Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
Your wording. On the todo list
The article only
A long time... Ie not anything I will witness
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 11
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Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
That video is probably v v embarrassing lol...
the biosemiotic submission below:
http://www.mind-phronesis.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Obj-sub-02-12-17-para.pdf
Reading this now with great interest. Regarding this paragraph --
"Other secondary properties of objects may include their chemical, heat or vibration signatures, in all their complex incantations. Such secondary properties are, by association, indicative only of the potential presence of an object of (Fodor 1996; Papineau 1997; Millikan 2004, ch. 6). In other words, secondary properties do not bear a direct correspondence to their merit-worthiness because it is the {object?} of their association that qualifies whether its assimilation has value. How then might we now understand the concept of merit in relation to the biochemical assimilation of secondary properties?"
I'm following your thought, and love the phrase "their complex incantations" in the first sentence. It suggests an application, for us, of the contemporary interest in and concept of 'resonance', which seems to support your application of the term 'discourse' to refer to preconscious awareness and response in plants. I noted your parenthetical reference in a preceding paragraph to sound frequencies as potential influences on adaptations in plant behavior: "(here, as elsewhere, environmental particulars might include such things as differing electromagnetic frequencies, auditory frequencies, chemical properties and concentrations, temperature variations, humidity and pH levels, each being potentially relevant to optimal organism function)". The fact, as you recognize it, is that we have as yet no broad or deep scientific knowledge or understanding of the intricacies of multiple kinds of interactions that occur between evolving living organisms and their environments.
In the paragraph I copied first in this post I placed the word 'object' in parentheses with a question mark -- {object?} -- to suggest that another term might be more appropriate or more accurate. Perhaps the word 'sense' could be substituted, or perhaps this phrase "because it is their sensed relevance ...." MP uses the term sense/sens to point to pre-thetic meanings available to biological species including protohumans and very young human children functioning prereflectively in their environments, absorbing knowledge about their environments as experienced before reflective consciousness begins to emerge.
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This article might be helpful to readers here not familiar with MP's phenomenology:
"Merleau-Ponty and The New Sense of Sense"
“We must therefore recognize as an ultimate fact this open and indefinite power of giving significance—that is, both of apprehending and conveying a meaning—by which man transcends himself towards a new form of behavior, or towards other people, or towards his own thought, through his body and his speech.”(RKP 226).
How might we recognize that which may, or may not be cognizable? Does re-cognition demand, or require an original cognition? Or, can our recognition fulfill itself in a deferral to the possibility of a future cognition? In the quote above, Merleau-Ponty suggests that we attend to the factuality, rather the ultimate factuality, of this “open and indefinite power” which is donative in that it bestows a sense that can be both apprehended and communicated in turn. Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion, however, is suggestive in a different sense, in that we obviously don’t need to recognize this power in order for it to remain operant. That is, this power we have is ultimately not founded upon its cognizability, and while Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion points to the possibility that it be subjected to a kind of viewing, it does not require it in order to function. This power, which it is our task to recognize, is simultaneously that by which man outstrips himself into novel modes of habitus, new ways of being towards others and himself, and that which constitutes a sense into a community of speaking subjects. This power is a corporeal power, which can be lived, and/or we can try to understand it through recourse to the auxiliary verbs of ‘being’ and ‘having.’[ii] The examination that follows will engage with this power, insofar as it is manifest in the movement of expression and in the case of acts of speech (parole). It will furthermore deal with the most important gestures Merleau-Ponty makes in the chapter “The Body As Expression and Speech.”
In the first place he maintains, in opposition to the tradition, that “the word has a meaning”[iii], that is that the word has both a gestural meaning (sens) and a cognitive one. In the second place, he argues that there is not a series of words, which we might view from above from some third person standpoint, but rather, a speaking subject who is always a particular way, or ‘style’[iv] of speaking the words. Merleau-Ponty argues, that it is not thought which subtends, or immediately precedes the speaking subject’s act of speech but, rather a silence, a motility, which he comes to refer to as the ‘tacit cogito.’ Furthermore, that speech[v] is exemplary in that it is an act, which constitutes and sediments a new sense into a fabric of constituted language, which in turn rearranges the linguistic field. In other words, speech acts are both constituted, in the form of a new sense, and at the same time constitutive of all subsequent attempts to say, think, express something further. It is therefore the case that the new sense of sense, as constituted, takes its place within, and unfolds as the movement of a tradition. As such the paper that follows will maintain that this relation between the body’s motility and the body’s intelligence which Merleau-Ponty calls fundierung[vi] is this strange power and ‘irrational’ power of the body to be simultaneously apprehending and conveying, appropriative and bestowing, creative and traditional. The new sense of sense that emerges from the movement of expression, is simultaneously a response, or a reaction, to an existing tradition and the creating of a new sediment within a tradition. Speech acts, therefore are traditionalized/traditionalizing movements.
Motor Intentionality and the Paradox of Existence
It seems to be the case that one the most important developments of the Phenomenology of Perception is, in the first place, that we rid ourselves of the primacy of the conceptual order and come to see that there is something already at work in advance of our attempts to conceptualize the content of experience. Merleau-Ponty presents us with a clear statement, a kind of manifesto of the project at hand, when he says:
“The task for us is to conceive, between the linguistic, perceptual and motor contents and the form given to them or the symbolic function which breathes life into them, a relationship which shall be neither a reduction of form to content, nor the subsuming of content under an autonomous form” (RKP 145).
If, as Merleau-Ponty says, “The task for us is to conceive, between the linguistic, perceptual and motor contents and the form given to them…a relationship…”[vii] and come to the realization that whatever this “relationship” might be, it is not solely conceptual, and neither is it purely motor and neither should the conceptual be our privileged mode of engagement with it[viii], we must recognize that the conceptual order—or the symbolizing power of abstraction and generalization—is founded upon a perception, or the pure apprehending of motor phenomena. The Phenomenology of Perception makes a departure from the tradition of phenomenology, in that it no longer seeks the “explanatory invariant” in the form of the transcendental ego.[ix] Rather, Merleau-Ponty locates a motor intentionality, [x] a motor power, or a movement, which is simultaneously an active apprehending and a passive appropriation. Herein we find the important notion of fundierung, which names the relation between content and form[xi]. In this relation it becomes possible to say that the visual contents of perception are appropriated and sublimated by a symbolic function, which is simultaneously founded upon these contents and beyond them.
What we have, therefore, is a kind of dialectical movement between content and form, which is constitutive of sense. Merleau-Ponty proposes firstly, that this movement is a contradiction, and secondly, that it can make sense only as a lived relation. It is important to note that we live the world before we come to see it as something questionable, and that this motor, or operant, intentionality gives us a motor significance upon which our capacity for generalization and the conceptual order are based. This intentionality is non-ideational, yet meaningful in that it deploys a certain field of experienceablity. Although pre-conceptual, our affective life as embodied beings, is no less rich than the conceptual, or secondary, way of existing. Furthermore, the fact that our existence is as embodied, makes us simultaneously “an object for others and a subject for myself”[xii]. This conceptual paradox disappears at the level of lived experience. Existence, therefore, is but another name for the dialectic between content and form, or the[xiii] fundierung, the “ambiguous setting”[xiv] wherein they intersect and overlap. As such, fundierung, perhaps deployed in order to gesture toward a certain space, cannot possibly name the space towards which it gestures, rather it is the apprehension of a movement, between the body’s motility and intelligence, a movement which is either everything, or nothing, or perhaps is already everything and nothing.
The Sense of the Word . . . .
The Movements of Phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and The New Sense of Sense
"Merleau-Ponty and The New Sense of Sense"
“We must therefore recognize as an ultimate fact this open and indefinite power of giving significance—that is, both of apprehending and conveying a meaning—by which man transcends himself towards a new form of behavior, or towards other people, or towards his own thought, through his body and his speech.”(RKP 226).
How might we recognize that which may, or may not be cognizable? Does re-cognition demand, or require an original cognition? Or, can our recognition fulfill itself in a deferral to the possibility of a future cognition? In the quote above, Merleau-Ponty suggests that we attend to the factuality, rather the ultimate factuality, of this “open and indefinite power” which is donative in that it bestows a sense that can be both apprehended and communicated in turn. Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion, however, is suggestive in a different sense, in that we obviously don’t need to recognize this power in order for it to remain operant. That is, this power we have is ultimately not founded upon its cognizability, and while Merleau-Ponty’s suggestion points to the possibility that it be subjected to a kind of viewing, it does not require it in order to function. This power, which it is our task to recognize, is simultaneously that by which man outstrips himself into novel modes of habitus, new ways of being towards others and himself, and that which constitutes a sense into a community of speaking subjects. This power is a corporeal power, which can be lived, and/or we can try to understand it through recourse to the auxiliary verbs of ‘being’ and ‘having.’[ii] The examination that follows will engage with this power, insofar as it is manifest in the movement of expression and in the case of acts of speech (parole). It will furthermore deal with the most important gestures Merleau-Ponty makes in the chapter “The Body As Expression and Speech.”
