Art, Zen, and Insurrection: Finding Personal and Social Change In The Art of Life Part III.1

PART III: Becoming an Existential Aesthetician: Integrating Imaginative Emotional Expression Into Daily Life

This is part III.1 of my essay 'Art, Zen, and Insurrection'. Part III is all about life as an art form and is titled 'Becoming an Existential Aesthetician: Integrating Emotional Expression into Daily Life'. Part III.1 is called 'Identifying Technical Theories Of Existence'. Here is a table of contents:

Part III: Becoming An Existential Aesthetician: Integrating Imaginative Emotional Expression Into Daily Life

1. Introduction

2. Art And Craft In The Social World

III.1. Identifying Technical Theories of Existence

3. The Technical Theory of Life: Modern Times and Overly Crafted Experience
4. The Technical Theory of Politics: David Harvey on the ‘Aestheticization’ of Politics

5. The Technical Theory of Society: John Gray and The Enlightenment’s Over-Reliance on Science and Technology

6. Technical Theories Of Existence As Tacit Mental Theories/Models As Status Functions As Ideology

7. Concluding Part III.1

Part III: Becoming An Existential Aesthetician: Integrating Imaginative Emotional Expression Into Daily Life

1. Introduction

Time to expound the main claim of this whole series of essays. I intend to argue that we can turn our lives into a work of art. Seeing as how I spent a little more than a hundred pages explicating Collingwood’s definition of art and the pragmatics of art, I now think I’m in a good position to explain how this possible. First, just to fill you in, Collingwood defines art as the conscious and imaginative expression of our emotions. Again, I gave this definition extended treatment, so if you really care, then check out Part I. But now I’m going to explain how it is that we can turn our lives into a work of art. I’m going to do this in three sections. First, I’m going to give a brief analysis of the two key terms that this section will be built around, art on the one hand, and craft on the other. Then I’m going to do what Collingwood did, I’m going to present a negative statement about what an artistic life is not. In The Principles Of Art Collingwood spends a bit of time refuting what he calls ‘the technical theory of art’, by which art is identified with craft. Similarly, I want to explain how I think there might be something like a ‘technical theory of existence’, in which life is identified as a craft of sorts. I’ll be identifying three technical theories of existence: that of life, that of politics, and that of society. In each case I’ll be exploring the question of whether these things should be identified simply as a craft, or if we would benefit more from defining them as an art, as a process of expression. That will be Part III.1, ‘Identifying Technical Theories Of Existence’. After the negative component I’ll begin a positive defense of this idea. I’ll be trying to explain how life can become an art form by talking about my inspirations for this idea, about the role of consciousness, language, minds, and choice. That will be Part III.2, ‘Defining The Aesthetic Theory Of Existence’. Lastly, I’ll be making some tentative statement about how we could potentially implement the aesthetic theory of existence. I’ll be discussing status functions, zen, and other ideas about the transformation of the self. That will be Part III.3, ‘Implementing The Aesthetic Theory Of Existence’. After that I’ll be introducing militaristic metaphors in Parts IV and V. That will be the insurrection component.

I think that the main issue I’m trying to tackle by writing about this is one that Collingwood thought incredibly important: the unification of moral philosophy and moral behavior, the unification of thought and action. He rejected the notion that moral philosophy has nothing to do with moral behavior. This was, evidently, the explicit claim of Collingwood’s contemporaries, and I fear that it is the implicit attitude of twenty-first century philosophy. In short, I hate the idea that moral philosophy would say: “I’ll tell you what moral living is. But don’t expect me to tell you how to do it.” Seems like pretty lame philosophy if you ask me. Adorno was also concerned that philosophy was losing its function as a guide to the good life. I’m trying to use philosophy to find a way to live well, as a way to becoming who I want to be. I think that conceptualizing life as an art is helpful, and that it might actually be a defensible idea. But in either case, that is the goal: to use philosophy to live a better life by explaining its potential affinity with art. But first, I want to explain how in our particular historical moment existence seems to be identified more so with craft.

Before I launch into the three subsections of this section, I would like to make a more general statement about the relationship between art and craft in the social world.

Disclaimer that applies to much of my writing: Please forgive my hyperbole. This is a mental exercise, and I don’t know if I believe what I’m about to write. What I do want is to find out what I’m capable of writing.

2. Art And Craft In The Social World

Now, in The Principles Of Art one of Collingwood’s main goals, perhaps his most important goal, is to clarify the distinction between art proper and craft. Craft is defined as the deliberate process of turning a raw material into a finished product based on a preconceived plan. There should be no real changing of the plan during the process of construction, so the finished product should turn out precisely as planned. Collingwood thought that art had become too heavily identified as a form of craft, so much so that the terms were becoming interchangeable. And just to note quickly, that representation, as in the deliberate creation of mental states in other people, is a form of craft. Art, for Collingwood, however, is not simply a craft or a matter of representation, but rather a process by which we imaginatively express our emotions. Art undoubtedly contains elements of craft, but they are not the same thing. In fact, craft is something that is used in service of art. Craft is only useful so long as it allows us to imaginatively express our emotions. As I said, I gave this definition of art an extended look in Part I.2 and I.3. But to rehash quickly, to imaginatively express our emotions means to use consciousness to extend the life of a particular experience or emotions. By focusing our consciousness on a raw emotional experience we are able to change it into something else, we elevate that experience to the level of imagination or idea. We are converting a raw emotions into something that is expressible through language (using the word language in the broadest sense). This is one way that art differs from craft: the process of expression changes the thing that is expressed, and therefore does not fit the definition of craft as the execution of a definite plan. So that is the distinction to grasp, art and craft. What is art, what is craft, how are they related, and why does it matter. It seems undeniable to me that there is a difference between art and craft, and that art has become largely identified as simply a matter of craft. But that can’t be the case. Again, this was what Part I grappled with.

Now the matter is to apply this distinction between art and craft to the concrete realities of the social world. How much does craft have to play a role in our social lives? How much can we make our social interactions become the imaginative expression of our emotions? What would that look like? What are the necessary forms of social craft that we need to engage with?How could social craft be used to make life an art? These are terms, these are the questions, this is what I want to figure out in Part III.

I will now begin parsing these questions by giving a closer look at the issue of craft in different aspects of existence.

III.1 Identifying Technical Theories Of Existence

Now, as I sad, in this section I’m going to be doing what Collingwood did in The Principles Of Art: I’ll be explaining how life, much like art, is incorrectly identified as a craft. The purpose of this is to provide a negative analysis that will lead into my positive analysis of what it would mean for life to be identified with art proper. So this section will be divided into four subsections. In the first three subsections I’ll be identifying three different ‘technical theories of existence’, i.e. three parts of contemporary American life that are thought of as crafts and should perhaps be thought of as arts. After that I’ll be talking about how these technical theories function below the radar, eluding people’s awareness. I’ll go through a process of comparing them to tacit mental theories, to status functions, and to ideology. So first the three technical theories, and then a closer look at how they might function in both micro and macro ways. As for the technical theories themselves, the first will be the technical theory of life, by which I mean that individual existences are thought of crafts, as the execution of plans. Second, I’ll be exploring the idea of a technical theory of politics, in which political behavior is identified with craft and representation rather than expression. For my writing on the technical theory of politics I’ll be drawing on David Harvey’s book The Condition Of Postmodernity and his discussion of ‘the aestheticization of politics’ in the 1980s. Thirdly, I’ll be looking at the technical theory of society as a whole, in which all of social organization is thought of in terms of craft. For that section I’ll be working with John Gray’s book Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals. In short, I’ll be moving from micro to macro, starting with how individuals lives are structured around the notion of craft, moving outward to the political sphere’s relationship with craft, and then even more macro by looking at society as a whole as it relates to craft. Onward

3. The Technical Theory of Life: Modern Times and Overly Crafted Experience

I have been doing all this reading, thinking, and writing on the role of art and craft in life for about three or four months now. In that time it has become much clearer to me how the notion of craft is present in my life and other people’s lives. When I look around me, when I talk to my peers, when I think about life, I see the notion of craft as an intrusive presence, sometimes as a hindrance. When I look at myself I feel myself grappling with the issue of craft and with one of its specific forms: representation. With both craft and representation we are attempting to create turn a raw material into a finished product based on a preconceived plan. But representation differs in that it is meant to create a certain idea or feeling in someone’s mind. So in this section I’m trying to explain how it is that life itself is conceived of as a form of craft. Sure, I can identify all kinds of little instances around me in which craft plays a role in life. But is it possible that much of life itself is identified with craft? There are two ways that I can see this being the case, two ways in which I see craft as a domineering force in my life. First, I see craft as playing a role in the way relationships are played out. Too often I find myself trying to craft my appearance, to represent my personality in certain ways to people. Second, I see craft as an issue in how we conceptualize life as a whole. I worry that life is thought of as something that must proceed by a plan, that life is thought of as a raw material that has to be converted into a certain preconceived end. Let me talk about these things in turn.

I’ve decided that this section is very personal, and so that I’m going to be speaking in very personal ways. This is something I’m doing for myself, something I’m doing to challenge myself to be more expressive, to be less concerned with social craft. So if I say we, I mean I. So I worry that relationships can proceed too rigidly along the lines of craft. I think this is true both in plutonic and romantic relationships.

When I first transfered from UMBC to the University of Maryland in the fall of 2006 I was living at my parents home and was completely horrified by my social prospects. I was living quite far away from College Park and had no sense of how to meet people, and I was insecure and depressed to boot. Things were not looking good for me. I had no idea how to meet people because I was completely fixated on the question of ‘what would I say? what am I supposed to talk about?’ I would plan out conversations in my head and want them to go that way. I would try to stick to these ideas of how a conversation ‘should go’. In retrospect I would say that I was implicitly expecting my social life to proceed along the lines of craft. I was expecting that I had to craft my image, my personality, and my interactions. It caused me enormous amounts of pain.

And perhaps even more importantly I was deadly afraid of expressing myself honestly. There were things that had happened to me, things that had really upset me, that I wasn’t even capable of expressing to myself. It reminds me of what Collingwood calls ‘the corruption of consciousness’: a state in which individuals are incapable of using consciousness to express the emotions, a state in which they simply avoid them through distraction and amusement. I think that my consciousness was corrupted. Furthermore, I think that my inclination towards social planning, my inclination towards craft, made it harder for me to showdown my emotions and exacerbated my inability to express myself, the corruption of my consciousness. So, in short, I was dominated by the idea that conversations were something that needed to be planned and then executed. I was completely incapable of expressing myself without knowing precisely what the outcome would be. Of course craft in the social world never worked out for me. But that didn’t stop me from trying. I can understand my personal experience in light of these ideas. It makes sense to me that art, as in imaginative expression of emotions, is the antidote to the corruption of consciousness. And frankly, I met a professor who was so good at expressing themselves that they allowed me to express myself. I work hard at expressing myself these days, and I think that I want to have a clear consciousness, a consciousness capable of chasing down the secrets I keep from myself.

My fixation with social craft also bled over into my attempts at romantic relationships. I tried to talk to girls that I thought were cute, I tried to think of what I could say, what I could do. But it never worked. I had countless awkward conversations with girls where I was just completely uncomfortable. I was simply incapable of coming up with social plans that would go further than a few words. Social craft really failed me in my romantic attempts because I was lacking any hint of art, any shred of honest expression. I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know how to simply express myself to someone without wondering why, what was the outcome, what was the plan I was trying to enact. ‘Could you be my next girlfriend? How should I present myself?’ These days I just want to express myself. I don’t want to plan out my relationships, I refuse to craft them. I will be aware of them, I will push myself to be expressive, and I will see what happens. Forget those plans for the world of friends and lovers. Just be honest with yourself, Riley.

