Dealing with Life’s Decisions – (2) Innate Resources

 

In the previous article in this two-part series, I explained why, in a broad class of cases, the information we receive is likely to be a very poor guide to the actions we should take. This is the much-delayed part two; delayed mainly because I realized I didn’t have a satisfactory answer to my own question of what a better guide might be. In this post, I’ll put together the elements I now have even if I am sure there is much more to be said.

So what basis may we then have for decision, if science does not afford one and positivism is to be mistrusted? And a linked question: on what basis, descriptively, do we actually make decisions?

To the best of my knowledge, though both have grappled with it, neither science nor philosophy has an answer to this age-old riddle.

Derrida was fond of the claim – somewhat abusively attributed by him to Kierkegaard – that “the moment of decision is madness“. Decisions, claimed Derrida, are characterized by circumstances in which “it is not possible to know what should be done, when knowledge is not conclusive and does not have the vocation to be so” [1]. In this case “the only possible decision passes by way of the folly of the undecidable and of the impossible” [2].

Kierkegaard in reality was talking about the act of faith, characterized by the Christian apostle Paul as “foolishness to the Greeks“, i.e. outside the frame of logical deduction to which Hellenistic philosophy by virtue of its very precepts could lead. [3] Paul’s account of the conversion experience rings phenomenologically true: it is a moment in which a feeling of knowledge renders reason superfluous, one which subjectively appears to take place on another level of consciousness. This describes not only religious experiences, but many key moments in the life of anyone. It therefore seems to be at least descriptively accurate. The decisions one takes in such moments are experienced as beyond doubt, as led by a higher force, as apodictic: and therefore as right even if, paradoxically, they ultimately turned out ‘wrong’. And yet conversion presumably is, in fact, in our normal sense always wrong as it is interpreted to include the act of adhesion to a number of precepts which cannot be completely correct – as Kierkegaard rightly noted.

With the benefit of hindsight I can see many ways in which I might have improved, in my own life, upon decisions which I took under the influence of internal circumstances which might be compared to a conversion experience. They include matters related to relationships and academic choices. And yet although I am capable of imagining or even holding some of those decisions to have been wrong, I am incapable of regretting those same decisions, however unwise a seemingly “neutral” observer might find them to have been. There is therefore, it seems, a state in which certain decisions can be taken which, even if they are arguably unwise or suboptimal, are at least insulated from regret.

If such a sense of certainty can pervade weighty decisions, therefore, it nevertheless seems to be well worth examining them critically. Psychologist Arthur Janov has argued that conversion experiences display a universal psychodynamic pattern of ego collapse, but this is of course entirely separate from the specific meaning attached to these experiences by those who undergo them[4]. It follows that, even if in that moment the subject may indeed have been in contact with “truth” – a possibility which cannot be assumed away – nevertheless it is essentially impossible to interpret this “truth” in a way which is verifiably and intersubjectively correct[5].

De facto, even under less dramatic circumstances a number of people would doubtless cite not only science and values as a guide to decision making, but also hunches/their inner voice and self-observation. This “inner voice” represents a type of knowledge the nature of which bears further consideration, comparable in some regards to Spinoza’s “third type of knowledge” which he called intuitive knowledge [6], as well as to Husserl’s phenomenological epistemology.

Innate somatic intelligence

At one level, it seems to me that we can found the notion of an inner voice biologically. I will take the example of food. It seems (at least to me subjectively) that our body has some sense of the nutrients which it requires at any given moment – an innate, pre-conscious nutritional intelligence – and that when we make decisions related to procuring nutrition, for example when shopping, preparing food or choosing from a menu at a restaurant, this innate intelligence plays a role, together, of course, with many other factors which may be less nutritionally relevant (emotional associations with particular foodstuffs, physiological addictions, what we have been told about food, what our choices communicate …). The reality of such a sense is well illustrated by the phenomenon of cravings during pregnancy  – these appear to be informative of physical needs (although this has not been proven) even if there is unarguably merit to interposing a reflective act between the drive and its gratification, as the linked article suggests. Such an innate intelligence presumably also informs the hunting or foraging impulses of other animals. We, as other primates at least, also have an innate ability to learn from our experience of certain foods which, perhaps largely subconsciously, feeds back into future decision making.

At the same time, it is hard to believe that if he were left to make all the decisions himself, my son would naturally gravitate towards a healthy diet (unless, perhaps, I were to release him into the wild). Food behavior is learnt socially in our species, presumably a significant evolutionary advantage; although on a simpler level, this is also true of other primates [7].

