The Privilege, No, The Irresistibility Of Mind

The idea of the mind occupies a strange place in conversations. There are plenty of ways to reduce the mind. Often by reference to physical processes. One could say, for example, that the mind is merely a chemical process in the brain, or that Man's actions are primarily a matter of evolution and instinct. It is hard to know how to treat mind among the plethora of physical and material processes that also determine human experience.

I, however, give mind a very privileged position. I cannot help but appeal directly to minds. I want to talk about my own mind, how I think, what I feel, what my experience is like. I want to talk about other minds, I want to understand what they feel, figure out how they work. I find mind irresistible. This does not mean that I don't pay attention to materialist philosophy or the sciences of life. I find that stuff fascinating, but I regard it useful only insofar as it helps me talk about minds, and, most importantly, how those minds can be educated in certain ways. I'm finding myself more and more convinced that all of my thinking has to culminate in pedagogical ends. I am ready to embrace knowledge of mind as the fundamental element of all knowledge. 

There is, however, a serious tension between mind and the physical reality that sustains it. The structures of the natural world and the physical structures that we create are constantly affecting our mental processes. We can get lost in these elaborate social worlds that we create. And although these physical processes are directed by people's minds, the physical structures persist beyond any one mind. I was reminded of this tension tonight when I say Werner Herzog's movie "The Cave Of Forgotten Dreams." 

The movie is about the Chauvet caves in southern France, home of the oldest cave paintings ever found. He documents the research efforts of archeologists attempting to understand who made the caves, what they thought about them, and what they used them for. The movie did a good job of not over-interpreting the cave, not claiming too strongly that such and such a site was used for such and such a ritual. The emphasis seemed to be much more on these scientist's attempt to access a historical experience radically different from our own. 

At one point they realized that two paintings that overlapped and complimented one another were created five thousand years apart from one another. The scale of time is unimaginable. That one person Thirty two thousand years about would paint one animal, and five thousand years later someone would add to it. At that moment Herzog says something like 'We are lost in history, they were not'. I see part of the tension lying in the type of creativity they were engaging in and what our creative expression is like. These people were adorning an unadorned landscape, a place modified only by natural processes was suddenly transformed through their actions. And to think that five thousand years later someone could collaborate with them, and just paint overtop and next to their painting is an amazing thing. We could never go into a museum and start drawing on someone else's painting. Our cultural and creative experience is very different. So the thing that is really shocking is the extreme difficulty of imagining an aesthetic experience like the artists of those cave paintings.

Our inability to imagine the aesthetic experience of our ancient ancestors is contrasted well with another example from the movie: the Aboriginal experience of cave art. One of the archeologists discusses a story from the 1970's where an anthropologist was being guided by an Aboriginal man. They came across a set of decaying Aboriginal cave paintings. The guide was upset with the decay of the paintings and began a process of touching them up, repainting and fixing them. When asked why he was painting the Aboriginal would respond, this archeologist said, something like 'I'm not painting, the spirit is painting through me', or something like that. The point being that for this Aboriginal man these paintings represented a spiritual-aesthetic experience that he had hereditary and direct access to. He lived in that tradition and could therefore bring the experience of the original painter back to life, re-enact the painting for himself, engage in a process that was simultaneously a simulation of a past act and a new act in its own right. His repetition of the past leading to something new. But we can't do that. Our cultural heritage took some strong turns and we can no longer re-enact/simulate the spiritual-aesthetic experience of a cave painting.

This same archeologist also said he believed that his goal was to get to some place outside the cave. That studying the cave was their starting point but the real goal was somewhere beyond it. When asked where he named other physical locations, South America, Australia, et cetera. The point being, I think, that when you understand one of these places and have really attempted to grasp the experience behind these places you need to compare that with other places. Only in this way can you hope to gain more general insights into the human experience. Something about simulation and comparison, like I wrote in my recent post. But it seems like that simulation, the recovery of that experience, was the task. 

So why is it that being 'lost in history' makes it so difficult for us to grasp a prehistoric aesthetic experience? What does this mean to be lost in history and why does it has this affect on our mental capacity? Why does being lost in history make it so difficult to re-enact the spiritual-aesthetic experience of the cave painting?

I believe these questions can be answered with a little help from Foucault. Foucault, too, believed that we had become lost in history. He believed that our culture and its ways of being had reached a critical mass where signs and representation were merely replicating themselves, no longer moving towards a union with reality. Representation was finally able to become a representation of representation, or something. In The Archeology of Knowledge he refers to 'discursive regularities', that is patterns of language that form a constellation of tacit assumptions that form the necessary basis for all thought. He believed that we could study these discursive regularities in their own right, tracking the historical progression of unconscious structures of thought. This, however, means that Foucault often had very little to say about individual minds. He himself says that he wishes to study statements "not from the point of view of the individuals who are speaking, nor from the point of view of the formal structures of what they are saying, but from the point of view of the rules that come into play in the very existence of such discourse: what conditions did Linnaeus (or Petty, or Arnauld) have to fulfil, not to make his discourse coherent and true in general, but to give it, at the time when it was written and accepted, value and practical applications as scientific discourse.... " (The Order Of Things, xiv). The focus, therefore, is not the individual mind, but the historical conditions that make that mind possible.

What Foucault is doing, I claim, is shying away from the subject in his recognition of the mind's intense historical conditioning. Our society, more than others past and present, has highly developed and codified rules about how we live. We talk about everything, our clothes, our money, our living, our sex lives, our gender presentation. As Foucault said, "Surely no other type of society has ever accumulated–and in such a relatively short span of time–a similar quantity of discourses concerned with sex" (Volume I, History of Sexuality, 33). We are a society overrun with historically dense prescriptive language. This realization, as I said, invites us to distrust the mind. If my mind is so historically conditioned, one might ask, how can I be sure that I really know what I'm doing? Foucault himself said that people know what they do, but they don't know what they do does. It is logical to distrust the mind in response to some of Foucault's work. I will show, however, that this stage is only preliminary to a return to the mind.

There is undoubtedly something problematic about the historical density of our moment. For one thing, the minds historical conditioning makes us incapable of accessing certain experiences (such as the problem of the cave paintings). In other words, the historical conditioning of our mind makes it exceptionally difficult to simulate certain types of experience. We can lose a certain capacity for empathy when we are ignorant of the historical conditioning of our mind. The tension between mind and historical/natural processes, therefore, is about the way that changing natural-cultural situations affect our capacity for empathy or, more generally, simulative thought. 

I think this tension between history and simulative thought is played out in Foucault's work. For many years Foucault did not engage in conversations about minds, about the role of subjectivity and volition. Historical conditioning outshone the subject in Foucault's early work. In his late work, however, we see a return to the mind. Foucault begins speaking about how an individual can shape themselves within the context of their situation. Suddenly the mind is a factor again. The subject, of course, was always present in Foucault's work, but much more subtly than in his late work.

There is much to be said about this problem of history and simulative thought. We get buried on our culture and our history and we lose a certain capacity for mental simulation. We lose touch with the past and with other communities because our mind has become locked into a certain way of thinking. 

But the mind must be reckoned with. We must take seriously the minds of the past and the minds of the present. Both the minds around us and the ones far away. And this requires a certain capacity for simulative thought. This capacity, further, rests on a certain awareness, which can be cultivated through historical study (but not exclusively there). Something going on here.

This is a weird series of reflections. But what I'm really getting at is the necessity of simulating other minds in your own mind. We need to take minds seriously. Only from them do we gain the synthetic experience necessary for our own experience. Only through minds are we able to repeat something to make something new. And only by taking minds seriously, I hope, can we begin to take compassion seriously. Can you logically work yourself into a state of compassion? Or does that take a real attempt to engage with, simulate, another mind? You can logically work yourself into a state of simulating another mind, I believe (to some extent). So if you can logically work yourself into a simulation you are, I suppose, reasoning your way into compassion. But only by means of simulation.

I conclude that privileging mind is most useful because it provides us with the best approach to morality. Direct engagement with minds is simulative and therefore leads to compassion. Life has no end other than the process itself and therefore the simplest things like compassion matter a good deal. Unfortunately I don't think we are often taught how to empathize.

Relationships And Mediums: Habits, Historical Knowledge, and Self-Creation

This is the second section of my current essay project 'Relationships and Mediums'. In the first section I tried to explain how there was a qualitative divide in my relationships. With certain interactions I and other people are warm, open, and most importantly empathic. And in other instances people are distant, cold, and seem to be operating with nothing other than labels or ideas about who I am. In other words, sometimes my relationships are governed by genuine engagement with another mind, and sometimes they are mitigated by nothing but economically defined roles.

In order to understand this divide I am turning to the issue of mediums. Because above all else this is an issue of how minds are interacting with one another. And for me mind is nothing but what mind does. And the only way a mind can do something is through a certain medium. Therefore I can only make sense of this issue of relationships if I make sense of the mediums through which minds are working.

The goal of this whole thing is to create a historically augmented and pedagogically useful theory of mind. I think that theory of mind suffers from its ahistorical perspective. And I hope to use historical data to supplement these ahistorical accounts so as to arrive at a better picture of what minds are like in this precise moment in history. This is a line of thought I initiated in my essay 'The Genealogy Of The Modern Mind'. And this is my attempt to pick up that line of thought, albeit in a loose way.

So in any case, this is the section in which I try to understand that divide in my relationships by analyzing the major mediums through which the mind works. I chose three mediums to focus on: architecture and urban design, language itself, and economic systems. I think that these three things constitute our major mediums for choice and action. So by analyzing them I am hoping to analyze the relationships that take place within them.

This writing was hard for me, and so is a little sloppy and confused and all over the place. But that is what I was trying to do.

