My Writing Last Year And Today

Today is the 1 year anniversary of me posting the first section of 'Society's Implicit War'. That project was super interesting for me. Foucault's Discipline & Punish threw a major wrench into my thinking. He effectively blurred the line between peace and war, between physical violence and symbolic violence. Fortunately, a year later, I feel capable of distinguishing between the violence of peace and the violence of war. Questions about war and civilization, however, are still floating around in my mind. My exploration of violence is far from complete, obviously.

But just thinking that 1 year ago I was in the thick of the SIW project is really interesting. I feel much more removed from it now. After SIW I began the 'Art, Zen, And Insurrection' project. That one was pretty personal and I think did a lot for me. It really helped me with the frustration I felt at the changes going on in my life. The project spanned from September until about April. But to be honest, I really lost momentum after February, and I think the whole project should have ceased with the end of Part III.

Part IV was more like the launching of a new line of reading and thinking. I wanted to turn to more political matters. SIW demanded that I take politics and violence seriously. I wanted to find out if my work on aesthetics, expression, and life as an art form had any political implications. This was pretty challenging. And I wasn't able to pursue that question within the framework that I had established for Part IV of AZI. So I abandoned the project. I stopped writing it for a little bit. I tried to do some other stuff.

Then finally at the beginning of of June something clicked and I was able to begin a new line of thought. It occurred to me that I might want to try and frame all of my thinking, reading, writing, etc., in terms of 'relationships', using the word in the broadest possible sense. This means thinking about how minds interact with other minds. And somehow I started thinking about minds in terms of mediums. Nicholas Carr's The Shallows was the first book that really pushed me to think about mediums. And the question of mediums then fit in very nicely with the issue of habit.

Habit has been a philosophical issue for me for a long time, but I wasn't always able to use that word to identify that problem. For a long time I talked about 'auto-pilot', about 'default modes of thought', 'the everyday a priori imagination' and other similar phrases. I was fascinated by the idea that we walked around with a whole set of assumptions that unconsciously structured our behavior. This is why Foucault was so fascinating for me. He was engaging in historical-philosophical studies that were exposing the structures of our thinking. And for a long time I wasn't sure what it was that Foucault was doing (and I'm still not precisely sure what he was doing). But fortunately I have been able to tie Foucault's work with the question of mediums and the habits that they create.

This is in part thanks to Roger Smith's book Being Human: Historical Knowledge And The Creation Of Human Nature. The operative idea of the book is that knowledge of humans is inherently reflexive. By reflexivity Smith is communicating that there are consequences to "people being both subject and object of knowledge" (8). Namely, that "knowledge of what is human changes what it is to be human" (62). In essence, you cannot say that you are something without effecting what it is that you are. You cannot represent yourself without modifying yourself. Knowledge of humanity is reflexive, it changes what we are.

Smith acknowledges his debt to Ian Hacking's work on 'historical ontology'. And Hacking, in turn, acknowledges his debt to Foucault. The task for all three authors is to use history to understand the conditions for our existence. What is the nature of our being? Why do we live in the ways that we do? Why we do use these particular words and engage in these particular practices? According to these thinkers, these are questions that can only be by historical methods. And I am inclined to agree with them.

There are, however, two things that I think these guys are ignoring. The first is the issue of individual minds and their mediums. The second is the importance of politics, economics, and governments. It isn't true that they are really ignoring the political. It is just that I don't find it as explicitly addressed as I would like.

As for the issue of minds: I am completely attracted to theory of mind because I am completely fascinated with my own mind. There is something going on with minds and consciousness. I believe in free will. I believe that we are capable of exerting volition. So when people like Foucault reduce the role of consciousness and will, I have some questions for them. I have some problems. I think Foucault is correct to pay attention more to the structures of thought, to treat language as something to be studied in its own right without regard for the speaking subject. But I also think that his work is valuable only if it helps us understand individual consciousnesses. It cannot ignore the phenomenon of consciousness. There is something real about it.

