The first useful thing to point out about frames (conceptualisations, constructions) is that they aren't themselves in the truth-speaking game. They have to do with what's prior to this: with ways of seeing/thinking/talking/conceptualising. (This is part of the complaint against the realist: the realist is oblivious to these prior questions, and their only critical apparatus is geared up to answering questions about the truth or falsity of judgments.) Now, once you have a frame in place, then you can ask whether some or other (frame-deploying) judgement is true. But the frame is not itself a judgement; it is not itself truth-assayable. Our social-scientific critic has it then that we can't then meaningfully ask, at least in any straightforward way, 'does mental illness as such actually exist?' For talk of 'mental illness' is, they'll say, a window through which one looks, rather than something which may or may not be being accurately seen through such a window. Even so, there are, they note, different, non-existence-related, kinds of critical question we can ask about framings. For example, we might ask whether a particular way of framing matters is or isn't really useful for us, or whether it hasn't perhaps become unhelpfully hegemonic. Or, noticing that frames give us the basic categories in terms of which judgements are made, we might ask whose interests are served by the widespread deployment of such and such a way of talking, seeing or thinking.
What's not often talked about by those who focus on framings is the limit, scope, remit, of the frame metaphor. It's this that I want to focus on here. To pre-empt: my thought is that whilst ignoring frames is naïve, so is taking "frame" to be a master concept for the interrogation of psychiatric judgement.
To start us along our path, consider first what might look like a rather different, metaphysical, matter. This has to do with what's wrong with that kind of transcendental idealism which has it that the mind always supplies the form of our judgement when it brings its concepts to bear on experience, whilst extra-mental reality supplies, through reality's impingements on us, our judgement's content. Take this all the way to a natural conclusion and we arrive at a peculiar view of the unconceptualised world as an intrinsically formless 'noumenal dough' which only has any order within it because we've been applying our cookie-cutter concepts to it. ... The problem now is that if the unconceptualised world really is such an intrinsically amorphous dough, why should there ever be any reason to apply one concept to one experience, another to another? Without structural constraints coming from, rather than imposed on, the experiences, how is discriminating judgement even possible? ... But note that talk of this or that 'structural constraint' shall itself be empty if it doesn't itself deploy more particular concepts. The point generalises: whenever a pundit of the idea of unconceptualised experience talks about our bringing our concepts to bear on any particular experience, which experience do they have in mind? If they can't individuate it without deploying a concept, then what are they even talking about? But how could they pick it out without a concept? (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §261: "So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound. -- But such a sound is an expression only as it occurs in a particular language-game, which should now be described.")
One way past this problem is to draw a distinction between conceptualisation and framing. Sure, all experience must be conceptualised, but this doesn't mean it all requires framing. Psychiatry's social-scientific critics, for example, typically suggest we should apprehend their object using concepts such as "suffering", "problems in living", "experience", "belief". Thus before we have 'symptoms' we already have (say) 'hallucinations'; before we have 'psychosis' or 'delusions' we already have 'beliefs' and 'experiences'; before we have 'neuroses' we already have 'anxiety', etc. These, then, are the pre-framed but even so always-already conceptualised experiences which are only elevated to the status of illness and illness symptoms when they're viewed through an optional psychiatric lens which frames them a certain way. The idea of non-conceptualised experience may indeed take us down impossibly dark philosophical alleyways, but the idea of non-framed experience needn't.
That, perhaps, is all well and good. But how shall we distinguish between such concepts as are frames and such as are more basic and are required by anyone before we can so much as talk about those experiences which are psychiatry's concern? One way to do this - and I can't think of any other! - is to say that if that over which the psychiatric frame precisely ranges can be picked out without using the frame concept, then it, the frame concept, can happily be seen as an optional extra. Thus we might ask, of the 'suffering' concept itself: is there a way to pick out bona fide experiences of suffering other than through that very concept ('suffering')? If not then we shall count 'suffering' as basic: as a concept which is not itself a frame.
The validity then of talk of framings, when it comes to psychiatry, rests, I suggest, in the viability of reductive analyses of psychiatry's diagnostic concepts. Is it really possible to decompose depression, or obsessive compulsive disorder, or the schizophrenias, or specific phobias, into constituent behaviours and experiences the appreciation of which need involve no awareness of them as 'symptoms of mental illness'? Is the kind of suffering met with in the mental illnesses in principle no different than the kinds of suffering met with elsewhere? Do general concepts like 'problems in living' and 'suffering' really get us into anywhere near-enough specific a terrain as we encounter with 'mental illness'? Do we really not need to tacitly borrow a specifically psychiatric vision in order to hone in on just those problems in living, just those instances of suffering, as are met with in the mental illnesses? Social scientists (including psychologists) sometimes talk as if all of this is just obviously the case. And those who take too conceptually seriously the ICD's or the DSM's putative operationalisations do something similar. My own thought is that all of that is rather naive. Mental illness concepts, as I see them, involve us in the apprehension of a nexus of formally inter-penetrating (hence irreducible to any raw ingredients) ongoing suffering, irrationality, and automatic-yet-motivated state-maintaining avoidance of suffering.
Whether I'm right in that analysis of mental illness is of course a topic for another day. What I hope to have shown here, though, is something far more modest: that the idea of mental illness talk as offering an optional framing is not something which can be respectably engaged in unless one's prepared to admit certain constraints on what shall count as frames and to spell out how they differ from such concepts as are not optional organisations of experience. What certainly won't do is simply saying something like 'but in this other culture they don't use mental illness concepts when discussing their travails.' Why won't it do? Because it doesn't by itself help us see whether they are simply blind to the character of certain of their own experiences, or whether instead they have adopted one set of metaphors or idioms or conceptualisations or what-have-yous over another. (After all, perhaps a psychiatric sensibility allows us to see that which is otherwise invisible?) ... That the presumption of a radical cultural relativism goes along with the presumption of the validity of 'framing' talk should surprise nobody. What the former can hardly do, however, is vouchsafe for us the latter.
]]>My point today is just that Luepnitz's, and perhaps even Freud's, is a redemptive (mis)reading of Schopenhauer's fable. But wait, I get ahead of myself! What's the story? Freud references it in his book on Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and it belongs to 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's Parerga and Paralipomena. (By the way, those weird words just mean something like 'random addenda to my main work'. Odd how this book of his was the one to revive his intellectual fortunes!) First, though, the tale in Luepnitz's own words:
A troop of porcupines is milling about on a cold winter’s day. In order to keep from freezing, the animals move closer together. Just as they are close enough to huddle, however, they start to poke each other with their quills. In order to stop the pain, they spread out, lose the advantage of commingling, and again begin to shiver. This sends them back in search of each other, and the cycle repeats as they struggle to find a comfortable distance between entanglement and freezing.
Note that in Luepnitz's hands we find none of Freud's somewhat unholy pessimism about the possibility of love not based in idealisation and narcissism, nor about a putative death drive, and so on. We instead find a beautiful humanistic hope-bringing realism about human life, one that holds out for the possibility both of developmental repair and of albeit fragile loving relationship in the midst of life's conflicts. We don't get to the redemptive neighbour love that René Girard rescues for us - where the withdrawal of projection, the work of conscience, and the end of the violence of scapegoating all come together in the radical proclamation of the divine innocence of a sacrifice to end all sacrifices. We don't get, that is, to the Christian solution to the group-based splitting and projection of which Freud is writing. Even so, what we find in Luepnitz's tragic oscillation around a 'comfortable distance' is something which offers a valuable ethic for psychotherapeutic practice.
Turn to the original Schopenhauer, though, and we meet with something really rather different - not only more pessimistic than Luepnitz, but also more dismal than Freud:
One cold winter's day, a number of porcupines huddled together quite closely in order through their mutual warmth to prevent themselves from being frozen. But they soon felt the effect of their quills on one another, which made them again move apart. Now when the need for warmth once more brought them together, the drawback of the quills was repeated so that they were tossed between two evils, until they had discovered the proper distance from which they could best tolerate one another. Thus the need for society which springs from the emptiness and monotony of men's lives, drives them together; but their many unpleasant and repulsive qualities and insufferable drawbacks once more drive them apart. The mean distance which they finally discover, and which enables them to endure being together, is politeness and good manners. … By virtue thereof, it is true that the need for mutual warmth will be only imperfectly satisfied, but on the other hand, the prick of the quills will not be felt. Yet whoever has a great deal of internal warmth of his own will prefer to keep away from society in order to avoid giving or receiving trouble or annoyance.
Schopenhauer, it seems to me, likely had - poor chap - what today we'd call a personality disorder. He was sent away to live with a relative from the age of 9-11. His father's drowning (when Arthur was 17) was probably a suicide; his mental health had been increasingly poor. Arthur's relationship with his mother was famously bad, later on, and when he reached 30 they broke off all contact.
My Dear Son, I have always told you it is difficult to live with you. The more I get to know you, the more I feel this difficulty increase. I will not hide it from you: as long as you are what you are, I would rather bring any sacrifice than consent to be near you.Why so? Because it comes intuitively to me to think that I need to exist in order for there to be situations that for me are sensibly considered better or worse. If there is no me, then there's no situation or predicament or state of affairs to be talked of. This is akin to Kant's claim, right-headed in my view, that 'existence is not a predicate'. (We properly predicate being red or shiny of a tomato; existence however is not a property, but the being - the sine qua non of any actual predication - of the tomato. (And yeh I know you can also play the utterly derivative/parasitic language game of predicating properties of imaginary tomatoes.))
The author - Christian Piller - invites us, in his very nicely written paper, to see the matter of the intelligibility of it being better to be alive than not along the lines of it being intelligible that sometimes it's better that we did the thing we did than the thing we didn't. We did wait to cross the road; we didn't step out in front of the bus. Piller, if I'm gamely grokking his gist, says: look, sure, the situation in which you stepped out in front of the bus didn't obtain. Even so, despite it not even obtaining, we can still properly say that it's better that you didn't do that! This is manifestly intelligible! (Agreed.) And so why can't we say the same of human life? I am not, Piller says, saying that non-existence is, but that it would have been, worse for me. Sure, he urges, if you didn't exist then your non-existence couldn't be said to be worse for you. Even so, he says, given that you do exist, from this standpoint, from the 'standpoint of your existence' if you like, your non-existence would indeed be worse - and worse for you! Oh, he also says that whether a life is 'worth having' can be understood in terms of what may or may not obtain within it: a life which involves friendship and health is better and hence, he says, more worth having than one which, ceteris paribus, doesn't. This, he thinks, is enough to get off the ground the idea of a good life being better than no life.
Against all of this I've a few gripes of different sorts:
The first is logical. I don't see how we're to gain reassurance about the dubious intelligibility of it being better to exist than otherwise from the manifest intelligibility of it being better to (actually) cross the road than to (subjunctively, as it were) be run over. It's rather the contrast between these situations that stands out for me. After all, either of the latter options requires my existence, whereas that's what's at stake in the former.
Second, I just don't grasp what's being said with the idea that, from the standpoint of an actually existing chap, any more from the non-existent standpoint of a non-existent chap, it's better for me to exist than to not. I mean, sure, if you ask me 'well Richard, would you rather carry on living or instead be painlessly snuffed out?' I'd go for the former. But the interesting question to my mind is what this amounts to. Turning it into one claim about preferences amongst others; assuming it enjoys something like the same logic: this in my opinion is unpersuasive. For what I'd suggest to be rather more natural would not be that we gain our reflective sense of what we mean by our desire to hang onto our lives, or to say 'yes' to life, or 'I value my life, I don't want to die!' from a more general notion of preferring one thing to another ... but that, instead, we glean our reflective sense of what it so much as means to say 'it's better to be alive than otherwise' from a close examination of those former affirmative expressions.
At this point I should own that there's another section of Piller's paper which I've not yet covered. So Piller in fact largely accepts that, for many ordinary comparative judgements (it's better to be x than y), you've kinda gotta exist to even be in the game. But he says there are other comparisons which we can get 'by entailment from non-comparative judgements'. Thus 'if one thing is F and another is not F, then the first thing is, by entailment, more F than the second.' He gives us the example of his sister who wants something blue for her Christmas present. In the shop there are only two remaining items: a blue jumper and an audio file. The latter is not something which enjoys colour, so one might think there's no contest in the sense of: 'no meaningful way of raising the question' rather than 'no way to justify doing other than buying the jumper'. But no, Piller says that 'lack of a comparison notwithstanding, the choice seems clear: I ought to buy the blue jumper. When something blue was available it will not do as a reason for buying the audio file to claim that there was not anything bluer than it.' I mean, sure, that's not a good reason! But so what? Piller 's idea is that for something to be worth buying here, it's gotta first be so much as in the game of being blue, and if the choice is between something blue and something not even blue we can say that whatever the former is it's better than the latter because it's at least in the running. Against this I'd simply say that I don't see that this notion of 'better' (through 'entailment from non-comparative judgements') meets any general application in our lives. Sure, sometimes we can imagine his sister saying 'Well, at least he listened when I said I wanted a blue thing!' when he buys her a hideous blue jumper. At other times we might imagine her, despite her earlier bonkers request for a blue item, baulking at his gift of a blue-painted turd over a non-coloured £1000 e-gift voucher. And I certainly don't see that it - this notion of 'better' that springs from a consideration of non-comparative judgements - meets an application in the case of 'it's better to be alive than otherwise'. The issue here is one that bedevils/vitiates the work of many analytical metaphysicians: of assuming without argument that concepts are to be grasped in the abstract and then merely applied in particular cases appeal to which will be by way of exemplification, rather than that we do well to gain a reflective sense of what it so much as means to say this or that by looking first at what we're doing with our words, to what ends, in particular contexts.
Third, I want to register that the topic in question is kinda important. Does someone feel their life is worth living - or not? Are they someone on whose lips 'it's better to be alive!' ring true or false? Adjacent to the 'analytical' concerns of Piller's paper are matters of deep existential import which get barely a look-in. To make a truly wisdom-loving examination of that which is of interest to Piller would surely require that we examine what 'But I want to live!' means on the lips of the recently diagnosed oncology patient. What are these words doing in her life? What's their expressive force; what their significance? So too if we think on prayers of gratitude for one's existence - and I mean, not just for all that's good in it, but for the simple fact of it. That I as it were made it through when many miscarried or aborted foetuses didn't: this might mean something to someone; its voicing may be part of a whole attitude to life, a whole ethic of (say) humility. An ethic that venerates life in a particular way. Here we're far away from the (to my mind) dubious intelligibility of 'Thank you God that you've given me a chance to be alive as opposed to never being born' which utterance is putatively intelligible simply in terms of the logic of certain kinds of comparisons we allegedly make in other contexts. (Think by the way on how morally ugly it would be to pray in supposed thanksgiving that you are one of the lucky as opposed to unlucky ones!)
Finally, I think that we'd do well to look at what the motivational pay-off and ethical cost of indulging the nonsense of 'I rather prefer being alive to not existing'. I suggest - this might be surprising at first but hear me out - that we might here not be a million miles away from why a certain form of the fear of death takes us over. Thus if we've first of all defensively abstracted ourselves from the world, to make ourselves invulnerable, and make our embodiment a contingent matter rather than an existentiale, then the idea of dying will start to seem not so much like the horizon of life but instead like something that happens within it. And that is of course both a comforting thought (it doesn't really happen to me) and a terrifying thought (it does however happen to me). Might something analogous be going on for (e.g.) Piller? He - recall - finds it both intelligible and often true to say that for the existing person, if not for the non-existing person, it's better to be alive than not. And I - recall - find my head boggling at this. (My bebogglement boiled down to: whilst it's clear to me that it's better for Geoff to have a hotel on Mayfair than for Margery to have a single house on Old Kent Road, we might yet be more envious than commiseratory of Tim who instead of joining in the Monopoly game had the perspicacity to go for a walk.) My suspicion, in other words, is not only that he who thinks it better to be alive than non-existent is confused, but that the fact that this confusion is obscured, the fact that it seems to the 'better to be alive' pundit to make sense to carry on as he does, may be because he's tacitly invoking a magically still-extant 'me' for whom it would be not so good to be non-existent.
]]>Shaun Gallagher
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The high priests of existential loneliness, as far as I know, are Levinas, Jaspers, Booth, Mijuskovic and Moustakas. Jaspers (The Individual and Solitude p. 189) has it thus:
to be an “I” means to be solitary
Levinas (Time & The Other p. 42) makes similar noises:
It is banal to say that we never exist in the singular. We are surrounded by beings and things with which we maintain relationships. Through sight, touch, sympathy and cooperative work, we are with others. All these relationships are transitive: I touch an object, I see the other. But I am not the other. I am all alone. It is thus the being in me, the fact that I exist, my existing, that constitutes the absolutely intransitive element, something without intentionality or relationship. One can exchange everything between beings except existing. In this sense, to be is to be isolated by existing. Inasmuch as I am, I am a monad. [I offered a critique of this here]
Moustakas (Loneliness, p. ix) ramps it up even further:
ultimately, in every fibre of his being, man is alone - terribly, utterly, alone.
Against these authors we may contrast Heidegger who (Being & Time p. 156) writes:
The Other can be missing only in and for a Being- with. Being-alone is a deficient mode of Being-with...To be fair, Jaspers, whilst not stressing the ontological priority of Mitsein, also ends up not entirely in the existential loneliness camp since for him (Philosophy, vol 2, p. 14), solitude and being-with are equiprimordial:
Solitude and communication; neither one of which is objectively what it
can be existentially. Objectively, communication is merely the relationship of interchangeable subjects who understand each other, and solitude merely the isolation of an atomized individual. Objectively there is either one or the other; existentially, both are in one.
Like I said, against the notion of existential loneliness, Gallagher offers us Heidegger's Mitsein and Trevarthen's primary intersubjectivity. But what's his actual argument? It boils down to this:
you cannot have it both ways, i.e. posit both an a priori transcendental condition of being-with, which specifies a deep interpersonal structure to human existence, and a transcendental existential loneliness that specifies the opposite, and treat these as in some way equiprimordial. It seems a theoretical contradiction... At best one could say, as Heidegger does, that one is derivative (or a deficient mode)...
Well, that seems fair enough to me - but where's the actual argument? Well... we don't get one. What we instead get is a description of primary intersubjectivity - i.e. of the fact that, from birth, we are attuned and responsive to the gestures, movements, expressions, intonations etc. of others. But it's surely not too hard to imagine an existential loneliness pundit saying "Yes of course, I know about all that! But surely that's just empirical psychology! I however am trying to give you existentialia!"
As I see it, in order to effect a satisfactory critique of the existential loneliness pundit one first has to understand why he wants to say what he says. This will help one understand what (he thinks) he's getting at, and give one a chance to say what's wrong with the philosophical or psychological motivation underlying the making of the claim. (Gallagher doesn't do this, and it's what makes his paper somewhat unsatisfactory to me.) Why is it, for example, that people are apt to say "You're born alone and die alone" when, well, I'm pretty sure (how about you?) that my mum was there at my birth, and that one of the utterly contingent tragedies of our recent covid-19 lockdown policies was that many people were forced to die alone rather than surrounded by loved ones? Clearly these aren't the kinds of things that the high priests of ontological solitude are agitated by. Instead, I suspect, they are driven by such concerns as:
i) Although primordial intentionality inexorably relates us to a world including to others, we must always, to be brought into relation with others, thereby also be separated off from them. The underlying (and surely correct) hunch here is that identity is not a relation.
ii) There are decisions that must be faced in life which, if you are to retain your human dignity, must be taken alone. Even if you decide to make a decision with someone else, that first decision - to make the second decision together with someone - must itself be taken alone.
iii) If we think of birth and death as a matter of shifting between different states of being, we might also think of this as rather like moving through a door from one room to another within the house of Being. And that journey - the thought is - can only be undertaken alone.
Against these I'd suggest:
i) It is indeed correct that, as we may put it, relationship individuates. But it isn't very helpful - or: it is unhelpfully hyperbolic - to articulate this individuation in terms of loneliness or solitude. Relational individuation is a condition of possibility of being - full stop; loneliness and solitude, as ordinarily understood, are intelligible only as modes of intrinsically relational being.
ii) We make lots of decisions together without deciding to decide thus. Even getting a divorce can be a joint endeavour! It's true that we may sometimes have to step up and be the locus where the buck of responsibility stops. The hero's journey is in particular one of stepping up fully into a silverbackesque form of self-determination. There might (?) be something especially Western about all that. But whilst we can if we wish go all Caspar David Friedrich and stress this solo aspect of our lives, we might equally well stress the virtues of cooperation, mutuality, joint decision-making, dependency, faith, etc. It's ... not necessary ... to engage in such mood-painting; the profundity of the heroic existential journey shouldn't be mistaken for depth of ontological insight.
iii) We could picture life and death as different states of being, and of transitions between them as journeys. But we could also - and might even do better to - picture death as a state of non-being, and so also be happy to drop the journey metaphor. Now the matter of whether we are or aren't accompanied can devolve back to an ontical rather than ontological matter. Well, it can at the end of life; at the beginning it's kinda analytic, at least until we employ artificial wombs, that your mum's there.
My own (psychological, ad hominemesque) view, for what it's worth, is that existential loneliness pundits were probably rather lonely people who existentialised their personal predicament and foisted it on the rest of us as an existentiale. Well, you can take or leave that! But a psychological matter on which I would like to elaborate - because I think it unfair - is Gallagher's treatment of Fromm-Reichmann.