II. Of Mediums: Inclinations And Habits In Relationships

As I said above, I now want to focus on the question of mediums so as to move closer to creating a historically informed theory of mind. I am convinced that if we want to understand minds we need to think of them as concrete historical realities, and not as some abstract unchanging entity. This means that we need to think of minds as things that do things. We need to take seriously the idea that ‘mind is only what mind does’. So what do minds do? And how do they do it? Well the answer to the first question is less important. But I’ll say that minds have relationships with other minds, with themselves, and with things around them. Minds relate. How do they do it is the more important question. They always do it through certain mediums. And here I am defining a medium in the most general sense as a means to doing something. By this definition everything is a medium, from our five senses to the technology we use to augment them, from our economic system to the design of our cities. All of these things are mediums that our minds work through. Further, we are not dealing merely with single mediums, but with mediums that are stacked upon one another. The senses being at the foundation, and the economic system and other ones being stacked on top. And I think that a closer look at this issue of mediums will make it clear how to construct a historically informed theory of mind.

So what is it about mediums that we need to understand in order to understand our minds? For this question I would like to briefly discuss Nicholas Carr’s work in The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. In that book Mr. Carr is trying to answer some questions about how the internet is effecting our behavior, our thoughts, and our brains. He has two foundational perspectives, the first is Marshal McLuhan’s work on media, the second being the recent advances in the field of neuroplasticity.

McLuhan is famous for coining the phrase ‘the medium is the message’, by which he meant that the form in which something is presented matters more than the content itself. This means that when studying media and communication we need to pay more attention to the way in which something is communicated and less to the actual content of what is communicated. This is the good old question of content versus form. Take poetry and aesthetic expression for example. Is it possible to communicate the same content in a different form? Or are content and form inseparably linked? I believe the latter to be the case. It isn’t enough, or even possible, to explain to somebody what a poem or a song communicates. This is because the content and the form are so intimately linked. I hear stories of musicians or poets what their work means. And in that case the best response is something like ‘if I could explain it to you I wouldn’t have to express it through music/poetry’. Hayden White also believes content and form to be intimately linked. I would really like to take a look at his book The Content Of The Form, but I haven’t been able to get to it yet. But in any case, the point is this: content and form, medium and message, are inseparably linked. And while we often focus strictly on content, people like McLuhan and White believe we would benefit from some focus on the medium or the form.

Carr uses McLuhan’s work on mediums as a starting point to discuss the way that the internet as a medium poses unique problems. If the medium is the message, then what is the message of the internet as a medium? Carr, however, takes this notion a step further by introducing the notion of an ‘intellectual ethic’. He claims that every medium contains an implicit ‘intellectual ethic’: “Every intellectual technology, to put it another way, embodies an intellectual ethic, a set of assumptions about how the human mind works or should work: (45). The users and even creators of a medium might not even be aware of the intellectual ethic of a medium: “The intellectual ethic of a technology is rarely recognized by its inventors. They are usually so intent on solving a particular problem or untangling some thorny scientific problem that they don’t see the broader implication of their work. The users of the technology are also usually oblivious to its ethic” (45). This is an important observation. We should pay particular attention to the way Carr describes an intellectual ethic as a set of assumptions about how the mind should work. This means that mediums are not simply a passive means that are completely under our control, but that they, on the contrary, directly shape what it is that we do and what it is that we are. Or, as Carr puts it, the medium appears “so much our servant that it would seem churlish to notice that it is also our master” (4). The medium as the message, therefore, means that we are actively transformed by the mediums that we use to navigate the world. Our minds change as a result of exposure to different mediums. This is where Carr’s concern with neuroplasticity comes into play.

Carr turns to the new science of neuroplasticity to show that mediums have an effect on human behavior. While for much of the twentieth century it was accepted that the brain was relatively static, recent findings show that the brain is far more plastic than people had suspected. Carr first draws on neuroscienctific evidence to make the general claim about the plasticity of the brain. He then turns to the more specific issue of how specific mediums effect the brain. He takes the book and the internet as his major concerns. He explains how the brains of literate individuals differ from the brains of illiterate individuals, and what parts of the brain are involved in reading books. He claims that the book as a medium encourages patient, concentrated, linear thought. To go from one page to another for a long time involves following and focusing on that narrative. As a result, the brain engaging with a book becomes better at focusing, on following linear trains of thought, and so on. The brain using the internet, on the other hand, is inclined to be distracted. He explains how with the internet we are always open to new pages, new hyperlinks, new tabs, and how, as a result, the part of our brain involved in judgement and decision making is engaged. While reading a book our decisions are relatively limited. We can put the book down and do something else, or we can keep reading. But with the internet we have the possibility of opening a new tab at any moment. And the activation of the part of the brain responsible for judgement is all it takes for us to be far more distractible on the internet. In any case, Carr is able to show that the internet and books both contain a unique intellectual ethic, and that they both effect the brain in different ways.

Carr makes a convincing case by extrapolating on McLuhan’s claim that the medium is the message. He shows that mediums are never just passive tools, but have a very active part in shaping our behavior, and in particular, our habits. The issue of habit has been increasingly important to me over the last number of months. And I think that Carr in many ways is getting at the issue of habits without making it explicit. When we talk about the medium being the message, or about the inclinations of a medium, what we are really talking about is the way that certain mediums instill certain unconscious habits in us. Using the internet, for example, I habitually jump from tab to tab, opening up different things and doing nothing useful. The medium encourages me to have certain habits. And this changes my brain. Habits show up in my brain probably.

Carr’s work leaves us with several lessons with regards to the importance of mediums. First, a medium is never a passive tool, but always possess a certain inclination, they always implicitly encourage us to behave in certain ways. Second, these mediums effect our brains in very real ways, produce noticeable effects in our behaviour and in our brains. Third, that we are best to think about mediums in terms of the habits they instill in us. Now that I have established these things about mediums in general, I would like to extrapolate it and reconnect it all to my discussion of minds and relationships.

So the first questions that I want to ask in order to reconnect the idea with mediums is this: What precisely is and is not a ‘medium’? If a medium is defined as ‘an agency or means of doing something’, then aren’t most things mediums? Does this mean that things like buildings, things like urban planning, things like economic systems, and even language itself, are mediums? If this is the case, and these things are ‘mediums’, then do all of these things contain something like the intellectual ethic and inclinations that Carr describes? If so, then what are the inclinations of these mediums? And how do we need to take them into account?

Well, I will just say right away that I think the answer to many of those questions is a yes: we do need to think of urban design, languages, and economic systems as ‘mediums’. And this means that we need to consider these mediums in the way that Carr describes: not as passive tools, but as things that instill certain habits in us and actively incline us towards certain types of thinking and behavior. We need to recognize, as McLuhan said, that mediums “alter ‘patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance’” (Carr, 3). Our lives, our experiences, our minds, and our relationships are being shaped on an unconscious level by mediums that are so fundamental to our existence that we don’t even recognize them as mediums. This is where I’m getting into a little bit of trouble. I have not read enough about urban design, economic systems, or language in order to understand this stuff. But I’ll try.

So is it possible to consider architecture and urban design to be a medium? And if so, what are the inclinations of this medium that we need to be aware of? Well I think that the answer to the first question is a definite yes. Human beings always interact with buildings, and buildings are always a way that we get certain things done. Buildings are almost always a means to something, and they are therefore a medium of sorts. But does this means that buildings induce certain habits in us? That, as a medium, they incline us to act in certain ways? Indeed, Walter Benjamin made this precise claim about buildings and architecture. He claims that many of our artistic mediums are historically contingent, they come and go. But that architecture has remained a consistent medium for human beings, because “the human need for shelter is permanent.” Benjamin therefore claims that architecture's “effect ought to be recognized in any attempt to account for the relationship of the masses to the work of art” (40). Understanding how the masses relate to architecture, however, is not a simple task. Benjamin believes that architecture is received in at least two ways: “by use and by perception. Or, better: tactilely and optically.” Further, that our tactile reception of architecture comes about through habit and largely determines our optical perception: “Tactile reception comes about not so much by way of attention as by way of habit. The latter largely determines even the optical reception of architecture, which spontaneously takes the form of casual noticing, rather than attentive observation” (40). I have a hard time understanding Benjamin. But clearly he regards architecture as a medium that is both artistic, and one that most people engage with. Further, he seems to think that the way people interact with architecture subtlety introduces habits into their lives. This would imply that architecture is indeed a medium as defined by Carr: a means to doing something that contains an implicit message, a secret suggestion, an inclination.

David Harvey further corroborates this idea that architecture and urban planning constitute an important medium for human choice. In The Condition Of Postmodernity he has a chapter called ‘Postmodernism in the city’. In it he discusses the change from modernity to postmodernity in terms of architecture, city planning, and urban design. He says that the switch from modernity to postmodernity in these field is characterized by the rejection of attempts to rationally organize space so as to regulate social and economic conditions. “Whereas the modernists see space as something to be shaped for social purposes and therefore always subservient to the construct of a social project, the postmodernists see space as something independent and autonomous, to be shaped according to aesthetic aims and principles which have nothing necessarily to do with any overarching social objective, save, perhaps, the achievement of timeless and ‘disinterested’ beauty as an objective in itself” (66). Clearly there is something important at stake in urban design and the management of space. “How a city looks and how its spaces are organized,” Harvey claims, “forms a material base upon which a range of possible sensations and social practices can be thought about, evaluated, and achieved” (66-67, my italics). I have emphasized the words ‘material base’ because I am trying to draw attention to the way in which the material world has the ability to govern our unconscious thoughts and habits, and is therefore a medium in the way Carr describes. And it seems that governments are aware that cities work on this level of unconscious patterns of behavior. This is why governments strive for “the rationalization of spatial patterns and of circulation systems so as to promote equality (at least of opportunity), social welfare, and economic growth” (69).