And for mediums: Minds, however, are not something that work in a vacuum. They always work through a particular medium. Further, a medium that instills them with certain habits, that encourages them to behave in certain ways. Those are the questions my latest writing has taken up: the question of the mind as the medium. Mind is what mind, and mind only does with the help of the medium. Mind, therefore, is nothing but the medium through which it works. A history of mediums, is therefore a history of minds. And I believe that Foucault is basically writing a history of mediums. He writes a history of spaces, of languages, of economic systems. And those are the things that I believe I showed to be 'mediums' in the sense that Carr defines them.

So the historical ontological project, I think, could benefit by being united with theory of mind. Further, it seems to me that it could benefit from more explicit politicizing. And this is something that comes through in Marx. Because it seems that Marx's concern is also how people's means, how their mediums create them. Our minds are created by the political and economic mediums through which they work. There is something very political about minds and their mediums.

And this is what my current writing is working towards. I'm trying to understand how civilization (as a collection of minds) is constituted by mediums that are controlled by political factors. And I want to understand how political, economic, and educational reform can be seen as a process of creating a new constellation of mediums that would in turn produce a different type of mind.

It is all very confusing. But for me the reading is taking place primarily in the philosophy of history, habit, representation and other stuff. So, I'm going to finish Foucault's Archeology Of Knowledge, then I hope to read Deleuze's Difference And Repetition, and after that I hope to read Elaine Scarry's Thinking In An Emergency. All will help me out hopefully.

I'm going to Maine tonight. I am not going to bring my computer. So I'll be offline for the rest of the month. I'm hoping to have a fun trip filled family, reading, and reflection.

Peace out.

See you for August, Seattle.

Theory-Theory, Cognitive Maps, Absolute Mind, Historical Knowledge, and Social Self-Creation

I am talking about the same problem with many different labels.

My latest writing has made me return to theory of mind a little bit. I've been trying to think again about 'theory-theory', in which philosophers believe that people understand one another by using unconscious/tacit mental theories to make inferences about other people's mental states. Or to put it another way, that we understand other people by using a mental process that (when made explicit) resembles the deductive logic characteristic of scientific method.

I don't know how much I understand theory-theory. In the past, I think I have made careless references to it without really understanding it. But I'm trying to think about it again.

I think that there are a lot of other ideas that remind me of theory-theory. One is the idea that of 'mental mapping', which I have learned about from Chris Frith, Guy Claxton, and Nicholas Humphrey. They maintain that the brain does not function as a passive perceiver of reality, but that the brain actively constructs our perception. Perception does not work from the outside in (with the brain objectively and passively observing reality), but from the inside out (with the brain actively constructing our perception in order to try and predict reality). Humphrey claims that this was an understandable step in our evolution, as we began to process greater amounts of sensory input the brain needed to come up with new ways of understanding reality. At some point, the amount of sensory information becomes to great to handle at once. So, Humphrey claims, the brain began to build models of reality, augmenting it with sensory data as necessary. This means that what we perceive is not necessarily reality, but our brains model of reality.

While other animals, like monkeys, also possess this type of cognitive mapping, I think that this has unique implications for humans. Namely, because of our unique capacity for complex language. This is when the work of people like John Searle, Roger Smith, and Ian Hacking become useful. All of them claim that knowledge of humans is reflexive, and therefore language has the unique power to change what people are simply by telling them what they are.

Searle argues that all of human institutional reality, which is defined by the existence of deontic power, is maintained by language's ability to create something simply by declaring it to be. He calls this a 'status function declaration'. It is a statement (a declaration) that creates something that functions only because its status has been collectively accepted (a status function). A good example is a cocktail party: it only happened because someone said it would happen. But that status function rests on other ones, like the notion of property. Someone can only have a party because they 'know' that they 'own' a certain space defined as an apartment or house. But that notion of property rests on another layer of status functions, namely, the existence of money and economic institutions. Money doesn't function for any other reason than that we collectively regard it as working. But even further, that money can't exist without political and military institutions, which are also the result of status functions. Nations only exist because of language, and so much of military organization (if not all) occurs along national lines nowadays. As you can see, our social existence is maintained by many layers of status functions that buttress one another.

