nosiarch

Dreyfus on Heidegger No. 4 and 5; also, The Conclusion to This Series for The Moment.

Some Bloke Taking a Stand on a Rock. Image: Caspar David Friedrich,
‘*Wanderer above the Sea of Fog*‘

This is going to be my last set of notes on Dreyfus’ lectures for two reasons. The first is that as I go, I’m becoming really vividly aware of how little of this I get, and the second is that I’m not convinced these pieces are going to be accessible enough to be worth putting up. If I’m wrong, and if anyone is really keen for me to keep going, I’d be happy to– but as it stands without any indication that it’s worth it I’ll probably leave it here.

That all being said, I think the content in these lectures wraps up what we’ve seen so far really nicely, and I think if you listened to lectures one to five and read my notes alongside them you would have an interesting experience.

Dreyfus on Heidegger No. 2 and 3; also, Schizophrenia and Addiction as Loss of Contact.

In this post I’m going to cover what I took away from Dreyfus’ second and third lectures on Heidegger’s Being and Time. It’s worth noting that a lot of the material he covers in these lectures is prompted by questions from the audience, and so it gets a little bit circuitous.

The following notes are less an attempt to reconstruct the lectures rather than my attempt to take something somewhat discrete and self-contained from them.

I. The World Relationship and Styles of Being.

A lot of the content of these two lectures is to do with the way that Dasein relates to the World. So, rehashing the definitions we explored in the last post, that has to do with the way that personal being relates to and is interdependent with the being that the world has. Dreyfus acknowledges that it will take a lot of groundwork to explain this fully, so it’s worth bearing in mind that the discussion that follows here will only cover certain aspects of the Dasein-world inter-being relationship.

The most explicitly interesting material in lecture 2 regards what Dreyfus calls the difference between Styles of Being and Modes of Being. I’ve written previously on what Fromm calls the ‘having’ and ‘being’ modes, but in Heideggerian terms, these would be styles.

So, just as a terminological point: a mode of being is the difference between Vorhanden (substances), Zuhanden (equipment) and Dasein (personal being, the being for which being is an issue.) A style of being is something like the way that Dasein relates to the world.

Dreyfus gives the example of Japanese and American parenting styles– he cites a supposed ethnographic point to the effect that Japanese parenting styles emphasize a soothing and calming relational approach, whereas American parenting styles emphasize a the formation of an ‘energetic individual.’ Japanese parents apparently tend to place the baby facing upwards in bed, so they can sing to and soothe it, whereas Americans put babies into bed facing belly down, so that they are more capable of walking and wandering.

Now, whether these findings are representative of actual behavior is neither here nor there. The important part is that for Heidegger via Dreyfus, a style of being is expressed in a not necessarily reflective way, and that these styles of being express structures of relationship and value that we inherit or are situated in as a feature of being Dasein. I don’t need to be aware of the way that I put a baby down for it to be expressive of a style of being that I’ve inherited from my world.

At this point it’s probably worth defining some of the relevant features of the world for Heidegger via Dreyfus. Dreyfus cites an example of dialogue from Terence Malik’s film on Heidegger on the difference between the Earth and the World: “The World has people in it, the Earth doesn’t need to.”

This also gets us into a position to understand another substantial point of Heidegger’s. Dreyfus explains why Heidegger employs phenomenology to understand being in terms of the relation that Dasein bears toward the world, quoting Heidegger: “Being depends on us, but beings do not.”

This means that the way we relate to beings says something about being as such, and being as such is dependent on us, in that we are Dasein for its nature.

However, it is important to note, as Dreyfus does, that this does not mean Heidegger is an idealist. Putting it in the terms of mainstream philosophy: there are mind independent substances– this is confined to the Vorhanden. But the nature of an object as Zuhanden is dependent on Dasein for its nature, because the structure of associations and values that imbues the Zuhanden with the nature of what it is– for example a hammer or a horse’s hairbrush– is dependent on Dasein.

There could be no culture without personal beings. Remember: while being depends on us, beings do not.

This leads into an interesting distinction Dreyfus makes between ‘The Physical World’ and ‘The World of Physics.’ While it’s true to say that there are certain practices, values and customs in the World of Physics without which it would not be what it is, it is not true to say that those practices, values and customs also inhere in the Physical World necessarily.

All of this is to say that for Heidegger via Dreyfus, the world is not the world without Dasein, and Dasein is not Dasein without the world. Each part can only be understood holistically, taking the other into account. Unlike as in traditional substance ontology, for example what we might find in Descartes, there is no separation between subjectivity and objectivity.

My culture and my world are interrelated, and they determine my style of being which in turn determines the ways in which I interact with my culture and my world. My culture and the set of my associations determines the way that the Zuhanden appears to me, and the way that I would equip myself with it.