As Gallagher notes, Fromm-Reichmann doesn't mention existential loneliness. One might think, then, that she's simply no prophet of it. The conclusion appears compelling to me because the deep deep loneliness of which she writes - what I call 'loneliness beyond loneliness' - is seen not as any kind of basic setting of any human life, but instead as the tragic plight of those unfortunate souls who she and (if I recall correctly) her colleague Harry Stack Sullivan called 'the lonely ones'. These inpatients at Chestnut Lodge, note, suffered severe borderline and psychotic illnesses. To this degree they're not to be taken as paradigms of the human condition; they may be 'more simply human than otherwise' but, in their loneliness at least, they're stepping out of a human conversation which many of us happily remain within. But no, Gallagher says that her description of profound loneliness nevertheless 'comes close to how [existential loneliness] is characterised. Specifically, a default incommunicability is part of that description since the experience of existential loneliness is said to involve a non conceptual experience of nothing... An alternative explanation, however, is that silence about loneliness may be due to cultural/normative stigma'. To make this point vivid, Gallagher cites the experience of two depressed individuals who talked of how they experienced stigma and social anxiety regarding talking to others especially about their loneliness.In my view, Gallagher has here simply missed the clinical music. It's not that Fromm-Reichmann is writing about 'clinical loneliness' and that 'clinical loneliness' is whatever loneliness is experienced by whosoever becomes a clinician's patient or by whoever is given a clinical diagnosis. Nor, I suspect, did the schizophrenic patients she worked with suffer either from a difficulty of ordinary loneliness except ramped up to a higher degree or from stigma. No, these poor souls instead had so fallen into their loneliness that it had become for them a total condition, rather than a feeling that could be isolated or commented on. They have as it were become icons of loneliness; they've become loneliness itself. It cannot be thought about or consciously felt by them because it's not a trickle of lonely water running through them; instead the crystalline structure of lonely ice has frozen over their entire form. Just as a delusional patient cannot have insight into their delusion unless they begin to relinquish it, so too can a sufferer from loneliness-beyond-loneliness only begin to talk of loneliness when their capacity to think and feel, so disabled by their struggles to tolerate intersubjectivity whilst remaining self-same, have come back online. This is, psychologically speaking, a far deeper concern than that of which Gallagher writes. Even so it's hardly so deep as to characterise Dasein itself! In fact, I'd say, and against the romantic proclamations of psychotic seers, psychotic life is one of Dasein's paradigmatic deficient modes.
]]>the Ville du Havre |
What I want now to note is how familiarity with a culture and a faith can breed blindness to its human significance. The clear message of Spafford's hymn is one of taking up an attitude toward one's soul which connotes its inner movements as in themselves well. Whether he's feeling deep peace or unspeakable sorrow: all is well with my soul. The soul is working as it should. The second arrow can be left in the sheath.
But in themselves? Is there a fact of the matter, independent of our relationship with the device itself, a fact about the inner workings of a computer, that make it apt to say of it that it is right now computing this rather than another result?
It's not an idea I'd considered before reading Awais Aftab's latest response to our ongoing blog conversation. This is the part of his text that caught my eye:
Bennett and Hacker said: “The computer calculates” means no more than “The computer goes through the electricomechanical processes necessary to produce the results of a calculation without any calculation.”... Unlike Bennett and Hacker, I don't think that it is simply the case that results of a calculation are produced without any calculation; I think that a relationship between abstract mathematical entities is embodied in a physical system. The embodiment of such a mathematical relationship is independent of the place the computer has in human lives.
Why does any of this matter? Well, it may inform our sense of whether or not the brain - which is not a cultural artefact, is not a device the motions of which enjoy a meaning through their uptake in a particular cultural praxis - can be said to process information, calculate, etc. If a computer's state transitions can be said to embody meaning in and of themselves, then why not a brain's too?
The notion is, to me, surprising, counter-intuitive, hard to make out. But let's try working with an example. We have a device in front of us which we use to make additions. There's 5 buttons we call '1', '2', '3', another we call '+', and a final one we call '='. There's also an LCD screen on which similar-looking figures are displayed by the computer. If you press '1+2=' the machine displays '3'; if you press '1+1' the machine displays '2'. (We can imagine extending this to more complicated patterns - e.g. adding a '4', a '5' to the buttons and to the display.)
It's easy I think to see how, because of our use of it, the device can be said to be 'calculating the sum of 1+2'. And if in a dark room the cat stood on it, depressing the same buttons, and if we'd turned the light on we'd have seen a '3' on the screen, what should we say? Well, we might say that here too the device is yet calculating. Or we might not. (Take your pick as far as I'm concerned.)
But what of the idea that it's performing calculations regardless of whether a display is plugged in? There are, the thought might go, 0s and 1s encoded in the calculator's operations. ... But wait, why call this or that electrical pulse a 0 or instead a 1? And how can we tell which pulse is which? I mean, it's easy if we ascribe the meaning to this rather than that pulse. But aside from such an ascription, how should we tell?
And if we type in '1+2=' and it displays '3', how do we know what the relation is between these numbers in our number system and the actual numbers which the calculator quite independently of us has encoded in its workings? For example, perhaps from the calculator's point of view, as it were, it has just performed the addition '2+4=6'. So that our '1' is its '2'. How could we tell whether our '1' is its '1' or is instead its '2'? Or, for that matter, how do we know our '1' is not its '10', our '2' its '20' etc?
For that matter, perhaps when it's helping us arrive at the correct answer for our addition tasks, it's actually making systematic errors according to the rules which, unbeknownst to us, are allegedly embodied in its system. Or perhaps its doing something quite other than maths? Or maybe the maths is just a hobby for it, or a spandrel of some sort, and the real task it's performing is artistic.
What now of an abacus? Imagine a fancy redesigned one with 3 beads. To perform an addition you take, say, 1 bead, then another 1 or 2, then put them in a chute, and - so long as you have a certain gate opened that you call '+', the beads roll down and collate together where you count them up. You have to know, of course, that the beads stand for numbers, just as you have to know that the marks on the calculator screen are symbols. But shall we say that this device, independently of whether we are using it for addition, or whether a monkey is playing with it, has embodied within it certain mathematical relationships? Again, what are they? How would we find our what they are? We think of each bead as standing for '1', but what do the beads really stand for in themselves?
I don't mean those suggestions seriously of course. It's just that I don't see how one would not be open to them if the idea of a calculator, or anything for that matter, embodying mathematical rules independent of the place of the calculator in our lives is taken seriously. My hope is that, by finding these implications of the idea of the contraption in question as performing particular calculations independently of their use in our lives, that very idea will itself come to seem rather less plausible.
Perhaps it be said that all that it is for a device to calculate 'in itself' is for it to engage in certain mechanical transformations onto which certain mathematical transformations could be mapped. ... 'So are you saying that the planets in motion, the tree with its sap rising and falling within it, and so on, all can be said to be 'performing calculations' so long as their motions can be mathematically represented?' ... Well, no, that obviously won't do. But perhaps what makes the difference between a mechanical system which is and which isn't a calculator is that it be capable of being used to 'perform' far more than one calculation. A pocket calculator which could only compute 1+2 would be a sorry thing, and we might baulk at giving it its (honorary or legitimate) standard designation. (Is it the limitations of the abacus that also make us reluctant to describe it in such terms?) But how about a bona fide pocket calculator that, say, breaks down after you've used it twice? Was it calculating? Well, perhaps we'd say it was since the very notion of it breaking down presupposes that it now doesn't perform the capacity which... Well, which what? Which it was designed to perform? For which we used it? Or which it 'had in itself'? I think we might say what we wished here, so long as we made ourselves clear.
But in any case I suspect that this latter possibility - this subjunctive conception of natural computation (were you to project onto the mechanical system such and such a rule, then...) - wasn't what Aftab had in mind. And it will in any case be possible to project onto the operations of any such system any number of rules (the above-stated problem of what number to pair up with the electrical pulses - 1, 10, 100? - in the calculator's wiring). Do we really want to say that a single burst of electrical activity in the pocket calculator is really computing any number (an infinity even?) of sums at the same time? ... Or if you imagine that the range of projective possibilities could be narrowed down to one for the calculator, now think of that messy gloop in your head where, presumably, many different physical 'realisations' may be had, at different times, for the same 'calculation'. Or wherein the same 'realisation' may be said to be component of different 'calculations' at different times.
]]>I think there are two important things to be said about this, things which are often simply not said or understood, but which need to be understood. So, well... so I'm going to say them.
First of all, consider how love's thread is composed of various strands, and how not all of these strands are available at all stages of life. The fullest forms of love show themselves in that of the fully mature adult. Here we meet with a complete set of: i) wanting to enjoy an appropriate union with the beloved; ii) wanting the best for them; iii) rejoicing in their existence; iv) being able to pull them into view as a distinctly other person, with their own values and needs and sensibility, and offer them ethical recognition in all of that (Iris Murdoch: love is the honouring of alterity; it is 'the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real'); v) wanting some kind of reciprocation in i)-iv). But the younger child is not able to do more than i) and v). All going well they want to be with and share with their parent. Does this mean they're less loving that their parent? No: this isn't a quantitative matter. It's about the form of love which is intelligibly predicable of humans at different levels of maturity. The young child isn't able to fully understand what we might call the 'reality' of other human beings: they're constitutionally egocentric. That others have tastes and preferences that are not their own is barely intelligible to them. This egocentricity is no moral failure: it's not egotism.
Consider next that it's also the case that not all adults have been able to master iv). They relate - often in not so obvious ways - to others as if they were extensions of themselves. (This is most pronounced in those who have characterological troubles of a sort attracting Axis II diagnoses.) They struggle to find intelligible how others can have different values and preferences and sensibilities, and tend to find these other characteristics 'strange', perverse, or instead feel criticised by their very existence. ('But it's for your own good, James'; 'I just can't see it's necessary for Tim to spend so much of his time online'.) Relationships between two parents with such developmental disturbance tend to be codependent, narcissist/echoist, reclusive, and set against the wider world into which the lingering alterity in the relationship is projected. And this is all a clear, direct, and tragic consequence of not having been able to adequately individuate during adolescence. (We simply don't acknowledge enough how much pseudo-maturity there is in this world.)
So there's two important consequences of all of this. The first is that there's often no single answer to the question of whether your parent really loved you. In some ways they truly did, and continue to. They're generous, perhaps, with gifts and offers to help you out; they really do want to spend time with you. But in another sense, they don't. Love has several strands - there are diverse criteria for the proper predication of love of someone - and they needn't all be woven together at all times. The second is that this may be no more a moral failure on their part than we'd say that a young child who hadn't yet escaped the orbit of their innate egocentricity was suffering a moral failure. They don't love, in sense iv), because they can't. The ultimately apt response to learning of such a deficit is not ongoing anger at the parent - but pity and sorrow. Honouring your father and mother now becomes valuing their having born you, showing recognition for what they do have to offer, doing what you can for them from an emotional distance, and so on.
I have of course left out the question of the extent to which we are all morally obliged to seek our maturation, to seek to transcend not only our egotism but also our egocentricity. But I think even the most hard-nosed critic of the intrusive parent will have to admit that, whilst we do well to chip away at our egocentricity's coal-face, we can't be held responsible for not mining its deeper seems. To some degree, character sets in in late adolescence, and the blindness of she who can't bring the other into view is not wilful.
None of this solves the hard question of how to resist the regressive yet natural urge to continue: to try to get the longed for water out of the parental stone, to establish a mature loving relationship, or to indulge depressive defences. With the depressive option, you collapse back into a conception of the self which prevents you from sensing intrusion and control as such, instead taking the hit of the uncongeniality of the relationship and chalking it up to one's own egregiousness. And those who love their parents will after all want, as part of that, to be close to them. But: you can't get what you want; this is one of the respects in which reality is inevitably, inexorably, frustrating. And part of 'adulting' is, after all, making conscious and then learning to carry one's wounds with dignity rather than trying to heal them.
Or, well... the dignity is in its own way healing. But that's another story for another time.
]]>Orbits and Explanations
What's an orbit, and what in a celestial system is properly said to orbit what? Well, take your pick:
i) What's properly said to orbit what (the sun orbits the earth, or the earth orbits the sun) depends purely on a decision as to what we set as our reference frame. (This was the 'geometric' conception I was working with before.) Pin the frame to the earth, and the sun will be doing the orbiting. Pin the sun, or go with Newton and pin the 'fixed stars' (imagine they exist), and we'll now have the earth doing the orbiting. (Note that, on this definition, talk of orbits just represents the distance and orientations of bodies: perfectly circular orbits are not here a different matter than two bodies rotating on their axes.)
ii) What's orbited is always the centre of mass of a system of bodies, not any object in it. Thus the centre of mass of the solar system is - because the sun is so massive compared to planets and moons - fairly near the sun's centre. The sun wibbles its way around it without it ever moving outside the sun's circumference. The earth orbits this centre of mass from a greater distance; so it always 'goes round', if not 'orbits', the sun.
iii) What orbits what is given by a grammatical rule which says: when two bodies move around one another, the body which is most massive is that which is orbited.
iv) If the centre of mass in a system remains inside one of the objects, we say the object in question is what is orbited. (This is another grammatical rule.)
Now if I read him correctly, Aftab would reject i)-iv) and opt instead for:
v) X is properly said to orbit Y if we have an explanation for X going round Y but not an explanation for Y going round X.
For Aftab, 'because Sun is extraordinarily more massive than Earth, it has a much larger gravitational pull'. And because of which has the much larger gravitational pull, we have 'a perfectly good explanation as to why Earth would move around the Sun' but not vice versa.
Now, Newton's third law tells us that forces between bodies are equal and opposite. So earth's gravitational pull on the sun is, one might think, as great as that of the sun on earth. And so I'm not entirely clear what Aftab means by saying that the pull of the earth on the sun is less than that of sun on earth. But perhaps we should distinguish between pull and force. Thus we might now say 'Because it's so much more massive, that same amount of force from the earth moves the sun but a little, whereas because it's so much less massive, the same amount of force moves the earth a lot'. And 'pull' we define in terms of the force's effects. (A big man readily pulls a little child along the ground and not vice versa, despite the fact that the forces in play between them are equal and opposite.) But the difficulty with this is that it simply begs the question we're trying to address. For why should we describe the effects in one way (the earth moves) rather than the other (the sun moves)? You can't here appeal to their movements in establishing which pulls which - well, not without a crippling circularity. (The example of the big man and the little child doesn't contradict this, for here we've involve a third body - the earth - which we've already established as our frame of reference.) The dilemma I see for Aftab here is simply: i) if you appeal to grammar to do the work of establishing which orbits which, then the appeal to explanation is redundant. ii) if however you leave room for explanation to do its alleged orbit-determining work, then you'll just end up begging the question as to what shall be counted as moving (and so as to what we shall count as orbited). My own proposal is that we instead just make clear which of senses i) - iv) we're using and leave matters there.
Perception
Aftab tells us that 'Gipps seems to think' that 'how do we perceive?' 'is not a meaningful question'. I'm a bit puzzled by that. After all, in both of my previous posts I said that it surely made good sense to enquire into the neurobiology and physiology of smell, hearing, sight, etc. Why can't that 'how?' question be used to prompt such enquiries?
Now I do happen to think - don't you too? - that we'd need to find out rather a lot more of what was puzzling the utterer of such words ('how do we perceive?') before we could be sure that anything we said would be meeting their need. (After all, word strings enjoy such meaning as they have only in particular contexts. 'How do we perceive?' does not, in and of itself, invite any particular enquiry; its sense is radically underdetermined.) But it's surely not hard to imagine contexts - I already adverted to some neurobiological contexts in my previous posts - into which a word string like 'how do we smell?' or 'how do we touch?' could be inserted and in which it could constitute a meaningful question.
But perhaps here's the focus of our disagreement. There's a use of the 'how do we x?' question which asks which component actions we need to perform in order to succeed at action/task x. How did you plough the field? Well, I got the tractor out, filled it up with gas, attached the plough, lowered the plough into the earth, drove it over the field, etc. My thought is that, when you ask 'how do you x?' in that spirit, we're typically already at the end of the action line when we get to hearing, smelling, moving your finger, etc. At this point, other questions and other answers may find their place - for example, 'when you move your finger / smell the rose, what happens in your nose/brain/arm to make this possible?' Our interests will now typically be framed in physiological terms. Cognitive scientists, however, typically take there to be one or more intermediary levels of explanation here - levels that in some sense are still worth calling 'psychological' even if we're no longer talking about the actions of whole persons. It is about the viability of such levels that, I believe, Aftab and I are in disagreement. But, to be 100% clear about this: I'm not trying to rule out a priori that enquiries and explanations framed in cognitive scientific terms are possible. My method is different: it's to urge that those who posit such a level a) aren't clear about what they mean, and b) rather look as if they've got in an unwitting muddle. (The difference between 'you're talking nonsense!' and 'might you say what you mean, because so far as I can tell you're not using words in the normal way here?' should I hope be obvious by now.)
Prediction
The terms in which Aftab articulates this intermediary level are 'information', 'inference', and 'prediction'. It's not, as he puts it, that the brain makes (Bayesian) inferences or predictions or processes information in the ordinary sense of those terms. Instead it does something analogous. So, what are these analogous senses? Seth didn't tell us in his book, and I've not yet found ready elucidations in the cognitive science literature. Now, Aftab doesn't tell us what it is for a brain to make something like an inference, but he does offer a suggestion as to what it might be for it to make something analogous to a prediction. This is predictive text on a phone.
If I understand Aftab right, then the idea is that the brain may be said to make predictions in the same sense that the phone makes predictions when we're texting. It's not that the brain predicts in the normal sense of 'predict', since otherwise we'd be in the peculiar business of trying to explain our ability to, say, make predictions in terms of our brain's ability to, er, make predictions - which would kinda be a non-starter. (It'd be like positing representations to explain how we see things - when the notion of a representation, if it's being used in anything like the ordinary sense, is clearly of something which itself needs to be seen. Or like explaining procedural knowledge in terms of the possession of theoretical knowledge which we'd have to know what to do with... etc. etc.) Instead, the brain 'predicts' in the sense of 'predict' that's in play when we talk of the phone predicting. Well, what is this sense, and is this a realistic suggestion?
Consider an online or paper dictionary: type in / look up 'arbo' and it will (let's imagine) show an alphabetical list like 'arboreal', 'arboriculture', 'arborization' ... etc. When we use predictive text, though, the order of words appearing on the screen isn't alphabetical, but instead depends on how often we've personally used them before (and how often we've used them after the previous word you've just written, etc. etc.). It's this difference - from a pre-programmed static order to a dynamically updated order - that gives our talk of the phone 'predicting' its sense.
I don't know that any particularly clear intuitions exist regarding what happens if this 'prediction' no longer displays. I mean: imagine that the problem is just with the output to the screen: might we say the phone is still predicting text? And at what point of failure in matching displayed word with intended word do we say that the phone is no longer predicting? Is it making bad predictions then, or just not predicting? And of course it's not that the phone knows what a word is, knows that you're typing on it, has any kind of orientation towards the future, can read or speak or write, has any genuine competencies, knows a language, can try or not try to do anything, etc. Speaking and writing - and ordinary predicting - are activities that go on for beings with a social form of life, and not only does the phone not enjoy sociality - it's not even alive. The phone has no praxis: it's not oriented to the truth; it's not engaged in intentional actions, since it has no ends other than those set by the programmer or those for which it's employed by the user; it doesn't actually follow or fail to follow rules - though we of course can describe its activity by using a rule (i.e. it behaves in accord with, rather than actually follows, rules); it only gets things 'wrong' or 'right' in an utterly derivative sense - i.e. in relation to our intentions to write this or that word; it can't think thoughts, and so the 'predictions' it makes aren't instances of thought; it understands (and misunderstands) nothing. But that's all fine of course. We don't mean that the phone is really making predictions in the normal sense. Predictions, after all, are actions, whereas all the phone (and, for that matter, the brain) has going on in it are instead (and as Aftab himself alludes to) happenings.
Now, Aftab says that what we have, when talking of predictive text, is nevertheless an analogical rather than metaphorical sense of 'predict', and that it's 'similar enough' to what we do when we think about what will happen and issue an actual prognostication. I confess I'm not quite sure what to make of this given both the myriad dissimilarities and the utterly derivative, artifactual, sense in which a phone 'predicts' anything. But perhaps the clue is in what Aftab also says: models of celestial bodies only make predictions of the planets' positions in a metaphorical sense, and to say of a pancreas that releases insulin (or whatever it does) in proportion to what's consumed rather than 'waiting' to detect blood sugar levels (I've no idea how it works; just imagine, ok!) is to indulge a 'pure metaphor'. In these situations there's 'nothing like prediction actually happening (as far as we know)'. .... But why is it that we say that the phone is doing something like predicting but that (my imagined) pancreas is not? Well, the only disanalogy I can see between them is that what the phone is involved with, even though of course it knows nothing of it (since it's not a knower), is semantic information or meaning. The marks on the phone's screen count as information because of how we relate to them, because of the place this artefact enjoys in our rich communicative, social, lives.
