Thursday, May 23, 2019
Popova On Love's Knowledge - Martha C. Nussbaum -
How Do You Know That You Love Somebody? Philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s Incompleteness Theorem of the Heart’s Truth, from Plato to Proust
“The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart.”
"Love … is a permanent structural feature of our soul."
BY MARIA POPOVA
"Love … is a permanent structural feature of our soul."
BY MARIA POPOVA
How, then, do we really know that we love another person?
That’s what Martha Nussbaum, whom I continue to consider the most compelling philosopher of our time, examines in her 1990 book Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (public library) — the sandbox in which Nussbaum worked out the ideas that would become, a decade later, her incisive treatise on the intelligence of emotions.
We deceive ourselves about love — about who; and how; and when; and whether. We also discover and correct our self-deceptions. The forces making for both deception and unmasking here are various and powerful: the unsurpassed danger, the urgent need for protection and self-sufficiency, the opposite and equal need for joy and communication and connection. Any of these can serve either truth or falsity, as the occasion demands. The difficulty then becomes: how in the midst of this confusion (and delight and pain) do we know what view of ourselves, what parts of ourselves, to trust? Which stories about the condition of the heart are the reliable ones and which the self-deceiving fictions? We find ourselves asking where, in this plurality of discordant voices with which we address ourselves on this topic of perennial self-interest, is the criterion of truth? (And what does it mean to look for a criterion here? Could that demand itself be a tool of self-deception?)
With an eye to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and its central theme of how our intellect blinds us to the wisdom of the heart, Nussbaum contemplates the nature of those experiences “in which the self-protective tissue of rationalization is in a moment cut through, as if by a surgeon’s knife”: Proust’s protagonist, Marcel, has rationally convinced himself that he no longer loves his beloved, Albertine, but is jolted into confronting the falsity of that rationalization upon receiving news of her death; in the shock of his intense sorrow, he instantly gains the knowledge, far deeper and more sinewy than the intellect’s, that he did, in fact, love Albertine.
In a testament to Proust’s assertion that “the end of a book’s wisdom appears to us as merely the start of our own,” Nussbaum writes:
Proust tells us that the sort of knowledge of the heart we need in this case cannot be given us by the sciences of psychology, or, indeed, by any sort of scientific use of intellect. Knowledge of the heart must come from the heart — from and in its pains and longings, its emotional responses.
Illustration from An ABZ of Love, Kurt Vonnegut’s favorite vintage Danish guide to sexuality
Such a conception of love’s knowledge, to be sure, stands radically against the long intellectual tradition of rationalism stretching from Plato to Locke like an enormous string of reason that plays only one note, deaf to the symphonic complexity of the emotional universe. The Proustian view calls for a restoration of lost nuance. Pointing to “the pseudotruths of the intellect,” Nussbaum revisits Marcel’s predicament, wherein the intellect has imposed an illusory sense of order and structure upon the entropy of the emotions:
The shock of loss and the attendant welling up of pain show him that his theories were forms of self-deceptive rationalization — not only false about his condition but also manifestations and accomplices of a reflex to deny and close off one’s vulnerabilities that Proust finds to be very deep in all of human life. The primary and most ubiquitous form of this reflex is seen in the operations of habit, which makes the pain of our vulnerability tolerable to us by concealing need, concealing particularity (hence vulnerability to loss), concealing all the pain-inflicting features of the world — simply making us used to them, dead to their assaults. When we are used to them we do not feel them or long for them in the same way; we are no longer so painfully afflicted by our failure to control and possess them. Marcel has been able to conclude that he is not in love with Albertine, in part because he is used to her. His calm, methodical intellectual scrutiny is powerless to dislodge this “dream deity, so riveted to one’s being, its insignificant face so incrusted in one’s heart.” Indeed, it fails altogether to discern the all-important distinction between the face of habit and the true face of the heart.
Nussbaum considers how our over-reliance on the intellect for clarity about love produces instead a kind of myopia:
The shock of loss and the attendant welling up of pain show him that his theories were forms of self-deceptive rationalization — not only false about his condition but also manifestations and accomplices of a reflex to deny and close off one’s vulnerabilities that Proust finds to be very deep in all of human life. The primary and most ubiquitous form of this reflex is seen in the operations of habit, which makes the pain of our vulnerability tolerable to us by concealing need, concealing particularity (hence vulnerability to loss), concealing all the pain-inflicting features of the world — simply making us used to them, dead to their assaults. When we are used to them we do not feel them or long for them in the same way; we are no longer so painfully afflicted by our failure to control and possess them. Marcel has been able to conclude that he is not in love with Albertine, in part because he is used to her. His calm, methodical intellectual scrutiny is powerless to dislodge this “dream deity, so riveted to one’s being, its insignificant face so incrusted in one’s heart.” Indeed, it fails altogether to discern the all-important distinction between the face of habit and the true face of the heart.
Nussbaum considers how our over-reliance on the intellect for clarity about love produces instead a kind of myopia:
Intellect’s account of psychology lacks all sense of proportion and depth and importance… [Such a] cost-benefit analysis of the heart — the only comparative assessment of which intellect, by itself, is capable — is bound, Proust suggests, to miss differences of depth. Not only to miss them, but to impede their recognition. Cost-benefit analysis is a way of comforting oneself, of putting oneself in control by pretending that all losses can be made up by sufficient quantities of something else. This stratagem opposes the recognition of love — and, indeed, love itself.
