Symbiophrenic Incursion...at the point from which I choose to jump...2009-09-20T17:42:36ZUser 373http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/OrgSpace NewsLogFood for Thought—Knowledge Chains around Food CyclesThis essay explores the role of story-telling about food in culture and its importance to knowledge about sustainability and cultural tradition.
Food for Thought—Knowledge Chains around Food Cycles
by Brenden MacDonaldThis essay explores the role of story-telling about food in culture and its importance to knowledge about sustainability and cultural tradition.
Food for Thought—Knowledge Chains around Food Cycles by Brenden MacDonaldBrenden MacDonald English 402: West Coast Literature April 19, 2008
Food for Thought—Knowledge Chains around Food Cycles
The need to eat connects humanity to a complex and subsuming ecology, and we maintain our ecological connections via understanding how and what to eat. Maintaining understanding of how and what to eat helps maintain our ecological connections, and our understanding about any integral aspect of life is necessarily an affair of communities. More and more people understand the need to “create sustainable communities[,] that is, social and cultural environments in which we can satisfy our needs without diminishing the chances of future generations,” as put in an essay titled “Ecology and Community” by Fritjof Capra, director of the Center of Ecoliteracy (1). I will look at some west coast British Columbian writers who have thoughts about food knowledge and ecological connections. Monkey Beach, by Eden Robinson, is a particularly strong example of literature with a complex focus on food, ecological cycles, and the links of human knowledge that clasp within a community’s culture. In our culture, there is a disconcerting extent of disconnection from and ignorance about environmental and food cycles. I relay these readings of west coast writing because we need to tell stories about food.
The easy evidence is all around us: common poor nutrition habits and food-related health issues; lack of knowledge about the origins of the food on the table and about techniques of growing, preparation, and distribution; and lack of general knowledge concerning biological and ecological patterns related to the existence of food. On the positive side, knowledge about food and about ecology is increasing, such as the blossoming organic and health food industry, growing signs of curiosity about food origins and politics, and increasing recognition and reform involving environmental issues. Awareness and knowledge are paramount in averting disconnection to food cycles just as they are paramount in averting the human risks to global and local ecosystems. Maintaining knowledge of food cycles is the responsibility of communities, and indeed has been performed by human cultures forever. The stories and perspective about food and its procurement that we clasp in chains leading from generation to generation and individual to individual maintain our involvement in nature’s cyclical systems.
Writing in 1982 in an essay titled “West of the Great Divide—A View of the Literature of British Columbia,” Allan Pritchard notes the theme of “conservation” as a part of BC literature and remarks that in some literature, “traditional cultures provide…models of the ideally harmonious relation between man and nature” (Pritchard 100). Eden Robinson, a Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations writer born in Kitamaat on the west coast of BC, wrote the novel Monkey Beach, whose story represents the Kitamaat\Haisla region and culture. A good number of passages depict eating, human food culture and economy, and Haisla traditional ecological knowledge. Right at the start, the novel makes reference to food economy, the “bad fishing season” experienced by Jimmy who is the missing brother of narrator Lisamarie who is contemplating him having just disappeared the night before when out on a usual fishing trip (Robinson 2). Making a life on the sea can be a dangerous occupation.
It may not be eating, but the first few pages refer to coffee, then smoking, which recur as tropes through the novel, along with alcohol. The issues explored with these tropes are interesting in my reading because arguably all in all they are addictive consumables, not nutritional, and (for hunger suppressing qualities) food substitutive. Through the novel, Lisamarie is ambivalent toward smoking, at times enjoying and at times ripping her room apart in desperation, thinking “[f]unny how you never appreciate a cigarette fully until you know it’s one of your last. Morbid thoughts” (Robinson 124). This view of tobacco contrasts Lisa’s grandmother Ma-ma-oo’s belief that “tobacco is for the tree spirits. You take something, you give something” (Robinson 152).