Unfortunately, explaining how this innate nutritional intelligence works, distinguishing it from other neurophysiological mechanisms, and determining the confidence we can have in it in making nutritional decisions is a serious philosophical and neurobiological problem which we are not even close to understanding. Some philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and Colin McGinn even argue that the mind-body problem, of which this is an instance, is inherently insoluble. Ramping this up to the next level to explain the role of intuition in complex decision making and the faith we should or should not put in it is therefore beyond the reach of any current theory, and quite possibly beyond even the reach of scientific enquiry per se. The most we can do is list instances where it goes wrong or is misleading and develop heuristics designed to avoid giving it excessive weight. This is perfectly valid and useful, and yet here is a core dimension of human existence about which we are struggling to say anything sensible.

Attitude

Faced with this situation, and with no way to resolve it, the philosophical tradition has focused on the question of the right attitude to adopt vis-à-vis our drives and urges. This tradition has tended, until recent times, to place in my view an unwarranted degree of trust in reason, the logos of Hellenistic philosophy, which presents itself as a metaphysical concept the boundaries of which (as with any socially constitutive concept) are inherently contested. The abandonment to reason urged on us by philosophers seems to lack practical value and to be value-laden, as I have previously argued. It inevitably leads to the tendentious classification of desires on a scale of value, with ‘base’ desires conspiring to lead us astray contrasted to lofty desires which lead to transcendence. This imposition of judgment can be labelled as at best arbitrary and necessarily leads to a bifurcated sense of self which is always in a state of internal conflict.

I therefore prefer a system of heuristics on top of intuition to a metaphysical belief that there is something called ‘reason’ which, if only I would listen to it, would direct my steps better than I might do myself; it sounds awfully like the superego. In my view, there is no need to sublimate desire or benefit from doing so; the contrary impression is merely the consequence of a parody of what constitutes human desire which incorporates unnecessary and ill-founded value judgments. However, I would still reason that the attitude to adopt towards desire is a question of both ethics and esthetics (in other words a question of consciousness), largely because these concepts capture a necessarily intersubjective dimension of desire which is missing in the atomistic Freudian account. This merits a discursus.

An important concept in this context is that of epoché or bracketing, popularized by phenomenologists in the tradition of Husserl who argued that the question of the real existence of objects perceived by the mind, which Kant argued was inaccessible to inquiry, could be set aside without losing the possibility of truth and meaning.

Epoché played an important role in the Greco-Roman Skeptical philosophy of Pyrrhonism. Without actually claiming that we do not know anything, Pyrrhonism argues that the preferred attitude to be adopted is the suspension of judgment or the withholding of assent, since only in this way can the seeker achieve the state of ataraxia or tranquillity. This does not imply that we have no rationale to choose one kind of action over another; however, one kind of life or one kind of action cannot be definitively said to be ‘correct’. Instead of a life of inaction, the Skeptic insists (presumably for no compelling reason other than social convenience) that one normally ought to live according to customs, laws, and traditions.

The nature of desire as movement-towards, and therefore presupposing representation of an object, is one which Franz Brentano argued it shares with other psychosomatic phenomena and which distinguishes such phenomena from phenomena in the natural world, a notion referred to as intentionality. Although it is questionable whether consciousness can be fully reduced to intentionality, for present purposes this problem can be set aside since the category of impulses we are concerned with for the purpose of assessing their reliability is certainly intentional. This intentionality may be social in nature, either because it is directed towards another person as such or because it involves the representation of an act or project which would confer more than purely private benefits or inflict more than purely private costs. Because of this fact, it is obvious that ethics and esthetics enter into the question; these are in fact social means – constitutive of intersubjective modes of action – which allow for group intention. To my mind, the possibility of intersubjective intention is fundamental to the nature and experience of desire.

It might appear that individual and group intention would be prone, even frequently, to conflict, and that there is a trade-off between them which poses itself in win-lose terms. Do we not, indeed, speak of antisocial desires and of social tyranny? While certainly a part of the felt experience of desire, however, there is more to it than this: the participation in shared desires also expands the individual’s range of possibilities and constitutes a source of gratification which is unavailable to her as a purely atomistic actor.

The question of the right attitude to adopt to desire depends at least in part on the confidence we can have in its subjective manifestation. Given the phenomenon of neurosis, that is, of displaced desire, it would seem that this may sometimes require considerable powers of introspection. This statement would appear also to hold good in respect of intersubjective intention. If food cravings are problematic enough to interpret, sexual desires, consumerist impulses and other displaced manifestations of the will to power are surely even more at risk of being tainted and subverted. Is this distinction phenomenologically available to the mind? That is, is there some qualitative characteristic of mental representations of desire which allows the subject to determine their authenticity, their freedom from involuntary subversion?