In the first place he maintains, in opposition to the tradition, that “the word has a meaning”[iii], that is that the word has both a gestural meaning (sens) and a cognitive one. In the second place, he argues that there is not a series of words, which we might view from above from some third person standpoint, but rather, a speaking subject who is always a particular way, or ‘style’[iv] of speaking the words. Merleau-Ponty argues, that it is not thought which subtends, or immediately precedes the speaking subject’s act of speech but, rather a silence, a motility, which he comes to refer to as the ‘tacit cogito.’ Furthermore, that speech[v] is exemplary in that it is an act, which constitutes and sediments a new sense into a fabric of constituted language, which in turn rearranges the linguistic field. In other words, speech acts are both constituted, in the form of a new sense, and at the same time constitutive of all subsequent attempts to say, think, express something further. It is therefore the case that the new sense of sense, as constituted, takes its place within, and unfolds as the movement of a tradition. As such the paper that follows will maintain that this relation between the body’s motility and the body’s intelligence which Merleau-Ponty calls fundierung[vi] is this strange power and ‘irrational’ power of the body to be simultaneously apprehending and conveying, appropriative and bestowing, creative and traditional. The new sense of sense that emerges from the movement of expression, is simultaneously a response, or a reaction, to an existing tradition and the creating of a new sediment within a tradition. Speech acts, therefore are traditionalized/traditionalizing movements.
Motor Intentionality and the Paradox of Existence
It seems to be the case that one the most important developments of the Phenomenology of Perception is, in the first place, that we rid ourselves of the primacy of the conceptual order and come to see that there is something already at work in advance of our attempts to conceptualize the content of experience. Merleau-Ponty presents us with a clear statement, a kind of manifesto of the project at hand, when he says:
“The task for us is to conceive, between the linguistic, perceptual and motor contents and the form given to them or the symbolic function which breathes life into them, a relationship which shall be neither a reduction of form to content, nor the subsuming of content under an autonomous form” (RKP 145).
If, as Merleau-Ponty says, “The task for us is to conceive, between the linguistic, perceptual and motor contents and the form given to them…a relationship…”[vii] and come to the realization that whatever this “relationship” might be, it is not solely conceptual, and neither is it purely motor and neither should the conceptual be our privileged mode of engagement with it[viii], we must recognize that the conceptual order—or the symbolizing power of abstraction and generalization—is founded upon a perception, or the pure apprehending of motor phenomena. The Phenomenology of Perception makes a departure from the tradition of phenomenology, in that it no longer seeks the “explanatory invariant” in the form of the transcendental ego.[ix] Rather, Merleau-Ponty locates a motor intentionality, [x] a motor power, or a movement, which is simultaneously an active apprehending and a passive appropriation. Herein we find the important notion of fundierung, which names the relation between content and form[xi]. In this relation it becomes possible to say that the visual contents of perception are appropriated and sublimated by a symbolic function, which is simultaneously founded upon these contents and beyond them.
What we have, therefore, is a kind of dialectical movement between content and form, which is constitutive of sense. Merleau-Ponty proposes firstly, that this movement is a contradiction, and secondly, that it can make sense only as a lived relation. It is important to note that we live the world before we come to see it as something questionable, and that this motor, or operant, intentionality gives us a motor significance upon which our capacity for generalization and the conceptual order are based. This intentionality is non-ideational, yet meaningful in that it deploys a certain field of experienceablity. Although pre-conceptual, our affective life as embodied beings, is no less rich than the conceptual, or secondary, way of existing. Furthermore, the fact that our existence is as embodied, makes us simultaneously “an object for others and a subject for myself”[xii]. This conceptual paradox disappears at the level of lived experience. Existence, therefore, is but another name for the dialectic between content and form, or the[xiii] fundierung, the “ambiguous setting”[xiv] wherein they intersect and overlap. As such, fundierung, perhaps deployed in order to gesture toward a certain space, cannot possibly name the space towards which it gestures, rather it is the apprehension of a movement, between the body’s motility and intelligence, a movement which is either everything, or nothing, or perhaps is already everything and nothing.
The Sense of the Word . . . .
The Movements of Phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and The New Sense of Sense
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
the missing word(s) are a bit glaring. "merit" i think but will have to check. how on earth did i manage to do that i wonder.
The following footnote in another article by the same author is helpful regarding Pharoah's WAIM, which I think has not yet been understood here. This footnote is in a paper titled "The Other," available at the link below.
"[3] Dasein is utilized by Heidegger so as not to import the presuppositions of the philosophical tradition; literally translated as “being there,” what is signified is the threefold structure of the being of an existing subject. Being-in-the-world, as its spatial location; Being-with, as its intersubjectivity, signifying that the space, wherein Dasein finds itself, is shared with others. Finally, Dasein is specificity, as a relation of the self to the self. Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. p 15
"[3] Dasein is utilized by Heidegger so as not to import the presuppositions of the philosophical tradition; literally translated as “being there,” what is signified is the threefold structure of the being of an existing subject. Being-in-the-world, as its spatial location; Being-with, as its intersubjectivity, signifying that the space, wherein Dasein finds itself, is shared with others. Finally, Dasein is specificity, as a relation of the self to the self. Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. p 15
I think that the limitations of our language (likely all languages) show up in the inadequacy of our available vocabulary/terminology for expressing subtle aspects of our subject matter here, such as the subject you are pursuing in this paper. On the whole I've seen considerable improvements in the clarity of your writing in the development of this paper.
@Pharoah, coming back to this paragraph to suggest optional terms for {object}:
"Other secondary properties of objects may include their chemical, heat or vibration signatures, in all their complex incantations. Such secondary properties are, by association, indicative only of the potential presence of an object of (Fodor 1996; Papineau 1997; Millikan 2004, ch. 6). In other words, secondary properties do not bear a direct correspondence to their merit-worthiness because it is the {object?} of their association that qualifies whether its assimilation has value. How then might we now understand the concept of merit in relation to the biochemical assimilation of secondary properties?"
Perhaps as options for 'object': 'result', 'beneficial effect'?
Also, reading the paragraph again I realized that a word is missing just ahead of the parenthetical references to Fodor et al. So: "... indicative only of the potential presence of an object of value? or use? or benefit?"
"Other secondary properties of objects may include their chemical, heat or vibration signatures, in all their complex incantations. Such secondary properties are, by association, indicative only of the potential presence of an object of (Fodor 1996; Papineau 1997; Millikan 2004, ch. 6). In other words, secondary properties do not bear a direct correspondence to their merit-worthiness because it is the {object?} of their association that qualifies whether its assimilation has value. How then might we now understand the concept of merit in relation to the biochemical assimilation of secondary properties?"
Perhaps as options for 'object': 'result', 'beneficial effect'?
Also, reading the paragraph again I realized that a word is missing just ahead of the parenthetical references to Fodor et al. So: "... indicative only of the potential presence of an object of value? or use? or benefit?"
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Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
I do talk about the how question in the paper... just after the section you, @Constance, just reference:
"Inevitably, a key inquiry for researchers and theorists follows from this account. This inquiry concerns the extent to which the subtleties of this proposed 'qualitative ontology' might be instructed through innately acquired biochemical mechanisms alone and how it is that biochemical mechanisms might grant sophisticated and subtle qualitative assignation to environmental particulars. I am of the view..."
"Inevitably, a key inquiry for researchers and theorists follows from this account. This inquiry concerns the extent to which the subtleties of this proposed 'qualitative ontology' might be instructed through innately acquired biochemical mechanisms alone and how it is that biochemical mechanisms might grant sophisticated and subtle qualitative assignation to environmental particulars. I am of the view..."
Yes, you do indeed address the 'how' question at a theoretical level in Part II -- i.e., how primordial organisms and primitive 'animals' gradually develop capacities for meaningful and self-referential behaviors in what we can call 'awareness' or proto-consciousness -- and you point to the significance of HCT in footnote 5:
"5 Contrastingly, after a detailed overview of naturalist theories of consciousness, Carruthers (1998, p. 216) concludes that few creatures besides humans will count as having conscious states: “we lack any grounds for believing that animals have phenomenally-conscious states”. See also Gennaro (1996) who is a proponent of the wide view that concepts specifically are necessary for the organization of sensory states."
{Incidentally, I would revise 'the wide view' to 'the widely held view' in the last sentence in note 5. The 'widely held view', that concepts/conceptual thought are prerequisites for prereflective phenomenal experience, is of course the result of presuppositions embedded in analytical philosophy, overturned in phenomenological philosophy and increasingly in biological research.}
You might also cite Panksepp and the new discipline of Affective Neuroscience in addition to von Uexküll (and others) as marking this change of direction in biological theory toward recognizing the meanings implicit in the emotions recognized in animals as responses to the experiential complexities they confront in the development of degrees of awareness in and of their environmental situations {sensed and perceived 'worlds'}.
I'm reading Part III today so I haven't yet seen whether you bring Panksepp/Affective Neuroscience into your current version of the HCT paper.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I'll post a link im a bit. This was written I think in the 90s.
" generally, a self-organizing system may settle into a number of relatively autonomous, organizationally closed subsystems, but these subsystems will continue to interact in a more indirect way. These interactions too will tend to settle into self-sufficient, “closed” configurations, determining subsystems at a higher hierarchical level, which contain the original subsystems as components. These higher level systems themselves may interact until they hit on a closed pattern of interactions, thus defining a system of a yet higher order. This explains why complex systems tend to have a hierarchical, “boxes within boxes” architecture, where at each level you can distinguish a number of relatively autonomous, closed organizations. For example, a cell is an organizationally closed system, encompassing a complex network of interacting chemical cycles within a membrane that protects them from external disturbances. However, cells are themselves organized in circuits and tissues that together form a multicellular organism. These organisms themselves are connected by a multitude of cyclical food webs, collectively forming an ecosystem.
" generally, a self-organizing system may settle into a number of relatively autonomous, organizationally closed subsystems, but these subsystems will continue to interact in a more indirect way. These interactions too will tend to settle into self-sufficient, “closed” configurations, determining subsystems at a higher hierarchical level, which contain the original subsystems as components. These higher level systems themselves may interact until they hit on a closed pattern of interactions, thus defining a system of a yet higher order. This explains why complex systems tend to have a hierarchical, “boxes within boxes” architecture, where at each level you can distinguish a number of relatively autonomous, closed organizations. For example, a cell is an organizationally closed system, encompassing a complex network of interacting chemical cycles within a membrane that protects them from external disturbances. However, cells are themselves organized in circuits and tissues that together form a multicellular organism. These organisms themselves are connected by a multitude of cyclical food webs, collectively forming an ecosystem.