A member of the Nu-Chah-Nulth First Nations, of central west coast Vancouver Island, once told me a story: before and after taking a great tree from the forest for use in longhouses or canoes, or even before taking cedar bark, members of the community would bury fish and animal organs and leave fruit and sacred plants upon the ground by the tree to revere its gift with a gift. Naturally, when a huge, thriving tree is cut from the forest and reveals so much sunlight anew to the forest floor in one patch, such gifts of the human community provide a wild nutrient brew-ha-ha for berry bushes, medicine plants, and new trees. In Monkey Beach, Ma-ma-oo uses cigarettes in “asking for [the] protection” of the “tree spirits,” but traditional cultural contexts of such practices were also known to be beneficial for the cycles of plant and animal nature that are important to eating and ecology (Robinson 152). The respect for gifting to nature along with the spiritual appreciation of living things is a powerful way that traditional cultures maintain valuable knowledge. On the other hand, though, the desperation for cigarettes portrayed in Monkey Beach reminds me of “the sickness” I’ve heard a good number of my First Nations friends talk about in various ways, the social problems that face certain individuals and face endangered cultures, languages, and knowledges—the forgetting and dislocation of culture.
Son of the late Chief Dan George and the chief of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation (or the "people of the inlet") in Burrard Inlet near Vancouver, Leonard George wrote an essay called “Native Spirituality, Past, Present, and Future” wherein he considers the history of his land. He conveys that “[t]he aboriginal people of North America had a system in place that allowed them to live in this land for thousands of years” very well in terms of sustainability and social prosperity (George 161). Things were never perfect anywhere, of course, but several of North America’s aboriginal cultures definitely did live in a manner of deep respect for the Earth and maintain between generations chains of knowledge about food through the telling of ecologically wise stories. Such knowledge as the difference in berries in terms of the plant, the berry’s taste, seasonality, and edibility are transferred in stories and memory: “Thimbleberries are completely different from salmonberries and come out just a bit later,” as Lisamarie tells (Robinson 77). A community’s link to certain knowledge, such as which berries are poisonous, usually is not put in complex spiritual contexts as much as shared and taught as the experience of an area that is the well-known home to a community. Pritchard also discusses “the making of a home” as a prevalent trope in BC literature (Pritchard 101). Lisamarie may go home from berry picking to watch “The Young and the Restless” before eating salmonberry stew, and Ma-ma-oo “[would] shout at the TV” and Mick would chime in “[i]t’s only TV. Everyone’s stupid on TV”; Lisamarie experiences through the novel clashes between the ways of Haisla tradition and contemporary ways of living (Robinson 77). The relation in Monkey Beach between contemporary ways and traditional, aboriginal ways of living constitute for Lisamarie and her family some tension between their native culture’s connection to ecological knowledge and the contemporary culture’s trends of forgetting and thereby unlinking the chains of a culture’s ecological knowledge.
Monkey Beach continually portrays Lisamarie, her family, and her friends as variously in between the old food ways and the new. Very untraditional food in terms of First Nations culture is eaten during the celebration of western traditional holidays, from “hot chocolate and sugar cookies…a beer and a slice of mincemeat pie” on Christmas to “chocolate Easter bunny” feast that leaves Lisamarie “marvelling at how big it was and how much chocolate [she] had” (Robinson 71, 135). Ma-ma-oo, however, carries the knowledge of oolichan fish and grease, using it as food, medicine, and more. Lisamarie doesn’t like the taste of the grease herself, but knows a lot about the fish, including how human contact has left their habitat “polluted by all the industry in town” (Robinson 92). One reason she recognizes the impact of humans on the fish is that her mom told her stories that “the runs used to be so thick, you could walk across the river and not touch water” (Robinson 92). Lisamarie’s family lives with contemporary as well as aboriginal tradition.
In terms of contemporary food options, they don’t always eat well. Uncle Mick, Lisamarie’s “cool” role model, “said it was his job as an uncle to get [the kids] hypered up before he sent [them] home” with “double scooped ice cream and candy” (Robinson 61). I don’t think Robinson was paid for the product placements, but her characters eat copious amounts of branded junk food, from “Jell-O powder…Oreo cookies and Kool-Aid” on the schoolyard on page 44 to Mick’s home-cooked “Kraft Dinner with wieners and some grape Kool-Aid” on page 52 and “Kraft Dinner and bologna” on page 115. Notwithstanding, Mick also lives close enough to the land that he buckets from a nearby stream water that is “burning cool and sweet with the taste of trees” (Robinson 103). However, it is only more indicative of the addictive, harmful lifestyle of contemporary culture and bears relevance to my overall reading that unhealthy food brand Kraft was owned by Altria before 2007 when sold to Altria shareholders, Altria which owns the Philip Morris cigarette companies. Food should not be considered and consumed for tastiness alone (like entertainment) as a contemporary commodity sold along items that are meant to addict, and food should not be sold with the intention of addicting, which has been a growing wonder about some food products and additives, definitely not restricted to Kraft.