[…]
To remove such powerful obstacles to truth, we require the instrument that is “the subtlest, most powerful, most appropriate for grasping the truth.” This instrument is given to us in suffering.
Half a century after Simone Weil made her compelling case for why suffering is a greater clarifying force than intellectual discipline, Nussbaum examines this antidote to the intellect’s self-delusion by quoting directly from Proust:
Our intelligence, however lucid, cannot perceive the elements that compose it and remain unsuspected so long as, from the volatile state in which they generally exist, a phenomenon capable of isolating them has not subjected them to the first stages of solidification. I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart. But this knowledge, which the shrewdest perceptions of the mind would not have given me, had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange, like a crystallised salt, by the abrupt reaction of pain.
Central to this method of truth-seeking is what Nussbaum calls catalepsis — “a condition of certainty and confidence from which nothing can dislodge us.” To be cataleptic — from the Greek katalēptikē, derived from the verb katalambanein, meaning “to apprehend,” “to firmly grasp” — is to have a firm grasp of reality. But, of course, the implied antinomy is that because reality is inherently slippery, either the firmness of such catalepsis or its conception of reality is false.
Noting the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Zeno’s view that we gain knowledge of the heart’s truth through powerful impressions that come directly from reality, Nussbaum returns to Proust’s Marcel:
[…]
To remove such powerful obstacles to truth, we require the instrument that is “the subtlest, most powerful, most appropriate for grasping the truth.” This instrument is given to us in suffering.
Half a century after Simone Weil made her compelling case for why suffering is a greater clarifying force than intellectual discipline, Nussbaum examines this antidote to the intellect’s self-delusion by quoting directly from Proust:
Our intelligence, however lucid, cannot perceive the elements that compose it and remain unsuspected so long as, from the volatile state in which they generally exist, a phenomenon capable of isolating them has not subjected them to the first stages of solidification. I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart. But this knowledge, which the shrewdest perceptions of the mind would not have given me, had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange, like a crystallised salt, by the abrupt reaction of pain.
Central to this method of truth-seeking is what Nussbaum calls catalepsis — “a condition of certainty and confidence from which nothing can dislodge us.” To be cataleptic — from the Greek katalēptikē, derived from the verb katalambanein, meaning “to apprehend,” “to firmly grasp” — is to have a firm grasp of reality. But, of course, the implied antinomy is that because reality is inherently slippery, either the firmness of such catalepsis or its conception of reality is false.
Noting the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Zeno’s view that we gain knowledge of the heart’s truth through powerful impressions that come directly from reality, Nussbaum returns to Proust’s Marcel:
The impression [that he loves Albertine] comes upon Marcel unbidden, unannounced, uncontrolled… Surprise, vivid particularity, and extreme qualitative intensity are all characteristics that are systematically concealed by the workings of habit, the primary form of self-deception and self-concealment. What has these features must have escaped the workings of self-deception, must have come from reality itself.
We notice, finally, that the very painfulness of these impressions is essential to their cataleptic character. Our primary aim is to comfort ourselves, to assuage pain, to cover our wounds. Then what has the character of pain must have escaped these mechanisms of comfort and concealment; must, then, have come from the true unconcealed nature of our condition.
Illustration by Julie Paschkis from Pablo Neruda: Poet of the People by Monica Brown
And yet there exists another, more dimensional possibility. Nussbaum writes:
For the Stoic the cataleptic impression is not simply a route to knowing; it is knowing. It doesn’t point beyond itself to knowledge; it goes to constitute knowledge. (Science is a system made up of katalēpseis.) If we follow the analogy strictly, then, we find that knowledge of our love is not the fruit of the impression of suffering, a fruit that might in principle have been had apart form the suffering. The suffering itself is a piece of self-knowing. Inresponding to a loss with anguish, we are grasping our love. The love is not some separate fact about us that is signaled by the impression; the impression reveals the love by constituting it. Love is not a structure in the heart waiting to be discovered; it is embodied in, made up out of, experiences of suffering.
[…]
Marcel is brought, then, by and in the cataleptic impression, to an acknowledgment of his love. There are elements of both discovery and creation here, at both the particular and general levels. Love of Albertine is both discovered and created. It is discovered, in that habit and intellect were masking from Marcel a psychological condition that was ready for suffering, and that … needed only to be affected slightly by the catalyst in order to turn itself into love. It is created, because love denied and successfully repressed is not exactly love. While he was busily denying that he loved her, he simply was not loving her. At the general level, again, Marcel both discovers and enacts a permanent underlying feature of his condition, namely, his neediness, his hunger for possession and completeness. That too was there in a sense before the loss, because that’s what human life is made of. But in denying and repressing it, Marcel became temporarily self-sufficient, closed, and estranged from his humanity. The pain he feels for Albertine gives him access to his permanent underlying condition by being a case of that condition, and no such case was present a moment before. Before the suffering he was indeed self-deceived — both because he was denying a general structural feature of his humanity and because he was denying the particular readiness of his soul to feel hopeless love for Albertine. He was on a verge of a precipice and thought he was safely immured in his own rationality. But his case shows us as well how the successful denial of love is the (temporary) extinction and death of love, how self-deception can aim at and nearly achieve self-change.
