Mouseworld -- Three
Yesterday I tried to say something brilliant about the causes of war ... and failed. Why did I fail? Because I committed one of the sneakiest of logical errors. I was explaining "war" as if all wars were the same, and because I traced the causes of war to non-specific concepts, specifically to the words "emotion" and "reason," as if all people were driven by the same mixture of those two abstractions. True, I did give an example that got down to cases, but in wrapping up my argument, by explaining the decision to go to war in Iraq as a failure to think, I never quite got inside the heads of the people who actually did the failing. I made only a half-vast attempt -- Newtonian inertia -- to explain the processes, when it was probably obvious to most of you (and certainly was to a young student) that there's more going on in our heads than can be explained by the laws of mechanics.
There is, though, a sense in which all wars are the same. They all are caused by human action. If that were not so, we could study war the way we study the weather, with equally marginal results. We may learn everything there is to know about typhoons and tornadoes without ever being able to do anything to prevent them. They are not caused by human action, so no amount of human action can change them. Leaning on the fact that all things that are caused by human action can be changed, I could say -- and did -- that war is certainly not inevitable. But that statement, true as it might be, says nothing about the processes of human thought which are, after all, the "intrapersonal structures" that lead us to do everything we do, both the stupid things and the wise things.
I briefly alluded yesterday to the dual aspects of human thought. Here's a bit more detail.
There exists for every idea, whether emotional or reasoned, a concomitant physical structure. If I think to run like hell when I see a hungry lion, the idea to run is accompanied by a bevy of neuronal and hormonal actions, all of which can (potentially) be explained by neurological and chemical analysis. Everything I do to escape the threat -- my running, my screaming for help, everything I might be observed to do -- can be understood by an analysis of the physical causes involved. But my desire to survive what I imagine to be a dangerous threat cannot be explained by any sort of physical analysis. My feelings of fear or of desperation certainly have counterparts in my physical structure, but the experiences themselves, the feelings, cannot be understood by an examination of my physical processes. Hence, Spinoza's two related claims, one, that the "the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things," and two, that the causes of things cannot be explained by reference to ideas, nor the causes of ideas by reference to things. Our ideas make sense only in the context of other ideas. The actions of the brain make sense only in relation to other physical causes.
We are physical beings, but our actions in the world are mediated by meaning. Said another way, we can explain every observed thing that happens by looking at the laws of physics and chemistry, but to understand human action we have to examine the world of meanings. Said still another way, human motivation is determined by what humans bring to the table. We do not act simply because we are physically compelled to act. We act because we, in our dual capacity as thinking bodies, determine ourselves to act. That is, we choose to do this or that, something or nothing, as physical beings who are motivated by meaning.
We are, thus, simultaneously engulfed by two disparate but related streams of causation. Those streams limit our ability to comprehend ourselves as meaning makers. Our physical selves set limits on our mental selves, and our mental selves are restricted by the paradoxes that crop up in our making of meaning. We are capable in our physical selves to do whatever is not denied by the laws of physics and chemistry, but those laws leave us with a finite set of possibilities. We are capable in our mental selves of thinking anything for which we can make up a word or an image or a feeling, but some of our words contradict themselves, some of our images cannot be translated into real physical things, and some of our feelings would have us destroy ourselves. We are, in a word, finitely limited beings. We cannot bootstrap ourselves out of our selves.
Philosophers of the materialist persuasion, focused on the physicality of the universe and of ourselves, have come to the conclusion that we are absolutely determined, that is, that human freedom is an illusion. Philosophers of a radical idealist bent have convinced themselves (here I use Schopenhauer's words) that "the world is my idea," or (Nietzsche) "all is determined by a will to power," or (Hegel) "men are driven by a quest for recognition." As true as any of these ideas may seem, they all derive their "truth" by attending to one or the other of the dual aspects of human nature. The reason none of them completely satisfies traces to the very point at which their proponents began to think. Starting with the physical world as the all-in-all of existence, the materialist finally finds it impossible to explain his own thoughts. Beginning with the mind (and disregarding the physical brain) the idealist reaches a point at which nothing is actually real as anything other than an idea.