The kind of contrast in representation of food from the intricate degrees of knowledge sharing about plants and animals to the binging on junk food and cigarettes is one interesting device (of many) in Monkey Beach that highlights the division between the traditional cultural ways of the Haisla people, which promote a strong and healthy connection to the land, and the contemporary modes of living, where the consumer gets from the store pre-packaged and precooked food and junk food, both of which are usually unhealthy. The modern food choices of the characters in Monkey Beach, especially compared to the more ecological stories about food, are one mode of expressing the novel’s theme of cultural dislocation. The dislocation of knowledge chains concerning food cycles, followed often by eating less healthy and by attending less to the environment, is a worrisome manifestation of cultural problem zones.
In Burning Water, the fictional version of George Vancouver’s search for the Northwest Passage and charting of coastal geography, George Bowering also employs numerous references concerning food and eating, with some interest such as in Monkey Beach toward aboriginal ways of knowing. For example, the title, “burning water,” is a phrase coming from Aztecs, roughly corresponding to the concept of imagination (Bowering v). The novel places an emphasis on imagination as a beneficial and essential faculty for properly living and as contrasted with the work of the mind’s “fancy.” The first passage of the novel consists in a conversation between two “Indians,” a young bloke in the throes of fanciful “vision” and one “about ten years older, a world-weary man with scars here and there” (Bowering 5). The younger one tells the older one: “The old folks told me about them. They said you went alone to the woods with no food for a week or two, and you would see visions. Well, maybe I have not been eating much lately” and he continues after the older one tells him he eats enough, “I am still growing. Surely you would not deny me the nourishment I require to take my place as a full man of the tribe” (Bowering 5). Because the younger one is in a flight of his fancy, the old one starts talking “facts” about fish: “He is a fact whether he is hidden under the surface or changing colours on the rocks. To make this fact your fact, you need skill and a well-made hook” (Bowering 6). The younger one’s fancy interests me: he does need nourishment, but he is not strongly connected in thought to how well he is eating or to how properly he should understand, according to his elder, the realm of spirituality and food.
While Burning Water comes across with great humour (the vision of the younger Indian is none other than George Vancouver’s ship, the Discovery), Bowering’s exploration of imagination and fancy also contemplates the realm of facts. In this first passage, the reader is given hints about First Nations customs of fasting, which are an important way to cleanse the body as well as prepare for spiritual journeying, and about the fact of needing skill (knowledge) to acquire food. In the list of facts about the Discovery, Bowering writes on page 13 the following:
Her storerooms were packed with salt beef, salt pork, peas, beer, and sauerkraut. Few sailors got sick aboard this ship. Captain Cook had taught Mr. Vancouver that you might keep the storerooms washed down with vinegar, and periodically smoke them out with a mixture of vinegar and gunpowder, lighting fires between the decks to force convection currents.
This is the first hint at what turns out to be very humorous play between the captain, George Vancouver, and his crew, who don’t particularly like, or understand for that matter, his insistence on the eating of sauerkraut, which wards off the vitamin C deficiency better known to sailors in 1792 as scurvy. Two pages later, William Blake is mentioned as “the best example you can think of if you’re looking for a poet or artist of the period and you want one who was interested in fact” as well as describing him as a “printer who did not eat a balanced diet”, a humorous contrast with the fact of eating properly hinted at in the conversation of the Indians and by the passage of food facts about the Discovery (Bowering 15). The need to eat well is consistently pointed out as a definite fact in Burning Water, whether the characters understand food safety and nutrition or want to eat a balanced diet.