We now see exactly how and why Marcel’s account of self-knowledge is no simple rival to the intellectual account. It tells us that the intellectual account was wrong: wrong about the content of the truth about Marcel, wrong about the methods appropriate for gaining this knowledge, wrong as well about what sort of experience in and of the person knowing is. And it tells us that to try to grasp love intellectually is a way of not suffering, not loving — a practical rival, a stratagem of flight.
[…]
Marcel is brought, then, by and in the cataleptic impression, to an acknowledgment of his love. There are elements of both discovery and creation here, at both the particular and general levels. Love of Albertine is both discovered and created. It is discovered, in that habit and intellect were masking from Marcel a psychological condition that was ready for suffering, and that … needed only to be affected slightly by the catalyst in order to turn itself into love. It is created, because love denied and successfully repressed is not exactly love. While he was busily denying that he loved her, he simply was not loving her. At the general level, again, Marcel both discovers and enacts a permanent underlying feature of his condition, namely, his neediness, his hunger for possession and completeness. That too was there in a sense before the loss, because that’s what human life is made of. But in denying and repressing it, Marcel became temporarily self-sufficient, closed, and estranged from his humanity. The pain he feels for Albertine gives him access to his permanent underlying condition by being a case of that condition, and no such case was present a moment before. Before the suffering he was indeed self-deceived — both because he was denying a general structural feature of his humanity and because he was denying the particular readiness of his soul to feel hopeless love for Albertine. He was on a verge of a precipice and thought he was safely immured in his own rationality. But his case shows us as well how the successful denial of love is the (temporary) extinction and death of love, how self-deception can aim at and nearly achieve self-change.
We now see exactly how and why Marcel’s account of self-knowledge is no simple rival to the intellectual account. It tells us that the intellectual account was wrong: wrong about the content of the truth about Marcel, wrong about the methods appropriate for gaining this knowledge, wrong as well about what sort of experience in and of the person knowing is. And it tells us that to try to grasp love intellectually is a way of not suffering, not loving — a practical rival, a stratagem of flight.
Art by Salvador Dalí for a rare edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy
And yet this notion of measuring love by degree of suffering seems to be a particular pathology of the human heart — could, Nussbaum asks, Marcel’s sorrow at the loss of Albertine be evidence not of love, or at least not only of love, but of grief or fear or some other constellation of contexts? She writes:
Marcel’s relation to the science of self-knowledge now begins to look more complex than we had suspected. We said that the attempt to grasp love intellectually was a way of avoiding loving. We said that in the cataleptic impression there is acknowledgement of one’s own vulnerability and incompleteness, an end to our flight from ourselves. But isn’t the whole idea of basing love and its knowledge on cataleptic impressions itself a form of flight — from openness to the other, from all those things in love for which there is in fact no certain criterion? Isn’t his whole enterprise just a new and more subtle expression of the rage for control, and need for possession and certainty, the denial of incompleteness and neediness that characterized the intellectual project? Isn’t he still hungry for a science of life?
Noting the contrast between the mutuality of love and the asymmetry of infatuation — after all, Marcel’s confrontation of his feelings for Albertine doesn’t require her participation at all and can be conducted as a wholly solitary activity — Nussbaum adds:
What Marcel feels is a gap or lack in himself, an open wound, a blow to the heart, a hell inside himself. Is all of this really love of Albertine?
[…]
The heart and mind of another are unknowable, even unapproachable, except in fantasies and projections that are really elements of the knower’s own life, not the other’s.
Proust’s protagonist arrives at this conclusion himself:
I understood that my love was less a love for her than a love in me… It is the misfortune of beings to be for us nothing else but useful showcases for the contents of our own minds.
And yet this conclusion, Nussbaum argues, is but a form of self-protection — in denying one’s porousness to the other and instead painting love as a curious relationship with oneself, it bolsters the illusion of self-sufficiency as a hedge against the suffering which love entails. Such a conception is ultimately a form of self-delusion masking the true nature of love and what Nussbaum calls its “dangerous openness.” Reflecting on Proust’s ultimate revelation, she writes:
Love … is a permanent structural feature of our soul.
[…]
The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart. In suffering we know only suffering. We call our rationalizations false and delusive, and we do not see to what extent they express a mechanism that is regular and deep in our lives. But this means that in love itself we do not yet have full knowledge of love — for we do not grasp its limits and boundaries. Sea creatures cannot be said to know the sea in the way that a creature does who can survey and dwell in both sea and land, noticing how they bound and limit one another.
Wednesday, May 22, 2019
Office Building as a Sanctuary for the Monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus)
**** Link : The Monarch Sanctuary (Lepidoptera terrarium)
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
Quatrains (5) - Rumi-
My heart wanted only a kiss from you;
The price you asked for that kiss was my soul.
Heart jumped in the deep and flowed alongside soul,
Advising, 'Close the deal. The price is cheap.'
*
I rush here and there in search of a friend.
Still I dream, though my life has reached its end.
And yes, one day I will find my friend,
But how will I find the life that is spent?
*
I'm sad that as she binds me in this pain,
My love does not intend my heart to gain
Its happiness. When she sees my distress
She laughs in secret at this sweet, sweet jest.
*
I was drinking wine, mired in my distress,
And fell asleep before my heart could be expressed.
When I woke from my drunken sleep, I found
My love gone, the candle out, Saghi sleeping sound.
*
Not just her laugh and her face are lovely;
Her anger, her moods, her harsh words are too.
Like it or not, she demands my life.
Who cares for life? Her demand's lovely too.