So, it is clear that cities constitute an important medium for choice. They are designed in ways that are supposed to maximize equality. They are purposefully created so as to allow people access to certain things and not to other things. But is it fair to say that they instill habits in people? And that they meet the definition of a medium in that sense? The answer seems to be yes. And I think that Harvey’s use of Pierre Bourdieu’s work is telling. He draws on Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’, which refers to the totality of learned habits and dispositions that individuals acquire in a given society. In the realm of habitus “we each of us possess powers of regulated improvisation, shaped by experience, which allow us ‘an endless capacity to engender products – thoughts, perception, expressions, actions – whose limits are set by the historically situated conditions’ of their production” (345, my italics). I emphasize the idea of experience and the idea of history for a few reason. By emphasizing experience I want to communicate that habits are not essential, they are learned from the mediums that we have around us, and for Harvey, the design of cities is an important medium for our choices. And I emphasize the issue of history because I want to hint at the final section of this essay. If these are historically contingent habits, then history will be an important place to look when we are thinking about change. But all that I really need you to take away from these last few paragraphs is that buildings and cities are mediums in the sense that they are a means by which we accomplish, and more importantly, that they implicitly incline us to behave in certain ways. So I think it is fair to say that architecture and cities meet Carr’s definition of a medium. But what about language?

So is it possible to consider language itself a medium? Language is so intimately linked to our experiences that we might not always think about it. But to me it seems like language is clearly one of our fundamental mediums. Every choice and most actions we make are mitigated by it. We often have to say something in order to actualize a choice, and you have to use linguistic categories to even conceptualize a choice. Language is perhaps the most fundamental institution. So, it seems pretty obvious to me that language must be considered a medium. The next question, then, is What is the inclination of language as a medium? What is the message of language as a medium?

Well, I think that language inclines us towards valuation and judgement. I don’t think it is possible to talk about something without implicitly evaluating that thing. Is it possible to label something without embedding some kind of value judgement in that label. Can you think of a value-free word? I wonder if I can. I’m not sure. But for the most part I would say that language inclines us towards judging something one way or another.

To really make this analysis more complete I would have to say what the most common words are in our daily language, and what kind of value judgement is implicit in that language. But I don’t feel like taking those pains right now. So I’ll just say that at some point I’ll have to look more closely at this question of language and how it inclines us towards judgement. That would really be helpful in creating a historical theory of mind. But right now I just want to finish up this section on mediums so I can move on to the issues of history and other stuff. But suffice it to say that I think language is a crucial medium for choice, and that it the language we use inclines us towards judging things in certain ways. Just a quick example: can you think of any word that can be used to describe a woman who has a lot of sex that has a positive connotation? It is tough to think of one. Slut, whore, promiscuous, etc., are the words that we usually have to describe a woman like that. But all of those words don’t simply describe the phenomenon, they also implicitly judge it. I think the same is probably true of much language: it is embedded with valuation. And a last point, I will just say that language also inclines us towards generalization, towards the violence of language that Zizek describes.

Now I’d like to ask if economic systems can also be considered mediums. This question as to whether economic system in itself constitutes a medium is a question I have less to say about. Mainly because it seems pretty obvious to me that if something like a city or language can be considered a medium, then the economic system is also a medium. In fact, it seems as though the economic system might be the most crucial of all mediums. In the past six months or more I have become more and more concerned with economic analysis. This is largely thanks to Collingwood, David Harvey, Zizek, and of course, Marx. Harvey pushed me to think seriously about Marxism, and so I picked up my copy of The German Ideology and found it engaging. Zizek then pushed me further to think about Marxism. I am still very confused by Zizek. But the one thing I’d like to note is Zizek’s claims that if we are to address social issues then we must address the economic system above all else. He says that “one can reduce all political, juridical, cultural content to the ‘economic base’, ‘deciphering’ it as its ‘expression’ – all except class struggle, which is the political in the economic itself” (IDOLC, 293). I don’t understand the end of that sentence, with the idea of excepting class struggle. But it is clear that the economic system, for Zizek, is the fundamental medium in which all other mediums are embedded.

It seems as though Zizek thinks that economics is the fundamental medium. Indeed, this is the fundamental tenant of Marx and of historical materialism: we are in the main determined and constituted by the material conditions in which we live. What people are, Marx argues, “coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production” (German Ideology, 7). The economic system is how we gain access to our basic material needs; it provides us with food, shelter, relationships, etc.. Everything is mediated through this basic care of the physical body. Furthermore, the economic system in many ways creates who we are, “that circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances” (Ibid., 29). This means that the economic system, too, fits Carr’s definition of a medium in that it actively creates habits of behavior in us. The economic system as a medium inclines us to do certain things, it makes us into something.

So what is the inclination of our economic system as a medium? Well that is a super difficult question, and I don’t really know how to answer it. I am inclined to resort to some kind of platitude about greed and capitalism and blah blah blah. But it would make sense that the economic system inclines us to greed, towards consumption, towards conceptual interactions with other people.

And this is one thing I’d like to say that will connect all of these issues of mediums to my original questions in the first section. I was asking why some of my relationships seemed to exist based on very little other than labels. And in particular, I experience this at my job. When I have an economically defined roll, as a ‘barista’, people don’t need to worry about any of the other things that I might be. When we first meet people we ask them ‘what do you do?’, by which we typically mean, ‘what is your profession/job? how do you make your money?’. It seems to me that the economic system is in many ways does seem like the master medium that governs our behavior and our relationships.

I still don’t know how to say precisely what the inclination of capitalism is. But it seems like when the violence of language meets the violence of the economic system, then some bad things happen. We have a social system in which we can label people certain things and leave them to the violence of the economic system. Those two processes would corroborate one another. The economic system has people born into poverty, and then the language of the economic system makes it so that they are blamed for their plight. ‘They deserve to be poor because they didn’t work hard enough, didn’t take advantage of their opportunities’. It seems to me that the interaction between the three mediums I’m describing is very real. Cities and urban design play into the needs of the economic system, the language helps create the economic system and then perpetuates the economic system. It seems that the mediums contain these types of inclinations.

I’m running out of ways to talk about this stuff right now. But it should be clear, hopefully, that based on Carr’s definition of mediums as containing inclinations, cities, language, and economic systems can all be considered mediums. All of these things are a means to doing something, and they all encourage us to do those things in certain ways. Cities incline us to go certain places, to do certain types of jobs, to engage in certain types of behavior. Language encourages us to generalize and value things in certain ways. And economic systems incline us to care for our bodies in certain ways, and seems to exert disproportionate influence on the other mediums. Meaning that language, urban design, and other things, are all effected by the economic system. That the economic system is the base, or master medium, in which all other mediums work through. This makes sense in that our bodies are the main thing that allow us to do anything. So perhaps the body is the master medium, and the economic system is the way the body continues to function. So anyways, that should be enough to make it clear that our minds work through many large mediums that interact with one another, and that cities, language, and economic systems are all crucial mediums for our choices. And furthermore, that the problem I addressed in the first section has to do with the inclinations of our mediums. I believe that some of my relationships have a strictly conceptual quality because language and the economic system incline us to think of people in strictly utilitarian, and not empathic, terms.

Before I move on to try and propose some solutions to the problem of conceptual relationships, I would like to say a few more things about mediums. The questions are, How do mediums get structured in this way? If everything down to cities and language is a medium, how do we change them? What is their internal logic or structure? What sort of factors contribute to the constitution of a medium? To answer this I would like to use my friends Michel Foucault, Guy Claxton, and David Harvey.

The mediums that I am speaking of consist of things that are typically regarded as mundane or ordinary. In order to understand how cities, languages, and economic systems are mediums, I think we need to focus on basic things like time, space, movement, sleep, etc.. In other words, in order to grasp the nature of our largest mediums we have to look for the significance in the mundane.

Foucault’s Discipline & Punish is loaded with this type of observation of social mediums. Foucault claims that sometime at the beginning of the nineteenth century a new type of society came into existence, what he calls a ‘disciplinary society’. The hallmark of disciplinary society is the intense regulation of individual bodies. Foucault believes that disciplinary societies came into existence for a variety of reasons, the rise of capitalist economies being one of the most important. He describes how the most basic facets of life came under the gaze of elite groups of individuals. Doctors, psychiatrists, factory owners, legal officials, and other individuals were suddenly capable of closely observing individuals. As a result it became possible to create large bodies of knowledge about individuals, their lives, their movements, their thoughts and attitudes, and so on. And that knowledge in turn allowed people to be regulated in more intense ways. Foucault would say that the creation of that knowledge, in fact, produced those individuals by telling them what they were. In particular, Foucault claims that mundane things like sleep, language, movement, space, and time were the most closely regulated. In other words, Foucault believes that a new form of political/economic culture, and thus new people, were created through the regulation of the most basic aspects of life. And for my sake, I’ll say that a new social medium (capitalist/disciplinary society) was created through the regulation of the mundane.

Claxton also offers some insights into the significance of the mundane. In What’s The Point Of School Claxton argues that a school’s culture is determined by the way it handles very basic things. Claxton, just like Foucault, identifies space, language, and time as key factors in determining the culture of a school. It matters how we arrange our spaces, how we regulate our time, how we speak about things. Claxton, for example, says that it is harmful to speak of students as ‘bright’ or ‘dull’. He argues that those labels imply that there is something inherently smart or dumb about a certain person. And instead we should be speaking of students capacity for learning. That the word ‘learning’ needs to be the crux of school culture. Claxton says that “small changes in the classroom layout and the activities on offer cumulatively shift students’ sense of ‘what we believe and value’, and they respond accordingly,” and that “Building a learning culture is not just a matter of individual teachers in separate classrooms. Every aspect of school life is important” (149, my italics). In other words, for schools, the most important things are the most basic things: the words we use, the way we arrange our space, the actions we partake in. For Claxton, schools are the medium to education, and the medium is the message. And the medium lies in the most basic aspects of our lives.