I think that craft also plays a role in the planning of life as a whole. I experienced this mainly with college and with the idea of a degree. It seems like the expectation is get a degree that can make you money, go make the money. Life should be a plan. ‘I’m going to get an international law degree so I can tackle issues of shipping in China’ (Holla Miriax). And I’m not trying to be pejorative towards people who do that, to people who execute a life plan. Good for them, I bet there are elements of art in it. But the issue is a little more difficult for those of us who don’t have degrees that immediately translate into a career. I have a history degree. ‘What are you going to do with that?’ someone might ask. I’m going to die some day, I might reply. Or I could tell them about my vague ambitions to become a scholar, but that wouldn’t sound very planned. At Christmas I had a conversation with a family member about someone who had really ‘executed the life plan.’ They had goals and they fulfilled them, straight up, did it all. They described this person, however, as rigid in his worldview despite his success. I wonder how good it is to really have a life plan and to try and execute it. I wonder how easy it is. I suspect it is very hard. It seems like so many people end up doing all kinds of things that they never thought they would. It seems like it might be better to let ourselves drift into the world as expressive people, and not as crafted people. I can’t execute a life plan because my ambitions are too grand and too uncertain.

Now one issue is that It isn’t clear to me where this tacit technical theory of life comes from. Why is it that relationships and life are seen as things that ought to be planned. Collingwood, however, drops a few clues as to how craft plays a larger role in our social existence. He says that in the modern age art is overwhelmingly identified with craft, and that this confusion is exacerbated by modern disciplines like psychology and economics: To confuse art with craft, he says, "is actually the way in which most people nowadays think of art; and especially economists and psychologists, the people to whom we look (sometimes in vain) for special guidance in the problems of modern life" (19). I find it interesting how Collingwood references guidance in modern life, and how these disciplines are supposed to help us with our lives. How much do we still look towards these types of figures for guidance? How much do we think of economists and psychologists as wise individuals who would understand how life should be lived in these confusing times? But how dangerous is it that they are operating under an erroneous definition of art that identifies it as mere craft? Collingwood makes the confusion between art and craft in the modern age even more explicit when he says that “It is an error much encouraged by modern tendencies in psychology, and influentially taught at the present day by persons in a position of academic authority; but after all it is only a new version, tricked out in the borrowed plumage of modern science, of the ancient fallacy that the arts are a kind of craft” (34). Collingwood seems to think there are things going on in the modern world that encourage the confusion of art and craft.

As I’ve been saying, the confusion of art and craft concerns me because I fear it encourages to live a life that is weighed by planning, a life that isn’t quite expressive enough, a life that puts pressure on us to ‘execute a life plan’. Furthermore, I fear that it introduces an unhealthy amount of generalization into our experiences. Psychology and economics make a living off of describing things, describing our patterns, our tendencies. And of course this is all very useful, it gives us a much richer knowledge of things. But it also damages our ability to express ourselves, and therefore makes it more difficult for us to live an artistic life: “The reason why description, so far from helping expression, actually damages it, is that description generalizes. To describe a thing is to call it a thing of such and such a kind: to bring it under a conception, to classify it. Expression, on the contrary, individualizes” (112). An artistic life would be one that regarded its own experiences as individual, as novel, as nuanced, and not as simply general. I don’t want to live a general, archetypical life, I refuse. Just like an artist, I want to get “as far away as possible from merely labeling... emotions as instances of this or that general kind,” and rather go to “enormous pains to individualize them by expressing them in terms which reveal their difference from any other emotion of the same sort” (113). That is what I want from my life. I want to express myself by particularizing my emotions and my experiences. I refuse to believe that I am archetypical or general.

So that is basically the explication of the ‘technical theory of life’ that I want to give. I’m pleased that I made this a personal section, because that is what it is. I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that I felt that craft was sometimes an intrusive presence in my life. So I talked about some of my experiences where I felt overwhelmed by the task of expressing myself, how I felt hindered by my focus on crafting my relationships. Then I talked about how I felt a similar anxiety or frustration with the way life is structured around ‘life plans’ in which we choose a major and it sets our path. Lastly I presented some of Collingwood’s quotations in order to show that he thought that craft was encouraged by the modern world and that it invaded more aspects of life than just art. Now I”ll discuss the technical theory of politics and of society.

4. The Technical Theory Of Politics: David Harvey On The ‘Aestheticization’ Of Politics

I had this idea about a technical theory of politics while I was reading David Harvey’s book The Condition of Postmodernity. A most fascinating book that makes some compelling claims about how postmodernism is a historical condition that was brought about by a switch from a Fordist-Keynesian economic model to a new model of flexible capital accumulation that is characterized by a less stable permanent working force, the growth of fictitious forms of capital, and more corporate power, among other things. Harvey believes that this switch to more flexible modes of capital accumulation brought about a new round of ‘space-time compression’, meaning that the way we experience space and time has been altered. Because of this wave of technological and economic change we think of the world as a much smaller place, we think of it in more abstract ways, and generally our experience of space and time is very different.

One hallmark of these different changes is what Harvey calls ‘the aestheticization of politics’. The phrase is actually Walter Benjamin’s, who I need to read soon. But the idea is generally that politics is no longer about transparency or honest expression, but is rather about representing things in different ways than they actually are. I believe Benjamin was concerned with the way that the Nazis were representing themselves in certain ways and actually doing other things. Harvey uses this idea of the aestheticization of politics to talk about the Reagan administration and the disparity between their rhetoric and the realities of the country during those years. During the Reagan administration record numbers of people became unemployed, became homeless, went below the poverty, lost their health insurance, and so on. There were all kinds of things that went terribly wrong in that period: “Between 1979 and 1986, the number of poor families with children increased by 35 percent, and in some large metropolitan areas, such as New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and New Orleans, more than half the children were living in families with incomes below the poverty line” (Harvey, 331). Harvey says, however, that the Reagan administration did not receive much criticism for these faults. Rather, they are regarded as one of the last great traditional administrations, lauded as the conservative heros of the 1980s. Harvey says that this is so because aesthetics, as opposed to ethics, is the dominant way that the Reagan administration handled itself. They made an effort to make themselves look good, to have a strong and identifiable rhetoric, and not to enforce moral values. “A rhetoric that justifies homelessness, unemployment, increasing impoverishment, disempowerment, and the like by appeal to supposedly traditional values of self-reliance and entrepreneurialism will just as freely laud the shift from ethics to aesthetics as its dominant value system” (Harvey, 336). The aestheticization of politics is therefore the concealment of bad policy with pleasant rhetoric.

I have issue with this phrase, however. Because I think that when they talk about the ‘aestheticization of politics’ they might be identifying aesthetics primarily with craft. Because to me what Harvey seems to be describing is that politics has been infiltrated craft and representation. It is not an expressive that characterizes the politics that Harvey describes, but rather a crafting and representing. Collingwood is adamant that aesthetics must first and foremost deal with the issue of expression, with the creation of aesthetic objects, with the aesthetic experience, and not with the issue of beauty. Aesthetic theory as the theory of beauty is fully rejected by Collingwood as a vestige of the notion that art is a sort of craft. Harvey, however, seems to be implicitly endorsing the identification of art as a sort of craft. What he describes in the Reagan administration is undoubtedly political craft and representation, not aesthetic expression. Furthermore, Harvey speaks of aesthetics and ethics as if though they are antithetical. Which I certainly do not think is the case. I think Collingwood thought that a proper understand of aesthetics could undoubtedly lead to moral behavior. If we are expressing ourselves in genuine ways, if we are engaging in the aesthetic activity, then we are engaging in a pursuit of truth and morality. If we had a true aestheticization of politics we could unify ethics and aesthetics.

If this is correct, if the notion of ‘the aestheticization of politics’ that Harvey and Benjamin speak of, is founded on an improper definition of the aesthetic as a form of craft, then what we might be dealing with is not an aestheticization of politics, but rather a technical theory of politics in which it is thought of as simply a matter of craft and representation. All this smoke in mirrors and politics, all this rhetorical deception, I refuse to call that aesthetic. That idea is so polluted with the technical theory of art that it is insane. If this is true, then what we might really need is a ‘true aestheticization of politics’, in which politics becomes a matter of an individual genuinely expressing their emotions and thoughts. A true aestheticization of politics would be the antidote to this technical theory of politics in which it is just a matter of representative deception. This is a very interesting idea to me. Because the aestheticization of politics is a very key idea for Harvey, and probably for Benjamin. But to me it seems so obvious that it is functioning under the technical theory of art. I wonder what a true aestheticization of politics would look like, what it would look like for aesthetic expression to enter the political world.

But anyways, that is all I’d like to say about the technical theory of politics. It seems to me that defining aesthetics properly might have some political implications, which I’ll be looking at more in Parts IV and V. But for now I want to say that this seems like another way in which craft has infiltrated the social world and has numbed us to any genuine sense of aesthetic value. To talk about the aestheticization of politics is a false definition of aesthetics, and it is another way that the technical theory of art has become a technical theory of existence. Now I’ll talk quickly about the technical theory of society as a whole.

5. The Technical Theory of Society: John Gray and The Enlightenment’s Over-Reliance on Science and Technology

My main inspiration for this idea of a technical theory of society is John Gray’s work in Straw Dogs, and the little bit that I have read of Enlightenment's Wake. John Gray is a political philosopher at London School of Economics who writes on problems of contemporary society and political philosophy. One of his major criticisms of contemporary work is that few philosophers or politicians are willing to question the values of the Enlightenment. In particular, Gray believes that contemporary thinkers clings to the ideal of “subjecting all human institutions to a rational criticism and of convergence on a universal civilization whose foundation is autonomous human reason” (Gray, 1995, 24). Gray believes that the strict adherence to these abstract ideals of reason and justice prevents political philosophers from having any real impact on the present. Because if we are so concerned with ‘justice’ and ‘man’ in the abstract we will have no way of apprehending the realities of our current political and social situation. Similarly, in Straw Dogs, Gray attacks secular liberal humanists for their over-reliance on science and technology as forces of social good. He says that the Enlightenment projects faith in reason, science, and technology has given people the idea that we can solve all of societies problems, that we can cure all the diseases, that salvation for everyone is possible. Gray sounds awfully nihilistic at times. But that doesn’t mean he is pessimistic. It means that he believes we are operating under erroneous assumptions about the social and political world, and that they need to be destroyed so that we can begin to think freshly about these problems. And for Gray, overcoming the legacy of the Enlightenment is one of the most important tasks. We can’t keep thinking that abstract and rational liberal values will be able to apply to every situation in the world, because clearly they won’t.

To me this has a few things in common with the distinction between art and craft. First and foremost, it sounds to me like the Enlightenment was preoccupied with a technical theory of society: that we needed to come up with a plan and rationally enact it through the raw materials of society. For the Enlightenment the creation of the ideal society is merely a matter of craft. John Gray doesn’t seem to think that this is possible, however. He believes that the adherence to these abstract ideals of the Enlightenment has prevented political philosophers from really reckoning with the concrete problems that face politicians nowadays. This brings me to two further connections between Gray’s work and Collingwood’s work on aesthetic theory. First, the issue of generalization and particularization. Second, the relationship between art and the attitude of modernity. Collingwood is clear that art is all about particularizing things; labeling is to be avoided at all costs. Gray, similarly, is chastising political philosophers for relying too heavily on abstract and general terms like ‘man’, ‘reason’, ‘justice’, and so on. Now if we were to embrace a more aesthetic notion of politics and society then perhaps we would be more able to recognize the nuance of political and social issues, thus making better decisions that weren’t confined by the analytical concepts of the Enlightenment. This leads perfectly into the relationship between art and the attitude of modernity. Collingwood claims that aesthetics is about grappling with the particulars of our time and place, about apprehending our own age and working within it. This is one reason that particularization is so important: it allows us to grapple with the nuances of our own age, it allows us to have a modern perspective on ourselves, and our society. I think that John Gray would agree based on his argument that political philosophy is inert because of the hope “that human begins will shed their traditional allegiances and their local identities and unite in a universal civilization grounded in generic humanity and a rational morality.” And that because of this philosophers “cannot even begin to grapple with the political dilemmas of an age in which political life is dominated by renascent particularisms, militant religions and resurgent ethnicities” (Gray, 1995, 2). In short, if political philosophy is to contribute to the ongoing struggle of society it needs to abandon its adherence to the generic principles of the Enlightenment and learn to grapple with the particular realities of the contemporary world. To me it sounds like social and political philosophy needs to embrace aesthetic values of particularization and grappling with the present.