***
The Meaningfulness of Lives -The Stone, NYT -
The Meaningfulness of Lives
BY TODD MAY
September 11, 2011
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
Who among us has not asked whether his or her life is a meaningful one? Who has not wondered — on a sleepless night, during a long stretch of dull or taxing work, or when a troubled child seems a greater burden than one can bear — whether in the end it all adds up to anything? On this day, too, when many are steeped in painful reminders of personal loss, it is natural to wonder about the answers.
This seems wrong on two counts. First, why would the existence of God guarantee the meaningfulness of each of our lives? Is a life of unremitting drudgery or unrequited struggle really redeemed if there’s a larger plan, one to which we have no access, into which it fits? That would be small compensation for a life that would otherwise feel like a waste — a point not lost on thinkers like Karl Marx, who called religion the “opium of the people.” Moreover, does God actually ground the values by which we live? Do we not, as Plato recognized 2500 years ago, already have to think of those values as good in order to ascribe them to God?
Second, and more pointedly, must the meaningfulness of our lives depend on the existence of God? Must meaning rely upon articles of faith? Basing life’s meaningfulness on the existence of a deity not only leaves all atheists out of the picture; it leaves different believers out of one another’s picture. What seems called for is an approach to thinking about meaning that can draw us together, one that exists alongside or instead of religious views.
A promising and more inclusive approach is offered by Susan Wolf in her recent and compelling book, “Meaning in Life and Why It Matters.” A meaningful life, she claims, is distinct from a happy life or a morally good one. In her view, “meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.” A meaningful life must, in some sense then, feel worthwhile. The person living the life must be engaged by it. A life of commitment to causes that are generally defined as worthy — like feeding and clothing the poor or ministering to the ill — but that do not move the person participating in them will lack meaningfulness in this sense. However, for a life to be meaningful, it must also be worthwhile. Engagement in a life of tiddlywinks does not rise to the level of a meaningful life, no matter how gripped one might be by the game.
A meaningful life is distinct from a happy life or a morally good one.
The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre thought that, without God, our lives are bereft of meaning. He tells us in his essay “Existentialism,” “if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us.” On this view, God gives our lives the values upon which meaning rests. And if God does not exist, as Sartre claims, our lives can have only the meaning we confer upon them.
This seems wrong on two counts. First, why would the existence of God guarantee the meaningfulness of each of our lives? Is a life of unremitting drudgery or unrequited struggle really redeemed if there’s a larger plan, one to which we have no access, into which it fits? That would be small compensation for a life that would otherwise feel like a waste — a point not lost on thinkers like Karl Marx, who called religion the “opium of the people.” Moreover, does God actually ground the values by which we live? Do we not, as Plato recognized 2500 years ago, already have to think of those values as good in order to ascribe them to God?
Second, and more pointedly, must the meaningfulness of our lives depend on the existence of God? Must meaning rely upon articles of faith? Basing life’s meaningfulness on the existence of a deity not only leaves all atheists out of the picture; it leaves different believers out of one another’s picture. What seems called for is an approach to thinking about meaning that can draw us together, one that exists alongside or instead of religious views.
A promising and more inclusive approach is offered by Susan Wolf in her recent and compelling book, “Meaning in Life and Why It Matters.” A meaningful life, she claims, is distinct from a happy life or a morally good one. In her view, “meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness.” A meaningful life must, in some sense then, feel worthwhile. The person living the life must be engaged by it. A life of commitment to causes that are generally defined as worthy — like feeding and clothing the poor or ministering to the ill — but that do not move the person participating in them will lack meaningfulness in this sense. However, for a life to be meaningful, it must also be worthwhile. Engagement in a life of tiddlywinks does not rise to the level of a meaningful life, no matter how gripped one might be by the game.
Leif Parsons
Often one defends an idea by giving reasons for it. However, sometimes the best defense is not to give reasons at the outset but instead to pursue the idea in order to see where it leads. Does it capture something important if we utilize it to understand ourselves? It’s this latter tack that I would like to try here. The pursuit of this core idea — that a meaningful life is both valued and valuable — allows us to understand several important aspects of our attitudes toward ourselves and others.
In this pursuit, the first step we might take beyond what Wolf tells us is to recognize that lives unfold over time. A life is not an unrelated series of actions or projects or states of being. A life has, we might say, a trajectory. It is lived in a temporal thickness. Even if my life’s trajectory seems disjointed or to lack continuity, it is mylife that is disconnected in its unfolding, not elements of several different lives.
If a life has a trajectory, then it can be conceived narratively. A human life can be seen as a story, or as a series of stories that are more or less related. This does not mean that the person whose life it is must conceive it or live it narratively. I needn’t say to myself, “Here’s the story I want construct,” or, “This is the story so far.” What it means rather is that, if one reflected on one’s life, one could reasonably see it in terms of various story lines, whether parallel or intersecting or distinct. This idea can be traced back to Aristotle’s “Ethics,” but has made a reappearance with some recent narrative conceptions of what a self is.
What makes a trajectory a meaningful one? If Wolf is right, it has to feel worthwhile and, beyond that, has to be engaged in projects that are objectively worthwhile. There is not much difficulty in knowing what feels worthwhile. Most of us are good at sensing when we’re onto something and when we’re not. Objective worthiness is more elusive. We don’t want to reduce it simply to a morally good life, as though a meaningful life were simply an unalienated moral life. Meaningful lives are not so limited and, as we shall see, are sometimes more vexed. So we must ask what lends objective worthiness to a life outside the moral realm. Here is where the narrative character of a life comes into play.
