict ToM performance in children. If hypothesis (a) serves correct, this study would not only provide evidence that emotion and mind understanding are interrelated for ToM understanding, but that emotional defense mechanisms in parents’ ToM may causally hinder their child’s development of ToM.

Method

Participants

Research participants were 144 infant-mother pairs from the city of Portland, Oregon, and surrounding suburbs. Participants included 73 boys and 71 girls who were all recruited through local health centers and baby clinics, where 75% of mothers who were approached agreed to take part in the study. There were no restrictions on subjects for demographic reasons. Children came about equally from middle class and working class backgrounds, the latter included some neighborhoods of considerable urban deprivation, and all attended primary schools. Sixty-eight percent were White, 26% were Black or Mixed race, and 6% were from other ethnic groups. Mothers were administered the Marlowe-Crowne and Tayler Manifest scales to assess repressive tendency at the beginning of the study (6 month old children), and again when the children were 4 years old. Measures of mind-mindedness were obtained at 6 months and infant-mother attachment security was assessed using the Strange Situation procedure at 12 months. Children were followed up at 45 and 48 months when their performance on age-appropriate ToM tasks was assessed. Treatment of all subjects was in full accordance with the “Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (American Psychological Association, 1992).

Materials

Administered to each mother were the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (see Appendix A), used as the defensiveness scale, and the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale (see Appendix B), used as the anxiety scale.

Procedure

Participants received a brief welcome and introduction by the experimenter. Mothers were given an informed consent form before proceeding, and information on family background was collected (age, maternal education, # of siblings, ethnicity). Every mother-infant pair was run individually, across 6 separate visits. The first three visits were each 20-min, in-home sessions (visits conducted, on average, 1 week apart) that assessed mother’s mind-mindedness while the child was 6-months of age. At the first visit, the mothers were provided with two surveys to complete on a laptop computer, the Marlowe-Crowne and the Taylor Manifest; responses were answered directly on the computer screen and the subject was told that the experimenter would pay no attention to her individual responses. Instructions for each survey were read out loud by the experimenter. The 4th visit was again an in-home visit at 12 months, and infant-mother interaction was videotaped for 20-min and later coded for attachment security. On the 5th visit, each child-mother pair attended the university’s developmental research laboratory when the child was 45-months of age, and was administered a battery of emotion understanding tasks. For the 6th and final visit, each child-mother pair returned once more to the university when the child was 48-months of age, and were administered a battery of false-belief tasks. The mother was re-administered the Marlowe-Crowne and the Taylor Manifest surveys, and her responses were cross-checked for reliability with her first responses 3.5 years prior. Each family was given $250 as compensation after having attended all 6 visits.

Measures

Mother’s mind-mindedness was assessed using measures suggested by Meins et al. (2002) and all videotapes were coded by a third-party researcher who was blind to all other measures and to the study’s hypothesis. Additionally, a randomly chosen fifth of the tapes was coded by a second blind researcher to insure interrater agreement was high. The ToM battery that measured early understanding of mental states consisted of 3 emotion understanding tasks that were administered at 45 months of age, and 3 false-belief tasks that were administered at 48 months of age.

Maternal Mind-mindedness. Mothers were videotaped interacting with their 6-month-old infants for three separate 20-min free play sessions at each participant’s home. Mothers were given no specific instructions on how to act during these sessions, other than being asked to play with their infants as they would do if the experimenters were not present. Mother’s behavior was coded for maternal mind-mindedness, and involved measures that were consistent with Meins et al. (2002).

Mental state language was categorized using Meins et al.’s (2001) category of mind-related comments: (a) comments on mental states, such as knowledge, thoughts, desires, and interests (e.g., “You know what that is, it’s a ball.”; “I think that you think it’s a drum.”); (b) comments on mental processes (e.g., “Do you remember seeing a camel?”; “Are you thinking?”); © references to the level of emotional engagement (e.g., comments about being bored, self-conscious, or excited); (d) comments on attempts to manipulate people’s beliefs (e.g., “You’re joking.”; “You’re just teasing me.”); (e) the mother “putting words into her infant’s mouth” so that the mother’s discourse took on the structure of a dialog between her infant and herself (e.g., “He says, ‘I think I’ve got the hang of that now’”; “She says, ‘I’m not interested in him, I’ve already got one’.”).

Mothers’ use of mental state comments were further subdivided into ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’ use to investigate the contribution to child’s ToM performance. Every mind-related comment was assigned appropriateness using Meins et al.’s (2001) criteria: a comment was classified as ‘appropriate’ if (a) the independent coder agreed with the mother’s reading of her infant’s psychological state, (b) the comment linked the infant’s current activity with similar events in the past or future, and/or © the comment served to clarify how to proceed if there was a lull in the interaction; a comment was classified as ‘inappropriate’ if (i) the coder believed that the mother was misinterpreting her infant’s psychological state, (ii) the comment referred to a past or future event that had no obvious relation to the infant’s current activity, (iii) the mother asked what the infant wanted to do, or commented that the infant wanted or preferred a different object or activity, when the infant was already actively engaged in an activity or was showing a clear preference for a particular object; and/or (iv) the referent of the mother’s comment was not clear. Further, mind-related comments were computed as proportions of the total number of comments produced during the 60 minutes of total session work.

Strange Situation Procedure: Infant-mother attachment security was assessed using the Strange Situation procedure, originally presented by Ainsworth and Wittig (1969). Continued observations of infant-mother observations were videotaped in-home for an additional 20-min session when the child was 12-months of age. Behavior was coded by the author, a nationally trained and world-recognized attachment rater, and attachment was coded as a dichotomous variable (insecure/secure), although insecurity was further differentiated as insecure-disorganized, insecure-avoidant, or insecure-resistant. A randomly chosen fifth of the tapes were coded a second time by an independent trained rater.

False-Belief Tasks. In this study, preschool theory of mind ability was indexed by an aggregate score of children’s success across a seven-part false belief task, all parts involved predicting, explaining or recalling a false belief. The tasks included four unexpected location tasks (2 prediction, 2 explanation), based on those of Bartsch and Wellman (1989), and three unexpected contents false belief tasks, two based on tasks by Harris, Johnson, Hutton, Andrews, and Cooke (1989), and the “Can’t Sleep” task from Hughes, Dunn, and White (1998). These tasks and their interrelations are described in full detail in Cutting and Dunn (1999). In all cases, both the test and reality control questions must be answered correctly to pass the task. Children scored 1 point for each false belief task passed, except in the 2 explanation tasks where 2 points were awarded for spontaneous explanations and 1 for prompted explanations.

Briefly, in a typical unexpected location task, children were presented with a prototypical box and a plain box, and shown that the prototypical box was empty, while the plain box contained the item in question. The child as asked where a puppet, who was ignorant of the contents, would search for the item (or why the puppet was searching in the prototypical box), and where the item was really located.

In the unexpected contents task, the contents of a container were swapped in a puppet’s absence. Children were then asked what the puppet thought was in the container, and what it really contained.

In the “Can’t Sleep” task, children were shown the pages of a story book, each of which had a hole through which an animal’s eye could be seen. On the last page, what appeared to be another eye transpired to be a spot on a snake’s tail. Children were asked what a puppet would think he could see though the hole before the last page was turned, and what it was really.

Emotion Understanding Tasks. Children’s affective perspective-taking ability was assessed using Denham’s (1986) task. Children had to name and indicate four emotions (happy, sad, angry and scared) illustrated on felt faces. A puppet then enacted 16 vignettes portraying situations in which the protagonist felt happiness, sadness, anger or fear, such as going to the zoo, seeing a parent off on a trip, having a toy hidden by a sibling, or having a bad dream. Children had to identify how the puppet felt in each vignette. In the first 8 vignettes, the puppet felt what most children would typically feel in the given situation. In the other 8 vignettes the puppet’s emotion differed from the emotion that the mother said the child typically expressed in such a situation (established beforehand by interviewing the mother). For each vignette in Denham’s procedure, children scored 2 points for a correct emotional identification, 1 for the correct valence but wrong specific emotion (e.g., ‘sad’ instead of ‘scared’), and zero for a completely incorrect answer (e.g., ‘happy’ instead of ‘angry’). Scores were summed across the 16 affective perspective-taking scenarios (max. score = 32).

The second emotion understanding procedure was an interview based on a method by Cassidy, Parke, Butkovsky, and Braungart (1992). In this interview, children were asked to identify each of four emotions (happy, sad, angry, and scared), and were asked what made themselves, their mothers and their friends feel each emotion (see Dunn & Hughes, 1998, for further details). Children’s responses were recorded and transcribed verbatim. The adequacy of each response was coded on a 5-point scale in which 0 = no response, denial; 1 = poor response, including relevant remarks, misunderstanding the causal nature of question, or suggesting a very unlikely cause; 2 = adequate response, including one-word or simple causes which were appropriate and plausible (e.g., friend, scared: ‘Monsters’); 3 = good response, including relevant appropriate sentence, or more than one adequate response (e.g., mother, happy: ‘When someone bought her flowers’); 4 = excellent response, including elaborate response or evidence of insight (e.g., self, happy: ‘Fireworks. They’re gonna be at the one o’clock club. I’ll be very happy because I haven’t seen it before’). Scores were summed across all 4 emotions and 3 people to give a total understanding of emotional causes score (maximum score = 48). Agreement on coding was assessed by two coders rating transcripts from 25 children.

The third emotion understanding procedure sought out children’s comprehension of mixed emotion. A story-telling interview based on that developed by Gordis, Rosen, and Grand (1989) was used to assess children’s understanding of situations in which a person can feel two opposite emotions. Two sets of stories were presented; in the first set, children were explicitly told that the protagonist felt two conflicting emotions and were asked to explain why. In the second set, children were told stories, and asked what the character felt (the correct answer being two conflicting emotions). There were three stories in each set. Finally children were asked whether they had ever experienced both a positive and negative emotion at the same time, and if so, to describe that situation. Children’s responses were tape-recorded and transcribed. For the six stories, scores were 0 for no emotions explained/stated, 1 for one emotion, or 2 for two opposite-valenced emotion for each story. In the ‘own story’ condition, 2 points were given if the children provided plausible explanations for two opposite-valenced emotions. Children’s responses were summed across the three conditions (max. possible score = 14 pts).

Results

Using a measure suggested by Boden and Baumeister (1997), participants were identified as repressors and non-repressors after a median split on the anxiety and social desirability scales. Mothers scoring above the median (5 out of 10) on the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (Myers, 2000), and below the median (18 out of 50) of the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale (Myers, 2000), were identified as repressors for the purpose of the experiment. All other individuals were identified as non-repressors. This classification strategy provided 72 repressors and 72 non-repressors.

As explained earlier, we believe that a full understanding of ToM performance involves both false-belief and emotion understanding. To provide a picture of children’s overall ToM performance across the three false-belief tasks and the three emotion understanding tasks, a composite ToM score was computed for each child. Equal weight was given to all six tasks in our composite, and 1 point was given for each task to make for a possible ToM performance score of 0 through 6. Composite scores were also computed for overall mothers’ mind-mindedness, and security of attachment.

We used a pairwise correlation matrix to show relations between all of the independent variables (composite scores) and children’s overall ToM performance. A regression analysis was used with repression tendency, mother’s mind-mindedness and attachment to predict overall ToM performance.

Discussion

The aim of this study was to examine whether mothers with repressive tendency predict children to show sociocognitive deficits in overall ToM performance, and further, that repression in mothers may lead to using significantly less appropriate mental state language. False-belief tasks and emotion understanding assessments could have juxtaposed any number of combinations of children’s ToM abilities against mothers’ repressive tendency and/or mental state language usage, but for purposes of this hypothetical discussion section, I will make reference to the four most likely outcomes that could be expected.

If repressive mothers use less mental state language & their children show ToM deficits:

Results showed that both mothers’ repressive tendency and mind-mindedness accounted for a significant portion of variance in children’s low ToM performance. This indicates that mothers with repressive tendency not only used significantly less appropriate mental state references, but that they made mental state references less often. Furthermore, it was found that the children of repressive mothers showed significant deficits in their ToM development. This provides broad support for our hypothesis, and that repression, as a defense mechanism for experienced emotion, directly influences the way ToM develops in their children. These results would confirm research that suggests that (a) early exposure to mental state language facilitates subsequent ToM performance in a child, (b) transmission of parental/maternal ToM understanding is the process by which infant children learn to develop their own ToM (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986 as sighted in Carpendale & Lewis, Chap. 6; in press), © mother’s mind-mindedness at 6 months is a helpful indicator of later ToM performance in child, (d) Social Construct theory is an accurate theoretical conceptualization of ToM (vs. theory-theory, or modularity, etc.), and finally, (e) emotions and beliefs are inextricably linked to ToM understanding.

The remaining question becomes which aspects of ToM performance suffered most, the false-belief tasks, or the emotional understanding tasks. I would expect to see each of the emotion understanding tasks suffer, while each of the false belief tasks remained average. Emotion understanding discrepancies would be explained by the skewed emotional experience of the mother. But I do not believe that emotion deficiencies resulting from repression would exclude children from false belief abilities. They still have an understanding of emotions, but one that does not allow them to accurately attribute negative emotions to others. If false belief performance also suffered, we would suspect that emotion is more deeply connected with cognitive/belief understanding than originally described. This could be further justification for the research that builds on the notion that desire concepts form earlier than belief concepts in the child, and that belief understanding builds on top of emotion understanding.

If repressive mothers use more mental state language & rep-children show ToM advancements:

Results showed that mothers’ repressive tendency and mind-mindedness accounted for a significant portion of variance in children’s high ToM performance. This indicates that mothers with repressive tendency not only consistently used appropriate mental state references, but that they made mental state references more often. Furthermore, it was found that the children of repressive mothers showed significant advancements in their ToM development. Such findings are in direct contradiction to the study’s hypothesis, but suggest that repression, as a defense mechanism for experienced emotion, may directly motivate advanced ToM development in children. Children with mothers who display repressive tendencies may routinely receive more verbal justification for experienced emotion, and this would be consistent with the increase in mothers’ use of mental state language. It may be the case that the mothers habitually draw attention to emotional cues (even if only to defend themselves from negative affect), and by so doing, their children become hyper-critical of their own emotional experience in ways that perpetuate understanding. This would account for the strong mind-mindedness and advanced ToM performance shown throughout repressive-mother-child pairs.

The following should also be considered: (a) which of the ToM tasks showed advanced understanding from the children of repressive mothers, (b) if repressive tendency becomes necessarily intertwined with the child’s future ToM development, and © why repressive tendency was cause for an increase in mothers’ mind-mindedness. The study is designed to compute a ToM score that reflects performance across both emotional and belief understanding. To show advanced performance is to at least perform to normal standards on one set of tasks, and above standards on another set. With such results, I’d suspect that children were proficient with emotion understanding but struggled to show advancements in the mixed emotion tasks. But we could have seen an entirely opposite effect, and repression mothers may inherently best help their children resolve emotion conflicts (always seeking positive affect, of course). This study’s weakness lies in its inability to examine influence of individual differences in social understanding after the 4 year of age. It’s true that many children develop ToM over different time frames, and it would be advantageous to continue follow-up assessments in attempts to better determine the magnitude of any found hindrances or catalysts to ToM development. It should also be noted that these results ultimately speak to repressive tendency’s ability to increase effective use of mental state language, and the real importance of this influence may lie not in the first year of life, but through persistent use throughout the preschool years.

If mothers show no difference in mental state language & rep-children show ToM deficits:

Results showed that mothers’ repressive tendency independently accounted for a significant portion of variance in children’s low ToM performance. This indicates that mothers with repressive tendency did not make mental state references in ways that significantly distinguish them from nonrepressive mothers. Furthermore, it was found that the children of repressive mothers showed significant deficits in their ToM development. Such findings conflict with the study’s hypothesis, but only because they suggest that repression, as a defense mechanism for experienced emotion, may directly hinder ToM development in children in ways immeasurable by mind-mindedness assessments made at 6 months of age. It is very possible that the repression tendencies in mothers contributed to children’s ToM deficits between 6 and 45 months of age. Although the relation between attachment and ToM is best explained by individual differences in mothers’ mind-mindedness (Meins et al., 1998, 2002), it may be advantageous to consult the results from the Strange Situation procedure. This assessment was made at 12 months of age for the purposes of further assessing the strength of attachment between the child and mother, and we might be able to infer potential influence from repressive mothers by its results.

The study provides parameters that restrict significant influence specifically to the repressive tendency in mothers. This tendency is expected to play-out in the mind-mindedness assessments, but such an outcome suggests that, in fact, repression is making its influence in other ways. This may have something to do with (a) discipline style (parental warmth, vs. strictness, vs. gender, etc), (b) father figure influences and other primary caregivers, © interpretation of and sensitivity to criticism, (d) the way attention is divided between siblings, etc. All of these could have implications that would exacerbate the influence of repressive tendency in mothers and make for deficits in both false-belief tasks and emotion understanding. It false-belief tasks are the only aspects of ToM performance that suffer, it may be that the child is not challenged by the mother to overcome errors in judgment. This theory is derived from a weak suspicion that repressive mothers will do their best to avoid negative affect, and (a) provide too much care in ways that prevent the child from developing, or (2) are too quick to shrug-off mistakes that children make for fear of imposing negative affect on their young identities.

If mothers show no difference in mental state language & rep-children show ToM advancements:

Results showed that mothers’ repressive tendency independently accounted for a significant portion of variance in children’s high ToM performance. Such an outcome is very similar to the previous discussion. The only difference is that repression is suggested to influence the advancement of ToM understanding in children, but again, the specific ways in which the mechanism achieves this is left to speculation. Again, to make sense of such results, we would have to interrogate the ToM performance tasks to determine which (if not both) sets of understanding tasks were performed with advanced understanding. An outcome of such a discussion is previously mentioned. What we are particularly finding with these results is the difficultly to isolate influential variables in these ToM performance experiments. The entire ToM research field has stumbled to define direction of causality, but such an results would admit that repression is bringing cognitive benefits to children in ways that are not detectable through mental state language use. This seems very strange, and is cause for a few questions, (a) What other behaviors could mothers’ emotion experience be consistently and quantifiably conveyed to children if not through language?, (b) which other family factors might be distinctly influenced by mother’s repressive tendency?, © assuming that emotion tasks are performed with advanced understanding by the children, how does the child interpret the mother’s skewed experience of emotion to his/her benefit?

A few general comments should be made about the limitations of this study. A degree of caution is warranted in interpreting the results, as the correlations, although significant and predictive in nature, are necessarily very modest. In the study’s favor, however, is a large and socio-economically diverse sample, which is rare in research in social cognition. Again, this study examined the influence of individual differences in social understanding over just one year (their 4th year of age). This is a particularly important year in the life of a young child, involving many life changes such as the transition to school, but future studies will need to examine longer-term sequelae of individual differences in social understanding. It is important to note that there may be costs as well as benefits to understanding other people well, early in life. There have been suggestions that good sociocognitive skills can be put to bad use, for example by some types of bully (Sutton, Smith, & Swettenham, 1999), and that some children may have a ‘theory of nasty minds,’ showing better sociocognitive ability within negative domains such as antisocial behavior (Happe & Frith, 1996) or mean tricks (Hughes et al., 1998). The repressive tendency in mothers may very well further discussions of how young children manage their negative emotions, and hopefully this study inspires further interest in the matter. How such children learn to control or differentiate the emotional aspects of their (and others’) minds can only be hypothesized in this study. I am suggesting that such theorizing might gain some insight by looking to Moses’ and Carlson’ (2004) work on effortful control, the suppression of a dominant response in favor of a subdominant response. This is a behavior that should be found to be more dominant in children with parental repressors. Of course, all such long-term implications would require further investigation if we are to understand fully the role of social cognition in everyday life.

In closing, our study seemed to provide an adequate starting point for our ongoing interests in the causality of ToM performance in children. Any set of results will show tendencies that might offer a helpful perspective into the possible differences and/or similarities between repressive and non-repressive mothers and their influence on the developing ToM in their children.

References:

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Astington, J.W. (2001). The future of theory-of-mind research: Understanding motivational states, the role of language, and real-world consequences. Child Development, 72, 685-687

Astington, J.W. (2003). Chapter 2: Sometimes necessary, never sufficient: False-belief understanding and social competence. Individual differences in theory of mind. pp. 13-35.

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Astington, J.W, & Jenkins, J.M. (1995). Theory of mind development and social understanding. Cognition and Emotion, 9, 151-165

Baron-Cohen, S. (2000). Chapter 1: Theory of mind and autism: a fifteen year review. In S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, & D. J. Cohen (Eds.), Understanding other minds: Perspectives from developmental cognitive neuroscience (pp. 3-20). Oxford: Oxford University Press

Bartsch, K., & Estes, D. (1996). Individual differences in children’s developing theory of mind and implications for metacognition. Learning and Individual Differences, 8, 281-304

Bartsch, K., & Wellman, H.M. (1989). Young children’s attribution of action to beliefs and desires. Child Development, 60, 946-964

Baumeister, R.F., & Cairns, K. J. (1992). Repression and self-presentation: When audience interfere with self-deceptive strategies. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 62(5), 851-862.

Boden, J.M., & Baumeister, R.F. (1997). Repressive coping: Distraction using pleasant thoughts and memories. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 73(1), 45-62.