When two sailors have a petty skirmish due to one not bathing, one yelling “[d]amn it, sailor, get thee downwind of me, or I will throw this sauerkraut down the front of your blouse” and the other, “[w]hy, just yestermorn I saw a gull fall dead from the rail into the salt, and all from perching downwind of you,” the one who threw the sauerkraut received twenty lashes and the other ten lashes as ordered by George Vancouver, because “[h]e was, as we have seen, a fanatic about sauerkraut and discipline” (Bowering 160). The novel contains many of these playful representations of the trouble in getting uncooperative, unknowing beneficiaries to eat well against their will, neither wasting food nor feeling pernicious about the precious facts of nutrition.
Holmes Rolston III in an essay, “F/actual Knowing: Putting Facts and Values in Place,” asks the following: “How do our facts depend on our acts? Do we humans always put in place, or sometimes find put, placed there before us, what we variously value on Earth?” (Rolston 137). He talks of “greening” our beliefs, realizing, for example, that the oxygen we breathe places us in the biological context of being a component to some cycle, some network. Since certain facts about nature’s organization (like the ecological food cycles) totally subsume human activity, Rolston writes that “environmentally grounding [our beliefs about our cultural activities] will require knowing and appropriately respecting these vital life processes—of which we are a part, but which also are “in place” and “take place” apart from us” and writes about such processes as “our respiratory (and perceptual) interactions; these extend systemically and are hardly anthropocentric” (Rolston 138). We are integrated into ecological systems with such intricacy that the system of Humanity\Earth transcends anthropocentric design while at the same time grounds all our social activity. For George Vancouver, his love for sauerkraut is highly anthropocentric—he desires to keep his crew healthy—but his knowledge about Sauerkraut won’t be confirmed until the early twentieth century when vitamin C becomes isolated for the first time. Whether we know it, we always ‘take place’ in the ecosystem which has us ‘in place.’ To reverse my essay’s title in an interesting way, food cycles deeply take place around any knowledge our culture can chain.
Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach and George Bowering’s Burning Water explore life in the same regions on the west coast of British Columbia. Monkey Beach connects the reader in some way to the area by means of many stories about food knowledge, as well as charting an intersection between contemporary and traditional food identity. Burning Water tells a story about the charting of and coming to know the area with numerous references to the discipline and fact of eating properly and the role of the imagination: “Your imagination tells you where to drop your hooks” (Bowering 8). There are other west coast BC writers, including non-fiction writers, who refer to food knowledge and ecological factuality and do so making more direct connections between food, ecology, and human knowledge.
For example, in the collaborative work, Full Moon, Flood Tide, Yvonne Maximchuk and Bill Proctor state that “[t]he most significant factor affecting the lives of people who live by the sea” is the natural cycle of the tides culminating in the flood tide of each full moon (14). The authors relay to the reader that salmon migrate into rivers to spawn during the flood tides (the best time for fishing) and that during the corresponding “low, low tide[,] The old saying on the coast was, ‘When it is low tide the table is set.’ This was the time, often at night, you could dig clams or gather abalone, mussels, crabs and barnacles” (Proctor and Maximchuk 14). I want to pay particular attention to the “old saying on the coast” in relation to the particular ecological cycles and food gathering. That a system of regional knowledge can become encapsulated in an old saying indicates that the chaining of knowledge runs deep in any regionally long-situated, ecologically stable culture. The authors of Full Moon, Flood Tide relay that the “more we know and understand about the world we live in, the greater our respect and appreciation of it” (17).
Proctor and Maximchuk also relay that logging and over-fishing, which occurred without proper knowledge to ensure it to be sustainable and life friendly, injured spawning rivers and streams and depleted salmon stocks:
The [Wakeman] river’s once mighty salmon runs were reduced to a fraction of their former size and the mighty Chinooks have all but disappeared. Nature is trying to heal the wounds in the valley with many kinds of plants. Some…are considered problems…are sprayed with pesticides, which kill much of the new growth and filter into the water, damaging salmon fry. The river is capable of regaining its health, but we human beings will have to help. (139).