Probably all I can say at this point is that it seems to me that there is. Not that I am entirely comfortable with a binary disposition of desires between authentic and inauthentic, nor indeed that even authenticity is sufficient to ground action, but nevertheless, all this being said, certain desires just ‘feel’ different from others, just carry within them more of a sense of growth and expansion which gives them greater appeal and authority.

So I think that this distinction can be made phenomenologically, but also that abandon and detachment can coexist. Readers will recall my earlier criticism of Buddhism on the grounds that it seems to preach an unwillingness to actually live life with full commitment. Nevertheless, the attitude of detachment is objectively a part of Dasein and required for its metaphysical consistency. Any identification with a project of ones life, or with ones sensory experiences, is necessarily a confusion since all of these things are perceived or shaped by ‘something’ which cannot be reduced to them, of a form of thought which precedes mind and possesses a potentiality which vastly exceeds its lived experience. It is the adoption of the perspective of this ‘something’ (for which of course a variety of names have been proposed, but I prefer not to employ them for fear of being misunderstood) which constitutes detachment in the sense of apprehending the finitude of ones temporal existence as an artefact of historicity and its subdimensionality relative to the perspective sub specie aeternas. In other words, there is a dimension to which even philosophy can painlessly accede, because it is required strictly by logic, but which cannot be reduced to individual experience and nevertheless is immanently present to being. This seems to me to be what Heidegger is saying in Being and Time: that the dichotomy between contemplation and celebration can actually be overcome, must, in fact, in the logic of things be overcome.

The attitude to be brought to desire is therefore both the serenity of ataraxia and the ecstasy of abandon, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, stillness and dance, the esthetic and the ethical, the perspective of being and the perspective of time; both, simultaneously.

To view this as an inadequate basis for decision is the result of a rationalist bent which I believe it is easy to show reduces to the absurd. The argument is on the following lines, but I will just sketch it out. Taking decisions is just a part of living life. In order to assess the quality of these decisions, it is necessary to determine their effect on the individual’s life. This is their sole yardstick, but it is inaccessible to anything other than the subjective experience itself of being. There is, in essence, no counterfactual and no possibility of error which we could speak about in intersubjectively meaningful terms. Given this, the only pain which is real and actually borne as a result of decisions is the pain of regret, a pain conditioned on having in fact taken a decision other than the one which one ‘knew’ at the time, or should have known, was the ‘right’ one to take. It follows that a strategy which insulates against regret is the best strategy available; there is nothing better, and certainly nothing better about which we can meaningfully talk.

Now, I may seem to contradict myself since the whole premise of my blog is that there are behaviors we are likely to engage in because of our biological nature which we would be better off avoiding. But this formulation, although clear and easy to understand, contains a subtle error : it is not our biological nature which prompts suboptimal decisions, but the way in which the available options are framed by social institutions. The error comes from the institutions, and not from our nature. When I insist that we need a better understanding of our biological nature, what I mean is merely that we need to adopt a standpoint which allows us better to detach ourselves from social institutions, to see their contingency, to reform them so that the act of making right decisions will require less of a superhuman effort than it does now, perhaps to see or consider options we otherwise would not, and to understand why our spirit suffers in the world as it is, that is, to attain to wisdom. This is an agenda of growth and it is part of life; it is not a precondition of being able to live or to live meaningfully.

Attaining a conscious perspective on the part of the individual will often not make additional social options available; the same menu of choices will be there. This is why taking a decision which is at variance with that which one would take if fully reconciled to ones biological nature is not wrong. It is because one cannot be fully reconciled to ones biological nature in isolation from ones peers. The range of decisions available even to a Buddha is a small subset of what would be the decision space of an enlightened humanity. Because I cannot take decisions for all of us, my decisions will never have the quality of plenitude which, if I criticize the decision framework I have outlined for being insufficient, I would be implicitly berating them for not having. It is simply the wrong yardstick.

If we manage to live without regrets from this point forward, we will have attained to the highest trajectory available to us within what remains of our lifetime given where we stand now. It seems to me that this should be our highest aspiration.
*****

Notes

[1] “Quand il n’est pas possible de savoir ce qu’il faut faire, quand le savoir n’est pas déterminant et n’a pas à l’être

[2] “La seule décision possible passe par la folie de l’indécidable et de l’impossible“.

[3] First letter of Paul to the Corinthians. On this paragraph see Bennington (2011), “A Moment of Madness: Derrida’s Kierkegaard”, in Oxford Literary Review, Volume 33, Number 1, July 2011, Pages 103-127.

