Thursday, January 18, 2007
The Atemporality of Privileged Moments
While we intuit that a concrete universe exists, all we know is what we actually sense. This creates a problem with language, because our differing sensory experiences require that we all understand different things by the language we hear, as we associate that language with shaping events that are unique to us. This opens up many questions about meaning, but it opens up another issue as well: is it possible to escape meaning?The Buddha instructed that the problem with life is dhukka, the suffering that comes from attachment. If you free yourself from attachment to earthly things, he argued, you will not suffer. When the Buddha practiced detachment, though, he appeared so happy that others wanted to follow in his footsteps. And so he taught them. Which seems like a strange thing for somebody who has truly found his own happiness to want to do. Aristotle said that the good is that at which all things aim. What was the Buddha aiming for?
Contemplating dhukka, what I find is that I don't want to be detached from all earthly suffering. I have people that I love, pets that I adore, places that give me pleasure. And the thought of their or my passing is not taken sanguinely: I want the experience of them to remain a part of what I do. And yet the grieving process has taught me that I can let go of these attachments over time. People I wept over ten years ago I now think of with absolute joy for what I learned from them. They have slipped out of my physical existence and into my mental existence. What causes the angst, I think, is not the suffering of attachments - though their breaking is unpleasant - but the lack of control. As Woody Allen said, "I'm not afraid of dying, I just don't want to be there when it happens."
I think the Buddha was, thankfully, in a different place than Woody Allen. But it bears noting what that place was: a choice between the sublime bliss that he had found and the thought that others would miss out if he didn't teach them. There's a generosity in this, but also a desire for control. Not, mind you, over the people he taught. But over the world. To teach is to assume that what you have to teach will improve the lot of others and that they ought to learn it. There is an inherent assumption you know something they need and you will make your impact on the world in providing it. The Buddha, seeking Nirvana, couldn't find it if the secret was to die with him. Which set the stage for his teaching - controlling the destiny of his ideas - but also for others to do wacky things with them like arguing over who's a proper Buddhist, which school of Buddhism is right and all sorts of other nonsense that would have made him laugh, weep or both if he had truly found the Enlightenment he claimed to have found. All of which is to say that part of human happiness is human suffering because, by our actions, we demonstrate that we prefer the suffering of existence to the relief of oblivion. We like our oblivion is controlled doses.
Now we've got another Buddha wandering around called Echkart Tolle. He tells us of the Power of Now. What he talks about, however, is the primordial sense of Pain whose closest analogous emotion is fear, or the desire to avoid impending pain. His answer is to separate oneself from the mind, ceasing to confuse our thoughts and emotions with a deeper sense of who we are as part of the world at large, and inseparably so. The idea, it seems, is to begin with shorter hops into Nirvana that are then extended. I appreciate this idea in the way that I appreciate the idea of Christianity building heaven on earth, one soul at a time, as opposed to getting lose in the idea that all is nought till kingdom come, which seemingly abjures Jesus' own injunction to pray that His will be done on earth as it is in heaven, something we shouldn't need to wait on.
Tolle says that positive emotions, such as love, are associated with our connection to Being, as in the old bit about us being human beings, not human doings. He tells us:
Glimpses of love and joy or brief moments of peace are possible whenever a gap occurs in the stream of thought. For most people, such gaps happen rarely and only accidentally, in moments when the mind is rendered "speechless," sometimes triggered by great beauty, extreme physical exertion, or even great danger. Suddenly, there is inner stillness. And within that stillness there is a subtle but intense joy, there is love, there is peace.I think these moments come with breaks in thought because they coincide with necessary breaks in contemplation of what we can and cannot control, allowing us to fall into flow.