These writers are sensitively aware that traditional ecological knowledge is important and are doing their share to inform others in the land about traditional and scientific ecological knowledge that will ensure healthy connection to the cycles. Human industrial economy gave us many fish to eat, but now we can’t eat nearly as much as we used to while our activity continues to prevent the fish from returning to something of their former success. Knowing about such systems of eating and human-consequence ecology will enable us to achieve sustainable cultures. The excerpts, particularly the “old saying”, from Full Moon, Flood Tide that I read gave me the idea of connecting natural cycles such as the tides to cultural chains of knowledge such as clam gardening. If the links in the human chains of knowledge about food and ecology break down or do not form in some culture’s storytelling, then the potential for risk will increase that the culture may act in a way that will disrupt important ecological cycles that subsume our biological needs. The only stories we ought not to pass on are of the best places to fish!
Ernie Crey is a member of the Cheam band of the Sto:lo nation, a near to west coast writer (from Chilliwack,) one who would have grown up seeing the Pacific salmon coming inland from the great Fraser River. In an essay titled “The Children of Tomorrow’s Great Potlatch,” he writes the “day will soon come when First Nations people and whites will sit together to take part in the greatest potlatch of all. They will talk and sing about the wonderful world they will be leaving for their children” (Crey 150). Crey writes that prior to this potlatch, “the whites must learn more of the First Nations history, because understanding is essential to create solutions and harmony” (Crey 150). For instance, “coincident with the creation of the residential schools, the Indian Act was amended to outlaw potlatches…outlawed not exclusively at the behest of the Christian denominations [but because] government officials and individuals at the head of fishing and lumber companies also wanted the “potlatch laws” introduced” (Crey 153).
To the government and industry, Crey writes that “residential schools represented a workforce the companies could draw on in future in order to expand their wealth and thereby their influence on the Pacific Coast” and to the Christian groups, “the residential schools were factories producing souls for Christ” (Crey 153). However, to the First Nations, “[p]arents and children were made strangers to each other. In the schools, children did not learn the meaning of family…It is a universal truth that one learns to be a parent in a family, not in an institutional setting” (Crey 153-154). These schools “virtually obliterated Indian family life and therefore, severely compromised the social order of most Indian communities” leading to higher “incidence of family violence and poor health due to diseases linked to self-destructive lifestyles and poverty” (Crey 154). Separating First Nations communities from the ways of the potlatch (a celebration of peace, prosperity, and sharing that happens between members of different communities) and from their traditional forms of family has harmed their links to ecological knowledge concerning healthy lifestyles. Monkey Beach depicts contemporary Haisla life as a challenge, such as passages about Cookie, Mick’s lover, when Mick’s friend Josh tells Lisamarie, when she asks how Cookie died, that she “got kicked out of three residential schools” for so-called behavioural issues by the time she was fourteen (Robinson 145). There is a subsequent, revealing scene where Josh accidentally tells Lisamarie more than before; while they drink whiskey at a sombre party (itself telling of cultural sickness), he reveals that Cookie was viciously murdered (Robinson 305-9).
In an essay titled “Sechelt Women and Self Government,” Theresa Jeffries, or Sxixixay, of the Sechelt band on the west coast offers her knowledge whose chain links to at least her Grandmother who “would teach us to recognize the right cedar trees, pinpoint the straight roots, and gather far enough from the tree so that the tree would survive. Through stories and myths, she would teach us about our family, our history, and our responsibilities” (Jeffries 82-83). In speaking of the present time (writing in 1991) and noting the lingering dislocation of cultural modes of life, Sxixixay writes that “[i]n order to feed and clothe our families, we rely on outside jobs rather than on the natural resources of the land. We recognize that sacrifices have been made” (Jeffries 85). Hopefully, in all the time it takes for the Sechelt “to rebuild a strong and dynamic community,” western cultural forces will allow traditional cultures to maintain the basic and highly valuable ecological knowledge strewn throughout their community’s chaining of stories and knowledge through the generations (Jeffries 86). Sxixixay notes the Sechelt “as a people have taken steps to strengthen the ties with [their] ancestors by strengthening [their] language and culture,” where the stories and knowledge sufficient to create traditional, sustainable communities persist (Jeffries 86). Knowing that necessary critical measures to maintain traditional cultures must address the imperial, colonial, economic, and repressive cultural forces of the global world, Sxixixay writes that the “process of change…applies not only to the Sechelt but also to the people living on the outside communities” (Jeffries 86).