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Cutting, A.L., & Dunn., J. (2002). The cost of understanding other people: social cognition predicts young children’s sensitivity to criticism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 43(7), 849-860

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Dunn, J. (1996). The Emmanuel Miller Memorial Lecture 1995. Children’s relationships: Bridging the divide between cognitive and social development. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 37, 507-518

Dunn, J., Brown, J., Slomkowski, C., Tesla., C., & Youngblade, L. (1991b). Young children’s understanding of others’ feelings and beliefs: Individual differences and their antecedents. Child Development, 62, 1352-1366

Dunn, J., & Cutting, A. (1999). Understanding others, and individual differences in friendship interactions in young children, Social Development, 8, 201-219

Dunn, J., Cutting, A.L., & Demetriou, H. (2000). Moral sensibility, understanding of others, and children’s friendship interactions in the preschool period. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 18, 159-177

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Happé, F. (1995). The role of age and verbal ability in ToM performance of children with autism. Child Development, 66, 843-855

Harris, P.L., Johnson, C., Hutton, D., Andrews, G., & Cooke, T. (1989). Young children’s theory of mind and emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 3, 374-400

Hughes, C., & Dunn, J. (1997). Pretend you didn’t know Preschoolers’ talk about mental states in pretend play. Cognitive Development, 34(6), 1326-1339

Hughes, C., Dunn, J., & White, A. (1998). Trick or treat? Uneven understanding of mind and emotion and executive dysfunction in “hard-to-manage” preschoolers. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry of Allied Disciplines, 39, 981-994

Hughes, C., Jaffee, S.R., Happé, F., Taylor, A., Caspi, A., & Moffitt, T.E. (2005). Origins of individual differences in theory of mind: from nature to nurture? Child Development, 76, 356-370

Jenkins, J.M., & Astington, J.W. (1996). Cognitive factors and family structure associated with theory of mind development in young children. Developmental Psychology, 32, 70-78

Joseph, R.M., & Tager-Flusberg, H. (2004). The relationship of theory of mind and executive functions to symptom type and severity in children with autism. Development and Psychopathology, 16, 137-155

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Schopenhauer Final (12/9/05)

Aaron Bell
Schopenhauer - 553
Will Davie
9 December 2005

Note to Prof. Davie - it has been a real struggle to wrestle with Schopenhauer. He has challenged my life’s philosophy to the core, and it was very important to me to salvage some sense of positive value from his writings that didn’t demand the complete obliteration of the willful self. I’ve re-written this paper many times, but this will be the draft I finish. If I was to re-write this paper again, I’d pick a passage that I easily agree with and found much more defendable, like this:

“However much great and small worries fill up human life, … they are unable to mask life’s inadequacy to satisfy the spirit; they cannot conceal the emptiness and superficiality of existence, or exclude boredom which is always ready to fill up every pause granted by care. The result of this is that the human mind, still not content with the cares, anxieties, and preoccupations laid upon it by the actual world, creates for itself an imaginary world in the shape of a thousand different superstitions.” (TWAWAR, v.1, p 322)

“Man creates himself in his own image demons, gods, and saints; then to these must be incessantly offered sacrifices, prayers, temple decorations, vows and their fulfillment, pilgrimages, salutations, adornment of images and so on. Their service is everywhere closely interwoven with reality, and indeed obscures it. Every event in life is then accepted as the counter-effect of these beings. Intercourse with them fills up half the time of life, constantly sustains hope, and, by the charm of delusion, often becomes more interesting than intercourse with real beings. It is the expression and the symptom of man’s double need, partly for help and support, partly for occupation and diversion.” TWAWAR, v.1, p323

or, quite simply, I’d take on the following question: Is Suicide an affirmation of the will? …

But for my own sanity, I had to defend my belief system. My entire being was at stake.
~Aaron
—————————————————-

Title:
All Life Is … Striving!
- putting positive value back into ‘the negativity of satisfaction’ -

As living beings, we are fated to a life of striving. This cannot be changed. Life must strive to survive. The body and mind undeniably have needs and desires that demand attention and fulfillment, and striving is understood as the perpetual task of trying to satisfy such demands. Throughout his text, The World as Will and Representation, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer views striving as a fundamental characteristic of life, and further, he insists that suffering is a natural and unavoidable bi-product of the striving process. For Schopenhauer, striving presupposes a state where life has some degree of irreparably negative value, where we strive because we suffer from feelings of lack, and where the attainment of anything we strive for is so temporary, that it forever leaves us with no less suffering than whence we started. Because he viewed suffering as ceaseless and unavoidable, Schopenhauer is very quick to characterize the entire human experience as wretched and woeful: “all life is suffering,’ and further, ‘it would have been better for us not to exist.’1

There is no mistake that Schopenhauer provides an extremely negative account of ordinary human life, and in so doing, the value and the meaning of human existence fall in jeopardy. I will insist that Schopenhauer has moved too fast when he concludes that all life is suffering. He has wrongfully made the leap that striving and suffering are nearly synonymous, suggesting that striving necessarily brings suffering with it. It must be understood that striving is not due to lack alone, it is an overcoming of sorts - and further, it is a condition for what it means to be living; a basic tenet common to all forms of life. In this essay, let us recover a fuller understanding of the nature of striving, readdress the possibility of positive value in the human experience, and begin to posit ways of achieving positive value for the individual, without denying the will. In our attempt to make sense of human life, striving is our first presupposition.

WHAT STRIVING IS:

Schopenhauer identifies a constant striving within all living things. To help us see the similarities, he shows all human beings to be as restless as the ceaseless activity of the plant cycle. For like the plant, with its rise from the ground, to the development of its seeds, to the growth of new plants, we too are laboriously involved in the perpetuation of the human life cycle, repeated ad infinitum,2 with no point of rest when seen from without. Further, he explains that there is a constant struggle between life and death within such cycles. Despite death’s inevitability, the tendency for all living things to individually strive towards life is something Schopenhauer terms “will-to-live.” He concludes, “we have long since recognized this striving… as the same thing that in us … is called will.”3

The will-to-live is the inner mechanism of all things. As it is for other organisms, the will is the root of all our actions and all our movements, and we should understand the human body as the objectification of this will.4 Since our interaction with the world is given entirely through the medium of a body, the act of will serves as the grounds from which one constructs his/her representation of the world. Schopenhauer will say that this will is our Real Self. However, the will itself has no intelligence per say; it is not something that knows, but rather, it is fundamentally something without knowledge.5 “The truth that the will can exist without knowledge is apparent, we might say palpably recognizable, in plant life,”6 since all plants display the characteristics of striving, but lack the brain power to produce an intellect. The affections of the body are the starting-point,7 but it is the intellect that allows us to feel the weight of our striving. This consciousness makes for the special ability to synthesize understanding from one’s perceptions, and to provide a working representation of the world.

Schopenhauer will say that consciousness is something given to all animals and humans alike, and that there are two parts to be found in every consciousness. The primary part is the immediate awareness of a longing, and of the many alternate states of its satisfaction.8 The secondary part, then, is this intelligence that we speak of, which gathers knowledge and makes manifest the Subject. “Intelligence requires an unusually developed, finely formed brain,” whereas the nature of the will is such that “it is not dependent on any organ, and is not to be prognosticated from any.”9

We must remember that the will is identical in all living things, and “in all animal beings the will is the primary and substantial thing; the intellect, on the other hand, is something secondary and additional, in fact a mere tool in the service of the will.”10 As this intellect gains more knowledge of the will within and of the world without, it behaves as one’s knowing consciousness.11 It becomes the Subject of our being, the conscious “I,” if you will. The Subject is always in relation to knowledge: it is that which knows all things, and is known by none. This conscious “I” presupposes the cognitive abilities of the organism, and the organism presupposes the will.

The more complicated the organism becomes, and the more advanced and dominating it’s intellect, the more manifold its needs become. Insisting that the will necessarily struggles to overcome deficiency, Schopenhauer assigns two qualities to the will-to-live that are ultimately perceived by the intellect: (a) the first is that the striving will leads to suffering, which occurs when encountering an obstacle between it and its temporary goal, or when experiencing general dissatisfaction of one’s state or condition;12 and the second, (b) is that the will seeks satisfaction, which is the happiness derived from the achievement of impeding the suffering.

Suffering comes in two forms: pain and boredom - the two foes of human happiness.13 Schopenhauer explains that, “the basis of all willing, … is need, lack and hence pain, and by its very nature and origin [humans are] therefore destined to pain.”14 Our sensibility is the very thing that allows us to experience pain. Thus, the more intelligent a person is, the more complex suffering s/he would endure throughout a lifetime.15 In this respect, ignorance and incompetence could really offer a life of considerably less pain, though by definition, it would still be a life that is entirely suffering. On the other side of the striving spectrum, Schopenhauer explains how suffering comes in the form of boredom, which occurs when a person lacks objects of willing. With no objects or goals to strive for, the result is said to be a meaningless and an emptiness that haunts and mocks one’s existence to the point where the miseries of life make death a more tempting alternative.16 “The striving after existence is what occupies all living things, and keeps them in motion… Therefore the second thing that sets them in motion is the effort to get rid of the burden of existence, to make it no longer felt, ‘to kill time,’ in other words, to escape from boredom.”17

Despite this effort to escape from suffering, Schopenhauer quickly reminds us that, “no satisfaction … is lasting; on the contrary, it is always merely the starting-point of a fresh striving.”18 The moment of attainment is too quickly replaced with a new feeling of lack, thus after a brief spell of satisfaction, we arrive at the same position as whence the suffering/desire began.19 In this way, he views satisfaction as completely negative, because the only thing ever to be attained is the absence of suffering or desire. Given this account, satisfaction is really suffering in disguise and the pursuit of it can only perpetuate a life of continued suffering. Schopenhauer would have us see that life is a striving without aim, and as humans, we should acknowledge that, in the end, life is just one giant, unquenchable thirst.20

To review, the inner and essential destiny of the will is suffering, which comes in the form of thirsty desires and unquenchable satisfaction. Our consciousness, and the intellect that eventually dominates it, is what allows for an awareness of suffering that is directly proportional to the amount of knowledge gained. Pain results from any action we will, and boredom arises whenever we have nothing to will.21 Clearly we are stuck between a rock and a very hard place. Additionally, we are right to understand that animals have no conscious “I”, no locus of selfhood, and thus cannot see themselves as we do: as victims of the will-to-live. However, Schopenhauer insists that the intellect is not our Real Self. The real self is the will.22 The intellect is merely what we employ to establish our feelings and perspectives, and it is what is used to make representations of the world around us. Schopenhauer’s philosophy is just this: his representation. And though I approve of his inclusion of the will-to-live, I am suspicious of the actual relationship he sees between the will-to-live and the unavoidable suffering that ensues.

WHY SCHOPENHAUER WANTS US TO STOP STRIVING:

It is clear that Schopenhauer believes that all striving necessarily leads to suffering. He concludes that all living things are “never satisfied striving … nowhere is there a goal, nowhere a final satisfaction, nowhere a point of rest.”23 He believes that no one can gain positive value from a life that affirms the will, a life that involves goals pursued and needs satisfied. For this reason, Schopenhauer will advocate the complete absence of striving. Coincidently, both Schopenhauer and I are primarily concerned with salvaging positive value from the human experience. The difference is Schopenhauer believes that this can only be done by denying the will and forfeiting our sense of individuality, whereas I do not believe this to be necessarily true.

Important to our conversation about value, I must now address how Schopenhauer’s discussion of suffering evolves throughout the context of both volumes of The World as Will and Representation. Such an evolution is to be expected since the two books were written over thirty years apart and any philosophical perspective is liable to develop over such time. In his early writings, Schopenhauer teaches that suffering is unavoidably a characteristic of life24 that emerges from our efforts of ceaseless striving and despite our moments of temporary satisfaction. Later Schopenhauer adds that, through the denial of one’s will, we abandon a life of striving, transcend our individualism and obtain a kind of knowledge of the world that can liberate us from all suffering,25 and consequently, lead us to salvation. This denial of will can happen in one of two ways: the inferior way, which is where the individual experiences such overwhelming suffering that his will-to-live naturally diminishes; and the second way, which Schopenhauer calls the superior way, is where one pursues a higher knowledge with such discipline that she learns to deny her own will in the process. In this paper, we will not interrogate these routes to positive value at length because they are not only rare,26 but they involve the denial of the will when our hope is to arrive at positive value with the will’s affirmation. However, we should acknowledge what the denial of the will provides: 27

“For a moment when, torn from the will, we have given ourselves up to pure, will-less knowing, we have stepped into another world, so to speak, where everything that moves our will, and thus violently agitates us, no longer exists. This liberation of knowledge lifts us as wholly and completely above all this… Happiness and unhappiness have vanished; we are no longer the individual; that is forgotten; we are only pure subject of knowledge [or what we could refer to as a genius].”28

This leaves us in a very precarious situation, where the two avenues to meaning that Schopenhauer provides involve a life where suffering and death reign, or where the denial of one’s inner being29 is necessary. Here, Schopenhauer speaks of a transcendence, a transcendence through the pains of human suffering to a state of pure knowledge that spares you of your miserable individuality and places you at one with all things. I will give Schopenhauer the fact that there is something to be said for denying the will and existing in a state of pure knowledge. I will even acknowledge that there may be a higher, purer meaning to be taken from such a state, however, my efforts in this paper are to show that overwhelming suffering is not the only interpretation that should be taken from the world of will. Specifically, he and I fundamentally disagree that the absence of striving is the only way to reach positive value. Without going to such dramatic lengths, I believe a balance can be maintained in one who affirms the will which allows for the achievement of positive value despite living a life that entails striving.

Respected Schopenhauer scholar, Christopher Janaway, similarly acknowledges both sides of this scenario. In his essay titled, “Schopenhauer’s Pessimism,” Janaway exclaims that “[within Schopenhauer’s view,] my only hope lies in the withering away of my sense of individuality or in my suffering so severely that the will to life within me is broken. That only such outcomes could give positive value to our existence, and to that of the whole world, is surely Schopenhauer’s most pessimistic thought.”30 Working through this pessimism is tremendously difficult, however, this is just the challenge that Christopher Janaway accepts in his essay, and as do I in this paper.

From here forth, I will do three things: address misconceptions of “striving,” readjust our conceptions of “suffering” and introduce new caveats of “positive value.” The three topics of meaning with which I make my argument are intended to recover positive meaning in a human being who is embracing the will-to-life, as opposed to denying it. By not denying the will, Schopenhauer might scoff and remind us that we necessarily resort to the world of suffering, but I think finding positive meaning in such a world is quite possible. Given that the inferior path of overwhelming suffering is the least desirable way towards positive value, this essay is an attempt to rescue meaning for those not prepared to or capable of accessing the knowledge needed for salvation through denying the will.

RECONCEPTIONS OF STRIVING:

Striving is “the inner and essential destiny of the will”31 It is before the experience of any suffering, and it results regardless of any feelings of lack. Striving must first be understood as a basic condition of all life. Because we live, we must strive. Every aspect of our being goes through dimensions of growth or change, some of which take decades to complete. Striving is not only undeniable, it is necessary. It is from where we start, and its maintenance is a matter of balance, before it is a matter of lack. Furthermore, as beings with an intellectual consciousness, we have a choice in the way we experience our striving, and because of this I firmly believe that striving does not presuppose a state with some degree of negative value.

Schopenhauer will explain that there is a failure in regarding one’s pursuit of satisfying the will as the point of human existence.32 And I agree - thinking in this way is shortsighted. I can understand how those who do not deny the will may think that existence can gain value from goals pursued and needs satisfied, but like Schopenhauer, I agree that satisfaction from events is not permanent. And therefore, attaining positive value through the satisfaction of impulse should not be the goal.

Events are short lived and inherently have a beginning and an end. “Satisfaction is thus never anything permanent and always lapses again into painful lack or painful boredom.”33 By nature, one could never maintain a sense of positive value throughout such fluctuation, unless a sense of connectivity could be reached despite. Understanding this distinction is very instrumental in my reconception of striving. Permanence comes not from events, but from the succession of events. Succession, here, implies the way someone lives - it implies the way a series of events could be connected by an overarching method/approach to living. Especially if those that learn to intellectually deny the will are rare and few and far between, it strikes me that we need less emphasis on how to stop striving, and more on how to strive well, on how to unify our striving experience into something valuable. This type of continuity can only be housed in consciousness.

The benefit of human consciousness is its propensity to produce perspective. Beyond our independent goals of striving, we can all perceive a more primal accomplishment in us, “the perpetuation of will itself.” Again, every present action of will is an accomplishment and your ability to continue accomplishing is maintained by your efforts and those of anyone who loves or cares for you. This maintenance is a responsibility to anyone who is concerned about you living (obviously, at least yourself). I will expand on this sense of responsibility as a caveat in my discussion of positive value, but for now, we must understand that life is not simply given; it is earned. Our life is not just a matter of having lack and satisfying it - it is a matter of overcoming.

Will is not just emptily charging into space. It is in perpetual tension against the world and itself, and it requires effort to prolong and maintain one’s life. Every moment of life can be considered a celebration. It is a cultural flaw that our birthdays serve as our only consistent reminder of this celebration. We could be celebratory in every moment! Schopenhauer will say that striving presupposes an awareness of lack, but this overshadows the fact the we are only afforded additional chances to strive because of our past accomplishments. Before we can feel the weight of lack, we have an opportunity to recognize our past successes as gain. This is a matter of perspective and involves the attitude of overcoming. And our consciousness should not be dissuaded by our need to strive, but rather be humbled by the awareness of every gain.

Further, striving is a lifelong process, and value should be determined not by a given outcome, but by a process as well. Now, granted, every human has many aspects of being that demand a kind of striving (e.g., biological, intellectual, emotional, etc). We must strive to keep these aspects in balance, and to strive well, a balance must also happen between the persistent willing itself and the intellect that governs it. As I said before, striving is a matter of balance before it is a matter of lack, and to be balanced, every avenue for striving must be kept in rotation. We open ourselves up to more suffering when we do not put effort into maintaining the manifold aspects of our being (e.g., health, exercise, etc). In fact, it is our chief responsibility and privilege to keep our many aspects of self balanced.

For the animal and plant kingdom, there is no locus of control. For humans, there is a joy to be had in recognizing the self as a life-long project, whose consciousness perpetuates and distinguishes the self as unique and contributive to the greater good. There is something to be said for directing the striving inwards. In this sense, we are striving to have control over one’s character - not to keep it from striving, but to impose a discipline and awareness to one’s character. Allowing the consciousness to evolve in this way may be a route to a True Freedom or true satisfaction, and at the very least, positive meaning. If too much restlessness in the will (too much suffering) can lead to denying the will and ultimately some glimmer of positive value, perhaps embracing the will-to-live by restraining and controlling one’s character can serve as another route. Schopenhauer is right to suggest that expanding our intellect is the path to positive value, but I believe that engaging the intellect can bring about positive value well before completely abandoning the striving will. But again, balance is necessary.34

For example, balance may involve a system of habits to help diffuse the trouble of negotiating one’s different needs. Having a routine can help bring connectivity to events and allow positive value to emerge for varying periods of time - for some this approach could last for weeks, for others years, and for some, their entire lifetime. This in no way implies that all suffering can be avoided, but rather it give us an opportunity to have pride in our maintenance, and to reduce the risk of allowing imbalance to add excess suffering to our lives. In short, it is exercising our will in a way that most alleviates us from (avoidable) suffering. In general, a support system of friends and family can also help manage any unforeseen challenges. And lastly, an ongoing, developing attitude of ‘awareness of gain’ is needed to sustain and manage the multifaceted nature of one’s striving. Even hard times can be balanced out by an awareness of gain. For most, striving is unavoidable, and we’ve got to come to terms with it, as opposed to turn our back on it.

RECONCEPTIONS OF SUFFERING:

In our reconception of striving, we have discovered excessive suffering clearly results from imbalance, from our inability to maintain one’s needs efficiently (e.g., letting a health problem advance to a more severe [and painful] degree). It also emerges when there is no overarching approach to living, no unifying perspective that is aware of gain. If a person fails to infuse his intellect with his will-to-live, he will necessarily be caught in the trap of trying to find value in the satisfaction of independent events, and will forever fall short of recognizing the human experience as one with positive meaning. People who fail to apply their intellects altogether are particularly susceptible to feeling vulnerable to suffering, as Schopenhauer explains, “vehement desires, passionate, violent character is associated with a weak intellect.”35 Again, the locus of value is not to be found in the pursuit of goals, but rather in the perspective that views striving as a process. Lacking the intellectual discipline to sustain an awareness of gain or to maintain a representation that unites several events into one perspective will surely lead to suffering.

There are two additional aspects of suffering that demand our attention today. Schopenhauer will insist in his thesis called ‘negativity of satisfaction’36 that the attainment of what one strives for is not accompanied with any positive feelings. I must challenge the legitimacy of this thesis. And secondly, I must make clear the distinction that much of human suffering is caused, not by the world, but by mankind itself. Addressing suffering in these ways will help us understand how to make room for positive value in the individual who affirms the will.

Schopenhauer’s claim that ‘all life is suffering’ is chiefly the consequent of his thesis called the ‘negativity of satisfaction.’ With this thesis, he claims that all happiness is illusory, and insists that a genuine lasting happiness is not possible. The negativity of satisfaction declares that, “all satisfaction, or what is commonly called happiness, is really and essentially always negative only, and never positive. …when everything is finally overcome and attained, nothing can ever be gained but deliverance from some suffering or desire; consequently, we are only in the same position as we were before this suffering or desire appeared.”37 Further, Schopenhauer will say that the beauty of nature is the only pure happiness which is not preceded or followed by suffering or need.38 However, he adds that this happiness cannot fill the whole of life, but only moments of it.

It seems that, in general, lasting happiness is impossible for Schopenhauer, whether one denies the will or not. In denying the will, one reaches “a state in which one becomes indifferent to happiness and unhappiness, unattached to the body, not wedded to the furtherance of any goals which an individual willing being might pursue.”39 If one affirms the will and her individuality, she can experience illusory satisfaction at the achievement of personal goals or she can experience momentary pure happiness upon recognizing the beauty of nature.