The dual aspect way of thinking about the world doesn't necessarily satisfy us either. We're still stuck with what we have come to call "the human condition." But this particular brand of stuck-ness has going for it that it is not forced to deny reality. The mind and the body are both real. We can at least understand why the human condition is such a messy affair. Our minds and bodies limit each other. Because the dual aspect theory seems to be describing things as they actually are, it provides us a way to intellectualize (i.e., to know) the nature of our limits. Out of that knowing we can begin to act with more power (i.e., more freedom) than we would were we restricted to one or the other of the aspects of our being. We can begin to run our lives on the basis of what my other favorite philosopher (Bernard Lonergan) calls "transcendent being." Because we know the struggling nature of the processes going on in our selves, we can act as if we were standing outside our selves. We can look at our "reasons" as proposals for action, rather than as settled affairs. We can assess our motives as "questions to be answered." We can see ourselves as whole beings -- as minds and bodies -- rather than as robotic "things" driven by impulses of one or the other.
As transcendent beings we will, of course, not have been satisfied with a mere awareness of the data, or the "facts." (That's what motivates dumb animals. They see, they react.) Nor will we be satisfied with the first sense we make of the data. (That's what fools do. They believe everything they think.) We will instead have asked of our selves if in studying our ideas we have considered all possible interpretations of the data, and we will have continued the process until we have run out of questions to ask ourselves. Then, and only then, can we act responsibly, since that's what being responsible means. It means to know why we are doing what we're doing. It means to be transcendentally honest with ourselves and others about our actions in the world. We can do that because we will have no reason to be ashamed of what we're doing, since we have performed at the highest level of which a human being is capable.
Will we always succeed? No. Why not? because we are not God. We do not know all that we can know, we know only what we do know. But because we have acted responsibly, because from our transcendent position we have treated our ideas as if they were actually someone else's, we can with virtual certainty say we have done all that was humanly possible.
So there are now at least two ways to fail. We can fail because we have not acted transcendentally, or we can fail because we did and were incapable of doing better than what we did.
Mostly, we fail for the first reason. We have acted impulsively. We've seen the data, and like any animal have acted without thinking. We have made sense of the data, and acted without asking if that sense can stand up to the scrutiny of responsible inquiry. We have asked questions, but have stopped short of asking questions we know we should ask. We have acted as self-limiting beings, ending our quest for true responsibility at what may well be a comfortable place. We have not acted as powerfully or as freely as we might have. We have acted as prisoners of one or the other of the ways we are.
This way of understanding ourselves does not assure that we will act responsibly. We must still act, and knowing is not acting. But because we now can claim to understand what it means to act responsibly, we are better able to understand why the world is such a messy place. We can confess that we have not acted as responsible beings, and thereby put to rest any concern for why it is that bad things happen to nice people, and worse things to a world that could be better. We can take blame for the way it is, and perhaps out of a sense of conviction, begin to take responsibility.
There is, though, a sense in which all wars are the same. They all are caused by human action. If that were not so, we could study war the way we study the weather, with equally marginal results. We may learn everything there is to know about typhoons and tornadoes without ever being able to do anything to prevent them. They are not caused by human action, so no amount of human action can change them. Leaning on the fact that all things that are caused by human action can be changed, I could say -- and did -- that war is certainly not inevitable. But that statement, true as it might be, says nothing about the processes of human thought which are, after all, the "intrapersonal structures" that lead us to do everything we do, both the stupid things and the wise things.
I briefly alluded yesterday to the dual aspects of human thought. Here's a bit more detail.
There exists for every idea, whether emotional or reasoned, a concomitant physical structure. If I think to run like hell when I see a hungry lion, the idea to run is accompanied by a bevy of neuronal and hormonal actions, all of which can (potentially) be explained by neurological and chemical analysis. Everything I do to escape the threat -- my running, my screaming for help, everything I might be observed to do -- can be understood by an analysis of the physical causes involved. But my desire to survive what I imagine to be a dangerous threat cannot be explained by any sort of physical analysis. My feelings of fear or of desperation certainly have counterparts in my physical structure, but the experiences themselves, the feelings, cannot be understood by an examination of my physical processes. Hence, Spinoza's two related claims, one, that the "the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things," and two, that the causes of things cannot be explained by reference to ideas, nor the causes of ideas by reference to things. Our ideas make sense only in the context of other ideas. The actions of the brain make sense only in relation to other physical causes.
We are physical beings, but our actions in the world are mediated by meaning. Said another way, we can explain every observed thing that happens by looking at the laws of physics and chemistry, but to understand human action we have to examine the world of meanings. Said still another way, human motivation is determined by what humans bring to the table. We do not act simply because we are physically compelled to act. We act because we, in our dual capacity as thinking bodies, determine ourselves to act. That is, we choose to do this or that, something or nothing, as physical beings who are motivated by meaning.