What is the point of understanding what makes lives meaningful? Why not just live them?
An intense life, for instance, can be lived with abandon. One might move from engagement to engagement, or stick with a single engagement, but always (well, often) by diving into it, holding nothing back. One throws oneself into swimming or poetry or community organizing or fundraising, or perhaps all of them at one time or another. Such a life is likely a meaningful one. And this is true even where it might not be an entirely moral one.
We know of people like this, people whose intensity leads them to behavior that we might call morally compromised. Intense lovers can leave bodies in their wake when the embers of love begin to cool. Intense athletes may not be the best of teammates. Our attitudes toward people like this are conflicted. There is a sense in which we might admire them and another sense in which we don’t. This is because meaningful lives don’t always coincide with good ones. Meaningful lives can be morally compromised, just as morally good lives can feel meaningless to those who live them.
We should not take this to imply that there is no relationship between meaningfulness and morality. They meet at certain moral limits. An evil life, no matter how intense or steadfast, is not one we would want to call meaningful. But within the parameters of those moral limits, the relationship between a meaningful life and a moral one is complicated. They do not map directly onto each other.
Why might all this matter? What is the point of understanding what makes lives meaningful? Why not just live them? On one level, the answer is obvious. If we want to live meaningful lives, we might want to know something about what makes a life so. Otherwise, we’re just taking stabs in the dark. And in any event, for most of us it’s just part of who we are. It’s one of the causes of our lying awake at night.
There is another reason as well. This one is more bound to the time in which we live. In an earlier column for The Stone, I wrote that we are currently encouraged to think of ourselves either as consumers or as entrepreneurs. We are told to be shoppers for goods or investors for return. Neither of these types of lives, if they are the dominant character of those lives, strike me as particularly meaningful. This is because their narrative themes — buying, investing — are rarely the stuff of which a compelling life narrative is made. (I say “rarely” because there may be, for example, cases of intensely lived but morally compromised lives of investment that do not cross any moral limit to meaningfulness.) They usually lack what Wolf calls “objective attractiveness.” To be sure, we must buy things, and may even enjoy shopping. And we should not be entirely unconcerned with where we place our limited energies or monies. But are these the themes of a meaningful life? Are we likely to say of someone that he or she was a great networker or shopper, and so really knew how to live?
In what I have called an age of economics, it is even more urgent to ask the question of a meaningful life: what it consists in, how we might live one. Philosophy cannot prescribe the particular character of meaning that each of us should embrace. It cannot tell each of us individually how we might trace the trajectory that is allotted to us. But it can, and ought to, reflect upon the framework within which we consider these questions, and in doing so perhaps offer a lucidity we might otherwise lack. This is as it should be. Philosophy can assist us in understanding how we might think about our lives, while remaining modest enough to leave the living of them to us.
Todd May is a professor of philosophy at Clemson University. He is the author 10 books, including “Our Practices, Our Selves” and “Death,” and is at work on a book about friendship in the contemporary period.
Is the ‘Dumb Jock’ Really a Nerd? - The Stone, NYT -
THE STONE
Is the ‘Dumb Jock’ Really a Nerd?
BY JASON STANLEY AND JOHN W. KRAKAUER
October 27, 2013
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
In the frequent debates over the merits of science and philosophy, or the humanities in general, it is often assumed that the factual grounding and systematic methodology of the sciences serve as a corrective to the less rigorous wanderings of the humanities. And while many take the position that the humanities can provide their own important path to enlightenment, few argue that considerations from philosophy can or should correct the considered judgment of scientists. Even most defenders of the humanities hold that the sciences are directed at truth, whereas the humanities have an alternate goal, perhaps the molding of ideal citizens.
Neuroscience has not vindicated the cultural distinction between practical and theoretical activities.
We believe that in the enterprise of uncovering truth, the paths of the scientist and the humanist must often intersect. Rather than argue in generalities, we will develop a specific example, though we assume that there are many others like it.
The example concerns the seminal case study of Henry Molaison —known to the public as H.M. — a patient with severe epilepsy. H.M. was treated with a bilateral temporal lobectomy. Afterward, he was left unable to form lasting memories from short-term memories. He would generally forget events within 30 seconds after they occurred.
In a groundbreaking experiment published in 1962, the psychologist Brenda Milner had H.M. perform a mirror-drawing task. The task required H.M. to trace the outline of a star with a pencil, using a mirror to guide him, with vision of his arm obscured. Over the course of three days, H.M. improved his performance of this task, even though he had no explicit memory of having encountered it on previous days. This is an admittedly fascinating and important result. But what exactly is its significance?
The standard interpretation is that H.M. was able to acquire and improve motor skills, even though he could not retain knowledge of facts. As a recent newspaper article explains in the context of an interview with the distinguished neuroscientist Suzanne Corkin:
Henry was not capable of learning new information, though his knowledge of past events — the Wall Street Crash, Pearl Harbor and so on — was clear. Only a very few tiny details of TV programmes he watched repetitively ever stuck. He could, however, learn and retain new motor skills, which led to important understanding of the difference between conscious memory and unconscious. The latter category would include learning how to play tennis or ride a bicycle, or even play the piano — things that the brain encodes and transmits to the muscles through conditioning, memories which we come to think of as intuitive.