Admittedly, it is not the case that we can altogether remove the experience of suffering from one who affirms the will but, suffering aside, it is important and possible to recover the experience of positive affect (e.g., happiness, satisfaction, pride, honor, etc) from our willful activities. Even if some amount of suffering accompanies our striving, we must understand that satisfaction is still present to some degree, and it must not be discounted. In the same way that pure happiness can last for moments of time when encountering the beauty of nature, so too can positive affect last for moments in other ways. Schopenhauer’s negativity of satisfaction makes three claims: (i) that satisfaction or happiness is always relative to prior dissatisfaction; (ii) that satisfaction is temporary and yields to further dissatisfactions; or (iii) that the sum of feelings of dissatisfaction is likely to be greater than the sum of satisfactions.40 As Janaway points out in his essay, none of these premises make for the complete absence of positively felt satisfactions.

The fact of the matter is that we do feel positive affect in our striving. We often feel positive sensations in the pursuit of goals, well before the actual attainment of that for which we strive. It seems that Schopenhauer ignores the positive feelings that arise within the striving process, even if they are later overshadowed by some amount of suffering (though, I argue that this is not always the case). In fact, Janaway raises a great point that “many human practices consist of arrangements designed to prolong a struggle: for instance, mountaineering, where to be lifted without effort to the summit would remove not just striving and pain, but the very pleasure which gives the activity its point.”41

The same is to be true when helping others - we put forth painstaking effort to care for those in need, and this returns positively felt satisfactions. Any expression of compassion rewards one with positively felt emotion, despite requiring an effort. There’s also something to be said for ‘humor.’ Often, we can attend a play or watch a movie, or even overhear a friend telling a story, and find positive enjoyment in the humor that may follow. Our involvement as an audience member naturally requires little to no pain or effort, but the satisfaction we feel is undeniable. Our laughter alone should serve as justification for the experience of positive affect. In this way, the thesis called negativity of satisfaction is too dramatic in concluding that there are no positively felt satisfactions. It can not be the case that every experience of suffering is so overwhelming that all possible feelings of satisfaction are eliminated from experience. Further, some of the suffering that exists in this world is very much in our control.

The fact of the matter is that mankind is the cause of much of its own suffering. It cannot just be in will that such malicious acts come about, for we don’t see maliciousness to the same degree in other things with will. Admittedly, it is a very difficult process to let the will-to-live manifest itself under the guise of the intellect. The difficulty arises in our inability to control the ego that emerges. Without the proper strength and discipline, the intellect is very susceptible to becoming a device that acts in ways only to satisfy the will, which, as Schopenhauer warns, yields a false sense of value.42

Will is something very distinct from human consciousness, but the two go hand in hand in forming one’s character. All acts of will are grounded in motives, and all motives only arise out of one’s character or a particular constellation of one’s character. Schopenhauer believes every human character has three characteristics in varying proportions: egoism, compassion and malice. Our propensity towards malice is something that especially separates us from animals and plants. In seeking one’s own interests, many often go to extreme ends to satisfy them, regardless of the wickedness s/he may display or the excessive pain s/he may inflict.

Our history as a species speaks for itself. For as long as there have been humans, there has been conflict between individuals and between groups. Resolve has rarely been in an effort to appease suffering for both parties, but rather to satisfy the will of the person(s) at any costs, and in ways that devalue the opponent and reduce real humans to expendable obstacles. The foundation of any group or state becomes the personification of a single character (will + ego) for the interests of its people. It generally directs its energies “towards preventing the suffering of wrong, and desires to procure for each and all the greatest sum of well-being.”43 But all too often, these goals are overtly selfish, and are attained at the expense of other groups.

Frequently, individuals with weak intellects, those who are unable to control their desires or act with compassion, may purposefully cause suffering in others. But the state, with its presumptuous propensity to serve the most ideal interests of its constituents often at all costs, is particularly susceptible to displaying acts of maliciousness in its vocation to protect and serve. Power and prestige emerge as weaknesses in social structures, and have allowed for world wars to wage across the land, and for systems of suffering to spread as strategies for combat:

“If, finally, we were to bring to the sight of everyone the terrible sufferings and afflictions to which his life is constantly exposed, he would be seized with horror. If we were to conduct the most hardened and callous optimist through hospitals, infirmaries, operating theatres, through prisons, torture-chambers, and slave-hovels, over battlefields and to places of execution; if we were to open to him all the dark abodes of misery, …he too would certainly see in the end what kind of a world is this.”44

These are clearly acts of horrible suffering, but the underlying mechanism that breeds such malice is the mind of man itself. In his discussions of genius and of denying the will, Schopenhauer offers an escape from such horror. In this essay I offer resolve. There is positive meaning to be found in a life that affirms the will, and it specifically involves curbing the intellect to recognize its control over the suffering it encounters and inflicts.

INTRODUCING NEW CONCEPTIONS OF POSITIVE VALUE:

To control one’s propensity towards malice would alone make for the possibility of positive experience. Regardless of the propositions I will raise for the recovery of positive value in the human experience, if one is unable to overcome a perspective of overwhelming suffering, or if one is incapable of controlling their malicious inclinations, positive value can only be achieved in the original two ways of denying the will that Schopenhauer suggests, if it is to be achieved at all. I find it curious that Schopenhauer expresses resentment that satisfaction is not permanent, when we both agree that this is not the goal. Clearly, the pursuit of goals is not the locus of value for Schopenhauer. Knowledge is. But truth be told, Schopenhauer seems more concerned with ridding oneself of the experience of suffering than finding value in human experience. He provides us with a means to first dispel suffering, and then to seek positive value. We are told that a rare few can achieve this, and at the cost of one’s selfhood. For the rest of mankind, “all life is suffering” and in a way where “each suffering drains away some (or even all) of the potential value from life, which nothing can restore.”45 In his haste and in his pessimism, Schopenhauer has robbed humanity of hope and positive value. To respond to Schopenhauer, the discussion of value must be the primary focus.

I am trying to salvage positive value for at least those with strong intellect, who are not the rare few geniuses. And knowledge and discipline will be our saviors. I am trying to salvage positive meaning for those who maintain a sense of individuality. And this can happen despite the suffering. Before having to deny the will, there are paths to positive value that empower people to strive towards the betterment of one’s own experience and the experience of others.

I hear Schopenhauer insisting that ‘all knowledge is positive value’, and suggesting that the reversal, ‘all positive value is knowledge’, simply couldn’t be justified. My impression of Schopenhauer is that he is not prepared to explore other paths to positive value, and my suspicion stems from my belief that Schopenhauer did not know how to strive … well. As we have discussed, striving can be done with the absence of overwhelming suffering; the two are not to be necessarily equated, though this is often the case. Living is a being and a becoming. Schopenhauer found positive value in controlling and limiting one’s general sense of becoming, and focused on the mental aspects of being the will itself. He felt he had discovered a way to nominally know the will itself.

Knowledge of this kind unquestionably makes for experiences of positive value. But I believe Schopenhauer makes the mistake of referring to other ways of living as exclusively wretched bouts of endless suffering, when they too may offer tastes of positive value (e.g., he has overlooked the full nature and possibility of life as becoming).
On the one hand, Schopenhauer explains that the will-to-life is the real self. On the other hand, he suggests that the road to positive value is one that denies the will, and hence, denies one’s real self. We are left to conclude that “being what one is is not worthwhile”46 and that there is no means to positive value for any human being.

Schopenhauer recognizes how drastic this claim is, and further, he charges that the endless spirit of nature cares nothing of the individual. He then concludes that as individuals, we not only fail to serve the endless spirit but by nature we are fundamentally inadequate to satisfy it. He will maintain that the abandonment of selfhood is our only means of evading suffering and of aligning ourselves with the truth of the world. But this is a gross overstatement. Life’s value comes not from understanding that one is not fundamentally distinct from the world, but value comes from striving to return one’s individual energy in a way that benefits the whole and satisfies the spirit. In this way, the way we strive, the way we satisfy lack, the way we make considerations of others before we attempt to satisfy ourselves should be considered as possibilities towards positively felt satisfactions. Upon doing so, it may be possible to find positive value, and to find it in the process of striving no less.

Understanding oneself in relation to others is necessary. Earlier, I made brief mention of the maintenance of one’s balance as a responsibility. I also exclaimed that this balance can also be cared for by others. When one recognizes their relation to others, there is an increase in awareness of will, and this spreads the notion of responsibility communally. I am not here providing an ethic, or grounding positive value in the notions of love or compassion, but simply insisting that understanding oneself in relation to others will necessarily and specifically ward off the tragic and the unexpected, and therefore can return positive value to our lives.

In our previous discussions, we explored ways of restoring balance in the way one strives so as to reduce excess suffering in ourselves, and to make room for positive value. In this section I am promoting an understanding of oneself in relation to others to achieve these two goals in yet another way. With a purer understanding of how to live in a way where one strives to re-invest one’s individual energy in the interests of the whole, we can also prevent elements of tragedy that might otherwise seem to be outside of our control. In this way we learn to reduce suffering from without, and I argue that this too will return positive value to the individual.

Schopenhauer might argue and insist that, “the inner being of [Nature] is the will-to-live itself… she is concerned only with the preservation of the species; the individual is nothing to her.”47 But to apply the rational capacities of the intellect in ways that serve the general will of Nature strikes me as something worthy of positive value. Schopenhauer admits himself that nature takes value in the individual in “the moment that individual has served the maintenance of the species,” thus it would makes sense that any efforts towards maintaining the species would admit of the possibility of positive value. Lastly, we must not forget that the mere fact that we persist to live despite our overwhelming vulnerability makes for more celebration. As an incarnation of the will-to-live itself, it would make sense that we would attain a semblance of positive value by being a faithful cog in the wheel of mother nature - to be at her service, and to strive at great lengths to perpetuate our own life and in a way that necessarily benefits the whole.

For our purposes here, positive value can be understood as living in a ways that perpetuate the endless spirit of nature. If in the affirmation of the will-to-live, one understands his/her relation and responsibility to others’ will-to-live, the attainment of positive value is clearly possible. Who can argue? Suffering may be involved, but this is not to take away from the positive meaning of one’s life.
—
In review and conclusion, this essay rescues the issue of positive meaning in three ways: first, by restructuring our understanding of what it means to strive, and its relationship to suffering; second, by challenging the legitimacy of his thesis called ‘negativity of satisfaction’48; and finally, by drawing attention to the fact that much of human suffering is caused, not by the world, but by mankind itself (there is a hope implied in the will of humankind!). This essay is an attempt to rescue meaning for those not prepared to or capable of accessing the knowledge needed for salvation through denying the will. At the heart of my exegesis is an emphasis on how to strive well, to strive so as to overcome and to strive so as to invest your individual energies into the well-being of the entire spirit of the will-to-live. At some point awareness becomes the driving force, and we can fit this into Schopenhauer’s philosophy if he is willing to allow ‘awareness’ to be a form of knowledge. If this is the case, Schopenhauer has a consistent philosophy; if this is not the case, then we are forced to conclude that Schopenhauer is a bit misguided…

… In closing, I leave you with a quote from Nietzsche:

“it is a sign of strength and greatness of character to affirm one’s sufferings as an integral and in some sense desirable element in one’s life… In a rough and ready way this suggests that people’s lives can make sense to them partly because of their sufferings not in spite of them. A pessimistic description of life is compatible with an affirmation of it.” -Nietzsche (Janaway, p. 335).

Footnotes:
——————————-
1 Janaway, p. 318 and p. 331, respectively
2 “The World as Will and Representation” (TWAWAR), v.1, p. 309
3 TWAWAR, v.1, p. 309
4 TWAWAR, v.1, p. 100, “all actions of the body are nothing but the act of will objectified”.
5 TWAWAR, v.2, p. 642
6 TWAWAR, v.2, p. 295
7 TWAWAR, v.2, p. 644; “The intellect with its external perception is primarily only the medium of motives for the more perfect phenomena of will.”
8 TWAWAR, v.2, p. 204 “What is always to be found in every animal consciousness, even the most imperfect and feeblest, in fact what is always its foundation, is the immediate awareness of a longing, and of its alternate satisfaction and non-satisfaction in very different degrees.”
9 TWAWAR, v.2, p. 246
10 TWAWAR, v.2, p. 205
11 TWAWAR, v.2, p. 205; “Through this important enhancement of the intellect, and hence of the secondary part of consciousness, it obtains a preponderance over the primary part in so far as it becomes from now on the predominantly active part.”
12 TWAWAR, v.1, p. 309
13 “The two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom,” Schopenhauer, Essays, Personality; or What a Man Is; http://www.germanculture.com.ua/library/weekly/aa01899.htm
14 TWAWAR, v.1, p. 312
15 TWAWAR, v.1, p. 310 and p. 314; further, “Human cheerfulness or dejection is obviously not determined by external circumstances, by wealth or position, for we came across at least as many cheerful faces among the poor as among the rich” (316).
16 TWAWAR, v.1, p. 325; later he explains that boredom can be so intolerable a burden that it has been historically used as punishment for prisoners (p. 313).
17 TWAWAR, v.1, p. 313
18 TWAWAR, v.1, p. 309, and p. 320
19 “Experience also teaches us that, after the appearance of a long-desired happiness, we do not feel ourselves on the whole and permanently much better off or more comfortable than before” (316); “nothing can ever be gained but deliverance from some suffering or desire; consequently, we are only in the same position as we were before this suffering or desire appeared” (319).
20 TWAWAR, v.1, p. 312
21 TWAWAR, v.1, p. 327; “This is the life of almost all men: they will, they know what they will, and they strive after this with enough success to protect them from despair, and enough failure to preserve them from boredom and its consequences.” But though despair and boredom are extremes, Schopenhauer will insist that everything in between is still suffering.

22 Janaway, p. 339
23 TWAWAR, v.1, p. 309
24 TWAWAR, Vol. 1, p. 324: “But as regards the life of the individual, every life-history is a history of suffering, for, as a rule, every life is a continual series of mishaps great and small, concealed as much as possible by everyone”… this passage implies that one’s life is a ceaseless cycle of suffering.
25 TWAWAR, Vol. 2, p. 613: “It is true that there also frequently occurs the call to give up all willing as the only way in which deliverance from individual existence and its sufferings is possible.”
26 The only consolation Schopenhauer provides is an exception found in the rare talents of geniuses! He explains that, “the finest part of life, its purest joy, … is pure knowledge which remains foreign to all willing, [and takes] pleasure in the beautiful, [and] genuine delight in art. But because this requires rare talents, it is granted only to extremely few, and even to those only as a fleeting dream.” (TWAWAR, v.1, p. 314).
27 Two great passages that I had to save for my own records, “An individual may suffer so much that his or her will to life gives out spontaneously. The individual continues to exist, but in a state of detachment from living as an end, indifferent to the prospering or ruin of the individual he or she happens to be, ‘purified … by the deepest grief and sorrow.’ The superior and rarer route is that of knowledge, or an exceptionally anti-egoistic vision attained by those whom Schopenhauer calls saints. The saint reaches an understanding that he or she is not fundamentally distinct from the world as a whole, that individuality itself is an illusion.” (Janaway, p. 340) & “Suffering in general, as it is inflicted by fate, is also a second way of attaining to that denial (of will). Indeed, we may assume that most men can reach it only in this way, and that is the suffering personally felt, not the suffering merely known, which most frequently produces complete resignation, often only at the approach of death. For only in the case of a few is mere knowledge sufficient to bring about the denial of will” (TWAWAR, v.1, p392)

28 TWAWAR, v.1, p. 197-198
29 TWAWAR, v.2, p. 640
30 Janaway, p. 341
31 TWAWAR, v.1, p. 310
32 Janaway, p. 337: “In addition to pursuing goals dependent on the needs of the bodily individual, human beings also do something which other animals do not: they regard this pursuit as the point of their existence.”
33 Janaway, p. 330
34 I’d like to mention that balance does not mean we are entirely in charge of the way we direct all of our energies. We will always be susceptible to being affected randomly by others, and by chance, and our sense of balance should include a basic understanding that we do not have full control. Balance, then, is living in a way that takes time to embrace all aspects of the self, while recognizing the world is beyond our full control.
35 TWAWAR, v.2, p. 203
36 Janaway, p. 331: “The thesis here - call it ‘the negativity of satisfaction’ - is that attainment of what one strives for is not accompanied by any positive feeling. Satisfaction is not only dependent upon one’s having suffered, but is itself merely the temporary absence of suffering, which soon yields again to suffering.”
37 TWAWAR, v.1, p. 319
38 TWAWAR, v.1, p. 321
39 Janaway, p. 339
40 Janaway, p. 333
41 Janaway, p. 333
42 Janaway, p. 324: “There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy.”
43 TWAWAR, v.1, p. 526
44 TWAWAR, v.1, p. 325
45 Janaway, p. 334-335
46 Janaway, p. 336
47 TWAWAR, v.1, p. 330
48 Janaway, p. 331: “The thesis here - call it ‘the negativity of satisfaction’ - is that attainment of what one strives for is not accompanied by any positive feeling. Satisfaction is not only dependent upon one’s having suffered, but is itself merely the temporary absence of suffering, which soon yields again to suffering.”

Emerson Seminar Final (06/07/05)

Aaron Bell
Emerson - 607
Dr. John Lysaker
7 June 2005

Title:
This Time, It’s Impersonal!
- critically engaging Emerson’s impersonal & its role in Self-culture -

If we could be promised access to “real being,” to an irreducible understanding of being that brings us into direct contact with the real, the truth of the world, I think many people would gladly lend an ear to the discussion. Ralph Waldo Emerson, with a very curious intrigue, entertains this particular inquiry, and quickly peaks the interest of many others who are equally concerned with issues of Self-culture. In an essay, “The Way of Life by Abandonment: Emerson’s Impersonal,” philosopher Sharon Cameron critiques Emerson’s philosophical maneuvers as he attempts to expound the true nature of the Self. Although ‘truth’ is an elusive topic, Emerson asserts that we would be reasonable to expect a certain degree of truth to emerge within his writing1. He recognizes an ongoing tension between two divided aspects of the Self: on the one hand, the personal, and on the other hand, the impersonal. Both are difficult terms to fully define, the latter being the most challenging of the two, but I believe we must discuss their respective explanations before I introduce the focus of the paper at hand.

The personal can be understood as the synthesis of a particular identity from one’s individual experience, and without continued investigation, this new identity is often assumed to be the whole ‘Self’. The personal is characterized as “the personal interest in an entity aspiring to be something of itself;”2 the resultant identity is a conglomerate of “what is experienced by the hands, the feet, the senses, and epitomized by an ‘appetite that could eat the solar system like a cake.‘“3 The formation of the personal Self is exemplified by an ongoing desire to know itself completely. In its egotism, it yearns for an almost impossible closure, and this struggle for closure is suggested by some as the ‘source of suffering’.4 However, and this is essential to understanding the dichotomous Self, Emerson (among others) insists that one’s immensity cannot be fully possessed as the personal- in the construction of the Self lies a natural and necessary divide between the personal and a more abstract relation to the world. This second relation is the impersonal, understood as the point where “one is ‘beyond’ emotions, beyond the idea that identity is fixed… not in relation to the voluntary.”5 Better still, the impersonal cannot be assigned to an individual will or a desiring self, as it is against the interests of the personal and assumes a manifold perspective that understands its relation to and from Nature. Cameron agrees and offers the following: “impersonality is the antidote for the egotistical, the subjective, the solipsistic. It is so specifically because it refutes the idea that mind is one’s ‘property,’ that one’s relation to being is that of ownership, on the one hand, and separate identity, on the other.”6 The implications she offers here are accurate, but her engagements with Emerson from this point forward seem to undercut the project that Emerson actually accomplishes with his writing. It is my intention with this paper to respond to the criticisms raised in Cameron’s article, and to defend the integrity of Emerson’s exposition.

In part 1 of the following, I explain how, in his essays, Emerson attempts to disclose the nature of the impersonal so that he and his audience can appreciate and acknowledge it. The impersonal withstands definitions and can be overlooked, denied or forgotten, yet Emerson challenges himself to bring us as close as possible to it through his writing, in hopes that we can feel (proprioceptively speaking) its legitimacy. My reading of Emerson is that the whole Self is a conglomerate of the personal and the impersonal. I do not believe that Emerson would claim that the personal can be completely discarded, but rather that the impersonal can be neglected, and further, there is a danger, a violence that can be done to the Self who fails to acknowledge the impersonal. His task then, becomes an attempt to disclose the impersonal through his essays.

In part 2, I will show how Cameron’s efforts are a bit misguided: she underappreciates Emerson’s address of the impersonal, and further, she misinterprets him, accusing him of trying to abolish the personal altogether. She is right to assert that Emerson’s essays are an attempt to dramatize the notion of ravishment, “that proprioceptive sense of what occurs at that moment when the personal is annihilated by the influx of the impersonal.”7 However, I believe she does not recognize this as Emerson’s strategy to draw out and distinguish the very nature of the impersonal. Additionally, she is too quick to discredit his authority to speak about the soul, or the truth of being, on the grounds that his statements are ‘insufficiently personal.’ Cameron does not recognize that Emerson’s circum-achievement of the impersonal voice in his essays is what we should be applauding. Finally, she openly asks, “What makes the impersonal so attractive?,”8 and in this section, I provide a response.

In part 3, understanding that the Self is the manifold of personal and impersonal attitudes, the most prevalent question arises as such: How shall I live?9 Clearly, Emerson will not settle for the pursuit of personal success and achievement, but it is possible, if one is not cautious, to read Emerson as insisting that we must completely obliterate the personal (the task of ravishment) in order to live a wonderful life. I discuss, here, that Cameron is right with her charge that it is unethical to ask people to entirely sacrifice their personal sense of Self for the emergence of the impersonal, but in response to this, I read Emerson as offering a middle ground. Emerson is calling us to live in a way that, at the very least, embraces the Self’s relationship to the impersonal. To not do so, could result in a disservice to the Self, and an injustice to an ethic. (It is not my intention in this paper to address what Emerson might offer as an ethic, but rather, to show how the impersonal is essential to such a conversation).

