Monthly Archives: October 2011

Political Considerations

26 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by in Blind spots in thinking, Gender culture, Political Power

≈ Leave a comment

Right-wing political ideology champions a certain claim about what is natural for the human species. It is very much Thomas Hobbes’ vision of the state of nature, a primal competition of all against all, unfettered individual freedom where the luckiest displace, destroy, or enslave the rest. Such is the right-wing utopia. (That characterization needs to be expanded at some point to account for the contradictory right-wing enthusiasm for interfering in private judgements about such matters as patriotism and sexual orientation. On those issues right-wing ideology demands conformity.) The right-wing utopia is a caricature of masculinity projecting a wish-fulfillment day-dream. It is not difficult to spot the fatal flaw: There are no children to be nurtured in that utopia. It would survive for precisely one nasty, brutish, and short generation. When the value of nurturing children enters the picture then what is natural is co-operation, play, sharing, and love.

The Conversation with Children

People continue to have children not because children are cute, or from brute instinct to continue the species, but because children are contributers to collective experience, essential interlocutors for adults. The innocent love of honest attachment and discovery characteristic of children is valuable in itself and not just as a stage to be rushed through on the way to adult mentality. Children are crucial contributers to the vitality of the human conversation. The realm of child-nurture, managed and cultivated by women, was effectively unknown, ignored, and despised by men from time out of mind. Due to that prejudice there is general lack of recognition for the female managed, child-care focused, culture in which all humans learn our first language and most other profound culture. It is not an unlikely, scarce, or exotic community. It is as universal for humans generally as first-language acquisition itself. There is no place for a contract because social attachment is an innocent accomplishment for ordinary people.

It isn’t just that children bring innocence to their conversation with adults, but also that children are the smartest people on the planet. Their brains are growing so fast that they learn a language from scratch ‘spontaneously’. The Suzuki music teaching method attempts to mimic first language acquisition with parental engagement, positive feedback, and playful repetition. With only these simple declarations of mutual attachment, children learn. Generation after generation of mothers have worked out how to sustain this work with some co-operation and mutual support. First language acquisition is inseparable from the domestic nexus of attachment, co-operation, and play, inseparable from the innocent love of attachment and discovery characteristic of children. Since the general underlying intent and purpose of language is to declare a distinctive voice in mutual play (rocks & bushes do not imitate), language is not as strictly rule-governed and game structured as Wittgenstein and others judged. Proto-linguistic play is fun and done casually all the time.

Hobbes and Schopenhauer represent philosophers who were childless and single privileged men immersed in a special minority culture of alpha-male competition, class, gender, and political dominance. It is not surprising that they grasped human nature as little more than egoism and a war of all against all. In ancient times Plato and, much later, Augustine also were embedded in privileged male culture-pods. Those philosophers believed human attachment is difficult and possible only under special circumstances as a gift from awe-inspiring power. They glorified the state as the greatest human achievement. (Check out Hegel.) The modern state was conceived and put into practice in the cultural matrix accumulated around the strategy for radical inequality which made life interesting and fun for competitive alphas.

On Meaning

A standard criticism of modernity is that secularism, democracy, and commercialism have destroyed meaning in people’s lives. Hegel claimed that meaning is bestowed on people by a hierarchical social order in which everyone has his or her place. (Something like: “It’s not much, but it’s home.”) In a variation of that view, Hitler observed that his best experience of meaning and purpose in life was as a soldier in the Great War of 1914-18. The war provided an overriding need in which everyone was willing to accept regimentation and personal sacrifice for a great cause. Hitler’s gift to his people was their nation at war, gloriously meaningful suffering and death. Leaders of all kinds are influenced by Hitler’s doctrine, often in more moderate forms.

It could be claimed that the ultimate Medieval narrative, the meaning of Medieval life, was the Roman Christian narrative of transcendence. Matching that claim would be that in modernity the ultimate narrative, the meaning of modern life, is competition in the market economy. However, it is just as plausible that the conversation with children and the family life which surrounds it have been more rewarding and meaningful all along. It looks like another instance of a cultured contempt for the female-managed and child-centered value matrix. Children still count as the focus of meaning for all classes. The imperative to nurture children ties people to stability in production and consumption, but not to any particular system. Many things have a presence in a person’s sense of meaning in life, with some being taken as more important if others are reduced. Individuals are fountains of meaning, and creatively confer meaning on their surroundings. A living legacy of classical heroism is the dignity and sanctity of individual self-invention, heroism turned inward. Anyway, mystery and uncertainty are not always problems. There is never a total absence of mystery and people are generally happy with that.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