The question still standing, now, is whether the brain could make predictions in something like this sense in which the phone predicts. And the issue I see with this suggestion is that there's an important sense in which we don't use our brains to think or smell. Now, sure, and of course, you'd have a hard job thinking or perceiving without a brain! And I don't mean to turn my face against idioms like 'use your brain for goodness sake!' That's not my point. What is my point is that the significance of the phone display really is a function of the phone having a role as an artefact within our discursive form of life. The significance derives from that use. The brain, however, has no such role. We can't see or hear or smell it or what's going on in it; we can't handle it; it's not a tool. It's part of us, an organ inside us, rather than something to which we, the 'whole us', stands in a meaning-conferring relation. Meaning is not conferred by us on our own brain activations: the activations are not used; they've merely a causal, rather than a meaningful, role in our normative practices.
In short, the relationship between brain stimulations and human psychological activity is quite unlike that between phone displays and human psychological activity. (This, in effect, is precisely why the functionalist notion of 'brain as computer' failed all those years ago.) Whilst artefacts enjoy a derivative form of intentionality, organs don't. However we ought to articulate the relationship between events in my noggin and the thoughts I have, analogising with artefacts won't do it.
Information
During his discussion Aftab suggests that 'maybe, just maybe' the brain makes something analogous to inferences about what is in the world around it. He doesn't delineate this analogous concept directly, instead choosing to focus on something he calls a 'physical' as opposed (presumably) to an ordinary, 'semantic', sense of 'information'. What is this 'information'? Information, in the sense in which, say, the brain can be said to process information, is present if the
state of a system at one point in time has a discernible relationship with the state of a system at any other time (e.g. you can use an equation to calculate the state of a system at one point given the state of the system at another point). In the case of perception, let's say I see a tree in front of me, and then I copy the shape of the tree on a piece of paper. We can think of this in terms of flow of 'information' -- there is a relationship between the physical state of the tree, the physical state of my brain, and the physical state of the piece of paper.
The 'system' here is presumably the tree-brain-paper system. To offer another example: the longer you leave a pizza in the oven, the less 'information' it eventually contains as to what toppings (vegetables, cheeses, microbes, etc.) were on it when you put it in. Information in this sense is, note, relative to what's discernible by some or other observer. (It may also be something like Shannon-information, another non-semantic kind of 'information' which cognitive scientists have said is relevant to the study of brain processes.)
Now it seems very likely to me - despite Wittgenstein's Zettel §610 - that there'll be physical-information 'about' (i.e. reliably correlated traces of) the environment 'in' the brain. There's presumably no little mouse neurone that lights up whenever you see or smell a mouse, but there will be brain activation patterns which in some way or other map onto both the objects around one which are causally impacting on the senses and onto what perceivers take themselves to perceive. As Aftab rightly says it's the task of neuroscience to work out these relations between sensory stimulations and perceptual reports / perceptually-informed activity.
What I can't yet see, however, is that this notion of physical information is going to get us anywhere when it comes to making sense of what it is for a brain to (in some or other similar-to-our-normal-use-of-the-terms sense) make inferences or predictions. After all, what inferences in the ordinary sense have to do with precisely is information in the semantic sense. Yet here we're all agreeing that there's no ordinary, semantic, information in the brain.
This, then, is the difficulty I see for the cognitive scientific project as it's typically spelled out. On the one hand it's urged that the brain is making predictions, inferences, etc., not in a metaphorical sense but in something like the literal sense. To support this it's pointed out that artefacts like computers and phones do after all make something like predictions, process information, etc. However then when it's pointed out that these artefacts are only said to engage in meaning-related activity in a derivative concessionary sense, because of the place we confer on them within our normative practices, and that the brain enjoys no such role - its role being instead its causal contribution to our capacity to engage in such practices - then notions of information etc which don't have to do with ordinary meaning are instead invoked. But the difficulty now is that causal operations on meaningless physical information look simply nothing like predictions and inferences in anything like their ordinary forms.
]]>In a recent blogpost Awais Aftab has expressed some welcome disagreements with what I wrote in my critique of Anil Seth's conception of perception 'Seth's vision' post. What follows is my response.
heliocentric or geocentric: what's the truth?
Aftab writes of a
scientific model according to which [the] sun is in orbit around the earth. This scientific model is decidedly false; the sun is not in orbit around the earth, however things appear to us.
Here Aftab's flatly disagreeing with what I wrote in my original post - I expressly denied that this is a decidedly false claim. But he doesn't argue his case - so I'll now just reiterate and expand mine. It's important to note, before we begin, that whilst the explicit topic is astronomical, the real issue - to which we'll return after the physics is expounded - concerns instead the relevance of considerations of linguistic meaning when what's under discussion are allegedly scientific questions.
So: I take it as axiomatic that if we're to model the movements of bodies we must always first stipulate a reference frame. Being decidedly terrestrial creatures it's our typical habit to use the earth's surface as this 'immobile'-by-definition reference frame for ordinary modelling and measurements. This use amounts to a tacit stipulation, a stipulation which gives us a rule of representation: movements of people and cars and birds are to be measured relative to the earth's surface (and not, say, relative to that hypomanic rabbit running hither and thither over there, since that'd really complicate everything terribly). Such rules of representation aren't themselves representations: they aren't, that is, themselves happily styled 'true' or 'false'. There's no such thing as a 'correct stipulation'. There are just reference frames which are more or less useful depending on our needs.
Now, when we're discussing the movements of celestial bodies, we might surely offer either the sun or the earth as our reference frame. We could of course stipulate the moon but, depending on the scientific context, that'd probably make the maths very complex. Might we follow Newton and pin our frame instead to the 'fixed stars'? Well, we'd first need to say in what sense they're 'fixed', since it's generally thought that, what with the expansion of the universe, many of them are moving apart from one another. And we'd surely want to avoid Newton's notions of 'absolutely fixed', or 'absolute motion', or 'absolute duration', etc., since, so far as I know, that idea - of motion or duration not relative to any particular spatial or temporal reference frame but just, somehow, 'in itself' - has never been provided with a meaning. But at any rate, if we stipulate the earth, then the sun will properly be said to be moving around it - and vice versa.
Given this I simply find it hard to know what's meant by Aftab's 'This scientific model is decidedly false; the sun is not in orbit around the earth, however things appear to us.' But perhaps he would say 'But in science we always call the simplest model decidedly true and the more complex model decidedly false.' Well, we could say this - though I don't think we always, or even usually, do. (I think we typically just talk of the advantages of simplicity, and leave off talk of truth and falsity for when instead we're talking about representational fit. That, at least, stops us getting into unnecessary muddles.) But, sure, I'm happy if we do decide to use the word 'true' like that: now we all know what we mean, philosophy has done its clarificatory job, and we're back not talking past each other. So now, because of what it does for astronomical science, we'll say that a heliocentric model is there the 'true one'. Or because of what it does for botanical science (you're trying to measure the light shifting over a plant's leaves, and it's rather easier to think of the sun moving overhead rather than of the plant orbiting the sun), we'll say that the geocentric model is there the 'true one'. My concern though is that there was rather a whiff of 'but in fact, or really, or as science reveals to us, it's the earth that orbits the sun and not vice versa' to both Aftab's and Seth's presentations. And, at least on its face, such an 'in fact' appears to rather transcend mere matters of simplicity. Instead it seems to be an 'in fact' which has (...in fact...) rather gone on semantic holiday. An 'in fact' which, like Newton's notions of 'absolute' motion or duration, has attempted to prescind from particular contexts of enquiry, forgetting that it's only ever relative to a context that such notions enjoy a meaning.
Well, wait... why does any of this matter - wasn't the real topic the cognitive neuroscience of perception? So, well, yes: this all has to do with how we understand the significance of philosophy - in particular: philosophical reflection on linguistic meaning - for (would-be) scientific enquiry. So let's now turn to this.
language... or science?
After claiming that the geocentric view is 'decidedly false' Aftab goes on to urge that:
We shouldn't be so preoccupied with the language itself that we forget there is an independent scientific question to be asked. In a similar way, questions pertaining to the use of language about perception should not lead us to ignore the scientific questions at hand.
Similar comments regarding the relation of linguistic philosophy to matters scientific are offered later:
To remember how to correctly use the word perceive doesn’t by itself tell us what the correct scientific psychological account of perception is, and any scientific psychological account of perception has to take into account the fact that the brain is confined inside the skull and only has access to signals in the sensory nerves.
Does the brain approximate Bayes’s rule in the process of perception? This is an empirical question, to be settled by scientific inquiry, but it certainly cannot be settled or eliminated by an analysis of ordinary language.
So, first, what is the 'independent scientific question to be asked' here, in this first context which, to recall, had to do with celestial movements? I confess the only one I can think of as a candidate might go something like: 'But, really, Dr Gipps, please leave aside all these parochial matters to do with this or that human-interest-relative context, and turn instead to matters of the raw scientific truth: just tell us, Dr Gipps: does the earth orbit the sun, or does the sun orbit the earth?!!' Yet, as I was at pains to show, it's here precisely philosophical considerations regarding language use - i.e. considerations regarding what it makes sense to say - and especially of distinguishing rules of representation (which as such aren't usefully described as true or false) from representations (which as such are either true or false) - which reveals that this just isn't a good question! We might at first think we know what it means. (Just like Anscombe, at first, thought she knew what she meant when she said that it seemed to her as if the sun went round the earth.) But then we think it through, and it turns out that we don't!
Turning now to perception, Aftab is of course correct that recalling how the word 'perceive' is properly used tells us nothing about which bona fide scientific theory of perception is correct. (And nothing in my original post declared anything else.) Where linguistic philosophy comes into its own, though, is when it helps clarify whether we are indeed asking bona fide scientific questions. My claim was that Seth seemed to think he was asking and answering clear scientific questions... but that this may be illusory. Now, philosophy can't help us answer scientific questions - but it can help us distinguish genuine from merely ersatz such questions. So, just as Seth and Aftab seem - if I'm not mistaken - to wrongly take 'Does the sun orbit the earth, or is it that the earth orbits the sun?' as a straightforwardly clear question - so too does Seth, as I read him, take his particular questions and answers regarding 'how we perceive' to enjoy a clear sense. But the appearance of meaningfulness, I claim, may be only a product of certain prior misunderstandings regarding how concepts work. If you conceptually assimilate donkeys to positive numbers, you may well think it a straightforwardly intelligible scientific question to ask just what the square root of a particular donkey is. (I don't say that we couldn't give this question a sense; only that it doesn't enjoy one on its face.) To undo that assimilation is not to obstruct scientific progress, but rather to point out that it seems we didn't so much as have a scientific question on the table. From Gellner's idiotic Words and Things onwards, philosophers have accused linguistic philosophy as being somehow antithetical to science. As I see it, however, this is entirely backwards. No science at all can happen if the questions being asked are not even empirical because they're riddled with conceptual confusion. By helpfully picking this apart, the linguistic philosopher is the one contributing to strengthening the scientific framework, whereas the would-be scientist who just ploughs on regardless despite their tacit confusion is holding back scientific progress by instead covertly indulging metaphysical nonsense.
brains and their owners
Aftab agrees that there is 'no mystery to how I see thing. I just do. I look around and see the world in all its beauty and ugliness. But in order for the brain to make this possible, an explanation is needed.' Brains however made perception possible long before explanations were available; I suspect Aftab really means: 'in order for us to understand how brain activity makes perception possible, we require a scientific explanation'. This to me seems utterly unobjectionable: sure, explanations aren't always required before we can understand something, but when we've got 'how does that work?' questions going on, an explanation will be just the ticket! So, yes: so far, so unobjectionable. Yet after noting that I suggest that an answer in neurological (I think 'neuroscientific' would have been a happier word choice by me) terms is required here, Aftab urges that this would:
not offer us the explanation we need; what will be missing will be explanation that connects the neurological activity to the perceiving I. There is, therefore, a cognitive and psychological question here as well. What cognitive and psychological processes are involved in our ordinary experience of perception?
I confess to not yet understanding this. If I want to know how, say, a Porsche can accelerate so quickly - the acceleration admittedly being a property of the whole car - I'll naturally be satisfied with an answer in purely mechanical terms, one which tells me about the functioning of the carburettor etc. Sure, I'll want to know too how the carburettor is connected to the throttle and the fuel supply and the engine and thereby to the wheels - but there seems to me no requirement for an extra kind of story, told at some other level of explanation, wherein I relate all of this to the accelerating car. Or, well, perhaps other details will be relevant too: depending on where I was coming from when I asked about the Porsche's acceleration, I might find it more illuminating to hear about the extraordinary funding of their R&D relative to other car manufacturers. But at any rate, we can I think imagine someone who is only interested in the question of what it is in the car itself that enables its rapid acceleration. And here they will, I think, be satisfied with a story about the mechanical goings on under the bonnet. So too a story about the eye, the optic nerve, the striate cortex, etc etc., which outlined the machinery of perception and detailed its operation could, I think, work in a similar way.
Aftab goes on to tell us that:
any scientific psychological account of perception has to take into account the fact that the brain is confined inside the skull and only has access to signals in the sensory nerves. The relationship between the voltage changes in the nerve membranes and the world outside the sensory organs is not a question that has a straightforward obvious answer, and I refuse to accept that this is a meaningless question that arises only because we are confused about how we use the word “perceive”!
Now I'm not sure what it means to talk of a brain being 'confined' (perhaps 'safely contained'?) in a skull, and of it only having 'access' to this or that sensory signal. But perhaps the Porsche analogy can help us here. So you notice that whilst I wanted to understand the acceleration of the whole car, we somehow talked mainly about the carburettor and other internal components. The carburettor, however, doesn't have direct 'access' to the wheels or the road; it only has only has 'access' to the fuel and the air. This, you suggest, makes for an explanatory problem. ... Well, I demur. It may well be that the relation of acceleration to air intake is not straightforward: much will also depend on the current pitch of the road, the current speed, the drag of the vehicle etc. By all means, let's look at the whole picture. And the same - except more so - will be true of the 'relationship between the voltage changes in the nerve membranes and the world outside the sensory organs'. None of these enquiries will involve us in asking meaningless questions (and, note, I never claimed that they did); none of them presuppose confusion about how the word 'perceive' is used. What would be a confusion, though, would be the assumption that the brain's generation of perception / the carburettor's generation of acceleration required it to reconstruct or represent or make inferences regarding what's happening outside the skull / engine. (Or to put it otherwise: what would be a confusion would be if we conflated 'access' in the mechanical sense of i) enjoying this or that degree of causal connectedness to the world, with 'access' in the epistemic sense of ii) making the world's acquaintance.) No: such activities, if we're meaning them in their normal senses, are properties not of the brain or carburettor but instead, at times, of the person whose brain or car is under discussion.
prediction and inference
Let's now turn to that last question about brainy inferences etc in more detail. The part of Aftab's critique I find most thought-provoking is this:
it strikes me as quite valid to hypothesize or talk about prediction in an analogous way to ordinary language but in a manner that doesn’t require intention or agency, etc. This is especially because we can meaningfully talk about mathematical models making predictions, and a variety of non-intentional, non-agential systems can enact said mathematical models.
Johannes Kepler |
So, if that's what Aftab means by a 'system enacting a mathematical model', then I should say that I can see nothing wrong with it. To transfer it now to the context of the brain, we might say this: Neuroscientists can model, and predict, how activity in part of the brain covaries with past and present sensory stimulation and motor activity (say) using a particular model. We then shunt the words around a bit to arrive at: 'this is the model the brain enacts'. We will say the same too for the release of insulin in the pancreas in response to blood sugar changes etc. We can model this mathematically; lo: the pancreas enacts the model. But what we don't yet get to, from the notion of a mathematical model making predictions, is a cogent sense in which the planets, the pancreas, or the brain are themselves predicting anything. So it looks to me like we'll need something other than the metonymic, conceptually parasitic, notion of 'mathematical models making predictions' to get us to a sense for 'the brain makes predictions'.
linguistic innovationHelmholtz, when he described perception as an inference, used inference in an analogous way: “[the “psychical activities” leading to perception] are in general not conscious, but rather unconscious. In their outcomes they are like inferences insofar as we from the observed effect on our senses arrive at an idea of the cause of this effect.” (Helmholtz 1867) [my emphasis, notice use of “like inference” suggesting an analogy].The... problem I have is with the insistence that unless an explicit definition is offered, the use must be considered muddled or nonsensical. Just because Helmholtz does not further specify what “like inference” is supposed to be, does that make it muddled and nonsensical? I don’t think so. Scientific ideas often begin as a sort of analogy, and are further refined and made more precise over time. Didn’t Wittgenstein have something to say about the meaning of a word being its use? If a word is being used by an entire community of scientists, can we not recognize that use as legitimate, even if a formal definition is lacking?
Hermann von Helmholtz |
a) If you, cognitive neuroscientist, are intending such and such a term in its ordinary sense, then your claims are, for reasons I've given, simply nonsensical.b) If however you're using it in a new, or somewhat new, sense, a sense that we readers don't yet know, might you please both acknowledge when this is so (so we don't wrongly assume that you mean it in the ordinary sense), and also make this new meaning clear for us? If it's a new technical scientific sense, then yes a definition really would be lovely, since that's rather how we tend to do things in science. However perhaps you might instead give some paradigmatic examples, or do what you can to make clear what would falsify your claims, or elucidate whatever ascription conditions you can for the concept, etc.? Doing literally nothing to make yourself clear, however, well, dude: that's not cool! For making oneself clear isn't just a job for philosophers! It's part and parcel of ordinary responsible scientific practice.
This is why, in my original post, I kept asking if Seth would tell us what he meant, rather than simply said 'what you're saying is nonsense'. I think I demonstrated that it would be nonsense if he was using the terms in the ordinary way. I think I demonstrated that Seth is bizarrely insouciant regarding the need to tell a reader of a popular book what his terms mean - and I do rather suspect that this might be because he doesn't think he is using terms in anything other than an ordinary sense. But I certainly can't demonstrate that there's not some occult sense he's employing. I can however complain that it is occult.
on use
Finally, what of this?:
Didn’t Wittgenstein have something to say about the meaning of a word being its use? If a word is being used by an entire community of scientists, can we not recognise that use as legitimate, even if a formal definition is lacking?
Well, I think it depends on what's meant both by 'can we' and by 'use'!
It's certainly true that there are indeed times when words are used with bona fide meanings despite the absence of any clear definition. I see no reason why this shouldn't obtain in science as well as in everyday life or in humanities discourses etc.
And it's surely true that we might often do well to presume that a word has sense on its users' lips. Innocent until proven guilty!, we might say, for matters of meaning.
Ludwig Wittgenstein |
To understand how Wittgenstein's comments on meaning and use don't commit him to the idea that any widespread use inexorably makes for meaning, it helps to distinguish between two senses of 'use'. In the first sense 'use1' refers to however a term or phrase is deployed by those who utter or write it. It refers, that is, to the mere fact of its deployment, the mere fact that people voice it. In the second sense, 'use2' contrasts with 'misuse'. (Use1 includes both uses2 and misuses2, but also includes such uses of terms as have no meaning and so which can't even be misused.) Now, people often mistakenly think that when Wittgenstein talked of the internal relationship between meaning and use, it was use1 he had in mind - as if he were trying to provide a reductive definition of 'meaning' in terms of how we shunt words about. I think this quite wrong, and that it's only the correct uses, the uses2, of a term that are of a piece with its meaning. (Glock: 'Meaning is a matter not of how an expression is actually used and understood, but of how it is (or ought to be) used and understood by members of a linguistic community. What is semantically relevant is the correct use of expressions.') So, to summarise: whether a community's deployment of an expression is meaningful is not something guaranteed simply by their using it. And whether it's meaningful will instead amount to whether it's use can be elucidated, whether it avoids oscillating unstably between different senses encouraging the making of illicit inferences, whether clear negations of propositions deploying the term can be formulated, and sometimes, yes, even whether it can be clearly defined.
In a recent episode of The Life Scientific, the guest - psychologist Julia Shaw (who researches false memories, forensic psychology, and bisexuality) - talks about coming to understand that her father was schizophrenic. She'd been home-schooled by him and, when she was 14, she realised that, whilst she 'didn't have a word for it', for him all was not well. After 9/11, for example, he spoke only to her; he was clearly out drinking too much in the day; he'd come home drunk from the bar and they'd watch Mortal Kombat through and through, or do a lot of sparring. ... And then later, in one of her first clinical psychology lessons, she learns about the 'paranoid schizophrenia' diagnosis: "Oh my God", she thinks, "that's my dad! It sort of put a construct to all of his behaviour and a lot of the experiences I had growing up."
Psychologists and psychiatrists of a so-called 'critical' bent have often challenged the value of such seemingly 'baggy' constructs as make up diagnostic systems. Now - and in what follows I set aside the value of diagnoses to the diagnosed individuals themselves - Shaw herself clearly found it very useful. I don't here intend to question this utility. What I want to ask is instead what the utility consists in. For I think it too easy to quickly assume that the value consists only in possession of a new label to describe what's going on. And for 'critical' psychs to then take issue with the rather magical-seeming notion that coming into possession of a mere word can provide substantive knowledge of anything more than semantics. (Thus Shaw eagerly takes up Al-Khalili's suggestion that the illumination came because "nobody had labelled" his paranoid behaviour 'schizophrenia' before.) The question of diagnostic utility then too quickly gets corralled both into a general discussion of the benefits and disbenefits of constructs in our lives - for example, do they organise our experience in useful ways - and also into a more specific discussion of whether the principles governing one particular organisation, one particular construct (one diagnosis, that is), are reliable and valid, or are instead arbitrary, haphazard, and pseudoscientific.