These two examples lend credence to David Harvey’s claims in The Condition Of Postmodernity. In that book Harvey wants to understand what it is that people loosely refer to as ‘postmodernity’. The most obvious question is, What is the relationship between the cultures that we call modernity and what we call postmodernity? Harvey argues that, above all else, the experience of (post)modernity is fundamentally connected with a certain experience of space and time (space-time). Furthermore, that the experience of space-time is closely tied to the economic system that is in place. Harvey claims that the rise of modernity is about new experiences of space and time that resulted from the growth of industry and capitalism. As industry grew in Europe people began exploring more, commerce grew, products could be shipped internationally, time became a more precious commodity, maps became more common. In short, as capitalism grew people began to experience space-time in new and profound ways. Harvey refers to this phenomenon as ‘time-space compression’, which refers to “processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter, sometimes in quite radical ways, how we represent the world to ourselves” (240). And the word compression refers to how “ the history of capitalism has been characterized by speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us” (240). Modernity as a cultural phenomena, therefore, is associated with a round of time-space compression that was brought on by the expansion of capitalism. Similarly, Harvey argues that postmodernity arose out of another round of time-space compression that was caused by a transformation in capitalism’s structure. He argues that we have changed from a Fordist-Keynesian economic model to what he calls one of ‘flexible accumulation’, meaning that the economy now “rests on flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products, and patterns of consumption” (147). Harvey drives home the point that the most minor things in our lives, like how we experience space and time, can actually have profound consequences for our personal and cultural lives. He corroborates Foucault and Claxton’s claims that culture emerges out of mundane things like basic language, space, time, movement, sleep, and so on. And all of these thinkers allow me to understand that our must essential mediums are constituted by constellations of these mundanities. Our mediums (economic systems, languages, cities, etc.) are constituted by certain organizations of space, time, movement, and so on. The mundane parts of our life have a lot of power to determine how we think, how we live our lives, and what our habits are.

I think that Carr is also aware of the importance of these mundane things, and how they create the mediums that give us our habits. He begins explicating his idea of the intellectual ethic of mediums by talking about the history of clocks and maps. He explains how each one of these intellectual tools, these ‘tools of the mind’, change the way that we think about the world, and thus change the way that we act within the world. Carr, however, has less to say about what the intellectual ethic of the map or the clock is. He is just saying that they are mediums that we use to understand ourselves in the world, and that they too have a set of assumptions, that they are a medium with a message.

Carr, however, does have plenty to say about the implications of the internet as a medium. In particular, Carr worries that the internet is making people more machine like, that by fully committing to the electronic world we are sacrificing something uniquely human. That by being constantly distracted by the internet and technology we are losing something. Namely, the power of judgement, empathy, and compassion. He claims that we are experiencing “a slow erosions of our humanness and our humanity” (220). That “the more distracted we become, the less able we are to experience the subtlest, most distinctively human forms of empathy, compassion, and other emotions.... It would not be rash to suggest that as the Net reroutes our vital paths and diminishes our capacity for contemplation, it is altering the depth of our emotions as well as our thoughts” (221). Indeed, the message of the internet is one of distraction, and I agree with Carr that this has serious consequences for our capacity for empathy and compassion. We are running the risk of destroying those traits that we think of as human or humane. “It may be that we are now entering the final stage of that [technological] entrenchment. We are welcoming the frenziedness [of technology] into our souls” (222). We do indeed need to worry about the way the modern world inclines us to eschew empathy, compassion, and emotions.

I think, however, that these issues go far beyond the internet as a medium. Because the disappearance of empathy and compassion is something that is happening in places beyond the internet. I fear that it is happening in our cities and urban design, in our language, and in our economic system. That is why I undertook this analysis of those mediums. Because I wonder if the message of those mediums is to abandon empathy for generalizations about people. I wonder if the message of our economic system is that we are essentially our jobs, and that as long as someone is economically defined we don’t need to take the time to show them any empathy or compassion. And this is the connection to the previous section on the difference between empathic and conceptual interaction, and why the question of mediums and their inclinations matters so much. People often habitually treat me as if I am simply a barista, as if I don’t need to be thought of in serious or nuanced ways. And I don’t think I can chock this up to stupidity, or laziness, or anything like that. I think I need to look at larger forces. And I think that I can understand this qualitative divide in my relationships by focusing on the mediums through which my relationships are mediated. And it seems to me that the message of our most prominent mediums, is that we ought to abandon empathy in favor of economic efficiency and personal generalization. And since I suspect that our economic system may be the most important medium, I will say that the message of capitalism might be greed, generalization, labeling, and a lack of empathy. And all of this happens on the habitual level.

I believe that I can only understand my relationships by understanding their mediums. And that is what I wanted to do in this section. I was asking, If the medium is the message, and if language, cities, and economic systems are mediums, then what is the message of those mediums? What habits are these mediums instilling in me and my fellow humans? And I fear that the mediums are giving us habits that are cold, and unemotional. We are being turned into beings that habitually label one another, habitually ignore one another, habitually scorn one another, habitually interact at the superficial level of words, habitually avoid empathy and compassion.

This was a hard section to write for me. I struggled to write about these mediums. I didn’t know how to approach them. But I made it through. And in the end I think I have addressed the question of relationships by focusing on mediums. My conclusions, however, are too vague. Carr believes that the internet, with its inclination towards distraction, is dulling our capacity for empathy. And I am similarly concluding that the economic system, our language, and our cities are also inclining use towards distraction and the dulling of empathy. It seems to be a fact of my experience and the world around me. I know there is still a lot of love and empathy out there. But there is also a lot of alienation, a lot of coldness, a lot of war, and probably not enough empathy. And I think that this must have something to do with our most prominent mediums.

In the last two sections I need to try and build on this work I’ve just done. I think that the only way out of this problem, the only way to understand our mediums and our habits, is through historical study. Similarly, I think that the only way to create informed policy is through historical study. And that the only way to reinvigorate our culture with empathy and love is through historical study. Thus, the next section will be on historical study, and the issue of human self-creation.

The Issue of Compassion In My Latest Essay

I have a big problem with people who don't show much compassion.

And as soon as I say that I begin to wonder about my own capacity for compassion. Do I really show compassion for other people? Or is this some idea that I have embraced intellectually but not practically?

It is unclear to me. But it is good that I am still doubting my own capacity for compassion. This way I'll be more vigilant in the future, more sure to show compassion.

But this new essay of mine is definitely pushing me to think about the issue of compassion. But it is frustrating me because I don't feel like I'm pushing the issue explicitly enough. I'm skirting around it, working my way towards it. I'm taking a big detour so that I can address the issue of compassion.

I'm taking all this time to talk about habits and mediums, about history, about theory of mind. But what I want to get at is compassion.

I feel that developing a philosophical defense of compassion, empathy, and love is the most important thing I can strive for. It is so intense to think like that. I don't know how to do it. But I feel like that is the problem that I am working towards. From all kinds of different angles, I feel that I am working my way towards the issue of compassion. Empathy is a step towards compassion. What I want is compassion. What I want is love.

Sometimes my thinking collapses under the weight of all the themes I want to address. I simply don't know how to think about these things.

What is the state of our current society? Why is love and compassion so hard to come by? Why are my relationships so often impersonal and odd? Why is my life this way and not some other way?

In any case, I feel that my latest essay has the potential to push me in some really good directions. I'm thinking about things that matter to me, that I feel good about. But I am approaching them through a concept (of mediums) that is unfamiliar to me. I don't know how to think about this issue of mediums. But I think that by focusing on mediums I'll be able to ask interesting questions. I think that I'm still working towards the issue of relationships, only I'm doing it through the issue of mediums.

Bleh.

My thoughts are jumbled jumbled jumbled.

My outline is so messy. I'm going in so many different directions. I'm trying to do so many different things. I just don't know how to do them. I don't know how to talk about all of my different themes in a coherent way.

And most importantly, I don't know how to make the essay emanate my desire for love and compassion. I don't know how to make love and compassion my central them.

I seem to only be able to tap dance around them.

I want people to love one another.

I want people to empathize with one another.

I want people to show compassion for one another.

My life is painful enough.

I need some compassion.

I think we all need compassion.

I just don't know how to develop this point philosophically.

But I'm working towards it.

Rationality and Rationalities

Recently I've had the opportunity to rant for two different people about the issue of logic and rationality. Such an overused word that doesn't mean as much to me as it does to other people.

Damn those illogical fools, some would say.

Curse you for being so damn irrational, others might say.

If you could only learn to be logical then you would abandon your foolish political ideas and learn to think like me, someone else might say.

As if though logic and rationality were some singularity! Ha!

Definitely not. It isn't some sort of singularity, it is a specific way of thinking that can lead to a variety of different conclusions. Not to the same conclusion all the time.

I think that the major thing I'm trying to talk about can be highlighted by pointing out the existence of a plural form: there is not simply 'rationality', there are 'rationalities'.

Yet we still speak of rationality as if though it were so singular, so obvious if you were to follow its magical trails.

I think this is a very serious issue and I don't really know how to tackle it in any substantial way right now.

But Foucault talks about it in interesting ways, highlighting that the Enlightenment did not give rise to 'rationality' in government, but rather to certain rationalities.