We are, thus, simultaneously engulfed by two disparate but related streams of causation. Those streams limit our ability to comprehend ourselves as meaning makers. Our physical selves set limits on our mental selves, and our mental selves are restricted by the paradoxes that crop up in our making of meaning. We are capable in our physical selves to do whatever is not denied by the laws of physics and chemistry, but those laws leave us with a finite set of possibilities. We are capable in our mental selves of thinking anything for which we can make up a word or an image or a feeling, but some of our words contradict themselves, some of our images cannot be translated into real physical things, and some of our feelings would have us destroy ourselves. We are, in a word, finitely limited beings. We cannot bootstrap ourselves out of our selves.
Philosophers of the materialist persuasion, focused on the physicality of the universe and of ourselves, have come to the conclusion that we are absolutely determined, that is, that human freedom is an illusion. Philosophers of a radical idealist bent have convinced themselves (here I use Schopenhauer's words) that "the world is my idea," or (Nietzsche) "all is determined by a will to power," or (Hegel) "men are driven by a quest for recognition." As true as any of these ideas may seem, they all derive their "truth" by attending to one or the other of the dual aspects of human nature. The reason none of them completely satisfies traces to the very point at which their proponents began to think. Starting with the physical world as the all-in-all of existence, the materialist finally finds it impossible to explain his own thoughts. Beginning with the mind (and disregarding the physical brain) the idealist reaches a point at which nothing is actually real as anything other than an idea.
The dual aspect way of thinking about the world doesn't necessarily satisfy us either. We're still stuck with what we have come to call "the human condition." But this particular brand of stuck-ness has going for it that it is not forced to deny reality. The mind and the body are both real. We can at least understand why the human condition is such a messy affair. Our minds and bodies limit each other. Because the dual aspect theory seems to be describing things as they actually are, it provides us a way to intellectualize (i.e., to know) the nature of our limits. Out of that knowing we can begin to act with more power (i.e., more freedom) than we would were we restricted to one or the other of the aspects of our being. We can begin to run our lives on the basis of what my other favorite philosopher (Bernard Lonergan) calls "transcendent being." Because we know the struggling nature of the processes going on in our selves, we can act as if we were standing outside our selves. We can look at our "reasons" as proposals for action, rather than as settled affairs. We can assess our motives as "questions to be answered." We can see ourselves as whole beings -- as minds and bodies -- rather than as robotic "things" driven by impulses of one or the other.
As transcendent beings we will, of course, not have been satisfied with a mere awareness of the data, or the "facts." (That's what motivates dumb animals. They see, they react.) Nor will we be satisfied with the first sense we make of the data. (That's what fools do. They believe everything they think.) We will instead have asked of our selves if in studying our ideas we have considered all possible interpretations of the data, and we will have continued the process until we have run out of questions to ask ourselves. Then, and only then, can we act responsibly, since that's what being responsible means. It means to know why we are doing what we're doing. It means to be transcendentally honest with ourselves and others about our actions in the world. We can do that because we will have no reason to be ashamed of what we're doing, since we have performed at the highest level of which a human being is capable.
Will we always succeed? No. Why not? because we are not God. We do not know all that we can know, we know only what we do know. But because we have acted responsibly, because from our transcendent position we have treated our ideas as if they were actually someone else's, we can with virtual certainty say we have done all that was humanly possible.
So there are now at least two ways to fail. We can fail because we have not acted transcendentally, or we can fail because we did and were incapable of doing better than what we did.
Mostly, we fail for the first reason. We have acted impulsively. We've seen the data, and like any animal have acted without thinking. We have made sense of the data, and acted without asking if that sense can stand up to the scrutiny of responsible inquiry. We have asked questions, but have stopped short of asking questions we know we should ask. We have acted as self-limiting beings, ending our quest for true responsibility at what may well be a comfortable place. We have not acted as powerfully or as freely as we might have. We have acted as prisoners of one or the other of the ways we are.
This way of understanding ourselves does not assure that we will act responsibly. We must still act, and knowing is not acting. But because we now can claim to understand what it means to act responsibly, we are better able to understand why the world is such a messy place. We can confess that we have not acted as responsible beings, and thereby put to rest any concern for why it is that bad things happen to nice people, and worse things to a world that could be better. We can take blame for the way it is, and perhaps out of a sense of conviction, begin to take responsibility.
posted by Benedict S. at 11:30 AM
1 Comments:
But we all try to control our emotions all the time. That too is part of being human. War is caused by elites acting in what they take to be their own interests, institutional violence promulgated by ruling groups for
personal gain. -- The Nation magazine, May 15, 2000, p20
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