According to this article, H.M. was able to “learn and retain new motor skills” (and even improve). Examples of such learning are “how to play tennis or ride a bicycle.” H.M. is therefore taken to show that motor skills, a paradigm example of which is tennis, are not the employment of knowledge.
In a recent paper, we argue that the case of H.M. has been misinterpreted. First, there are mistaken assumptions about the nature of knowledge and the nature of skill. Secondly, the importation of a merely cultural dichotomy between practical and theoretical pursuits has distorted the interpretation of experiments about motor skill. Neuroscience has not vindicated the cultural distinction between practical and theoretical activities. Rather, fueled by misconceptions about knowledge and skill, a merely cultural distinction has skewed the interpretation of scientific results.
A clue to the misinterpretation of the significance of H.M. lies in a 2010 paper by Shumita Roy and N.W. Park, in the journal Neuropsychologia. Roy and Park introduced several patients with the same amnestic condition as H.M. to novel tools. They discovered that the patients could not learn how to use the tools over days. The patients could not remember how the tool worked. They were able to exhibit improvements in execution similar to the improvement H.M. showed in mirror learning, but only after they were instructed what to do each day. Roy and Park conclude that tool use is not a motor skill, since it requires remembering facts.
We are not supposed to call Lebron James a “genius” because cultural bias has infected science without the moderating input of the humanities.
What is of interest is that they favor this conclusion over the obvious alternative — that motor skill, like any other cognitive task, requires knowledge. Perhaps patients with H.M.’s condition can acquire one part of what is required for skill, but not other parts. If so, then neuroscientists have made an overly hasty identification of a noncognitive component of motor skill with the category of motor skill itself. This identification overlooks the knowledge component of anything that common sense classifies as a motor skill, like tennis. Indeed, we would predict that just as with the tools of Roy and Park, H.M. would never have been able to learn how to play a tennis match (assuming he had never encountered the game before his surgery).
Roy and Park’s conclusion that even tool use is not a motor skill should ring alarm bells about whether the concept of a skill is what is at issue in these discussions. Martin Heidegger uses the example of hammering with a hammer as a paradigm example of a motor skill. Philosophers from Aristotle to Gilbert Ryle have held that whether or not to employ a skill is under a person’s rational control. But this seems to require knowledge — knowing how, when and with what means to do it. A skilled archer knows what to do to initiate the activity; this is in part why she can decide to do that activity. Still, we are not supposed to call LeBron James a “genius” because cultural biases have infected science without the moderating input of the humanities.
Neuroscientists and psychologists have other views that argue that motor skill does not involve knowledge. But these arguments involve false assumptions about knowledge.
We discuss and reject one such assumption, that a person must be capable of verbally explaining her knowledge. A second false assumption is that anyone who acts on knowledge must be considering that knowledge while acting upon it; for example, that the center fielder must be actively thinking about how to field the ball if he is acting on knowledge. A third false assumption is that anyone who knows something must be aware of knowing it (the following tempting argument appeals to this third assumption: it is possible to forget that one knows how to ride a bicycle, yet still retain the skill of riding a bicycle. Therefore, skill at bicycle riding does not involve knowledge). All of these assumptions have been widely rejected by philosophers who have recently considered them (see here for discussion).
It turns out that H.M. too had to be reinstructed in certain details — how to hold his hand, the correct placement of the mirror and other aspects of the task. He was not able to acquire a skill. One facet of skill improved, but this does not mean that he acquired the skill. One way to improve motor skill is by acquiring knowledge. For any given skill, it’s an open question as to how much knowledge is needed to acquire it and improve significantly. Skilled football players and cabinetmakers possess a large amount of complex knowledge about these activities, which accumulates over time and contributes to success. That someone can master such a complex knowledge base for these “practical” skills suggests that they could also be successful at activities that are considered more intellectual.
The significance of many scientific results is conveyed in the vocabulary of the humanities. In the case of HM, these terms are “skill” and “knowledge.” Gary Gutting has argued in The Stone —here and here — that scientific significance should be assessed in tandem with those who are familiar with the history and role of the relevant concepts — often humanists. We have argued that he is right. It is not possible to separate humanists and nonhumanists in the successful pursuit of truth, even if they employ different methodologies.
Constructing an argument in mathematics or history is one kind of human activity. Football and cabinetmaking are others. We argue that skilled human activity generally requires the acquisition and manipulation of knowledge, as well as implicit processes that do not depend on propositional knowledge (for example, increased dexterity). It is hard, and perhaps not possible, to forge a theoretically significant distinction between working with one’s hands and working with one’s mind.
Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of “Knowledge and Practical Interests,” “Language in Context” and “Know How.”
John W. Krakauer is a professor of neurology and neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is director of the Brain, Learning, Animation and Movement Lab.
Saturday, May 18, 2019
Thursday, May 16, 2019
The Sacred Spell of Words - From The Stone NYT -
THE BIG IDEAS: WHAT IS POWER?
The Sacred Spell of Words
Power is language.
By N. Scott Momaday
Mr. Momaday is an author, poet and playwright.
May 15, 2019
Emily Spear, who is Kiowa and Cheyenne, at a Kiowa Pow Wow in Oklahoma.CreditCreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times
This is the first essay in The Big Ideas, a special section of The Times’s philosophy series, The Stone, in which more than a dozen notable thinkers and writers — including Elena Ferrante, Cornel West, Yuval Harari, Gen. Wesley Clark and others — answer the question, “What is power?”