The Transcendence of Intelligence

19 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by in Freedom, Subjectivity, Transcendence

≈ Leave a comment

Intelligence is common to conceptions of transcendence, both ancient and modern. Even if God is the particular form a sense of transcendence takes it is still a matter of intelligence transcending inertial non-intelligent nature. The power of God is always a deliberate teleological power, the power of intelligence. The sense of the absurdity that there is beautiful nature, intelligences, and culture instead of nothing shares a kind of transcendence with the sense of God, because that mystery temps us to interpreted it as a deliberate act of creation. Intelligence itself is the only evidence for a higher plane of existence, and subjectivity is our primary acquaintance with intelligence. The encounter between individual intelligence and merely inertial nature begins to make transcendence thinkable.

The freedom of intelligence has two aspects: strategic insight in the choice of action in the world, and transcendence of mute nature. Moving in the grip of instinct, random impulse, or external forces is not freedom, and neither is clashing with rivals in reflexive efforts of self-inflation. For a person to be free there must be a continuity of evaluating action-impulses for self-definition, self-creation, self-declaration, and attachments to others. For choices of action, intelligence has more than sensory perception and immediate responses stimulated by perception. It has memory and enduring intentions to create a certain personal future-in-life. In adjusting its bearings out of the past and into the increasingly remote future, rational thinking has the power to identify relevant causes and effects from a context which includes remote features as well as possibilities, probabilities, and negations. Deliberative intelligence has powers of making sense of perceptions through conceptual invention, pattern recognition, pattern imposition, analysis, and extrapolation. It has the power of deliberation, of presenting itself with conflicting propositions and evaluating their merits by ranging over a substantial body of mental contents. Embedded in individual deliberative power, language endows rational mentality with a unique public voice. The rational will or intellect is an individuating personal genius with the dignity of deliberative freedom. Intelligence is able to rise above the brute actuality of any moment to judge action which will be good over-all with respect to increasingly remote lifetime outcomes and goals.

A voice is not the same as the language or words uttered. A voice is also more than the sounds of physiological vocal organs. In addition to the language and the vocal organs there are emotionally expressive qualities from an intelligence in a life-situation. The voice carries or expresses a character, persona, or avatar in addition to any meaning that might be denoted or connoted by linguistic utterance. The voice expresses a continuity of deliberate acts of self-creation, self-declaration, and attachments.

There are grounds for transcendence in these observations. For one thing there are no negations, possibilities, or probabilities in the brute actuality of nature. Neither are there temporally remote features. These are brought to the situation by a personal mentality and clearly transcend the actuality of nature. The rational will is free, beyond the compulsion of natural impulses and merely ephemeral appearances, because it draws upon powers which transcend nature.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

Existential Non-Appearance

13 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by in Subjectivity

≈ Leave a comment

The actor’s questions are: Who am I? Why am I here? Where have I come from? Where am I going? * This is the fabric of self knowledge. For the question ‘Who am I?’, there is a social definition and there is a purely subjective definition: the gusher of subjective playfulness, curiosities, questions, orientations, synthetic productions of the dream-engine, gratifications, appetites, frustrations and impulses to mark the environment. Subjectivity is a strictly personal answer to the question “Who am I?”. For all the other questions there are also two answers, one focused on the subjective buzzing and bubbling and another focused on a socially assigned “I”.

As the philosopher David Hume declared in 1739, innocent subjectivity has a problem specifying its own existence due to the absence of a subjective appearance that can be measured and pointed out. It has existence before identity, or maybe existence without identity. It is pointless to undertake a study of something like “soul,” “mind,” “self”, “beliefs”, or “ideas” for example, because that discussion is about imaginary objects. Subjectively is not an object of any kind.

Subjective intelligence has a problem in its own non-appearance. It is a gusher of creativity, building a life and a way of being in a life with questions, curiosity, immediate gratification and suffering, ambitions, appetites, desire for self-preservation, and impulses to mark the objective world in ways which involve self-definition, self-creation, self-declaration, and attachments to others. Yet, it feels the lack of a stable image or essence as a fragility and questionability about its existence. Its existence is verified by that very agonizing, the “existential” dread or doubt of insubstantiality. Intelligence feels that its intellectual and emotional powers transcend voiceless but measurable nature, and yet cannot escape the ephemerality of its emotional, libidinous, actualizing, or intellectual presence. Everything that can be said of it is momentary, and soon something else will mark its presence. Subjectivity, that is, existence as a particular person, is exposed, unstable, and fleeting, especially in our volitional nature and our mortality. Personal acts of volition change and change and emphasize differences between one person and another. As individuals what we have is always sliding away and the unknown is bearing toward us. In youth and in life’s prime that is normally balanced by graces and opportunities raining continually and by the strength, skill, and endurance we can devote to getting along. Mortality means the rain of graces itself is slipping away. However, there is also a subjective accumulation.