In literature, we think of the "privileged moment" as time out of time, a short space where two characters can share something that transcends the ordinary unfolding of the plot. And while a privileged moment may be tacked on to many stories - "and they lived happily ever after" - the true completion of such stories is inevitably the resolution of events in a familiarly temporal world. Which is why Tolle gave up sitting on park benches smiling at people and wrote his book. Why the Buddha took up teaching. And so on. Longfellow tells us, "Life is real, life is earnest, and the grave is not its goal..." In the same way, successful quests for Nirvana do not end with the sage disappearing into eternity in contemplating his navel, but with that self-same sage giving those around him a chance to hear the whisperings of eternity within the framework of mortal life. Privileged moments will come, often in literature, and more often than we acknowledge in our real lives, but even as an eternal universe pulses. to our senses time marches on. The Power of Now and the proper handling of dhukka does not come in severing ourselves from the reality of how we are constructed, but in finding a way to let the immortal soul sometimes reveal itself from within the mortal body so that our lives may give expression to something larger. To return to where we started, if our sensory lives give meaning, the highest state is not the escape from meaning, but to transcend, momentarily grasping the idea of that old hymn - "As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be world without end" - and knowing that we're a part of it, not apart from it.
posted by gbarto at 1:35 PM
Friday, May 26, 2006
Rambling about Goldstein
Jeff Goldstein's been writing about intentionalism (eg here and here), and as someone who got out of the narratology biz sometime back - to the extent I was ever in it, I'm not going to get into any great debates about the subject matter. But there are a few ideas I think need to be tossed out for consideration as regards the imposition of meaning by interpretative communities. When Goldstein refers to intentionalism and the idea that utterances have the meaning intended by the utterer, he offers what strikes me less as a physical law than as a useful traffic rule.There is the notion that when we speak, we know what we intend to say. There is the notion that when an author writes, he knows the message he would broadcast or the tale he would tell. This doesn't always work. Writing on this blog - and to a lesser extent the Turkeyblog, I am often surprised by where I wind up based on my starting premise. I am even at times surprised to discover things about my beliefs about the world that I hadn't previously considered. Language has a way of creating meaning. By imposing an orderly but constrained framework on our thoughts, it forces us to make long-term and spur-of-the-moment decisions not only about how to express what we think but about what we actually believe. The same goes for those thoughts we leave unvoiced. We are advised, "Know thyself," but most of us don't, and many would be quite surprised at the picture of their thought left by their choice of words - including choice of subject, approach to argument, and so on.
It is extremely problematic to believe to wholeheartedly in intentionalism as a way of locating actual meaning, because it involves the bizarre assumption that the average person knows what he is talking about. At the same time, it has a clear advantage over listening to select interpretative communities, especially when listening to the latter requires removing from the utterer any benefit of the doubt as regards his intentions: the people listening aren't usually that much more credible than the people talking. There is a disconnect between our experience of language and our experience of the world that makes the marvel just how much we can communicate, even if imperfectly.
The place where we really run into trouble is when the communication seems clearest. Anger. Passion. Joy. Hope. When a speech or a work of literature truly moves us, it taps into that part of our thinking that goes beyond interpreted language to the accelerated heartbeat, the flushed cheeks, a physical response to airy language. Many people might be moved by a novel, but all in different ways. Because while the overall set of intertwined signifiers points to something magnificent, we each experience those signifiers in a different way.
Some people see in the American flag a symbol of freedom. Others see a symbol of oppression. Two grown men may unconsciously associate the American flag with starting class with the Pledge every morning when they were second graders. The first man wanted to stay home and draw airplanes and has no idea why the sight of the flag - symbol of liberty - weighs heavy on his heart and makes him feel tired. He's a bit of a hippy and wary of anything done in the name of God and country. The second man, from a dysfunctional family, found in the recitation of the Pledge the first bits of order in his day. Now he's a cop and has no idea of the real reason he so reveres the flag, nor of how the source of his reverence prompts him to fervently pursue justice for all but with less thought for liberty. What do you do when these two men get into an argument about, say, the war on terror? Neither one of them knows the source of their own arguments, much less grasps emotionally the arguments of the other.
We are all subject to this problem of understanding what meaning means. Of determining what signifiers actually signify. And the killer is that it isn't confusion about the signifiers that hampers us. It's that each of us has an individual language where the things that matter most are also the most difficult to define because of the flavor of meaning they contain owing to us knowing them through necessarily unique experiences.