As Michael Milburn (of East Coast Canada) describes in his essay, “Indigenous Nutrition: Using Traditional Food Knowledge to Solve Contemporary Health Problems,” contemporary global culture must develop the “recognition of a relationship between diet and the chronic degenerative diseases characteristic of industrialized culture” such as perhaps, Ma-ma-oo’s heart problems that the “oolichan grease…would be good” for (Milburn 418 \ Robinson 238). Tying cultural identity to food and health issues, Milburn writes that an
integrated approach, using both Indigenous and Western nutrition, is another possibility for the future, one that respects the diversity of Indigenous foodways and the holistic foundation of Indigenous science. For Aboriginal communities, the path of the ancestors represents both a means of cultural renewal and a solution to the problem of diet-related disease. (427)
For Western civilization to move toward sustainability, people must continue, or start, to tell stories that speak in some way to food and eating in order to add links to the cultural chains of knowledge concerning food and ecological cycles. To understand science and healthy eating and to remember traditional and regional ways of food that we have carried a long time is to respect the great inherent value, potential, and sensitivity of ecological networks and of sustainability. Works such as Monkey Beach, Burning Water, and Full Moon, Flood Tide embody the most visceral way to get these food and ecology lessons into people’s heads: telling them something new in interesting ways and giving them new knowledge. Literature, science writing, and story telling between people has done, and can do, a great deal for promoting and preserving important cultural knowledge about the food cycles and ecosystems that are the subsuming ground from which we arose. We need to tell stories about food.
Capra, Fritjof. “Ecology and Community”. Brochure. Center for Ecoliteracy. 5 Dec. 2005 .
George, Leonard. “Native Spirituality, Past, Present, and Future”. Jenson and Brooks. (160-168).
Crey, Ernie. “The Children of Tomorrow’s Great Potlatch”. Jenson and Brooks. (150-158).
Jeffries, Theresa M. “Sechelt Women and Self-Government”. Jenson and Brooks. (81-86).
Jensen, Doreen and Cheryl Brooks, eds. In Celebration of Our Survival: The First Nations of British Columbia. Also BC Studies Vol. 89. 1991.
Milburn, Michael P. “Indigenous Nutrition: Using Traditional Food Knowledge to Solve Contemporary Health Problems”. The American Indian Quarterly Vol. 28. Summer/Fall 2004. (411-434). April 2 2008. Project Muse.
Pritchard, Allan. “West of the Great Divide: A View of the Literature of British Columbia”. Canadian Literature Vol. 94. Autumn 1982. (86-112).
Proctor, Bill and Yvonne Maximchuk. Numerous excerpts. Full Moon, Flood Tide: Bill Proctor’s Raincoast. Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2003.
Rolston, Holmes. “F/actual Knowing: Putting Facts and Values in Place”. Ethics and the Environment Vol. 10.2. Autumn 2005. (137-174). March 28 2008. Project Muse.]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000022.htm2009-09-20T17:42:36Z2009-09-20T17:48:32ZI am an artist, have my art.The intro subject says it all! I am a musician and have been learning to compose and produce electronic music and hip hop instrumentals. The links are within the main text of this post.The intro subject says it all! I am a musician and have been learning to compose and produce electronic music and hip hop instrumentals. The links are within the main text of this post.I'll just drop the links.
Please give any feedback if you have any. Cheers.
http://reverbnation.com/nerBeater http://soundclick.com/DSCBeats]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000021.htm2009-08-16T13:44:02Z2009-08-16T13:44:02Z Freedom, Fancy, and Life’s Mystery from Spinoza to RomanticismThis is the first of two essays about Spinoza's philosophy and its application to other thinkers and other thoughts. The essay below this one is focused on the contemporary state of ecological imagination, and this one is devoted primarily to re-interpreting Spinoza and Romanticism together, with...This is the first of two essays about Spinoza's philosophy and its application to other thinkers and other thoughts. The essay below this one is focused on the contemporary state of ecological imagination, and this one is devoted primarily to re-interpreting Spinoza and Romanticism together, with just passing, though hopefully insightful, reflection on the current day.Brenden MacDonald Ian Whitehouse Engl 382—Romanticism Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Freedom, Fancy, and Life’s Mystery from Spinoza to Romanticism
We see therefore that all the notions whereby the common people are wont to explain Nature are merely modes of imagining, and denote not the nature of any thing but only the constitution of the imagination…For many are wont to argue on the following lines: if everything has followed from the necessity of God’s most perfect nature, why does Nature display so many imperfections, such as rottenness to the point of putridity, nauseating ugliness, confusion, evil, sin, and so on?…For the perfection of things should be measured solely from their own nature and power; nor are things more or less perfect to the extent that they please or offend human senses, serve or oppose human interests. From the “Appendix” to Part I of Spinoza’s Ethics (62).