Now, what does this mean for the issue of mental modeling? Well, what it means is that our mental models, unlike that of say monkeys, is open to a wider range of possibilities. On pure speculation, i will say that apes and other animals are probably dealing with smaller amounts of data, a smaller world of possibilities, and their mental maps would therefore be more static, more consistent, more stable.

Humans, however, have a more (linguistically) diverse environment, and their mental maps would therefore be more flexible, more plastic. I sometimes wonder whether it has something to do with neuroplasticity. As I understand, humans brains are far more plastic than most animals, and change throughout our lives. Could this somehow be connected to the fact that language makes our mental models less stable and more variable? Just a side thought though. Back to the main issue.

So if language is unique in giving humans a more complex and constructed social reality, and this means that humans mental maps are more diverse, then how can we gain knowledge of what it means to be human. Smith claims that evolutionary and physical science will never provide an adequate understand of what i means to be human. That knowledge of being human is unique in that it is reflexive, to tell someone what they are is to change what they are. As a result, scientific knowledge will never pin down a precise and unchanging 'human nature', because our very nature will be changing with the conversation. I remember a quote, 'humans are by nature indeterminate'. Something like that. It is in our nature to be diverse creatures whose practices and thoughts change with our language.

Smith, therefore, claims that the conversation about being human must turn to historical knowledge. People are, he argues, what they say they are. Historical knowledge of what people say it means to be human is therefore knowledge of being human. This is what Hacking refers to as historical ontology. Hacking follows Foucault in his claim that we can only understand the nature of our being if we can understand the historical conditions that have created our being.

So, if human nature is in constant flux, and historical study, the study of texts, can tell us what it means to be human, what does this mean for the human nature of the future? Well, Smith puts it strangely: "the answer to the question, 'What is human?', lies in the history of the forthcoming answers" (Being Human, 15). What Smith ultimately advocates is the prospect of human self creation, 'the creation of human nature'. This is indeed an idea with considerable historical precedents. Vico, Collingwood, Croce, Foucault, Searle, and others have all discussed the way that humans create themselves through language and history. And with my reading on neuroplasticity, I feel more convinced that humans are capable of creating themselves through language and culture.

So there are two more questions I want to ask myself. If the human mind and human nature are plastic things that are created through language and historical processes, and the task thus becomes the purposeful creation of that nature, how is one to go about it? Well, I have two ideas. The first involves a diagnostic step. The second involves a thought I have about the purpose of political and social policy.

Before we can take steps to purposefully create our society, we need to know to some extent what it is that our society is. We need to assume a modern attitude (in the Foucaultian sense), and we need to examine history to understand what it is that is going on in our society. What are the problems we see in our society? What are the status functions that are governing people's experiences and causing these problems? What are the institutions maintaining the social/linguistic world that is making these things possible? Or, to put it in Foucaultian terms, what is the character of the episteme that is maintaining the current discursive regime? Or, to put it in Collingwoodian terms, what is the character of the current 'absolute mind' of society? Perhaps this could even be called a question if 'ideology' (I think for Zizek it could be). It is so interesting how society is so governed by 'thoughts' or 'ideas' in this very large sense (which I hear Hegel talks about). I wonder if Searle has any affinity for German Idealism (or Collingwood's idealism). But in any case, because society is constructed by language, status functions, ideology, ideas, so on, we need to take time to understand the historical basis for the current state of society. This means studying the history of language, ideas, etc.. Only if we can understand the historical basis for our social experience will we be able to understand why peoples mental maps are the way they are, why their tacit theories exist in the form that they do.

The second part would be one that is more decisive, more progressive. It would be about making a major social change, and trying to enact this change at the level of individual mental maps. We need people to behave differently, we need people's mental maps of reality to change. So how to do this?