I also think that Searle's work in Making The Social World has something to do with this. I think that the notion of status functions has something to do with rationalities, as a plural.

When I was writing my essay on art and status functions I stumbled upon the idea of 'layers of rationality' or 'layers of status functions'. By which I mean that there are certain rationalities or status functions that only make sense if there is already another rationality or status function that has already been implicit accepted. If I want to enforce a certain type of behavior in my home, for example, I am only capable of doing it because the notion of ownership of space is already an accepted rationality. I can only enforce my rationality about the behavior in my home because the rationality of property ownership is already accepted. This same thing can be spoken of in terms of status functions as well. When I declare that people can behave a certain way in my space I am making a Status Function Declaration. But ownership and property is also a Status Function that has been established by countless Status Function Declarations already made in the past. Thus there are layers of Status Functions that build upon one another. Some Status Functions are possible only because other Status Functions exist to buttress to them.

The example I was using in that writing was how people say 'shotgun' to claim the front seat of a car. In high school I thought that was stupid and I wouldn't allow it in my car; I made my friends rotate. Because it was my car my friends respected the things that I said. I was able to create a new Status Function because the Status Function of ownership was already in place. I was able to impose a new rationality in the space of my car because there was already a rationality there for it to work with.

So the questions I have are these: if rationality exists as a plural and diverse phenomenon, then how do we determine the best rationalities to live by? how deep do these layers of rationalities go? what status functions/rationalities enable other status functions/rationalities to exist? what rationalities exist only because there are other rationalities buttressing them? what are the crucial rationalities that we are unaware of?

Hmmm. This is a complex issue that is going over my head right now.

But I'm tired of everyone speaking of rationality as some self-evident singularity. Because it isn't.

Please, don't speak of 'illogical' or 'irrational' people so carelessly.

If you looked hard at them you might find a rationality in their actions.

You won't find a singular rationality anywhere. But you will find a form of rationality everywhere, I suspect.

This is why I wrote about empathy and particularization. If we accept that there a diverse set of rationalities then we might be more empathic, more compassionate.

Art, Zen, and Insurrection: Finding Personal and Social Change In The Art of Life Part II.2

This is part II.2 of my collection of essays 'Art, Zen, and Insurrection'. Here is a table of contents:

II.2. Art, Status Functions, And Contemporary Consciousness

7. Art As A Means To Understanding The Present: What Is The Collective Thing That The Artist Tries to Communicate?

8. John Searle's Status Functions And Specifying The Collective Nature Of The Artist's Expression: The Artist As Expressing The Linguistic Structure Of Social Experience

9, Status Functions and The Structure Of Emotions, Consciousness, And Experience: Social Knowledge and Self-Knowledge

10. Art, Status Functions, And The ‘Corruption Of Consciousness’

11. The Artist as Enabling New Behavior With New Status Functions: Deliberately Unifying Thought And Action

12. New Status Functions as New Thoughts As New Actions As New Brains: Art and Neuroplasticity

II.2. Art, Status Functions, And Contemporary Consciousness

Now that I have explored art as an empathic, social, and historical phenomenon, I would like to try to specify the usefulness of art a little more specifically. In the previous section I was painting in very large strokes and don’t think I made it very clear why art is actually useful. All I really established was that art can help us with our emotional lives, and that it can do this on a larger social scale, and with a historical perspective. But now I want to try to explain how it can possibly have these greater cultural impacts (in the abstract).

The main thing that I want to do in this section is bring John Searle’s work in Making The Social World into the picture. I think that he will be able to help me with one of the biggest questions I have about this issue of emotional expression somehow benefiting a community: If the artist supposedly expresses something that is of benefit to all of society, what is this collective thing that is being expressed? Can we name it? Can we abstract it somehow? I suspect it might have something to do with what John Searle calls ‘status functions’. A status function is something that functions in society only because it has been declared to have that status, the best examples being money, marriage, and other social institutional phenomena. Searle believes that the existence of status functions all comes back to the human capacity for language, and language’s capacity to create the things that it declares to exist. He believes that status function declarations are the bread and butter of social reality. So after exploring Collingwood and Searle’s connections generally, I’ll try to discuss some of Collingwood’s more specific ideas through the framework of status functions. In particular, I’ll be introducing Collingwood’s crucial notion of ‘the corruption of consciousness’, which he believed was one of the greatest threats facing modern European and American culture. After that I’ll try to integrate the issue of the union of thought and action that Collingwood believed to be so important. And lastly I’ll be vaguely introducing neuroplasticity into the picture, just for my own fun. Here I go.

7. Art and the Means to a Universal Understanding Of The Present: What Is The Collective Thing That The Artist Tries to Communicate?

So as I said above, if we accept that art is a social and historical phenomenon that revolves around emotional expression and empathy, we are met with other questions. In particular, I can’t help but push the question of what exactly an artist could express that would be useful to all of society? Is it possible to name this type of expression? Is it possible to really understand what the heck an artist would be doing if he were trying to express something in the hearts of everyone?

All I can say for now is that for Collingwood artist’s should not simply be expressed their own trivial emotions, but should rather be addressing problems. Furthermore, the artist should always be using his audience as the reference point for these problems: “The audience is perpetually present to him as a factor in his artistic labour; not as an anti-aesthetic factor, corrupting the sincerity of his work by considerations of reputation and reward, but as an aesthetic factor, defining what the problem is which as an artist he is trying to solve – what emotions he is to express– and what constitutes a solution” (315). It seems very interesting to me that the expression of an emotion is in itself is simultaneously an identification and solution to a problem. But this falls in line with other things that Collingwood says about art and consciousness. Collingwood believes that it is the task of consciousness to turn our emotional problems into clearly defined issues, and this transformation of sensation into idea is in itself the solution to emotional problems. This is what he means when he says, for example, that once “we form a clear and distinct idea of a passion, it ceases to be a passion” (219). Once we have turned a feeling into a clearly defined idea it ceases to be a problem like it was.

This also seems to be why the artist is fundamentally occupied with truth. For if the artist is attempting to identify and express certain problems that he sees around him, then it must have something to do with truth. I also think that Collingwood uses the world truth in a similar sense to Foucault. Because I don’t think he means that truth is some kind of absolute or essential property, but is rather the reality of people’s experiences and emotions. Perhaps truth for Collingwood has something to do with the way that people experience their social lives. I’ll just admit that I don’t grasp Collingwood’s use of the word truth at this point. It is clear, however, that artistic expression has to be about truth. As he says, artistic expression “so far from being indifferent to the distinction between truth and falsehood, is necessarily an attempt to state the truth. So far as the utterance is a good work of art, it is a true utterance; its artistic merit and its truth are the same thing” (287).

So how is it that the artist is trying to identify an emotional problem that is both social and true? Well, I’m not sure. So I’m going to start explicating John Searle because I think that his work on status functions will be useful here.

8. John Searle's ‘Status Function Declarations’ and Specifying the Universality of the Artist's Expression: The Artist As Expressing The Linguistic Structure Of Social Experience

Now I mentioned above that Collingwood might be using the word truth in a similar way to Foucault. That would mean that ‘truth’ is not about some essential thing lying in the world waiting to be discovered, but is rather a reality that exists in people’s minds and in their experiences. I think this is probably the case. Collingwood has been identified as an idealist philosopher, one that believes that what exists in the world exists because of how our mind apprehends it. I look forward to the day when I read his book Speculum Mentis, which means ‘mirror of the mind’. He believed that reality was not essential, but was rather the mirror of the mind. This being the case, I have to ask how this view relates to art and to artistic expression. If the artist is expressing something fundamental in society, and something in the hearts of all people, yet it is something that is not essential, and exists more so in people’s minds, then what kind of thing could this be?

Well, I think that John Searle’s work on Status Functions will throw quite a lot of light on this issue. While Searle doesn’t seem to be identified with idealist philosophy, I think that his work on Status Functions has enough similarities to make the comparison legitimate. So what I’m going to do is just explicate Searle’s basic argument (not his nuance) in its own right, and then I’ll go about explaining how it illuminates Collingwood’s claims about art.

In Making The Social World: The Structure Of Human Civilization Searle is advocating the creation of a new branch of philosophy known as ‘the philosophy of society’. He believes that philosophy has not yet adequately dealt with the existence of human society and institutions. Searle, therefore, is attempting to explain the existence of human social institutions. In particular, Searle is concerned with things like weddings, cocktail parties, presidencies, and national borders – i.e. things that have no reality except their agreed upon status. Weddings only exist because our society has accepted that weddings exist and are binding agreements. Same thing with the president; Obama is president only because we have all accepted that he is president. Searle dubs these things Status Functions, because they only function because they have been given a certain status. He believes that Status Functions are created by what he calls Status Function Declarations. Searle believes that it is a unique property of human language that it can create the very things that it declares to exist. A physical border, for example, does not exist until it is declared to exist, but that declaration makes it an institutional reality. Searle uses a mundane, everyday example, to explain how status functions exist all around us. He gives a hypothetical instance of going to a bar. Say I am with two friends, I buy three beers, one for each of us. I carry them back to our table, and I say, this is X’s beer, and this is Y’s beer. If friend Y were then to reach for the beer that I designated X’s there would be an awkward moment. My allocation of the beers would have been a Status Function Declaration that would brought a social reality into existence.

I want to quickly note that although Searle believes that human institutional reality is created by the working of language, he argues that language is the fundamental human institution. In his chapter “Language as Biological and Social”, he explains how language could have come about through evolutionary processes. From that evolutionary account he goes on to explain how language must be the fundamental institution of humanity that then allowed for the rest of our complex institutions to be created through SFDs. I’m not explaining this well because I don’t want to take the time and effort. But it seems necessary to note that Searle claims that language is the fundamental institution that then allows the rest of institutional reality to be linguistically constituted.