Given, as we saw in the notes for the last lecture, that Dasein is determined by the way it equips itself through the Zuhanden– for example how a Carpenter becomes a Carpenter when he avails himself of hammers and wood and nails– we start to get an idea for how complex and interrelated the structure of being is.

II. Definition and ‘The Existential Analytic.’

Towards the end of the second lecture, Dreyfus brings up a few definitions, that I think it would be valuable to reproduce here. Those definitions are for ‘the ontic’; ‘the ontological’; ‘the pre-ontological’; and of ‘fundamental ontology.’

To say of an aspect of something that it is ‘ontic’ is to say that it is to do with ways of relating to that something that are substance ontological. That’s a really confusing claim.

Basically, I’m thinking ontically about something if I’m thinking about it in terms that Aristotle or Descartes could understand– in terms of a subject-predicate duality. Remember, this is the view of the world that Heidegger is trying to build on; it is not the only way to relate to being, recall from my last post that the Zuhanden is a pretty clear example of being that is non subject-predicate.

To talk about something ‘ontologically’ is to talk about the mode of being it inhabits. If I’m talking about the distinctions between the Zuhanden and the Vorhanden and Dasein, then I’m talking about ontology.

For Heidegger via Dreyfus, to do or talk about something ‘pre-ontologically’ is to relate to something’s mode of being in a sort of naive or initial way. Japanese and American parents treat babies the way they do in a pre-ontological manner.

If they spoke about the differences without reference to the Zuhanden or the world of associations they inhabited, they would be speaking about the ontological– remember, they’re talking about styles of being– in a pre-ontological manner.

Finally, Dreyfus defines ‘fundamental ontology’ as the study of what any ontology is about. So, for Heidegger, his whole project is the project of a fundamental ontology.

Understanding the relationship between World, Dasein, Vorhanden and Zuhanden is understanding being itself, so that’s what Heidegger is most interested in. Remember that ‘the question is being’ is Heidegger’s question.

If we bear in mind that ‘being depends on us’, then you start to get an idea for why Heidegger is so concerned about Dasein and phenomenology. Recall that Heidegger calls the sort of being that Dasein has ‘existentence,’ and you get why his solution to the problem of fundamental ontology is what he calls ‘the existential analytic.’

In order to get to the bottom of what being is, we need to understand the being for whom being is a problem, because all of being being depends on it.

I found this last bit to be very nifty, because it situates philosophy back in the realm of the personal. There is no understanding without the perspective of some whom that understands.

So far we’ve mostly spoken about material from lecture two, though I’ve gone over to lecture three to find material to fill in gaps I had. So let’s talk about my main takeaway from lecture three now.

III. Coping with The World, and the Affordances in The World.

I’ll want to come back to some psychological theory here, because behaviorism and the ecological theory of perception are two theories that I think are really interestingly related to the concepts of coping/dealing and affordance respectively.

A personal note: I’m realizing more and more that I should just read Gibson on the ecological theory rather than rely on second-hand accounts as I’ve been doing so far. Maybe I’ll write a book review.

A lot of what follows is going to be interpretative and reconstructive– that’s just my style. If you want Dreyfus’ word for word account, the links for the two lectures are in the first paragraph of this article.

For Heidegger via Dreyfus, coping is part of the way that the world determines the being of Dasein. It does this by offering certain affordances, which Dasein is available to avail itself of in order to cope. Dreyfus notes that another way to understand coping is as ‘dealing’, which is another translation for the German term which he does not give.

So here’s the model: Dasein is presented with the world, with which it must cope. It copes with this world by way of relating to certain affordances in the world. The relation with the affordances themselves are the process of coping.

Let’s say my world presented me with the need to build a house, assuming that it renders me a carpenter. That means that the tools of carpentry, and the materials with which a carpenter builds a house offer me the affordances necessary to cope with the demands of the world on me by building that house.

In doing so, this reinforces my being a carpenter, inasmuch as I have built the house in action, and now also inasmuch as the world contains in it a house which has the aspect of having been built by me.

Both my being and the whole world shift in reaction to the coping actions I take in relation to the affordances which the world has offered me. This is yet another area in which the being of the world and the being of Dasein are inseperable.

Dasein is not what it is without the world, and the world is not what it is without Dasein to relate to it.

Okay, so affordances determine coping which determine being. Here’s an example: my vocabulary happens to be quite limited in Spanish, but I can speak a little bit, which means that I can only offer certain types of responses. If we model personality as the range of responses that a person would give– and accepting that would is constrained by could; it can’t be true if I would do something if I couldn’t– then we might say that personality is actually constrained by the range of affordance my world gives me, which means the interplay of the problems I face in the world of Spanish speakers and the equipment afforded me by my knowledge of Spanish.