The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains are, in truth, the causes of its life and the sources of all activity, but the chains are the cunning of weak minds, which have the power to resist energy.—William Blake, In A Memorable Fancy [A Printing-House in Hell] (Wu 212).
There are laws of sustainability which are natural laws, just as the law of gravity is a natural law. In our science in past centuries, we have learned a lot about the law of gravity and similar laws of physics, but we have not learned very much about the laws of sustainability. If you go up to a high cliff and step off it, disregarding the laws of gravity, you will surely die. If we live in a community, disregarding the laws of sustainability, as a community we will just as surely die in the long run. These laws are just as stringent as the laws of physics, but until recently they have not been studied.—Fritjof Capra, director of the Center for Ecoliteracy, in a short paper titled “Ecology and Community”.
Robert J. Richards, in The Romantic Conception of Life—Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe, reminds students of literature that while “[w]e usually think of this group as forming a coherent movement” of poets, philosophers, and theologians, the Romantics “often appreciably diverged from one another in their conceptions of the operations of sensation, imagination, and reason” and even frequently reassessed their own views during ongoing intellectual development (18). Nevertheless, “[i]n conformity to our usual understanding of Romanticism, [some individuals] turned decisively toward the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, under which beauty revealed a more intuitive, emotionally marked, and even mystical path to reality’s inner core” (Richards 19). In a usual understanding, being unromantic might be akin to turning decisively toward reason-driven, method-bound knowledge to be expressed in clear thought and orderly art, not to be inspired by the vastness of a starry night. Some thinkers contrast the Romantic activity with that of the radical, rational Enlightenment, scientific and political achievement born from classrooms and courthouses, not from dreaming of and poeticizing rivers and faeries. Figures espousing rationalist approaches to philosophy over romantic approaches have also differed amongst themselves.
Personally, I like drawing parallels and relation rather than division and exclusion between the directions and pursuits of the great critical eras of human thought as have transpired. Michael Scrivener in his essay “Inside and Outside Romanticism” asks “have we so far removed ourselves from the assumptions of Romantic texts that we are finally outside of Romanticism?...Is it possible to get outside of Romanticism?” and he answers no to both (152). He mentions that romanticism sourced ecocriticism (which I will focus on later in the present essay), and suggests an argument he attributes to Hans-Georg Gadamer, a German philosopher of the twentieth century: Romanticism “has shaped our pre-understanding, […] has inscribed us with meanings we cannot disentangle from our lifeworld” (Scrivener 152). Romanticism is not over; there may always be Romantics at heart.
The primary Romantic figures had new ideas and modes of expression that arose in the intense revolutionary and intellectual fervour of Europe in the late 18th and 19th century. There was political upheaval, the instantiation of modern democracy and of various rights and ethical movements, an up-and-coming scientific-industrial-capitalist culture, new philosophies of mind and of ethics, and the precursor to still emerging ecological paradigms in the growing awe and curiosity about natural settings. Michael Scrivener calls “periodization” of Romanticism “always a risky enterprise”, giving modestly the era a fifty year span and reservedly a hundred year span, and all the things I just mention in setting the historical ground for Romanticism must really be seen as diverse cultural phenomena on time scales definitely reaching centuries backward and forward, if not millennia as some potential perspective might give to human history the individual yet encompassing Romantic impulses (151).