Part 1.

Let us, at the onset of our investigation, hear Emerson plainly affirm in his essay, The American Scholar, that, “the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature.”10 Upon further interrogation of this essay, we discover the relationship between Nature and the human soul: initially, we see that they are opposites.11 On the one hand, Nature is the Law of the divine, with no beginning, no end, and it provides the inexplicable, and continuous circumstance for our existence; it is our fate.12 On the opposite hand, we find the soul. Raised over a divine passion, it beholds eternal causation and is capable of perceiving the self-existence of Truth and Right.13 As human beings, we are an event of nature but also the house for a soul. We are born into a dichotomous tension between nature and soul, and our whole Self, our being then, is the freedom to respond to this fate as the bridge between the two. As man, we are not pure nature, nor pure soul; we are manifold of the two.

Additionally, there is a restlessness in the human form that argues for want of character.14 It recognizes that “life has no generous, guaranteeing task, no duties or affections, that constitute a necessity of existing. Every man’s task is his life-preserver.”15 This becomes the voluntary task of the Self to distinguish, maintain and protect its individuality. This is the personal. And though it can be denied, overshadowed by the impersonal, it cannot be altogether destroyed. Emerson insists that, “we must have an intellectual quality in all property and in all action, or they are nought. I must have children, I must have events, I must have a social state and history, [since] my thinking and speaking want body or basis. But to give these accessories any value, I must know them as contingent and rather showy possessions, which pass for more to the people than to me.”16 This last sentence is Emerson’s attempt to remind us that the value we ascribe to life from the perspective of the personal is rather insincere. For him, such things as populations, interests, government, history, although important aspects of being and culture, are all like ‘toy figures in a toy house,’17 and can easily distract the weak and vicious for an entire lifetime.

To engage solely in the personal is to involve only half of one’s whole, or to continue an earlier metaphor, to never realize oneself as the bridge between nature and soul. Each of us is in need of another half to make the Self complete; this process of becoming whole is what Emerson calls recompense, and one’s missing half emerges from the soul as the impersonal. 18 To live a life that neglects our soulful relationship to nature, is to refuse one’s access to the truth of the world, and to consequently whither in the sorrows of egotism. Emerson addresses this concern in his essay, Culture:

The pest of society is egotists. There are dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. ‘Tis a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. … The man runs round a ring formed by his own talent, falls into an admiration of it, and loses relation to the world. It is a tendency in all minds.19

The Self is the project of trying to keep both halves together,20 this is what is meant by Self-culture for Emerson. And as such, Cameron is right to note that he argues the need for recompense in his essays,21 the need to embrace both the personal and the impersonal. This is no easy effort. From the start, our being is not fundamentally at our disposal, and Nature will not reveal our real being for us: “Nature is no sentimentalist, - does not cosset or pamper us. We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of dust.”22 It is our fate and our greatest challenge to bring up our conduct to the loftiness of nature,23 and this cannot occur without the recognition of the impersonal. Thus, Emerson’s chief objective is to expose the impersonal through his writings:

For the soul’s communication of truth is the highest event in nature, since it then does not give somewhat from itself (personal), but it gives itself, or passes into and becomes that man whom it enlightens; or, in proportion to that truth he receives, it takes him to itself.

We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation (impersonal). These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. … The nature of these revelations is the same; they are perceptions of the absolute law.24

Emerson sets out on an admittedly difficult mission. It is not easy to characterize the impersonal “because the experiences in which it is shown to be situated eschew logical ‘comparative’ relations.”25 Like Nature, the impersonal is something that bends and overlaps onto itself. Cameron unknowingly catches Emerson struggling to confer consistent designations for and definitions of the term, as he describes the impersonal with words like: whim, the involuntary, genius, intuition, revelation, enthusiasm, ecstasy, trance, inspiration, the soul, ravishment - but its many manifestations defy systemization, and in this defiance, it is all of these things. The impersonal puts us in touch with the divine law of the world. This law is the basis of both Nature and of the human mind. In us, it is impersonal inspiration; out there in Nature, we come to see its fatal strength, down to the very last stone.26 One thing is clear, at times Emerson manages to write with a voice above and beyond the personal,27 and in this way, he bring us as close as possible to the soul of the world, in hopes that we can feels its legitimacy and taste a hint of its truth.

Part 2.

In her article, “The Way of Life by Abandonment: Emerson’s Impersonal,” Sharon Cameron engages Emerson’s essays in three parts: first, she examines the mechanics of impersonality, and articulates how people come into contact with the impersonal; second, she considers how it is possible for one who is expounding impersonality to simultaneously relinquish the perspective of the personal; and third, she compares the poet, ‘the practitioner of impersonality’, to Emerson, arguing for a deficiency in Emerson’s attempt to disclose the impersonal because “his statements are insufficiently personal.”28 All three parts are merited, however her analysis is a bit misguided, and consequently, she runs into what appear to be irresolvable contradictions that cause her to lose faith in Emerson’s achievement. I should like to speak to each of her treatments of Emerson, so as to defend the integrity of his exposition.

Cameron begins her essay with a very accurate account of Emerson’s impersonal, and she appropriately suggests that, “in Emerson’s essays the personal is most marked at the moment of its obliteration.”29 Agreed, Emerson begins his discussion at the moment where we must set the personal aside. He does not intend to labor on the presence and the value of the personal, for it is unavoidably involved with every man already. However, Cameron interprets the language of ravishment to imply the complete and perpetual abandonment of the personal, but I hear Emerson very differently. When Emerson looks out across the people of our nation, he sees that, “in our large cities, the population is godless, materialized - no bond, no fellow-feeling, no enthusiasm. These are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites walking.”30 These are people engaged in only the personal halves of the Self. He cries out, “how is it people manage to live on, - so aimless as they are?”30 Their restless souls have taken the insincere route to fulfillment, and have abandoned the pursuit of the Real and the True as they drink themselves drunk from the well of egotism, swallowing down the personal by the bucketful. Emerson sees little need to inform his audience of the personal - its hold on our culture is everywhere in sight.

To be concerned with the real, is to engage the spirit of Nature, given to us by the Divine, “the true meaning of spiritual is real; that law which executes itself, which works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not existing.”31 This spirit rests in us as the impersonal, and though it cannot be conceived as not existing, it can be forgotten. The personal can suffocate and overshadow the impersonal, and for this fact, Emerson’s point of departure for his writings justly begins with ravishment of the personal - not to destroy it, but to reveal the impersonal beyond it. One might hear a priority and an urgency ascribed to the impersonal, but at the very least, I do not hear Emerson promoting an erasure of the personal. Cameron seems to misinterpret this effort, thinking that Emerson is advocating the complete removal of the personal, and what otherwise might have appeared as justly defended, appears in the form of discouraging contradiction to her.

For example, in the second section of her account, Cameron admittedly hears Emerson using the voice of impersonality: “the ‘person’ that Emerson represents himself as being is one with no situational givens - one who, like the poet’s language, is ‘fluxional,’ ‘vehicular,’ ‘transitive,’ therefore a man indifferent to needs.”32 Such a state of ‘removedness’ or ‘trance’ is the effect of one in touch with the impersonal, however, she feels that Emerson has completely foreclosed the personal, and this leads her to mistrust him and his message.

She and I both think it is impossible to disengage from the personal, and she is right to draw on the examples of the preacher and the poet as authorities because they retain their sense of the personal, specifically by “calling [their] own authority into question.”33 If Emerson were to insist that he was without individuation, we would be right to be suspicious of him. But I do not believe Emerson would admit this. In fact, I think Emerson would agree with Cameron’s definition of legitimate authority, and agree with her when she insists that, “the impersonal speaks despite us, though through us, as it perpetually calls the idea of a fixed self into question.”34 For here, the language of ‘despite’ allows for the personal to still remain, but the ‘through’ implies that the impersonal is something which extends within and beyond it - both are conditions that Emerson professes.

Cameron’s mistrust grows from her criteria that, “the legitimacy of [divine] discourse therefore depends on the visibility of the person speaking,”35 and then accuses Emerson of being ‘insufficiently personal.”36 I feel compelled to remind her that the personal half of Emerson has not gone away; perhaps it is Cameron’s vision of which we should be suspect. Perhaps the real trouble is that our language fails to show the dialectical Self in its struggle to be both halves at once, and when Emerson writes in the voice of the impersonal, so as to unmistakably bring forth the authority of the impersonal to his readers, his statements necessarily appear insufficiently personal - but this is not to say that the personal is not visible.

In his essay, Experience, when he says, “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing,”37 I hear Emerson admit of the Self struggling to hold both its personal and impersonal halves together - one half identifies a sense of grief, while the other posits grief from a distance as merely the effect of Circumstance. The disconnect offered in the language speaks to the visibility of the personal, despite its imbeddedness in the voice of impersonality. The same example could be used to address Cameron’s complaint about the ambiguous nature of the “I” who writes the essays. She admits that “Emerson [is] writing in no man’s voice,”38 and she insists that this voice is implicitly just, “a rhetorical construction, the most enduring feature of which impedes or staves off any apparent individuality, any representation of a ‘private will’.”39 In other words, the impersonal voice makes no room for the personal and we are to assume that it is literary concoction. She uses this ambiguity of language to support her suspicion of Emerson’s authority, but I think the real difficulty seems to be that we have no rhetorical means for acknowledging the Self’s full relation to the impersonal.40

Other examples extend from a similar sense of misinterpretation, but I will only make time to address a few such instances in this essay. Let us remember that Emerson has established the Self as a dialectic between the personal and the impersonal. He tries to speak through the voice of the impersonal in an effort to better understand it in-itself,41 and to better reveal it to his audience. Cameron suggests that he is persuading us to completely disregard the personal, and as she continues to read him as irresolvably contradictory. She hears him advocating both self-trust and self-abolishment,42 and a perplexity arises as to how this is possible if Emerson is also advocating an annihilation of the personal. Quite simply, he has not destroyed the personal. The dialectical nature of the Self maintains a tension between the impersonal and personal. On the one hand, the impersonal self must be trusted as it discloses our relationship to Nature, and on the other than the personal self must be subdued, so as to make room for the emergence of the impersonal.

Such misunderstandings have led Cameron in the opposite direction that Emerson is trying to take us. She hears Emerson trying to excommunicate the personal, and her response is to necessarily preserve it. She draws on thinkers such as Levinas and Parfit because they “represent a person’s resistance to the idea of impersonality… There cannot help but be resistance to the idea of the impersonal since the consequences of the impersonal destroy being the only way we think we know it.”43 This is precisely why there is a need to address the impersonal - because we cling to the personal as if we know we should. Initially, I suspected Cameron of being caught up in the satisfaction of her own identity, and as someone who has never experienced the sincere fulfillment of the impersonal, she became understandably skeptical. But her argument is a bit less subtle.

I hear her exclaiming that Emerson does not have the ethical right to ask people to sacrifice their personal identity for the universal spirit (impersonal).44 She appeals to Kant45 to demand that Emerson recognize our responsibility to other’s personals, and to insist that we should be considering the happiness of another’s individuality more deliberately. But Emerson is not writing for an ethic here, and even if he was, I think we would hear him start with the impersonal’s universality anyways; he’s responding to the truth of Nature. He recognizes that “Nature is not outside of us. If we can’t oversee nature, that’s not because it’s alien but rather because it is internal.”46 It is the nature of the impersonal to unite us to Nature, to unite us to Truth. The impersonal is the same relation to Nature across all people. It is all people. There’s no question that when he writes as the voice of no man, as the impersonal, he is writing for all of us - as all of us.

I believe that misinterpreting this central theme of Emerson’s essay directly leads to Cameron’s questioning: “What is the appeal of the impersonal; what makes it attractive?”47 At this point, I should hope the answer is very clear. The impersonal is the very half of the Self that puts us into touch with all of Nature, and in that harmony lies the Truth of our real being. “When our higher faculties are in activity, we are domesticated, and awkwardness and discomfort give place to natural and agreeable movements.”48

Part 3.

To disclose the impersonal, is to bring forth the second half of the Self. This recipe will forever imply a tension between the personal and the impersonal as one struggles to keep the manifold Self together; and so the question arises: How shall I live? In what way do we proceed as a dialectical Self in search of truth, and harmony, and purpose?

Emerson notices the tendency of many men is to live for praise and fortune from the accomplishments of their personal: “I have noticed that, a man likes better to be complimented on his position, as the proof of the last or total excellence, than on his merits.”49 But in the opinion of the ancients, the great man was traditionally one who scorned to shine, and who contested living for fortune alone.50 In this way, I hear Emerson exclaiming that we must not settle for the pursuit of personal success and achievement, but this in no way invites the presumption that our efforts should be spent on the complete dismissal of the personal. I hear Emerson insisting on a middle ground.
Emerson’s search for such a middle ground appears to involve an assumption that nature, in its growth, is a fit model for our understanding of man. By learning the laws that conduct the balance of Nature, man can aspire to conduct himself in a similar fashion. He explains that, “[one] who has once seen things in their divine order, will never quite lose sight of this, and will come to affairs as from a higher ground, and, though he will say nothing of philosophy, he will have a certain mastery in dealing with them, and an incapableness of being dazzled or frightened.”51

The hope of such a middle ground, for Emerson, seems to lie in the promise of culture. He explains that the whole state of man is a “state of culture,”52 and with a culture that is conscious of its balance, we can learn to overcome our personal urges and emotional alarm arm in arm. “If one shall read the future of the race hinted in the organic effort of Nature to mount and meliorate, and the corresponding impulse to the Better in the human being, we shall dare affirm that there is nothing he will not overcome and convert, until at last culture shall absorb the chaos and gehenna” (C, 859-860) Is nature in its growth a helpful model for understanding man?

Extra Notes:
———————-
Part #3: “There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in town and country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet; that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials; that goes rusty, and educates the boy; that sells the horse, but builds the school; works early and late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again” (C, 854)

Part #3: “very few of our race can be said to be yet finished men” (C, 859)

Part #3: “The good Laws themselves are alive, they know if he have kept them, they animate him with the leading of great duty, and an endless horizon. Honor and fortune exist to him who always recognizes the neighborhood of the great, always feels himself in the presence of high causes.” (W, 902).

?? “the whole state of man is a state of culture; and its flowering and completion may be described as Religion, or Worship.” (W, 883) “Religion or worship is the attitude of those who see this unity, intimacy, and sincerity; who see that, against all appearances, the nature of things works for truth and right forever.” (W, 891). The impersonal is recognizing the divine at work in all things.

“We believe that holiness confers a certain insight, because not by our private, but by our public force, can we share and know the nature of things” (W, 889). The impersonal puts us in touch with the divine system of the world.

Conclusion:
“What is a person? No answer with any coherant substance can be produced with reference to Emerson’s writing” (31) - that’s because he writes to expound the Self, which is part personal and impersonal. His writing hopes to specifically disclose the impersonal, and I don’t think he would argue that the personal can never be disregarded.

“the method of nature is that there is … no private will, no rebel leaf or limb, but the whole is oppressed by one superincumbent tendency, obeys that redundancy or excess of life which in conscious beings we call ecstasy.”53

———————
Footnotes:
———————
1 To his critics and to the skeptics of his writings, he says, “I am sure that a certain truth will be said through me, though I should be dumb, or though I should try to say the reverse… [If you are skeptical of me, then] we are at different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth” (Worship, 881). Emerson knows that people, such as thinkers like Cameron, might disagree with the full production of his thought, but we can be assured that truth can be discovered therein. At times, Emerson tries to take on the persona of the impersonal while he writes; this is merely one approach to arrive at the truth of real being, and the approach itself seems off-putting for Cameron. He insists here that we must not be discouraged with such a method, but rather, use our efforts to critically attempt to decipher the truth embedded in the language.
2 Cameron, p. 19
3 Cameron, p. 14
4 Cameron, p. 29, in reference to Levinas and Parfit; Emerson would agree, “I grieve that I do not grieve” (Experience, 473)
5 Cameron, p. 10
6 Cameron, p. 2
7 Cameron, p. 16
8 Cameron, p. 19
9 Fate, p. 769
10 The American Scholar, p. 55
11 “Nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part,” (The American Scholar, p. 56)
12 “The Circumstance is Nature… The book of Nature is the book of Fate” (Fate, p. 775)
13 Self-Reliance, p. 271
14 Culture, p. 848
15 Worship, p. 897
16 Culture, p. 855
17 Fate, p. 781
18 “The soul is free of particulars, good or bad; impersonality is a consequence of that liberation,” (Cameron, p. 7)
19 Culture, p. 841-842
20 In Emerson’s essay, Fate, I take his discussion on p. 783, “there must be a fusion of these two to generate the energy of the will…,” to imply that the will is a confluent of forces, not just a single will making choices, but a single Self forced to mediate between perspectives.
21 Cameron, p. 7
22 Fate, p. 771
23 Fate, p. 780
24 The Over-Soul, p. 392-393
25 Cameron, p. 15
26 “Fatal strength,” (Worship, p. 891); “Man is made of the same atoms as the world is, he shares the same impressions, predispositions, and destiny. When his mind is illuminated, when his heart is kind, he throws himself joyfully into the sublime order, and does, with knowledge, what the stones do by structure” (Worship, 902).
27 Even Cameron, on page 16, is able to acknowledge that Emerson assumes a stance and a voice above and beyond the personal, and he assumes an authority of one who has access to principles that are conferred beyond individual experience. My only response is that his authority is not beyond one’s experience, but within. It’s juxtaposed. Just as the preacher transcends, so can the great man. Of course it is not Emerson’s voice! It is no one’s voice, for it is the voice of the impersonal … the voice of the soul of all men, and the voice of Nature.
28 Cameron, p. 25
29 Cameron, p. 17
30 Worship, p. 885
31 Worship, p. 888
32 Cameron, p. 18
33 Cameron, p. 4, and again on p. 23, but here she uses the term ‘minister’
34 Cameron, p. 22
35 Cameron, p. 26
36 Cameron, p. 25
37 Experience, p. 473
38 Cameron, p. 22
39 Cameron, p. 18
40 Continuing the talk about the inadequacy of language, I can’t help but think of the Rastafarian language; when they speak of man by the help of God, they say “I-and-I” so as to denote the dialectical Self, the personal relationship with the impersonal; as in “I, with the power of the almighty” (e.g., “I-and-I am a fighta’, man” or “I-and-I will overcome such things,” etc). The language allows for the simultaneity of a Self, that is, both the impersonal and the personal together.
41 Cameron, herself, recognizes this, but doesn’t seem to realize that this is Emerson wrestling with his own language to try to understand the impersonal, “The Emersonian speaker who celebrates the impersonal is something like the ‘soul’ [or intellect, or a force like love] he frequently catechizes,” (Cameron, p. 18)
42 Cameron, p. 18
43 Cameron, p. 30-31
44 She speaks about this on p. 23 of her essay.
45 Cameron, p. 24-25
46 Cameron, p. 22
47 Cameron, p. 19
48 Culture, p. 856
49 Fate, p. 791
50 Culture, 858
51 Culture, p. 857
52 Worship, 883
53 Cameron, p. 17-18

Philosophy of Art Final (12/1/05)

Aaron Bell
Philosophy of Art
Dr. Mark Johnson
1 December 2005
Final Paper

Title:
The Lyricist.

This is an essay dedicated to the power of art, and its expression of sentience. It must be clear that I am not concerned with establishing a standard for the evaluation of artwork, nor am I hoping to provide a formal definition. To me, art is more than a practice and is something that involves the experience of both the artist and the audience.1 In quite Deweyian fashion, I will approach art from experience, specifically at the intersection of the poet and the musician - the Lyricist. Let us understand the term, lyricist, to imply a new breed of artist. One who fashions an expression of the human emotional experience out of poetic verse and rhythmical music. The lyricist is the impassioned artist whose music accentuates the words and the words the music. With lyrical music, there is an indistinguishable overlap between the two, and the product is a mode of art, more organic and more introspective than anything I have ever experienced.

Our focus will be a heartfelt song entitled, “Rebel Music,” by Azeem & the Variable Unit (VU), from their album, Mayhem Mystics. This song beautifully introduces its audience to a full understanding of the artist and the art form. “Rebel Music” inherently helps us consider how to understand the human emotional experience as layered, how an artist finds inspiration to create, and how lyrical music serves as an exceptionally valuable way to express the whole self and its many layers. This discussion of “Rebel Music” walks us into a history of debate over the aesthetic and experiential nature of art, while also juxtaposing our inquiry alongside the philosophical perspectives of Langer, Schusterman, Gardner and Collingwood, among others. Azeem performs this piece to speak up, to call attention to the way we are living our lives. This paper intends to further that same sentiment.

For centuries, the poet has stolen our breath and awakened our soul. Pulling gently on our mind and our spirit, the discursive art of labored language has served as an emotional sanctuary for all of humanity. Our best and worst times have been chronicled in poetic verse, and the patient hands of a whole history of poets have slaved by the pen, transcending the confines of language as we know it, to perfect new ways of expression, new meter and metaphor, new rhyme and rhetoric, that might best speak to our emotional selves. The poet has transformed language into an artistic event,2 … and Azeem’s lyrics, when read on paper, have done this for us once more. (See Appendix A)

However, after reading Susanne Langer’s essay, Feeling and Form, one confronts another kind of art than poetry, although one just as concerned with the symbolic expression of sentience. Before its introduction, Langer concedes that language is the most amazing symbolic system humanity has invented, where individual words are assigned separately conceived items in experience and, consequently we construct complex symbols (such as a sentence) to articulate and express meaningful relations.3 In fact, she would quickly admit that a good poet could use words in combination to express something of our experience in an entirely new and profoundly meaningful way. But this would come with a most certain disclaimer: “discourse with all its refinements is only one possible pattern. For practical communication, scientific knowledge, and philosophical thought, [language] is the only instrument we have. But… there are whole domains that philosophers deem ‘ineffable’.”4 One such domain, Langer insists, by virtue of its dynamic and rhythmic structure, can express the forms of the human emotional experience in ways that language, and hence poetry, is particularly unfit. “Music,” she says, “has import, and this import is the pattern of sentience - the pattern of life itself, as it is felt and directly known.”5 Music expresses the vital activity, the rhythm of emotional life, in all of us.