Coping is what happens when the equipment given to me by my knowledge of Spanish is sufficient to deal with the problems I’m facing.

But in this case, if the affordance of my Spanish knowledge determines the coping strategies I can employ, and in this case the range of coping strategies I can employ determines my personality, then it seems like the world is determining my personality. My available methods of coping determine my being.

Next we’re about to depart pretty substantially from Dreyfus and Heidegger and see if I we can find space for Psychology. If we take something like Skinner’s Behaviourism as a starting point, we can start to say all sorts of interesting things, mechanically speaking, about how the world and the coping relation I can bear towards it determines my being.

IV. Coping and Determining Styles of Being.

Imagine that my world offers me only the opportunity to suffer and the opportunity to avoid that suffering without changing a thing about it.

That’s right, I’m tying Heidegger back into my work in mental health! It seems that my attempt to cope would afford me only certain opportunities. It also seems that coping is the naturally preferential place to be– but we’ll talk more about why that is in my post that involves lecture four.

Take the example of addiction: an addict is in such a world that coping is addiction, especially given the relationship that most addicts have to the helping functions in society or lack there-of.

The world affords them addiction. It may afford them other equipment, but in the cases of addicts I’ve met, their ejection from society and loss of the cultural machinery that underlies the affordance of more generally adaptive coping strategies means other equipment just isn’t available.

Often, the only world that appears to them is the world of addiction and addicts. Therefore the only equipment they can avail themselves of is the equipment of addiction. So the only kind of existence they can live is an addiction.

From a behaviouristic standpoint, an addiction is a problem because it’s self-reinforcing. It begets itself biologically, but it also begets itself because it removes the addict from any world that might afford them another opportunity. We might say the same of an extreme avoidance reaction.

Consider the theory that trauma is a key player in the aetiology of schizophrenia. I have a few gut hypotheses to the effect that schizophrenia may be related to the divorce of the meaning-making faculty from reality.

Vervaeke would call this ‘the lost of contact epistemology.’

If the trauma hypothesis correct, then schizophrenia involves– in at least some cases– the loss of the ability to adapt models of the world due to the loss of contact in an extreme avoidance reaction, leading to a runaway, rapidly mutating internal model of reality. I feel the need to note that this model of schizophrenia as the formation of an encapsulated meaning-making faculty, divorced from reality initially came to me from the work of Ian McGilchrist.

They say that the definition of insanity is doing the exact same thing over and over, and expecting different results. We might understand this as an inability to update your model. There’s a reason that psychotherapy involves helping the client reflect on themselves– why a very notable mechanism of change in therapy is the insight and perspective the client gains into their own situation.

Here is the bottom line, or the most valuable insight: beware the world that offers you only the option of leaving it, and beware the world that does not offer you the option to leave it. In either case, your optionality is out the window, and with it, so goes your adaptivity.

If you’re stuck in one world, you can’t leave when it stop being an adaptive place to live, so to speak. If we acknowledge that our affordances determine our coping, and our coping determines our being, we should be careful inasmuch as is possible to choose which worlds we inhabit. As I’ve discussed before, we should beware who’s feeding us. Otherwise, we just might end up like Pavlov’s Dogs!

Why Heidegger is So Hard to Understand.

I’ve been spending the last few weeks working through Heidegger’s Being and Time. It’s fascinating, but also super difficult to understand.

One of the reasons it’s so difficult to understand is that Heidegger insists on inventing specialist terminology. I really understand the motivation behind it, which is that language can often obfuscate the truth of Being if Being is seen only through the lens that language allows, but I also think it might be worth trying to get some of his ideas out in plain-er English.

Instead of talking about some of his ideas, it’s probably worth puzzling over the idea that language can obfuscate Being. But first, let’s see what he means by ‘Being’ as opposed to ‘being/s.’

For Heidegger, Being-with-a-big-B is something like ‘what it is to be.’ It’s something more and also something less than just ‘the sum of all the beings.’ He sees it as the main thing worth investigating, because it seems to be the thing that is always relevant to any investigation, but which has been mostly ignored since Plato’s Sophist and Aristotle’s Metaphysics.

Now, on to justifying all his weird mystical terminology.

II.

From the perspective of cognitive theory, more specifically map theory, we get an idea of the relationship between a representation and the represented. The phrase the map is not the territory is an expression of the idea that we might potentially confuse the representation of something with the thing itself. Kant figured that we could never understand the thing in itself because the way it presented itself to us always alienated it from us. The noumenon is always separated from us by the phenomena.

For Heidegger, there’s a real worry that language will separate us from the phenomena. The language at fault is the language of an outdated Philosophy. Heidegger would claim that the ontologies of the past– the metaphysical attempts made by previous philosophers like Descartes– ran us down a track of thinking which was a sort of dead end.