Far afield from the fascinating subject of how consciousness develops in the evolution of living species (which for me is the most interesting inquiry we engage in here) are the various ideas of major Continental philosophers informed by phenomenological existentialism concerning the problems of consciousness as experienced by human beings in either 'authentic' or 'inauthentic' ways. Yet some of these ideas are relevant, I think, to a deep comprehension of consciousness from its beginnings to its complex character in human experience. I quoted a passage from the following paper earlier, but here I want to reproduce the whole paper because of the relevance of Deleuze's thinking, in particular, to @Pharoah's thinking in developing his hierarchical construct theory of consciousness and mind. [Note: the notes to the paper are included at the bottom so that readers can readily locate the authors of the claims presented through the embedded links to the notes at each point.]
The Other
Introduction:
Despite nominal differences, that is, differences of name, repetition is at play within the works of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Deleuze. The notion of the Other, be it ‘the crowd,’ ‘the herd,’ or ‘das man,’ converges in the divergent works. The subject exists in the collectivity, it is singular, yet at the same time resides in the world alongside others. We find ourselves ‘there,’ already in the world, dealing with the herd of man. Perhaps, we come to see ourselves as part of the crowd, the powerful gatekeepers of objective truth. We remain, at all times, that singularity, or the possibility of being singular for being a self authentically. The question, therefore, becomes, ‘how’ can I exist my specificity, authentically, yet at the same time be located in the world with the crowd? The enigmatic statements, “to become what I already am[1]” and “to become those we are,”[2] or “proximally and for the most part, Dasein is not itself,”[3] take on a supreme relevance if what I am concerned with is becoming the individual, which is always a possibility of my being. It would seem that this possibility remains hidden from me so long as I adhere to the whims of the crowd. It is, therefore, the case that what is reflexively referred to as “I,” namely a singular relation to one’s self, is not itself properly, but rather is the Heideggerian “They self” of everydayness. The examination that follows will illuminate the role of others in the works discussed. Furthermore, it will examine the movement from the universal to the particular, the differentiation, or process of individuation, which the authors see as the necessary movement in the task of becoming a self. This movement necessitates that we pose the question of ‘how,’ as a manner of existing oneself as a singular individual and not simply running with the herd; the herd, or crowd, must, therefore, be overcome by the existing subject. While the authors propose divergent programs, there is a large degree of convergence, which will be our topic of discussion. Repetition is this point of convergence; it is the ‘how’ of maintaining oneself within the process of becoming what we already are.
“The Crowd,” “The Herd,” “Das Man” and The Everyday:
“For a ‘crowd’ is untruth.”[4] Truth, in the Kierkegaardian sense, is found in subjectivity; the task therefore, of every existing subject, is to become subjective. The existing subject is always the self’s relation to itself.[5] However, the self’s self-relation is caught in a dialectical paradox between the eternal (God) and the temporal. The crowd is, therefore, a manifestation of the seductive temporal, its ways being that of objectivity; the crowd takes the self’s relation away from the eternal; alienating it from the subjective truth. For Kierkegaard, the crowd is but a mere abstraction, the crowd is nothing more than a congregation of individuals each one possessing the means of becoming one such individual self in passionate inwardness. Becoming an individual is the highest task placed before the existing subject; the crowd is always concerned with the general, with world historical significance. The crowd exerts anonymous control; it is every individual, but no single individual, because every individual is a something general with no special significance for the crowd. The crowd gives the impression of power, but it is merely a terrestrial power; one which alleviates the burden of responsibility from the self, however, “Only one attains the goal.”[6] The crowd, in fact, hides the truth in a false temporal truth; a truth which can only end in despair; the real truth, the truth of the eternal, is only for the single individual. As we shall see for Kierkegaard the process of individuation resides in the ‘how’ of repetition, such that the existing subjects self relation can maintain itself as freedom.
Nietzsche is similarly concerned with the task of becoming an individual and the affirmation of life. For Nietzsche, therefore, the task is to undermine, to remove the ground from that which denies life; that which denies the creative force which resides in the individual as such. The herd is one such denial of life; the will to power of the herd, undermines the will to power of the individual in favour of all that is average and unspectacular. It posits truth, where there are only errors and illusion. This truth is the will to power; within the herd will to power is the will to preservation of the species, such that, “The species is everything, and one is always none.”[7] Morality, as a major informant of action, is nothing more than the manifestation of the herd’s will to preservation in the existing individual. Morality, as a creation of the herd’s will to power, makes the individual a mere function of the herd, as a means to the ends of the herd. [8] Morality, as the law of the herd, pronounces its “thou shalt,” as a great equalizer of that which is not equal; posits sameness where there is difference, and values the individual only in terms of the whole.[9] The herd instinct is ingrained within every existing subject, such that consciousness, that which sees itself as a unity in the I am I proposition, is nothing more than the herd manifesting itself in the individual. For Nietzsche, consciousness is but an emergent faculty, which satisfies the need for communication.[10] The individual who trusts the valuations of consciousness, therefore, trusts the valuations of the herd. Nietzsche, however, is not so trusting; the task he gives us is “to become those we are,” as such, we must overcome the will to power of the herd and strive through our own will to power to make our own truths and create our own values. Repetition, is once again the how this can be accomplished; through Eternal recurrence we can overcome the crowd, with a newly informed sense of time, and project our “retroactive force” into the future.
Heidegger, is concerned with uncovering Being through an ontological ‘existential analytic’ of Dasein. Dasein find itself, as throwness, already in the world amongst other Dasein and entities not of the character of Dasein. As such, Dasein, which is my specificity, is forced to deal with its world and the others located therein. Although the “I” is given, and seems to impart a notion of specificity, it is nonetheless the case that “proximally and for the most part, Dasein is not itself in everydayness.” Pre-ontologically, Dasein find itself in a world already interpreted by the Dasein of others, and thus finds in itself not the “I” of Dasein specificity, but rather the they-self (Das Man) of everyone and no one. Therefore, Dasein, as a requisite of its existence, has the presuppositions of the they-self as given.[11] In everydayness, or pre-ontologically, Dasein understands itself and the world in terms of the Das Man. So long as Dasein remains in this state, it remains inauthentic and falling away from itself.
The clock is a creation of Das man:
“Then time is already interpreted as present, past is interpreted as no longer present, future as indeterminate not yet present: past is irretrievable, future indeterminate.”[12]
Time, lived in this fashion, is marked by its irreversibility and the primacy of the present as the space of homogenization. Time, lived in this manner, is in-authentic and Dasein living time in this manner concerns itself with questions of ‘when’ and ‘what.’ The task, for the authentic, singular, Dasein concerned with individuating itself, concerned with maintaining itself as possibility, involves a reconception of time grounded in the most extreme possibility of its being. The most extreme possibility of Dasein is its death and in death the specificity of Dasein is manifest; this possibility necessarily involves the question of ‘how’ time is to be existed.
Repetition As the ‘How’ of individuation:
Deleuze’s account in “Difference and Repetition,” seems to be an ideal starting point in order to explain the notion of repetition as it is employed by the various authors. Firstly, Deleuze posits various levels of repetition, a general, external, bare repetition, and an internal ideational repetition.[13] Repetition is the ‘how’ which all the authors’ employ; once individuated, it allows the subject to maintain itself as freedom as a singular difference which defies representation. “Repetition must be understood in the pronominal; we must first find the self of repetition, the singularity within that which repeats. For there is no repetition without a repeater, nothing repeated without a repetitious soul.”[14] The singularity, which avoids identity, which defies representation, is the true repetition for which Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger seek to repeat. It is a creative act which creates a new space and time, it is an affirmation of life, it is the difference which animates action.
Kierkegaard’s task, that of becoming subjective, is theological in nature. Kierkegaard is primarily informed by his relationship to God. Becoming subject is, therefore, the cultivation of this relation to God.[15] Kierkegaard’s subject is individuated by faith in God and the ability to think death in every moment. The crowd offers security, anonymity, and irresponsibility; cowardess would have us choose to remain part of the crowd. Courage and passion allow the existing individual to think its own death and “attend to this thought at every moment.”[16] The uncertainty of death requires an inward movement toward the truth in subjectivity. Becoming subjective allows us to become the self which we already are. Repetition is the ‘how’ this can be done; without the possibility of repetition the subject would lose its self in the crowd as actualized by it. Freedom, which is always the self’s self-relation, must seek to actualize itself as freedom. Repetition[17] is the task of freedom, for maintaining oneself as possibility in the moment as the intersection between the eternal and the temporal. Repetition of this sort is the second type of repetition which Deleuze mentioned, namely, it is internal repetition; it allows the subject to exist the eternal temporal paradox, while at the same time taking the past up into itself and existing it forward as freedom; as freedom’s possibility.