George Kelly |
An analogy may be helpful. We're struggling in one of our relationships, and come to realise that the problem lies not within ourself, nor within a systemic property of the relationship, but instead in our friend or colleague. They are, we come to realise, vicious (i.e. vice-ridden). 'Why do you say that?' your spouse says. What makes it apt to say they're being a git, and what makes it apt to say they're being a git? And now you offer the judgement that they suffer a particular form of gititude: they're always drawing attention to the faults of others whilst boasting of their own successes. This can be important to note in its own right, of course. (By analogy: think of the different treatment implications that can sometimes follow from psychiatric diagnosis.) But what may be rather more helpful, from the provision of this more fine-grained judgement of gititude, is the warrant it provides for your taking your moral attitude of condemnation to your friend or colleague. If you want to ratify your allocation of someone to a genus, then showing how they meet the mark of belonging to a particular species within that genus will tend to do it.
To return now from morals to madness: the value of knowing one's father for schizophrenic may, I suggest, lie rather less in now knowing what treatment is indicated, or in understanding that he's one amongst others who have somewhat similar difficulties. Instead it may lie rather more in securely knowing that adopting a moral or relational approach is here inapt since he's not in his right mind. The dangers of such an allocation should be clear: that now every troubling thought or feeling or action of his is now chalked up to his insanity rather than to his situation or to oneself. But the possibility of abusing psychiatric judgement in this way is hardly grounds for avoiding it - any more than we do well to avoid moral judgement just because it may wrongly be used when instead psychiatric judgement would be more apt. Knowing him to be deeply, ongoingly, rationally awry in the way he experiences and responds to the world helps one get one's bearings, to know what's what. And we aren't forced to think of this as the provision from within ourselves, from within our language, of a scheme which we as it were 'impose' on our 'raw' experience of him. Leave those tired constructivist metaphors aside for a moment, and think instead on what it is to acknowledge morally or psychiatrically objective situations, rather than to construe some allegedly non-intrinsically psychiatric or moral situation a particular way. It's not that we're now making sense of him, if you like, but that we've now recognised what's what. Dad is mentally unwell. His behaviour isn't some version of normal of which I should be struggling harder to make sense. It's something which of its nature is not rationally intelligible. In this way he's a patient, not a rational agent. For this reason the social contract must be renegotiated. Losses must be mourned. But the relief of saying 'I shan't keep trying to play with someone who's breaking the rules', as it were - (and the 'as it were' is important unless we're to drift into unholy Szaszian libertarianism) - is palpable. I shall no longer bang my head against the cliff face of his unreason. I will no longer always try to reach shared understanding with him. There he goes - my poor dad. But here I am, freed now from the impossible obligation of, as it were, living within an impossible home. I can now carry on rationally - since I can now recognise that: he cannot.
]]>That life is like this, though: this is undeniable. No amount of Sartrean objections to the Freudian unconscious, the unknown experience, obviate the observation. And, let's face it, something similar happens with regard emotional rather than physical pain too. A patient, prior to developing a capacity for self-sympathy, typically remains oblivious to such hurts as can not only later be acknowledged but also then be acknowledged to - in some sense - have been alive earlier too. This happens, and far more widely than is typically acknowledged.
I don't raise this issue to try to psychologically explain it. It is, perhaps, not ultimately something that even requires explanation: it may instead simply be "there like our life", something in which we must acquiesce, an aspect of life to which we must just offer acknowledgement. And yet, if that's so, and if we're to not feel cheated of understanding, we shall surely instead at least require some explanation as to why it's hard so to do.
My own favourite metaphor for unconscious emotional life is owed not to the psychoanalysts but to the existential phenomenologists. We indwell unconscious affect like a fish which knows not of water yet endlessly swims within it; we can't get the distance from it to mentalise it. This water, though, runs all the way through us, so shaping the seeing eye that it can't itself be pulled into view. It structures the Lichtung's fabric, rather than shows up within it - and yet, being part of our very 'flesh' in this way, it's alive within every encounter we have. We could pile up the metaphors here, and they're useful both for bringing into view the phenomenon in question and for avoiding an unhelpful, personal/subpersonal-levels-muddling, pseudo-explanation in terms of (say) 'interoception'. And yet, let's face it, they're not really explanations. They don't really explain how it's possible; they just provide a picture which offers the phenomenon acknowledgement.
I've no doubt that my friend with the hip replacement was, before his operation, also walking in such a manner as would minimise discomfort without realising that he was even doing this. (Thomas Fuchs writes well about this sort of phenomenon in his treatment of unconscious mental life.) This too provides a helpful fact, as it were, with which to bolster our stand against the idea that Sartre's apt critique of the Freudian idea of the censor takes us far by way of refuting the notion of unconscious experience. We motivatedly veer away from that which we yet don't even experience. We don't need to think on what we yet somehow know to avoid.
The ACT idea that it's futile to try to avoid such thoughts or feelings ("whatever you do, don't think about a pink elephant") as (in particular) make for misery, so we should instead make room for them whilst defusing from them, is ultimately perhaps somewhat limited. For people do, it seems, manage rather well to intentionally not think about or engage with affective 'pink elephants'. In fact I'm happy to here report some results newly in: that I myself have succeeded in very intentionally not thinking on a certain topic, and maintaining instead a clear mind, for a few minutes at a time. If the very idea seems paradoxical then it may be high time to update our sense of what it is to direct our attention away from that which inwardly vexes us. And in truth, certain depressed and procrastinating patients are, in fact, the ultimate masters of this: their affective ostrich heads remain resolutely buried in the unmentalising sands.One tempting but ultimately vacuous option here would be to talk of 'levels of consciousness'. We say something like 'my friend's pain did not "rise to the level" of a truly conscious experience, but instead plied its trade under the radar of self-conscious suffering'. This Freudian submerged iceberg metaphor, however, doesn't really get us anywhere. It just rehearses the fact of the phenomenon in question, whilst once again inviting us to occupy an epistemic perspective on our own suffering even as it denies that suffering can be understood ('thetically' / 'positionally') as its own intentional object.
Wilfred Bion |
Christopher Bollas talks of the 'unthought known', a concept I've found of value in my own life. One has an emotionally charged realisation regarding a significant fact or happening from earlier in life and can now attest that that about which one can now think, one nevertheless in some sense knew about all along. Is it just that the significance of the newly appreciated fact is now more clearly available to one? Well, it is that (but not the 'just'), but what this way of putting it misses is the significance of the knowledge in question. This knowledge is indwelt, it structures one's relationships like an inexorable yet by-oneself-unformulable a priori (Jonathan Lear writes well on this) rather than as one thinkable way of being among other possibilities.
The underappreciated Bede Rundle once suggested that it's intelligible that withdrawing one's hand from a pricking pin need not constitute a response to pain - if 'to' here means 'caused by'. Instead it could be that the pain and the response were effects of a common cause. 'I winced with pain' might, he said, be as or more apt a locution, in this regard, than 'The pain made me wince':
Compare an explanation which puts the shaking of a man's hand down to nervousness. 'Because he is nervous' does not here amount to a causal claim, but locates the behaviour within a larger set of circumstances, within a cluster of reactions whose causal structure has yet to be disentangled. / Closely analogous to pain is the example of sound: the hearing of a loud bang can actually succeed a startled reaction associated with it, minute though the time lag is. Note that, while this rules out the auditory experience as cause of the reaction, it does not necessarily contradict the claim of the sound to be cause, since, despite the different grammars of 'sound' and 'sound wave', their points of contact may allow the sound to be credited with causing whatever is attributable to the agency of the waves.
This is interesting. It's natural to object: but were he to not have felt pain, he shouldn't have withdrawn from the pin. And yet: is this not an empirical claim? Isn't it at least intelligible, that is, that the body's reflexive movements be sometimes a response to injury rather than to injury's sensation? Similarly: I remember that I once saw a huge snake on the path and jumped in fright - and that the jumping, the startle, obtained before I'd got a clear idea of what I was looking at. Here, however, we're rather far from 'unfelt pain', and rather closer to 'unfelt injury'. For what we'd instead be analogically after here, let's recall, is the idea of a body with/from which one disidentifies, as it were, when one's injured, and so avoids feeling pain - and with which one reidentifies at a later time - at which time one can not only feel pain again but also newly acknowledge its prior presence.
Thinking about the relation of mood to emotion might help here. Thus when in a true mood one's not typically suffering a discretely emotional experience - but out of a mood can crystallise a particular emotion, at which point the mood ceases and one instead starts to genuinely suffer the emotion. Looking back at the moody time we might say: 'I now can see how much pain I was in / how angry I was before'. Looking back to times of what we call 'dissociation' can be like this too. My proposal now is that this isn't simply a subjunctive/hypothetical claim: that were I to not have been dissociated, I should then have felt pain / anger. For what that misses is that there's a whole new ease of being now in play which itself bespeaks a prior unregistered pain.
So how can we understand why it's hard to acknowledge what's manifestly true: what I'm calling 'the fact of unfelt pain'? My proposal is as follows: We tend to misconstrue nouns as inexorably referring to things - and it's characteristic of our concepts of things to have but a few criteria of identity and, moreover, criteria of identity which inexorably co-occur. It's also the case that when we think of intense physical pain, we tend to think it's impossible that we wouldn't be alive to it. Finally, we tend to imagine that the later acknowledgement of an earlier psychological truth (about ourselves) amounts to a kind of memory judgement - a recognition of the truth of a proposition which concerns an earlier state of affairs. Pain, both physical and mental, is however not at all like this.
First of all, there are several criteria for pain, and these can come apart. There's the behavioural response (move away from pain-inducing stimuli). There's the expressive response (the grimace). There's the pre-emptive avoidant behaviour. There's the expressive or reportative present-moment self-ascription. And then there's the later acknowledgement of the earlier pain. (I leave out the body's physiological activity which to my mind is extrinsic to the concept.) The meeting of any of these may be enabled by somewhat different physiological mechanisms. (Wincing, now, becomes criterial for pain - rather than something which, as Rundle suggests, may merely be an effect of a common cause. Thinking about what it is to wince, i.e. about the internal relation of 'wincing' and 'pain', should also help us out here!) The wrong way to think about these criteria is as evidence for the obtaining of a singular inner fact. Pain is not, as it were, an inner torchlight that is either on or off - the behaviour in question being evidence that the switch is in one or the other position. That is to make of pain what, following Wittgenstein, we may call a mythical 'beetle in a box', and once we've done that the temptation will be to think our denial of the torchlight makes of it 'a nothing' rather than 'a something'. Whereas what we ought to do is to here reiterate our question: ok, let's assume for the sake of argument that your talk of a torchlight beam is cogent: when do we properly say of someone that their torchlight beam is on?
Second, we typically find the pain of significant injury to be so intrusive and unresponsive to the will that we find it hard to imagine not being able to avow (i.e. express through self-ascribing) it. Yet why should that be? I simply have had patients who only came to be able to acknowledge the pain caused by significant injury after we looked together at their pain with ordinary respectful sympathy.
Finally, we need to acknowledge that a 'delay' in the avowal of a psychological fact needn't turn it into an empirical (i.e. merely factive, potentially erroneous) claim, i.e. needn't turn it into the expression of a judgement about one's own past state. I form a resolution, but do so while out hiking. My immediately calling my friend and sharing it is no more truly criterial for the fact of the resolution than is my finally doing so the next day - or six months later. I may of course never share it; I may forget about it; none of this, however, turns the times when I do share of it into something less than an avowal (i.e. when I voice the earlier resolution, rather than simply voice a judgement that I once made that resolution. Which isn't, of course, to say that I couldn't do the latter: as I might when I've quite forgotten it, and even on looking at the declaration of it in my diary cannot form an 'inner connection' with it - but yet have no cause to reject my diary entry.).
To conclude, I want to ask whether, to sustain the attribution of pain to he who sincerely doesn't avow it, we must posit the operation of a defeating condition. Is it intelligible that my friend, or my patients, who were not, as we say, 'aware' of their pain at t1, but at t2 can offer a belated avowal for t1's pain, be properly said to have yet been in pain at t1 unless we also have an explanation as why they couldn't avow it at t1? Must we refer to a broader character trait of self-neglect, or (what needn't be an entirely different matter) the operation of a dissociative defence mechanism, in order to sustain the attribution of unavowable pain at t1? Or will a later acknowledgement suffice? Well, it may differ from case to case as to where our shared intuitions as to intelligibility lie - and in fact there also need be no universally shared set of intuitions here either. There may be an indeterminacy in the very concept, that is, perhaps especially when we come to mental pain.
]]>Anscombe and Wittgenstein
by Dave McKean |
A gloriously pithy little dialogue between Wittgenstein and Anscombe goes like so:Wittgenstein: ‘Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the Earth rather than that the Earth turned on its axis?’
Anscombe: ‘I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the Earth.’
Wittgenstein: ‘Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the Earth turned on its axis?’
On this, in chapter 4 of his 'Being You', Anil Seth offers a gloriously muddled take:
In this delightful exchange between Wittgenstein and his fellow philosopher (and biographer) Elizabeth Anscombe, the legendary German thinker uses the Copernican revolution to illustrate the point that how things seem is not necessarily how they are. Although it seems as though the sun goes around the Earth, it is of course the Earth rotating around its own axis that gives us night and day, and it is the sun, not the Earth, that sits at the centre of the solar system. Nothing new here, you might think, and you’d be right. But Wittgenstein was driving at something deeper. His real message for Anscombe was that even with a greater understanding of how things actually are, at some level things still appear the same way they always did. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, same as always.
What's gone wrong here? Leave aside the fibs about Wittgenstein being German and about Anscombe being his biographer. Leave aside too the unhappy idea that 'really', or 'of course', it's the earth spinning on its axis, and not the sun orbiting the earth, that accounts for there being night and day. (Doesn't it just depend - as Einstein points out in his little introduction to relativity theory - on which you stipulate as your reference frame?!) Also put aside the notion that it's any more than a truism that the sun, rather than the earth, sits at the centre of the solar system. Focus instead on the fact that Wittgenstein's lesson for Anscombe is neither that 'how things seem is not necessarily how they are' nor that 'even with a greater understanding of how things actually are, at some level things still appear the same way they always did'. His point is instead that it in truth no more seems to us as if the sun goes round the earth than it seems as if the earth goes round the sun! Wittgenstein's emphasis isn't here on the 'no more'; it's instead on the presumption that 'seems as if' is here being deployed with any meaning at all. Anscombe's point, to repeat, is that she was caught up in a mere illusion of sense.
Not only is Wittgenstein offering neither the surface nor the deeper message which Seth ascribes to him, but the lessons Seth suggests are in truth ruled out by Wittgenstein's actual lesson. (Something can't meaningfully be said to seem one way rather than another, with or without greater understanding coming into it, if 'seem' is used without meaning.) Anscombe makes all this perfectly clear, by the way, in the very paragraph from which Seth takes his extract:
The general method Wittgenstein does suggest is that of 'shewing that a man has supplied no meaning [or perhaps: "no reference"] for certain signs in his sentences'. I can illustrate the method from Wittgenstein's later way of discussing problems. He once greeted me with the question: 'Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?' I replied: 'I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.' 'Well,' he asked, 'what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?' This question brought it out that I had hitherto given no relevant meaning to 'it looks as if' in 'it looks as if the sun goes round the earth'. My reply was to hold out my hands with the palms upward, and raise them from my knees in a circular sweep, at the same time leaning backwards and assuming a dizzy expression. 'Exactly!' he said. In another case, I might have found that I could not supply any meaning other than that suggested by a naive conception, which could be destroyed by a question. The naive conception is really thoughtlessness, but it may take the power of a Copernicus effectively to call it in question.
If it seems peculiar, at this point in our discussion, that Seth should just ignore Wittgenstein's actual lesson, I hope it shan't by the discussion's end. Or at least, that it won't seem peculiar for him. For what we find, again and again as we read his chapter, is him doing precisely what Wittgenstein was teaching us to not do: he (like many a neuropsychologist colleague of his) uses familiar terms but fails to assign them meanings in the novel contexts in which they're redeployed. (Perhaps he's somehow assumed not that the meaning of words in sentences is a function of their use-in-context, but - to borrow a metaphor a friend of mine once offered - that they carry self-contained meanings about with them in little semantic rucksacks on their backs.) And just as he projects his own favoured scheme for representing the interactions between sun and planets onto that scheme's objects - so that he now imagines it makes ready sense to proffer that 'really' or 'of course' the earth goes round the sun - so too does he without demur project his own (rather peculiar, anthropomorphising) forms of description onto the operation of the perceptual system, mistaking this for the proffering of insight into the essential nature of perceptual reality contact itself.
Let's consider some examples.
'I open my eyes and it seems as though there's a real world out there'
Here's how Seth continues his discussion:
As with the solar system, so with perception. I open my eyes and it seems as though there’s a real world out there. Today, I’m at home in Brighton. There are no cypress trees like there were in Santa Cruz, just the usual scatter of objects on my desk, a red chair in the corner, and beyond the window a totter of chimney pots. These objects seem to have specific shapes and colours, and for the ones closer at hand, smells and textures too. This is how things seem.
Although it may seem as though my senses provide transparent windows onto a mind-independent reality, and that perception is a process of ‘reading out’ sensory data, what’s really going on is – I believe – quite different. [all italics in original]
What does Seth mean here by 'it seems as though there's a real world out there'? Recall that the ordinary use of either 'seems as though' or 'looks as if', in the context of talk about perceptual judgement, is either i) to distinguish veridical perception from perceptual illusion or hallucination, or ii) to express self-conscious caution. The point of i) saying 'it looked as if there was an oasis there' is to make clear that here we're instead talking of a mirage. (And we understand what visual illusions are precisely by contrasting them with the ordinary business of seeing what's actually going on about us.) The point of saying ii) 'well it looks as if the golf ball's gone into the hole' is to make it clear that, being 50 rather than 2 yards away, we can't see it very well so may be wrong. Yet when it comes to 'I open my eyes and it seems as thought there's a real world out there' it's obvious that Seth is using the phrase 'it seems as though' in neither of these senses. He's not i) contrasting cases of misleading visual appearance with cases of ordinary perceptual encounter that take in how things are - since he's talking about ordinary, non-illusory, perceptual experience. It's not as if he could intelligibly say 'But it's all illusion, all a perceptual maya veil' since then we've lost the contrast ('veridical perception') which gives the concept of 'illusion' any content. And he's not ii) talking about being meaningfully cautious in perceptually less-than-ideal circumstances, since he's imagining our just opening our eyes in the day time and seeing whatever's right in front of us. So what does Seth mean by 'it seems as though'?
Well, he doesn't tell us. He uses words outside of their normal sense-affording context of application, but fails to spell out how he's instead using them. It's as if he were trying to extrapolate from the manifest intelligibility of 'The partly submerged pencil looks bent' to a putative intelligibility for 'This ordinary pencil right in front of me, in ordinary lighting, in a circumstance in which there's no hint of anything being awry, looks straight'. But any such transfer of meaning is illusory; the only illusion we here encounter is (not sensory but) one of meaning. Or, well, perhaps Seth does intend something specific, something else, with his words! But speaking as the reader of a book which is presumably written in order to be understood - it would've been nice to have been told what it was!
'commonsense' ... or 'out there'?
As a foil for his own 'perception as controlled hallucination' view (we'll get to this later), Seth offers something called a 'commonsense' or 'how things seem' conception of perception. This conception sees the world as being 'out there', and holds that our senses are 'windows' onto this 'external' reality, windows looked out of by 'the self', an 'I behind the eyes' which 'receives' and 'processes' 'sense data' in order to 'build an inner picture of an outside world'. ... And yet, and of course, if we're sitting in our study looking at the objects on the desk or the red chair, we don't experience these objects as 'out there'. After all, it doesn't 'seem' to us, we don't take it as commonsense to suppose, that we're somehow trapped inside our own bodies or heads! We might use the 'out there' locution to articulate what's beyond the front door, but such talk presupposes for its very intelligibility some perceivable 'in here' with which we may contrast it. And yet, in the case of looking at the paraphernalia on one's desk, there's no perceivable 'in here' to offer an intelligibility-providing contrast. (Thank goodness, right? Think how gruesome it'd be if the eyes pointed inwards.) And we look with, rather than through, our eyes. (What would I even look through my eyes with?! We may have adult teeth waiting in the wings to replace our milk teeth, but we don't have further eyes behind the alleged windows provided by our ordinary eyes.) What it is about this view that warrants its description as 'common sense' - rather than as something which, in a different sense of the idiom, really is rather 'out there' - is utterly unclear. It instead looks to me far more like what in C18th philosophy, and in even today's sciences of perception, but not for the man on the street, is fairly common nonsense.
Dan Dennett |
perception: 'generated by the brain'?
Part of this allegedly 'commonsense' view has it that we ordinarily think that 'A coffee cup out there in the world leads to a perception of a coffee cup generated within the brain.' And it turns out that whilst Seth will dispute a neurophysiological outside-in or bottom-up theory - one in which the neurological events enabling perception follow a unidirectional cascade from eyeball to striate cortex etc - he actually agrees with (what in fact is) this only allegedly 'commonsense' view that perception is 'generated within the brain'.