Searle believes that the Status Function Declaration is the single thing that has created all of our social institutional reality. He is quite explicit about the core claim of his book: “all of human institutional reality is created and maintained by (representations that have the same logical form as) SF Declarations” (Searle, 13, his italics). It is thus language, and its ability to create the things that it represents, that allows us to have things like weddings, nations, and borders. While language has many facets, Searle believes “the Declaration is peculiar in that it creates the very reality that it represents it” (16). This allows us to explain how our social lives are structured in a way so as to give us reasons for doing things that seem contrary to our desires. Language can, Searle argues, “create desire-independent reason for action if the status function that they attempt to create are recognized by other members of the community” (86). So why do I wake up in the morning and go to work to make money even though I feel tired and frustrated with my life? Well, money is an institutional reality that has been collectively acknowledged, and it thus comes along with a set of deontological rules. Deontology is the study of rules, right, obligations, and limitations. Searle believes that SFDs work primarily by creating deontic powers: “The only reality that we can so create is a reality of deontology. It is a reality that confers rights, responsibilities, and so on” (89). It is words, and the use of specific words, that allows these social realities to function. Furthermore, Status Functions are responsible for facilitating our social relationships. We think in terms of ‘friendships’, ‘love’, ‘relationships’, all kinds of other institutional facts. This is why vocabulary is so important in social relationships. Social revolutions can revolve around the reclaiming or words, or the creation of new words. Searle points out how the Soviet Union used the word ‘comrade’ to make a feeling of unification between all people, and how the use of that word constituted a SFD that tried to bring new institutional realities into existence.

Searle then goes on to explain how SFDs bring certain types of power relations into existence, and how they constitute certain types of human rights. He also explains how SFDs need to be backed by physical force in the case of government; how government can’t exist without the implicit threat of violence. This will be important when I reach the sections on ‘insurrection’.

I fear that I’m failing to explicate Searle in meaningful ways. His book is quite complex and quite important. I have a lot of grappling left to do with it. But there are several things that I’d like to take from Searle in order to enhance my analysis of art and its usefulness. The first is the role of language in constituting social reality. If language, in the form of SFDs, has the power to constitute new social realities, then doesn’t art (being a form of language) have the potential of being a SFD? Second, it seems like Searle’s work on SFs can help me understand how the artist’s expression is supposed to speak to the hearts of an entire community. Perhaps what the artist manages to express is the existence of a Status Function that has eluded everyone’s awareness. Third, I want to entertain the idea that our experiences, our emotions, and our consciousness is structured by the existence of SFs (which seems obvious to me). Finally, I want to explore the idea that what the artist does is to use art to make new SFDs into existence, thus creating new institutional realities, and new relationships. Before I delve into those ideas in the next few sections I want to prevent some evidence from The Principles Of Art to show that Collingwood may have embraced some of the same ideas that Searle entertains.

One of Searle’s most important claims that Collingwood seems to agree with is that language is an institution that is fundamental to human society. Furthermore, that what grammarians analyze and describe as ‘language’ is really the aftermath of the expression that really constitutes language. Grammarians take symbolism, an agreed upon meaning of a word, to be the core form of language. But Collingwood insists that language cannot exist only as symbolism, it cannot exist as something that has been settled upon, because “the supposed agreement by which the meaning of a given word is settled implies a previous discussion out of which the agreement is arrived; and unless language already exists and is already capable of stating the point at issue the discussion cannot arise” (225). Language, as expressive gesturing, therefore, must predate what we know as words and symbols. But Collingwood seems to think that grammarians have a limited grasp on language as a natural phenomenon, and rather treat it as an analyzable social phenomenon. On the contrary, Collingwood asserts that language is not simply symbolism, but is an action: "Language is an activity; it is expressing oneself, or speaking. But this activity is not what the grammarian analyses. He analyses a product of this activity, 'speech' or 'discourse' not in the sense of a speaking or a discoursing, but in the sense of something brought into existence by that activity. This product of the activity of speaking is nothing real; it is a metaphysical fiction" (254). This point is awfully confusing to me. But generally I think the idea is that language is the process and not the residue or meaning of that process. This is why it is a fiction. Perhaps this will be made clearer by another idea, that of the recurring word. “Thus we get a new fiction: the recurring word, the entity which forms the lexicographer’s unit” (256). Collingwood believes that language becomes analyzable as a codified set of symbols when we take the time to analyze it. Further, it is not that we are discovering these divisions within language, but we are creating them: "The division of the 'thing' known as language into words is a division not discovered, but devised, in the process of analysing it" (255). Collingwood seems to believe that language has been inappropriately identified as a ‘thing’, while in reality it is an activity. It is something that we do, a way that we express ourselves, and the codification of language is what brings symbolism into being: “Thus, what the grammarian is really doing is to think, not about a product of the activity of speaking, but about that activity itself, distorted in his thoughts about it by the assumption that it is not an activity but a product or ‘thing’” (255). Now this all sounds a bit too loosely connected to Searle’s work. I think it is a bit of a stretch to really say that Collingwood totally shared these views about language as a biological phenomenon. But it does seem that they line up in the sense that language is not simply words and symbols, as grammarians would assert. But that it is rather a natural phenomenon of gesturing and expression. I suppose this reminds me of Searle’s work on ‘speech acts’. I don’t understand it entirely, but the basic idea is that speech is an action, something that you do. That idea seems implicit in Collingwood’s work.

For Collingwood, however, this is issue of language being misunderstood as a thing rather than an action is fundamentally tied to the issue of art and craft. He believes that language has been misidentified in this way because it is approach from the standpoint of the philosophy of craft, and not the philosophy of art. Language as a thing, he claims, “is believed to exist only because the theory of language is approached from the standpoint of the philosophy of craft, and the assumption unquestioningly made that any activity is essentially a kind of fabricating. That being so, the activity of expression will be essentially the fabricating of a thing called language, and the endeavour to understand that activity will take the form of an endeavour to understand its product” (254-55). Then what are we to make of the analysis of language? If language is being misunderstood as a product and not as an action, then what is the usefulness of analyzing the aftermath of language, these ‘metaphysical fictions’ that are symbols. Well, this is where I lose Collingwood a little bit. Because symbols undoubtedly do exist, and they do have a social reality to them. But Collingwood does seem to recognize this. He says that the analysis of language as symbolism “may seem like a futile undertaking. What possible result, good or bad, can come of trying to understand a thing which does not exist? The answer... is that these metaphysical fictions are in one sense real enough” (254-55). Does this have some echos of the idea of status functions? To me it does. When he talks about ‘metaphysical fictions’ that are ‘real enough’, what does this mean? It means to me that although they are linguistically constituted realities, they are still realities that are capable of structuring our lives and our experiences. Status functions are precisely this: linguistically constituted realities that still make us feel certain things, think certain things, experience life in certain ways.

Now, when Collingwood goes on to specify the task of the artist as speaking the heart of his community, and more specifically, speaking the parts of their heart that they are unaware of, could this have something to do with status functions? Well, me thinks yes. And I think this based on something Searle says, and also based on something Collingwood says. Searle says that status functions have the tendency to stay below the radar, to defy people’s awareness. Searle claims, “We live in a sea of human institutional facts Much of this is invisible to us. Just as it is hard for the fish to see the water in which they swim, so it is hard for us to see the institutionality in which we swim. Institutional facts are without exception constituted by language, but the functioning of language is especially hard to see” (90). These linguistically constructed realities elude are awareness, and this is probably how they like it. This prompts some questions about the artist’s expression. If the artist is expressing the hearts of the community, and it is a part of their hearts that they are unaware of, then perhaps what the artist is expressing is the status functions that are structuring our lives without knowing it. This quotation I’m about to present rings with this idea. It seems implicit that the artist is expressing some sort of status function that is eluding the apprehension of the masses. I fear I’m projecting, or making silly connections. But you tell me: “As a spokesman of his community, the secrets he must utter are theirs. The reason why they need him is that no community altogether knows its own heart; and by failing in this knowledge a community deceives itself on the one subject concerning which ignorance means death” (336). How is it that the community doesn’t know their heart? Perhaps it is because their experience is structured by status functions that are below their awareness. Sounds silly, doesn’t it? Yup.

In any case, I feel frustrated with the way this section has been panning out so far. I don’t think I grasp Searle’s work enough to draw its full implications. I suspect this is because the implications are quite large. Also, I don’t have enough of a command of Collingwood’s claims about language to fully bring together him and Searle. But I’m trying here. The general conclusion that I suppose I have reached is that if the artist is attempting to speak the unknown emotions of his community, then there is a chance that these collective ineffabilities have roots in the social structure, and might therefore be identifiable as a status function. Searle’s work on status functions can therefore help us conceptualize the collective ineffables that Collingwood says the great artist articulates. But why does this matter? Why are status functions important? What bearing does this have on anything at all? Well, in the next two sections I want to explain why it is important to take status functions seriously. In the two sections after that I hope to explain how we can try to create our own status functions.

9. Status Functions As Structuring Emotions, Consciousness, And Experience: Social Knowledge And Self-Knowledge

The main reason that I think that status functions matter for this current writing is because they provide the structure of our social world, which in turn gives a structure to our subjective world. Status functions shape the way we live in the social world, they shape my individual life. If self-knowledge is in any way important (which Collingwood believes it is), then it would do me well to understand exactly what was structuring my life. If I really want to know myself I need to know the status functions that govern my world. I think there are three things I can talk about in order to make this clearer: emotions, consciousness, and experience. So the questions are, How are my emotions structured by status functions? How is my awareness, my consciousness structured by status functions? And what does this mean for the whole of my experience, how is that structured by status functions? I intend the notions of emotions and consciousness to be subsumed under the larger category of experience.