Nietzsche finds in the eternal recurrence the means of undermining the valuations of the herd, and of “becoming those we are.” For both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, courage lies on the side of becoming the self; further for Nietzsche, courage lies in willing the eternal recurrence. “Courage, however, is the best slayer--courage which attacks: which slays even death itself, for it says, ‘was that life? Well then! Once more!”[18] Eternal recurrence, as a repetition of all that is in every moment, undermines the notions of the herd. Eternal recurrence undermines the Christian notions of origins, of judgement, of another world beyond our own. In the recurrence there is only the moment, which repeats eternally, a moment, which has never begun, nor will it cease, to repeat. Eternal becoming is the result, as a sort of (non) being, not as a negation of being but as the affirmation of being as becoming. There is repetition of sameness, which affirms the moment as an eternally important one:
“This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything utterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence--even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself.”[19]
The eternal recurrence is an internal repetition, regardless of whether it is so in actuality; it is a manner of living, which affirms life and affirms the creative force of becoming a self. The eternal recurrence brings with it a new conception of time, allowing every existing individual to assert its retroactive force, making the past a possibility. It allows the individual to take up the whole of history, as a creative force, and repeat it in the eternally repeating moment.[20] The whole of history, in the single individual, lived as possibility in the moment;[21] the moment, which has never begun and shall never cease to become. Nietzsche makes the ultimate affirmation of life; the life of the singular existing individual thus takes on the “greatest weight,” the greatest significance, and shall be the source of all our joy.
In everydayness, Dasein is not itself, but rather the they-self of everyone and no one. Dasein individuates itself only through the notion of its own death. As throwness, into the pre-interpreted world, Dasein comes to live itself in everydayness as the they-self, as the One. However, death, as specifically my death, cannot be interpreted by the they-self, for my death is mine specifically and I cannot come to know it through the death of other Dasein. Dasein, therefore, must interpret for itself the most extreme possibility of its being, its own death.[22] The ability to see this futural uncertainty undermines the they-self, that Dasein is pre-ontologically and in everydayness; this undermines Dasein's conception of itself, allowing Dasein to seek to create itself based upon the indeterminate certainty of its own death. Being-towards-death frees Dasein from its everyday conception of time as the present, a conception informed by the they-self, such that Dasein becomes futural, the future being the most fundamental phenomenon of time. The specificity of Dasein’s own death grounds Dasein as the fundamental possibility of its being, or ceasing to be. In running ahead to this most extreme possibility Dasein is thrust back upon itself in everydayness, but with something more, as a ‘how.’ Being-futural, Dasein is running ahead to its past, a past which it now has; a past which it uses to cultivate the present; the past, is now possibility, which is repeated in ‘how’ it is lived.[23] “In so doing, it becomes manifest that the original way of dealing with time is not a measuring. Coming back in running ahead is itself the ‘how’ of that concern in which I am precisely tarrying.”[24] Authentically Dasein is time; running ahead to the past allows for a repetition of the past yet a repetition which is concerned with ‘how’ this past is existed.
Conclusion:
While a conclusion seems out of place, it is nonetheless expedient as a summation of what has been illuminated thus far. The individual must become that which it already is; that which remains hidden from it by the crowd. The movement, which individuates the subject, is an existential one, one which must allow itself to be subject to repetition. Although it would seem, reflexively, that we are a particular within the universal, the truth of the matter is that we must become this particular. This task, which is specifically our own, should take up the whole of our lifetime. Courage, creativity, passion and repetition are the prerequisites in the task of becoming and maintaining oneself as a singularity. The ‘how’ of repetition is the manner of existing as a particular individual. The repetition which allows us to remain possible at all times in [the] moment, must be the object of the will, such that repetition is not a something outside of us, but rather, a manner of existing a task we give ourselves which informs all of our actions.
Bibliography
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Colombia University Press, (1993.)
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, (1962.)
Heidegger, Martin. The Concept of Time. Trans. William McNeil. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, (1992.)
Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling/Repetition. Trans. Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, (1983.)
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. Trans. Reidar Thomte. Princeton: University of Princeton Press, (1980.)
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Point of View For My Work As An Author: A Report To History and Related Writings. Trans. Walter Lowrie. New York: Harper & Row, (1959.)
Nietzsche, Frederich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, (1974.)
Nietzsche, Frederich. Thus spoke Zarathustra: a Book For None and For All. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books, (1978.)
Nietzsche, Frederich. The Will To Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollindale. New York: Vintage Books, (1967.)
Swenson, David F.. Trans. Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Princeton: Princeton University Press, (1944.)
Notes:
[1] David F. Swenson. Trans. Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944. p. 116.
[2] Frederich Nietzsche. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. p. 266.
[3] Dasein is utilized by Heidegger so as not to import the presuppositions of the philosophical tradition; literally translated as “being there,” what is signified is the threefold structure of the being of an existing subject. Being-in-the-world, as its spatial location; Being-with, as its intersubjectivity, signifying that the space, wherein Dasein finds itself, is shared with others. Finally, Dasein is specificity, as a relation of the self to the self. Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. p 151.
[4] Soren Kierkegaard. The Point of View For My Work As An Author: A Report To History and Related Writings. Trans. Walter Lowrie. New York: Harper & Row, 1959. p 110.
[5] The self is a synthesis of psyche and body, achieved when spirit is posited as the third term. The self is also a synthesis of the eternal and the temporal, which can only be synthesized in the moment where time reflects eternity. Soren Kierkegaard. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. Trans. Reidar Thomte. Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1980. p. 85-86.
[6] Kierkegaard. The Point of View For My Work As An Author. p 111.
[7] Nietzsche. The Gay Science. p 74.
[8] Ibid., p. 174-175.
[9] It must be held firmly in mind that the notion of morality is based on the notion of the divine laws of God. Morality, furthermore, functions in consciousness in terms of what seems to be a unified self. However, Nietzsche proclaimed the Death of God and denies the existence of a unity in consciousness. Frederich Nietzsche. The Will To Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollindale. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. p 156-157.
[10] Nietzsche. The Gay Science. p 299.
[11] This is what is meant by throwness into the world; it a sort of abandonment into a world already interpreted by the-they to which we are thrown.
[12] Martin Heidegger. The Concept of Time. Trans. William McNeil. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992. p. 17E.
[13] The external repetition is one of difference between objects represented by the same concept. The internal repetition is the pure unmediated movement of an idea, as a creative accentuation, or moreness. The internal repetition is always masked by the external repetition, such that they are intimately interlinked. Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Colombia University Press, 1993. p 24.
[14] Deleuze. Difference and Repetition. p. 23.
[15] “The truth can neither be communicated nor be received except as it were under God’s eyes, not without God’s help, not without God’s being involved as the middle term, He himself being the Truth. It can therefore only be communicated by and received by the ‘individual’ which as a matter of fact can be every living man.” Kierkegaard. The Point of View For My Work As An Author. p. 117.
[16] Swenson. Trans. Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. p. 151.
[17] Kierkegaard lists three stages in the history of repetition in the sphere of individual freedom. The first is freedom as desire, which leads to despair; freedom as sagacity, which in turn leads to despair; freedom as freedom, which is the highest repetition and leads to atonement. Soren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling/Repetition. Trans. Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983. p. 288.
[18] Frederich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra: a Book For None and For All. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books, 1978. p. 157.
[19] Nietzsche. The Gay Science. p. 273.
[20] Ibid., p. 104.
[21] Ibid., p 268.
[22] Heidegger. Being and Time. p. 296.
[23] Heidegger. The Concept of Time. p. 14E.
[24] Ibid., p. 14E
Posted by Nicholas Alexander Smith
The Other
Introduction:
Despite nominal differences, that is, differences of name, repetition is at play within the works of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Deleuze. The notion of the Other, be it ‘the crowd,’ ‘the herd,’ or ‘das man,’ converges in the divergent works. The subject exists in the collectivity, it is singular, yet at the same time resides in the world alongside others. We find ourselves ‘there,’ already in the world, dealing with the herd of man. Perhaps, we come to see ourselves as part of the crowd, the powerful gatekeepers of objective truth. We remain, at all times, that singularity, or the possibility of being singular for being a self authentically. The question, therefore, becomes, ‘how’ can I exist my specificity, authentically, yet at the same time be located in the world with the crowd? The enigmatic statements, “to become what I already am[1]” and “to become those we are,”[2] or “proximally and for the most part, Dasein is not itself,”[3] take on a supreme relevance if what I am concerned with is becoming the individual, which is always a possibility of my being. It would seem that this possibility remains hidden from me so long as I adhere to the whims of the crowd. It is, therefore, the case that what is reflexively referred to as “I,” namely a singular relation to one’s self, is not itself properly, but rather is the Heideggerian “They self” of everydayness. The examination that follows will illuminate the role of others in the works discussed. Furthermore, it will examine the movement from the universal to the particular, the differentiation, or process of individuation, which the authors see as the necessary movement in the task of becoming a self. This movement necessitates that we pose the question of ‘how,’ as a manner of existing oneself as a singular individual and not simply running with the herd; the herd, or crowd, must, therefore, be overcome by the existing subject. While the authors propose divergent programs, there is a large degree of convergence, which will be our topic of discussion. Repetition is this point of convergence; it is the ‘how’ of maintaining oneself within the process of becoming what we already are.
“The Crowd,” “The Herd,” “Das Man” and The Everyday:
“For a ‘crowd’ is untruth.”[4] Truth, in the Kierkegaardian sense, is found in subjectivity; the task therefore, of every existing subject, is to become subjective. The existing subject is always the self’s relation to itself.[5] However, the self’s self-relation is caught in a dialectical paradox between the eternal (God) and the temporal. The crowd is, therefore, a manifestation of the seductive temporal, its ways being that of objectivity; the crowd takes the self’s relation away from the eternal; alienating it from the subjective truth. For Kierkegaard, the crowd is but a mere abstraction, the crowd is nothing more than a congregation of individuals each one possessing the means of becoming one such individual self in passionate inwardness. Becoming an individual is the highest task placed before the existing subject; the crowd is always concerned with the general, with world historical significance. The crowd exerts anonymous control; it is every individual, but no single individual, because every individual is a something general with no special significance for the crowd. The crowd gives the impression of power, but it is merely a terrestrial power; one which alleviates the burden of responsibility from the self, however, “Only one attains the goal.”[6] The crowd, in fact, hides the truth in a false temporal truth; a truth which can only end in despair; the real truth, the truth of the eternal, is only for the single individual. As we shall see for Kierkegaard the process of individuation resides in the ‘how’ of repetition, such that the existing subjects self relation can maintain itself as freedom.