The term “power” is everywhere in our world. Thinking of it, the phrase “word inflation” comes to mind. Much of what we encounter in print, on television and in advertising centers on the concept of power.
But what is that concept? What is power? The truth is that the word bears an impossible burden of interpretation. Definitions are myriad; the dictionary lists an unusual number of meanings. Surely power is what it is — that which enables us to influence, if not indeed determine, the course of our lives.
And it is a word.
Words are powerful. As a writer, my experience tells me that nothing is more powerful. Language, after all, is made of words.
Words are conceptual symbols; they have denotative and connotative properties. The word “power” denotes force, physical strength, resistance. But it connotes something more subtle: persuasion, suggestion, inspiration, security.
Carnegie, Okla., home of the Kiowa tribe.CreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times
Consider the words of Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”:
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.
We might be hard pressed to find words more charged with power to incite, to inflame, to affect violence and destruction. But there are, of course, other expressions of power in words.
They can be especially personal. They can touch our sensibilities in different and individual ways, perhaps because they have different associations for us. The word “Holocaust” frightens me because survivors of the Nazi death camps have told me of their suffering. Notwithstanding, the word is intrinsically powerful and disturbing.
The word “child” delights me; the word “love” confounds me; the word “God” mystifies me. I have lived my life under the spell of words; they have empowered my mind.
Words are sacred. I believe they are more sacred to children than they are to most of us. When I was first able to make my way in language, my Native American father, a member of the Kiowa tribe, told me stories from the Kiowa oral tradition. They transported me. They fascinated and thrilled me. They nourished my imagination. They nourished my soul. Indeed, nothing has meant more to me in fashioning my view of the world. I came to understand that story is the engine of language, and that words are the marrow of language.
Language is a system of communication based upon sounds and symbols.CreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times
Several years ago I was on a stage with the Kenyan paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey in Chicago. We were speaking on the subject of origins, specifically the origin of humans. Mr. Leakey argued that we became human when we became bipedal, and his argument was convincing. But I begged to differ: Surely we became human when we acquired language, a point of view I continue to hold.
Language is what separates our species from all others. It is, as we understand the term, a human invention, a system of communication based upon sounds and symbols — words, spoken and written. The late scientist and writer Lewis Thomas, in his book, “The Fragile Species, ” speculates on the origin of language. People were living in caves, he wrote, and one day two communities came together. There came about a critical mass of children. The children played all day long, and at the end of that day we had language.
It seems incredible that a child should take possession of language at the age of 2 or 3, and yet it happens in the normal course of events. It happens, I suspect, because children love to play with words, and they are not afraid of them. Only in time do they come to know the spectrum of power in words, that they can wound as well as elate, promote war as well as peace, express hate as well as love.
In my tenure as a professor of English and American literature, it has been my good fortune to teach courses in Native American oral tradition. There is a formula in that tradition that goes: “In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken. ”
It may be that the essential power of language is realized by word-of-mouth expression. The oral tradition is inestimably older than writing, and it requires that we take words more seriously. One must not waste words. He must speak responsibly, he must listen carefully, and he must remember what is said.
A Navajo formula to make an enemy peaceful advises to “put your feet down with pollen.”CreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times
There is a Navajo formula to make an enemy peaceful. It goes:
Put your feet down with pollen.
Put your hands down with pollen.
Put your head down with pollen.
Then your feet are pollen;
Your hands are pollen;
Your body is pollen;
Your mind is pollen;
Your voice is pollen.
The trail is beautiful.
Be still.
Now that is power.
The Sacred Spell of Words
Power is language.
By N. Scott Momaday
Mr. Momaday is an author, poet and playwright.
May 15, 2019
Emily Spear, who is Kiowa and Cheyenne, at a Kiowa Pow Wow in Oklahoma.CreditCreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times
This is the first essay in The Big Ideas, a special section of The Times’s philosophy series, The Stone, in which more than a dozen notable thinkers and writers — including Elena Ferrante, Cornel West, Yuval Harari, Gen. Wesley Clark and others — answer the question, “What is power?”
The term “power” is everywhere in our world. Thinking of it, the phrase “word inflation” comes to mind. Much of what we encounter in print, on television and in advertising centers on the concept of power.
But what is that concept? What is power? The truth is that the word bears an impossible burden of interpretation. Definitions are myriad; the dictionary lists an unusual number of meanings. Surely power is what it is — that which enables us to influence, if not indeed determine, the course of our lives.
And it is a word.
Words are powerful. As a writer, my experience tells me that nothing is more powerful. Language, after all, is made of words.
Words are conceptual symbols; they have denotative and connotative properties. The word “power” denotes force, physical strength, resistance. But it connotes something more subtle: persuasion, suggestion, inspiration, security.
Carnegie, Okla., home of the Kiowa tribe.CreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times
Consider the words of Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”:
Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.
We might be hard pressed to find words more charged with power to incite, to inflame, to affect violence and destruction. But there are, of course, other expressions of power in words.
They can be especially personal. They can touch our sensibilities in different and individual ways, perhaps because they have different associations for us. The word “Holocaust” frightens me because survivors of the Nazi death camps have told me of their suffering. Notwithstanding, the word is intrinsically powerful and disturbing.
The word “child” delights me; the word “love” confounds me; the word “God” mystifies me. I have lived my life under the spell of words; they have empowered my mind.