It’s no secret that Philosophical terms like ‘essence’; ‘category’; etc., end up working their way into every-day language. For example, the English ‘idea’ finds its origin in the Greek ‘eidos’, which originally expressed something like ‘the view of x’ where x is whatever the eidos is of.

If that’s true, and if a particular language implies a particular mode of looking at the world, then we ought to be very careful with the language we use when we’re asking questions about really fundamental topics. The more fundamental a topic is, the less we can allow external preconceptions to influence us. Speaking metaphorically, I suppose we need more sensitive instruments to examine more fundamental topics: in the same way we need an electron microscope to examine very small objects, we need a very clean language to examine topics like Being.

But it’s not at all obvious why language needs to be especially clear in order to talk about Being. I’ll have to admit this is where my understanding starts to break down, but I’ll try and make my best argument to see what I can come up with.

As far as I can see, Heidegger emphasises language free of preconception because he’s trying to avoid invoking any particular ontological perspective. If Metaphysics asks questions like ‘how many kinds of substance are there?’, then Heidegger is asking questions that are really quite prior to that. Let’s say that there is some set of specialist vocabulary A, and some set of specialist vocabulary B, and that using either of those sets of specialist vocabulary seems to prompt you to view the world from the perspective of the group of people who originated either set.

An example of this sort of arrangement might be Marxist and Capitalist ways of viewing the world. It seems to be the case that really committing yourself to understanding Marxist concepts prompts you to view the world in a Marxist way. If we accept the Marxist definition between use-value and Capital value, for example, then we’ll start to experience the world in those terms. If we start to look at the world in terms of marginal gains, expenditures and over-heads, then we’ll start to see the world in Capitalist terms.

These is somewhat like Heidegger’s idea of handiness. For Heidegger, an object is handy if I relate to it with a particular purpose or essence involved. It’s handiness is the function it presents itself to me as having. Heidegger probably invented the ecological theory of visual perception.

Chairs are handy, and so are any people that I bear determinate relationships to. This isn’t to say I objectify people, just that I relate to them in such a way that their value to me cannot be divorced from how I experience them. Chairs are handy in that I set in them. People are handy in that they tell me good jokes and might want to share dinner with me. The potential actionality of something can’t be ignored when I relate to it, or when I relate it to someone else.

A bar of chocolate on a table is edible. That it’s edible is unavoidably part of the way it presents itself to me. If the same bar of chocolate was in an unbreakable box of transparent material, it would become some sort of odd art installation, and it would cease to present itself to me as food. But if that same box also had a hungry child in it, the same chocolate bar would present itself to me again as food, but simply for someone else. In the third case, it presented itself as food to me again because it presented itself as food to someone else. The actionality of the child affected the handiness of the food.

The language available to me affects what I can pay attention to. If you have ever studied anatomy, then you’ll know about the strange and pleasing sensations of realizing that your body is far more detailed and intricate than you ever realized. It’s quite possible that this changed your perception of yourself. Perhaps it made you more aware of the relationship between your emotions and your body, or perhaps it made you more calm in general.

If this happened, then it’s because the your body presented itself in a different way to you. If that was so, then the way the world presented itself to you differed. There is a connection, then, between the maps of reality that are entailed by our vocabularies and the way the world itself emerges.

The problem with Being is that it neither is any being, nor is directly apparent. That means to get an idea of it, we have to look at all the beings very closely and carefully. If our linguistic tools aren’t up to snuff, we’re going to miss detail in the phenomena; we’re going to have wrong ideas; or we may accidentally conflate categories that are distinct.

III.

Now, this was my best attempt at justifying Heidegger’s odd use of language, and it strikes me as somewhat odd that I’ve done so by being simultaneously very sloppy with my language. If I’ve been able to do that, it’s probably because Heidegger’s thinking was so clear in his invented terms. It’s also worth noting that I’m stealing perspectives and arguments from Logical Positivism and Wittgenstein, who I see as taking a very similar approach towards a sort of conceptual sensitivity in language.

One interesting question for Science would be to ask whether the ways we label things actually affect the implicit predictions we make about those objects. For example, in a priming paradigm: if I convinced you that there was such a language wherein children were called ‘dogs’, would you be less amused by the child barking due to some judgement on an implicit level? Would the presence of the child in a glass box with a Frisbee change the handiness of the Frisbee?

Or another fun possible experiment, slightly less ethically dubious, and also possible less related. I’m including it because I think it would probably be interesting: we could spend a whole day teaching participants to use the wrong words for things, and then put them in time-limited situations where they had to be able to quickly reach for a particular object. For instance, we might put a knife, a lighter, a fan and a bottle of water in front of them, and then teach them to habitually use the term ‘water-bottle’ when they mean ‘lighter’ and vice versa.