Nietzsche is similarly concerned with the task of becoming an individual and the affirmation of life. For Nietzsche, therefore, the task is to undermine, to remove the ground from that which denies life; that which denies the creative force which resides in the individual as such. The herd is one such denial of life; the will to power of the herd, undermines the will to power of the individual in favour of all that is average and unspectacular. It posits truth, where there are only errors and illusion. This truth is the will to power; within the herd will to power is the will to preservation of the species, such that, “The species is everything, and one is always none.”[7] Morality, as a major informant of action, is nothing more than the manifestation of the herd’s will to preservation in the existing individual. Morality, as a creation of the herd’s will to power, makes the individual a mere function of the herd, as a means to the ends of the herd. [8] Morality, as the law of the herd, pronounces its “thou shalt,” as a great equalizer of that which is not equal; posits sameness where there is difference, and values the individual only in terms of the whole.[9] The herd instinct is ingrained within every existing subject, such that consciousness, that which sees itself as a unity in the I am I proposition, is nothing more than the herd manifesting itself in the individual. For Nietzsche, consciousness is but an emergent faculty, which satisfies the need for communication.[10] The individual who trusts the valuations of consciousness, therefore, trusts the valuations of the herd. Nietzsche, however, is not so trusting; the task he gives us is “to become those we are,” as such, we must overcome the will to power of the herd and strive through our own will to power to make our own truths and create our own values. Repetition, is once again the how this can be accomplished; through Eternal recurrence we can overcome the crowd, with a newly informed sense of time, and project our “retroactive force” into the future.
Heidegger, is concerned with uncovering Being through an ontological ‘existential analytic’ of Dasein. Dasein find itself, as throwness, already in the world amongst other Dasein and entities not of the character of Dasein. As such, Dasein, which is my specificity, is forced to deal with its world and the others located therein. Although the “I” is given, and seems to impart a notion of specificity, it is nonetheless the case that “proximally and for the most part, Dasein is not itself in everydayness.” Pre-ontologically, Dasein find itself in a world already interpreted by the Dasein of others, and thus finds in itself not the “I” of Dasein specificity, but rather the they-self (Das Man) of everyone and no one. Therefore, Dasein, as a requisite of its existence, has the presuppositions of the they-self as given.[11] In everydayness, or pre-ontologically, Dasein understands itself and the world in terms of the Das Man. So long as Dasein remains in this state, it remains inauthentic and falling away from itself.
The clock is a creation of Das man:
“Then time is already interpreted as present, past is interpreted as no longer present, future as indeterminate not yet present: past is irretrievable, future indeterminate.”[12]
Time, lived in this fashion, is marked by its irreversibility and the primacy of the present as the space of homogenization. Time, lived in this manner, is in-authentic and Dasein living time in this manner concerns itself with questions of ‘when’ and ‘what.’ The task, for the authentic, singular, Dasein concerned with individuating itself, concerned with maintaining itself as possibility, involves a reconception of time grounded in the most extreme possibility of its being. The most extreme possibility of Dasein is its death and in death the specificity of Dasein is manifest; this possibility necessarily involves the question of ‘how’ time is to be existed.
Repetition As the ‘How’ of individuation:
Deleuze’s account in “Difference and Repetition,” seems to be an ideal starting point in order to explain the notion of repetition as it is employed by the various authors. Firstly, Deleuze posits various levels of repetition, a general, external, bare repetition, and an internal ideational repetition.[13] Repetition is the ‘how’ which all the authors’ employ; once individuated, it allows the subject to maintain itself as freedom as a singular difference which defies representation. “Repetition must be understood in the pronominal; we must first find the self of repetition, the singularity within that which repeats. For there is no repetition without a repeater, nothing repeated without a repetitious soul.”[14] The singularity, which avoids identity, which defies representation, is the true repetition for which Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger seek to repeat. It is a creative act which creates a new space and time, it is an affirmation of life, it is the difference which animates action.
Kierkegaard’s task, that of becoming subjective, is theological in nature. Kierkegaard is primarily informed by his relationship to God. Becoming subject is, therefore, the cultivation of this relation to God.[15] Kierkegaard’s subject is individuated by faith in God and the ability to think death in every moment. The crowd offers security, anonymity, and irresponsibility; cowardess would have us choose to remain part of the crowd. Courage and passion allow the existing individual to think its own death and “attend to this thought at every moment.”[16] The uncertainty of death requires an inward movement toward the truth in subjectivity. Becoming subjective allows us to become the self which we already are. Repetition is the ‘how’ this can be done; without the possibility of repetition the subject would lose its self in the crowd as actualized by it. Freedom, which is always the self’s self-relation, must seek to actualize itself as freedom. Repetition[17] is the task of freedom, for maintaining oneself as possibility in the moment as the intersection between the eternal and the temporal. Repetition of this sort is the second type of repetition which Deleuze mentioned, namely, it is internal repetition; it allows the subject to exist the eternal temporal paradox, while at the same time taking the past up into itself and existing it forward as freedom; as freedom’s possibility.
Nietzsche finds in the eternal recurrence the means of undermining the valuations of the herd, and of “becoming those we are.” For both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, courage lies on the side of becoming the self; further for Nietzsche, courage lies in willing the eternal recurrence. “Courage, however, is the best slayer--courage which attacks: which slays even death itself, for it says, ‘was that life? Well then! Once more!”[18] Eternal recurrence, as a repetition of all that is in every moment, undermines the notions of the herd. Eternal recurrence undermines the Christian notions of origins, of judgement, of another world beyond our own. In the recurrence there is only the moment, which repeats eternally, a moment, which has never begun, nor will it cease, to repeat. Eternal becoming is the result, as a sort of (non) being, not as a negation of being but as the affirmation of being as becoming. There is repetition of sameness, which affirms the moment as an eternally important one:
“This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything utterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence--even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself.”[19]
The eternal recurrence is an internal repetition, regardless of whether it is so in actuality; it is a manner of living, which affirms life and affirms the creative force of becoming a self. The eternal recurrence brings with it a new conception of time, allowing every existing individual to assert its retroactive force, making the past a possibility. It allows the individual to take up the whole of history, as a creative force, and repeat it in the eternally repeating moment.[20] The whole of history, in the single individual, lived as possibility in the moment;[21] the moment, which has never begun and shall never cease to become. Nietzsche makes the ultimate affirmation of life; the life of the singular existing individual thus takes on the “greatest weight,” the greatest significance, and shall be the source of all our joy.
In everydayness, Dasein is not itself, but rather the they-self of everyone and no one. Dasein individuates itself only through the notion of its own death. As throwness, into the pre-interpreted world, Dasein comes to live itself in everydayness as the they-self, as the One. However, death, as specifically my death, cannot be interpreted by the they-self, for my death is mine specifically and I cannot come to know it through the death of other Dasein. Dasein, therefore, must interpret for itself the most extreme possibility of its being, its own death.[22] The ability to see this futural uncertainty undermines the they-self, that Dasein is pre-ontologically and in everydayness; this undermines Dasein's conception of itself, allowing Dasein to seek to create itself based upon the indeterminate certainty of its own death. Being-towards-death frees Dasein from its everyday conception of time as the present, a conception informed by the they-self, such that Dasein becomes futural, the future being the most fundamental phenomenon of time. The specificity of Dasein’s own death grounds Dasein as the fundamental possibility of its being, or ceasing to be. In running ahead to this most extreme possibility Dasein is thrust back upon itself in everydayness, but with something more, as a ‘how.’ Being-futural, Dasein is running ahead to its past, a past which it now has; a past which it uses to cultivate the present; the past, is now possibility, which is repeated in ‘how’ it is lived.[23] “In so doing, it becomes manifest that the original way of dealing with time is not a measuring. Coming back in running ahead is itself the ‘how’ of that concern in which I am precisely tarrying.”[24] Authentically Dasein is time; running ahead to the past allows for a repetition of the past yet a repetition which is concerned with ‘how’ this past is existed.
Conclusion:
While a conclusion seems out of place, it is nonetheless expedient as a summation of what has been illuminated thus far. The individual must become that which it already is; that which remains hidden from it by the crowd. The movement, which individuates the subject, is an existential one, one which must allow itself to be subject to repetition. Although it would seem, reflexively, that we are a particular within the universal, the truth of the matter is that we must become this particular. This task, which is specifically our own, should take up the whole of our lifetime. Courage, creativity, passion and repetition are the prerequisites in the task of becoming and maintaining oneself as a singularity. The ‘how’ of repetition is the manner of existing as a particular individual. The repetition which allows us to remain possible at all times in [the] moment, must be the object of the will, such that repetition is not a something outside of us, but rather, a manner of existing a task we give ourselves which informs all of our actions.
Bibliography
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Colombia University Press, (1993.)
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, (1962.)
Heidegger, Martin. The Concept of Time. Trans. William McNeil. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, (1992.)
Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling/Repetition. Trans. Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, (1983.)
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. Trans. Reidar Thomte. Princeton: University of Princeton Press, (1980.)
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Point of View For My Work As An Author: A Report To History and Related Writings. Trans. Walter Lowrie. New York: Harper & Row, (1959.)
Nietzsche, Frederich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, (1974.)
Nietzsche, Frederich. Thus spoke Zarathustra: a Book For None and For All. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books, (1978.)
Nietzsche, Frederich. The Will To Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollindale. New York: Vintage Books, (1967.)
Swenson, David F.. Trans. Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Princeton: Princeton University Press, (1944.)