Once upon a time, I tried to be a practical realist, knowing that meaning was unstable and absolute truth unlikely to be found, but that we had to make an effort to get at some idea of what was really there. But I keep drifting back to the postmoderns, because I think they're right about the nature of meaning, even if they're wrong about everything else. The practical realists are right, of course, that we have to seek some notion of tentative truth, have to believe some meaning can be extracted from our shared experiences of the world. Were it not so, language - even with its imperfections - could not exist. But there's one underlying problem with the practical realists, and it sums up nicely: In a world of unstable interpretations, the thing the practical realists need to guard against most is the thing postmodernism warns against most stronly: subjectivity, or the imposition of meaning through force.
When academics discover racism and utterers declare innocence, there are plainly multiple meanings being given to a select set of signifiers. The problem is not the multiplicity of meanings - doubtless the speaker spoke and the listeners heard and they all had experiences of meaning with greater and lesser degrees of shared understanding. The problem, rather, is one of power. Should utterers be able to force listeners to absorb sets of signifiers that combined they find offensive? Should listeners, relying on their responses to signifiers, be able to impose new signifiers upon an original utterer when he claims not to have meant what they understood? If I use a derogatory term in reference to a Black person, I am doubtless imposing a signifier upon him, am giving him a meaning that I am not entitled to place upon him. But the same is true when we call someone a racist without sufficiently clear provocation.
In the world of literature, intentionalism provides us with a way to avoid having every book be a book about the oppression of homosexuals just because the chair of the department is gay and has issues. It also provides us with a way to dig deeper into the original thought processes that generated a highly complex set of signifiers that provoked in us an emotional response. When we're dealing with a book by a long dead author, having these debates is a way to see how we each comprehend and respond to the world differently. In this circumstance, it is fair to say that some interpretations are better than others. In particular, if one critic offers different interpretations for every work he encounters but another always discovers the same story, we can conjecture that the first critic may be responding more to the work, while the second is interacting less with the individual works than with the frame of reference within which he reads. Still, we cannot absolutely privilege one meaning over all others, but must instead accept that that which is most commonly held may have a grain of truth in it - just as the cliché has its power in that it wouldn't be a cliché were it not so widely held.
Outside the world of literature - and literature from long ago - we run into a circumstance that requires a different treatment: The matter is no longer academic - to use the term in the pejorative sense. When we debate about what it means to keep Sophocles in the curriculum, we are debating about how we as a culture create, interpret and extend meaning. And we, as a culture, will eventually wind up imposing a view, just as we impose the leadership of a party upon those who oppose it, the hearing of popular songs upon those who don't like them and even, by vote of the marketplace, the choice of muffins one finds at Starbucks. But these aggregate decisions, filtered across time and space, are of a different order than what one finds in a confrontation between a living individual and an interpretative community. A man judged racist may lose the means to feed himself, feed his family and express his unique but not unworthy understanding of the world through the life he chooses to live. For this reason, when we move from imposing signifiers upon works to imposing them upon people, we must take care.
In the political correctness debates, some people like to fling about careless language to prove that they can. They are wrong, and their auditors are right to be suspect about their motives. But that careless language includes both epithets and charges of racism, sexism, homophobia and all the rest. In this environment, we ignore the postmodernists' warnings about subjectivity - about imposing meaning because we can - at our peril. We must, rather, observe the Golden Rule, and respond to the utterances of others with the greatest measure of generosity we can offer, assuming the best and understanding that if we wish to debate no holds-barred with bold charges and bold language, we have to expect the same in return, but that if we expect others to be careful of our feelings and sympathetic in their bearing we must first extend this courtesy on our part.
In other words, and to end, when we move from debates about meaning to debates about the worthiness of individual people based on the things they express, the usual rules about finding meaning must go. At this point, the meaning of signifiers is too personal and the possibility for oppression by interpretation is too great. When we reach this point, we must work to depersonalize the debate, moving away from charges about the nature of the person we are addressing and toward the dissection of the arguments they present as we understand them with the necessary caveats about talking at cross purposes. Only in this way can we assure the academic freedom necessary to take on the big ideas and avoid the twin messes of debate silenced or points of view silenced.
posted by gbarto at 5:13 PM
Monday, May 22, 2006
As you think...