I’m not sure what my hypothesis here would be. One question to examine would be whether or not it made any of the participants anxious on some level to put a water-bottle next to a big puddle of conspicuously flammable material.

If this experiment were to shine any light on Heidegger, it would probably be because I had completely misunderstood him. I’m just going to put that out there now.

But in any case, these are not questions for Philosophy; these are questions for Psychology– or perhaps, if you want to be fancy, Cognitive Science. That means trying to do hypotheticals on them is a waste of time. As it stands, nobody will give me volunteers to lie to or children to lock in glass boxes. Instead, I’ll just have to hope that someday, someone else is more able to persuade an ethics committee to let them have those things than I am.

IV.

One final note: it wouldn’t be one of my essays if I didn’t recommend an experiment at the end.

I was recently reading Impro by Keith Johnstone, which is full of interesting exercises designed to prompt you to drop the sort of overly restrictive cultural-cognitive-affective bondage that he figures school imposes on you.

The one I found most valuable was to go around for about ten seconds shouting out the wrong names for things in a room. It’s really simple. Just go around for ten seconds and call things whatever they aren’t. I called a lamp a Fishman, and a punnet of cherry tomatoes were simply ‘Sperm.’ The point isn’t to make sense. In fact, the point is probably to try and suspend sense in order to see what you can learn about it.

You will probably realize something about just how tenuously words are related to ‘reality.’ Or maybe you’ll just call a punnet of cherry tomatoes ‘Sperm’ and feel like a real wanker afterwards. Who knows?

What’s most interesting is that he claims that you’ll get a little giddy and that the colors in the world will seem somewhat brighter and more saturated at the end. In my experience, and in my partner’s experience, this was absolutely the case. I would encourage you to try it, just once or twice. He claims that he can produce this experience in his students, but then that might just be suggestion.

This sort of discussion does make you wonder whether those Zen types like Dogen were on to something when they advised us to ‘think not thinking.’

Beware the Optimization-Effiency Constraint! Also: A Hope for Freedom.

Here are some ideas to play with: that culture affects thought through language; that culture can be impressed and enforced in relation to some incentives; that culture is incentivized to impress certain modes of thinking, speaking and being in order to reinforce its own position. These are all sort of standard moves if we’re talking about ideology.

An example of how culture might impress itself on your thought is as follows. You might work in an organizational environment in an entry-level role. In plain English, there are some consequences of that. You’re expected to shut up on things you aren’t qualified to discuss, and you’re expected to learn a sort of organizational argot. There are enough pieces on “Business English” to nauseate a world, so I won’t bother writing this piece to add to those.

I also don’t want to argue whether or not “Business English” as a plain example actually affects anyone body and soul. I think the claim that language affects how you behave and thing is actually uncontroversial. For those who doubt me, here is a way you can test this: learn another language, and then see how your personality changes in that language. I learned Spanish, and I found that I was arguably a distinct person when speaking in Spanish. The relationships I built in Spanish and what sort of nonsense I got up to ended up forming a distinct personhood.

So we’ve heard an example of a distinct culture, and we’ve heard about how a distinct language might affect a mode of being, but how might a distinct culture impress a mode of being by a language? That’s a somewhat slipperier contention.

Let’s see how a mode of being can be opened up by learning a new language, as impressed by a culture. When you learn about anatomy, you are shown a language for describing the parts of your body. As such, you get the opportunity to become more aware of your body. If you take advantage of this opportunity, then you end up with the desired outcome. I don’t see how this could be anything other than positive, other than that it might end up distracting you from other things.

One way a culture could alter your mode of being then, is by incentivising you to acquire a knowledge of anatomy, which would lead you to developing a familiarity with your own anatomy. I suspect medical students have this experience, but I can personally confirm that students of partner dance or athletic pursuits like martial arts or rock climbing are also incentivised to acquire this sort of knowledge. The way that the culture around these activities incentivises certain knowledge is simply that they incentivise excellence in the pursuit. If the pursuit is such that familiarity with your own knowledge makes you better at it, then you’ll acquire the knowledge. That will lead you to acceptance and a sense of accomplishment and so on.

A discrete example: all of the above pursuits require you to get acquainted with the fine muscles in your abdomen and legs that allow you to balance. They also require you to get acquainted with your startle response and your anxiety response, both of which will throw those fine muscles and the awareness you need of them to havoc.

Those are all very positive ways that a culture might affect your mode of being. You could say the reason we trust culture at all is that culture is actually a fantastic transmitter and motivator when it comes to acquiring useful modes of being– or skills, I guess you could say. If you’ve ever tried to teach yourself something and then realized how much easier it is to learn something when embedded in a community dedicated to learning that thing, then you might have an inkling of what I mean. It is simply much easier to muster the dedication required for skill acquisition if there is some external motivational support. I won’t say reward as such, because I don’t know if anyone pursues the activities we’ve been talking about so far for just social acceptance. If anything, social gains seem like supplemental gains.