Langer insists that, “music is not a kind of language,”6 but rather an artistic tradition that puts us in direct relation to something more intimate and more vital - our life of feeling. Furthermore, she explains that we are mistaken to think that the function of music is the stimulation of feeling. Its function is the expression of feeling.7 “Because we are organisms, all our actions develop in organic fashion, and our feelings as well as our physical acts have an essentially metabolic pattern. Systole, diastole; making, unmaking; crescendo, diminuendo. Sustaining, sometimes, but never for indefinite lengths; life, death.”8 Our vital activity is rhythm,9 and music, with its melodies and harmonies, its bass beats and hi-hats, with its overtones and undertones, inspires a frenzy of rhythm in us that accentuates our sensibilities. Langer will make arguments for why the instrumental elements of music alone can synthesize our lives of feeling, but Azeem goes one step further. As a lyricist, he brings sound and verse together, allowing for a whole new level of meter and articulation, an organic10 way of engaging the world of feeling. (See Appendix B)

The Life of Sentience

Before we can address the ways in which Azeem makes his music so effective, we should first makes some considerations about the way people engage the world on a daily basis. Experiencing emotions is no easy business. It is my belief that we create and represent our experiences and perspectives in layers. Some aspects of our experience are simple, or shallow, and require little energy to produce or maintain. Others are deeper and demand a sort of patient interrogation with no real promise of resolution. On the whole, our emotional experience falls on a continuum, but for our purposes in this paper, much can be gained by separating experience into two categories, simple and complex.

For many of us, our simple-layered experiences have, sadly, become our most frequent or most dominant means of interacting with our life of feeling. We are to understand the simple experiences as those sensibilities that float on the surface of our sense of comfort. They operate without need or want of deeper contemplation. These are our ordinary quick answers, our instincts, our fleeting desires, and our passing judgments. These are our practical courtesies, our formalities, our public face and easy politeness. Much of it is social and personal conditioning. Most of it is our routines and our habits. As humans, it seems that our weakness is to settle for the easiest and most practical way of interacting with the world. In our haste, life becomes so functional, and so rational that we lose the will to keep questioning and challenging our experience. To really ask big questions about the nature of experience is to encounter a struggle and a confusion that can be both disconcerting and effortful. “At a certain point in human thought, rationality breaks down and can speak to us only of the mundane.”11 This mundanity is what we can best articulate with language alone. Once numbed and sedated by the complexity of life, the simple layer of emotional experience, though necessary, often becomes our operating table.

The beauty of art is its ability to elevate us beyond the mundane, beyond rationality. It has a special way of speaking to us about the real drama, the real complexity of human experience. A good lyricist seems to have “penetrated what is common in human experience throughout time,”12 and takes us to the root of our deeper layers of emotional experience. This is a place reserved for the reasons and the justifications of our beliefs, our opinions, and our preferences. The very nature of ‘depth’ implies a conglomeration of remembered events that have led to a particular experience of feeling(s). Our deep layer associations emerge as a testament for the tendencies in our behavior and for the lasting impressions that our past has left with us. At this depth, we wrestle with our hopes, our loves, our resentment, and our prejudice. This is a place for values and for virtues. These, among others, are the things that give life true meaning. These are the things that move us. When Langer defines us as “rhythm”, and when Azeem speaks of “movement,”13 it is here, at the very depths of our layered life of feeling, to which we must open ourselves.14

Azeem performs “Rebel Music” to rescue a message, for himself and for his audience: Life is a movement and a depth that must not be forgotten. For him, he sees that our culture has lost its emotional rhythm. And worse, it encourages us to settle for the simple experience, and distracts us with instantaneous satisfactions. Our musical art form has been abused, or better, the power of art to express our deepest emotions has been abandoned. On this he writes,

“Our music’s dying on machines and tampered samples./ Yeah, I love to dance but, damn,/ It’s like my radio got cancer./ Every time I change the station,/ And they play out the summer anthems,/ They’re all bland and seem to sound the same,/ Like rain drops in Atlanta.”15

In general, our contemporary music has simply come to entertain, to amuse, to appeal to our more accessible and superficial layers. And it sells! Why, because people are not asked to feel. The image of “rain drops in Atlanta” paints an especially helpful image of a life without feeling. As a city, Atlanta is as mundane as they come. It is a concrete jungle, with bland buildings spread out for miles, as far as the eye can see. No towering tree lines. No happily rolling hills. And on a rainy, dreary day, the city becomes trapped under a desolate blanket of grey, and all aesthetic vibrancy is gone. Azeem assures us that his music reaches for something different: “This is not your favorite Lust song./ This ain’t R’n’B and Fashion./ This is Spirit, mixed with lyrics -/ Dressed as music,/ Filled with passion -“16

The words alone are persuasive, and one hears in them Azeem’s commitment to rebelling against the suppression of our sentience. But the power in the words is only accentuated by the music that accompanies them. The true and essential beauty of the lyricist is that, as a poet and a musician, he gets a chance to deliver his work in the way he hears it. There is something to be said for allowing a poet to speak his own words into your ear, and by the melody of his own choosing. Some will insist that this brings us closer to the full experience of the emotion that originally inspired the author himself. But before we can begin that discussion, we should ask how it is that such authors find their inspiration in the first place. In this case, the lyrics speak for themselves.

The Creative Process

Azeem is on a mission to overcome the emotional deprivation of our time, and challenges himself to penetrate our complexity in hopes of better understanding the life of feeling. In his chorus, he shares, “This is a movement that’s made to slay illusion/ This is a soothin’: sun and moon and grass rooted/ We put a light, plus a torch to the confusion.”17 Azeem is helping us feel that this song is prepared to penetrate the complexity of all the universe and to provide some sense of soothing; and in this way, he is “An Assassin, stabbin’ madness in its’ back,/ Just for the answers.”18 The metaphor he uses is very helpful in our discussion of artistry. At first glance, it may be difficult to see how the “assassin” shares a commonality with the lyricist, but the two both embody a necessary set of skills and diligence with which to meet their objectives. Their persistence demands a kind of alienation that quickly becomes their advantage.19 Both are true and patient interrogators, who see the whole of an experience or situation, and at a certain climatic moment, they have complete access to snuff out their target - for the lyricist, the struggle is with articulating the abstract.

“Most people who write about art to-day seem to think that it is some kind of craft; and this is the main error against which a modern aesthetic theory must fight.”20 Lyrical music is not some craft that can just simply be perfected with enough practice and enough patience. Granted, some background practice and form of skill is required,21 but this will not guarantee the finest works of art.22 Every time, it is a new struggle with one’s sentience, where the lyricist wrestles with his own experience to bring his emotions to rest.

An artist like this is not distracted or discouraged by the complexity of his emotional layers. He may tear through draft after draft of lyrics until “everything seems right. But however the given [artist] expresses it, this feeling out of the [artwork’s] implications, this refusal to let the [artwork] go until it has proved itself a closed and self-sustaining system, an alternative reality, an organism, this is the true [artist’s] check on himself and his road to understanding.”23 When we say that art is for expressing emotion, this is the case for both the artists and his audience. To create art is to create and experience emotion in the artist himself (too!) - “Until a man has expressed his emotions, he does not yet know what emotion it is. The act of expressing it is therefore an exploration of his own emotions.”24 Since the time of Plato it has been said that creating art involves more than exploration. At a certain point in the process, the artist often experiences a moment of inspiration of an almost divine nature.
In his play, The Ion, Plato writes Socrates as saying, “You know, none of the epic poets, if they’re good, are masters of their subject; they are inspired, possessed, and that is how they utter all those beautiful poems. The same goes for lyric poets if they’re good… it’s not mastery that enables them to speak those verses, but a divine power.”25 No matter how hard art philosophers have tried to define the generative process, the entire art world cannot help but recognize the ineffable nature of ‘inspiration.’ Its discussion has proved irresolvable, but Azeem speaks to the topic in ways that confirm this age-old suspicion.26 He begins “Rebel Music” by explaining the day that his inspiration came:

“This was written facing East,/ In sleepy pearls of early mornings,/ After two rakat salats,/ Where my body folds while falling,/ Calling forward through the Heavens,/ Plug my soul back in its socket,/ Park my flying carpet,/ And then embrace the day that started.”27

In ‘sleepy pearls of early morning,’ I hear Azeem explain how he awoke to the pureness of a new day, and being a San Francisco native, “facing East” seems to imply that he found his mind turning away from the Western culture that confines him, towards one that opens. Shusterman will tells us that, “aesthetic experience always depends on a background of prior perceptions, prestructuring orientations, and funded meanings.”28 It’s safe to say, that Azeem includes these lines in his lyrics because he has to - they necessarily bring us deeper into the very layers of emotion that he is preparing to share. Meanwhile, the music carries our ear and we slowly feel the weight of Azeem’s persona. We hear a spiritual balance coming over him, and a recognition of something greater to which he feels soulfully connected. This is his reality. And in this moment, he is prepared to embrace it fully, as he shares:

“When it seems the Earth is sleeping - peep it:/ Thought goes into actions,/ Inspirations in my brains,/ Spirits whisper words and captions;/ And my hand begins to fly across the page from the reaction,/ So fast I get dyslexic,/ And I write my letters backwards./ With a passion like calligraphy,/ A sculptor of the strange,/ See my lyrics make ‘em dance,/ Like they had waterfalls for legs./ Bring the visions of a painter/ To a canvas that was blank,/ And shape a masterpiece -/ Redecorate your mind with what we make./ It’s rebel music.”29

Experience is inchoate, and always demands a kind of synthesizing. “The reason why description, so far from helping expression, actually damages it, is that description generalizes.”30 Above, Azeem portrays the actual moment of his inspiration, and he describes, first hand, the way the free flow of his speech pours out onto the page and brings more to the experience than description.31 We hear a supreme clearness of consciousness that comes from Azeem’s inspiration. Such consciousness makes the emotion accessible to him and, ultimately, to others.32 He asks us to ‘redecorate’ our minds with the very same song that has so strongly influenced him.

As a lyricist, Azeem has two resources at his disposal: his poetry and his music. How he combines lyrics to the proper musical rhythm creates an emotional affect that takes us deeper still into the layers of experience. Langer tells us that the music alone in his song “bespeaks his imagination of feelings rather than his own emotional state, and expresses what he knows about the so-called ‘inner life’; and this may exceed his personal case, because music is a symbolic form to him through which he may learn as well as utter ideas of human sensibility.”33 If we recall, unlike language, music is a very different kind of symbolic expression. Specifically, it has no pre-assigned meaning to any of its components, and as an artist, one is free to fill it with meaning.34 The moment we encounter such music, our own body and mental rhythms seem to give over their allegiance to the sounds that surrounds us. Hearing monopolizes our experience, organizing and filling and shaping it with a meaning only measurable by the sensibilities. “Our very life is measured by rhythm: by our breathing, by our heartbeats. These are all irrelevant, their meaning is in abeyance, so long as time is music.”35 The drum pushes away the world of practical time, and we become the rhythm itself, as the beat takes us even farther into the poetry. This is the beauty and power of the lyricist. And an attentive audience cannot help but surrender to their emotional experience.

The Value of Lyrical Music

Over time, it is clear that our memories of events and of people become associated with other similar experiences (as causes, or as effects, or as general milestones for life, etc), and as described earlier, these memories become layered in cognitive weight. Some experiences we hope to remember, others we try to forget. Some are accessible with a little patience, and others may take years to really understand. In this way, our inner life of feeling may look quite different from one person to the next. There is no one right way to experience the world, and it is very clear that we all do it a little differently. However, two things must be said about this. Firstly, it is true that we all live uniquely and this undeniably results in the experience of emotion from different perspectives. Secondly, the layers inherent to poetry and music provide rhythms and a vital energy that speaks to those impulses in us.

Lyrical music carries a weight, and expresses the whole self and its many layers. Found hidden in its subtleties, emotions and associations are embedded in the movement of words. Though something in and of itself, the music also brings new emphasis to the flow of the lyrics, and the entire production serves as a process for unveiling, revealing, discovering, and constituting the self. There is a mirroring of being that occurs. In as much as we experience things differently, and even though our many descriptions of emotions “depend on (semi) unconscious associations or intuition… our associations are remarkably similar.”36 When Azeem tells us of the imperfection of life, and our struggle to salvage hope and love from our fears and strife, he reveals a complexity that unites our experiences.

“Yo I done pointed many fingers,/ Been caught tellin’ lies and failed,/ Made unforgettable mistakes,/ Because perfection’s not for sale./…/ ‘Cause they told us men don’t cry,/ And I been grown since I was twelve,/ When they told us trust nobody - Damn,/ I barely trust myself!/ Pressure builds, trained to deal,/ Change the taste of pain to milk./ Wish we had a dime for all the times/ We tried to climb and fell./ So we fling our hopes to heaven,/ Fear to everlasting Hell./ You may not think we’re gonna make it,/ But I know for sure we will!”37

His metaphors preach to our souls,38 telling tales of regret, and of resistance, and of the will to overcome. Being caught for telling lies teaches us truth. Pressure and pain, like milk, make us stronger. Life’s pressures and our failures force us to make a decision: to flee or to fight? Azeem’s lyrics and music inspire us to know “we’re gonna make it!”

“So ‘till that day we reach the ESSENCE,/ We’ll be fightin’ on this mission./ My heart has half of Love,/ And half a hungry Lion in it./ Rebel Music./…/ Feel the essence,/ Seed to sidewalk circumstances./ Picture that:/ If I’m the seed/ Then on the concrete where we landed,/ There’s a crack!/ We commin’ back with fruits;/ Our roots are firmly planted./ Rebel Music.”39

In four minutes’ time, Azeem arranges an experience that fills us with a love as hungry as a lion. We feel a communion with our deeper layers of sentience, and as the song drifts to a close, we, like Azeem, are empowered to face our realities with impending confidence. He puts us on a quest to resist our culture’s propensity to smother us with instant gratifications or distract us from questioning our life’s struggle. The title ‘Rebel Music’ gathers its roots from traditional Jamaican reggae, a genre of music that has many themes of political and social liberation from institutions that fail to treat the fullness of human experience. Upon listening to Azeem’s “Rebel Music,” in true rebel music style, we find ourselves just as inspired to take ownership for our growth, and to fight for our understanding.
Few lyricists have sought to inspire mental revolution through such an art form. Azeem hopes the deep feelings he invokes are taken to heart and never lost, “Never lose it, Rebel Music/ This is a record revolution.”40

I agree with Tolstoy when he explains that the “activity of art is based on the fact that a man receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it.”41 Be it poetry or music or the combination of the two, an audience is brought closer to the full experience of the emotion that originally inspired the author himself. Tolstoy argues that, “the stronger the [emotional] infection the better is the art,”42 but I suggest that the stronger the infection, the more similar the received emotional experience is to the original emotion that fueled that artwork’s creation. “If a poet expresses, for example, a certain kind of fear, the only hearers who can understand him are those who are capable of experiencing that kind of fear themselves. Hence, when someone reads and understands a poem, he is not merely understanding the poet’s expression of his, the poet’s, emotions, he is expressing emotions of his own in the poet’s words.”43

Furthermore, I firmly believe that each lyrical presentation is a unique expression of a particular emotion. One could make a mix tape of 15 sad songs by 15 different artists, and each song will convey sadness in a slightly different way. In this way it is possible for there to be as many different works of art as there are people. I must qualify Tolstoy once more and insist, however, that not all people experience the emotion that ‘moved the artist who expressed it,’ and, further, some people are inherently incapable of experiencing the expressed emotion within a certain piece of art. Such people might not have (yet) had the necessary experiences to fully feel a complex emotion like the ‘fear of war’ or the ‘rage of jealousy,’ and for such people, the work of art may conjure emotion to a lesser degree, or have no affect whatsoever.

Earlier, I briefly mentioned a special luxury of the lyricist: recorded lyrical music brings its audience particularly closer to the original experience of the artist. He not only gets to perform the work for the audience, but does so every time in the same way. This is the nature of lyrical music. We hear Azeem read his own words the way he hears them himself. Our hearing of the original reading seems as essential to grasping “Rebel Music” as is viewing the entirety of a painting. Reading the lyrics alone on paper would be as unjust as if we were to cut the Mona Lisa in half! Azeem has crafted a whole work in the same way as Di Vinci, and without its original presentation, without his original reading, emphasis or rhythm might be lost in places where he intended them to shine.

In “Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes will tell us that we need know nothing of the life or history of the artist to find meaning in his work, but poetry alone on paper is vulnerable to (mis-)interpretation. Allowing a poet to be involved in the delivery of his work puts us in closer proximity to the emotions experienced in the author during the creation of the work. There is something to be said for the human voice, and the integrity of its expression. If we remove the intentions of the author from the presentation, I firmly believe something of value is lost. This disregards the effect art has on its creator and neglects forms of artistic expression44 - both of which can impact the way an audience takes to a piece of art. E. D. Hirsch, Jr. defends this position in his essay, In Defense of the Auther, and believes that with poetry especially, the final work loses meaning if there is no relationship to the subject that created it. “A word sequence means nothing in particular until somebody either means something by it or understands something from it. There is no magic land of meanings outside human consciousness.”45

I think it is clear that Azeem has created a lyrical and musical masterpiece. “Rebel Music” achieves a consciousness that is pure inspiration, both to himself and to his audience. His words, his rhythms, his voice all unmistakably bring a vital energy to our ear and a value to our life of feeling. Further, he shares the extraordinary artistic process with his audience in a way that unites us. Like Azeem, we find ourselves questioning the way we live our lives, but with newfound understanding of our layers of emotional experience, and with a confidence that has half a hungry Lion in it! I hope the lyricism found in Azeem and Variable Unit’s song, “Rebel Music” has opened your eyes - both to art and to the spirit of Life….

References:
——————————
Barthes, Roland, “The Death of the Author,” The Philosophy of Art (Neill & Ridley, 1995), pp. 386-389.

Collingwood, R. G., “The Principles of Art,” The Philosophy of Art (Neill & Ridley, 1995), pp. 118-143.

Gadamer, Hans Georg, “The Ontology of the Work of Art and Its Hermeneutical Significance,” Truth and Method (Crossroad Publishing, 2nd ed, 1992), pp. 101-120.

Gardner, John, “Moral Fiction,” Moral Fiction (Basic Books, 1978), pp. 105-126.

Hanslick, Eduard. On the Muscially Beautiful, translated by G. Payzant (Hackett Publishing, 1986), pp. 1-44.

Hirsch Jr., E. D., “In Defense of the Author,” The Philosophy of Art (Neill & Ridley, 1995), pp. 390- 404.

Langer, Susanne. Feeling and Form (Scribner, 1953), selections, pp. 27-33, 46-48, 72-73, 87-89, 109-111, 125-126.

Shusterman, Richard, “Art and Theory Between Experience and Practice,” Pragmatist Aesthetics (Rowman & Littlefield), pp. 24-61.

Tolstoy, Leo, “From What is Art?,” The Philosophy of Art (Neill & Ridley, 1995), pp. 506-521.

—————————
Footnotes:
—————————
1 Shusterman is in full agreement, “For experience, as Dewey insists, involves both receptive undergoing and productive doing, both absorbing and responsively reconstructing what is experienced, where the experiencing subject both shapes and is shaped. The notion of experience does better justice to the fullness of art and links artist and audience in the same twofold process.” (Shusterman, p.55).
2 Gadamer, though he specifically speaks of play, will say that a work of art isn’t just some object to be evaluated by consciousness; it is an event on its own terms: “The being of art cannot be defined as an object of an aesthetic consciousness because, on the contrary, the aesthetic attitude is more than it knows of itself. It is a part of the event of being that occurs in presentation” (p. 117).
3 Langer, p. 228.
4 Langer, p. 227
5 Langer, p. 229
6 Langer, p. 226
7 Langer, p. 226
8 Langer, p. 234
9 “The most characteristic principle of vital activity is rhythm.” (Langer, 239).
10 “The essence of all composition - tonal or atonal, vocal or instrumental, even purely percussive, if you will - is the semblance of organic movement, the illusion of an indivisible whole… The rhythmic character of organism permeates music, because music is a symbolic presentation of the highest organic response, the emotional life of human beings.” (Langer, 239).
11 Gardner, p. 114
12 Gardner, p. 125
13 Azeem & VU, Stanza Group A, “Rebel Music, yeah, Movement, yeah.” & again, in the chorus, “This is a movement that’s made to slay illusion/This is a soothin’: sun and moon and grass rooted.”
14 Good ol’ Hanslick agrees: “motion is the ingredient which music has in common with emotional states.” (Hanslick, p. 11)
15 Azeem & VU, Stanza Group H.
16 Azeem & VU, Stanza Group G.
17 Azeem & VU, Chorus.
18 Azeem & VU, Stanza Group G
19 Mark, this was the best place for me to make reference to a great quote you brought to class discussion one day, after watching some television interview: “Not sure if you’re going to starve or not, if not told to stay the course, we would be driving cabs in L.A. Artists are on the perpetual edge, and so are somewhat alienated. This alienation gives them insight into the world.” -I forget, but I think this was a quote from Morgan Freeman or Samuel L. Jackson.
20 Collingwood, p. 126
21 Shusterman, p. 48
22 “The artist must have a certain specialized form of skill, which is called technique. He acquires his skill just as a craftsman does, partly through personal experience and partly through sharing in the experience of others who thus become his teachers. The technical skill which he acquires does not by itself make him an artist; for a technician is made, but an artist is born. Great artistic powers may produce fine works of art even though technique is defective; and even the most finished technique will not produce the finest sort of work in their absence; but all the same, no work of art whatever can be produced without some degree of technical skill,” (Collingwood, 126).
23 Gardner, p. 123. I think Gardner is on to something. He speaks about the method of the poet/writer and explains that the “discoveries of epiphanies are not fully planned in advance.” Often artists “simply keep tinkering until everything seems right.”
24 Collingwood, p. 136, and further, “for until the work is complete one does not know what emotions one feels; and is therefore not in a position to pick and choose, and give one of them preferential treatment,” (Collingwood, 139).
25 Plato, The Ion, The Philosophy of Art, (Neill & Ridley, 1995), p. 10-11
26 Shusterman will say that there is very little way to refute “the testimony of artists, who recognize elements of inspiration surrender and loss of control in the creative process,” (Shusterman, 54).
27 Azeem & VU, Stanza Group A and Group B
28 Shusterman, p. 47
29 Azeem & VU, Stanza Group B and Group C
30 Collingwood, p. 137… and further, “The poet needs no such words at all; the existence or nonexistence of a scientific terminology describing the emotions he wishes to express is to him a matter of perfect indifference.” Hence, Langer makes so many arguments for other systems of expression - music! But here, we have the best of both worlds.
31 “If art means the expression of emotion, the artist as such must be absolutely candid; his speech must be absolutely free,” (Collingwood, 139).
32 “The characteristic mark of expression proper is lucidity or intelligibility; a person who expresses something thereby becomes conscious of what it is that he is expressing, and enables others to become conscious of it in himself and in them,” (Collingwood, p. 141).
33 Langer, p. 226-227
34 Langer, p. 229
35 Langer, p. 238, who quotes Basil de Selincourt.
36 Gardner, p. 119
37 Azeem & VU, Stanza Group D, E and F
38 “The mysterious rightness of a good metaphor - the one requisite for the poet, Aristotle says, that cannot be taught,” (Gardner, 119).
39 Azeem & VU, Stanza Group F and Stanza Group I
40 Azeem & VU, Chorus
41 Tolstoy, p. 510
42 Tolstoy, p. 514
43 Collingwood, p. 141
44 Shusterman, p. 54
45 Hirsch, p. 392

Did Someone Say: "Schleiker"???

