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.

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.

Rationality and Rationalities

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

Damn those illogical fools, some would say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Concluding Part II.2

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

Concluding All Of Part II

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

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

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

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