Nobody (sane) could disagree that we're dependent for our perception on the activity of the brain. In order to see - to actually see, that is - a cat, the following ingredients are required: 1 medium sized cat, a few ounces of light, 1 or 2 retinae, and a goodly pinch both of optical nerve, and of striate cortex, activation. (Or, if all we're after is a mere cat hallucination, we may leave out the first 4 ingredients.) From none of this does it follow, however, that perception is intelligibly described as 'generated within' the brain. Perception just isn't the right kind of thing to be 'generated' anywhere. (In truth, and en passant: whilst I just offered the above 5 ingredients as a recipe for perception, we ought to acknowledge that, to truly be counted a perceiver, one must also enjoy animate life: a body, and all the neural and physiological movement control apparatus to sustain such a life. But let's not get into that here!)
Now, if we'd subscribed to what Seth construes as the 'commonsense' view - that perception involves inner images - we can I think imagine thinking of perception as being generated, since its in the nature of the coming about of images that we do talk intelligibly of their generation. Absent some such conception, however, and it's hard to see what talk of 'generation' could be getting at, let alone talk of 'generation within the brain'. Compare my paying for my shopping. Paying, like perceiving, is something I do. But must the paying be generated somewhere, perhaps somewhere within me? No, of course not. This isn't to doubt that it happens - it most certainly does (I'm not a thief). It's instead to doubt that there's any clearly intelligible role for talk of 'generation' here. So too, I suggest, for the idea that perception is 'generated by' - or as Seth also says, 'a construction of' - the brain. Perception is not the name of an entity or process; it's instead an action - which is to say, or by which I mean: it's something I do. The action relies on the generation of ATP, neurotransmitters, etc., sure. And when I do perceive, all sorts of activity obtains in my CNS - which activity certainly is generated. But my perceiving is neither such activity itself, nor some further activity generated by it; it's not itself activity in this sense - though in a different sense we might describe it as an activity.
This idea of perception as something somehow 'coming about' within us pops up throughout Seth's discussion, and colludes there with other peculiar ideas such as that our perceptual consciousness is not of the world but of what is generated by neurological processes: 'Whenever we are conscious, we are conscious of something, or of many things. These are the contents of consciousness. To understand how they come about...[we should consider the functioning of the brain].' The idea here seems to be that what you are conscious of, when you are perceptually aware of something, is something which comes about inside the brain. This however is straightforwardly mistaken: what you're conscious of, when you actually perceive something, is something that's on the desk in front of you! And if you want to know how pencils, laptops and coffee cups come about - well, don't ask a neuropsychologist! (To voice this is not to engage in either naive or sophisticated or philosophical or psychological theorising about perception: it's merely to remember how to use the word 'perceive'.) ... Or perhaps Seth had in mind what philosophers call the 'intentional' rather than 'material' objects when talking about consciousness's 'contents'? But, well, that hardly helps, since we aren't conscious of intentional objects: they're logical constructs, not perceptibilia.
the brain: 'constantly making predictions'?
When presenting his opponent, Seth frequently merges together two different stories about perception into one. The first narrative is an empirically false theory: a neurological story about perception being enabled by a merely bottom-up stream of neuronal activity that begins at the retinae and moves on to the striate cortex, activating 'feature detectors' as it goes along its merry afferent way. The other is not even false: it's the philosophically confused notion of a perceiving person as allegedly being in the desperate epistemic predicament of having to reconstruct the glories of the visual scene from the meagre data to be found on the retinae - as if we were all somehow trapped inside our own skulls. Bring these together and we arrive at the idea of the brain now being involved in somehow solving this poor person's predicament. (As far as I can tell we also find something like this latter muddle in Helmholtz, Gregory, Frith, and in much of contemporary cognitive neuroscience.)
Rather than separating out the empirically testable from the philosophically confused, Seth's own positive alternative is also something of an unholy hybrid. One aspect of it is a scientifically intriguing story - this has visual perception neurologically underwritten not only by afferent 'bottom-up' enervation deriving from retinal stimulation but also, and more importantly, by a complex 'top-down' set of central processes. Unfortunately however, and so far as I could tell (I've read chapter 4 carefully but rather skipped about in the rest of the book), Seth tells us absolutely nothing at all about the actual neurological details. (Perhaps he thought the reader just wouldn't find this of interest. ... I admit to finding this all a great shame. To return to Wittgenstein for a moment: recall his discussion with Bouwsma about the difference between the ghastly pop-sci writing of the likes of Jeans or Eddington, and the patient, empirically detailed, well-grounded, accessible writing found in Faraday's Chemical History of the Candle. The former tends toward the sensational and merges inchoate philosophical claims with poorly elucidated empirical details; the latter deploys careful plain prose to describe actual empirical details, making a circumscribed matter truly intelligible to a lay reader. Speaking for myself I found Seth's popular book ( - I'll own that I know nothing of his actual neuroscientific contributions, and have no idea if I'd even understand them - ), with its lack of actual neuroscientific detail and its sweeping, conceptually awry, claims about consciousness, to be rather more Jeans than Faraday.) The other is the philosophically confused notion articulated above: of an anthropomorphised brain in the dismal epistemic predicament of somehow fathoming an external world from the confines of its own bony cavern.
Here's the story as he develops it:
[T]he brain is constantly making predictions about the causes of its sensory signals, predictions which cascade in a top-down direction through the brain’s perceptual hierarchies (the grey arrows in the image opposite). If you happen to be looking at a coffee cup, your visual cortex will be formulating predictions about the causes of the sensory signals that originate from this coffee cup.
What is it for a brain to make predictions? Well, let's recall first what it is for a creature to make predictions. To predict you must first be able to 'dict' - i.e. verbally communicate, describe what is happening right now. After this you must be able to enjoy the kinds of thoughts about the future which are afforded to such language users as have mastered tensed verbs. Animals and young children can anticipate or expect (we ascribe anticipation to them on the basis of their ongoing coping with a changing world, on the basis of their lack of surprise by changes, etc.) but not predict. Such mastery of tensed verbs is of course not simply a matter of being able to say certain things. It's rather a skill which requires its performer to be culturally situated, to act and react in such ways as warrant us talking of intention and agency, to be able to use a whole lot of other language too, to mean what one says, and so on. Literally none of these things are possible for non-human animals or pre-linguistic children, let alone any of their behaviourally inert, non-vocal, non-verbal internal organs.
So we're forced to conclude that - since it'd be a nonsense to say that a brain is actually expecting or anticipating, let alone predicting, anything - Seth must either i) be in a terrible muddle, or ii) be, wittingly or unwittingly, using the word 'predict' in a special way. Let's adopt interpretative charity and assume the latter. Seth is really talking, we might say, about 'prediction2'. The question arises: what are the criteria governing its use; what are its ascription conditions? When shall we say of a natural process - e.g. one occurring in the brain - that it constitutes a prediction2? Shall it be that, say, a leaf predicts2 the sun's position if it turns the leaf not to where the sun now is but to where it will maximise photosynthesis in twenty minutes? Shall we say that a pancreas (let's imagine, I've no idea how they work...) predicts2 what insulin shall be required to digest the food that's being eaten if it releases it not in response to current blood sugar levels but instead in response to mastication or smell? Well, we can do! That's just fine! A perfectly innocent metaphor which we perfectly well understand. Unfortunately, however, Seth doesn't tell us what he means by 'predict', so his theory remains either cogent yet occult, or, if he was intending his word in the normal sense, incoherent.
It might be argued: 'But surely scientists extend or creatively misuse words all the time; scientific theorising is riddled with metaphor, and this is all for the better!' It's important to note that with that I have absolutely no quarrel. All I ask is that the metaphor user or new sense deployer stop at some point to explain what this new or extended use is. Otherwise we just shan't know what's being talked about.
'perception as controlled hallucination'
Hippolyte Taine |
So how do we get to 'controlled hallucination'? Well, having accepted i) the unhelpful philosophical idea that internal neural processes either are or generate perceptual experiences, whilst ii) promoting the valuable empirical idea that perceptual activity is made possible by largely top-down rather than bottom-up neurological processes, we arrive at the idea that actual perceptual experiences exist or arise independently of their objects! It's this odd admixture of epistemology and neuroscience that results in a perfectly legitimate (if radically under-described in 'Being You') neurological story taking on such extraordinary epistemological garb.
The truth, of course, is that far from veridical perception being helpfully theorised in terms of hallucination, it is necessarily that against which hallucination can be understood for what it is. Again, only on an 18th century picture according to which experiences go on somehow 'inside us' could anyone even begin to think of hallucination as the stuff of perception itself. We only have to recall what it is to hallucinate - to have an experience which in some ways if not in all is for one as if one were actually perceiving something despite the fact that one isn't - to realise what a non-starter it is. Perception, considered epistemologically, has to do with our 'openness' to the world, our capacity to 'take in' how things are. Those are epistemological metaphors, mind you: they've nothing to do with subpersonal goings on in the retinae, optical nerve, or striate cortex. There is simply no reason to superimpose the two pictures, any more than there's reason to superimpose the facts about the control of movements by the motor cortex onto a story about acting on intention. (A point Susan Hurley made back in 1998.) Neither the intentions nor the perceptual experiences are 'inside' us; action is not 'output' and sensation is not 'input'; the subpersonal is not the instantiation of the personal.
Søren Overgaard has recently made the point that something like a performative contradiction appears to lie at the heart of the 'perception is hallucination' view, just as it famously does for the 'eliminative materialist' and the 'logical positivist' projects. The cognitive scientist, after all, presumably got the evidence for his view by inspecting brain scans, reading papers, etc. But according to Seth he in fact experienced a hallucination of these scans, papers, etc. It is of the essence of hallucination, however, that it provides no actual knowledge of the world about one. So the theory would appear to be based upon no actual evidence. Now clearly this is a rather cheeky objection. But it's important to understand it for the challenge it is, which may be put like this: 'You say perception is hallucination, but obviously, in any ordinary sense of the word, it is not. So please, please, tell us what instead you mean by 'hallucination'!'
'chairs aren't red'
Not content to leave us with the paradox of perception as hallucination, Seth next ventures into the notion that chairs (which ones? ... red ones...) aren't red. We get there by way of some standard-issue and utterly sound observations regarding the context- and light-levels- influenced nature of our perceptual judgements combined, once again, with some decidedly C18th philosophy - this time to do not only with a conception of perception as something happening inside us but also with 'secondary qualities' (colour, sound, etc.) not truly belonging to objects. How now does the story go?
Seth begins by pointing out that our capacity to judge the colour of objects is enabled not only by our responsivity to light of this or that wavelength, but also by a range of contextual factors including the form of illumination in play. 'Take a white piece of paper outdoors and it still looks white, even though the light it reflects now has a very different spectral composition'. So far, so good: it's not simply that different lighting and contexts can mislead us as to the actual colour of a thing (as assessed by taking it outside into daylight); it's also that we can correctly perceive that something is the same colour even when the wavelength of the light reflected from it alters considerably.
From this, however, Seth argues - not against the reductionist notion that wavelength is a happy index of colour, but - that the 'brain infers' the 'invariant property' of 'the way in which the paper reflects light', and that this 'inference' or 'best guess' 'appear[s] in our conscious experience'. We finally arrive at the subjectivist notion that 'colour is not a definite property of things-in-themselves', but instead 'a useful device that evolution has hit upon' to keep track of objects in changing lighting conditions. But how do we get here? How do we get to the idea that colour is a property not of things themselves but is instead 'the subjective, phenomenological aspect' of the 'mechanisms of perception' deployed by the brain to keep track of objects through keeping a bead on the 'way-in-which-they-reflect-light'?
So far as I can tell, the thought tacitly underlying Seth's theory here owes nothing to science and everything to scientism. It's the thought, that is, that the 'real' properties of things are what's discernible by natural scientific investigation. We can I think see this in such peculiar lines as the following: 'Chairs aren't red just as they aren't ugly or old-fashioned or avant-garde.' But of course, chairs can in fact truly be ugly or old-fashioned or red, so it's obvious he's not using the term 'is' or 'really' in the normal way. With this deviation in play he effectively invites us to simply leave behind our ordinary use of 'real' to distinguish the actual colour of things from the colour they merely appear to have under certain odd lighting conditions or behind a hastily added disguise. But, well, why would we use the word 'real' in this new way? How does it help rather than confound? Which scientific facts about vision are illuminated rather than obscured by such a usage? I must here own that I just can't think of a cogent reason to speak of red chairs not being red.
Seth arrives at the thought that 'we assume that we each see the world in roughly the same way, and most of the time perhaps we do. But even if this is so, it isn’t because red chairs really are red'. Here we're rather back to where we started, with a use of the words 'assume' and 'same way' without a manifest sense in the context of their applications. I assume that you and I both see the red chair as red? Well, sure, I typically assume that you've nothing wrong with your eyes. But what does it even mean: to see a red thing as red? (To not be making a mistake about its colour perhaps?) Or: what's even meant by 'same or different way' here? Once again, Seth puts words together in what look to be grammatically well-formed sentences - but we're left with no understanding of what they mean in the particular context of his prose.
]]>12th June 2020 St Cats, Oxford / Revised for 1st March 2022, Phenolab
1. Introduction
a. Psychopathologists tell us of range of distinctly schizophrenic disturbances – Ichstörungen – that we may call ‘self-disturbances’, ‘I disturbances’… even call them ‘ipseity disturbances’ if you want…
(a) "My thoughts are not thought by me. They are thought by somebody else"
(b) "Feelings are not felt by me, things are not seen by me, only by my eyes"
(c) "This (thing, event) directly refers to me."
(d) "My thoughts can influence (things, events). This (event) happens because I think it"
(e) "To keep the world going, I must not stop thinking/breathing, otherwise it would cease to exist."
(f) "My experience has changed somehow. It is not real somehow such as I myself am somehow not real."
(g) "Things do not feel real. There is something like a wall of glass between me and everything else."
(h) "Time has disappeared. … you could say there are bits of time, small pieces, shaken and mingled, or you could also say that there is no time at all."
The English psychopathological lexicon calls some of these ‘passivity / made experiences; depersonalization, derealisation; delusions of reference, delusional perception’.
b. My claim in what follows: The phenomena are what they are, and are articulated by patients the way they are articulated; with all that I naturally have no quarrel! But the theory brought to bear on them by quite a few phenomenological psychopathologists is unhelpful. Unhelpful: not because it's false - but because it's meaningless. So the explanations of the pathology developed using the theory are invalid. (Also, though this is a topic for another day: it's unclear that we should even be after explanations of this kind for psychotic experiences.)
Some key terms from this phenomenological theory: Sense of myness / mineness. Ipseity. Self-givenness (i.e. givenness to self). First-person point of view. First-personal presence. Sense of self-coinciding. Auto-affection. Consciousness’s purely immanent (i.e. non-transcendent) presence to itself. Non-thetic self-consciousness.
A note on ‘self-consciousness’: if one enjoys this simply to the extent that one can make meaningful use of the word "I" in ‘avowals’ or ‘declarations’ of one’s thoughts, feelings, bodily posture, actions, etc…. then, ok, fine! No quarrel!
But if ‘self-consciousness’ is taken to mean ‘consciousness of self’ – so that I could be said to properly use the word ‘I’ as above because I'm in some sense ‘conscious of’ my mental and physical states…. Then, not ok, not fine!
2. Schneider and Jaspers
How this got going in the Heidelberg school:
Schneider:
Because this sense of “me” and “mine” is so elusive a concept to grasp, its disturbances are ill defined and hard to sample. This particularly applies to thinking and somatic experience… Only when the sense of “me” and “mine” is encroached on from without can we grasp at the disturbance.
Jaspers:
Self-awareness is [KJ alleges] present in every psychic event. … Every psychic manifestation, whether perception, bodily sensation, memory, idea, thought or feeling carries this particular aspect of ‘being mine’ of having an ‘I’-quality, of ‘personally belonging’, of it being one’s own doing. … If these psychic manifestations occur with the awareness of their not being mine, of being alien, automatic, independent, arriving from elsewhere, we term them phenomena of depersonalization. … In the natural course of our activities we do not notice how essential this experience of unified performance is.
The idea: a putative non-thetic (non-positional - these are Sartrean terms) self-awareness is normally so recessive that it can’t be noticed. But we do notice it in breakdowns, and these reveal to us something about the structure of ordinary (self-)consciousness (an idea also mooted by John Campbell, George Graham & G Lynn Stephens). (Positional Cs: Cs transcends itself, is directed at objects in (i.e. is an ‘intentional’ relation to) the world. Non-pos self-Cs which provides the putative 'sense of mineness’ is not ‘directed at’ anything in this manner; Sartre puts brackets round the ‘of’: my seeing the cat doesn’t contain also an awareness of my seeing, as if my seeing is the intentional object of a further act.)
So what is this sense of mineness? This sense of my thoughts, hand, face, feelings, sensations, as mine?
Well, what are ‘senses’? 26 different senses of ‘sense’ in the OED!
19th OED sense: “A faculty, esp. of an intuitive nature, of accurately perceiving, discerning, or evaluating. Frequently with of.”
I will use the term 'experiential judgements’ here; you can have a sense of: outrage, foreboding, injustice, something being not right, sense of right and wrong, someone standing silently behind us, sense of timing. (En passant: talk of ‘experiential’ is here intended to get away from cogitation. By analogy: I may, as I drive by, judge or misjudge how close your car’s wing-mirror is to mine without ever thinking about it.)
Because they have to do with judgement, it’s essential to such senses that they may be misleading; it’s of their nature to get something right or wrong. My outrage may be misplaced; there may be nobody behind me; my arm may not be raised, my timing be off.
So what then is this alleged sense of mineness that my own thoughts and feelings and postures etc are involved in? Surely I don’t pre-reflectively judge that they are mine? For I can’t get it wrong that they are mine. (Although this is not a helpful formulation – see later.) The cases in which we can get it wrong, that an arm or a gesture is mine, (e.g. in a photo, on a battlefield) involve instead what Sartre called reflective consciousness.
Now, I can be radically confused. But there are 2 types of confusion. One involves error. But the relevant sort here has instead to do with failing to make sense.
Let me share 3 philosophical 'jokes' which have about them that depth which Wittgenstein said characterises a certain kind of philosophical humour:
1. William James’s correspondent’s anecdote about Baldy:
In half-stunned states, self-consciousness may lapse. A friend writes me: "We were driving back from —— in a wagonette. The door flew open and X., alias 'Baldy,' fell out on the road. We pulled up at once, and then he said, 'Did anybody fall out?' or 'Who fell out?'—I don't exactly remember the words. When told that Baldy fell out, he said, 'Did Baldy fall out? Poor Baldy!'
Baldy’s disturbance is manifest not simply in his confusedly calling himself by his own name, as a young child might, but by his falling out of the carriage and knowing that someone had fallen out – but not who!
Far from Baldy’s disturbance showing up a failure to engage in an allegedly normal business of correctly picking oneself out as the subject of one’s own activities, our sense of its absurdity instead shows up the nonsensicality of that very idea.
2. A Sufi tale attributed to Mullah Nasruddin:
After a long journey, Nasruddin came at night to the marketplace and lay down to sleep. But so many people were there in the hubbub that he feared not knowing which one was he on waking. To make himself identifiable, he tied a gourd to his ankle, and then went to sleep. His mischievous neighbour, seeing what the Mullah had done, untied the gourd and affixed it to his own ankle. On waking Nasruddin was mightily disturbed and exclaimed: ‘It seems that he is me. But if so, then who now am I?’
Nasruddin’s confusion here, we might say, consists not in his actually taking himself for his neighbour – since it’s not clear to us what that would even mean – but in his confusedly thinking that he so much as needs to identify himself in the first place.
3. Or: a nice story, 25th September 1938, front page of The Oregonian (newspaper), Portland, Oregon:
Headline: ‘Nope’, he says, Body isn’t his. ‘Charles Keville walked into a temporary morgue and looked at a body which had been identified as his. “Nope”, he said, “that ain’t me”, and walked out again.’
We understand all this - that there’s no such thing as identifying oneself to oneself as oneself - well enough when we laugh at the above ‘jokes’. And we forget it when we’re at our unfunny studies. Even so, the comic provides the truer understanding of human nature than the philosopher.
3. Is My-ness Just Competence with ‘I’?
Perhaps having a sense of myness simply involves the ability to self-ascribe thoughts and feelings, to use ‘I’ as a reflexive pronoun, to not confusedly ascribe my own thoughts and feelings to another?
OK, fine.
But if we agree to that, we shall also have to agree that reference to an absence of a sense of mineness is now utterly non-elucidatory when it comes to the Ichstörungen.
How so?
Well, if what it is to enjoy a sense of X is to not be in state Y, then we can’t form any clearer an idea of what it is to be in state Y by adverting to the absence of a sense of X.
The psychopathological ambition is, after all, something like this. Gordon says ‘The thoughts in my mind are not mine; they are Humphrey’s thoughts’. How is this so much as possible? Supposed answer: well, Gordon has suffered a disturbed sense of mineness, a disturbance of ipseity. But: what is it to suffer such a disturbed sense? Well, it’s to be disposed to become confused in the way Gordon becomes confused. ... This is a mere virtue dormitiva.
Anscombe registers this in her 1975 essay ‘The First Person’:
The … normal state is the absence of … discontinuity, dissociation and loss … [which] can therefore be called the possession of ‘self-feeling’: I record my suspicion that this is identifiable rather by consideration of the abnormal than the normal case.