Notes Fuzzy Signals (from some time ago):By contrast, for generative thinking, a positive frame of reference pays off. In tracking brain waves and through other experiments, cognitive psychologists demonstrate that we perceive more options and opportunities when we're in a positive mindset, and far fewer when we're in a negative or depressed fame of thinking. Moreover, therapies that force us to dwell too long on the past (like many psychoanalytical techniques) can make us too passive about our future and embittered by our victimhood. Our lived experiences confirm this as well. We've all felt a deep sense of "stuckness" when we're depressed, that dark place where solutions seem elusive and where every option seems either wrong or undesirable.This sounds exactly like what James Allen was saying about disposition in As a Man Thinketh, and it fits to a T what his spiritual - though not actual - descendant, Marc Allen, pushes in everything from The Millionaire Course to The Type-Z Guide to Success. What Fuzzy Signals offers is a concern that we're hardwired for "adaptive thinking" - watching for dangers and threats and figuring out how to respond to them - rather than "generative thinking" - figuring out how to envision or shape what isn't but could be. What Marc Allen and other take-it-easy self-help gurus push is, in effect, expanding or harnessing the "generative" mindset - an antidote to this tendency.
What is worrying is that while Fuzzy Signals shows us the need for and logic of seeking ways to increase our "generative thinking," she doesn't tell us what to do about the millions - billions - who find their thinking normal enough (as it is) instead of reading self-help books to find out how we could all be better.
Wittgenstein tells us the world is the sum of facts - and not things. The post-modernists would tag onto this that facts are unstable things, all of us having different ones. And Fuzzy Signals tells us that the facts we're likely to find are the ones about protecting ourselves, not reaching out and building new things.
Are the Islamists hard-wired to fear cultural interchange with us?
Is the West hard-wired to fear Islam?
In other words, is the almost ubiquitious fear of the other the result of us all constructing worlds - emotional and mental universes - that arise when human beings think they know what they see but don't in fact even know why or what they're looking for?
My question, I confess, doesn't really offer any particularly new insights. We've know that babies smile at people who like them for years, for example. But here's the thing: What Fuzzy Signals tells us is that there is a way out. It's just that it's not "sensitivity training," so much as "generative thinking" that needs to be optimized.
The scarier thing for our politics is to wonder how many of our leaders - in government and business alike - think they're making the tough choices in tough times when what they're in fact doing is letting a fear mindset constrain their visions and set us on paths designed only to keep danger at bay a while, rather than preparing us for glorious things in the future.
The next time you read of troops being dispatched, layoffs announced or other such gloomy news, be sure to stop and wonder if fear or hope drove the decision and whether the choices were tough because life is tough or - sadly - because our race conspires inadvertently to make it so.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm getting back to my Instant Self-Hypnosis books, so that I, at least, can live in a world where things look a little better.
posted by gbarto at 10:38 AM
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Watching television with Wittgenstein?
Yup, someone did a Tractatus of television viewing. Link here.posted by gbarto at 7:44 PM
What is time like?
I seem to recall a moment in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy in which it was noted that time is even worse than space to get lost in. (Probably, it was in Life, the Universe and Everything.) Scott Adams sent out the call for thoughts on how the universe started. I'm not sure if I believe in it, but I don't see why time couldn't curve in on itself the way space does, in which case everywhere and nowhere would be the point of origin, depending on your perspective. I commented:When all is said and done - to pick a highly inapt phrase - eternity is probably like infinity, curving around and into itself. Note that like infite space, infinite time is probably not exactly uniform. There are probably bubbles, pockmarks. But where (or when) they are probably shifts.For those seeking a mix of confusing prose and still more confusing reasoning, the rest of the comment is here.
posted by gbarto at 7:04 PM