[4] http://cigognenews.blogspot.be/2010/11/conversion-experience.html

[5] Janov speaks of the conversion experience as if it is necessary a solitary one. It seems to me likely that in so doing he significantly underestimates the importance of community – that is, of the tribal impulse – in religious conversion.

[6] Ethics, Part II, proposition 40

[7] Whiten, A. (2000), Primate Culture and Social Learning. Cognitive Science, 24: 477–508

The cult(ivation) of self

 

The following video was recently shared by Glen Brauer of Philosophy Dinners. I think it is a good synthesis of mindfulness, philosophical enquiry and the state of knowledge in the neuroscience of emotions, and so it is a good starting point for an exploration of the limits of some pervasive concepts in the world of what is often called self-development.

Now obviously I have nothing against self-development per se, or I wouldn’t be writing this blog. And I think Chade-Meng Tan sets the idea of self-awareness out, in the video, in a contemporary manner which already avoids some of the traps, even if he is still constrained to some extent by language. Thus it is obvious that what he means by “mindfulness” is not an awareness only of the mind or of cerebral processes, but also, to the extent possible, of somatic processes and in particular of emotion. This idea (“bodyfulness”) in itself already takes us beyond the mind/body split which we inherit from Hellenistic philosophy, and I think it is very valuable. He also indicates that the result of self-awareness should be an increased flexibility in ones mental range of action: that the ego becomes a tool and not a driving force. So far I agree. However, before zeroing in on what seem to me still to be some limitations in this paradigm, a brief excursus is required.

The Socratic exhortation to self-knowledge is historically inseparable from an exhortation to self-discipline, as Plato’s development of it, and its political economy, make clear. Socrates in no way was advocating a truly open-ended spirit of self-enquiry. Plato and Aristotle assume all number of things about the universe, none of which is founded in sensory data. In my opinion, there is nothing in the Western philosophical tradition before modern times which encourages or even allows for a phenomenologically based calling into question of social institutions. The dictates of logos, imagined to be self-evident, apparently led everyone to conclusions which are now mostly incompatible with major swathes of scientific knowledge about the human condition. The exhortation to follow the promptings of conscience was in reality an exhortation to conform, and one which led to no revolutionary insights at all, and no degree of authentic being.

There have been, of course, dissenting voices to the Socratic tradition, even if they have been marginalized by history: the Epicureans, the Cynics, Boethius…. But each of these has (of understandable necessity) sought a consolation compatible with the established order, even as they rejected it. The French Revolution was doubtless the first time that philosophy played any sort of a role in a mass political uprising, and it was hardly in the driving seat.

I know next to nothing about the history of Zen Buddhism, but the question arises of whether the particular form of the movement and its characteristic doctrines do not represent a similar accommodation. To ask this question, I would argue, is to answer it. Therefore, we should be on our guard for likely omissions in the doctrine which would have rendered it marginalized or existentially endangered, and thus have not survived to this day or are, like liberation theology, only in the process of formulation.

Primitive societies would struggle to understand our concept of self-awareness. To them it would be utterly alien to imagine that not only could an “I” exist separate from the tribe but that it could be so much an object of attention and cultivation that the tribe disappears almost entirely from view. At times it might seem like the whole spiritual tradition of “civilized” societies is a roundabout, almost absurd means to rediscover and enter into an unio mystica which to a hunter-gatherer is so immanent as to be self-evident. The hunter-gatherer, whose senses are already honed to perfection to his/her environment and peers, has no need of a doctrine of self. Perhaps we only privilege it because we have lost all else?

This view is more radical than I am able to be right now. However, it affords a neat perspective against which to evaluate some of the claims of even a progressive theology of mindfulness, and especially its equation with self-awareness. Tan’s presentation seems to draw on models of the emotions within neuroscience which embody an implicit limitation in the scope of knowledge to the self, at least de facto. This seems to pit self-awareness against other-awareness in a manner which betrays significant cultural bias and I am not sure survives a phenomenological audit. Tan seeks in this way to obtain “mastery” over experience. But who is it, in this case, that masters, and in the name of what? What scope does this leave for rapture and for the numinous? To give just one example, but which is telling, is one seeking to “master” the sexual act? Is this the mode of experience of it which is most authentic and most felicitous? Intuitively it seems not. And when we are “honest” about our limitations, are we as aware as we should be that what we really lack is a not a self-audit, but a critical perspective on society?