So how are my emotions structured by status functions? Well, in one sense there are things about emotions that are essential. That facial expressions don’t vary between cultures attests to this fact. There seems to be a universal thing that we could call ‘anger’, or ‘sadness’, or ‘happiness’. There also exist, however, things about our emotions that are not universal, but are rather historical and social. There are undoubtedly things about my emotions that have to do with the existence of status functions. These would be not the emotions themselves, but the things that set off our emotions, that make us feel certain things strongly. If we were robbed, for example, we would feel a variety of emotions; we would feel angry, sad, frustrated, hopeless, and so on. But we would only feel those ways because the status functions of ‘property’, ‘theft’, ‘money’, and so on structured our existence. Or if a romantic partner were to cheat on us we would feel sad or angry or so on. But we may only feel those ways because of status functions like marriage, relationships, monogamy, so on. This example runs tricky ground, I know. I suspect people thnk jealousy is an essential attribute, something apes feel. Perhaps it is. But I also suspect that marriage and other status functions structure our emotions, make them different. Now what about happy emotions? We would be very happy if we won the lottery. Again, this is because money is such an important status function in our society. Winning the lottery would mean that we would have enough money to bypass the status function that is the working world. Well, we would still be engaging with the capitalist world of status functions, but we would bypass its drudgery, so to speak. In any case, it seems clear to me that while emotions may be essential, what sets them off in a social context is structured by status functions. If we were to examine our emotions, wonder about their causes, we might be aided by knowledge of status functions.

What about our consciousness? How is that structured by status functions? When I use the word consciousness I am using it in the sense of awareness, the things that we notice, and the things that we don’t notice. Clearly we don’t notice everything all the time, our awareness only picks up on certain things. So why is it that we notice certain things but don’t notice other things? Because our consciousness is structured in certain ways, likely by status functions, by language. One time that I first really was convinced of this idea was when I read How To Read Foucault by Johanna Oksala. Oksala uses the example of Inuit categorizations of snow. The inuit have more than 100 words for snow, all different types, different shades and qualities. Further, they register these differences in snow in their daily lives, they simply notice that yesterday the snow was like this or like that. But for us there is simply snow, and so our consciousness doesn’t register much nuance. Now this idea extends to culture at large. Norman Doidge confirms this in The Brain That Changes Itself. He says that culture determines what it is that we do and do not notice. We notice the things that our culture has deemed important, the things that our society has categorized for us. Because when something has been articulated, when it has been named, labeled, categorized, it becomes very easier for us to assimilate it into the things that we notice. Have you ever been told of a certain thing and then suddenly you see it everywhere? Is it really that they are everywhere now? Or has the structure of your consciousness been altered and you are now noticing different things? I think that the structure of our consciousness has likely been changed. And because it is categorization and labeling that structures our consciousness, it seems clear that status functions would be the things that are structuring our awareness. Anything in society that has been named is potentially a status function.

What kinds of things do you notice? What do you notice about people? Their gender, their height, their weight, their race, their age. What else? All of those things are status functions and structure our awareness. What do you notice about spaces? Their color, their size, their ‘class’ and ‘style’. What do you notice? Why do you notice those things? What is the structure of your consciousness?! What kinds of things come to mind and what kinds of things don’t? These seem like exciting and important questions to me. If you want to understand yourself you may have to reckon with the structure of your consciousness. I want to understand myself. I don’t fully understand the structure of my awareness. But I try to be vigilant about what I notice and why. Especially after writing this paragraph, I’ll be very careful about what I notice. The woman in front of me: I notice she is old, I notice she has a bottle of war, Deer Park. I notice she looks concerned and tired as she tentatively drinks from her bottle of water. I notice this airport and the people all watching the T.V.. I notice the rainbow book in front of me and I wonder if it is about something new agey.

Look at all the concepts that just informed my observations! I assume the timidity of the elderly, I notice bottled water because I find it repulsive, I notice people watching tv because I myself am averse to T.V. I notice the rainbow book because of my past with reiki and yoga. The structure of my consciousness comes from my history, my individual history. But it also comes from my collective history and the history of status functions.

We are structured beings. Status functions have something to do with that.

Now what about our experience as a whole? It is obviously structured by our emotions and by our consciousness, but what else structures it? Well, there is also a structure to our physical actions. And here again I keep coming back to capitalism as one of the ultimate status functions. Money as one of the ultimate status functions. Because lets face it, I get up every day, I go to work, I think of my time in certain ways, all because of this idea of money. An idea that has become real enough. That is why Discipline & Punish is such a fascinating book to me; it looks at the way that ideas contribute to the physical regulation of he body. Because status functions change the way I move and use my body. There is a structure to all of my physical actions that goes beyond me. I was thinking, oh but what about when I dance, isn’t that less structured. But the notion of dance is also a status function, we dedicate certain spaces to it. The structure of my physical actions also has to do with the way that space and time are structured by status functions. People can’t come behind the counter at my job because there exists a status function around that space. I wake up in the mornings, monday through friday, because the calendar tells me those are work days. I was able to fly home and see my family because the calendar said these were the holidays, and because families are valued, and we should be with our families on holidays. All of that is status functions. If we want to understand ourselves and our experiences we have to look at the way that status functions regulate our physical actions.

I think I’ve said enough to make this point clear: status functions, although mere linguistically constructed realities, have the power to shape much of our lives and our experience. They change the way that our emotions are expressed by giving them a social context in which they acquire new meanings. They structures our consciousness by making it so that we notice certain things and so that we don’t notice certain things. And it structures our physical actions by giving us reasons for doing things, by regulating space and time, and by giving us faith in money. All of this contributes and structures our experiences, our lives, and our thoughts. If self-knowledge matters to us, if we think it important, we can’t ignore the way that status functions constitute our own identities. I think that understanding status functions would give us a whole new set of tools with which to understand ourselves. Social knowledge is inseparable from self-knowledge.

Now that I’ve made these claims about how status functions structure our lives, I’d like to connect this to a specific issue that Collingwood raises. He calls it ‘the corruption of consciousness’, and I suspect that status functions have something to do with it. Duh.

10. Art, Status Functions, And The ‘Corruption Of Consciousness’

Now one of Collingwood’s major concerns in The Principles Of Art is what he calls ‘the corruption of consciousness’. He thinks that people in early twentieth-century England were incapable of facing down their own emotions. For Collingwood, art is useful because it helps us get a grip on our emotions: it is all about using consciousness to raise our raw emotions to the level of imagination and idea and thus making them expressible. Collingwood believes that when we use consciousness to express ourselves we alleviate any emotional pressure or anxiety that our raw emotions may have caused us.

Collingwood, however, believed that people were losing their ability to show down their own emotions. He thought that people were being run down by the working world, and that they were turning more and more to amusement as a way to escape their unhappiness. Instead of expressing the dissatisfaction that they felt with the capitalist world, Collingwood believed they were using alcohol, drugs, popular fiction, movies, and pornography to escape their unhappiness. This is what Collingwood means when he refers to the corruption of consciousness: the proliferation of amusement that is a sign that people are dissatisfied with their basic means of living. Furthermore, Collingwood believed that art is useful because it combats the corruption of consciousness. “The corruption of consciousness,” he argues, “in virtue of which a man fails to express a given emotion makes him at the same time unable to know whether he has expressed it or not. He is, therefore, for one and the same reason, a bad artist and a bad judge of his own art” (283). It is the task of art proper to relieve people from the corruption of consciousness, to show them that they can express their dissatisfaction, and that they don’t have to simply turn to amusement. This is why the “corruption of consciousness is the same thing as bad art” (285). If we could make art a more prevalent factor in people’s everyday lives then perhaps we could combat the corruption of consciousness a little more effectively. Perhaps we could push people towards self-knowledge, and not be so overrun by amusement. Collingwood really thinks that embracing art can help us overcome the corruption of consciousness: “For the evils which come from that ignorance the poet as prophet suggest no remedy, because he has already given one. The remedy is the poem itself. Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of mind, the corruption of consciousness” (336).

I’ll have more to say about amusement in Part IV, but for now I’ll say a few things. I think that contemporary American culture is overrun by amusement. I think that the internet, video games, alcohol, television, movies, and little cell phone games that are played for only a few minutes, makes it so that we never have to be unoccupied. We never have to be bored because amusement is constantly at our fingertips. But I think this detracts from our ability to pay attention. It prevents us from having serious downtime to reflect on ourselves and our actions. There have been a whole slew of articles that have addressed these issues in the NYtimes and other publications. But when I read these sections in The Principles Of Art on amusement and the corruption of consciousness I freaked out a little bit. Collingwood was diagnosing his own era, and not ours. But I think it has only gotten worse. Amusement is only more rampant, and I fear that consciousness is that much more corrupted.

But what about status functions how does this fit in with the issue of the corruption of consciousness? Well, to me it seems that the corruption of consciousness undoubtedly exists because of larger social factors, because of status functions. Collingwood does seem to single out the economic system as one of the ways that the corruption of consciousness has come about. He talks about how our social lives have become referred to as ‘drudgery’, and how we seem to think of our means of existence as not worthwhile. “When this reaches a point of crisis,” he claims, “practical life, or ‘real’ life becomes, emotionally bankrupt; a state of things which we describe by speaking of its intolerable dullness or calling it a drudgery. A moral disease has set in, whose symptoms are a constant craving for amusement and an inability to take any interest in the affairs of ordinary life, the necessary work of livelihood and social routine.” (95). How many of us take a genuine ‘the necessary work of livelihood and social routine?’ My recent foray into the working world has definitely lit a fire in me. It has me feeling what it is like to work 40 hours a week, to struggle to find the time to do what I want to do, to not make a lot of money and to not find my work to be socially useful. I struggle everyday to maintain my awareness, to stay positive and intellectually vigilant. As I said before, capitalism exists because of status functions, my life is structured this way because of status functions. The corruption of consciousness, therefore, must be a matter of status functions and how they structure our experience.