Yeah. He came to Eugene, and he blew it up. I have proof:

The Blurry Dons…

Focused. Say what!

Schleiks and the Roz

Givin’ the ladies somethin’ to talk about…

The Birthday Cake…

Schleiks and Coco…

Schleicher, “King of the Post-game,” and Melanie Gurbish…

Aristotle Final - (12/9/2005)

Aaron Bell
Phil 521: Aristotle
Dr. Peter Warnek
9 December 2005

Title:

Hey, Leggo my Logos!
- my existential impasse in Aristotle’s discussion of Potency and Being-at-Work -

[implications regarding the paradoxical nature of d??aµ?? ?at? ????s??]

…forgive me, the greek translations don’t show on my blog— mentally replace greek words for anything that lookslike: “d??aµ?? ?at? ????s??” or so forth… Thanks…

As beings with the capacity to think and the ability to reason, we humans have unfortunately distanced ourselves from nature (phusis) since the time of Aristotle. In our modern attempt to know nature, we have chosen to step outside of it. We have objectified it as mechanistic function, and reduced it to an interplay of causality. However the anomalies continue to appear despite our reasoning and the truth of being grows progressively more unclear. In our latest attempts to dissolve philosophy into episteme, we have lost sight of philosophy’s very origins, and Aristotle would insist that we have strayed from the path to knowledge -what he calls the ‘natural road.’ To embark down the natural road, then, is to reinstitute the discipline of philosophy so as to move “from what is more familiar and clearer to us to what is clearer and better known by nature.”1 To travel this road is to re-situate ourselves in relation to understanding, as Aristotle suggested, as ‘oneness’ with nature. Philosopher Martin Heidegger maintains that the access to knowledge involves a humility and a wonder,2 and philosophy in this way, will be our only chance to rescue the truth of being from its concealment.

Being is spoken of in many ways, “by way of what or of what sort or how much something is, but in another way in virtue of potency (force) and complete being-at-work (force), and of a doing-something (again, a force).”3 To contextualize our discussion of truth, I should like to examine this Aristotelian notion of force (dunamis) and its relationship to thinghood (ousia). Aristotle will insist that anything with being can maintain its attributes only through a very complex relation to force, and he elaborates on this notion of force throughout the first three chapters of his Metaphysics, Book ?.4 Seeing the magnitude of its import, Martin Heidegger engages the very same chapters in his book, Aristotle’s Metaphysics [theta] 1-3,5 and together, the two texts will serve as our starting point. In this paper, we will interrogate the ways in which Aristotle describes this notion of dunamis, the way he articulates its role in resolving an age-old paradox of being, and finally, we will encounter a place where subjectivity becomes problematic, so much so that I have reached a seemingly irresolvable existential impasse that Aristotle all too conveniently fails to address. If we are to engage Aristotle’s natural road in full application, such an impasse seems to demand the highest priority and our most critical attention.

The journey begins with the underlying assumption that truth is not a characteristic of human knowing: there are those things that appear to us (endoxa), which are to be understood as our commonly held opinions, and there are those things that are known by nature (paradoxa). Nature as such is one that preserves and withholds the truth of endoxa, while philosophers are free to run rampant with their ad hoc inquiries. As Heidegger suggests, knowledge comes to those who humbly address the paradoxa, and who patiently build their understanding by first posing questions about what is familiar. In this way, to know something is to give an account of the origin of that something, but this involves, of course, identifying just what ‘that’ something is. Before one can inquire about the what a being is or the why a being is a certain way (due to causes or properties), one must first identify the that of which the being proves to be, the qualities that distinguish the object as itself.6 When Aristotle turns to examine ousia, he finds the that-ness of being to be manifold, spoken of in numerous ways, many of which speak to a very primal and original force observable therein. This force is what we are to understand as dunamis, or in the original Greek, d??aµ?? ?at? ????s??, ‘force in regards to movement.’ However, for our intents and purposes, I believe it best to embrace the Joe Sach translation of dunamis as ‘potency.’ Potency, then, as a crucial and necessary component to the that-ness of being, becomes the focus of the first three chapters in Aristotle’s Book ? of his Metaphysics, and will be central to our discussion henceforth.

As Aristotle discovered, the ousia of being involves many things, a statement which by definition becomes our first paradox: one is many. At first glance this contradiction seems to be an irresolvable impasse (aporia). It is a contradiction that arises because a single being that is attributed to having a unified thinghood, is observed to be constituted by a manifold of many individual particulars. This proves to be the case for all beings with potency; the logos of all such beings involve a contradiction of this kind. However, if we consider the thorough description of potency provided in Aristotle’s first chapter, we will discover that potency makes this paradox intelligible, and that it resolves its complexity. The contradiction remains, but we learn that the truthful nature of a single being is to often exhibit features of acting in more than one way, and of ‘becoming’ another aspect of itself. In this way we must admit that being is “being and becoming.”

Already we have suggested that being is spoken of in different sorts, specifically ‘in virtue of potency and complete being-at-work, and of a doing-something.’³ We must understand what is meant by each. Being-at-work (energeia) is the nature of all beings. A being is always at work, always in activity as itself, always in motion (kinesis). In this way, a being is always doing-something, whether moving from one condition to the next or simply resisting change. Anything incapable of movement or of doing would cease to be.

Let us define potency as the innate propensity for something to be-at-work in the ways characteristic of the kind of thing it is.7 On one hand, this implies a thing’s many capabilities and potentials, and on the other hand, we see potency as the kinesis between these different ways of being. We must understand that potency cannot emerge into activity or move and change a thing in any which way, but rather it requires first, the presence of proper conditions for its emergence, and second, the absence of agents that might prevent this motion. For instance, my being may be seated firmly in a chair, and my desire to stand would normally be enough of a condition for my potency to emerge into activity, but the fact that my chair is a roller-coaster ride that has me strapped-down acts as an agent preventing my change in kinesis.

Essentially, potency and the potential of being have two ways about them: (a) either the “power of being acted upon” by some other thing or by itself as other, and (b) the “active condition of being unaffected for the worst or for destruction” by some other thing or by itself as other.8 In these ways, all things with being are simultaneously susceptible to change from itself and/or from being acted upon by some other thing. “The potency of acting and being acted upon is one.”9 Here, one could argue that potency is a contradiction as well. There is only one sense of potency, but yet involves two distinct ways - ‘of acting’ and ‘of being acted upon.’ However, the nature of potency is such that it can never be both ways at once.10

To avoid more contradiction, the virtue of potency, then, must not to be confused with the nature of the thing, but rather must be understood as the source of change in its being. As the agent of change, potency is not a contradiction. If something is missing something on account of force, this lack is fulfilled in potency. Potency fills deprivation. It is the power for a being to have the potential to actualize its being in other ways already inherently capable to it11. This distinction is important. Potency is contrary to incapacity and incapability. If something has a complete lack of capacity, potency is of no help (e.g., humans cannot have potency to fly). However, if something has the capacity, but lacks the conditions, then potency emerges into activity to fill this deprivation. On this, Aristotle explains that, “the primary and authoritative meaning of nature is the thinghood of things that have in themselves a source of motion in their own right.”12 In this way, Aristotle is slowly beginning to show how our initial paradox, one is many, is the actual ousia of things in nature.

But our resolve of all contradiction will not come easily. Aristotle begins his second chapter by explaining that potencies are rational and irrational.13 He explains that “all the arts and the productive kinds of knowledge are potencies,”14 because they are sources of change to other things. From this we are to infer that a person, as being, is necessarily home to irrational and rational aspects. He teaches that art (techne) is a source of motion, and is irrational only, yet it is inspired in the soul of the artisan. Similarly, he explains that knowledge is a source of the rational, but which resides in the ‘reasoned account’ (mind) of the human. In this way, we are to take note that a person, despite their ability to know and exercise reason is the embodiment of contrariness, since it is home to the contrary potencies of rationality and irrationality. Chapter one already taught us that contradiction and contrariness are not indicative of irresolvable paradox on account of potency. Now in chapter two, Aristotle hopes to extend this logic to legitimize the abilities of the human being, despite our inherent contrariness. We must recognize that every potential virtue of reason in us will act in ways that are contrary since such acts are performed by a person who engages in potencies that are rational and irrational.

Aristotle also explains here that it is not the case that we evenly or equally engage in potencies of rationality and irrationality. Further, he insists that embodying a contrary disposition does not preclude one from doing either well. For example, having a propensity to create art (irrational) will not keep one from doing rational things well, and of course, “the one merely doing [rational things] does not necessarily also do it well.”15 Again, he patiently explains this to show how propensity accounts for and justifies contrariness in ways that re-legitimate aspects of the human being which could have otherwise been lost in haste.

In his third chapter, Aristotle responds to general misinterpretations of the terms potency and capability. He writes that it is false to believe that, “something is only potential (possible) when it is active (energeia).”16 If this were true, it would imply that one who is not building a house cannot build a house because he in not actively doing so. Clearly this is an absurd inference, and Aristotle draws on this example to make the point that ‘lacking a potency’ is not equal to having ‘incapability’. If this were true, the conclusion would follow that “what is not happening will be incapable of happening,”17 and this is precisely the opposite understanding that is needed for potency. Extending such assertions of incapability would abolish both motion and becoming as we have come to know them.

Aristotle also takes advantage of this discussion to highlight the differences between being-at-work (energeia) and potency. The above misinterpretations of potency would make potency and being-at-work exactly the same, since being-at-work implies motion most of all, where as potency is to be understood as the possibility for something “to be capable of being yet not be, or be capable of not being and yet be.”18 It is quintessentially the possibility of change, as understood by the limited capabilities of the being itself. Capability, then, denotes that which is still possible for potency to achieve in a being, despite the fact that the being-at-work is currently engaged in other activities. This chapter is written to salvage the nature of ‘becoming’ from the eager grips of faulty logic, and to better distinguish potency as having the capability to be contrary.

All three chapters together are meant to explore the that-ness of being, and to improve our understanding of potency (dunamis) so as to make sense of the contradictory nature of being and becoming. Aristotle will have us believe that such distinctions help bring us closer to understanding phusis, and in turn, the paradoxa that is truth. Further, our work with potency makes it “possible for someone at one time to think truly and at another time to think falsely,”19 because we are compounded in potency. That is, we can be being-at-work in one way while having the potential to be in other ways. This gives us versatility as a being. In chapter ten, however, Aristotle explains that not all things are compounded in potency. Some things are all being and all at work, with no potency, and hence, show no signs of coming into being or passing away.20 With such a strong distinctive demarcation, Aristotle insists that “it is not possible to be deceived about anything the very being of which is being-at-work… one either grasps or does not grasp it in contemplative thinking.”21 In this way, we can begin to determine the that-ness of two certain kinds of being, a distinction that will prove helpful for our later discussions.

In his book, Aristotle’s Metaphysics [theta] 1-3, Heidegger very thoroughly expounds each of Aristotle’s arguments in ways that prevent any and all misinterpretations of Aristotle’s work, and they prove to be very helpful in our understanding of potency. Heidegger claims that we experience our potency as our many abilities and inabilities. “We called to mind phenomena which are to be found under the title d??aµ?? (potency) and which we designated as power, capacity, competence, proficiency, aptitude, talent, skill, being accomplished, capability, power, violent force.”22 Each term here signifies a particular way of force that constitutes the potency of our beings. Without these specific words and their specific definitions, we would be utterly incapable of comprehending such realms of potency. Heidegger agrees that each of these abilities (or inabilities) is perceivable through our subjective experience, but he insists that the origin of these concepts does not begin with subjective experience. We may be able to verify such abilities with our subjectivity, but this is not the same as saying that the concepts themselves originate in our experience.

In fact, Heidegger largely writes his book on Aristotle to specifically make clear that the origin of the concept of potency does not lie in subjective experience. “The said explanation is indeed a sham.”23 On one hand, Heidegger will remind us that subjective experience cannot be the origin of such concepts because the act of potency is to unfold what is already in the phusis of the object, “we would already find in them what we would attribute to them.”24 In this way, what we are calling a force or a capacity may essentially be neither subjective nor objective. And on the other hand, Heidegger confirms the difficulty of trying to understand their origins - “forces do not allow themselves to be directly discerned… We come upon forces only retrospectively, and for this reason, to be sure, the positing of forces is in a special way continually subject to suspicion.”25 He continues with his work to explore the applications and possibilities of force and of potency and of capability. But I found myself unable to move beyond the issue of subjectivity. Upon questioning the relationship between subjectivity and potency, and I reached a philosophical impasse, and one that Aristotle seemed not to acknowledge. Let us turn to subjectivity.

Heidegger seems to describe the subjective experience very accurately. “It is assumed that the subject, the proper I, is that very thing which is first of all experienced and which thereby presents itself at any time as the nearest.”26 I recognize that subjectivity not only unifies our identity (for ourselves), but it is the way in which we contemplate our understanding of being. Our subjectivity allows us to live with ourselves as being. Our inner subject is forced to make sense of our realities, and think through our motivations, and live out our daily responsibilities. It seems that the nature of subjectivity is to keep our inner and outer experiences united.27 Naturally, I have come to question the actual ousia of subjectivity itself.

We seem to find one’s subjectivity at work in many ways. In fact, we experience our entire being (and its many ways) through subjectivity. In one way, subjectivity serves as a medium through which art is brought to fruition from the soul, through the hands of the artist, to the potential of natural materials in the outside world. The subject is also home to one’s reasoned account (mind) and we would be right to see the personal I as having both rational and irrational tendencies. In a third way, we find that subjectivity, like art and knowledge, is a source of change in other things; our subjectivity can cause us to bring about influence on other beings. From these accounts alone, it seems reasonable to ascribe qualities of potency to the ousia of subjectivity.

Additionally, with a bit of contemplative thinking (theoria), 28 it is not difficult to unveil a subjective nature that involves being and becoming, especially when we contemplate specifically on the nature of the proper I. The proper I is very much subjectivity in action, our energeia, and anything that can be remembered or imagined involves this proper I. However, much of our experience occurs when the I is not present. Such times are easily recognized by those experiences in which we cannot remember being subjectively engaged: we remember being somewhere, for example on a park bench in San Francisco waiting for a friend, but time passes so quickly and we are left with no specific experiences/memories to draw on of our time spent on this bench. Where was the subjective attention? This is more than an issue of memory loss. It is a matter of engagement. Or for a second example, choose any moment where you were entirely absorbed into a sensory feeling that you later found the I to be absent. This could come from watching something intently, or listening with all of your attention. Some refer to this as ‘zoning out’ - it is a suspense of subject, a moving beyond thoughts. This occurs in dream states as well (although lucid dreams often incorporate the I). In any case, there is a kinesis to be inferred to the subjectivity by the coming and going, the presence and absence of the proper I alone.

I have explained how the proper I of subjectivity displays a capability of being present and not-present in different ways. Thus, I feel compelled and assured to infer that subjective experience is a thing compounded with potency (dunamis). In light of Aristotle’s work in Book ?, this is not strikingly difficult to accept. However, I soon reach existential impasse when we consider the ways in which its potency emerges into activity. If we recall in Aristotle, all being potential has two ways about it: the power of being acted upon and the power of resisting a change for the worst, both of which can be achieved by some other thing, or by itself as other. It is clear to me how subjectivity can be influenced by some other thing, say a largely emotional experience from a dramatic situation or loved one. The question for me becomes, “How does subjectivity influences itself as other?”

Subjectivity had a very unique ousia. It is a consciousness, an awareness of intention and experience. I hear the above question as implying a more difficult one: “What does it mean to know the subjective self as other?” In a sense, it seems that the subject could so chose to influence itself as other, if it so decided. But the question is how? How does the subject treat itself as other? And surely, coming to know and influence the self in this way is a process, a full action, or what some existentialists might call a ‘project’. This is a question that asks how one should live so as to come to know and to influence the self. As something with a compounded thinghood, we are ultimately concerned with the logos of subjectivity. Remember that identifying the that-ness is half the challenge of coming to learn what subjectivity really is. But here, the question of ‘how’ seems to speak to the way of coming to know subjectivity. This is a question of ‘how to approach the self,’ which, given the extraordinary nature of subjectivity, is really a question of ‘how to live (in relation to the self).’ The implications of this question are overwhelming indeed.

Both Aristotle’s and Heidegger’s Book ? leave us in the dark with regards to this matter. The question of ‘how to live in relation to the self as self’ is dauntingly complicated. A quick answer may be that the ways in which subjectivity influences itself are purely kata sumbebekos, everything is left to the infinity of accidental attributes. Admittedly, I suspect that chance often has some portion of influence on this situation, but the question cries for a mechanism, or a philosophy. Coming to know the subjective self as other has emerged as a hardened challenge for many philosophers who have since woven complex philosophies that try to achieve this by seeking omniscience through acquired knowledge, or through the denial of will, or even through the expression of divine, and steadfast love. But even these suggestions serve as versions of ‘natural roads’ that do not really resolve the problem. At its heart is a fundamental complication of how to know one is even on the natural road, or better still, how to go about traveling it.

The question of how to influence the self seems to be, in some part, a matter of choice, yet there is nothing but trial-and-error method for attempting to know the self with all of its rational and irrational parts. Nor do we know if there are different ways of living for different people, or different ways of traveling the ‘natural road’ - just countless suggestions that all demand practice anyway. The nature of practice is to be working towards an unreached end, to gather momentum in preparation for, and this implies a passage of time. How are we to manage in between such practice? In the case of doubt, there is no way to verify our belonging to a given path or our progress thereon. There is no way to know which path is best. There is no indication as to how to judge the progress of one’s own journey. And if there were ways to judge our journey, we run the risk of having the same subject be the experiencer and also be the evaluator,29 which is the very argument that Heidegger uses to persuade us that the origin of things can not be in subjectivity. Considering the existential uncertainty of not knowing ‘how’ to walk the natural road, it is no wonder that Heidegger turned towards existentialism! So, again, I am left asking: how am I to live, especially if my very subjectivity is capable of purposively influencing itself as other? This ability is one I must confront, and Aristotle provides little help.

The ultimate question of ‘how to live’ is at the root of my encounter with Aristotle. It is an existential impasse, only because Aristotle provides no clear way to proceed. Book ? was written to help us discern the truth of dunamis. His description of being addresses only the that of the what we are said to be. I am left curious as to how Aristotle addresses subjectivity itself as other. I must insist that the why is necessarily intertwined with the how, as the why of something receives its explanation because of the-ways-in-which (how) it maintains its that-ness. I believe the question of ‘how’ is deeply rooted in the question of being human. And this question seems to go unanswered, and worse, unaddressed in Aristotle’s discussion of dunamis. That potency emerges into activity is obvious through Aristotle, especially for the purposes of acquiring knowledge, but the ways-in-which (how) of movement is still not explicit.

Throughout this paper we have looked to Aristotle and Heidegger with humility and wonder, in hopes of finding some truth to being. We have encountered the first and major paradox of being (one as many) and Aristotle has quelled such paradoxical woes through his discussion of potency (dunamis). The irony is that in relating our understanding of potency to the subconscious (we can here blame Heidegger, ha!), we found that Aristotle leave us with an existential impasse - not fully knowing how to proceed with engaging the potency of subjectivity itself. In the end, Aristotle’s writings leave room for the desperate cry of existential crisis. There is no resolve on ‘how to live’ in our new formulations of ‘being,’ but this is not to discredit the resolve that Aristotle and Heidegger bring to the general paradox of ‘being verse becoming’. For their exegesis of potency, I am deeply grateful.