Notes:
[1] David F. Swenson. Trans. Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944. p. 116.
[2] Frederich Nietzsche. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. p. 266.
[3] Dasein is utilized by Heidegger so as not to import the presuppositions of the philosophical tradition; literally translated as “being there,” what is signified is the threefold structure of the being of an existing subject. Being-in-the-world, as its spatial location; Being-with, as its intersubjectivity, signifying that the space, wherein Dasein finds itself, is shared with others. Finally, Dasein is specificity, as a relation of the self to the self. Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. p 151.
[4] Soren Kierkegaard. The Point of View For My Work As An Author: A Report To History and Related Writings. Trans. Walter Lowrie. New York: Harper & Row, 1959. p 110.
[5] The self is a synthesis of psyche and body, achieved when spirit is posited as the third term. The self is also a synthesis of the eternal and the temporal, which can only be synthesized in the moment where time reflects eternity. Soren Kierkegaard. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. Trans. Reidar Thomte. Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1980. p. 85-86.
[6] Kierkegaard. The Point of View For My Work As An Author. p 111.
[7] Nietzsche. The Gay Science. p 74.
[8] Ibid., p. 174-175.
[9] It must be held firmly in mind that the notion of morality is based on the notion of the divine laws of God. Morality, furthermore, functions in consciousness in terms of what seems to be a unified self. However, Nietzsche proclaimed the Death of God and denies the existence of a unity in consciousness. Frederich Nietzsche. The Will To Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollindale. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. p 156-157.
[10] Nietzsche. The Gay Science. p 299.
[11] This is what is meant by throwness into the world; it a sort of abandonment into a world already interpreted by the-they to which we are thrown.
[12] Martin Heidegger. The Concept of Time. Trans. William McNeil. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992. p. 17E.
[13] The external repetition is one of difference between objects represented by the same concept. The internal repetition is the pure unmediated movement of an idea, as a creative accentuation, or moreness. The internal repetition is always masked by the external repetition, such that they are intimately interlinked. Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Colombia University Press, 1993. p 24.
[14] Deleuze. Difference and Repetition. p. 23.
[15] “The truth can neither be communicated nor be received except as it were under God’s eyes, not without God’s help, not without God’s being involved as the middle term, He himself being the Truth. It can therefore only be communicated by and received by the ‘individual’ which as a matter of fact can be every living man.” Kierkegaard. The Point of View For My Work As An Author. p. 117.
[16] Swenson. Trans. Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. p. 151.
[17] Kierkegaard lists three stages in the history of repetition in the sphere of individual freedom. The first is freedom as desire, which leads to despair; freedom as sagacity, which in turn leads to despair; freedom as freedom, which is the highest repetition and leads to atonement. Soren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling/Repetition. Trans. Howard V. Hong & Edna H. Hong. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983. p. 288.
[18] Frederich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra: a Book For None and For All. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books, 1978. p. 157.
[19] Nietzsche. The Gay Science. p. 273.
[20] Ibid., p. 104.
[21] Ibid., p 268.
[22] Heidegger. Being and Time. p. 296.
[23] Heidegger. The Concept of Time. p. 14E.
[24] Ibid., p. 14E
Posted by Nicholas Alexander Smith
I was somewhat curious about the author of the above paper and what else he might have published. Googling the name provided I came across individuals including an orthopedic surgeon, a medical general practitioner, a scientist at Argonne investigating means of remediating the negative effects of nuclear residues in the environment, and several other people. Ultimately I found an academic philosopher identified as Nicholas Smith whose impressive publications suggest he might be the author of the above paper.
Nicholas Smith - Macquarie University
Nicholas Smith - Macquarie University
smcder
Paranormal Adept
smcder
Paranormal Adept
@Pharoah:
"I do talk about the how question in the paper... just after the section you, @Constance, just reference:
"Inevitably, a key inquiry for researchers and theorists follows from this account. This inquiry concerns the extent to which the subtleties of this proposed 'qualitative ontology' might be instructed through innately acquired biochemical mechanisms alone and how it is that biochemical mechanisms might grant sophisticated and subtle qualitative assignation to environmental particulars. I am of the view..."[/QUOTE]
Which "how question"?
Here is a fuller quote:
Inevitably, a key inquiry for researchers and theorists follows from this account. This inquiry concerns the
extent to which the subtleties of this proposed ‘qualitative ontology’ might be instructed through innately
acquired biochemical mechanisms alone and how it is that biochemical mechanisms might grant sophisticated
and subtle qualitative assignation to environmental particulars. I am of the view that biochemical and
neurological mechanisms are capable of delineating, notably in a qualitatively relevant manner, any kind of
environmental particular, be it for example, a particular electromagnetic wavelength, chemical compound,
vibration frequency and amplitude, pressure, pH etc. One could go further and surmise that this account of the
emergence and evolution of a qualitative ontology is a first step naturalistic response to the challenge that
Chalmers’ (1995) coined ‘the hard problem’ (see also Nagel 1974). Of course, regarding the hard problem,
Chalmers was referring specifically to the phenomenal qualitative content of conscious experience, to which
humans can directly relate from personal experience. He was not suggesting that the biochemical mechanisms of
7
plants or of primitive animals was relevant to the problem of qualitative content. Nevertheless, what I have been
arguing is that the precedent is there in evolving biochemical mechanisms for a nuanced qualitative ontology to
evolve in increasing sophistication from the most primitive to the most complex of organisms.
"I do talk about the how question in the paper... just after the section you, @Constance, just reference:
"Inevitably, a key inquiry for researchers and theorists follows from this account. This inquiry concerns the extent to which the subtleties of this proposed 'qualitative ontology' might be instructed through innately acquired biochemical mechanisms alone and how it is that biochemical mechanisms might grant sophisticated and subtle qualitative assignation to environmental particulars. I am of the view..."[/QUOTE]
Which "how question"?
Here is a fuller quote:
Inevitably, a key inquiry for researchers and theorists follows from this account. This inquiry concerns the
extent to which the subtleties of this proposed ‘qualitative ontology’ might be instructed through innately
acquired biochemical mechanisms alone and how it is that biochemical mechanisms might grant sophisticated
and subtle qualitative assignation to environmental particulars. I am of the view that biochemical and
neurological mechanisms are capable of delineating, notably in a qualitatively relevant manner, any kind of
environmental particular, be it for example, a particular electromagnetic wavelength, chemical compound,
vibration frequency and amplitude, pressure, pH etc. One could go further and surmise that this account of the
emergence and evolution of a qualitative ontology is a first step naturalistic response to the challenge that
Chalmers’ (1995) coined ‘the hard problem’ (see also Nagel 1974). Of course, regarding the hard problem,
Chalmers was referring specifically to the phenomenal qualitative content of conscious experience, to which
humans can directly relate from personal experience. He was not suggesting that the biochemical mechanisms of
7
plants or of primitive animals was relevant to the problem of qualitative content. Nevertheless, what I have been
arguing is that the precedent is there in evolving biochemical mechanisms for a nuanced qualitative ontology to
evolve in increasing sophistication from the most primitive to the most complex of organisms.
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
Which "how question"?
**how is it that biochemical mechanisms grant sophisticated and subtle qualitative assignation to environmental particulars? I am of the view...**
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
The first step to appreciating HCT is in its account that objective physical stuff can respond to interaction in a novel qualitatively relevant way. This is a big deal. Objectivity does not include quality: Matter is typically indifferent to what it reacts to. A real problem for physicalism is getting that kind of meaning into brute material causal mechanism. In this first step we have a conceptual leap. The how of qualitative mechanism is still a significant empirical challenge. And we still are just saying that physical things are doing what we already new they were doing. But the conceptual advance of HCT is potent; matter can have a qualitative ontology
Last edited:
I came across this article while researching empathy in animals and specifically in birds.
Bird Brains and Cross-Species Empathy
by William Carroll
within Enviroment, Philosophy
March 4th, 2016
Speaking about empathy between humans and animals requires a robust philosophy of nature. Such a philosophy can guide us in thinking more deeply about what it means to be human and how the human animal can better be connected to the broader animal world.
Evolutionary biology tells us that dinosaurs are the distant ancestors of birds, who existed well before the arrival of human beings in the grand scale of life on Earth. Increasing evidence about the extraordinary behavior of birds in making tools and social interaction suggests that there is in the natural order a far earlier path to “complex cognition” than that which led to human intelligence: a path that started with dinosaurs. As one author has put it, some birds (e.g., crows and parrots) exhibit “an alien intelligence that links directly back to minds we’ve long believed to be forever lost to us, like the dinosaurs’, but that can also be wounded, under duress, in the same ways our minds can.”
These comments by Charles Siebert, a prominent science writer for the New York Times, appeared in his recent essay, “What Does a Parrot Know About PTSD?” He is well-versed in contemporary analyses of animal behavior, especially as that behavior involves interactions with human beings. He also has written about attempts to grant the legal status of personhood to a chimpanzee. Indeed, the Nonhuman Rights Project—the litigant in favor of personhood for chimpanzees—considers other members of the great ape family (bonobos, orangutans, and gorillas), as well as dolphins, orcas, belugas, elephants, and African gray parrots to possess higher-order cognitive abilities, different from those of human beings only in degree.
Traumatized Parrots
PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder] may seem a strange phenomenon to attribute to parrots, but Siebert writes about fascinating relationships between human beings who suffer from this disorder and a variety of traumatized parrots at the West Los Angeles Veteran Administration Medical Center. The Center has a garden, “Serenity Park,” that contains abandoned parrots who, as Seibert observes, are “twice-traumatized beings: denied first their natural will to flock [with other parrots] and then the company of the humans who owned them.” Some of the parrots also suffer from various physical afflictions.