But what about those skills you pursue solely for social gains? I’m somewhat reluctant to call them skills at all. But take the “Business English” example. If we model language acquisition as a skill, then learning how to speak “Business English” is a skill. It’s socially incentivised, that’s for sure. If you don’t have experience of this, just consider any organizational culture you’ve had to learn to fit into.

The question I want to ask is: is there any danger to acquiring these skills? Is it possible to reduce your mode of being by acquiring easy or comfortable ways of thinking implicit in these skills? As I write it, it sounds a bit alarmist. Instead, perhaps it’s more worthwhile to consider how to sidestep possible pitfalls, and what those pitfalls might be.

Let’s consider a general principle of economy: if you can do something more easily, then you will do. Is this true of your emotional or being oriented habits? Let’s consider emotional avoidance as an economic tactic. If you model yourself as having a finite amount of emotional resource, you might tend towards becoming emotionally avoidant as a way to protect yourself and maintain your integrity.

This is where the danger comes in my mind. Let’s think evolutionarily about the cultures and linguistic patterns that emerge in

A quick example of “Business English” in an odd context: I once heard a colleage talking about ‘actioning’ a problem in a procedure. This was noteworthy, because it seemed to abstract away what was actually happening. To be precise, we were talking about ways to make sure we were adequately safeguarding our clients, many of whom have mental health problems or learning disabilities. While I don’t think the effect I’m talking about was present here– namely that emotional reality of the situation seemed present to my colleague– it does make me wonder whether there are cases where we might tend towards thinking in abstract ways as a technique of unconscious avoidance.

II.

When I talk with my friends about eating the rich, I am always cautious. I don’t want to blame money-hoarding Capital holders. The reason for this is that I am certain I would feel an unbearable temptation to do exactly what they’re doing in those situations where they’re doing it.

Let’s always bear in mind a principle from Evolutionary Psychology: the human organism did not evolve in a socio-cultural context like the one we currently live in. If we look at the meaning of the term Anthropocene, the academic facon de parler that dubs our current geological era, we can start to understand just what an odd pickle we’ve got ourselves into, speaking in terms of resource.

For the longest time, mankind was made for the flow of resource. The flow of resource was not made for mankind. This is now, to an extent, no longer the case. The relevance here of these ideas is to illustrate that the people on the top of our social structure may have unconscious mental maps of resource in terms of uncertainty and uncontrollability. This means that they may be far more likely to hoard than is warranted by their wealth. This may go doubly if we considered which types of people are most likely to become Capital holders in the first place, who I would suggest have a tendency toward conservative behaviours.

It would be odd to have acquired and stockpiled a large amount of money if you didn’t want to do those things, and given that you exist in a world that has people who do want to do those things, it’s likely difficult to acquire a large amount of money unless you do things that specifically optimize for acquiring large sums of money at the expense of other things. Casualties of this process might be social or emotional well-being, or time to pursue creativity, or other human goods.

I think the central Marxist thesis, or at least the one which appeals to me the most, is that the problem with Capitalism is that it ends up producing a system in the end that actually does incentivise against human goods, and instead results in an all-or-nothing, where you have to either commit entirely to money or not at all.

Basically, I’m trying to say that I feel sorry for the people who compulsively hoard money. I’m also trying to say that they likely suffer from an extreme over-specialization into modes of thinking and being that optimize for money generation and not much else. In the past, when I’ve spoken to successful middle managers, I’ve often been shocked by how little they knew or did that wasn’t related to the promotion of their own image.

It didn’t seem to be something I could justifiably be sicked by, because it seemed like it was a survival-critical strategy for them that they couldn’t shut off. It also seemed like they didn’t have much of anything else to offer.

From a Cognitive-Behavioural standpoint, a personality disorder can be understood as a pattern of adaptation that was at one point useful– likely during the course of an incredibly traumatic early life. If we took the same sort of perspective towards people who happened to have a particularly acquisitive or conservative nature, who had then been railroaded by the way Capital abstracts possession-value from use-value and trapped in a particularly empty mode of being by the process, then it gets a lot easier to feel less scorn for those who have much.

We might want to say that people like these have been trapped in a cycle by the optimization-efficiency constraint. This constraint might turn up in any system where scarcity is a problem, or where it is a perceived problem.

I’m not saying all people who have large amounts of money are like this, only that some seem to be. I could see myself falling prey to this sort of cycle if I wasn’t careful.

III.

What if there were more conservative ways of thinking or being with our emotional resources, assuming that we view ourselves with the ego-depletion model? Well, one way I could think of would be to avoid developing modes of being that we were weak in, and where the expected rate of return was low. That would lead to the sort of overspecialization of self that I was talking about in the earlier part with middle-managers.