There is an educational notion of “readiness”. Roughly, the experience of many teachers is that each student learns best what he or she is really wondering about simply from having reached a particular stage of personal development. To wonder is to approach the world with particular questions, but not questions formed in a language. Wondering is pre-linguistic, and pre-cultural, and originates in each individual outside social influences. Wonder does not need to be taught, and likely cannot be. Wondering and discoveries that follow from it are progressive, each discovery contributing to a new bearing in a person’s wondering, and although there are rough stages of development in most people, there are individual peculiarities. What one person wonders about is never exactly what others are wondering about, and that is the peculiar genius of every person. Each person’s wondering process could be seen as a peculiar force of nature that shapes the world by a principle that is not reducible to gravity, electro-magnetism, kinetics, mechanics, thermodynamics, chemical bonding, DNA, nuclear bonding, momentum, or inertia.

When subjective questioning evaluates and measures nature, the questioning is changed. A question is not a picture of the world, but its bearings and directedness change with satisfactions, disappointments, and discoveries. Its discoveries are part of its moment of directionality, evaluation, and measurement. Every discovery, satisfaction, disappointment, or surprise adds itself to the bearings of a question. Training and education work to the extent that they contribute to a person’s questioning. At a personal level within subjectivity, knowledge is a modification of curiosity, wonder, or questioning, the personal orientation or bearing which confers meaning on an environment. Every change is present in the instantaneous bearing or directionality of a person’s questioning. Everything that is part of the meaning of experience must be present instantaneously, as the question with which a person confronts, reads, and makes sense of sense-impressions. The instantaneous stimuli which fit into the bearings of questioning are those which make sense. Ultimately, a question is a person at some instant. Perception is a reading process, an interpretive activity by a person in a life.

* My Dinner with Andre, A Screenplay for the Film by Louis Malle, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, Grove Press, Inc., New York, 1981, ISBN: 0-394-17948-X. (p. 26. Attributed to Stanislavski.)

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

What is Being Called Thinking?

06 Thursday Oct 2011

Posted by in Subjectivity, Why thinking?

≈ Leave a comment

To think is to proceed on a subjective journey, to go to a new place. Thinking is an act of re-orientation, a leap into novelty of mental focus and direction, self-directed re-orientation in aid of growth, increase, or going farther in questioning. Getting further along can be building a personal mark on the environment from subjective impulses, or evaluating the findings from digging into history and current events. Both involve an individual’s creativity, and both involve accumulating orientation by reference to inertial non-intelligent nature as well as collective culture. Thinking is the creative gusher of impulses and orientations building a global mental synthesis by positing probable relationships among variously discovered features of the world. Thinking is progressive re-orientation by questioning, mentally opening experiences through various principles of relevance, discovering the consequences of different assumptions and possibilities.

Thinking is different from meditation in which the intent is not to get further along but rather to abide with or be with immediate experience. Thinking is more like doubting than like knowing. Thinking is not the same as talking silently to yourself, although sometimes it may take that form.

To think is to engage in some part of a cluster of subjective activities related to questioning, to notice your questioning and develop it, to be a source of questions. Thinking is a searching, holding to a principle or tree of relevance. To think is to wonder or question and sometimes to be borne by questioning to an evaluation of nature, sometimes measurements of nature, and to question differently by including findings in subsequent questioning. Questioning opens features of the world and so connects the reaching intelligence with inertial non-intelligence. Ideas are questions which create openings of the world and become vigils, and as such are ‘through the looking-glass’. An idea is a vigil, a vector of ‘listening’ sensitivity.