Siebert describes the ways in which traumatized human beings and parrots bond with one another. In the process, both species experience mutual physical and psychological therapy. As one of the veterans Siebert interviewed remarks, “You can look into their eyes, any of these parrots’ eyes, and I myself see a soul. I see a light in there. And when they look at you, they see right into your soul.”
According to Siebert, “abundant evidence” tells us that parrots possess “cognitive capacities and sensibilities remarkably similar to our own.” He refers to the classic case of Alex, an African gray parrot whose behavior was studied by its long-time companion, psychologist Dr. Irene Pepperberg. The parrot had “cognitive skills” that “tested as high as those of a 5-year-old child”; among others, he “mastered more than 100 words, grasped abstract concepts like absence and presence . . . and often gave orders to and toyed with the language of researchers who studied him, purposely giving them the wrong answers to their questions to alleviate his own boredom.”
Cognitive Capacities of Birds and Human Beings
Does the “similarity” to which Siebert points suggest only a difference in degree between the capacities and sensibilities of parrots and those of human beings? In describing the “cognitive capacities” of parrots and other animals and attributing to them “mastery of words,” “grasping of concepts,” and “purposely giving wrong answers to alleviate boredom,” we need to be especially careful in the verbs, adverbs, and nouns we predicate across species. This admonition is true of what we say not only about animals but also about angels and even God.
Intelligence, purposeful activity, sensibilities, and emotions seem evident in animal behavior—and our initial understanding of them begins with human experience. When we speak of these attributes beyond the realm of human affairs, we need to use the language of analogy. A parrot knows and acts in ways consistent with what it means to be a parrot: there is a kind of proportionality between the being or reality of a parrot and the behavior it manifests. It is an error to think that the difference between human cognitive capacities and those of parrots, for example, is a matter of degree, thus justifying the univocal use of these terms.
We also need to guard against various forms of dualism that separate body and soul in a way that ignores the physical, neurological foundations of cognition, sensibilities, and emotions. The neurosciences have helped us see the correlations between chemical-electrical processes in the brain and human perception, cognition, and emotion. Human beings are animals; we are creatures whose bodily functions are essential to who we are.
There are important questions in the philosophy of nature involved in comparisons of human and animal behavior. One obvious danger is to think that, since there is a neurological basis for the various activities in which human beings engage, therefore an explanation in the natural sciences alone offers (or, in principle, can offer) a complete account of these activities. A commitment to such philosophical materialism lies behind comparisons of human and animal behavior that conclude that certain behavior of parrots (or other animals) is “remarkably similar” to that of human beings.
Analyses of the brains of birds indicate that birds “think and learn,” to use Siebert’s terms, using very different parts of their brains from that which humans use. Still, the ratio of brain size to body size in birds “is similar to that of the higher primates.” This ratio, which scientists call an encephalization quotient, yields, according to Siebert, “in both species not only the usual indications of cognitive sophistication like problem solving and tool use but also two aspects of intelligence long thought to be exclusively human: episodic memory and theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states, like intention, desire and awareness, to yourself and others.” What has attracted Siebert’s attention is parrots’ capacity for desire and awareness—not their cognitive abilities, although perhaps there is some connection.
The Anatomy of Empathy
Serenity Park has achieved spectacular success in positively affecting the psychological states and behavior of many PTSD-afflicted veterans. That animal companionship can enhance psychological well-being is not a new discovery; domesticated animals have often had this effect on human beings. Some animals can sense human emotional states, at least in the sense of reacting to observed external behavior such as tone of voice. But it is not clear what meaning we should give to the kind of “sensing” we attribute to animal reactions.
We might conclude that traumatized parrots offer special advantages—leaving aside, of course, that trauma for a parrot may well mean something very different from trauma for a human being. What is striking in Siebert’s analysis is the judgment about the emotional state of the parrot and that somehow the parrot must choose to enter into a relationship with a particular human being. The parrot’s choice is the result of its supposed empathy for a particular, traumatized human being.
For the Greeks, from whose language the word originates, empathy [en and pathos] is an emotion that allows us to enter into or inhabit the suffering (or general experience) of others. Siebert describes the traditional meaning as feeling, for example, the fear another has over a threat, or the thrill of new experiences, or sorrow over loss. Empathy is an important feature of the “fabric of a community.” The capacity for empathy is a foundational feature of human society; empathy is crucial to moral judgment.
For contemporary neuroscience, empathy is a “neuronally ingrained bio-evolutionary tool for survival.” This tendency to view biological analysis primarily, if not exclusively, in the historical category of evolutionary development ignores the biological and ontological question of what a living thing is.
If we start and end with an exclusively neurological account of empathy, we identify it as “the shared neuronal circuitry that has now been mapped across species, from us to the other primates to elephants and whales and, we now know, to creatures with entirely different, non-mammalian brains, like crows and parrots.” Knowledge of the neuronal circuitry connected, that is, correlated, to certain behavior or to recognizable dispositions, can surely help us to understand better animal life, including human life. It is, however, a huge philosophical leap to identify empathy with a particular neuronal circuitry. It begs the question of what we mean by emotions in the first place. A similar error is evident when we identify thinking with states of and processes in the brain.
Identifying empathy with a neuronal state, Siebert concludes that, in the actions of both human patients and parrots, he witnessed “the extraordinary capacity conferred by that [neuronal] circuitry to recognize and respond to the specific infirmities, both psychic and physical (although those are essentially both one and the same) of another species.” The parenthetical remark, that physical and psychic are essentially one and the same, is the premise that allows Siebert to claim that the emotion of empathy must be similar in human beings and parrots since the neuronal circuitry is fundamentally the same.
A Philosophy of Empathy
But what is the empirical evidence that physical and psychic are one and the same? This is a bold philosophical claim. To reduce the emotion of empathy to neuronal activity is to argue that an emotion is nothing more than a physical-chemical reaction in the brain. Empirical analysis reveals nothing more than the kind of evidence susceptible to such analysis. All empirical analysis, however, occurs within categories in the philosophy of nature. If we accept as true the philosophical premise that only that which is empirically observable and measurable is real, then we are likely to conclude that there is nothing more to emotions (or to cognition, for that matter) than what is susceptible to such observation and measurement.
To examine empathy, or any emotion, we need a broader context than activity in the brain. As the word suggests, an emotion is a “being moved.” To be moved involves a prior “ableness” to be moved: a kind of potentiality that is actualized by some stimuli or agent. Potentialities are necessarily rooted in actual things. Individual existing things have all sorts of potentialities and these find their source in the various kinds of things which have these potentialities. We cannot say that a water molecule has emotions because of the actual thing a water molecule is. A certain sensory apparatus is required for there to be emotions in living things, but here we need to examine clearly the differences that exist among different kinds of living things.
Psychologists speak of “empathic care” based on a kind of “emotional contagion” that involves a perception of another's moods or feelings. Among human beings this is a “cognitive empathy,” made possible by a common human nature.
A human emotion is not a discrete activity; it is a feature of the life of a human being precisely as a human being. Although we can abstract certain physical processes (such as processes in the brain) from human experience as a whole, and consider them separately from the whole, these processes remain human and are fully understood only in this context. When human beings experience empathy, they do so as the rational animals that they are. Whatever experiences parrots might have, they do so as the kind of animal they are.
If we think that the differences among natural entities are only the presence or absence of material parts and processes, we are likely to conclude that animate and inanimate things differ only in degree on some scale of material complexity. This kind of physical reductionism commits the philosophical error of ignoring the whole entity precisely as a unified whole. It is the human being as a whole that is capable of empathy. It is the whole human being, an actual unity, that has the potentiality to be moved in a way that we identify as the emotion of empathy. Such a potential to be moved is rooted in, and thus must ultimately be understood in terms of, the human being as a whole.
However much the neurosciences can provide valuable information about neuronal activity that can be correlated with the emotion of empathy, we need more than this information in order to understand empathy. Actual human beings are more than what the empirical sciences can describe; the empirical sciences help us to see the parts, but we need to look at the whole as well, and at the kind of causal agency exercised by the whole entity. This is true not only for human beings, but also for parrots.
To speak of cross-species empathy we do need information from the neurosciences, but we need in addition a robust philosophy of nature, including a philosophical anthropology. Fascinating accounts of the relationships between human beings and animals, such as those in Serenity Park, invite us to think more deeply about what it means to be human and how the human animal can be connected to the broader animal world. We might very well speak of parrots exhibiting empathy. Clarity calls for us to reflect on what human emotions are, since referring to empathy in parrots involves analogical claims based first of all on a good grasp of what empathy is in what we know best: human beings.
William E. Carroll is Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, and a member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion of the University of Oxford.
Bird Brains and Cross-Species Empathy
Bird Brains and Cross-Species Empathy
by William Carroll
within Enviroment, Philosophy
March 4th, 2016
Speaking about empathy between humans and animals requires a robust philosophy of nature. Such a philosophy can guide us in thinking more deeply about what it means to be human and how the human animal can better be connected to the broader animal world.
Evolutionary biology tells us that dinosaurs are the distant ancestors of birds, who existed well before the arrival of human beings in the grand scale of life on Earth. Increasing evidence about the extraordinary behavior of birds in making tools and social interaction suggests that there is in the natural order a far earlier path to “complex cognition” than that which led to human intelligence: a path that started with dinosaurs. As one author has put it, some birds (e.g., crows and parrots) exhibit “an alien intelligence that links directly back to minds we’ve long believed to be forever lost to us, like the dinosaurs’, but that can also be wounded, under duress, in the same ways our minds can.”