Thus there seems to be something like a technical theory of society that has come out of the Enlightenment. We still believe that society can be transformed from a raw material into a universal and rationally moral society. But clearly society cannot be crafted like a table. I don’t know precisely what an aesthetic theory of society would look like, except for the emphasis on particularization of the contemporary that I described above. But it seems obvious that the technical theory of society is a thing, and that the Enlightenment gave rise to it. I look forward to reading the rest of Enlightenment’s Wake.

Now that I have run through the three technical theories of existence, that of life, that of politics, and that of society, I now want to explore how they would function in individual minds.

6. Technical Theories Of Existence As Tacit Mental Theories/Models As Status Functions As Ideology

Now that I have identified these three technical theories of existence I have to ask myself how they function, how they are disseminated among individual minds, through what mechanisms they work, how they function both on the micro and macro levels. So I’ll be vaguely examining these categories in terms of three different ideas: that of tacit mental theories/models, that of status functions, and that of ideology. Here I go.

So one thing I am fairly concerned with is how these things would function in individual lives, how they would work in individual minds. And I am fairly convinced that individual minds engage with the world in terms of tacit mental theories and mental models of reality. This idea of tacit mental theories is a current vein of analysis in contemporary philosophy of mind. While the notion of mental modeling is an idea from neuropsychology. In both cases the idea is that there is a structure to our thoughts and perceptions, that we have certain unconscious theories that we rely on to understand ourselves and other people, or that our brain models reality in certain ways. So that what we experience in the world is not necessarily the actual world, but our perception of the world as filtered by our tacit theories and mental models. This is why Chris Frith claims that ‘perception is a fiction that coincides with reality’. These technical theories of existence, therefore, would have to exist in some way in our tacit theories and mental models. David Harvey actually hints at this idea. I think he is drawing on Frederick Jameson’s idea of ‘cognitive mapping’, which sounds similar to mental modeling to me: “The transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation, such as it has been, ought to imply a transition in our mental maps, political attitudes, and politics institutions.... There is an omni-present danger that our mental maps will not match current realities” (Harvey, 305). So we have to think about how our individual experiences are structured by these technical theories of existence. I think it would be useful to think in these terms just so that we can analyze our own perceptions and thoughts more carefully. How often does craft inform your model of reality?

So the next question is this: if my mental models are what influence me to perceive the relationship between life and craft in this way then what constitutes my mental models? Where do they come from? One answer I have is that they are constituted by the sea of status functions that regulate our social life. I was at work the other day talking to a friend about this. A box had been moved from a shelf. The box had been on this shelf the entire time i have worked there, so to see this shelf without the box was a startling thing. I was like whoa, I have always expected that box to be there, and now it isn’t. I told my friend that my model of reality had been broken a little, and that I had to reconfigure it. He then pointed out that it had been a status function: all of us at the cafe had implicitly decided that that shelf was designated for that particular box. So I began to perceive the relationship between status functions and mental models. Our models of reality are constituted by the status functions that constitute our social reality. Change the status functions and we change our mental models. So then don’t these technical theories of existence probably have status functions that constitute them? And so therefore they exist in our mental models because they exist as status functions? Probably. Sounds abstract, don’t know how to clarify this right now.

Now what about ideology? What is ideology? How does it work? Well recently I have been keen on Slavoj Zizek’s definition of ideology as a sort of unspoken structure to the world. He says that ideology is politeness, it is habit, it is all of the things that we do without realizing that we do it, or it is all the things that we notice but pretend we don’t notice. Ideology is above all a structure to our experiences. This sounds an awful lot like how status functions, and how mental models work. I think that there is a relationship between all these things, between our mental models, between status functions, and between ideology: they are different manifestations of the same social structure. Mental models are the individual manifestation, status functions are their linguistic constituents, and ideology is the manifold collection of status functions and mental models.

So then, the technical theory of existence must therefore operate on all of these levels, it must in some ways be ideological, it must exist in terms of status functions, and it must exist in our minds as mental models.

7. Concluding Part III.1

So, then this is all I will write for Part III.1. I’ve tried here to clarify the tension between art and craft in the social world. I’m trying to explain how it is that our lives can become an aesthetic project, a project or imaginatively expressing ourselves. But before I explain that positively I had to undertake this negative component of explaining how it is that existence is largely identified with craft. So I explained how there is such a thing as a technical theory of life, of politics, and of society. I tried to argue that our lives and our relationships can sometimes be thought of as crafts, as something that needs to be planned and executed, thus moving it further away from simply emotional expression, removing it from an aesthetic life. I tried to explain how politics, too, had become a matter of craft and representation, and how it too was distanced from aesthetic expression by this emphasis on craft. Finally I tried to explain how society itself had fallen victim to craft, how the Enlightenment project made us believe that society can be transformed from a raw material into a preconceived plan based on generalities. Finally I explained how these technical theories of existence would function in terms of mental models, status functions, and ideology. In all three of these areas I believe that we would benefit from introducing a proper conception of aesthetics into the picture. Perhaps then we could regard our lives as a process of expression, and not a process of enacting a plan. We could regard politics as something that would be about expressing beliefs, about expressing ethic, rather than simply representing things. And we could perhaps think of society as something to be founded on expression and not on crafting. Let me now undertake a positive defense of this idea that our life can become a process of expression, a work of art. I want to explain how life itself can become an art form.

The Science and Art of Minds: Theory and Practice in the Social World

I fell apart at the end of this essay. There is so much to articulate here. But I'm so tired and can't muster my thoughts right now and want to be done with this one. I finished it. But there should be sub sections in each chapter, but I can't do that right now.

Table of Contents:

1.

Military Theory and the Relationship Between Theory and Practice

2.

Life and Decision Making as the Art of Minds

3. Theory of Mind as the Science of Minds

4. The Conflict Between the Art and Science of Minds

5. Uniting the Science and Art of Minds: Zen and the Creative Application of Principles

6. The Content of a Theory of Mind: Science and Genealogical History

7. The Application of a Theory of Mind: Theoretically Supported Study of Our Own and Other People's Experience

This essay has been prompted by my essay of 8/30/10 called 'The Genealogy of the Modern Mind'. In that essay I tried to argue that theory of mind needed to be conceptualized as a fundamentally historical project that should be focused on the study of the humanities. I tried to explain how history was essential to the construction of a theoretical body of knowledge about minds. I then tried to argue that this body of theory should be applied primarily to the study of the humanities with the goal of acquiring synthetic experience that would lead to an increased capacity for empathy and judgment.

I am now realizing that I can perhaps frame these difficulties in terms of science and art. Frankly, I think that these two terms are inadequate and are partially escaping my grasp at this point. But the general idea is that with theory of mind there is a noticeable tension between theory and practice. Theory of mind seems to amount to a body of theoretical knowledge that is constructed primarily out of scientific and philosophical evidence. But the application of that theory is not clear. So when I say the science of minds I am generally referring to the creation of systematic knowledge about minds. But I think that the real application of that theory can only happen through daily life and decision making, through the art of minds. And right here I am exploring the idea that daily life and social decision making can be considered an art of minds. If that phrase is appropriate. At this moment I sort of like it.

I suppose right now I'm not necessarily exploring the historical component of theory of mind. I do believe that I made some alright arguments about why history has to be incorporated into theory of mind. Interestingly, I think it needs to be incorporated at both levels – both in the construction of theoretical knowledge about minds and in the application of that theory to the study of the humanities.

But here I suppose I am more interested in exploring this relationship between technical knowledge (science/theory) and practical and creative living (practice/art). I want to explore this relationship both generally and specifically as it relates to theory of mind. First I am going to explain how military theory initially introduced me to the theory/practice, science/art dichotomy and the solution that I favor. Then I'd like to elaborate on this idea that theory of mind is somehow the science of minds, and that real living and decision making is an art of minds. After that I'll try to use zen to explain how the science of minds can be applied to the art of minds (i.e. how theory of mind can help us make better decisions in the social world). After that I'll attempt to more clearly restate the ideas that I first came upon in my GOMM essay. I'll try to explain succinctly how theoretical knowledge of minds needs to be constructed of both scientific knowledge about brains/minds and from historical knowledge that tells us about the contemporary states of minds. Lastly I'll try to explain more clearly how this theory of mind (which is both scientific and historical) should be applied to the study of the humanities with the goal of improving sensitivity, empathy, and intuitive judgment.

Military Theory and the Relationship Between Theory and Practice

So the conflict between theory and practice, and some solutions to the problem, have been highlighted by my work in military history. Military decision making has two traits that make it valuable in this discussion of theory and practice – it is a field that involves an overwhelming amount of practical decision making, and it has been subjected to a plethora of theorizing. This makes it a very useful field for gauging this relationship between theory and practice. Another important thing to note is that military practice is often about decision making. Because my main concern here is the theory and practice of social decision making, military history offers a nice lens for this focus on decision making.

There are two military theorists that I want to discuss, both of which I learned about from Jon Sumida, Alfred Mahan and Carl von Clausewitz. Both of these authors were concerned primarily with the education of command ability – they wanted to figure out the best way to train people to make difficult military decisions. Both authors were also concerned with how theoretical/technical knowledge could be used to train the decision making ability of commanders. The biggest problem in educating command with theory has to do with the role of language: theory relies entirely on language, while command decision making relies mostly on intuition, which is decision making without the aid of language and rationality. So the problem becomes bridging this gap between the strictly articulable nature of theory with the intuitive nature of command decision making. How to use language to train a form of decision making that doesn't rely on language?

Then the question for military theory becomes that of intuition. How is intuition trained? How do you train this creative and intuitive form of decision making? The short answer is experience. You need experience in order to get better at intuitive decision making. So then the crucial thing becomes the relationship between theory and experience: How does theory help describe experience? How does theory help us learn from experience? How does theory help us replicate/synthesize experience?

Mahan and Clausewitz both posed different sorts of answers to this question of how to best use theory to learn from experience. My understanding of Mahan is rough and only second hand from Sumida's book. My understanding of Clausewitz is a bit better because I have read large portions of his writing. That being said, Mahan believed that technical and theoretical knowledge could be used to help us learn more from actual experience. Further, Mahan also believed that history could be a source of experience that theory could help us learn from. Mahan believed that by learning the technical and theoretical aspects of command, and applying them to the study of historical and real experience, one could learn to exercise the art of command. So for Mahan the study of scientific ideas was meant only to improve your ability to exercise the art of decision making. Sumida compares Mahan's views on theory and experience to zen. Sumida says that zen similarly provides rules for conduct, but that they must be applied only loosely and leave room for judgment and creativity. I'll explore this comparison to zen more closely when I talk about theory of mind more closely.

Clausewitz also believed that theoretical and technical knowledge was useful only so long as it facilitated an education that was grounded in experience. Clausewitz, however, believed that history could not only help us learn from experience, but that history could provide an adequate substitute for experience. He believed that historical study combined with intelligent theoretical historical surmise could provide a synthetic experience of sorts. If we were to study history with the intention of reenacting/simulating the thoughts of past commanders we would be gaining access to the difficulties of high command and thus a synthetic experience.

So based on what Mahan and Clausewitz said about military theory I want to make a few things clear. 1. Military decision making is about the social world and therefore cannot be a matter of applying rigid technical or theoretical ideas, but rather intuitive decision making. 2. Because military command requires intuition it has to be trained primarily through experience. 3. Theoretical knowledge thus has to be directed towards either the acquisition of real experience or synthetic experience. 4. Because it is about intuitive decision making it is akin to an art form, the art of command social decision making.

So then, military theory offers me a model of how to conceptualize the relationship between scientific/theoretical knowledge and the art/practice of decision making. I want to import these general conclusions to what I am calling the science and art of minds. I'm trying to explain how there exists a similar gap between theory and practice with theory of mind. I think that decision making in the social world, like in the military world, has to be intuitive and creative. This means that experience is also a valued commodity in the social world just like it is in the military world. I will therefore argue that theory of mind has to be directed at the acquisition of real experience or synthetic experience. And I think that because social decision making is intuitive and creative, and because it revolves mainly around minds, can be considered an art of minds. So then from here, using this model from military theory, I'm going to talk about how to unite the science/theory of minds with the art/practice of minds. How to unite theoretical knowledge about minds with their practical engagement in the social world.