This has some implications for battling the corruption of consciousness, which I will now explore.

11. The Artist as Enabling New Behavior With New Status Function Declarations: Deliberately Unifying Thought And Action

Now one of Collingwood’s concerns, in general, is the unification of thought and action, the unification of moral philosophy and moral behavior. Now, if our actions come about as a result of the status functions that structure our social lives, and if the corruption of consciousness is one of our key concerns, then how do we go about aligning our thought and our behavior? Well, an unrealistic conclusion, but one which I fear I must tentatively talk about right now, is that the artist attempts to create new status functions that would allow people to behave differently. This could in a sense be conceptualized as enabling a freedom of sorts. Because I’ll be frank, I don’t feel free in my own life. I feel that the things around me, the status functions that structure my life, restrict me. I am not free to do whatever I want. I am free to do what I am capable of doing within the already established status functions. I am only free in the sense of ‘meta-strategy’. I can develop my own strategy, but it must operate within the already existing social strategies that structure my life. Freedom within a social determinism. Relative freedom.

So could new status functions enable a new freedom of sorts? Well, if status functions are what already structure our lives, then would it be possible to restructure them by creating new status functions? The answer is yes, but the scale matters. A small example. When I drove a car in high school everyone followed the rules of the game ‘shotgun’, so that if you yelled ‘shotgun’ then you got to sit in the front seat of my car. I didn’t tolerate that. I thought it was dumb. I enforced a rotational system in my car. People would exchange front and back seats. I pointed this out to people, I made the declaration. I was in effect making a status function declaration about my car. Interesting, because my ownership of the car was in itself a status function. And having that status function of ownership gave me the power to make a new status function declaration that would change the way that people behaved. So in this example it is clear that I was modifying the way that people behaved with the way that I spoke, with the things that I declared. By Searle’s definition, I was creating a new institutional reality.

So sure, on a small scale, new status function declarations can enable new forms of behavior. But how to create status functions that function on a larger scale? Seems like a much more difficult task, frankly, like the task of a government. I already used the example of how the Soviets called everyone comrade in an attempt to create a new set of status functions and relationships. Perhaps if the artist is simply exposing status functions for what they are, that would be enough to create new status functions. If the artist is truly capable of empathizing with his community, and capable of speaking their hearts, then perhaps that is enough to bring new status functions into existence. It seems that the artist can’t go about creating new status functions, he can’t be prescriptive. All he can do is express and expose the status functions that people are unaware of. This is why “Art is not contemplation, it is action.... it requires of the artist that he should participate in his public’s emotions, and therefore in the activities with which these emotions are bound up” (332). So if the artist is sharing his people’s emotions then he will be able to express what they feel, and alert them to the structures of their lives.

Perhaps this type of expression should simply make people more aware. Perhaps this is how art can battle the corruption of consciousness. By exposing status functions for what they are the artist will jar people out of complacency, he will make them see their lives in a new way, he will reinvigorate their awareness, re-spark their consciousness. Perhaps this will be something like a mindfulness. Hmmm. Curious. It reminds me of something Searle says in Making The Social World: “My main strategy in this book is to try to make the familiar seem strange and striking” (106). The corruption of consciousness comes from a complacency with life, and a sense that our way of living is boring drudgery. To make the familiar seem startling sounds much to me like the reinvigoration of consciousness. It seems, therefore, that the artists task is not to create new status functions, but to expose existing ones, thereby giving other people a chance to create new ones. Expression that precedes social creativity.

This would be how the artist would open people up to new behavior. She would display to the public the status functions that structure their lives, and thereby give them chances to behave in new ways, and give them a chance to restructure their lives. But this could breakdown into a loop of restructuring. Perhaps that would be for the best.

The last thing I want to do is make some vague connections to neuroplasticity.

12. New Status Functions As New Thoughts As New Actions As New Brains: Art And Neuroplasticity

So, I am hopelessly interested in the idea of neuroplasticity. The idea that when we think differently and behave differently we change our brain. Why am I so drawn to this idea? Why does it matter so much that thought can change the brain? Well, I suspect I feel overwhelmed by the prevalence of scientistic thought. Science is regarded as the pinnacle of knowledge it seems. So I don’t know, I’m drawn to connect things to scientific evidence as much as I can, as poor as my grasp on the stuff is. But nonetheless I think it is important. I think that it can help us understand how it is that our culture effects our behavior. I think it helps us demolish the notion of ‘essential’ or ‘hardwired’ aspects of ourselves. It shows us that we are plastic, that we can change, and that we can change as the result of thought. So this section can essentially be stated in a single sentence: if new status functions enable new categories, then that enables new thought, and if new thought enables new actions, then that undoubtedly means we would have new brains. If we behave differently that will show in the brain. Art, therefore, has the power to change the brain for the better. I think that this is doubly the case if we regard art as a source of synthetic experience.

Later in this essay I’m going to be exploring the issue of neuroplasticity and synthetic experience more fully. But I guess I’m just dropping this note on neuroplasticity now so that it isn’t a total curveball later on. To restructure our consciousness by creating new status functions would be to restructure our neural circuits.

Concluding Part II.2

This section was awkward, difficult, and a bit frustrating. I tried to connect Searle’s work to everything that I was saying, and don’t really know if I did it successfully or not. But generally here is what I tried to do. I tried to ask about what type of thing the artist could be expressing that would be valuable to an entire community. How could one person’s expression have something to do with the hearts of everyone who lives in that society. I concluded that Searle’s work on status functions could help us understand how a whole society could feel something yet be unaware that they were really feeling it. Status functions fit the bill perfectly: they are linguistically constructed realities that structure civilization and our individual experience. I tried to explain how they structured our emotional reactions, our consciousness, our physical behavior, and thus the bulk of our experience. Having established the importance of status functions generally, I tried to connect it to Collingwood’s notion of ‘the corruption of consciousness’. I claimed that the social disease that Collingwood diagnosis probably has something to do with status functions, and more specifically, with capitalism and its associated status functions. If Collingwood is correct, and art is the antidote to the corruption of consciousness, then doesn’t art therefore have something to do with status functions, their exposure, and their restructuring? I concluded that yes, that artist must be in some way exposing status functions that are structuring our experience, and thus making it possible for new status functions to come into existence. This is one way that the artist would be able to introduce new types of behavior into the social world; she could reveal the linguistic structure of experience and thus allow people to overcome rutted ways of thinking and acting. This would, I think, constitute an antidote to the corruption of consciousness. If you were to reveal status functions for what they are you could then reinvigorate consciousness, bringing new things into people’s realm of awareness. The artist’s task, in some way, is to raise consciousness (shout out to Mary). I then made a vague (and probably useless) connection to art and neuroplasticity, briefly telling you that if artists were there to raise awareness, and to change behavior, then they would in essence be changing brains. A mishmash of reflections on status functions, art, and social change, I know.

Concluding All Of Part II

In all of part II I was generally trying to state what the use of art could potentially be. I handled it in two sections. Part II.1 I was trying to explain the relationship between empathy, society, and history. Art is about emotions, and therefore it has to have something to do with empathy. I ended up explaining how art as the expression of emotions and experience, must be about a pedagogically useful empathy: it has to be a sharing of experience that helps other people learn to feel things for themselves. What I described was an empathic loop in which the artist empathizes with his community and expresses their emotions for them, and the audience in turn empathizing with the artist’s expression, thereby learning to express for themselves. Finally I tried to explain how this was a historically situated process by which the artist was trying to diagnose and express the condition of his times, thereby making art a ‘modern’ or ‘genealogical’ process.

In part II.2 I tried to take these questions of art, society, and empathy into a more technical realm by introducing John Searle’s work into the picture. I summarized that section above. But basically the question was: If the artist empathizes with the community and expresses their heart, thereby giving them self-knowledge, what type of thing could the artist possibly be expressing? It now seems somewhat clear that the artist is expressing something that has to do with status functions and the way they structure life. In his own time, Collingwood believed that the greatest issue for art to tackle was ‘the corruption of consciousness’; by which he means society’s inability to engage its own emotions due to the plethora of amusement that was distracting people. Collingwood believed that this had to do with the working world, with economic organization, which I explained, is one of the most important status functions that is still around us today. Furthermore, I also believe that the corruption of consciousness is a serious problem, and that amusement is rampant. It seems to me, therefore, that art as the empathic expression of the social effect of status functions may still be a viable means of combatting the corruption of consciousness in contemporary society.

In the next section I will be elaborating the full claim that all of this has been building towards: the notion of an aesthetics of existence; the idea that all of life can become an art form. Whether existential aesthetics has the same pragmatics as art as Collingwood describes it is yet to be determined. But I will tentatively say that I think that these ideas about the empathic exposure of status functions will still apply to life as an art form. Here I go.

I think that my writing in this section became a bit self-deprecating at times. I was frustrated. I am not informed enough for this stuff. I’m writing about things far too serious for me, things far beyond my grasp. But that is why I’m reaching. If I’m not confused I’m not working hard enough. If I’m not confused I’m not thinking clearly. If I’m not confused I’m probably not learning. I want so badly to learn and to be a good person. I want philosophy to help me live a good life.