These comments by Charles Siebert, a prominent science writer for the New York Times, appeared in his recent essay, “What Does a Parrot Know About PTSD?” He is well-versed in contemporary analyses of animal behavior, especially as that behavior involves interactions with human beings. He also has written about attempts to grant the legal status of personhood to a chimpanzee. Indeed, the Nonhuman Rights Project—the litigant in favor of personhood for chimpanzees—considers other members of the great ape family (bonobos, orangutans, and gorillas), as well as dolphins, orcas, belugas, elephants, and African gray parrots to possess higher-order cognitive abilities, different from those of human beings only in degree.
Traumatized Parrots
PTSD [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder] may seem a strange phenomenon to attribute to parrots, but Siebert writes about fascinating relationships between human beings who suffer from this disorder and a variety of traumatized parrots at the West Los Angeles Veteran Administration Medical Center. The Center has a garden, “Serenity Park,” that contains abandoned parrots who, as Seibert observes, are “twice-traumatized beings: denied first their natural will to flock [with other parrots] and then the company of the humans who owned them.” Some of the parrots also suffer from various physical afflictions.
Siebert describes the ways in which traumatized human beings and parrots bond with one another. In the process, both species experience mutual physical and psychological therapy. As one of the veterans Siebert interviewed remarks, “You can look into their eyes, any of these parrots’ eyes, and I myself see a soul. I see a light in there. And when they look at you, they see right into your soul.”
According to Siebert, “abundant evidence” tells us that parrots possess “cognitive capacities and sensibilities remarkably similar to our own.” He refers to the classic case of Alex, an African gray parrot whose behavior was studied by its long-time companion, psychologist Dr. Irene Pepperberg. The parrot had “cognitive skills” that “tested as high as those of a 5-year-old child”; among others, he “mastered more than 100 words, grasped abstract concepts like absence and presence . . . and often gave orders to and toyed with the language of researchers who studied him, purposely giving them the wrong answers to their questions to alleviate his own boredom.”
Cognitive Capacities of Birds and Human Beings
Does the “similarity” to which Siebert points suggest only a difference in degree between the capacities and sensibilities of parrots and those of human beings? In describing the “cognitive capacities” of parrots and other animals and attributing to them “mastery of words,” “grasping of concepts,” and “purposely giving wrong answers to alleviate boredom,” we need to be especially careful in the verbs, adverbs, and nouns we predicate across species. This admonition is true of what we say not only about animals but also about angels and even God.
Intelligence, purposeful activity, sensibilities, and emotions seem evident in animal behavior—and our initial understanding of them begins with human experience. When we speak of these attributes beyond the realm of human affairs, we need to use the language of analogy. A parrot knows and acts in ways consistent with what it means to be a parrot: there is a kind of proportionality between the being or reality of a parrot and the behavior it manifests. It is an error to think that the difference between human cognitive capacities and those of parrots, for example, is a matter of degree, thus justifying the univocal use of these terms.
We also need to guard against various forms of dualism that separate body and soul in a way that ignores the physical, neurological foundations of cognition, sensibilities, and emotions. The neurosciences have helped us see the correlations between chemical-electrical processes in the brain and human perception, cognition, and emotion. Human beings are animals; we are creatures whose bodily functions are essential to who we are.
There are important questions in the philosophy of nature involved in comparisons of human and animal behavior. One obvious danger is to think that, since there is a neurological basis for the various activities in which human beings engage, therefore an explanation in the natural sciences alone offers (or, in principle, can offer) a complete account of these activities. A commitment to such philosophical materialism lies behind comparisons of human and animal behavior that conclude that certain behavior of parrots (or other animals) is “remarkably similar” to that of human beings.
Analyses of the brains of birds indicate that birds “think and learn,” to use Siebert’s terms, using very different parts of their brains from that which humans use. Still, the ratio of brain size to body size in birds “is similar to that of the higher primates.” This ratio, which scientists call an encephalization quotient, yields, according to Siebert, “in both species not only the usual indications of cognitive sophistication like problem solving and tool use but also two aspects of intelligence long thought to be exclusively human: episodic memory and theory of mind, the ability to attribute mental states, like intention, desire and awareness, to yourself and others.” What has attracted Siebert’s attention is parrots’ capacity for desire and awareness—not their cognitive abilities, although perhaps there is some connection.
The Anatomy of Empathy
Serenity Park has achieved spectacular success in positively affecting the psychological states and behavior of many PTSD-afflicted veterans. That animal companionship can enhance psychological well-being is not a new discovery; domesticated animals have often had this effect on human beings. Some animals can sense human emotional states, at least in the sense of reacting to observed external behavior such as tone of voice. But it is not clear what meaning we should give to the kind of “sensing” we attribute to animal reactions.
We might conclude that traumatized parrots offer special advantages—leaving aside, of course, that trauma for a parrot may well mean something very different from trauma for a human being. What is striking in Siebert’s analysis is the judgment about the emotional state of the parrot and that somehow the parrot must choose to enter into a relationship with a particular human being. The parrot’s choice is the result of its supposed empathy for a particular, traumatized human being.
For the Greeks, from whose language the word originates, empathy [en and pathos] is an emotion that allows us to enter into or inhabit the suffering (or general experience) of others. Siebert describes the traditional meaning as feeling, for example, the fear another has over a threat, or the thrill of new experiences, or sorrow over loss. Empathy is an important feature of the “fabric of a community.” The capacity for empathy is a foundational feature of human society; empathy is crucial to moral judgment.
For contemporary neuroscience, empathy is a “neuronally ingrained bio-evolutionary tool for survival.” This tendency to view biological analysis primarily, if not exclusively, in the historical category of evolutionary development ignores the biological and ontological question of what a living thing is.
If we start and end with an exclusively neurological account of empathy, we identify it as “the shared neuronal circuitry that has now been mapped across species, from us to the other primates to elephants and whales and, we now know, to creatures with entirely different, non-mammalian brains, like crows and parrots.” Knowledge of the neuronal circuitry connected, that is, correlated, to certain behavior or to recognizable dispositions, can surely help us to understand better animal life, including human life. It is, however, a huge philosophical leap to identify empathy with a particular neuronal circuitry. It begs the question of what we mean by emotions in the first place. A similar error is evident when we identify thinking with states of and processes in the brain.
Identifying empathy with a neuronal state, Siebert concludes that, in the actions of both human patients and parrots, he witnessed “the extraordinary capacity conferred by that [neuronal] circuitry to recognize and respond to the specific infirmities, both psychic and physical (although those are essentially both one and the same) of another species.” The parenthetical remark, that physical and psychic are essentially one and the same, is the premise that allows Siebert to claim that the emotion of empathy must be similar in human beings and parrots since the neuronal circuitry is fundamentally the same.
A Philosophy of Empathy
But what is the empirical evidence that physical and psychic are one and the same? This is a bold philosophical claim. To reduce the emotion of empathy to neuronal activity is to argue that an emotion is nothing more than a physical-chemical reaction in the brain. Empirical analysis reveals nothing more than the kind of evidence susceptible to such analysis. All empirical analysis, however, occurs within categories in the philosophy of nature. If we accept as true the philosophical premise that only that which is empirically observable and measurable is real, then we are likely to conclude that there is nothing more to emotions (or to cognition, for that matter) than what is susceptible to such observation and measurement.
To examine empathy, or any emotion, we need a broader context than activity in the brain. As the word suggests, an emotion is a “being moved.” To be moved involves a prior “ableness” to be moved: a kind of potentiality that is actualized by some stimuli or agent. Potentialities are necessarily rooted in actual things. Individual existing things have all sorts of potentialities and these find their source in the various kinds of things which have these potentialities. We cannot say that a water molecule has emotions because of the actual thing a water molecule is. A certain sensory apparatus is required for there to be emotions in living things, but here we need to examine clearly the differences that exist among different kinds of living things.
Psychologists speak of “empathic care” based on a kind of “emotional contagion” that involves a perception of another's moods or feelings. Among human beings this is a “cognitive empathy,” made possible by a common human nature.
A human emotion is not a discrete activity; it is a feature of the life of a human being precisely as a human being. Although we can abstract certain physical processes (such as processes in the brain) from human experience as a whole, and consider them separately from the whole, these processes remain human and are fully understood only in this context. When human beings experience empathy, they do so as the rational animals that they are. Whatever experiences parrots might have, they do so as the kind of animal they are.
If we think that the differences among natural entities are only the presence or absence of material parts and processes, we are likely to conclude that animate and inanimate things differ only in degree on some scale of material complexity. This kind of physical reductionism commits the philosophical error of ignoring the whole entity precisely as a unified whole. It is the human being as a whole that is capable of empathy. It is the whole human being, an actual unity, that has the potentiality to be moved in a way that we identify as the emotion of empathy. Such a potential to be moved is rooted in, and thus must ultimately be understood in terms of, the human being as a whole.
However much the neurosciences can provide valuable information about neuronal activity that can be correlated with the emotion of empathy, we need more than this information in order to understand empathy. Actual human beings are more than what the empirical sciences can describe; the empirical sciences help us to see the parts, but we need to look at the whole as well, and at the kind of causal agency exercised by the whole entity. This is true not only for human beings, but also for parrots.
To speak of cross-species empathy we do need information from the neurosciences, but we need in addition a robust philosophy of nature, including a philosophical anthropology. Fascinating accounts of the relationships between human beings and animals, such as those in Serenity Park, invite us to think more deeply about what it means to be human and how the human animal can be connected to the broader animal world. We might very well speak of parrots exhibiting empathy. Clarity calls for us to reflect on what human emotions are, since referring to empathy in parrots involves analogical claims based first of all on a good grasp of what empathy is in what we know best: human beings.
William E. Carroll is Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, and a member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion of the University of Oxford.
Bird Brains and Cross-Species Empathy
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