4. Zahavi, Sass, & Parnas
Some examples of the phenomenological psychopathologists' claims:
On ipseity:
Parnas & Henriksen: “From a phenomenological perspective, all experience manifests in the first-person perspective as “my” experience—that is, the first-person givenness of experience implies a sense of “mine-ness,” “for-me-ness,” or “ipseity” that transpires through the flux of time and changing modalities of consciousness. … I am always pre-reflectively aware of being myself and I have no need for self-reflection to assure myself of being myself (e.g. I do not need to reflect upon who these feelings or thoughts might belong to in order to know that it is me).”
On psychopathology:
Schizophrenic disturbances of ‘mineness’ (Meinhaftigkeit (Schneider), for-me-ness, ipseity (Sartre)) are disturbances of ‘self-givenness’, disturbances of the ‘first-person/subjective perspective/presence’.
Parnas & Henriksen: ““ipseity disorder” … indicates an instability in the normally tacit, taken- for-granted, pre-reflective sense of being a subject of awareness and action, which no longer saturates the experiential life in the usual, unproblematic way”
Dan Zahavi: “whether a certain experience is experienced as mine or not … [depends] upon … the [implicit self-]givenness [the non-thetic/non-positional self-consciousness] of the experience. If the experience is given in a first-personal mode of presentation, it is experienced as my experience, otherwise not.”
Dan Zahavi: Talk of “mineness… is not meant to suggest that I own [all my] experiences in a way … similar to the way I possess external objects…” The experiences’ “commonality” has instead to do with “the distinct givenness [or] first-personal presence of experience. … [T]he experiences I am living through are given differently to me than to anybody else.”
A dialectical encounter, beginning with my critique:
Error Theory: It means nothing to say that own experiences are given or present to us. This is all just a hangover from an inner consciousness / introspection / acquaintance model of our involvement with our thoughts and feelings, in which they become objects of some kind of inner sense.
Imagined Response: But it is precisely the point of non-thetic/positional self-consciousness to deny this two-part subject-object relation in self-consciousness. Here we relate to ourselves qua ourselves not qua another.
Counter: But why talk of self-awareness or self-relating or givenness or presence at all here? Why think that when an object is present to us in our experience of it, the experience is also itself somehow present to us? [[[not quite sure what I had in mind here: Why think of self-consciousness as consciousness of/by a self?]]]
Response: Because without some such presence, how would we know what we think or feel? We would be ‘mind- or self- blind’.
Counter: Why assume that any kind of awareness or sense of anything is needed to self-ascribe sensations, thoughts, limb positions, etc? Being ‘mind-blind’ could only be a meaningful problem if our self-consciousness were some kind of self-awareness in the first place. (We are neither mind-blind nor mind-present!)
What then is our diagnosis as to what’s gone wrong - why is the ‘ipseity’ idea so attractive?
Diagnosis: this idea of inner immanent self-awareness: “is blown up out of a misconstrue of the reflexive pronoun” (Anscombe 1975, 25)
OK, so that sounds a bit ‘out-there’. How could it all be blown up out of a linguistic 'misconstrue'?
Well, recall first that the topic is: my alleged sense that I am the subject of my experiences. It is this alleged sense which has gone wrong in the ‘I disturbances’.
The critical Anscombian thought is that the underlying temptation here is to think that when I say ‘I feel X’, I’m expressing a thought which voices two judgements: that X is what is here felt, and that I am the one to feel X. But this is wrong in both parts: I am not, when I voice (say) my pain, judging that it’s pain that I’m in, nor that I am the one in pain.
The ‘misconstrue’ has to do with assuming that ‘I’ is a ‘referring expression’: that there is something (self-ascription) that could be succeeded or failed at here, that there is ‘guaranteed success’ in self-reference. But this is just a nonsense: if there’s no such thing as failure, there’s also no such thing as success.
It is rather to do with the fact that - to now come back to something I mentioned earlier and said then that I’d return to later - and to quote Anscombe (1975, 32): “Getting hold of the wrong object is excluded, and that makes us think that getting hold of the right object is guaranteed. But the reason [it’s excluded] is that there is no getting hold of an object at all.”
Talk of ‘immunity to error through misidentification’ is an unhelpful way to make a conceptual point – one that borrows the terms of the very kind of thought it’s really trying to reject. As if there actually was some kind of success – a guaranteed success in identification! – here in play.
Counter-Critique: On ‘I’ not being a referring expression – surely it refers to the one using it?
Counter: Well, the issue isn’t the word ‘refer’. Help yourself to it if you must. But the thing is: that it ‘refers to the one using it’ is a rule that others can use - but it doesn’t at all capture our own use of it.
Thus we can’t achieve the same with ‘I' as we can with names (so also questionable whether ‘I’s is really a pronoun at all – depending on what we mean by ‘pronoun’). We can imagine peculiar cases, more neurological than psychopathological, in which I’m mistaken about whether, say, Richard Gipps is hungry (perhaps I’ve forgotten my own name). But what we don’t find cogent is the suggestion that I may be mistaken about whether it’s I who is/am hungry.
Counter-Critique: We are not talking about ‘linguistically-conditioned self-reference’, but about ‘a property of mineness in experience itself’.
Response: The point of the critique was that precisely such talk of ‘mineness', ‘self-presence’, etc., expresses a philosophical fantasy itself rooted in a misunderstanding of our concepts. Avowal - in the sense of simultaneous expression and self-ascription (e.g. ‘I’m hungry’, ‘I hope it’s nearly the end of the talk’) am in pain - is not grounded in any kind of judgement about who we’re talking about. We aren’t in the business of picking out anything or anyone, in putative pre-reflective judgements of however immanent a sort, when we use the reflexive first-person pronoun.
5. Conclusion: What Then Are Ichstörungen?
So: confusional failures of ‘self-consciousness’ either in clear consciousness (delusional passivity experiences etc), or in Baldy type cases, are not confusions of a mis-judgement but of a nonsense sort.
This is what is striking. This is what must be accepted. We get into such confusions. Especially when severely mentally ill. But also when infants, when dreaming, when concussed, etc.
The ‘self-alienation’ these experiences manifest shows itself in the use of a language only apt for alterity (for matters ‘positional’, for judgements proper) in the domain of subjectivity (my ‘living out’ of my experiences).
There’s no need for psychopathological theorists to follow their subjects here – to embed alienated conceptions of subjectivity in their explanations of alienated experience.
The temptation to the question remains: ‘So just what is going on here?’. Well, what I leave you with is the thought that the subject who is experiencing radical self-disturbances is having such experiences as are actually individuated by their disposition to use just the peculiar terms they use. (Jaspers: We're forced to use the words provided by the patients. ... Not, I'd add, because we don't enjoy independent access to their mental goings on, not because we have to make do with second best ... but because the very idea of such access is incoherent, because we have here only the illusion of something better ... and ultimately because the criteria of identity for the experiences in question just are the articulations offered them by their sufferers.)
Don’t think that the patient here is accurately or inaccurately describing their own experiences. If they were sane, still prodromal perhaps, they might say ‘it is for me somehow as if I had a thought that’s not my own’. No: they are not describing, but expressing, and the expression gives the criteria of identity for the content of the confusion.
]]>This, sometimes, is surely the right way of thinking about it - think of such anxiety as stems from, say, alcohol misuse, thyroid problems, and some trauma-generated anxiety. CBT, I think, often takes this view: the aim of treatment is to reduce anxiety by altering core beliefs, defusing from fraught thoughts, reinterpreting bodily sensations, etc. The patient may come into therapy thinking their anxiety has a meaning (e.g. "I’m going mad / dying"). The aim of therapy, however, is pretty much to convince the patient that it has no significance, carries no message, at all. It's just a set of bodily sensations and neurobiological activations that are receiving an optional and misinformed interpretation. A psychodynamic therapy may be similar: anxiety is caused by inner conflict - so to achieve the therapeutic goal of reducing the anxiety, address the conflict. Your superego's giving you gyp - so learn to challenge it and develop a gentler self-relation.
I now think that this way of thinking about anxiety can have considerable costs. What it ignores is the way in which anxiety may be taken to disclose valuable truths about your life and mind, which truths have a significance far beyond their anxiogenic character. A patient recently relayed to me a Joseph Campbell quote:
It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.
On such a view, anxiety is giving us a useful clue as regards our individuation. It's showing us where growth is required. Where is it that I have an inner conflict, which conflict I will do well to transcend not simply because it's anxiogenic, but rather because it is ennobling and mature, dignified and individuating, to do so? Being a divided self is intrinsically undignified; it reduces our capacity for truth telling. It reduces our self-possession, and leaves us liable to being buffeted by fate. To manage the anxiety which stems from inner division we deploy defences that damage or suppress ourselves and others. Anxiety provides valuable information about where the treasures of life, the source of what you're looking for, is. Listen to it, turn toward it whilst understanding what it tells of your as-yet un-met challenges, meet such challenges as become you, thereby living a life more attuned to your noble values.
Such conflict anxiety is just one form anxiety takes. Another form is existential: my anxiety here constitutes the shaking apart of my insecure self when I'm facing life challenges such as isolation, illness, social socially holding my own, etc. Here too it can provide a valuable signal - that we're not yet fit to face all the facts of life. That we have some resilience to build, some exposure to undergo, a zone of proximal development to expand, facts to face, courage to build, shame to overcome, self-possession to develop, and integrity to muster.
In what sense, then, does anxiety have a meaning? I think it's clear that the meaning isn't 'intrinsic'. That is to say, the meaning it enjoys is really a function of our living a life in an existential mode. It derives from our living it under the aspect of - to borrow another phrase from Campbell - the hero's journey. It implies we're actually interested in realising ourselves, individuating, become who we can be, growth, strengthening ourselves to better protect others, facing our fears, facing our failings, taking moral courage and making amends where we need to, desisting from letting ourselves and others down in a way which currently produces a diffuse guilty anxiety, and so on. Against such a set of values, anxiety has a valuable meaning for us. It shows us where to look.
The real tragedy of the view of anxiety with which I started out, then, is not I think a function of anything it has to say about anxiety per se. It's rather the utter absence of an existential perspective that trots along with it, the absence of goals beyond the blandly affective ones of 'feeling better'. And yet it's almost a truism of psychology that 'feeling better' is rarely helpfully set as a goal in life, that hedonism is a dud, and that happiness comes from the pursuit of meaning in life rather than vice versa.
Bentley University, July 12-15, 2021
Solitude by Usmonov |
So, what I don't mean is moral shrillness, or moralising, or a failure of empathy, or an absence of the light touch, or an inability to take oneself less than seriously (i.e. a failure of what Jonathan Lear calls irony.)
And now the example. It's from a recent blogpost by Jon Frederikson; Frederikson is a particularly lucid and thoughtful exponent of ISTDP (Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy). One of his trademarks is what ISTDP calls 'deactivating the projection of will':
Pt: "I don't want to dig too deep today because I'm in a precarious personal equilibrium."Th: I have no right to dig into anything you don’t want to dig into. That’s why I have to ask you what you want to dig into that you think would be useful to you.” [Deactivating the projection of will.]Pt: I don’t want to dig into anything.Th: It’s your therapy, so you can dig as much or as little as you want. [Deactivate the projection of will.] If we don’t dig into anything, what will be the result for you?Pt: I won’t get anywhere.Th: So it sounds like you are at war with yourself: wanting to get somewhere and not wanting to get somewhere. What’s that like to notice that struggle within yourself? [Point out the struggle he faces within himself. There is no struggle between the two of you.]Pt: "I'm afraid if I connect too much with how exhausted I am, I will just fall down."Th: That makes complete sense. Would it make sense to look under the exhaustion to see what it might be covering up? [Exhaustion is not something we want to explore since the patient would only become depleted. We might test whether exhaustion is functioning as a defense and invite the patient to look under it.]Pt: “I don’t want to look at my issues too closely today because I’m balancing lots of things and I feel fragile.”Th: I have no right to look at any of your issues unless there are issues you want to look at that you think would be helpful to you. That’s why we need to find out what you want to look at that you think will be helpful to you. [Deactivate the projection of will.]Pt: I feel fragile.Th: How so? [If the patient is fragile, naturally we want to know so we can assess his strengths and weaknesses. Or the patient may not be fragile. We can’t know unless we assess.]Pt: I didn’t sleep well last night.Th: And the fragility? What are the signs telling you that you might be fragile?Pt: “I’m afraid if I let myself feel how tired I am I won’t be able to go on.”Th: That makes sense. Shall we look under this tiredness and see what it might be covering up?Pt: Covering up?Th: Yes. Would it make sense to look at a specific example where this tiredness comes in, so we could see what it might be covering up? [Invitation to engage in the therapeutic task.]
Now Frederikson doesn't describe his intervention in moral terms. He focuses, quite properly, on the character of the defense and the apt means of blocking it in the service of the therapeutic work. But it seems to me that the extract warrants a moral redescription, and that such a description will reveal something important about what's going on.
The first thing I want to note is that the projection of will is, in a sense, quietly abusive. I don't say this to make a big thing of it - it is often just a little thing - but to highlight an essential aspect of its character.
So: I come to my therapist's consulting room but then, rather than stay in touch with my wish to know myself better and do the work of therapy, I regress and in effect say 'I want to be here but I don't want to do the work'. Except if it'd actually been said like that, then the patient would at least have been owning the contradictoriness of her action and her thought. Yet instead of owning the contradiction, she secretly disavows her wish to do the work whilst still coming to therapy. The contradiction is a living, rather than a thematised, one.
The therapist is after all a professional, is someone who does her job because she enjoys exercising her skills. And the patient who says he doesn't want to work in the session is depriving them of the opportunity of actually earning their living by plying their trade. (Imagine going to the dentist and saying, 'oh don't worry I'll pay you for your time, but today I just want to sit and chat'... It's not cool.)
For a patch of time some years ago, when a couple of patients habitually turned up late and apologised for it, I found myself saying something like 'Well as for me I was very happy reading my book; and I'll still be paid; it's surely only your own time you're wasting.' The reason I'd give myself for saying this was that I wanted to help them see what they were losing because of their actions, as well as to help myself avoid slipping into a 'oh that's quite all right, please don't worry about it', people-pleasing, overly empathic, state of mind. No doubt it was sometimes of help in those ways. But it truly failed in at least five respects. First, in saying it I failed to acknowledge the fact that I do my job because I find it rewarding - not just because it's how I earn my living. In this way what I said was disrespectful to myself: I wasn't noticing that I was being deprived of the opportunity to be the professional I am. (Of course, properly understood, the discussion of the lateness was also precisely an opportunity to engage my professional skills! But y'know, and to make an analogy: being abused by a narcissist is also an opportunity to develop one's self-possession - it doesn't mean we should thank them for it.) Second, by implying that it really was of no more value to me than my book, it devalued the therapeutic work that the patient and I were doing together and potentially also the patient. Thirdly, it failed because it deprived the patient of a chance to have a healthy experience of repentance, an apology being heard, blame being aptly apportioned, and forgiveness being given. (Experiencing true rupture repair, as opposed to competitive grudge-bearing, is majorly important for many patients since their early environment provided them very little opportunity for internalising healthy regulative moral ideals.) Fourthly it tanked because it rather prevented meaningful investigation into the meaning of the lateness. And finally it failed because it was perhaps something of a passive aggressive vengeful devaluation of the patient. I thought I was being morally serious - but, yeah, I wasn't.
Back to Frederikson on deactivating the projection of will. So, as well as not holding onto her own wish to actually do therapy, and as well as disrespecting the therapist by prima facie depriving her of the opportunity to ply her noble trade, the patient also disrespects the therapist by bending out of shape the moral fabric of their relationship. This projection is in truth a kind of projective identification. The patient not only fails to hold onto his own wish to do the work; he regressively shunts it into the therapist; and now sets up a dynamic in which the therapist is invited to experience herself as opposed to the patient. This is the structural equivalent of going up to an innocent stranger in a bar, nudging them, and then - rather than apologising - acting as if there's now some standing beef between them for which the nudgee is no more responsible than the nudged. The real issue, of course, is what's going on within the nudgee - it's an issue between himself and himself.
It's precisely here that the therapist's moral seriousness is most required. For what she mustn't do is what I described my past self doing above - or, even worse, just ignore the issue or become pathologically 'understanding'. But rather, in a gentle and firm way, she must implicitly call the patient out on what he's doing, and invite him to re-own what he's projecting. This demands the therapist's full self-possession. She must have spotted the projection in play, been able to stand up to it without getting drawn into an enactment, implicitly let the patient know not only that it's happening but that it's not ok, hold in mind the patient's better self's reason for coming to therapy even whilst he's busy disowning it, actively recall the patient to his better self, openly hand back the covertly passed over baton of the patient's will, not be reactive or dismissive, hold true to a dignified sense of her own value (and in this way manifest that moral value we call self respect), hold morally true to a sense of the value of the work, be aware of the patient's genuine struggles and anxieties without letting this awareness become a spurious exculpation, and invite a reparative - 'depressive' rather than 'paranoid-schizoid' position - dynamic. Being 'the adult in the room' is not, we might say, simply a matter of having a certain psychological maturity. Or rather, it is, but such a maturity must be understood as itself ineliminably a moral maturity.
I want to end by noting that it's not only master therapists who have (amongst other signal attributes) cultivated and embody what I'm calling 'moral seriousness'. The other professionals who I'm most aware of embodying it are what we might call master school teachers and master social workers. They deal with difficult and in some ways toxic dynamics not by becoming remote, not by morphing into a perversely uninvolved version of the so-called analytic 'blank screen', not by allowing themselves to get sucked into the dynamics or by becoming 'superior' to their charges. Instead they retain dignity and, without being patronising about it, and without minimising the fact of the disrespect in play, and - without removing themselves from the vital, dynamic, respect-constituted character of the relationship - recall their charges to their better selves.
]]>that therapy is to genuine loving friendship (‘agape’) as prostitution is to erotic love (‘eros’). The therapist is selling herself, or some simulacrum of herself; the client is being cheated if this fact is played down or veiled.Therapy may look like something which it makes sense to pay for if it’s dressed up as something technical - as if the patient is merely consulting for the therapist’s skill or knowledge. But Read’s point is that real therapy isn’t aptly articulated in such terms - for therapy requires us to be genuinely loving toward our patients. What’s really mutative in it is, he suggests - and with certain caveats I agree with him - is something rather ordinary and commonplace: it’s a truly caring form of attention. But at the same time, the very idea of therapy as a transaction seems to cancel what’s important in that:
Prostitution is relatively direct and ‘clinical’, or at worst is the selling of a fantasy of a relationship. Is psychotherapy, too, not a more subtle selling of such a fantasy? The therapist doesn’t - mustn’t - literally kiss their client; but I, for one, find the ‘metaphorical kiss’ which the therapist gives their client in return for ‘love money’ perhaps more repulsive than the paid attentions - the literal sex - that a prostitute gives their client’.
What I am asking is simply whether ‘mutuality’ - and the kind of I-thou meeting which … is so vital to the success of … therapy - is possible at all, given the asymmetry introduced by money.One response would be to bite the bullet, but to compare therapy with surrogacy rather than prostitution. That is, just as a sex therapist may use a surrogate to help a patient gain their confidence, without crippling shame, before they can move onto genuine sexual relationships, so too might a therapist play the role of a surrogate for someone who has been having what we might call love troubles. The patient can now experiment with expressing himself fully for the first time, to see whether or not his habitual latent expectation - that he will be met with rejection if he shows his true emotional face - will be confirmed or disconfirmed. Perhaps he’s paying for tolerance for when he lashes out or hides away.
Transference provides the impulse necessary for understanding and translating the language of the unconscious; where it is lacking, the patient does not make the effort or does not listen when we submit our translation to him. Essentially, one might say, the cure is effected by love. And actually transference provides the most cogent, indeed, the only unassailable proof that neuroses are determined by the individual’s love life.Here, too are some minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society from around the same time:
There is only one power that can remove the resistances, the transference. The patient is compelled to give up his resistances to please us. Our cures are cures of love. There would thus remain for us only the task of removing the personal resistances (those against the transference). To the extent that transference exists — to that extent can we bring about cures; the analogy with hypnotic cures is striking.What we seem to find here is in fact the rather dismal view that a patient will only change to please a therapist who they’ve idealised. The ‘love’ of which we hear, here, is in short nothing but the ‘positive’ transference. That is, it’s a defensively motivated form of relating which requires an unrealistic idealised sense of the therapist along with a diminishment of the patient’s self-possession. Far from this providing a paradigm of therapeutic action I suggest it represents the floundering of early psychoanalysis to find its way into genuinely therapeutic activity.
Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another's company? For if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two—I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?'—there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need.In short, this is a story of love which has us seeking for our ‘other half’. But as Beck tells it, and as we all actually know, this fantasy is an expression of an ‘infatuation program’ which cannot make for genuinely happy relationship. What else is needed? Well, we need he says to develop realistic attitudes concerning what our partners actually think, want, know, understand, need, and feel. We need, in short, to recognise them in their separateness from us - to recognise that we don’t magically know what they are thinking and needing, and so we need to ask them.
cannot advise my colleagues too urgently to model themselves during psychoanalytic treatment on the surgeon, who puts aside all his feelings, even as human sympathy, and concentrates his mental forces on the single aim of performing the operation as skilfully as possible.This advice famously contrasts not only with aspects of his own practice but with the attitude of, amongst others, Ferenczi (1932) who wrote that
if the patient notices that I feel a real compassion for her and that I am eagerly determined to search for the causes of her suffering, she then suddenly not only becomes capable of giving a dramatic account of the events but also can talk to me about them.It also contrasts markedly with the approach of Carl Rogers who from the 1940s offered the world his client- or person-centred therapy. In the extract I’ll now read, Rogers approvingly quotes a colleague’s description of how the word
“love”, easily misunderstood though it may be, is the most useful term… to describe a basic ingredient of the therapeutic relationship. … [A]s a therapist I can allow a very strong feeling or emotion of my own to enter the therapeutic relationship, and expect that the handling of this feeling from me by the client will be an important part of the process of therapy for him. [T]herapeutic interaction at this emotional level, rather than interaction at an intellectual … level, regardless of the content concerned, is the effective ingredient in therapeutic growth. … In terms of the therapeutic situation, I think this feeling [our deepest need to be met with as a person ourselves] says to the client, I have a real hunger to know you, to experience your warmth, your expressivity - in whatever form it may take - to drink as deeply as I can from the experience of you in the closest, most naked relationship which we can achieve. I do not want to change you to suit me: the real you and the real me are perfectly compatible ingredients of a potential relationship which transcends, but in no way violates, our separate identities.Here and elsewhere (see Client-Centred Therapy 1951 p.160ff.) Rogers fundamentally agrees with other humanistically minded psychologists - such as Gordon Allport (1950, p. 80) - that “Love is incomparably the greatest psychotherapeutic agent”. We also find such an understanding in object relations theorists such as Harry Guntrip (1953) who talked of a “kind of parental love . . . agape . . . [which] is the kind of love the psycho-analyst and psychotherapist must give the patient because he did not get it from his parents in sufficient measure or in a satisfactory form.” And we will come to all this soon. But what I want to note for now is how Rogers consistently sentimentalises love. That is to say, he turns it into a feeling or emotion. The third condition of effective therapy - positive regard, which he also calls love - is talked of by Rogers in terms of what the therapist experiences: "the counselor is experiencing a warm, positive, acceptant attitude toward what IS the client.” Or: “I am describing … a feeling which is not paternalistic, nor sentimental, nor superficially social and agreeable.”
Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object… Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it. (Waiting for God, p. 111-2)We can bring this form of attention into clearer view by contrasting it with how we relate to another when we stand back and think about his character. Describing someone as ‘a character’ is another way in which we refuse to pay loving attention to them. Here is how the Danish theologian K E Løgstrup puts it:
In love and sympathy there is no impulse to give an account of the other person’s character. We do not construct a picture of who he or she is. …We have not made a conscious effort, for the simple reason that nothing about the other has made us wary of them. … On the other hand, if we are not in sympathy with the other person, but there is some tension between us because there is something in the other that we are uncertain about or view with irritation, dissatisfaction, or antipathy, then we begin to construct a picture of the other’s character. We see in him or her a complex set of dispositions, because we are wary of that person. … But in being together with the other person, the picture normally breaks down; their personal presence annihilates it. (The Ethical Demand p. 13)I now want to offer a particular example. It’s curious in its way, because it doesn’t involve interpersonal love. But perhaps this can even help - in just the same way that we’re sometimes more able to feel pathos in stories of the heroism or friendship of animals than of people. It comes from W H Vanstone’s book Love’s Endeavours, Love’s Expense. Vanstone, a clergyman, is visited by two bored boys from his parish asking him for ideas of what to do in the winter half-term break. And he gives them the uninspired task of making a model of a waterfall they’d all visited in the Irish countryside the previous summer. They set about their task without enthusiasm. But over four days they really got into it, becoming oblivious to mealtimes and their own tiredness, utterly giving themselves to the task.
Having expended to the full their own power to make, they became the more attentive to what the model itself might disclose. The two boys became vulnerable in and through that which, out of virtually nothing, they had brought into being. … For the self-giving built into the model I could find no simple word or name but love. … I had actually seen the activity of love - the concentration, the effort and the unsparingness of self-giving that are involved in love. … Love aspires to reach that which, being truly an ‘other’, cannot be controlled. The aspiration of love is that the other, which cannot be controlled, may receive: and the greatness of love lies in its endless and unfailing improvisation in hope that the other may receive.Essential to this attention, then, is getting oneself out of the way so that the other may truly be seen for who she is. A lovely example of this is given by Iris Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good:
A mother, whom I shall call M, feels hostility to her daughter-in-law, whom I shall call D. M finds D quite a good-hearted girl, but while not exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile. M does not like D’s accent or the way D dresses. M feels that her son has married beneath him. Let us assume for the purposes of the example that the mother, who is a very ‘‘correct’’ person, behaves beautifully to the girl throughout, not allowing her real opinion to appear in any way. … Time passes, and it could be that M settles down with a hardened sense of grievance and a fixed picture of D, imprisoned … by the cliché: my poor son has married a silly vulgar girl. However, the M of the example is an intelligent well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, capable of giving careful and just attention to an object which confronts her. M tells herself: ‘‘I am old-fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me look again.”Essential to such attention is looking at something justly.
One day a nun came to the ward . … everything in her demeanour towards [the patients] - the way she spoke to them, her facial expressions, the inflexions of her body - contrasted with and showed up the behaviour of those noble psychiatrists. She showed that they were, despite their best efforts, condescending, as I too had been. … I felt irresistibly that her behaviour was directly shaped by the reality which it revealed. … Whatever religious people might say, as someone who was witness to [her] love and .. claimed in fidelity to it, I have no understanding of what it revealed independently of the quality of her love. … the quality of her love proved that [the patients] are rightly the objects of our non-condescending treatment, that we should do all in our power to respond in that way.The aspect of Gaita’s narrative to which I wish to draw attention concerns love’s disclosiveness. The nun’s love reveals the patients in their irreplaceability; it reveals the fact that we are ‘precious beyond reason’. ‘Love is the perception of individuals’, as Iris Murdoch puts it (The Sovereignty of Good). We can understand this, I think, by calling to mind either our friends or our patients. Perhaps you might try this right now with just one or two patients. Bring to mind someone’s distinctive face, and in particular how he animates his face and how he inhabits his body, how he comes into or leaves the consulting room. His tone of voice. Recollect him struggling in his distinctive way, and recollect the way he uses words, and the distinctive enthusiasms he has, the kinds of things he finds funny. Recall his distinctive vulnerability, and how he shares of himself from that vulnerable state. In short, bring to mind what Christopher Bollas calls his ‘idiom’, his ‘style of life’ that transcends his defences. And then bring to mind another patient, and the different way she is herself. Can you enjoy them in their differences? Can you want the best for them in their particularity?
And did you get whatyou wanted from this life, even so?I did.And what did you want?To call myself beloved, to feel myselfbeloved on the earth.
British Psychoanalytical Society - 9th December 2020
(Pulling together various previously blogged thoughts regarding narcissism and narcissistic abuse.)
Abstract
Gaslighting is often portrayed in terms of blame-shifting and lying, but in reality also involves far more subtle manipulations that aren't straightforward to describe. The survivor movement provides a rich repertoire of concepts to help the sufferer of narcissistic abuse think about and resist what they fell into. And psychoanalysis comes to our aid with its theory of the intrapsychic and interpersonal forms of projective identification. This talk considers what philosophy has to add. In particular we'll see what light a phenomenological perspective can shed on the (apt or spurious) allocation, within an intimate relationship, of moral properties of culpability and woundedness. We’ll also see how Wittgenstein’s ‘private language’ arguments help us understand how the narcissist sustains his illusion of self-ratifying unaccountability. In such ways we may formulate more clearly what it is for the narcissist to bend out of shape the soul’s moral fabric - both his own and those of the people in close relationship with him.
Introduction
Let me begin by saying something about the kind of ‘application’ that I’m engaged in, in this ‘Applied’ rather than ‘Scientific’ meeting. My application isn’t of psychoanalytic ideas to matters outside the clinic, but rather of some philosophical thought from outside the clinic to what we find within. What I want to talk about are two aspects of narcissism, one concerning matters intrapsychic, the other having a more interpersonal focus. These correspond in some ways, I think, to two different aspects of projective identification: one a personal unconscious phantasy, the other an intersubjective process. I don’t claim that one is more fundamental than the other; a better way to think of them may be as 2 different angles on the same narcissistic process.
Today I’ve no ambitions to provide a general theory of narcissism. Psychoanalysis already has plenty of those. Instead I’m particularly concerned with that kind of narcissistic abuse that goes by the name of ‘gaslighting’. And what I want to focus on is the gaslighter’s means by which they queer the moral pitch of their interaction with their victim. This gaslighting not only warps the abuser’s own mind’s moral fabric but, as it always occurs in interaction with another, also warps the moral fabric, the morale, of the other’s mind.
Whence ‘Gaslighting’?
The original inspiration for today’s psychological use of the term ‘gaslighting’ comes from the 1939 play Gas Light, penned by the playwright Patrick Hamilton - who himself suffered considerable characterological complications. An American film, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, was made in 1944. The play’s setting is the home of newlyweds Jack and Bella in 1880s London. Jack disappears from the flat each night, not telling Bella where he’s going. In fact he’s going to the flat upstairs to look for the missing jewels of a murdered woman. While up there, his turning on the gas lights causes the lighting in the whole block to dim; Bella notices this and also hears his footsteps through the ceiling. In a maddening way Jack convinces her she’s seeing and hearing things. ‘Gas lighting’ was then put to psychopathological use in 1969 by psychiatrists Barton & Whitehead, who documented examples of wives inventing stories of their husband’s violent behaviour in order to get them psychiatrically detained. More recently - perhaps driven by Robin Stern’s (2007/2018) book on hidden manipulation, The Gaslight Effect - the phrase has taken a more psychological turn, and is now used to describe certain forms of narcissistic abuse and the unwitting cooperation with that - especially by such abused subjects as we now, following Donna Savery (2018), call ‘echoists’. It’s the notion of lying to undermine another’s stability and morale that’s captured in most contemporary definitions; here’s a representative one from Wikipedia:
Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, it attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim's belief. Instances may range from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred up to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.
The internet has been a major source of supportive and illustrative literature on gaslighting, with excellent websites (e.g. the Narcissist Family Files) springing up, often created by survivors of narcissistic abuse. Here we find thousands of moving stories of people who, coming across the online literature and videos, realise that they’ve been caught in a malignant folie à deux, perhaps even for several decades, finally understanding why they’ve been so exhausted and demoralised, and finally restoring something of their self-possession. Of course we also find here plenty of narcissistic characters looking to blame their ex-partners for their woes! But what we come across should, I suggest, be compelling enough for us to distrust such adages, sometimes commonplace in psychotherapeutic circles, as “the responsibility for conflictual difficulties in relationships is always 50:50” - at least, until we’ve ascertained that our patient doesn’t belong to that segment of the population unlucky enough to be in a relationship with someone whose narcissistic traits are more prominent than average. In short, gaslighting is a very 21st century topic, one that relied on the internet to take off, and one that’s found its way into popular culture. The (Dixie) Chicks, for example, recently released their first new song in 14 years - ‘Gaslighter’ - in which lead singer Natalie Maines calls out her ex-husband’s abusive behaviour.
A particularly interesting feature of this online literature has been the development of a new language to aid in the symbolisation, and hence thoughtful resistance, of such abuse. Thus we now have not only ‘gaslighters’ or narcissistic abusers, ‘empaths’ and ‘codependents’, but a whole new rhetoric of manipulation: ‘supply’ (the term in fact originates with Fenichel, 1938) consists of those the narcissist either idealises and emulates or instead abuses to prop up their own esteem; ‘hoovering’ is the attempt to suck old disillusioned supply back within the narcissist’s dominion; ‘enablers’ are those in the family who don’t question the narcissist’s inflated self-image; 'flying monkeys’ are such enablers as are tasked with doing the narcissist’s dirty work; the ‘scapegoat’ is, for example, a child onto whom is projected all a narcissistic parent’s toxic shame (contrast the idealised ‘golden child’); strategies of ‘divide and conquer’ involve setting up an environment of competition and terror in which people try to avoid the narcissist’s attack but at each other’s expense; ‘fauxpologies’ are those spurious sorry-sayings such as ‘I’m sorry you are so sensitive’; ‘I’m sorry you think I’m such a disappointment as a mother’, ‘I’m sorry to have made you angry’ (rather than being sorry for what was said, in response to which anger might well have been the apt response); ‘smear campaigns’ involve systematically discrediting those who’ve seen through the narcissist’s mask, or those who are envied or resented. Strategies for dealing with such abuse include 'going gray-rock’, i.e. disengaging and making yourself dull and non-reactive to antagonism, despite constant attempts to get under your skin. The language is, I think, particularly important: by naming what’s going on it allows for an empowering restoration of thinking and self-possession, and aids the refusal of intrusive and controlling projections. (Needless to say, the language can itself get abused: ‘You’re gaslighting me!’ has itself now become a classic gaslighting manoeuvre.)
In what follows I’ll argue that, contra the emphasis we find in common definitions of gaslighting, definitions which stress the narcissist’s perpetuation of falsehoods regarding determinate external facts, what’s often more pernicious in gaslighting are distortions to the less determinate contours of the inner life, particularly to our sense of our own moral qualities and worth. I’ll suggest too that such distortions are often provided not so much by overt misrepresentation but by the selective use of attention, by silence, subtly dismissive uses of gesture, tetchy vocal tone, selective ignoring, tacit accusations, the gradual cultivation of distorted expectations, and so on.
Gaslighting and the Indeterminacy and Holism of the Mental
Here’s an example of a somewhat subtle use of gaslighting, one that relies on acts of omission rather than of commission:
[kris777] When I was in my late teens, my mother had about 10 of her closest friends over for a party right after Christmas. I was sitting among them (the only one of my mother's children present) enjoying the banter when all of a sudden, my mother grabbed everyone's attention and asked "would you all like to see what my children gave me for Christmas?" They all chimed in "absolutely"!! And I knew she was about to pull one of her classic gaslighting moves as she's done it so many times. She doesn't realize she has a tell (a certain tic in her facial muscles) when she's about to go full on narc. She walked over to the tree and grabbed two gifts - the one my brother got her and the one my sister got for her. She showed both as her friends ooohhhhed and awwed over them, and then she went and put them back under the tree. Her two closest friends' eyes got very wide and puzzled but neither would look over in my direction. I did not take the bait. I knew she wanted me to spout off so that she could humiliate me in front of the group and say she just forgot about my gift - I guess she forgot she has 3 children. It was beautiful though the way her move completely backfired as everyone got very quiet and uncomfortable as I sat completely silent.
Kris777’s mother engages here in an act of omission which, precisely because it isn’t so readily ostensible, can - if called out - be more readily defended. (In fact it likely won’t just be defended but, under the cover of the plausible deniability that such acts offer, turned into an opportunity to push a demoralising counter-accusation of over-sensitivity or presumptuous judgementalism.)
Now, our everyday psychological vocabulary - I mean that regarding beliefs, desires, feelings, intentions and the like (I’ll call them all ‘thoughts’) - doesn’t reference individual behaviours: there’s no one-to-one correlation between particular actions and thoughts; one and the same behaviour can properly be said to express different thoughts depending on its context. And this context extends not only to other aspects of one’s thinking and the present situation but also reaches back in time to include aspects of the history of one’s interactions. (Philosophers call this the ‘holism of the mental’.) Because of this, such gaslighting as aims to distort the other’s judgement regarding his own and the gaslighted person’s thoughts has far more wriggle room than that which aims to distort our present grasp of particular facts in external reality. And what shall count as the right circumstances against which to read any particular stretch of behaviour as expressive of this or that thought will always be a matter of judgement. (I’ll come back to that shortly.) What exactly, for example, is the context in which that raised eyebrow shall count as non-accusatory surprise, or as a warranted or unwarranted accusation? Does that context obtain here, or not? And who’s to say?
We also do well to note that even utterly competent and perfectly knowledgeable observers can differ on the moral or psychological meaning of certain gestures. We sometimes encounter expressions which to one person look to be of annoyance, to another, mere indifference, and for which consulting the subject in question may provide no clear answer. We may take ourselves to be motivated by entirely selfless ambitions; another finds a sliver of selfishness there - and sometimes there can - I suggest - simply be no fact of the matter as to who here is right. Was he being annoying or just insistent? Was it thoughtless or merely casual? Uncertainty here can, as Wittgenstein (1980, §657) suggests, be “constitutional… not a shortcoming. It resides in our concepts that this uncertainty exists…” And this ‘constitutive indeterminacy of the mental’, as philosophers call it, also provides a cover of plausible deniability for gaslighters to work under.
I don’t think, however, that reference to acts by omission, to holism, and to indeterminacy fully explains how the gaslighter is able to ply his or her shifty trade. Consider for example the following description of gaslighting as ambient abuse (it’s by YouTube presenter Sam Vaknin, himself a narcissist who’s written a lot about the condition):
ambient abuse is the stealthy, subtle, underground current of maltreatment that sometimes goes unnoticed even by the victim herself until it's too late. Ambient abuse penetrates and permeates everything, but is difficult to pinpoint and identify. Gaslighting is vigorous, equivocal, atmospheric and diffuse, hence its insidious and pernicious effects. It is by far the most dangerous kinds of abuse there is. ... Ambient abuse yields an irksome feeling, a kind of disagreeable foreboding, a premonition, a bad omen; it's in the air. In the long term such an environment erodes the individual's sense of self-worth.
How shall we understand this ‘stealthy’, ‘subtle’, ‘ambient’ and ‘atmospheric’ narcissistic abuse?
Distorting the Foundations of Judgement
Let’s continue to deepen our understanding of gaslighting by picking up the above-mentioned matter of judgement. The word has varied meanings. Philosophers sometimes use it very broadly, to stand for any determinations we make. However we often use it in a more restricted sense, one having to do with practical wisdom and manifesting in what we term ‘judgement calls’. Invoking this latter sense we might say that the need for judgement can sometimes be obviated through the use of checklists, criteria, necessary and sufficient conditions, definitions, and so on. A trainee psychiatrist, for example, might rely on an operationalised diagnostic scheme. By so doing she can, when making her diagnosis, avoid calling on her judgement (in the restricted sense). Such judgement, however, cannot be avoided for long. For example our psychiatrist will hardly be able to avoid it when determining whether one of her patient’s beliefs truly does count as a delusion. And here her ability to exercise good judgement is not something other than her grasp of the meaning of words (like ‘delusion’): she shall count both as knowing what ‘delusion’ means, and as having good psychiatric judgement, if she picks out only those mental states which competent psychiatrists pick out as delusions.
Now, to initially and ongoingly calibrate our judgement regarding ordinary moral and mental matters we rely on interaction with our families, teachers, peers and psychoanalysts. Our calibration consists both in conforming our judgement to that of others and, when enough of that has happened and we’ve developed sufficient mental apparatus of our own, in testing our judgement by also exploring our disagreements with them. (Part of what’s insidious about gaslighting is that, obtaining largely within couples, it involves isolating the victim from alternative sources of calibration; now that she can’t see her friends, her skewed judgement goes quite unchecked.) And what I want to stress here is that these skews to judgement needn’t involve anything so flagrant as buying into out-and-out lies about what facts obtain - about what was and wasn’t said or done. It’s at least as often, or as well, in judgements about the meaning of such facts that these skews are here introduced.
Many of our morally significant interactions involve our ongoing sense of when we’re to blame and, correlatively, when we’re being wronged. The determination of this is always contextual - both situational and historical - and typically relies on judgement. What after all shall count as being over-sensitive, and what instead as a reasonable standing up for oneself? When is and when isn’t one’s forgetting a culpable matter? (NB a typical verbal trick of the narcissist is to spuriously push for non-culpability merely on the basis of unintendedness, conveniently ignoring that we are also responsible for what we should have thought, but didn’t think, about. Another is to substitute commiserative for apologetic meanings of ‘sorry’.) What counts as showing apt consideration, and what instead counts as taking up a perverse invitation to jettison one’s self-possession and instead be possessed by the other? What counts as an understandable tired tetchiness that should be tolerated by another, and what as someone's failure to take apt care for his relationship? What shall be taken as disrespectful, and what as relaxedly casual?
If the persons in a couple have well-formed moral sensibilities, they will often enough agree as to what counts as the violation of reasonable behavioural norms. If they were to ‘graph’ the domain of their responsibilities for the moral upsets obtaining within their relationship, enough of their plots will coincide for meaningful moral discourse to be possible.
If however we here encounter a relationship between a narcissist and someone who buys into the narcissist’s tacit revaluation of moral values, we find them accepting a new moral reality, one in which the narcissist shirks responsibility and projects blameworthiness. In this new reality, new rules have tacitly been introduced; the narcissist has subtly queered the pitch of the distribution of responsibility and blame, and distorted the moral fabric of her victim’s soul. But still, how does she get away with such distortions to judgement?
Our Embodied ‘Understandings of Being’
I want to approach this question by thinking on the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the unconscious. And to get going with this we’ll need to understand 2 concepts which Merleau-Ponty develops from Husserl and Heidegger.