First I'm going to dwell for a bit longer on this notion of social decision making as the art of minds. Then I'm going to spend some time with this idea of theory of mind as a body of scientific knowledge. So I just want to really ground these terms art and science in theory of mind. From there I will explain the connection to zen more clearly. After that I'm going to rehash what this has to do with a genealogical theory of mind that is aimed at acquiring synthetic experience for the purpose of becoming more sensitive.

Life and Decision Making as the Art of Minds

So how is it that life can be considered an art form? Is it possible that all of life and decision making can be an art form? If so, can it be considered an art of minds? My sense for all of this is yes. Life can indeed be an art form, and it can be an art form that is executed as an art of minds.

I think there are probably two different things I want to talk about to make my case for this. I think this is probably weak evidence, but I'm very new to this idea that life is the art of minds. But I will talk about Foucault's notion of the 'aesthetics of existence', and then I'll talk about Collingwood and the few parts of The Principles of Art that I have looked at.

Now in The Use of Pleasure Foucault discusses ancient Greek sexual practices. He talks about how their major concern was not to master their desires, but to use pleasure. They were engaging in self-disciplined use of food, alcohol, and sex. This self-disciplined engagement with pleasure was meant to build a beautiful reputation. Foucault claims that they were engaging in this disciplined lifestyle so that they could have a beautiful reputation in their community that would then allow them to exercise political power with more authority, and it would allow them to leave a beautiful legacy for future generations. Foucault says that this can be called an aesthetics of existence. Why does art need to stop at painting, sculpting, or the other accepted mediums? Why can't life itself become a form of creative expression? Why can't life be an art form? The ancient Greeks provide some strong evidence that life can indeed become an art form, that it is possible to try and beautify your existence for yourself and for those around you.

Now accept for a moment that life can indeed be an art form. Accept that there is such a thing as the aesthetics of existence. Ask the question, How would this aesthetics of existence be actualized? Or how is any aesthetic affect realized? It would be realized in the mental world. How could this aesthetics of existence exist anywhere other than in minds? The art would be taking place in the mind of the individual that is trying to build a beautiful reputation and existence, and it would take place in the minds of the individuals who recognized that someone had achieved a beautiful existence. In short, based on this short line of reasoning I feel comfortable concluding that life can be considered the art of minds. It would be a way to produce a beautiful life both in your own mind and in the minds of others.

But I will corroborate this slightly with what I have read in Collingwood's The Principles of Art. Collingwood basically says that art has to meet two criteria: it has to be expressive and imaginative. I think that Collingwood also says that art has to be 'language' of some sort, which does not mean just words. Anything can be language. Now what is to prevent me from thinking that life and the decisions that are made in life cannot be both expressive, imaginative, and linguistic? Well, my essay On Creativity was a lot of fun to write and I really feel like I made a good case that all of life, language, and decision making could be creative. I also feel that life and decision making can be expressive, imaginative, and creative. I plan on reading The Principles of Art once I finish what I'm reading right now. But even my skimming seems to suggest that life itself can be an art in Collingwood's eyes. Furthermore, with Collingwood's emphasis on minds, I have no problem concluding that living and making decisions in the social world should be considered the art of minds.

I also want to point out real quickly that I have already said in numerous places that minds function intuitively. That the art of minds is not something that could happen deliberately or rationally. We have to learn to do this sort of expressive and creative social interaction on an intuitive level.

Now let me talk about how theory of mind is more so the science of minds.

Theory of Mind as the Science of Minds

Now here when I am talking about science I mean it in in its most general form. Even with that being said, I fear that the term doesn't quite apply to what I'm talking about here. But I'm talking about science as the production of a systematized body of knowledge that is supposed to achieve the full explanation of a phenomena, and often the prediction of that phenomena, and even prescription for action within that phenomena.

So is theory of mind really a science of mind? For one thing I can say that theory of mind draws primarily on scientific and technical information. Theory of mind typically uses the results of neuroscience or psychology, and also utilizes armchair thought experiments. But in any case, theory of mind is an articulated body of knowledge. Alvin Goldman does say explicitly that he is trying to create a comprehensive theory of mind. What that means, I'm not sure.

In this section I'm going to make a quick concession: I think this term is 1. eluding my grasp for the most part, and 2. probably inadequate for what I'm trying to talk about.

Basically I'm just saying here that theory of mind is an articulated body of knowledge that relies primarily on scientific evidence. And it is therefore in contrast to the actual practice of minds.

I think that calling theory of mind a science of mind will make more sense if I explain the conflict between the science and art of minds.

The Conflict Between the Art and Science of Minds

What I'm trying to talk about is how theory of mind is a clearly articulated body of knowledge about minds. It is always rooted in language, in articulation. And seeing that real interaction of minds functions primarily on an intuitive level (i.e. it functions without language), there is conflict between the theory and practice of minds. I am using the terms science and art to highlight the conflict between the theory and practice of minds.

Having established that engaging with minds can be an art, I want to figure out how to contrast that well. Mahan talked about the art and science of command. So I am talking about the art and science of minds. But I don't know if that makes sense.

But again, the point is this: theory of mind is an articulated body of knowledge that does not translate into real action in any clear way. Theory of mind is incapable of providing any kind of prescriptive action for the real world of minds. So there is a clear conflict between the theory of minds and the practice of minds. I want to specify the pragmatics of theory of mind more clearly. That is why these terms science and art are useful right now. Because I'm trying to explain how social decision making is an intuitive, creative, and expressive process that is akin to an art form, but that theory of mind is a systematized and articulated body of knowledge that has no direct connection to actual practice of minds, which is something like a science. So I'm using this dichotomy of science/art to explain how I want to turn theory of mind into a practical guide to daily living. I'm trying to unite the science and the art of minds. I'm trying to make it so that theory of mind can help us exercise the art of minds. I think this can be done. But it is tricky. I'm struggling with it, obviously. As I should be, right?

So generally the conflict is between theory of mind and the practice of minds: theory of mind is a clearly articulated and scientific body of knowledge, but the practice of minds is an intuitive process of social interaction that does not rely on language or reason. Theory of mind is like a science, while living in the world of minds is something like an art. Theory of mind does not lead to any obvious form of action. So I want to find a way to make this science of minds helpful in the art of minds.

I'm going to move on and try to clarify how I want to do this. I'm going to explain this unification of the science and art of minds in three sections. First, I'm going to scrape the surface a little bit with a reference to zen. Then I'm going to talk about how I want to reconfigure the body of theory that a theory of mind would use. Then I'll talk exactly about how I think it should be applied.

Uniting the Science and Art of Minds: Zen and the Creative Application of Principles

I only want to briefly compare this whole thing to zen. I haven't read nearly enough on zen, so I won't even try to make this clear or long. But I will say that when I read Jon Sumida's book on Alfred Mahan, Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command, I was struck by the way that zen can be applied to this issue of the 'science' and 'art' of something. Sumida describes how Mahan's views on naval command were similar to the way that zen approaches formal propositions. Mahan believed that formal rules could not be rigidly applied to command decision making. They rather had to be used as a set of principles that allowed room for flexibility and creative judgment. Zen regards moral principles in the same way. Zen has a certain number of things that it holds to be true about good or proper living. But these rules are never to be rigidly applied to life. They are to be applied loosely, flexibly, and creatively. Judgment is supreme, and rules are only useful so long as they aid in the process of judgment.

I think that theory of mind should have a similar goal in mind. I think that theory of mind should come up with a series of propositions about the ways that minds work. It should explain as best we can how they work, and how we can interact with them. But theory of mind can never be prescriptive, so it needs to be an aid to judgment. The social world is about exercising judgment in relations of minds. But I bet theory of mind could be an aid to judgment in the social world, the world of minds.

But what principles should theory of mind use? Let me explore.

The Content of a Theory of Mind: Science and Genealogical History

I think that a theory of mind should consist of at least two elements that are somewhat distinct. The first is what theory of mind typically revolves around: scientific and philosophical evidence. Theory of mind typically draws on evidence from psychology, neuroscience, and general philosophical arguments. These traditional elements are crucial to theory of mind, obviously. The discovery of mirror neurons, neuroplasticity, all kinds of psychological experiments–all of this offers a lot to a theory of mind.

But I believe that a theory of mind also has to contain historical information. It needs to use genealogical historical methods to try and figure out what exactly is going on with minds in the present. It needs to figure out what minds in the past were like, and use that information to determine how minds have developed historically, and exactly how they are functioning in this historical moment. Culture has so much to do with minds, I don't see any way that a theory of mind could really function without historical study.

So I'm proposing that the content of theory of mind needs to be expanded to include historical information. I argued all of this in my essay 'The Genealogy of the Modern Mind'.

The Application of a Theory of Mind: Theoretically Supported Study of Our Own and Other People's Experience

So, I've told you in these last two sections that theory of mind needs to be regarded as a loose set of rules and principles that are to be intuitively and creatively applied in the social world as aids to judgment, and that a theory of mind can't possibly be adequate unless it uses historical evidence in conjunction with scientific evidence and philosophical argument. Now I just want to explain briefly how I think this theory of mind should be used as an aid to the study of our own and other people's experience. I think that the study of our own experience can be accomplished through mindfulness and reflection, while the study of other people's experience is to be found in the humanities and in social interaction. The goal with all of this talk of theory of mind is to make it so that theory of mind becomes part of our unconscious decision making apparatus. We need to make it so that theoretical lessons are absorbed into the mind at an unconscious level so that we can simply act those ways intuitively.

I think that the best way to absorb theory into the unconscious is by engaging in deliberate reflection on our own thought and deliberate simulation on other people's thoughts. In other words, we can't make our actions reflect our theoretical values unless we are willing to engage in mindfulness and empathy. Unless we take the time to really think about our own minds and think about other people's minds we won't be able to intuitively enact our moral values.

So we can use theory of mind to equip our minds with a conceptual tool kit that is both scientific and historical. We would learn about simulation theory, about mirror neurons and empathy, about social classifications, about the history of our thought. But that theoretical knowledge about minds isn't any good unless we can somehow transform it into the art of minds. It isn't any help unless it helps us live differently in the social world. We act intuitively in the social world, so we need to use it to transform our intuitive behavior. I think that is best done through reflection on our own experience and through the acquisition of synthetic experience from the humanities.

I'm so tired from starting my new job and from being stressed out and confused. I can't think clearly and want to publish this essay. I'm exploring fruitful things here. I'm articulating good stuff about how theory of mind needs to be reconceptualized both in terms of content and pragmatics. But I don't care to chase this post anymore. I want it to be done. I'll leave my original notes below. I'll stop here.

Original Notes of 9/1/10

- Theoretical ideas and being primed to learn from our own experience

- Mahan and learning from our own experience

- The humanities and synthetic experience

- Sensitivity

- Judgement

Zen and principles as guides to learning from experience. Principles as a means of creativity. These are some questions prompted by GOMM

This is really about the theory of mind. What are the propositions that theory of mind elaborates? And what are there use? What is the body of theory like? What is the use of that body of theory? Theory of mind has to be a zen like project.

Life is an art. Theory of mind is a science. But. Just like Mahan and Clausewitz, you can't have this type of theory for minds. You need a theory of mind that 1. helps you learn from real experience better and 2. helps you gain synthetic experience

Articulation and Ineffability: Science, Language, and Modern Identity in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Articulation and Ineffability: Science, Language, and Modern Identity in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

In Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson depicts the bifurcation of a nineteenth-century intellect. The main character’s original, singular identity of Dr. Henry Jekyll is divided when a chemical transforms him into another being named Mr. Edward Hyde. The personalities of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde exhibit radically different behavior. The chemical substance, however, had “no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine;” and was not the base cause of his mind’s division (Stevenson, 2003, 51). Instead, the split between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was caused by the nineteenth-century intellectual community’s strictly articulable criteria for human identity and its failure to account for much of Dr. Jekyll’s experience. Dr. Jekyll was torn between the highly articulate world of the intellect, and the ineffable world of his emotions and experiences.