Footnotes:
————————————————
1 Physics, Book I, Chap. 1; p. 33
2 “Only if we become truly humble is the scent awakened for what is great, and only if this occurs do we become capable of wonder. Wonder is, however, the overcoming of the self-evident” (Brogan & Warnek, 69)
3 “Being is spoken of in one way by way of what or of what sort or how much something is, but in another way in virtue of potency and complete being-at-work, and of a doing-something.” (Aristotle, 167)
4 Translated by Joe Sachs.
5 Translated by Walter Brogan and Peter Warnek
6 incidentally, Aristotle will say that the what of a being is the combination of the that and the why. But I digress…
7 Aristotle’s Physics, p. 252
8 Metaphysics, p. 167-168
9 Metaphysics, p. 168
10 “For it is possible for the same thing at the same time to be contrary things potentially, but not in full activity (actuality, energeia),” (Metaphysics, p. 67, Book IV, Ch. 5).
11 “The source of motion in things by nature is present in them all along in some way, either potentially or fully at work,” (Metaphysics, p. 82, Book V, Ch. 4)
12 Metaphysics, p. 82 (Book V, Chap. 4).
13 “Potencies too, some will be irrational and some will include reason,” (Metaphysics, p. 169, Book IX, Ch. 2).
14 Metaphysics, p. 169.
15 Metaphysics, p. 169
16 Metaphysics, p. 170
17 Metaphysics, p. 170
18 Metaphysics, p. 171
19 Metaphysics, p. 183, Book IX, Ch. 10
20 “And what’s more, we shall expect to understand that there is among beings a certain other kind of independent thing to which there belongs neither motion nor destruction nor any becoming at all,” (Metaphysics, p. 67).
21 Metaphysics, p. 184, Book IX, Ch. 10
22 Heidegger’s Aristotle’s Metaphysics [theta], p. 63
23 Heidegger’s Aristotle’s Metaphysics [theta], p. 63
24 Heidegger’s Aristotle’s Metaphysics [theta], p. 64
25 Heidegger’s Aristotle’s Metaphysics [theta]. p. 65
26 Heidegger’s Aristotle’s Metaphysics [theta], p. 63
27 “The human transfers onto the things outside inner experience… Subjective experiences in the internal soul are projected and transferred outward to the objects,” (Aristotle’s Metaphysics, p. 62).
28 “To know is not to achieve something new, but to calm down out of the distractions of our native disorder, and settle into the contemplative relation to things that is already ours,” (Physics, p. 246).
29 I must draw our attention to Heidegger’s challenge, “Is anything actually explained by referring the positing of forces in things and objects themselves back to a transferal of subjective experiences into the objects,” (Heidegger’s Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 63).

American Philosophy Precis II (11/20/04)

Aaron Bell
American Philosophy, Phil 520
Dr. Scott Pratt
30 November 2004

Precis II - Putnam
Ethics Without Ontology

Since its dawn, philosophy has longed for practical solutions to the controversial ethical disagreements of everyday life. Throughout this struggle, thinkers have traditionally sought, for better or for worse, to provide a strategy for ethics that is objectively rooted in a type of ontology. Pragmatic philosopher Hilary Putnam rejects the need for an ontology altogether. After emphasizing how ontologically based theories are not helpful in identifying practical ethics, such as those appealing to one single human concern (e.g., sympathy) or to one single set of concepts (e.g., Platonic forms, or abstract identities), he argues for a system of ethics that can still stand objectively alone (p3).

In his work, “Ethics Without Ontology”, Hilary Putnam deconstructs the supposed objectivity of both mathematics and logic, and defends the reasonableness and objectiveness of ethical (-value) judgments. In this maneuver he shows how learned common sense will help coordinate a sense of convention for constructing axioms of empirical knowledge (e.g., notions of object and existence). This construction, made possible by convention, is what Putnam terms, Conceptual Relativity. Conceptual Relativity, which is naturally pluralistic and of its own optional language, provides the basis for a strategy of ethics, regardless of issues of ontology.

Lastly, Putnam claims that there have been three enlightenment periods, where each new period of enlightenment has offered a revolutionarily new system of convention, which, in turn, dictates a new Conceptual Relativity. Putnam is in the business of addressing practical problems and the project of this text is to show how the ‘pragmatic enlightenment,’ fueled by John Dewey, provides the most reasonable method for addressing such ethical disagreements. It will be my job to show you both how this is possible and how its rejection of (an) ontology necessarily demands pluralism.

I will first mention, albeit briefly, how Putnam defines ‘ethics’. For him, the term ‘ethics’ is understood as a system of principles - “a system of interrelated concerns, concerns which [are seen] as mutually supporting but also in partial tension” (22). He acknowledges that there are many operational definitions of ethics out there, many of which share common interpretations and serve as presuppositions of ethics - for example, those involving the idea of sacrificing the self for the betterment of the community, or those upholding the ideals of courage and prowess as virtues. But what Putnam seems to embrace most is “the emphasis on alleviating suffering regardless of the class or gender of the sufferer” (23). Putnam is clearly drawn to this as an attractive model for ethics, a universal ethical equality of sorts. It is from here, now, that we will move forward and engage Putnam’s argument.

To eventually reject ontology, Putnam must first provide its definition. He begins by distinguishing the word ‘ontology’ from it’s Heideggerian influence, and describes it in its more traditional, metaphysical outfit, “the science of being” (17). With this there are three ontological views, each worth rejecting: inflationary, reductionism and eliminationism.

The inflationary ontological view “claims to tell us of the existence of things unknown to ordinary sense perception and to common sense” (17). For Plato, issues of ethical value and obligation were explained by the “Theory of Forms.” For G. E. Moore, ethical judgments were made in conjunction to a non-natural, supersensible quality called “good” (18). This form of ontology requires a special intuition, or relation to a higher ethical knowledge on the part of the philosopher, and “reduces all ethical phenomena, all ethical problems, all ethical questions, indeed all value problems, to just one issue, the presence or absence of this single super-thing” (19); which is a commitment to monism.

Reductionist and eliminationist ontologies are both a type of deflation. Where inflationary ontology magnifies the importance of ontological claims to an all knowing source of answers (God, the Forms, good, etc), these two deflationary ontologies are to de-emphasize our initial ethical disagreements. Reductionist ontologies claim “ethical utterances are nothing but expressions of feelings” (20). They reduce ethical dilemmas from what they seem to be, to what they, supposedly, ‘really’ are. Eliminationist ontologies make the claim that what seems to be an ethical problem really is nothing at all. It’s “aim is to show us that we are talking about mythical entities” (21).

Putnam explains that these continental approaches to ontology have failed to provide a practical solution for dealing with ethical problems. One applies to a monistic higher authority that is only available to a select few; the others essentially deny a person access to tangible problem-solving techniques by displacing the ethical issues at hand. Putnam admits, “ontology in all three of the forms I distinguished in my opening lecture - inflationary, reductionist, and eliminationist - has been a failure” (78). Further, Putnam calls us to simply realize that the there is no “single, unified theory of the world” (81) and, more sensibly, he states:

“the whole collection of human languages now in existence illustrates how many ways there are of ‘quantifying’ in the process of describing very simple situations, situations as simple as someone’s pulling a branch aside. The whole idea that the world dictates a unique ‘true’ way of dividing the world into objects, situations, properties, etc., is a piece of philosophical parochialism. But just that parochialism is and always has been behind the subject called Ontology” (51)

Putnam continues. He mentions how Quine was the first philosopher to establish ‘ontology’ as a respectable subject in analytic philosophy the moment he (Quine) published his famous paper titled, “On What There Is” in 1948. Quine’s claim, essentially, rested on the premise that “it is only our best scientific theory of the world that says anything we can take seriously about what there is” (84), including issues of ethics. Putnam is quick to show how our so-called ‘best’ scientific theories, established by past enlightenment periods, provide ‘misguided’ Ontological explanations for their objectivity (3). That is to say, the objectivity in mathematics and logic is not coming from ontological claims, but, rather, from within their own respective languages. On this, Putnam defines and challenges the notion of what is meant by ‘objective,’ and, before exploring the objectivity of logic and of mathematics, let us do the same.

Objectivity is derived from the philosophical idea that there must be objects to which the objectivity claim ‘corresponds’ and “if there are no obvious natural objects whose properties would make the claim true, then there must be some non-natural objects to play the role of ‘truth-maker’” (52). This notion is fervent among the three forms of ontology stated earlier, and is the reason why ontology and objectivity have gone hand-in-hand for so long. Further, Putnam explains that in accepting this idea, one will most likely be willing to accept a third, “the idea that if a claim is true, then the claim is a description of whatever object and properties make it true” (52). This being the case, the average person will regard whatever s/he believes to be objectively true as merely a description. The line of thinking here is that if someone struggles to satisfy his/her descriptions with natural objects and/or properties, then s/he will be forced to construe the descriptions with reference to non-natural entities (53). This is the very line of thinking that Putnam believes is completely mistaken and misguided.

He argues for the possibility of there being a thing, which serves as a truth, that is not a description of some object(s). His first example is of logic. He presents the following simple logical inference:

If all platypus are egg-laying mammals, then it follows that,
Anything that is not an egg-laying mammal is not a platypus.

On this, he admits that one could call this a description, but Putnam explains that when we use simple logical inferences (above), we are pointing out the validity of the relation between statements, not literally describing a certain relation between intangible objects. Putnam explains, “logic is neither a description of non-natural relations between transcendent ‘objects’ nor a description of ordinary empirical properties of empirical objects” (59). In this case, we have an example where a given statement is true (the validity of the structure is true), but cannot be understood as a description of objects (the ‘validity of the structure’ cannot to be understood as a description of an object). At best, this is what many philosophers of science have long called a pseudo-explanation (implying a lack of surplus meaning & fruitfulness, as explained on p60).

Another example worth highlighting is where Putnam speaks briefly, and confusingly so, about Quine’s assumptions on tautologies. He says:

“And since a Tarskian ‘truth definition’ provides no general notion of truth, but only an infinite series of different notions, … then Quine’s definition of validity, presupposing, as it does, that Tarski has provided a purely extensional explanation of the predicate ‘true,’ likewise provides only an infinite series of different notions of validity, … and not a single notion ‘valid’ applicable to statements in an arbitrary language” (58).

With this, Putnam arrives at a very relevant conclusion: one cannot validate notions of truth outside of a given, particular language. Above is a case where the importance and meaningfulness of the truth and/or falsehood of a given statement is largely dependent on its own language, and is, thus, untranslatable between arbitrary languages.

Some things, now, seem to exist as objective without need of a description (e.g., logical statements), while other seemingly similar things cannot share descriptions since they necessarily belong to their own language (e.g., Tarskian vs. Quinian). Here, Putman has shown some of the misguided reasons for which objectivity has appealed to ontology for so long. However, although ontology has attempted to provide the non-natural reference needed as a description for (objective) things, Putnam has helped us to see the separation that can be made between Ontology and objectivity. I should carefully mention that removing the need for ontological ‘descriptions’ from objectivity is not the same as to dismiss the possibility of objectivity. To maintain that statements in logic are correct, and to uphold objectivity in general, Putman explains a new term, conceptual truth.

Though limited as a full explanation, conceptual truth for Putnam is an corrigible interpretation of sorts, it is a truth that “is impossible to make (relevant) sense of the assertion of its negation” (61). For example, ‘2+2 = 4’ and the logic inference involving platypuses (above) are both conceptual truths. He mentions that our acceptance/denials of conceptual truth come from within one’s body of beliefs and one’s conceptual connections. Conveniently, this definition recognizes the interpenetration of conceptual truth and empirical description, which allows for the possibility for a scientific revolution to overthrow one’s belief system from which one’s original notions of truth were substantiated.

The limit that Putnam speaks of is in regard to three things. First, not all logical truths are conceptual truths in the sense we previously discussed; some necessarily need proofs. Second, there is no way to provide a non-empirical guarantee that our conceptual truths will not some day fail to a new empirical finding. And third, “to know what it is for something to be a logical truth, it is not enough to be familiar with a few examples of self-evident logical truth, … but one must have some familiarity with logical justification” (64). Essentially, Putnam is reminding us that one learns logic, and that the value of conceptual truths is, in part, due to a progressive and accumulative learning attitude. This is how Putnam defends conceptual truths, and in doing so, revives our ability to arrive at objective truth without necessitating description. If you recall, while providing examples for conceptual truth, Putnam included a mathematical term. We have concluded our talk of logic, it is only right that we address mathematics, in short, as well.

On the topic of mathematical truth, Putnam has this to say: “we learn what mathematical truth is by learning the practices and standards of mathematics itself, including the practices of applying mathematics” (66). Mathematical truth strongly resembles logical truth (67), and Putnam certainly emphasizes mathematics as having its own language to boot. The objectivity of mathematics lies within this language, within its own structure, and to determine its conceptual truth is to learn of its practices and applications. Incidentally, Putnam explains how, on one hand, much of contemporary science, namely physics, is supported by use of mathematical theorems as objective truths, while, on the other hand, “nothing supports taking mathematical theorems as a description of a special realm of ‘abstract entities,’ and nothing is gained, in philosophy of mathematics or elsewhere, by so doing” (67). This he adds so as to confirm and emphasize the stability with which mathematics has maintained throughout the centuries - all on its own objective terms!

On this note, Putnam has successfully pulled objectivity away from its dependence on ontology. He has deconstructed the issues of objectivity within mathematics and logic, leaving each to maintain their own objectivity without homage to ontological ideals, but within their own language and certifiably so by way of conceptual truth. At this point, Putnam would wish to emphasize that he is in the business of “rejecting the widespread belief that ethical judgments lack objectivity” (3). Looking more closely at how Putnam defends the reasonableness and objectivity of ethical judgments, we will determine how Putnam provides a method for ethics without ontology.

Putnam’s system of ethics seems to focus around an ideal that has had ontologists scratching their heads for years. This notion is termed, Conceptual Relativity. The real goal with Putnam is to provide a method of ethics that would allow groups of people to join perspectives and address legitimate practical problems. Conceptual relativity achieves just that. We will define it shortly, but first let us arrive at what is meant by ‘convention’.

In a world of many individuals, discrepancies on how to see the world emerge. Putnam uses a great analogy to ‘mereological sums’ to support this idea. The mereological sum is an analogy for things that exist in the world. It takes a world of three objects (x1, x2 and x3) and shows you how there are several legitimate, equally possible worlds that a person could construct with regards to these same three objects (x1, x2, x3, x1+x2, x1+x3, x2+x3, and x1+x2+x3). Unable to determine which of these sums ‘exists’ more than another, since each is equally plausible, a strategy is needed to determine which construction is right for you. The simple act of choosing is what Putnam calls ‘convention’ - “it is literally a matter of convention whether we decide to say they exist” (43).

Symbols aside, with so much potential and equally viable variance in the world, it is out of convention that we choose between multiple and equal options - in much the same way that it is out of pure convention that the British drive on the left side of the road, and Americans drive on the right; same problem, different but equally good resolution. For Putnam, “a convention is simply a solution to a certain kind of coordination problem” (44). When we come to a dilemma, we exercise our common sense, take into account our natural language, “the language that we all speak and cannot avoid speaking every day” (43), and choose the most ‘conventional’ means. Putnam reminds us that, “while there is an element of convention in all knowledge, there is no guarantee that anything we call a convention won’t someday have to be given up, perhaps for a reason we are totally unable to foresee now” (44). But in the meantime, this is a perfectly good strategy for making judgments, or more specifically, choosing between specifiable ways of using words (45). This is what is meant by constructive relativism - “the possibility of different extensions of our ordinary notions of object and existence” (49).

There are differing ways of formalizing the possible extensions of our ordinary ways of speaking (43); this formalizing is called ‘optional language’. Optional language is used to mediate between options, but it has no ability to choose or give preference. In review, the way one chooses is by convention, which is in direct response to your own learned common sense. This process all together is conceptual relativism. Putnam notes:

“[All the examples] of conceptual relativity so far mentioned … all involve statements that appear to be contradictory … but are not in fact contradictory, if we understand each of them as belonging to a different optional language, and recognize that the two optional languages involve the choice of incompatible conventions. What are ‘incompatible’ are not the statements themselves, which cannot simply be conjoined, but the conventions” (46).

Every relation, every definition, everything within a specific conceptual relativity is thought to be its own self-supporting, objective language - much like mathematics, logic, etc. There being multiple optional languages and room for differing conventions demands that there be multiple conceptual relativities. This, by nature, gives way to what Putnam calls conceptual pluralism. He says, “that we can use [multiple] schemes without being required to reduce one or both of them to some single fundamental and universal ontology is the doctrine of pluralism” (49). Conceptual relativity necessarily implies pluralism. This scheme, as a whole, provides the necessary basis for a strategy of ethics without ontology.

Putnam leaves us with some historical relevance for these claims. His views emerge from the third of three enlightenment periods. The first was what he terms the Platonic enlightenment, where Plato and Socrates helped instill a type of reflective transcendence (e.g., ‘standing back’) and worked to establish early conceptions of justice and critical thinking. The second enlightenment is what most people refer to as the Enlightenment. Lead by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and the likes, this era involved the emergence of theories of ‘social contract’ and of ‘natural rights’ and was witness to the introduction of a ‘new science’ (e.g., Newton and the scientific method, p93). The third enlightenment, however still in progress, is what he terms as the ‘pragmatic enlightenment.’

Fueled by John Dewey, the so-called third enlightenment provides the most reasonable method for addressing ethical disagreements. For Putnam, “enlightenments are simultaneously revolutions in our epistemological thinking and in our ethical thinking” (5). I think Putnam would say that with each new enlightenment, a new system of convention is offered, and with each new convention is a new potential to reform the way we deal with practical problems. Dewey rejects the social contract ideals of the second enlightenment and pushes for the belief that morally decent communities should be democratic (104). Dewey, as does Putnam, believes that “only in a democracy does everyone have a chance to make his or her contribution to the discussion” (105). If the real goal of ethics, as proposed by Putnam, is to require individuals to be learned and to seek knowledge so as to better contribute to the ethical conversation, than the challenge of the third enlightenment is to treat ethics as a learning process (125). Putnam’s ethics without ontology necessarily follows suit, if not leads the way.

Putnam has provided a theory of ethics that is as pluralistic as possible. I am inextricably drawn to wonder about ‘optional languages’. Like Putnam, I think of Davidson’s “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” and the question of how languages are affected after translation. Again, like Putnam, I believe that both languages are necessarily affected. The idea of translatability seems to demand that both languages compromise a (portion of a?) conceptual scheme, and in so doing, necessarily create a new perspective. After deliberating about the Shawnee, Putnam raises the issue that, “the conceptual scheme of English is constantly being enriched by interactions with other languages, as well as specific, artistic, etc., creations” (50), and I completely agree.

But what I wonder is, considering the current rate of language translatability on an international scale, who’s to know how quickly other optional languages can emerge? Of all the terms in Putnam’s theory of ethics, optional languages seem to include the fewest variety, and this allows his method to be somewhat manageable. If optional languages were to grow to be nearly as numerous as conventions, or as broad as common sense, I can’t help but be fearful that Putnam has allowed for an ‘every man for himself’ scenario. I understand this is a bit extreme, but I’m still left wondering how he proposes to control for that.

All in all, we should be applauding Hilary Putnam’s work in “Ethics Without Ontology”. He has provided a credible historical assessment of past strategies for ethics. He has defined and proposed three periods of enlightenment. He has given our current era a charge for and a challenge to approach development and progress via a process of learning. And on top of it all, he has provided a strong system of ethics that convincingly rejects ontology and, arguably, successfully provides a new approach to dealing with practical ethical disagreements. For this we should be thankful. However, for this, we should also keep one eyebrow raised.

American Philosophy Final (1/7/05)

Intentionality in Bio-Systems: a vitalistic proposal for pluralistic consciousness

I am providing a vitalistic proposal for pluralistic consciousness. “Vitalistic” in the sense that I embrace the notion that not all processes of life are explicable by (our current?) laws of physics and chemistry alone, and that life is, in some part, self-determining. “Pluralistic,” not merely because all humans exercise consciousness, but so do all animals and all plants - in short, at least all bio-systems. As for “consciousness,” our mainstream definitions of it will require some slight adjustments, and in doing so, I will place large emphasis on “intentionality”. We are about to embark on a journey that penetrates the confines of the phenomenal barrier, and intentionality will be our rocket ship.

I write this essay to join the cosmological discussion that Royce has begun with his paper, “Self-Consciousness, Social Consciousness and Nature.” Royce shows us the limits of our experience, and makes apparent the fact that “there now exist certain possibilities of experience which [we] do not realize” (Royce, p. 16). With a voice of critical reason and by reference to empirical knowledge, I will suggest that intentionality is the primary discernable function of consciousness. As such, the dominant epistemological maneuver of this essay will be to describe the possibility for and manifestations of intentionality in bio-systems, and necessarily, I will reduce the structure of the human psyche to components common to all organisms, remove the need for a ‘witness’ (e.g., ‘ego’) within consciousness, and deconstruct the notion that humans are the only organism capable of said consciousness. For dessert, I leave you with an irrefutable possibility - the intentionality of water. Our point of departure will be in direct simulation to Royce: What is the meaning of this phenomenal relation of man to nature?1 Let’s begin.