I think Tan is at least guilty (judging only on the basis of this presentation) of allowing his audience to persist in cultural biases which he might have helped them to overcome. If that cultural bias predisposes to individually and collectively unhappy outcomes, which I believe in the aggregate it does, his disciples can listen to their bodies and emotions all they like, they will still be zombies walking a path to global ruin.

It may be objected, of course, that we have nothing else than sense-data, and hence that Tan’s position is a tautology. I do not dispute this; but everything is in how matters are framed. I could quote Bourdieu at this juncture, but I will content myself with Rumi, whose precocious prefiguration of social constructivism is breathtaking. “Speak a new language, so that the world will be a new world.

Somatic climatology

In a previous post, I discussed John Sarno’s ideas on the psychological etiology of pain and other pathologies. In this context I would like to add some further hypotheses on how emotional repression affects the body and the felt sense.

The repression of emotions from consciousness does not merely prevent their expression in the neocortex. Emotions are naturally linked to the much more ancient endocrine system, which affects the body by means of hormones produced in the glands and vectored through the bloodstream and ultimately the extracellular matrix. The nervous and endocrine systems are interdependent, with response coordinated by the hypothalamus in the brain. The repression of emotions is a process which affects both the nervous system and certain key endocrine functions related to the evolutionarily adaptive response to the emotion in question. However, the body’s natural response to these locked emotions is not altogether disabled – they continue to produce effects in parts of the somatic and autonomic nervous systems as well as in parts of the endocrine system. The key point to understand is therefore that repression from consciousness is not equivalent to complete somatic disactivation. Repression by the ego is an imperfect dam, around which the stored emotions must find routes in order to maintain homeostasis. Because these routes do not provide for a full discharge of the emotions, however, the body is under constant tension.

We may consider that the primary emotional response is the alloplastic one – the one which is directed to changing the situation at the origin of the emotions being felt – and that it is this alloplastic response which is suppressed (if we are anything like our bonobo cousins, the repressed instinct may frequently be to have sex; this response does not change the external situation as such but rather its social expression, and could be termed mesoplastic or socioplastic). In its place, an autoplastic response is favored – the organism tries to change itself.

The inappropriate and sustained nervous and endocrine response to repressed emotions is what gives rise to the pathologies discussed, and it is important to realize that this is not just a “trick of the mind” but rather that it takes place on a biochemical level which, while not fully autonomous, enjoys a degree of autonomy from the conscious functions which we tend to think of when we use the term “mind”. In reality, of course, it is our terminology and its intrinsic duality which is at fault, because the bodymind operates as an integrated system in which certain material may be withheld from consciousness, but the vast majority is unavailable to consciousness in the first place.

The same objection has to be raised in respect of a focus on pathological syndromes only. In fact, the repressed response does not produce candidate pathologies only, but directly influences the biochemical environment of the body, proprioception, and our mental somatic map. It is not only pain, allergy or disturbed bowel function which may be provoked by emotional circumstances, but more generally also our level of somatic energy, our self-perception and our sense of wellness: aspects which we may think of as an innate part of our personality, but in reality are no more so than these other more obvious disturbances.

This raises, from my perspective, the interesting question of how an undisturbed individual would experience the body and embodiment. If it was not immediately obvious to me that my pain had emotional causes, it was even less obvious that the same was true for my general sense of self, for my general sense of inhabiting the body I inhabit. If this experience can also be altered by an awareness of its etiology, then interesting times lie ahead.

I wish all my readers a happy 2013!

Reich’s economic model of psychosomatics (4 – a reappraisal)

In my previous articles on the development of Reich’s thinking*, I have explained how his inquiry into Freud’s libido theory eventually led to his positing an equation between somatic and psychic states, an identity which I believe has been very therapeutically fruitful.

Reich of course went on to engage in work of a much more (some would no doubt say “even more”) speculative character, in which he sought to identify the energy present in orgasm with other energies physically present in the cosmos. From our modern perspective, this effort seems very strange, and to many of Reich’s admirers it is no doubt an embarrassment.

Bernd Laska’s biography helps us somewhat to see the chain of reasoning from Reich’s own perspective, and thus more sympathetically, but it remains evident that Reich in his later period wandered far from scientific method and truth, and one cannot help asking what these later developments imply for the scientific validity of his earlier orgasm theory.

And it seems to me that there is indeed a major flaw embedded in the earlier theory, which does not undermine its therapeutic validity but did lead both to the raft of later speculations and to a certain alienation from authentic sexual experience.

Reich’s error seems to me simple: he confused correlation with causation. Continue reading “Reich’s economic model of psychosomatics (4 – a reappraisal)”