In nineteenth-century England, industrialism and the natural sciences were producing more results than ever. Dr. Jekyll himself was an esteemed scientist and member of the English intellectual community. At the heart of scientific pursuits is the deliberate observation of reality with the goal of using language to classify, explain, and predict. For those involved in intellectual pursuits, therefore, articulation and identity became linked in the nineteenth-century. As a result, Dr. Jekyll only incorporates his thoughts and feelings into his identity so long as they can be put into words. The human mind, however, cannot be subjected to the rigorous standards of scientific observation and articulation. Thoughts are frequently blended with emotions, images, sounds, and other inarticulate sensations. In other words, there are parts of the human mind that are ineffable. Mr. Hyde’s existence, his physical appearance, and his behavior are a result of Dr. Jekyll’s over reliance on language and his failure to tend to the ineffable and animalistic parts of his mind.

My analysis of Strange Case revolves around three themes: the role of articulation within European and American culture; the dynamism and ineffability of the human mind; and the connection between human’s ineffability and their status as animals. Each of these three themes will be explored in turn utilizing textual analysis, historical context, biographical evidence, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century science and philosophy. The theme of articulation will be explored through character’s engagement with articulation, the historical context of the Romantic movement, Stevenson’s writings on science and articulation, and twentieth-century cognitive science. The theme of ineffability will be illuminated with the novella’s descriptions of thought, nineteenth-century medical context, Stevenson’s reflections on his own mind, and late twentieth-century neuroscience. Finally, the connection between ineffability and animalism will be demonstrated with the novella’s references to animals, a discussion of nineteenth-century evolutionary theory, Stevenson’s thoughts on evolutionary theory, and twenty-first century-philosophy of evolution.

The role of articulation within the world of Strange Case is exhibited by both minor and major characters. Minor characters repeatedly express the importance of articulate thought. Dr. Jekyll, too, provides evidence for the existence of an over-reliance on articulation. Dr. Jekyll’s experience, however, seems to be in conflict with the logocentric standards of the scientific community. As a result, he often expresses frustration with language. A discussion of the Romantic movement will provide historical context for the novella’s publication. Stevenson’s concern about the cultural role of articulation will be explored in his writing on popular literature. and his thoughts on the scientific and industrial revolutions. Lastly, twentieth-century cognitive science will corroborate the connections between the scientific and industrial revolutions and a modern culture of articulation.

Throughout the course of the novella both minor and major characters make it clear that articulation is highly regarded. Most of the minor characters, as well as Dr. Jekyll, belong to specific professions that rely almost exclusively on articulation – they are doctors, lawyers, and scientists. In fact, English Professor Jane Rago argues that their ability to articulate and represent reality allows these men to regulate the way in which other individuals conceive of identity. They constitute a medico-juridico-scientific discursive regime. “It is precisely this discursive regime,” Rago argues, “that Hyde threatens, and this results in a panic of representation and self-implication that surrounds the professional world” (Rago, 2006, 277). In other words, language dominates the minds of these characters, and Hyde’s ineffability shakes their faith in articulation, and thus in their own identities.

Minor characters, and Mr. Utterson in particular, cling to language and articulation as their primary source of knowledge throughout the text. For example, while trying to understand the actions of Hyde, Mr. Utterson grapples with thoughts that are described as “shifting, insubstantial mists.” Despite the inarticulate nature of his thoughts, or perhaps in response to them, Utterson decides to consult his friend Dr. Lanyon. He travels to “Cavendish Square, that citadel of medicine, where his friend, the great Dr. Lanyon, had his house and received his crowding patients. ‘If anyone knows, it will be Lanyon,‘ He had thought” (Stevenson, 2003, 13, emphasis added, all italics mine). When Hyde’s presence produces inarticulate thoughts, and his legal knowledge fails to explain them, Utterson turns to another highly articulate field, medicine. Utterson also hopes that close observation of Hyde will ease the cognitive dissonance he produces. “If he could but once set eyes on him, he thought the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll altogether away, as was the habit of mysterious things when well examined” (Ibid., 15). Utterson assumes that individuals can be handled scientifically – that they can be observed, understood, and articulated. Even when dealing with intense emotions Utterson maintains his reliance on articulation. For example, Mr. Utterson urges his friend to clearly articulate his feelings when he says, “Now, my good man,... be explicit. What are you afraid of?” (Ibid., 32). This line confirms that Utterson and others regard articulation of thought as highly important – even something as affective as fear must be put into words.

While attempting to solve the disappearance of Jekyll, Utterson continues to rely on language. He says, “supposed Dr. Jekyll to have been... murdered, what could induce the murder to stay? That won’t hold water; it doesn’t commend itself to reason” (Ibid., 35). Utterson fails to consider that some situations in general, and this situation in particular, cannot be tackled with language. Despite its shortcomings, Utterson repeatedly speaks of articulation as the supreme form of cognition, showing that he has been thoroughly indoctrinated into a culture of articulation.

Dr. Jekyll is also immersed in the British culture of articulation. Unlike other characters, however, Dr. Jekyll has begun to lose his faith in language’s ability to accurately represent human experience. He begins criticizing fellow scientists for their over-reliance on language. Moreover, he begins seeing less articulate thought in a positive light.

Despite his involvement with law and science, Dr. Jekyll is averse to his over-reliance on articulation. For example, Dr. Jekyll scorns Dr. Lanyon for being a “hide-bound pedant.... I know he’s a good fellow... but a hide-bound pedant for all that; an ignorant, blatant pedant. I was never more disappointed in any man than Lanyon” (Ibid., 20). Apart from Dr. Jekyll’s hostility to pedantry, it is important to note the double meaning of the term ‘hide-bound.’ This is meant to signify not only the rigidity of Lanyon’s thinking, but also that it will ultimately estrange Dr. Lanyon from the ineffable, making him more likely to develop a ‘Mr. Hyde’ of his own.

Moments before transforming back into Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde also offers a harsh admonishment of scientific pursuits. Mr. Hyde asks Dr. Lanyon,

Will you be wise?... or has the greed of curiosity too much command of you?... As you decide, you shall be left as you were before, and neither richer nor wiser, unless the sense of service rendered to a man in mortal distress may be counted as a kind of riches of the soul. Or, if you prefer to choose, a new province of knowledge... shall be laid open to you.... (Ibid., 46).

Given that Mr. Hyde represents the parts of Dr. Jekyll that have been ignored by articulation, we can consider these to be Dr. Jekyll’s views, however withheld from his conscious self they are. As Victorian scholar Ronald Thomas argues, Mr. Hyde “is both what is produced by Jekyll’s utterances and what cannot be contained in them” (Thomas, 1986, 164), meaning that any view expressed by Mr. Hyde essentially belongs to the mind of Dr. Jekyll. Dr. Jekyll believes that scientific knowledge is inherently rapacious, and that it does not necessarily lead to greater wisdom. Instead, Dr. Jekyll claims that helping other individuals can lead to an enrichment of ‘the soul,‘ by which he means the emotional and affective parts of the self: the ineffable. Finally, Dr. Jekyll believes that embracing the ineffable can lead to a ‘new province of knowledge’ – it would offer an escape from the culture of articulation, and could exist as its own legitimate form of understanding. Dr. Jekyll’s engagement with the Victorian culture of articulation has made him skeptical of scientific language, and has inclined him to embrace less articulate thinking. Stevenson’s depiction of a logocentric British culture was part of a larger movement that spoke out against the dominance of science and articulation.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Romantic thinkers articulated a view of the mind that challenged the assumption that language and rationality were the chief human traits. Psychologist Guy Claxton argues that a culture of articulation was formed when the majority of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers espoused a logocentric view of the mind. Romantics, on the contrary, believed that human minds could not be fully explained by language and reason. The Romantic movement, Claxton claims, was fundamentally about “leaning far back on one end of the epistemological seesaw on whose other end sat Locke and Newton, in order simply to try to create a little movement” (Claxton, 2005, 135). Romantic’s of all periods put their faith in “experience, emotion and imagination not as material for reason to work on, but as valuable ways of knowing in their own right” (Ibid., 136). Biographical information shows that Stevenson held similar views on the role of language in British culture, and was concerned with the limitations of articulation.

As an heir to the Romantic movement, Stevenson expressed similar views on the issues of science, language, and the mind. In his engagement with the English intellectual community, he regularly had discussions with leading thinkers, and reportedly contributed to conversations on the shortcomings of rationality, and particularly “the connection between imaginative writing and dreaming” (Reid, 2006, 217). Furthermore, Stevenson doubted the intellectual utility of popular novels. He suspected that large scale reading did not necessarily lead to wide spread intellectual growth. On the contrary, Stevenson and other Romantics believed that many nineteenth-century novels were “a mark not of intellectual progress but of morbid overcivilization” (Ibid.). Stevenson, instead, thought that novels ought to invigorate the “sensual and quite illogical tendencies in man” and should reacquaint us with our “atavistic instincts”(Ibid., 218).

Stevenson’s emphasis on Romance and emotion is directly related to his thoughts on science and industrialism. He claimed that scientific thought took people “into zones of speculation where there is no habitable city for the mind of man” (Turnbull, 2006, 228). This is because it gave people the idea that the world should work “deftly and perfectly, like the play of an ideal machine” (Ibid., 229). Stevenson could not have been more explicit when he said, “Scientific language, like most other language, is extremely unsatisfactory” (Ibid.). Stevenson questioned the primacy of rationality and language, suspected that mass reading would not lead to uninterrupted intellectual progress, and saw both of these fallacies as directly linked to the scientific and industrial culture of articulation. Late twentieth century cognitive science has drawn strikingly similar connections between the scientific revolution and the emergence of a culture of articulation.

Contemporary cognitive scientists have argued that many Western cultures pay excessive credence to the use of language. These cognitive scientists also argue, however, that language can provide only a partial picture of the human mind. In 1997’s Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, Claxton argues that Western culture has lost touch with less articulate ways of knowing in favor of more conscious and deliberate modes of thought. Claxton calls this over-reliance on language and reason “d-mode,” with the d standing for both deliberation and default. “We have been inadvertently trapped,” Claxton argues, “in a single mode of mind that is characterised by information gathering, intellect and impatience, one that requires you to be explicit, articulate, purposeful, and to show your reasoning.” More than anything else d-mode relies on “language (or other symbol systems) as a medium and deliberation as a method” (Claxton, 1997, 6). As a result, “d-mode must operate at the rates at which language can be received, produced and processed” (Ibid., 10). In short, Western societies have often eschewed the ineffable in favor of articulation.

Claxton traces the origins of this rigid mode of thinking to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers and scientists. Thinkers like John Locke claimed that deliberate rationality was the only legitimate form of thought. “The assumption that conscious reason was the core of human identity,...” Claxton claims, “fed the growth of empirical science and the plethora of technological miracles to which it gave rise. From technology, it was a short step to the effective cultural takeover which we see today” (Ibid., 206). To combat the ubiquity of d-mode Claxton proposes that we embrace “sources of knowledge that are less articulate, less conscious and less predictable” (Ibid., 13). Dr. Jekyll was immersed in the scientific community and was therefore indoctrinated into the culture of d-mode. Dr. Jekyll’s over-reliance on d-mode inherently involves the neglect of less articulate ways of knowing described by Claxton, forcing the ineffable to become Mr. Hyde.

The world of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, therefore, is permeated with a culture of articulation that favors scientific pursuits. Both minor and major characters simultaneously reflect the cultural value of articulation, and question its absolute applicability. Further, Stevenson’s historical context was fraught with controversy over the effects of the scientific and industrial revolutions. In fact, Stevenson himself regarded language as a limited tool, and thought science placed too much faith in articulation. Finally, late-twentieth-century cognitive scientists substantiate these ideas by identifying British and American culture with the term d-mode: an overly-deliberate pattern of thought that allows no time for inarticulate, ineffable thought. In short, the novella, historical context, Stevenson’s biographical information, and contemporary ideas confirm the existence of a Western culture of articulation.