Our investigation begins with something initially perplexing: you and I are invariably and inevitably the same. Additionally, all organisms are defined by intentionality, and thus have consciousness - but we must first understand the nature of our similarity. As all individual organisms of life wax and wane between precious breaths, what lies outside of their unrememberable firsts and their undesirable lasts is necessarily the same: a heap of dust. Coincidentally, these heaps of dust are composed of the same tiny particles, called atoms, with which all things are necessarily made. We must understand that these atoms are so feverishly recycled at death,2 that millions upon millions of other organisms are necessarily comprised of what we might like to call, ‘our old bits and pieces.’ We cannot forget to begin this conversation with the realization that all organisms are made with interchangeable parts. Thus, the possibility of making consciousness in one organism (e.g., the human psyche, per se) is just as likely as making consciousness in another. But I digress, slightly. We will return to this idea of interchangeable parts, more specifically, atoms; for now, let us dilute the belief that the human brain is the only home for consciousness.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett begins his book, Consciousness Explained, “by arguing that current ideas about consciousness usually presume the existence of a subject who is capable of witnessing what we take to be the objects of consciousness. The problem with this view, of course, is that events in the brain, much like events in the liver, seem to proceed quite nicely with no sign of any such witness” (Frisina, 2002, p. 45). Here Dennett has pointed out that if we uphold the dualistic notions of consciousness that Descartes first described, then we are assuming that consciousness is not only reflective and self-witnessing, but it is necessarily a nonmaterial, purely mental substance - incapable of coming in contact or impacting the physical realm. Admittedly, whether or not an immaterial substance can exist in the brain, and whether or not that substance can have the characteristics of ‘witnessing’ are difficult points of departure for argument. This being said, neither Dennett nor I intend to argue that consciousness is not capable of being self-witnessing, but rather, we agree that the processes of the human brain (and other brains or organs for that matter) can clearly function on the physical level. Even if consciousness can involve a non-material self-witness, Dennett is proposing that the brain’s physical proficiency must come first. “On Dennett’s model, consciousness is not in any one place within the brain. It is the product of the whole brain, an outcome that stems from the sympathetic interaction of innumerable subroutines, all of which are operating in concert but with no overarching witness or coordinator. In short, the witness is the end product, rather than the starting point of consciousness.”3 It is our goal, then, to explore that very starting point.

It is generally assumed that the human consciousness is situated in the brain. Entire fields of academia, in part, are devoted to proving it. Despite failing to reveal consciousness structures in the brain, neurobiologists have placed responsibility of consciousness largely on the “evidence for the impressive computational power of an individual neuron” (Scott, 2000, p. 72). Neurons are very particular to humans, along with a handful of other higher level primates, and if their computational power was specifically responsible for consciousness then we would have very little reason to question whether consciousness could exist in other organisms.

However, in his new book, Biophysics of Computation, Christof Koch offers a variety of speculations for non-neural computation in the brain, including molecular computing that takes place below the level of a single neuron and chronicling significant effects of chemical diffusants4 on a large numbers of neurons.5 Though the neuroscience community pays little attention, Koch is offering up novel ideas. The very possibility of alternative computational power, especially below the level of the neuron, is a monumental proposal. If the brain’s computational power is derived from components more elementary than a neuron, we are left to entertain questions of consciousness at the molecular and atomic level.

Our return to atoms is important in our quest to dismantle the belief that consciousness exists in only the human brain. If we still believe that consciousness is necessarily in the human brain, yet we agree that, by the micro-processes of compost and decay, atoms are recycled millions of times over into other organisms, what is to stop us from asking the following: in the same random ways that specific individual atoms once constituted our conscious brains, couldn’t they now be situated in, per se, a plant system with the same aptitude for consciousness?

Empirically, a plant cell’s aptitude for consciousness is currently difficult to measure, however one very curious study with animals has much to offer about the potential aptitude for consciousness within a non-brain-cell. Max Velmans quotes Charles Sherrington in saying, “A brain-cell is not unalterably from birth a brain-cell. In the embryo-frog the cells destined to be brain can be replaced by cells from the skin of the back, the back of even another embryo; these after transplantation become in their new host brain-cells and seem to serve the brain’s purpose duly” (Velmans, 2000, p. 268). If the brain really is the source of consciousness in humans, Sherrington’s study leads us to believe that the actual cells that serve as brain-cells do so rather arbitrarily and that non-brain-cells could just as easily have carried-out brain-cell processes. Prior to his work, cells were regarded as having a specific inherent function, but the fact that they can be resituated and assume the roles and functions of different parts of an organism (e.g., skin vs. brain) puts traditional views of consciousness in jeopardy. If cells are responsible for the construction of consciousness, then Sherrington has shown a variety of different cells to have consciousness capabilities. We are left to ponder how many different cells are capable of performing the same job(s). And further, would it be possible to assume that these cells are all directly involved, in one way or another, with the phenomenon of consciousness?

To this, one might argue that a brain is organized in a certain way to carry out specific functions, nearly all of which differs from plant systems. However, on closer inspection, there is not much separation between humans, animals or plants. We are reminded of two things:

First, “we don’t even know the necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness in our own brains!” (Velmans, 264). I should add that I am not convinced that human consciousness is just in the head. All cells potentially contribute to its constitution, and therefore consciousness can be in all places (well, at least more than one) - we tend to locate it in the brain, not only because of its central location or its affiliation with all body parts, but in a strange way, I think we objectify the head because of its very vitality.

Secondly, we must remember atoms are interchangeable parts that constitute all organic things.6 In his text, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson quotes Matt Ridley as explaining, “Wherever you go in the world, whatever animal, plant, bug, or blob you look at, if it is alive, it will use the same dictionary and know the same code. All life is one,” (Bryson, 2003, p. 294). Already, we have succeeded in reducing the structure of the human psyche to components common to all organisms. Additionally, we have acknowledged the predicament of the reflective self-witness within human consciousness and Daniel Dennett has helped us to see this as a sufficient but not a necessary product of consciousness. And we have clearly diluted the notion that only humans can have consciousness. We are ready to discuss and define Life, and the conditions of its ability to experience consciousness.

Let us define those things which we fit under the umbrella of ‘Life.’ If we are concerned about tracing it’s evolutionary roots, what I will later call ‘conscious life’ would seem to date back at least to the first ‘eukaryote.’ This will be our point of departure, since it deals directly with the possibility of multicellular organisms7. A eukaryote arose as the first cell of its kind, one with a nucleus and other little bodies called organelles. The creation of this type of cell was thought to have occurred when some “blundering or adventuresome bacterium either invaded or was captured by some other bacterium and it turned out that this suited them both.” (Bryson, 2003, p. 300). The captive bacterium is thought to be mitochondrion, which made complex life possible.8 However mitochondria are very curious, as they help the body system by manipulating oxygen in a way that liberates energy, but they look, divide and respond in unusual ways, while maintaining their own DNA. They don’t even speak the same genetic language as the cell in which they live. But, in the end, these eukaryotes grew to carry massive amounts of DNA, and evolved to form complex multicellular organisms.9

“According to [biologist William] Roux, the most remarkable characteristics of the activity of the organism were, first, that it was a combination of activities - growth, reproduction, elimination, etc.; secondly, that these activities were apparently self-originating; and thirdly, that they were conditional upon the ability of the organism to maintain itself by constant reparation” (Tomlin, 1955, 98). Roux has outlined the characteristics of multicellular organisms precisely how I think they should be described. Every organism of this type is what I term a ‘bio-system’ and each is necessarily involved in a consciousness.

Consciousness should be seen as the unifying process by which an organism maintains biological stability and progress. I am not claiming, however, that every level of consciousness be a higher-level intellectual function as Dewey10 or Lycan11 would so have me do. Introspection,12 Awareness,13 Inquiry,14 Language,15 Subjectivity are all perhaps terms related to consciousness, but they are not primary. Intentionality16 is primary, and this is the first recognizable symptom, or starting point of consciousness as Dennett would agree. It constitutes consciousness. There may be other unifying qualities beyond or before intentionality, but we can be certain that intentionality is the lowest common denominator of consciousness observable in bio-systems.

“There is no special problem about consciousness or awareness over and above the problem of intentionality as traditionally framed” (Lycan, 1987, 71). Unfortunately, Lycan’s definition of an ‘intentional state’ is plagued with misplaced rhetoric (ie., brain, mental), all of which are metaphors for the very consciousness we are trying to unveil. Lycan, and many others, seem blinded by the limits of their phenomenal experience. On this subject, Royce convincingly notes, “I take it that our scientifically conceived laws of nature are largely phenomenal generalizations from very superficial aspects of the inner life of nature, and that very much indeed of what we now call nature has existence only for human perception and thought, as a matter of the similarities of the experience of various human observers” (Royce, 20). Essentially, Royce is admitting that science has for too long depended on only the possibilities which are experienced by human consciousness (phenomena) and he feels strongly, as do I, that we have no right to speak in any way that suggests “the inner experience behind any fact of nature were of a grade lower than ours, or less conscious, or less rational, or more atomic” (Royce, 21). Above all, we are equally atomic.
Royce and I have set out to analyze man’s phenomenal relation to nature, and at this point we see a confounding of sorts taking place because humans’ phenomenal position impedes the potential scope of his scientific perspective. Schopenhauer17 proposed the ‘will’ as the true noumenal reality. For him, will is a concept of ‘energy’ or ‘force’ that drives all things. I propose that this vitalistic force is the starting point of consciousness in all organisms. It is responsible for and clearly visible in the intentionality of all bio-systems18. We proceed by making a case for the possibility and manifestation of intentionality in bio-systems.

All complex multicellular organisms19 are originally and naturally in competition for a mode of corporeal unification. As I stated earlier, consciousness is that unifying property, the will that incites organisms to make use of their environment. Bill Bryson may have said it best, “[All living things] will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be” (Bryson, 2003, p. 336). There is a very visible boundary between the organic and the inorganic and Bryson, here, is alluding to the incessant striving characteristic of all bio-systems. Whether it’s a sunflower following the movement of the sun across the summer’s sky, or a leaf curling itself to catch a drop of rainfall, organic striving is the most primitive state of intention.

According to biologist Wilhelm Roux, “an organism, in contrast to a machine, possessed what he called a ‘disposition.’ Varying with ‘type’ of organism, this ‘disposition’ exercised a causal influence at every stage of development. This amounted to a new conception of the notion … of ‘internal cause’…defined as working within or ‘informing’ matter” (Tomlin, 97). Roux recognized that all bio-systems are disposed to act in ways that preserve and promote their growth and development. These processes in non-human organisms were thought (by humans, who are limited in their phenomenal scope) to be the product of some scientifically determinable notion of causality. Meanwhile, humans agreed that we can freely engage our external environment by way of conscious choice. After recognizing the dispositions of other organisms, a new conception of cause was needed to interpret their will, and Roux seems to be leaning towards what Schopenhauer so eloquently explains: “The act of will and the action of the body [or organism] are not two different states objectively known, connected by the bond of causality; they do not stand in the relation of cause and effect, but are one and the same thing” (Schopenhauer, Vol. I, p. 100) - that is to say, an organisms consciousness is both its vital cause and its effect.

Initially, this may sound a bit confusing, but such is the noumenal reality. E. W. F. Tomlin provides a noble explanation. He says, “The organism is what it does. The same is true of life itself. The problem of isolating a living substance or vital core thus becomes an unreal problem. Life is neither the material nor the property of the organism but its activity.” (Tomlin, 1955, p. 97-98). To not accept this would be to insist that not all non-human organisms have the power of consciousness. I would be forced to match your reduction of organic action to causality with an argument that just as easily reduces human behavior and ‘decision-making’ to causal reactions as well. This would show how all organisms are subject to the same criticism, and that a rejection of organic consciousness is a rejection of all consciousness, including more advanced levels of (at least human) consciousness. After all, the need for consciousness is to unite the various components of a single organism so as to operate in the best interest of the whole. The intention of a bio-system, then, is the full-functioning product of the organism itself.

Finding intention in all complex, multicellular, organic beings necessarily provides a pluralistic account of consciousness. It is pluralistic not only because each being presumably articulates and exercises its own driving consciousness, but also there would be some things in the world that are not multicellular (or even cellular at all), and thus have no intentionality and no consciousness whatsoever (ie., rocks)20. However, despite the rejection of the Cartesian duality between body and mind, dualism could potentially render its curious head one last time, life and not-life. If we agree that the end goal of consciousness is the full-functioning product of the organism itself, then it seems that the larger, over-arching notion of consciousness is the preservation, maintenance and progression of Life. This, too, is a rather problematic anomaly, since we cannot determine from where this vital life force came.

Further, like Dennett, I imagine I will be criticized for describing consciousness in a way that “merely [postpones] the question of consciousness” (Frisina, 2002, p.46). This is perhaps true. To this, I have both a defense and a retort. I will defend that this essay has accomplished a significant amount. I have reduced all bio-systems to the same interchangeable atomic parts, proposed that the most basic state of consciousness is intentionality, and shown all multicellular organisms to be commonly driven by the vital life force of consciousness. As a species, our phenomenal tunnel vision has left us so solipsistic and anthropomorphic that we have for too long refused to accept that which we so likely have in common with other plants and animals. I would like to add, this streak in us is nearly as long and as thick as our repugnance toward being wrong. However, I will acknowledge that this essay has not resolved the question of where consciousness or vital will comes from. There may be some medium beyond molecules, or something beyond matter that creates the life force. There may be something unique to every organism that we are overlooking. Bill Bryson leaves us to believe that the secret may be hidden away in mitochondria.21 Indeed, I do have another fanatical suggestion. It is irrefutably possible, but admittedly difficult to fully defend. In attempting to posit an inorganic object that also demonstrates intentionality, I could think of none - except for one possible anomaly: water.

But what an anomaly! Water is the largest, physical commonality to which all organisms share a relation. The sun comes close, but organisms like chemosynthetic plants refute the universal need for direct sunlight, but I could think of no multicellular organism that can refute its relationship with water. “Every scenario you have ever read concerning the conditions necessary for life involves water” (Bryson, 2003, p. 291). My proposal only goes so far as to propose a theoretical scenario that might reveal whether water has intentionality. If we were able to show water to have intentionality we could do one of two things: (a) we could assume that water is conscious, or (b) considering that water is so integrally related to Life, we could propose the core of consciousness to exist within water. Farfetched, perhaps - but possible. If the second possibility were taken seriously, I would recommend more closely examining the unique molecular structure that distinguishes water molecules from so many others. Allow me to propose my scenario for determining the intentionality of water:

To discover water’s potential state of intentionality, we would first need to cut a perfectly symmetrical glass, cup or container of sorts. The walls, base and rim would all need to be perfectly symmetrical relative to all of its opposite sides. For sake of theoretical ease, imagine a perfectly symmetrical pint glass. We would then need to rig up a device that, drop by drop, perfectly and evenly fills the glass up with water at the exact center of the glass’ mouth (e.g., the midpoint of the glass’ diameter). Naturally, as the glass fills, a meniscus will form at the top of the glass. Water’s properties are as such that it will cling to itself; we would suppose that its attraction to itself (the meniscus) would be even and equal within the contexts of a perfectly symmetrical glass. At some point, the volume of water will overcome the meniscus’ capacity for retention. The test for intentionality will be whether the water collapses over the sides of the glass evenly at all places, or if the meniscus will break in one place first. If the meniscus collapses in one place, we may infer that, of the infinite equal options given to the water, it intended to break in one place, rather than another. This could be seen as support for the intentionality of water.

The theory of intentionality of water is appealing and conjures up many new avenues and possibilities of thought - perhaps worthy of an additional paper. However, we must not be too distracted from the dominant epistemological maneuver of this essay. With reference to empirical claims about the molecular relationship of neurons and other organisms, I have redefined a case for consciousness that includes all multicellular bio-systems, and incited fresh enthusiasm into its most basic premise, intentionality. Our discussions of pluralism, in regards to the phenomenal relation of conscious man to nature, are furthered by the inclusion and accompaniment of all organisms to the experience of consciousness that we previously reserved for ‘humans only.’ I remind you that there certainly seem to be large differences between the ways in which some organisms experience consciousness, and there is no denying that humans have cognitive levels beyond the wildest dreams (no pun intended) of plants and animals. However, our examination of intentionality is important for establishing the first and most elementary state of consciousness, and for exploring our commonality with other organisms. The moral implications of such a position will be left to discussion in subsequent papers.

I write this essay to join the cosmological discussion that Royce has begun with his paper, “Self-Consciousness, Social Consciousness and Nature.” Royce shows us the limits of our experience, and makes apparent the fact that “there now exist certain possibilities of experience which [we] do not realize” (Royce, p. 16).

Hence, our point of departure will be in direct simulation to Royce: What is the meaning of this phenomenal relation of man to nature?22 Let’s begin.

At second glance, the response is clear: all organisms are defined by intentionality, and thus have consciousness. At first glance, however, our conclusion is immediately more digestible: we are invariably and inevitably the same.
Intentionality is will —- don’t forget!

Work Cited
——————————————-
Bryson, B. A Short History of Nearly Everything. New York: Broadway Books, 2003

Frisina, W. G. The Unity of Knowledge and Action: Toward a Nonrepresentational Theory of Knowledge. New York: State University of New York Press, 2002.

Jacquette, D. “Brentano’s concept of intentionality,” The Cambridge Companion to Brentano. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Lycan, W. G. Consciousness. Cambridge: A Bradford Book, The MIT Press, 1987.

McDermott, J. J. The Writings of William James: A comprehensive edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967.

Royce, J. “Self-Consciousness, Social Consciousness and Nature,” The Works of Josiah Royce (Electric Edition). Charlottesville, VA: Intelex Corporation, 2002.

Scott, A. “How Smart is a Neuron?: A Review of Christof Koch’s ‘Biophysics of Computation’,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 7, No. 5 (2000), 70-75.
Retrieved on December 6th, 2004, from: http://www.imprint.co.uk/Koch.pdf x

Schopenhauer, A. The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (in two volumes). Translated by E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, Inc, 1969.

Tomlin, E. W. F. Living and Knowing. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1955

Velmans, M. Understanding Consciousness. London: Taylor & Francis Inc., 2000.
1 Royce, 1895, p. 50
2 Bryson, 2003, p. 134
3 Frisina, 2002, p.46 - further, directly following, Frisina says, “My sense is that Deweyans should be especially comfortable with this aspect of Dennett’s position, since Dewey regularly says that the self emerges from the situation as a product rather than as a starting point.”
4 By diffusants, Koch is suggesting nitric oxide, calcium ions, carbon monoxide - all things that might cause a reaction out of molecules in the brain. I’m at liberty to remark that it seems we cannot seem to avoid the atomic level of life, and the smaller we get, the more common and level the playing field becomes for all living things.
5 Scott, 2000, p. 73
6 Bryson, 2003, p. 134
7 As a disclaimer, I am not going to bite off more than I can chew. Single-cell prokaryotic cells, or single-cellular organisms in general are more ambiguous in regards to their display of intentionality. In this paper “bio-systems’ or ‘organisms’ will only refer to multicellular organisms, attributing their existence to the evolution of eukaryotic cells.
8 Bryson, 2003, p. 300
9 Bryson, 2003, p. 300-301
10 “Consciousness, as Dewey uses the term, is best seen as a higher level of sensitivity that emerges from and is dependent upon these less complex sensitivities and patterned responses,” (Frisina, 2002, p. 113). Though we might be able to fudge with Dewey’s language, it’s clear that he places consciousness in higher ‘mental’ processes.
11 “I hold that to be in an intentional state is to host a mental representation, a brain state that bears a natural (causal and teleological) relation to the object represented, or in the case of abstract or nonexistent objects, to linguistic events that go proxy for them” (Lycan, 1987, p. 71).
12 (Lycan, 1987, p. 72)
13 (Lycan, 1987, p. 72)
14 (about Dewey; Frisina, 2002, p.114)
15 “Given Dewey’s definition of consciousness, it should be clear that consciousness could not spring forth full born in an individual human alone in the jungle. It grew out of language, culture, and communication” (Frisina, 202, p. 115); though I agree with Frisina, the only thing I would clarify is that ‘human consciousness as is’ could not have sprung out of one individual in the jungle, but there was necessarily some operating level of consciousness at that point.
16 Franz Brentano, considered the father of Intentionality, defines Intentionality in relation to human thought, but the definition is helpful: “To say that thought is intentional is to say that it intends or is about something that it aims at or is directed upon an intended object” (Jacquette, 98). Brentano will argue that intentionality is only a psychological phenomena, but I will argue otherwise.
17 In his primary text, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, Arthur Schopenhauer explains that man, the phenomenal being, imposes his representation (p. 1) on the world. On this noumenal notion of ‘will’, he explains that “the meaning that I am looking for of the world that stands before me simply as my representation … could never be found if the investigator himself were nothing more than the purely knowing subject” (99) - hence, the average scientist/biologist. Better still, he says, “we can never get at the inner nature of things from without” (100), however that inner nature, aka ‘will’, is within all things and serves as the mechanism of being, of action and of movement. Humans don’t realize that the action of their body is “nothing but the act of will objectified, i.e., translated into perception” (100). Lastly, I’ll add: in Volume II he says, “primarily, therefore, the vital force is identical with the will; but so also are the other forces of nature, though this is less apparent” (296).
18 In volume II, Schopenhauer regards the will of plant life. He quotes G. R. Treviranus, who fully represents his view, “A form of life is, however, conceivable where the effect of the external on the internal gives rise to mere feelings of inclination and aversion, and in consequence of these to cravings or desires. Such a form is plant life. In the higher forms of animal life the external is felt as something objective” (295). And again, Schopenhauer admits, “the truth that the will can exist without knowledge is apparent, we might say palpably recognizable, in plant life” (295).
19 A reminder, I am using ‘organism’ and ‘bio-system’ interchangeably.
20 I will admit, there very well may be another sub-level, more primitive state of consciousness than intentionality. However, the chief accomplishments of this essay are to justify the consciousness of multicellular bio-systems. I cannot say if Schopenhauer’s noumenal will or if Royce’s phrase, “nature consists of masses of ‘possibilities of sensation’”(16) allow for consciousness of all objects - I can and will only comment on the justified consciousness of plants, animals and humans.
21 Bryson, 2003, p. 300 - On this page, Bryson explains how elusive mitochondria really are, and how little we know about them, thus leaving open the possibility for questions about the origin of consciousness.
22 Royce, 1895, p. 50