Well, to answer this question I would like to make reference to an article I read for a military sociology class. The author claimed that there are two layers of rules on every naval vessel (or military institution). There is the explicit layer of rules which are stated clearly and directly to people. But then there is a second layer of implicit rules that are not stated, but are somehow brought into existence by the explicit rules. On the highway, for example, the speed limit is 60 mph. But clearly everyone drives above the speed limit and not everyone is arrested for going 65 or 70 mph. Explicit rules cannot always be directly enforced, and they give way to this secondary, implicit, cultural rules. This is what Zizek says is the level of habit. He says that to know a society's habits is to know the meta-rules that dictate how explicit rules are applied. I would say that this level of habit can also be thought of as the level of mental mapping.

The task of policy, therefore, is not to create the best explicit rules, or to specify the rules of an ideal society and hope that people obey the laws. Rather, policy should be approached in a meta fashion: we should think about how the explicit rules are going to interact with the secondary world of meta rules, of culture and habits, of minds and their mental maps.

Historical knowledge should therefore help us develop policies that are aimed at reshaping a society's culture, and thereby its habits, its mental maps. This could potentially happen if we were to regard policy not as an end in itself, but as a means to reshaping the world of culture that it rests on. This is a crucial lesson of the reflexive nature of human knowledge: we cannot know ourselves without changing what it is that we are. And in the same way we cannot create policies without those policies changing what it is that we are. What we should really be considering is how those explicit policies are going to create a ripple in the social and cultural world. And thus try to create policies that are going to ripple in the ways that we want them to. We need to know that human nature is essentially about change, and try to create policies that are about actively creating society, and not about maintaining it. Hmm, perhaps the argument about the reflexivity of human nature implicitly endorses liberal/progressive politics. That is kind of what it sounds like.

The last thing I will say is more of a side note. I want to know what would be the most crucial status function, the most important layer of society to address and change. Zizek and Marxists and all that think it should be the economy. And part of me is really starting to understand that and agree with it. That type of thinking will require so much more research. But I wonder.

But no doubt historical knowledge has quite a lot to do with the possibility of human self creation, which I think must have something to do with policy change.

This writing will probably be going in my latest essay 'Relationships and Mediums: Habits, Historical Knowledge, And Self-Creation'. This writing was super on the fly. But I really enjoyed this last hour or so of writing. And I think I worked out some interesting stuff. Hmmmm. Retroactive freedom fits into all of this somehow.

On Second Thought...: On Reflexivity

I'm not sure if I agree with the post I wrote earlier this morning. Part of me really does still feel like writing things. And I realized that when I was in my kitchen. I was thinking about the writing project I initiated a week or so ago. And I was thinking about the book I just finished, Being Human: Historical Knowledge And The Creation Of Human Nature. A most interesting book.

The author, Roger Smith, is attempting to vindicate history and the humanities as 'sciences' that need to play an important role in how we understand ourselves as humans. Smith is convinced that we will not be able to understand ourselves and our humanity if we approach it only from the perspective of evolutionary, biological, of natural science. Only through historical knowledge and the study of texts, Smith maintains, can we understand what it means to be human.

We do not study history, however, just to learn what it means to be human. But, on the contrary, to actively create what it means to be human. This claim rests on Smith's epistemological outlook, which he spends the bulk of the book explicating. The main thing that Smith wants to analyze is the reflexive nature of knowledge about being human. The term reflexive "characterises the nature and consequences of people being both subject and object of knowledge.... One implication of this, since people are subject and object of knowledge, is that knowledge about human beings changes what people are" (8, my italics). The study of history, according to Smith, is fundamentally a process of reflection. We are always reflecting on ourselves when we study history. And because knowledge of being human is inherently reflexive, this historical reflection will always change what we are. This is the starting point of Collingwood, Foucault, and Ian Hacking's work. Smith claims that Hacking's work in Historical Ontology is his starting point.

So anyways, this is what I have been reading about. These issues of the reflexivity of knowledge and the possibility of self-creation through historical and philosophical work.

So maybe I should write more. Because the truth is that my major writing projects have always changed me. I can see myself change from project to project. 'Society's Implicit War' changed me. My work on 'Art, Zen, and Insurrection', although unfinished, definitely has changed me over the last 9 months. So perhaps this new writing on relationships and mediums will change me too. Well, it will definitely change me. But perhaps it will change me in ways that I find beneficial.