The problem with expected values in considering personal development is that what you value changes with the sort of personal experiences and transformations that you undergo. For instance, I value a stable relationship and community substantially more than I used to. You could account for that in terms of my ageing and becoming more mature, but I would be reluctant to accept that explanation– you can see plenty of exceptions to it. Plenty of people never end up with that sort of view, despite all the age and maturation they acquire.

Let’s round up again: so far we’ve spoken about how language and cultures can affect modes of being; we’ve spoken about how the impressions of culture on modes of being can be really beneficial; we’ve played with some examples of how modes of being might be bad adaptations; we’ve seen examples of how economically conservative behaviour might trap us in bad modes of being; and we’ve seen that transformation in modes of being across time might change what we value, and therefore what we aim at.

So here’s the kicker: if we’re incentivized to develop poor modes of being, for example in an organizational context; and if we lose the opportunity to develop compensatory modes of being as a consequence of economically conservative modes of behaviour such as emotional avoidance, then we may put ourselves in a hamstrung position, where all we can safely optimize for is more avoidance.

Which sounds hellish.

IV.

So what are our routes of escape? As far as I can see, there are at least two useful personal virtues that help us avoid these problems. The first is self-awareness, and the second is focus. The importance of self-awareness is that you can’t correct what you don’t know is a problem. Things that don’t hurt don’t get changed. The importance of focus is that it is often very painful to acknowledge personal failures. It is much easier to ignore problems than to acknowledge them. But remember that this means overcoming the detrimental effect of Capital and the optimization-efficiency constraint. That’s motivational enough for me.

As far as I can see, contemplative practice is the best option for developing both of these traits. However, there are many, many problems that I can see with contemplative practice as it’s currently presented via marketing and understood in the West– the culture which is patient zero of the optimization-efficiency constraint.

I don’t want to criticise traditional forms of meditation as practised in Eastern cultures, or the mythological-cultural structures that animate them. I don’t think that from my current historical state of consciousness I could ever understand what the texts mean. In fact, that’s related to the problem. Those ideas emerged in at a specific point in history, and are completely divorced from the history of thought that I was raised on, and that is implicit in both of our modes of being, given that you’re reading me in English.

Instead I want to offer a very simple set of instructions I’ve been playing with. They work a treat for me. The idea of these is to interrogate them and to experiment. But bear in mind that they will likely be uncomfortable at first. The main aim of the instructions is to practice resisting the optimization-efficiency constraint, and to get proficient at it in a habitual way. In doing so, you’ll have to develop both self-awareness and focus. You’ll develop self-awareness by being forced to examine yourself implicitly by the activity itself, and you’ll develop focus by doing something difficult that you’ll have to continuously recommit yourself to doing.

Maybe these ideas won’t make sense at first. If so, go try this and then come back and read them again. Remember, the ultimate goal of this practice is to weaken the need to serve the sense of scarcity within you. If you try this, you ought to do it in the spirit of freedom.

I do also want to note that I am suspicious of “Mindfulness” as a cultural movement. This isn’t because there’s anything wrong with Mindfulness as a personal quality. Saying that would be silly. I try and cultivate it myself, and I find it deeply rewarding to do so. My problem is just that “Mindfulness” has become an excellent buzzword. It has been appropriated by a profit machine disguising itself as good organizational practice in some cases, and by a profit machine disguising itself as a healthcare system in others. That’s all I want to say on the matter, as plenty of interest has been written on it lately.

Back to the instructions. You might find these familliar.

1. Find a quiet and comfortable place to sit. Grab some cushions if you want. I use a meditation cushion called a zafu. But make no mistake, I am not sitting Za-zen.

2. Assume a sustainable posture. That means a soft and ‘S’ shaped back. There are plenty of guides on good sitting posture in the world. If you don’t know what good posture is, go research it. The posture needs to be sustainable, because you are going to be sitting in it without movement.

3. Set a timer for twenty minutes, and put it nearby. Don’t look at it, no matter how much you want to. that would count as moving.

4. Set an intention with yourself. Say to yourself ‘no matter what happens, I will not move.’ Be ready to be gentle with yourself– you’re probably going to move.

5. Focus on your breath, and do not move. You’re going to really want to move, but don’t. Get used to choosing not to. Keep doing this until the timer goes off. If your attention goes somewhere else, bring it back to your breath. If you can’t bring it back, let it go where it goes.

6. Be grateful. I like to bow until my head touches the ground. I’ll explain why later.

You might have suffered the entire time, thinking about all the tasks you have to complete, or the fear you have about your career, or the lack of money in your bank account, or how little you’ve done in your life to meet your parent’s expectations. But for at least those twenty minutes, you resisted the urge to react.