Words are sacred. I believe they are more sacred to children than they are to most of us. When I was first able to make my way in language, my Native American father, a member of the Kiowa tribe, told me stories from the Kiowa oral tradition. They transported me. They fascinated and thrilled me. They nourished my imagination. They nourished my soul. Indeed, nothing has meant more to me in fashioning my view of the world. I came to understand that story is the engine of language, and that words are the marrow of language.
Language is a system of communication based upon sounds and symbols.CreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times
Several years ago I was on a stage with the Kenyan paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey in Chicago. We were speaking on the subject of origins, specifically the origin of humans. Mr. Leakey argued that we became human when we became bipedal, and his argument was convincing. But I begged to differ: Surely we became human when we acquired language, a point of view I continue to hold.
Language is what separates our species from all others. It is, as we understand the term, a human invention, a system of communication based upon sounds and symbols — words, spoken and written. The late scientist and writer Lewis Thomas, in his book, “The Fragile Species, ” speculates on the origin of language. People were living in caves, he wrote, and one day two communities came together. There came about a critical mass of children. The children played all day long, and at the end of that day we had language.
It seems incredible that a child should take possession of language at the age of 2 or 3, and yet it happens in the normal course of events. It happens, I suspect, because children love to play with words, and they are not afraid of them. Only in time do they come to know the spectrum of power in words, that they can wound as well as elate, promote war as well as peace, express hate as well as love.
In my tenure as a professor of English and American literature, it has been my good fortune to teach courses in Native American oral tradition. There is a formula in that tradition that goes: “In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken. ”
It may be that the essential power of language is realized by word-of-mouth expression. The oral tradition is inestimably older than writing, and it requires that we take words more seriously. One must not waste words. He must speak responsibly, he must listen carefully, and he must remember what is said.
A Navajo formula to make an enemy peaceful advises to “put your feet down with pollen.”CreditMaddie McGarvey for The New York Times
There is a Navajo formula to make an enemy peaceful. It goes:
Put your feet down with pollen.
Put your hands down with pollen.
Put your head down with pollen.
Then your feet are pollen;
Your hands are pollen;
Your body is pollen;
Your mind is pollen;
Your voice is pollen.
The trail is beautiful.
Be still.
Now that is power.
N. Scott Momaday is an author, poet and playwright. He is the 2019 recipient of the Ken Burns American Heritage Prize. His novel, “House Made of Dawn,” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969.
On Love & Hate - Gibran -
On Love & Hate
One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.
*
A woman said unto a man, “I love you.” And the man said, “It is in my heart to be worthy of your love.”
Ant he woman said, “You love me not?”
And the man only gazed upon her and said nothing.
Then the woman cried aloud, “I hate you.”
And the man said, “Then it is also in my heart to be worthy of your hate.”
*
I use hate as a weapon to defend myself; had I been strong, I would never have needed that kind of a weapon.
**
Wednesday, May 15, 2019
On Bees & The Beauty of the Fields @ Home ... - Gibran -
 |
| A Bee, This Morning in my Hometown Fields .... |
And now you ask in your heart, “How
shall we distinguish that which is good in
pleasure from that which is not good?”
Go to your fields and your gardens, and
you shall learn that it is the pleasure of
the bee to gather honey of the flower,
But it is also the pleasure of the flower
to yield its honey to the bee.
For to the bee a flower is a fountain of
life,
And to the flower a bee is a messenger of
love,
And to both, bee and flower, the giving
and the receiving of pleasure is a need and
an ecstasy.
- Gibran -
Out of my Deeper Heart - Gibran -
Out of my Deeper Heart
Out of my deeper heart a bird rose and flew skywards.
Higher and higher did it rise, yet larger and larger did it grow.
At first it was but like a swallow, then a lark, then an eagle, then as vast as a spring cloud, and then it filled the starry heavens.
Out of my heart a bird flew skywards. And it waxed larger as it flew. Yet it left not my heart.
O my faith, my untamed knowledge, how shall I fly to your height and see with you man's larger self pencilled upon the sky?
How shall I turn this sea within me into mist, and move with you in space immeasurable?
How can a prisoner within the temple behold its golden domes?
How shall the heart of a fruit be stretched to envelop the fruit also?
O my faith, I am in chains behind these bars of silver and ebony, and I cannot fly with you.
Yet out of my heart you rise skyward, and it is my heart that holds you, and I shall be content.
- --oOo-- -
Beyond My Solitude - Gibran -
Beyond My Solitude
Beyond my solitude is another solitude, and to him who dwells therein my aloneness is a crowded market-place and my silence a confusion of sounds.
Too young am I and too restless to seek that above-solitude. The voices of yonder valley still hold my ears and its shadows bar my way and I cannot go.
Beyond these hills is a grove of enchantment and to him who dwells therein my peace is but a whirlwind and my enchantment an illusion.
Too young am I and too riotous to seek that sacred grove. The taste of blood is clinging in my mouth, and the bow and the arrows of my fathers yet linger in my hand and I cannot go.
Beyond this burdened self lives my freer self; and to him my dreams are a battle fought in twilight and my desires the rattling of bones.
Too young am I and too outraged to be my freer self.
And how shall I become my freer self unless I slay my burdened selves, or unless all men become free?
How shall the eagle in me soar against the sun until my fledglings leave the nest which I with my own beak have built for them?
- --oOo-- -
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