I shouldn't stop writing because I don't want to stop creating myself.

Reading This Roger Smith Fellow

I'm reading a new book. Roger Smith's Being Human: Historical Knowledge And The Creation Of Human Nature.

I will say a few things. First about the author. The second thing about my impression of the arguments. The third thing about my reason for turning to this book.

So, the thing that concerns me about Mr. Smith is that I know very little about his credentials. He is a historian of science, and the human sciences in particular. He lives in Russia and is affiliated with a couple universities including Durham University, and a institute in Moscow. I have no idea who he is. Hayden White has a very intense blurb on the dust jacket and so it seems to be legit. His bibliography is most interesting. Collingwood, Foucault, Ian Hacking, Hegel, many others. He seems to have earned his chops as a historian, but n this work he is pursuing an expressly philosophical. But he still seems to be using history as his major point of reference. So, the first problem is this: Mr. Smith is a mystery to me. I worry about his credentials. And I find his personal life to be a mystery. I don't know who he is, and I seem to be having a hard time finding information about him. The book, however, was published by Columbia University Press, and so that gives me a little bit of hope about its quality.

The last book I finished was Edward Hallett Carr's What Is History?. In that book Mr. Carr says that to study history you must also study the historian and the situation in which that history was being written. So I am eager to approach books in that way.

So, the second part, the arguments: Mr. Smith wants to make sure that history as a form of knowledge is properly understood. In particular, he thinks that the discourse around the issue of 'human nature' needs to have historical and philosophical perspective if it is to be valid. In the English speaking world, Smith claims, we are apt to think of science and specifically biology as the most important source of knowledge about what it means to be human. Smith claims, on the contrary, that biology cannot provide us with the information that we need to understand what it means to be human, what it means to be both the subject and object of knowledge about human nature. He claims that Ian Hacking's work in the field of historical ontology is the foundation of his work. This pleases me because I have read much of Hacking's book Historical Ontology. He quotes Hacking when he says that "Categories of people come into existence at the same time as kinds of people come into being to fit those categories, and there is a two-way interaction between these processes" (Smith, 12). Foucault is one of Hacking's major influences (if not his most important influence). Indeed, Foucault provided the phrase 'historical ontology' in his fascinating essay from 1984 "What Is Enlightenment." Furthermore, this idea of the interaction of behavior and categories is implicit in much of Foucault's work, most notably in Discpline & Punish and Volume I of The History Of Sexuality. Moreover, this notion is explicitly corroborated by John Searle's work in Making The Social World. So, having read only the introduction and a little bit of Mr. Smith's book I see a sort picture forming: a picture in which human nature is something that can be self-consciously created by reference to the ability of language to constitute certain experiences and forms of behavior. I suspect that my journey through the whole of the book will give me a much more nuanced view of the way that these issues relate to the natural and human sciences, and to history.

The reasons I have turned to this book are many. For one thing, I have been personally invested in the union of Foucault, Collingwood, Hacking, Searle, and others for the last few years. I care a lot about the philosophy of history, I think it has been largely ignored, and I suspect that its implications are quite significant. Further, my (very) recent realization that the issue of relationships is at the core of my thought has pushed me to think about humans, history, human nature, technology, etc., has pushed me towards it.

I have a lot of thinking left to do (as usual). But I am pleased to be reading this book. Richard Restak's Think Smart turned out to be too dry. And Roberta Wohlstetter's Pearl Harbor: Warning And Decision turned out to be too difficult for me right now. So this book will be a wonderful way to continue my philosophical reading while maintaining a historical orientation.

I wonder sometimes, especially with me frustration with Wohlstetter, if history is the discipline for me. I feel so much more inclined to be a philosophical thinker. I thrive so much in terms of philosophical reading. That doesn't mean that I can't become a powerful historical thinker, or that I couldn't become a good historian. It just means that my reading over the last year has been devoted to this kind of philosophical reading. I just have so much work to do to become a historical thinker.

But I suspect it to be of the highest importance.

Hopefully Mr. Smith can take me somewhere.

Over and out.