In addition to an over-reliance on language, the novella abounds with dynamic minds that defy articulation. The novella’s characters are shown to have complex minds that cannot be precisely articulated. For Dr. Jekyll, scientific standards of articulation fail to account for his ineffabilities, and he is transformed into Mr. Hyde. Stevenson’s depiction of a divided mind may have been influenced by nineteenth-century medical experiments. Further, Stevenson suspected that his own mind was composed of many facets, many of which were inaccessible to language. Lastly, twenty- and twenty-first century neuroscience suggests the existence of multiple minds within humans.

During the novella both minor and major characters express the shortcomings of language, and hint at the ineffability of their minds. Many minor characters recognize the shortcomings of language, and find their minds processing information without words. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde demonstrate similar lessons about the conflict between articulation and ineffability. Dr. Jekyll has a troubled relationship with language, but ultimately fails to identify with the ineffable portions of his mind. Mr. Hyde, on the other hand, is described mainly by his ineffable nature and his refusal to engage in articulation. The friction between articulation and ineffability becomes too great for Dr. Jekyll, and his personality divides into Mr. Hyde.

Despite the excessive cultural significance ascribed to articulation, the minor characters of Strange Case doubt language’s ability to explain certain phenomena. In particular, language falls short when grappling with complex situations that involve imagery or emotions. Further, many characters implicitly recognize that their minds possess ineffable qualities: they process information without the help of language and they act based on wordless emotions and impulses.

Although articulation dominates the culture of the novella, minor characters express views that question the universality of language, and show that thought occurs in ways that are ineffable. Mr. Utterson, for example, regards inquiry as a potentially dangerous process that may lead to unintended consequences. He says:

I feel very strongly about putting questions;.... You start a question, and it’s like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden and the family have to change their name. No, sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask (Ibid., 11).

This quotation demonstrates Utterson’s selective engagement with articulation. He favors language and inquisition only so far as they support his quest for clarity. If there is any chance that a question will lead to obscurity, Utterson’s desire for articulation evaporates. The novella’s culture of articulation, therefore, is limited in it’s ability to facilitate understanding, and must be augmented by less articulate thought.

In addition to selective articulation, Utterson also engages with ineffable forms of thought that involve detailed images. For example, late at night Utterson contemplates difficult questions: “Hitherto it had touched him on the intellectual side alone; but now his imagination also was engaged or rather enslaved;... Mr. Enfield’s tale went by before his mind in a scroll of lighted pictures” (Ibid., 14). Although Utterson’s engagement with the culture of articulation has dulled his awareness of ineffable thought, it is clear that his mind still operates beyond language.

Similarly, characters recognize that communication between humans is not restricted to language. For example, after Mr. Poole expresses fear to Utterson, Stevenson writes that “The man’s appearance amply bore out his words; his manner was altered for the worse” (Ibid., 33). While words were Poole’s original medium, it is his body posture that truly communicates his feelings. In addition to the limited scope of language, some characters entertain the idea that articulable understanding is a burden.

In a conversation between Mr. Utterson and Dr. Lanyon they both express views that question the benefits of articulate knowledge. Mr. Utterson says of Dr. Jekyll, “he is a doctor, he must know his own state and that his days are counted; and the knowledge is more than he can bear,” to which Lanyon replies, “I sometimes think if we knew all, we should be more glad to get away” (Ibid., 29). Dr. Lanyon is referring to the ways in which medical knowledge can heighten our awareness our bodies deterioration and our mortality. While medicine provides insights that improve health, it also gives us an understandings of health and age that binds our thoughts and actions. The historical philosopher Michel Foucault also thought that forms of power, which always corresponds with a form of knowledge, could transform individuals into subjects in two senses of the word. Power/knowledge could simultaneously makes one “subject to someone else by control and dependance,” and allow a sense of one’s “own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge.” There existed, therefore, “a form of power with subjugates and makes subject to”(Foucault, 1982, 781). This perfectly describes Mr. Utterson and Dr. Lanyon’s relationship with medical knowledge. Medical knowledge allows Dr. Lanyon to constitute his identity as a doctor, and it lets him gain insight into the functioning of human bodies. On the other hand, his knowledge is a burden that he will never be able to escape. He is both subjugated by and subject to medical knowledge. Mr. Utterson, Dr. Lanyon, and Poole all recognize that articulation and knowledge can be a burden, and are not indiscriminately beneficial to the mind.

Dr. Lanyon continues to recognize the limitations of articulation. Lanyon, however, notices the way in which thought and language operate at different speeds. He notes, “These observations, though they have taken so great a space to be set down in, were yet the work of a few seconds” (Ibid., 45). In this moment Dr. Lanyon, although deeply committed to articulation, realizes that his mind has the ability to process information without ratiocination. These characters demonstrate the limitations of language and the inarticulate nature of thought.

While these characters acknowledge the limitations of language, they also recognize that certain aspects of their minds are ineffable. Somewhat appropriately, however, they acknowledge their ineffability implicitly, and through action. On the first page of the story Mr. Utterson is described as a charming man who is an awkward conversationalist. “At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something eminently human beaconed from his eye; something indeed which never found its way into his talk, but which spoke not only in these silent symbols of the after-dinner face, but more often and loudly in the acts of his life” (Ibid., 7). This passage demonstrates that the definitive characteristic of human beings is not our ability to articulate. On the contrary, the description of Mr. Utterson shows there is an aspect of human identity that is only revealed under the influence of alcohol and in action. Most importantly, Mr. Utterson’s ‘eminently human’ characteristics never manifest themselves through words, but in silence and in action.

Similarly, one of Utterson’s closest friendships cannot be explained. His relationship with Mr. Enfield seems to be based on no articulable criteria:

It was a nut to crack for many, what these two could see in each other or what subject they could find in common.... in their Sunday walks... they said nothing, looked singularly dull.... For all that, the two men put the greatest store by these excursions, counted them the chief jewel of each week, and not only set aside occasions of pleasure, but even resisted the calls of business, that they might enjoy them uninterrupted (Ibid., 8).

Utterson and Enfield have an affinity for one another not because they can articulate their relationship, but because they identify on a level that transcends language – because together they can exist ineffably.

Other characters also find Mr. Utterson’s quiet nature a great comfort, “Hosts loved to detain the dry lawyer, when... the loose-tongued had already their foot on the threshold; they liked to sit... in his unobtrusive company, practicing for solitude; sobering their minds in the man’s rich silence” (Ibid., 19). Other characters find silence and dreaming to be an infinitely human activity. The maid who witnesses Dr. Lanyon’s murder was “romantically given, for she sat down upon her box,... and fell into a dream of musing.... never had she felt more at peace with all men or thought more kindly of the world” (Ibid., 21).

As the story continues characters continue to recognize the difficulties of defining human emotions and identity with words. Mr. Poole says, “It is well, then, that we should be frank.... We both think more than we have said” (Ibid., 37). In this passage Mr. Poole makes a simple admission that has significant implications. His statement is further evidence that characters in the story recognize the ineffable nature of the mind. Further, Poole’s difficulty with explicating his thoughts also comes from the limited analytical tools available to him. The novella’s culture of articulation excels when discussing science, but flounders when faced with emotions. These moments from the text demonstrate language’s shortcomings when attempting to capture an individuals characteristics, and the ineffability inherent to the human mind.

Dr. Jekyll, too, often expresses the inadequacy of language, and frequently drifts into the realm of the ineffable. For example, Dr. Jekyll admits on several occasions that his thoughts and problems cannot be articulated. He expresses the shortcomings of language when he says, “My good Utterson... this is downright good of you, and I cannot find words to thank you in” (Ibid., 20). His skepticism of language extends to his personal problems. While speaking to Utterson, he says, “I am painfully situated, Utterson; my position is... a very strange one. It is one... that cannot be mended by talking” (Ibid.). In this moment Dr. Jekyll is recognizing the divide between himself and Mr. Hyde. He operates in the realm of articulation while Hyde exists as the ineffable. He furthers this notion when he says, “my instinct and all the circumstances of my nameless situation tell me that the end is sure” (Ibid., 41).

At times, Dr. Jekyll even prefers to eschew articulation: “I have brought on myself a punishment and a danger that I cannot name.... you can do but one thing, Utterson,... and that is to respect my silence” (Ibid., 30). Again, he gives up on articulate thinking when “he had grown very silent, he did not read; it seemed as if he had something on his mind” (Ibid., 31). Dr. Jekyll even explicitly states his awareness of the division in his mind. He says, “Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured... at the furtherance of knowledge” (Ibid., 48). He goes so far as to suggest that all humans may be composed of many different minds, not just the two that he has been able to identify within himself:

With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth,... that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow;.. and I hazard to guess that man will ultimately be known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens (Ibid.)

Clearly, Dr. Jekyll knows that his mind is composed of far more facets than he is aware, and that the ability to articulate, his ‘intellectual intelligence,’ is only one of them. He even feels inclined to save the ineffable portion of his mind when he tells Mr. Utterson, “I only ask you to help [Mr. Hyde] for my sake, when I am no longer here” (Ibid., 21). Dr. Jekyll’s statements reveal his skepticism of articulation, and his awareness of the ineffability of his mind.

Although Dr. Jekyll seems to recognize the shortcomings of language and his minds ineffability, he is too enmeshed in the culture of articulation and ultimately rejects the ineffable portions of his mind. Rather than embrace the ineffable, he attempts to banish Mr. Hyde through rational choice. Dr. Jekyll claims that he could easily be done with Mr. Hyde. “The moment I choose,” he claims, “I can be rid of Mr. Hyde” (Ibid., 20). As Mr. Hyde’s disconcerting behavior continues, Jekyll reaffirms his faith in choice, albeit in a more desperate tone. “I swear to God I will never set eyes on him again. I bind my honour to you that I am done with him in this world” (Ibid., 25).

When Jekyll is incapable of suppressing Hyde, he begins to openly denounce him. He says, “I cannot say I care what becomes of Hyde; I am quite done with him. I was thinking of my own character which this hateful business has rather exposed” (Ibid., 26). When Jekyll speaks of his ‘own character,’ he is referring to a specific identity; his reputation as an articulate member of the intellectual community. Although Hyde can legitimately be considered part of Jekyll’s overarching identity, he is incapable of relating to these portions of himself. “Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde.” Jekyll, however, reconciles this by saying, “It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired” (Ibid., 53).

At one point, Jekyll believes that he has been able to conquer the presence of Mr. Hyde. He says he “bade a resolute farewell to the liberty,... the light step, leaping pulses and secret pleasures, that I enjoyed in the disguise of Hyde. I made this choice perhaps with some unconscious reservation, for I neither gave up the house in Soho, nor destroyed the clothes of Edward Hyde” (Ibid., 54-55). Despite his confidence in rational choice, it proves to be an inadequate form of personal control. His articulate self was able to concoct a convincing rationalization, while the ineffable portions of his mind maintained their own agenda, leading to the eventual return of Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll even explicitly notes that Hyde seems to function as though he were indifferent to his rationality. “Hyde was indifferent to Jekyll,...” he says, “Jekyll had more than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a son’s indifference” (Ibid., 55). It seems as thought the impulsive, emotional, ineffable Mr. Hyde is able to trump Dr. Jekyll’s reason. As we will see, twentieth-century neuroscience has confirmed that emotions can overwhelm reason.

Dr. Jekyll is only able to discount Mr. Hyde as a part of himself because he uses limited criteria to constitute the identity known as ‘Dr. Jekyll.’ Meaning that Dr. Jekyll can think of himself as a coherent individual so long as his only metric is his rational scientific pursuits. Jekyll even admits that he had long wished to separate his articulate self from his ineffability. “I had learned to dwell with pleasure,” he says, “as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable” (Stevenson, 2003, 49). Ironically, however, Dr. Jekyll contemplates the idea of rationally banishing his ineffability with an inarticulate form of thought: a daydream.