You might be full of thoughts, or you might not be. Either is fine. Eventually, you’ll probably experience what it’s like to not have any thoughts. That isn’t the point. Don’t think that’s the point. That being said, it’s nice while it lasts– and you might say that it’s one the few ways you have to break from ideology.

These instructions might sound familiar, and that’s because they probably are. Don’t think about them too much. The main idea is to get used to feeling your own body, and all of its urges and fears. There is absolutely no substitute for doing this if you want to understand how to free yourself from the awful structures of optimization we live in.

Don’t think of this practice as meditation– it isn’t. And don’t think of it as ‘mindfulness’ either. Both of those conceptualizations trap you in an ideological structure. I have plenty to say about mindfulness and the way it’s been appropriated by Capital, but I’ll save that for another day. Whether it’s Buddhism, or Taoism, or Zen, or Capitalism, or whatever. I don’t want my body and soul to be a slave to a structure of ideas, nor their optimization constraints. So let’s not adopt too many ideas around this practice if we can help it.

I would suggest doing it every day. I do it twice a day. I really don’t like the feeling of being a slave to scarcity. But I do really like the feeling of freedom from slavery, even if it’s just internal. Additionally, remember the hellish picture we painted in section II, about the money-oriented slave to the optimization-efficiency constraint? Well, you can take my word for it that practising this will make you less likely to become that guy, at least so long as you do it right.

Bear in mind that I am not a meditation teacher, and would not be accepted as anyone of any value by any existing spritual tradition, probably.

If you do this for long enough you’ll probably have periods where it feels really good. If you do it long enough, you might also have lots of really weird emotional disturbances. Hopefully those lead to some productive self-inquiry. If you’re anything like me, you’ll also have humongous periods of ego-inflation that make you think all sorts of weird things– that’s why I bow every time I’m done, to counteract those tendnecies. But remember: I don’t know, I’m not a doctor.

For the People I’ve Known Without Parents.

It seems so unfair that the world could be organized in such a way that someone could take you away from the place you came from. It’s more unfair that this could be seen as the best option.

I want to argue with that idea, but I don’t have the background to make a case more convincing than you could. Is anyone in favour of taking kids away from their parents unless they really have to? I’ll try anyway. It seems like the only fair thing to do.

Eight Brief Remarks on Phenomena.

Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis agree on a very important point: that something appears means it must be. This is understood in terms of relevance. Or otherwise, I suppose your neurosis is best ignored, hm?
To be is not different than to be relevant. It cannot go another way. There is no doubt. This was Descartes’ characteristic fuckery: to pretend that to be could be something other than to appear. If only he applied his perverse wisdom to himself– and disappeared from doubt along with his relevance– then we could have been saved many generations of fuckery.
Substance Dualism is a conceptual hazard. Descartes was patient zero, and we are now sick with his cognitive divorce. He was a paranoid schizophrenic, in the traditional sense of the term; reality had lost touch with him. All this is to say nothing for political correctness, it is just poetry from a sense.
There is no deliberate ideology without the notion that we could be wrong about our selves.
Heidegger perceives essence ecologically. He embodies an ecological theory of visual perception, from a Cognitive Scientific perspective. In much the same way, one at first sees the purpose of Heidegger, and only then can one construe him.
We might wonder what context could ever be more related to our being than the being-position in which we currently occur– phenomenologically, this is the position from which we find ourselves. It is one’s self that the position reveals, sympathetically.

(Scholarly remark: for more on 5, consider Vervaeke’s concept of
the relationship between agent and arena.)
Nietzsche was the first person to take the problem of pathos seriously. In that sense, he is a moral pathologist as well as a historian of morality. He asks us: “Where did it hurt?” If only he treated us like a good and caring doctor after that.
This really is the worst mistake: to neglect that you are unwell. This is the best question: “Why does it hurt?” Another way of asking “Why does it hurt?” is to ask “Where am I, and who?”

Resource List!

Just to let you all know, I’ve started compiling lectures/webites/books/etc that I find useful/beautiful/meaningful in a page just off to the side.

I figured I’d make a post here to direct attention to it for anyone who uses an RSS feed, etc. I hope it’s useful for someone.

Nos.

Writing Exercises for Self Inquiry.

*Image Unceremoniously Nicked from the **University of Hanover Website**. But don’t worry, they didn’t make it either.*

In previous pieces, drawing on the work of John Vervake and Ian McGilchrist, I’ve discussed the importance of reciprocal processing and participatory experience in enabling insight, wisdom, and implicitly, eudaimonic well being. For the most part, those pieces were theory-oriented. Now let’s talk about applying the theory in practice. These practices are not my own invention. Rather, I’ve adapted them from other sources to match my theory a little better.