The first is that of the ‘lived body’. Whilst Freud offers us an unconscious of individually repressed ideas, the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty offers us a bodily unconscious. The body in question is not the body qua mere organism, not that which is studied by anatomy and physiology, but rather the body as lived. This notion, taken over from Edmund Husserl, has to do with the body: as the coordinated site of sensation and instinct, as a largely perceptually invisible locus of our perceptual points of view, as the sensate receiver and explorer of the world, and as a structure of habit and know-how with well-practiced motor sequences and perceptual Gestalten sedimented into it. It’s with and in our lived bodies that we automatically grasp how close or far to stand to others. We who aren’t beset by autistic disability or schizophrenic illness can readily coordinate our gestures and come into communicative synchrony with others. And only with this subconscious intercorporeal synchrony in place can we make ready sense of one another’s actions and utterances. In this way the lived body provides a recessive foundational background which all our explicit communicative acts presuppose.
The second concept which is relevant here is Martin Heidegger’s notion of the ‘clearing’. Heidegger invites us to eschew the problematics that arise from thinking of human understanding as self-contained and inner, as something we could enjoy and bring to bear on a world utterly external to it. Instead he wants us to think of ourselves as consisting primarily of being-in-the-world - as always-already situated in a world of which we’re a part. We are, in the terms of the metaphor, ourselves a part of the world’s woods and thickets, but within these our culture, including our language, and our own personal histories create a ‘clearing’, and within that clearing matters can show up for conscious consideration. What can show up there depends, however, on the clearing’s structure. What Merleau-Ponty was interested in were cases where something which we might expect someone to encounter within their clearing has instead become part of their being’s very fabric. Rather than rely here on the usual metaphors for repression, Merleau-Ponty thinks in terms of ‘generalisation’: what once showed up within the visual field instead now becomes part of the field’s invisible boundary, constraining what can be seen. On this view the unconscious is, as it were, the water the fish is always swimming in without realising it, or an invisible ‘atmosphere’ (to use another of Merleau-Ponty’s terms) or unconscious mood with which we’re utterly identified, which utterly surrounds us and which we can’t help but breathe.
To bring these two concepts together now: it’s with and in our lived bodies that we encounter the world, and what’s visible of that world depends upon the ‘set’, so to say, of that body. Consider how sometimes in therapy or analysis you sometimes think, after eventually arriving at a valid formulation, that in some inchoate sense you’d known what the problem was from the way the patient walked in the door on his first visit to your consulting room. Or think of how the transference functions as an invisible force field utterly constraining the way the patient relates to you. On his way up to your door he sometimes slips from one mode of functioning into another quite regressed one, one now constraining the thoughts available to him. The disturbance is contained in his lived body’s habitual postures - postures of deference or shame, fear or awkwardness, for example. Because the patient is this body, is as it were enclosed within what Reich called his ‘character armour’, the way it structures his encounters isn’t visible to him. Psychopathology, on this view, involves the fixation, into the general structure of the clearing, of that which would better be placed as a discrete moment in the living of a life. And psychotherapy, amongst other health-giving relationships, involves the remobilisation and diversification of these structures through a disidentificatory process of symbolising them.
The third concept I want now to introduce is that of intercorporeality. Different cultures have different ways of inhabiting the body, different forms of gesture, different codes regarding eye contact, what counts as warmth and what as flirting, and so on. Such cultural mores sediment themselves invisibly into the lived body, just as accents do into our voices. Let’s focus on such moral emotions as guilt, shame, penitence, forgiveness, warmth, love, confidence, diffidence, open-heartedness and so on. These attitudes not only have their characteristic embodiments - the downward eyes of shame, the expansive motions of open-heartedness, the stride of healthy confidence, and so on - but are ongoingly entrained in us through our interactions with others. Their ongoing entrainment in us is sometimes explicit - as when a parent says ‘Now go and apologise to her!’ - but is often conducted implicitly. Subtle shifts in tone and pitch, fleeting facial micro-expressions, a bodily stance that is slightly less or more welcoming or shunning, the placing of pauses in discourse - these all contribute to the co-regulation of our moral interactions. Our lived bodies constantly find their complementary levels in relation to one another. Together we spontaneously enact - bodily, linguistically and epistemically - our correlative moral sensibilities. My concernful voice correlates with your wounded posture; your sudden move toward me with my flinching away. And we unreflectively understand together when it is that, say, looking into the other’s eyes constitutes openness, and when instead it amounts to presumptuous interrogation or intrusion. Or what tone of voice, what prosody, shall count as innocent and what as suggestive of reproof. This corporeal co-regulation provides the bedrock on top of which our words sit and in relation to which they have their meaning. And, to finally get back to our principal concern, it provides the entry point through which such projective identification as is interpersonally efficacious takes its effects: I can think of a few patients who fairly mastered the art of the projection of a sense of personal uselessness through, say, the slight arching of a single eyebrow or an in-drawing of breath.
The claim on the table, then, regarding narcissistic abuse is that it often consists not only in such manipulations as are lies, nor only in manipulating the terms of explicit moral judgement, but also in distorting the whole paralinguistic, bodily, context in which all such judgement is situated. The deep habit structure of our intercorporeal lives is perverted. It is our openness to the automatic co-regulation of moral sensibility that allows in the narcissist’s warping of the mind’s moral fabric - i.e. that projectively bends out of shape our soul - i.e. bends out of shape our morale and our moral self-understanding. The indrawn breath, proximity and distance, vocal tone, bodily openness and closedness, and facial micro-expressions, may all be used to set the scene for the perverted morality tale which then plays out in the lives of the narcissist and her victim. Just as the natural corollary of another’s sadness is our own pity, or of their anger is our fear, so too is an automatic taking up of the demoralised stance of shame the near-inevitable outcome of the war of attrition waged in part by implicit accusations. This is then sustained by the victim learning to walk on eggshells, to avoid triggering the narcissist’s avowed disappointment, accusations and rage. His skill at walking on these eggshells is far greater than he himself realises: his ‘understanding of Being’ itself, as Heidegger puts it, has shifted (Dreyfus & Wakefield, 2014); he now dwells in an invisible-to-him atmosphere of unconscious shame, discouragement, and guilt. When a victim of narcissistic abuse who has escaped, and begun to recover, has to see his abuser again, his whole demeanour, gestures, posture, tone, automatically shrink back down. And from the vantage of this alternatively configured lived body, a whole different world comes back into view for him.
The Intrapsychic Situation
So far what’s been discussed is the interpersonal situation: how gaslighting takes its pernicious effect on the narcissist’s victim. I now wish to think about what it is that happens alongside this within the mind of the narcissist. A common way of understanding narcissism is that it involves excessive self-love, grandiosity and superiority (covering over painful shame and inner fragmentation). This, I think, is rather like the idea that gaslighting primarily involves lying about facts. It’s not necessarily wrong, but doesn’t illuminate the underlying structural situation.
Consider the following exchange I witnessed on the Oxford-to-London commuter bus:
Every morning a preening young man would talk loudly, at length, and obnoxiously to his boyfriend on the phone. A fellow passenger had had enough and – pointing to the window sign requesting passengers to keep mobile conversation quiet, short and to the essential – asked if he might limit his conversation to the advantage of his fellow passengers. The young man quickly flew into a rage, and exclaimed to her ‘Who are you to tell me what’s too loud or too long or inessential?!’, and returned to his obnoxious conversation. (So thought-stopping was this furious response that the complainant did not think of the correct answer: ‘I’m a member of the general public’.)
We recognise this as a paradigm of narcissism. But what, considered intrapsychically, does this narcissism consist in? Is it just that he thinks himself superior to others? That rather suggests we think his narcissism results from his having an intelligible but false thought. But this, I think, fails to do justice to the character of his exclamation, the implication of which seemed to me to be that his fellow passenger’s negative appraisal traduced his universal right to that sovereign self-determination which is constitutive of personal dignity. And this in its way was of a piece with his aim which appeared to be to queer the moral pitch of the interaction, spuriously projecting his own blameworthiness into those who would judge him.
What this man seemed to be claiming was that only he could possibly know whether his actions reflected a valid imperative – not because his fellow passenger didn’t, as a contingent matter of fact, have access to the relevant facts about his life situation, but rather simply because she was not he. But what exactly is awry with his thought? In what follows I suggest that we can arrive at an answer to this by considering an aspect of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s deliberations on the very idea of a ‘logically private’ language.
The ‘private language arguments’ are contained in §§243-315 of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. In them we find Wittgenstein inviting us to try to ‘imagine a language’ (§243) which ‘describes my inner experiences and which only I myself can understand’ (§256), a language to be set up by giving ‘myself a kind of ostensive definition’ for a sensation term ‘S’ by concentrating ‘my attention on the sensation – and so, as it were, point[ing] to it inwardly’ (§258). (It’s because only I could possibly understand that which only I experience that it’s called a ‘logically private’ language.)
In arguing that we have here only the illusory fantasy of an actual language, Wittgenstein first reminds us of an important feature of genuine sensation language. This is that, if it feels to me like I’m in pain, then I jolly well am in pain. Or, to put it better, there simply is no appearance/reality distinction in play when we’re talking about our conscious inner experiences. This just is what it means for us to be ‘authorities’ regarding our own mental states. This authority is extremely important to us: we rightly complain about intrusion into this sovereign aspect of our lives. (I’m reminded of a couple who visited for dinner before lockdown. I asked what they wanted to drink. One told me ‘a beer please’, but the other somehow had different ideas for his partner. After some squabbling the first, with patience and good humour, said ‘Well Richard, the problem is that I’ve decided what I want; it’s just that he hasn’t yet decided what I want!’ The joke made clear the patent absurdity of the idea of someone else knowing better what we want when our mind is already made up.)
Whilst such inner sovereignty is of course extremely important, Wittgenstein points out that the inapplicability of the seems/is, appearance/reality, distinction here means that we can’t do such things as dream up our own logically private languages to describe what we’re inwardly feeling. For meaningful language is essentially normative - which is to say, its uses are evaluable as correct or incorrect. If, however, there’s no such thing as me using a term wrongly within my own mind, then there’s also no such thing as me using it correctly here (see §258). (This, by the way, is why it’s important that genuine psychological language always has a double aspect: on the one hand we may use it inwardly to authoritatively ascribe thoughts, sensations, wishes, etc. to ourselves; on the other hand, there are observable patterns of behaviour which anchor these psychological states and which function as criteria for the ascription of them to us by others.)
In the text Wittgenstein’s inner interlocutor attempts various strident formulations against himself and in support of the idea of a ‘logically private language’. He tries to insist such things as that, still, here, he can
To which his better self responds with a thoughtful irony:
In Wittgenstein’s practice of philosophy, it is the illuminating comparison which does much of the work in helping us be freed from compelling illusions. To help us break loose from the fantasy that we could enjoy both sovereign invulnerability to error at the same juncture as we can make substantive truth claims he offers the example of a particular design for a self-driving steamroller he once saw, one in which:
the inventor’s mistake is akin to a philosophical mistake. The invention consists of a motor inside a hollow roller. The crank-shaft runs through the middle of the roller and is connected at both ends by spokes with the wall of the roller. The cylinder of the petrol-engine is fixed onto the inside of the roller. At first glance this construction looks like a machine. But it is a rigid system and the piston cannot move to and fro in the cylinder. (Philosophical Grammar §141; see also Zettel §248 and Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, volume 1, §397.)
Other examples of this fatal ‘rigidity’ are provided by someone saying: ‘ “But I know how tall I am!” and laying his hand on top of his head to indicate it!’ (Philosophical Investigations §279). Or: another man pushes on a car dashboard to try to make the car go faster (Blue Book p. 71); yet another tries to give himself a gift by passing it from one hand to another (Philosophical Investigations §268); a final chap buys ‘several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true’ (Philosophical Investigations §265). Wittgenstein uses these absurd examples to make clear how the would-be private linguist’s case is just as absurd: here too there’s a normatively fatal non-independence of the ‘inner standard’ for S from the ‘inner judgement’ that here we meet with an S again. Again, if whatever you want to say is to count as correct, then the very idea of correctness, of your words actually having meaning, is lost. No work gets done: the steamroller or car stays where it is, the news is not corroborated.
Let’s return this discussion now to our young man on the bus. Implicit in his challenge – ‘Who are you to tell me what is too loud or too long or inessential?!’ – is, I suggest, a wish to achieve two incompatible things at once: 1. On the one hand he wishes to be counted as having correctly grasped the meaning of the terms: ‘too loud’, ‘too long’, ‘inessential’. The communication is after all predicated on him and his interlocutor sharing an understanding of the meaning of the terms – otherwise his challenge should itself be pointless. 2. On the other hand, he wishes to be treated as the unchallengeable and sole judge of what here is to count as ‘too loud’, ‘too long’ etc. Whatever he judges to be essential or inessential is to count as such. In short, he wishes to still have his normative cake even whilst popping it down the cakehole of his own subjectivity.
This too was just what we found with our private linguist. He wanted to be able to inwardly institute, and accord with, actual norms for the correct use of ‘S’, but also to continue to enjoy his inviolable first-person authority regarding his suffering of S. He refused to accept that the coin which has first person authority (of his avowals of S) as one of its faces must have an availability to appraisal (of the correctness of his use of ‘S’) as its other. It is this fantasy of normative self-sufficiency and yet inviolability – of being able to purchase the goods of normative warrant without handing over some of his first-person authority – which – I’m suggesting – constitutes a key structural element of the intrapsychic heart of narcissism.
Conclusions
How should we understand the relationship between these two, inter- and intra- personal, aspects of narcissism? Recall the diagram presented above which described the interpersonal situation where a narcissist creates an illusory skew in her partner’s understanding of his own moral character:
In both cases we find a narcissistic subject bending the meaning of words, actions, expressions out of shape to hide her culpability and accountability. But it should also become clear how the perverted sense of authority aids the skewed representation of moral culpability. The young man on the bus found it outrageous that anyone else should presume to have a say as to what should count as too long, loud or inessential a conversation for him. We might describe his attitude as one which in fact sets its face against the very idea of a fellow passenger. In such ways we see how truly corrupt narcissistic abuse is: it bends out of shape the narcissistic subject’s own soul, trashing his conscience and devaluing his relationships. And it bends out of shape the soul of his victim, covertly demoralising her through its insidiously enacted revaluation of her moral self-understanding.
Above I discussed something of Wittgenstein’s inner battle against the illusions of a ‘private language’. These were not, I believe, restricted to his philosophical life. For he was often preoccupied by his own unholy desire for utterly secure admiration or for an inner security quite beyond this world - a longing which, I believe, can be traced to the emotional impoverishment of his childhood, and an impoverishment which left him believing that only displays of genius could secure the affection of others. I have developed this theme elsewhere; there’s no time to develop it further here. Instead I shall simply illustrate it with an example from one of his dreams; this one is from 28.1.1937:
I stood with Paul & Mining [his pianist brother Paul and elder sister Hermione] … as if on the front platform of a streetcar …Paul told Mining how enthusiastic my brother-in-law Jerome was about my unbelievable musical gift; the day before I had so wonderfully sung along in a work of Mendelssohn …. it was as if we had performed this work among ourselves at home and I had sung along with extraordinary expressiveness and also with especially expressive gestures. Paul and Mining seemed to completely agree with Jerome’s praise. Jerome was said to have said again and again: “What talent!” … I held a withered plant in my hand with blackish seeds in little pods that had already opened and thought: if they were to tell me what a pity it is about my unused musical talent, I will show them the plant and say that nature isn’t stingy with its seed either and that one shouldn’t be afraid and just throw out a seed. All of this was carried on in a self-satisfied manner. – I woke up and was angry or ashamed because of my vanity. … May I not become completely base and also not mad! May God have mercy on me.’ (PPO pp.163-4)
To end, to provide another helpful metaphor for the narcissistic wish, and to show something of the inner emancipation from this narcissistic defence which Wittgenstein achieved during this time, we may contrast the above dream with another dream of his, recorded 10 weeks later (11.4.1937). The image he presents (and which is also drawn on by Nietzsche in Beyond Good & Evil) is taken from the Narrative of Baron Munchausen’s Marvellous Travels - a famous 18th century work of fiction by Joseph Raspe (himself an inveterate swindler who based his tales on the self-aggrandising stories of an actual Baron Munchausen - who in turn wasn’t best pleased by the satire). In one such tale the Baron is out riding and, finding himself stuck in a swamp, pulls upwards on his own hair to extricate both himself and his horse from the quagmire. The dream, which is just a fragment, consists of Wittgenstein exhorting himself to trust in what is not of his own making, and to relinquish the narcissistic fantasy of (as we might put it) suckling at one’s own breast:
“But let us talk in our mother tongue, and not believe that we must pull ourselves out of the swamp by our own hair; that was – thank God – only a dream, after all. To God alone be praise!” (PPO p. 243).
Reading
Russell Barton & J. A. Whitehead (1969). The Gas-Light Phenomenon. The Lancet, 293 (7608): 1258–60.
Hubert Dreyfus & Jerome Wakefield (1988/2014). From Depth Psychology to Breadth Psychology: A Phenomenological Approach to Psychopathology. In Hubert L. Dreyfus & Mark A. Wrathall, Skillful Coping: Essays on the Phenomenology of Everyday Perception and Action. Oxford University Press.
Otto Fenichel (1938). The Drive to Amass Wealth. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 7:69-95.
Thomas Fuchs (2019). Body Memory and the Unconscious. In Richard Gipps and Michael Lacewing (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Oxford University Press.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945/2013). The Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge.
Rudolph Erich Raspe (1785). The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
Donna Savery (2018). Echoism: The Silenced Response to Narcissism. Routledge.
Robin Stern (2007/2018). The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life. Harmony Books.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1980). Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vols I & II. Blackwell.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958). Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1967). Zettel. Blackwell.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1980). Philosophical Grammar. Blackwell.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (2003) Public and Private Occasions. Rowman & Littlefield.
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Left Hemisphere Factoids |
Right Hemisphere Factoids |
uses logic |
uses feelings |
details oriented |
big picture oriented |
facts rule |
imagination rules |
words and language |
symbols and images |
present and past |
present and future |
maths and science |
philosophy and religion |
comprehension of meaning |
intuition of meaning |
knowing |
believing |
pattern perception |
spatial perception |
knowing names |
knowing functions |
reality based |
fantasy based |
forms strategies |
presents possibilities |
practical |
impetuous |
The Left Hemisphere… |
The Right Hemisphere |
Attends to what is known, to specifics, to what’s familiar. Places in pre-existing categories. Looking for prey. |
Has a broader attentional field to capture and understand the new in context. Looking out for predators. |
Prefers and generates sense of certainty. Black and white. Quantities. |
Open to possibility. ambiguous, ambivalent, symbols and energies. Qualities. ’God and poetry, love and sex’ all lose meaning if not taken up in a contextualised and particular and embodied manner. |
Aims at fixity. Isolates what’s attended to from its context, holding it still. ‘ |
‘The right hemisphere appreciates that nothing is static; it is constantly flowing; and all that differs is the rate at which it is flowing.’ |
‘The left sees parts…’ |
‘…whereas the right sees the whole’ |
Attends using singular sense modalities. |
Attends in many modalities together. |
Only understands what has been made clear. |
Understands implicit meaning; the metaphor that poetry, dreams, and symbols rely on; jokes; irony; shades of meaning; body language. |
re-presenting … as with a map’ |
presencing . …. of the terrain’ |
Cooper's Argument
As I detail Cooper's reading I'll number her key claims:
As a conceptual tool to evaluate claims that mental disorders are located 'in' individuals, Cooper offers us the kettle analogy:
Cooper finds this reconstructed argument invalid:
Critique
Let's go through these key points one by one:
I want to hammer this home a bit since, it being Laing's central contribution to psychiatry (for which we've to thank his own desperately intrusive mother), we should get it right. The narrative regarding the parents' interactions with Maya is one of an utter existential stifling that prevents her from developing a well-functioning mind. Her father always sits too close; she isn't given room to express and enjoy her own preferences; she struggles to individuate and achieve autonomy; the Abbotts regard Maya's 'use of her own mind', her attempts at 'autonomy' and 'self-possession', as synonymous with her 'illness'; it's her 'illness', her 'selfishness' and her 'greed' that makes her 'difficult', they say. She shouldn't 'want to do things for [her]self'. Maya complains, and Laing affirms in his observations, that her parents do not 'see her as the person I am'. Her father just 'laughs off' what she tells him of her own experiences (her preferences, opinions, night-time dreams), disturbing experiences that she desperately needs to be taken seriously and psychologically contained. In short she's consistently invalidated rather than offered recognition. Laing's claim isn't that Maya's behaviour can be seen as sane / not delusional in the family context. It is that, in this context, her psychodevelopmental difficulties in becoming her own person, knowing and having her own clear thoughts, make perfect psychosocial sense. Her father's mind is experienced by her as so intrusive that she can't develop a clear sense of her own. Her 'delusions' thematise this existential struggle. She lacks the ego strength to trust her own mistrust of her parents' sincerity; because she cannot trust her own mistrust, she cannot develop a stable mind. At puberty she's troubled by her sexual thoughts, and tries to express this to her parents; they simply deny to her that she has thoughts of this kind. And 'when she told her parents in the presence of the interviewer that she still masturbated, her parents simply told her that she did not!' There are many, many, more examples like this in the book.
r d laing
To reiterate the main point: Laing's claim isn't that Maya can be seen as not delusional and hence as rationally intelligible in the context of her parents' intrusions. It's rather that Maya's preoccupations and disturbances, whether or not we call them delusional, are emotionally, psychologically, and developmentally intelligible in that context.
not a refrigerator mother |
And, in my view, in this he succeeded.