Dr. Jekyll’s quest to conquer his ineffability is grounded in his experience with a culture that assumed the primacy of articulation. Jekyll continues to show how his articulate scientific pursuits have affected his relationship with himself. While reflecting on the course of his life Dr. Jekyll laments, “I saw my life as a whole: I followed it up from the days of childhood,... and through the self-denying toils of my professional life,.... I could have screamed aloud; I sought with tears and prayers to smother down the crowd of hideous images and sounds which my memory swarmed against me” (Ibid., 57). When presented with cognitive information that is ineffable, ‘images and sounds,’ Dr. Jekyll feels confused and overwhelmed. Rather than accept it, he turns to a plea that is rooted in language: prayer. Given that Jekyll utilizes prayer in reaction to ‘sounds and images,‘ we can be sure that he is launching an articulate assault against the ineffable. This moment fully demonstrates Dr. Jekyll’s dependence on his ability to articulate, and that he has an intense aversion to cognition that consists of ineffables.

Once Dr. Jekyll has disowned the ineffable portions of his mind, they start to manifest themselves as Mr. Hyde. Since Hyde rarely speaks, his uncanny, ineffable nature is expressed primarily by the story’s secondary characters. From the start of the story characters find it difficult to put words to Mr. Hyde. Mr. Enfield, for example, says, “He is not easy to describe.... I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scare know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point.... And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment” (Ibid.,11). Enfied not only experiences Hyde as an ineffable feeling, but he assumes that this means he is monstrous and detestable.

Hyde’s ineffability is so startling that characters give up on attempts to articulate him. “Mr. Utterson sighed deeply but said never a word; and the young man presently resumed.... ‘Let us... never to refer to this again.’ ‘With all my heart,’ said the lawyer. ‘I shake hands on that, Richard.’” (Ibid., 12). Mr. Hyde is so disconcerting that these characters are willing to give up on articulation, their most prized cultural asset.

When Hyde encounters Mr. Carew he continues to exist in a wordless space, “He had in his hand a heavy cane, with which he was trifling; but he answered never a word” (Ibid., 21). Even when multiple people witness Mr. Hyde they can find no consensus: “[T]he few who could describe him differed widely,.... Only on one point were they agreed; and that was the haunting sense of unexpressed deformity with which the fugitive impressed his beholders” (Ibid., 24). Again, Mr. Hyde’s central attribute is ineffability. Dr. Jekyll’s butler, Mr. Poole, despite his familiarity with Jekyll, is also incapable of expressing this aspect of his master, “there was something queer about that gentleman... I don’t know rightly how to say it, sire, beyond this: that you felt it in your marrow kind of cold and thin.”

Poole even recognizes that Hyde is antithetical to intellectual standards of articulation. He says Mr. Hyde’s presence “went down his spine like ice. O, I know it’s not evidence, Mr. Utterson; I‘m book-learned enough for that; but a man his his feelings.” Mr. Utterson concurs, “Ay, ay,.... My fears incline me to the same point” (Ibid., 37). In this moment Mr. Poole and Mr. Utterson experience thoughts that defy articulation. Again, when Mr. Utterson sees Hyde weeping he becomes “conscious of a sudden chill of horror” (Ibid., 38). Rather than articulable thought, they experience Mr. Hyde as a feeling, as an inkling of trouble, as ineffability. Dr. Lanyon also finds that Hyde’s presence gives him a feeling that “bore some resemblance to incipient rigor, and was accompanied by a marked sinking of the pulse” (Ibid., 44).

Furthermore, even when Dr. Jekyll explains Hyde’s existence to Lanyon, he is incapable of articulating it: “What he told me..., I cannot bring my mind to set on paper. I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard.... I ask myself if I believe it, and I cannot answer. My life is shaken to its roots” (Ibid., 47). Hyde’s ineffable nature is so disconcerting because he threatens everything that their cultural and professional lives are founded upon. Observation of Hyde only leads to horror, attempts to articulate him fail completely, and he leaves them with overwhelming emotions.

Mr. Hyde’s ineffability is also confirmed when Dr. Jekyll involuntarily transforms after entering a less articulate frame of mind. While reflecting on Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll says that in his “psychological way, began lazily to inquire into the elements of this illusion, occasionally, even as I did so, dropping back into a comfortable morning doze. I was still so engaged when, in one of my more wakeful moments, my eye fell upon my hand.... But the hand which I now saw... was the hand of Edward Hyde” (Ibid., 54). Clearly, Hyde thrives on inarticulate forms of thought, and represents the ineffable portions of Jekyll’s mind. Prior to the novella’s publication, nineteenth-century medical experiments were suggesting the possibility that humans may have multiple minds.

Indeed, nineteenth-century scientific endeavors were providing evidence for the existence of multiple minds in the human brain. A.L. Wigan, in 1844, for example, conducted an autopsy of a well known friend, only to find that “one cerebral hemisphere was totally absent” (Cytowic, 1993, 213). Given that this individual had a completely normal life and personality, Wigan concluded that a single hemisphere was sufficient to house a complete mind. Following this logic, Wigan argued that “the brain is not a single organ of two halves but a closely apposed pair, just as the kidneys or lungs are paired organs” (Ibid.). Wigan’s work implies that “having two hemispheres means that we possess two minds that differ in content, mode of organization, and even in goals” (Ibid., 214). In nineteenth-century England the notion of multiple minds was being argued from many angles. Stevenson, too, explored the possibility of multiple minds in his writing, and believed that language was only one facet of the mind.

Stevenson’s essays shows that he suspected that his mind was comprised of multiple elements, some of which were inherently beyond the reach of language and consciousness. In his article “Crossing the Bounds of Single Identity,” Richard Dury argues that Stevenson was most likely aware of contemporary scientific theories that distinguished consciousness and rationality from the unconscious. “The concept of the unconscious,...” Dury argues, “undermined any sense of a simple and single identity ruled by will and reason, an idea as disconcerting to contemporary received ideas as any of the theories of Darwin” (Dury, 2006, 240). In this vein, Stevenson believed that life’s dynamic experiences could provide us with many different perspectives, many of which were absorbed at an unconscious level. While reflecting on his childhood Stevenson recognized that his pre-conscious experiences must have deeply influenced him: “that too, was a scene of my education. Some part of me played there” (Reid, 2006, 220.). Stevenson blatantly expressed this view when he said, “Our conscious years are but a moment in the history of the elements that build us” (Ibid.).

Apart from the dynamism of experiences, Stevenson thought the human mind inherently possessed multiple faculties. In fact, he wrote about a part of his mind that he called his “‘sleepless Brownies’” (Ibid., 222). Stevenson believed that this part of his mind was beyond his control, and that his Brownies “‘manage[d] man’s internal theatre,’ and... provide[d] inspiration for the tales that the waking Stevenson [was] able to write” (Ibid.). Stevenson even wrote as if his Brownies could not be fully incorporated into his identity. While thinking about himself as an ethical agent, Stevenson placed more emphasis on the rational portions of his mind, while doubting the morality of his Brownies. “I,” Stevenson wrote, “do most of the morality, worse luck! and my Brownies have not a rudiment of what we call a conscience” (Ibid., 223). Stevenson’s reflections on his own mind reveal a deep understanding of the relationship between articulation, ineffability, and identity. He knew that his mind possessed attributes that functioned without language, and more importantly, that these portions may act entirely beyond the consent or influence of the “I” that was responsible for speaking. Contemporary theories of mind also recognize different roles played by language and emotion, and the existence of multiple minds.

Twentieth-century neuroscience has confirmed that emotion, and not rationality, has the greatest impact on behavior. Neurologist Richard Cytowic has written on the different faculties of the mind, paying special attention to limited role of language. Cytowic draws a distinction between the “cognitive mind” that deals exclusively with reason and language, and the emotional mind that “is attuned to a deep source of wisdom and engaged in a process to which the cognitive mind has no access” (Ibid., 213). Neurologically speaking, the cognitive mind is controlled by the frontal cortex, while emotions are controlled mainly by the limbic system. The cortex and the limbic system remain in constant communication with one another, balancing reason and emotion. Many neuroscientists, however, have made the logocentric assumption that the cortex exerted greater control over the limbic system. But measurement of the neural connections between the two shows otherwise. The limbic system provides far more information to the cortex than it receives in return. “Thus,” Cytowic concludes, “the emotional brain is physiologically able to overwhelm the rationality of the cortex” (Cytowic, 1993, 162). This perfectly explains why Mr. Hyde’s impulses are able to overwhelm Dr. Jekyll’s reasoning.

Cytowic believes that the cognitive and emotional mind are simply the most obvious of our multiple minds. Humans possess “multiple modes of thinking, not just two, and that most of them occur at a level about which we have no sense of pulling the strings” (Ibid., 214). This notion is corroborated by Claxton in 2005’s The Wayward Mind. Claxton argues that a personality or mind is essentially “a point of view that can be characterised by a set of goals, fears and hopes that give rise to a backdrop of expectations and attitudes” (Claxton, 2005, 284). The human mind, however, experiences a wide range of emotional states that come along with different sets of views and priorities. Claxton thus concludes that different emotional states create a variety personalities and minds within one individual.

When these multiple personalities conflict with one another, however, there can be noticeable effects. In Strange Case, for example, Dr. Jekyll’s participation in a hyper-articulate culture forces his emotional, ineffable self to find expression as Mr. Hyde. Indeed, Claxton addresses the issue of split identity with a reference to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Claxton aptly concludes, “By playing Jekyll too hard, I make myself Hyde” (Claxton, 2005, 350). Mr. Hyde, therefore, should be understood in terms of the strength of the limbic system in determining behavior, and the fact that different emotions constitute multiple personalities. Furthermore, Hyde’s emotional behavior can only be understood in relation to the nineteenth-century scientific culture that paid little credence to the ineffability of the human mind, exacerbating Jekyll’s emotional stress and forcing it into a separate identity. In short, Dr. Jekyll’s emotional mind created Mr. Hyde to revolt against the cultural tyranny of his cognitive mind.

The novella’s tension between articulation and ineffability is compounded by a nineteenth-century scientific discovery: that evolution has left humans and other animals with primitive, inarticulable, and emotional minds. Evolutionary theory exposed the inherent ineffability of the human mind. The distinction between humans and animals, as well as the distinction between ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’ humans, often centers around the role of language in human culture. Western scientists assumed they were beyond the ineffable world of emotional ‘savagery’ and animalism. Evolutionary theory, however, gave humans a new perspective on their biological development through deep time. Suddenly it was possible to conceptualize humans as part of an evolutionary cycle that was defined by emotion and ineffability rather than reason and articulation. In short, evolutionary theory challenges the supremacy of articulation by drawing attention to the ineffable qualities of the human mind.

The ubiquity of articulation, therefore, was challenged by theories evolution that claimed humans were emotional, ineffable animals. Indeed, both minor and major character’s ineffable qualities are related to animalism throughout the text. An examination of Charles Darwin’s work will provide context for Stevenson’s depictions of animals. Further, Stevenson explicitly addressed evolutionary theory and believed it provided insight into human life. Finally, twenty-first-century philosophy provides similar insights into the relationship between human identity and evolutionary theory.

There is textual evidence that suggests the ineffable nature of the human mind is directly related to the fact that humans are animals. Both minor and major characters regularly behave as if they were driven by animal instincts, and are often compared to animals. For example, while exploring London, Mr. Utterson is struck with how the weather has emptied the streets, “The wind made talking difficult,.... He could have wished it otherwise; never in his life had he been conscious of so sharp a wish to see and touch his fellow-creatures” (Ibid., 33). In this moment Utterson does not crave articulation. Rather, he feels an affection for humans as animals, as ‘creatures.’ In another instance, Utterson chooses not to express his thoughts aloud, but turns to inarticulate noises. “‘Good God!’ thought Mr. Utterson,.... ‘But he kept his feelings to himself and only grunted in acknowledgement of the address” (Ibid, 17).