Thinking could include any part of an individual’s complicated subjectivity, typically “listening” for pattern building, tentative orientations, or placements from a semi-conscious dream-like process. By far the greater part of thinking is unconscious and pre-linguistic. The mechanics or habits of the process make up the visible tip of the iceberg. You “load” information, theories, and principles, the insights and observations of others, by reading and listening to people, getting things in separate bits without being judgmental too quickly. You let it work in the semi-conscious dream-engine and ‘listen’ for patterns, follow-up questions, and conclusions shot into consciousness. The “visible tip” is often a process of writing by which ideas can be developed through stating a tentative claim, collecting elaborations as well as alternative claims and contrary evidence in the most charitable interpretations, re-reading and correcting, accumulating and organizing by relevance.

Thinking can be more than problem solving. Problem identification is part of survival and creature comfort. There are irritations and hazards to survival and security too urgent for much deliberation. Subjectivity is often dominated by a sense of predicament and vigilance to overcome it. Curiosity and impulses to make a distinctive mark are often interrupted by that. Thinking is personal curiosity, appetite, and ambition evaluating, tasting, and re-making surroundings. Thinking quests after orientation-truth, science; grace (appetite gratification); self-declaration (intelligence creates voices, personae), and self-possession; all without dependence on an existing social order, although much concerned with mutual attachment. Thinking about the social and cultural context of an individual life will always involve questioning history and the legitimacy of authority and the value of the talk going around. Collective memories are often misinformed. There is a kind of mental soaring involved in getting beyond the influence of conventional or current cultural assumptions and projects.

The push of subjectivity should be upgraded as a marker of orientation. Since the perceiver projects so much selectivity and contextual placement onto sense-intuitions, the deliberate re-orientation that is called thinking has a claim to transcendence as a source of experience. Self-possession is awareness of the subjective gusher, awareness that deliberative intelligence shakes loose from the objective world by exercising freedom. (In Kant, freedom is transcendence.) Freedom does not have to be a godlike unlimited power. There can be real freedom within limits.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.

 

Disinterestedness: The Vita Contemplativa

05 Wednesday Oct 2011

Posted by in disinterestedness, University

≈ 1 Comment

Individuals have questions which they, as students, bring to the university to develop skills necessary to find answers. They tap into scholarly conversations with that readiness to research their questions, but study cannot be approached with too narrow a sense of relevance. Study in humanities, for example, is a deliberate encounter with great literature and requires some ‘rising to the occasion’, challenging ourselves to respond in a spontaneous and charitable way to products of original thought, insight, inspiration, and expression. Reading as a study activity requires charity and patience. It requires a suspension of one’s own questions in order to grasp those of another voice. Encountering greatness can enlarge anyone’s thinking, emotions, and sense-of-self in a general way, even in people who simply want a ticket to a professional career with a degree of dignity and gravitas.

Thinking about any issue is assisted by awareness of complications and objections already on record. Being aware of a variety of points of view comes with an awareness of history. Education should leave a person with the knowledge of why it is valuable to know the record of observations and discoveries. Academic disinterestedness includes a willingness to accept that others have recorded important insights and interpretations of observations and that learning them will improve anyone’s thinking. There is no accomplishment in re-inventing the same wheel continually.

Academic disinterestedness is also a subordination of personal likes and dislikes, wishes and fears, to the principles of rational evidence and recognition that one’s personal view might have gaps and misconceptions. Knowing this adds the purpose of identifying biases, agendas, needs, wishes, and fears, as much as possible, and making efforts to reduce their distorting effects. That is part of academic disinterestedness and involves relying on measurement, verification, and logic as much as possible. It is a subordination of ego to logic. Craftspeople of all kinds learn a similar disinterestedness in the love of materials, tools, technique, skill, and of learning itself. The work involves displacement of ego in favour of an openness to nature and materials and a patient searching and trying over until skill and sensitivity are achieved, an acceptance of the solitude of the process. There is a determination to keep going in spite of making mistakes, to accept fallibility while trying to do better.

For any claim to knowledge, it is necessary to consider objections and inconvenient observations, either in debate as Socrates did, or over time by reading and thinking. Writing then re-reading your own thinking is a technique that enables comparisons.

The best thing accomplished in education is contemplative disinterestedness: a discipline of submitting to evidence and logic in the joy of learning and understanding the truth, rather than to wishes and fears or a ‘party line’. Kant’s idea of duty is doing what is right for the joy of something greater and more honourable than personal or party benefits. Socrates thought ethical action results from knowledge of The Good (the greater good, the good overall) which removes the knower from narrowly self-interested motives. For Kant, calculating duty, a general will rather than a private will, had the same result.

Copyright © 2011 Sandy MacDonald. The moral right of the author is asserted.