Dr. Jekyll’s servants also behave like animals, particularly when they are experiencing fear. While Dr. Jekyll is acting strangely his servants do not know how to respond. “The whole of the servants, men and women, stood huddled together like a flock of sheep.” Further, “the housemaid broke into hysterical whimpering” and then “lifted up her voice and... wept loudly” (Ibid., 34,). As I will discuss, evolutionary theory recognizes fear and weeping as expressions shared by humans and apes. In this scene, these emotions blur the distinction between humans and animals, demonstrating that these characters exist as ineffable animals.

Just like the minor characters in the story, Hyde’s ineffability is directly related to his status as an animal. Indeed, Hyde is constantly described as inhuman or animalistic. “It wasn’t like a man;” Mr. Enfield says, “it was like some damned Juggernaut” (Ibid., 9). During Mr. Hyde’s assault on Mr. Carew, he is said to act with “ape-like fury” (Ibid., 22). Similarly, after encountering Hyde, Mr. Poole says, “Well sir, it went so quick, and the creature was so doubled up, that I could hardly swear to that” (Ibid., 37). He reaffirms Hyde’s lack of humanity when he says “that thing was not my master” (Ibid., 36). Again, Hyde is compared to an ape when Poole says, “that masked thing like a monkey jumped from among the chemicals” (Ibid., 37). Additionally, Hyde is described with words that are typically reserved for animals such as “haunches” (Ibid., 45). Moreover, Jekyll says that Hyde’s penchant for alcohol reaches a “bestial avidity” (Ibid., 53). Furthermore, Jekyll describes Hyde’s hand as “lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair” (Ibid., 54). Those who witness Hyde almost always describe him as animalistic – as beastly and atavistic.

Apart from external descriptions of Mr. Hyde, his animalism is also apparent in his use of inarticulate sounds. When confronted by Mr. Utterson “Mr. Hyde shrank back with a hissing intake of breath” (Ibid., 16). Again, Hyde is described as making odd sounds, “He looked up when I came in, gave a kind of cry, and whipped upstairs.” Poole even says that these sounds resembled an animal, “If it was my master, why did he cry out like a rat, and run from me?” (Ibid., 36). Hyde is also said to be caught weeping at times, “Once I heard it weeping!.... Weeping like a woman or a lost soul” (Ibid., 38). As Utterson and Poole are attempting to enter his room Hyde’s fear causes him to emit beastly sounds: “A dismal screech, as of mere animal terror, rang from the cabinet” (Ibid.).

Mr. Hyde continues to communicate not with words, but through facial expressions and sounds. Dr. Lanyon says, “I could hear his teeth grate with the convulsive action of his jaws; and his face was so ghastly to see that I grew alarmed both for his life and reason.” When told to act more rationally “he uttered one loud sob of such immense relief that I was petrified” (Ibid., 46). Right before transforming back into Dr. Jekyll, Hyde continues his inarticulate expression and bestial appearance: “He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth” (Ibid., 47). Based on the fact that most characters describe Hyde as an animal, and that he vocalizes himself primarily through inarticulate sounds and gesturers, he clearly represents the atavistic portions of human’s that still dwell within us – he represents humanity’s ineffability that comes from our evolutionary history.

For all of his animalism and misdeeds, however, Hyde is not intrinsically evil. On the contrary, his behavior is caused by the culture of articulation that forced Dr. Jekyll to ignore his ineffability and animalism. Several characters make this point clear. Mr. Guest, for example, initially assumes that Mr. Hyde is driven by insanity. After seeing Hyde’s handwriting, however, Guest concludes otherwise: “Guest’s eyes brightened, and he sat down at once and studied it with passions ‘No, sir,’ he said; “not mad; but it is an odd hand” (Ibid., 28). Far from being mad, Hyde represents something within all humans. While trying to understand Hyde’s confounding nature, Dr. Lanyon realizes that it is not anger that defines Hyde, but something much deeper and universal. Of his reaction to Hyde he says,“I have since had reason to believe the cause lie much deeper in the nature of man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than... hatred” (Ibid., 45).

At times, Dr. Jekyll also doubts that Hyde’s anger can exist within human nature. He says that Hyde is “even beyond what [he] had thought possible to man” (Ibid., 60). This is because Hyde does not exist as a ‘man,’ but as an animal. These statements are irreconcilable with the fact, however, that “[t]he drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prisonhouse of my disposition” (Ibid., 51-52). Dr. Jekyll’s mind is described as a ‘prisonhouse’ because his rational mind had been suppressing his ineffability and animalism for much of his life. Dr. Jekyll recognizes the universality of Hyde, however, when he describes him as “the common quarry of mankind” (Ibid., 58). Dr. Jekyll’s challenge, then, is not to see Hyde’s behavior as consistent with humanity, but to conceptualize his ability to articulate as compatible with his status as an ineffable animal. Hyde’s evil, therefore, is not essential, but is created by Dr. Jekyll’s rejection of the foundational parts of his mind: ineffability and animalism. On the whole, some nineteenth-century thinkers were exploring the implications of evolutionary theory for human identity.

The work of Charles Darwin is the most well known example of nineteenth-century comparisons between humans and animals. In1872 Darwin published, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. This book implied that humans are not different, or superior, than other animals. Throughout the nineteenth century, evolutionary theory threatened the distinction between humans and animals. When Darwin directly compared the emotional expressions of humans with apes, the conclusions were hard to avoid. Darwin notes that both humans and monkeys express sadness and anger in similar ways. For example, both humans and animals are prone to weeping when they experience intense sadness or grief (Darwin, 1872, 134-136). As for anger, Darwin notes that both humans and animals experience a quickening of respiration, a tensing of the lips and mouth, a reddening of exposed skin, a widening of the eyes, and a contraction of the eyebrows (Ibid., 136-138; 234-235). Darwin notes one important difference, however. Some species of monkeys will bear their teeth when threatened. This is important to keep in mind when considering how Stevenson depicts Hyde. In fact, Ilaria Sborgi notes that some scholars have commented on how Stevenson’s depictions of Hyde resemble Darwin’s descriptions of animal emotions (Sborgi, 2006, 148, 154). Stevenson’s comparisons between humans and animals in Strange Case are embedded in this scientific and cultural climate.

Biographical information confirms that Stevenson was concerned with the implications of evolutionary theory. Namely, that humans possess the qualities of most animals, and that we are driven mainly by emotion rather language. In particular, Stevenson was intimately familiar with Darwin’s ideas and pressed his fellow intellectuals to embrace its implications. He claimed it offered a new way of viewing human existence, but that it was “still not properly worked into the body of our thoughts” (Turnbull, 2006, 233). In fact, many of Stevenson’s essays highlighted “the persistence of pre-civilized states of consciousness” (Reid, 2006, 222). Furthermore, Stevenson also stressed that humans should embrace this new understanding because it “lights us a step further into the heart of [our] rough but noble universe” (Turnbull, 2006, 233). Stevenson was even more explicit when he drew a direct comparison between humans and monkeys: “Of all earth’s meteors, here at least is the most strange and consoling: that this ennobled lemur, this hair-crowned bubble of the dust, this inheritor of a few years and sorrows, should yet deny himself his rare delights, and add to his frequent pains, and live for an ideal, however misconceived” (Ibid.). In this last quotation the ‘misconceived ideal’ that Stevenson speaks of is the idea that language and reason make humans fundamentally different from other animals. And when he refers to our tendency to deny pleasures, he is likely thinking of the culture of science and industrialism, which as we have seen, favors articulation while eschewing ‘pre-civilized states of consciousness’ like sensual pleasure and emotion. Steven suggests, on the contrary, that we should embrace the animalistic sides of ourselves. He believed that the Romantic movement specifically appealed to “humankind’s primitive heritage” (Reid, 2006, 218). Stevenson embraced Darwinism precisely because it problematized assumptions about “relations between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ life” (Ibid., 216). He felt that humans must begin to conceptualize themselves as animals, and more importantly, they must avoid the tendency to rely exclusively on language. Instead, he thought that articulation should be used to pursue the ineffable and animalistic parts of the mind. Stevenson’s thoughts on evolution have been substantiated by twenty-first century philosophy.

Twenty-first century explorations of evolutionary theory also shed light on the world of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In Straw Dogs, John Gray attacks secular liberal humanists’ faith in science and technology. Gray claims that many liberal humanists act as if science and technology will solve all of humanity’s problems. By pursuing technological solutions to humanity’s problems, Gray asserts, “they renew one of Christianity’s most dubious promises – that salvation is open to all. The humanist belief in progress is only a secular version of the Christian faith” (Gray, 2002, 4). Instead of flocking to scientific and technological forms of salvation, Gray proposes that we embrace the implications of evolutionary theory and cognitive science. Chiefly, Gray believes that humans have failed to embrace two particular lessons of these disciplines. First, Gray claims that evolutionary theory means that humans are essentially animals that exist in a world defined by emotions and the drive for survival. Second, Gray believes cognitive science has convincingly shown that humans are not fundamentally rational beings. Gray summarizes: “The lesson of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science is that we are descendants of a long lineage, only a fraction of which is human. We are far more than the traces that other humans have left in us. Our brains and spinals cords are encrypted with traces of far older worlds” (Ibid., 79).

Gray’s thoughts apply to the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in two ways. First, Gray shows that humanity’s relationship with science and technology has become a culture of progress and salvation. Second, Gray’s thoughts on evolution deflate the notion that humans are different from other animals. In the end, Gray synthesizes thoughts on the limitations of science and technology with the implications of evolutionary theory to blur the distinction between humans and animals.

The cultural theorist Jaun Baudrillard also claims that animals threaten the Western culture of articulation and representation. Referring to animals Baudrillard says, “In a world bent on doing nothing but making one speak, in a world assembled under the hegemony of signs and discourse, their silence weighs more and more heavily on our organization of meaning” (Baudrillard, 1984, 137). Awareness of animals and their inability to articulate draws our attention to humanity’s culturally definitive systems of language and our alienation from the ineffable.

If humans are unique in their ability to articulate, and human life has become largely a matter of language, than how do we identify with the ineffability that is inherent to animal life? Strange Case explores these questions and implies some interesting answers. We must recognize our place within a culture of articulation, find ways to identify with the dynamic and ineffable nature of our minds, and begin to see ourselves as members of the animal world.

In Conclusion, Strange Case revolves around a scientific culture of articulation, the presence of dynamic and inarticulable minds, and a failure to account for the ineffable animalism of humans. Minor characters simultaneously express the cultural value of articulation and its shortcomings in the face of human’s ineffable animalism. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, on the other hand, serve as a physical embodiment of the imbalance between a culture of articulation and the ineffability of life as an animal. Prior to Stevenson’s writing, nineteenth-century thinkers were exploring the dominance of articulate scientific thought, the inherent ineffability of the human mind, and the implications of evolutionary theory. Perhaps most importantly, Stevenson himself explicitly claimed that the scientific and industrial revolutions ushered in an era of over-articulate thinking, that the mind possessed qualities that could not be accessed by language, and that humans should embrace their evolutionary history as a guide to life’s difficulties. Furthermore, all of these claims have been substantiated by contemporary work that show the persistence of a culture of articulation, the ineffability of the human mind, and a failure to draw the full implications of evolutionary theory.

Strange Case, therefore, should be considered a challenge to forge a new type of identity that transcends the hegemony of articulation, incorporates mental ineffabilities, and embraces the painful and emotional nature of animal life. Stevenson seems convinced that ignoring the ineffable and animalistic parts of the self can have dire consequences. Perhaps we should take John Gray’s advice when he says: “Today the good life means making full use of science and technology – without succumbing to the illusion that they can make us free, reasonable or even sane. It means seeking peace – without hoping for a world without war.... The good life is not found in dreams of progress, but in coping with tragic contingencies” (Gray, 2003, 194). While it is unlikely that many human beings will begin to experience dual or multiplicitous identities, it is probable that Western civilizations will become increasingly estranged from less articulate forms of thought. If this trend of alienation from the ineffable continues, many people may find a bit of ‘Mr. Hyde’ in themselves. But if we can learn to embrace the limitations of language, the ubiquity of dynamism and uncertainty, and the persistence of animalism, we might feel a little more okay with life’s pains and difficulties.

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