So to stretch that century back in time, I would like to identify and explore pre-Romantic impulses and ideas in Baruch Spinoza, a widely influential rationalist philosopher who wrote in the 17th century. Many have figured Spinoza as a member of Europe’s “Radical Enlightenment”, but interpretations of his work have always varied with some broad agreements but also huge gaps in the understanding of what he was getting at. Is he a pantheist or a materialist? Does he believe will is “free” in any sense? Spinoza has also been read by feminist and ecological philosophers heavily in the 20th century, who have found very new readings for his works. Romantic works such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman set the foundation for “feminist theory, as a modern intellectual enterprise”, and the nature writing of many Romantics set the Western foundation for ecological paradigms, so if Spinoza is interesting to these discourses now, how can we re-read him in terms of Romanticism and the Romantics in terms of him (Scrivener, 152).
We may as well start with a comparison of terms concerning “the conceptions of the operations of sensation, imagination, and reason” as Richards identified as part of Romantic thought. A profound poet the Romantic age, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in the nineteenth century about “imagination” in a very different manner than did Spinoza. In The Ethics (1677), Spinoza regards the imagination as the progenitor of “inadequate ideas”, or spurious universals of an ungrounded ideational structure that comprise the thoughts of un-liberated, passive emotion-bound human mind. In chapter XIII of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge very beautifully articulated (“primary”) imagination “to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (Wu 691). The difference in opinion may at first glance be attributed to the regular habits (or what someone might suppose to be) the deep and distinct habits and dispositions of rationalist philosophers versus romantic poets. Worse yet, someone may just decide that Spinoza and Coleridge, or rationalists and romantics, are probably just using their words differently and independently and should not be compared.
A closer look at Coleridge warrants the opposite conclusion; he was aware of Spinoza’s work and in certain passages stages arguments against him. In chapter VIII of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge writes concerning philosophy of mind: “system of DUALISMintroduced by Des Cartes--Refined first by Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the doctrine of Harmonia præstabilta—Hylozoism—materialism—None of these systems on any possible theory of association, supplies or supersedes a theory of perception, or explains the formation of the associable” (Representative Poetry Online, U of Toronto 128). The “formation of the associable” or the cause of that which one can associate with, i.e. the cause of consciousness of reality, is not explained by Spinoza’s dualistic but ultimately materialist philosophy, to the reading of Coleridge. But later, Coleridge, in talking of the materialist system, writes “Spinoza…had himself taken the hint from Des Cartes's animal machines” (RPO 129).
Hold on, Samuel! Maybe you did not read Spinoza very well. In The Ethics, Spinoza either directly or indirectly critiques much of Rene Descartes’ philosophical positions. If they do agree on anything, it may only be about some very general characteristics of the project of rationalist philosophy; Spinoza hardly “refined” Descartes as much as he continually exploded the other’s ideas. I could still understand that a poet who enjoyed intoxicated trances and the beauty of human imagination would take issue with Spinoza’s frankly wordy and logical exposition on the inadequacies of human imagination and on the virtues of living by reason. The Ethics progresses by the ancient geometrical method of argumentation, whereby one begins with a set of basic definitions and hard-to-refute axioms. Now, Coleridge aligns Spinoza with confused, dualistic materialists, which is plausible from a surface reading of the complex philosopher, but we should look more carefully at his views. Coleridge may be considering passages such as the definition of emotions as “the affections of the body by which the body’s power of activity is increased or diminished, assisted or checked, together with the ideas of these affections” or such as propositions like “[t]he body cannot determine the mind to think, nor can the mind determine the body to motion or rest, or to anything else (if there is anything else)” (Spinoza 104, 105). Spinoza does seem to try to explain emotions through the body and seems to claim also that mind and body are logically independent from each other, which Coleridge may find “absurd… [and] too repugnant to our common sense” to consider as a viable explanation of the associable (RPO 129).
Actually fairly close to Coleridge’s conviction that “body and spirit are therefore no longer absolutely heterogeneous, but may without any absurdity be supposed to be different modes, or degrees in perfection, of a common substratum”, Spinoza holds that “mind and body are one and the same thing, conceived now under the attribute of Thought, now under the attribute of Extension. Hence it comes about that the order or linking of things is one, whether Nature be conceived under this or that attribute” (RPO 129-8, Spinoza 105-6). Spinoza’s position might be confused in Coleridge’s philosophy of mind as materialism or hylozoism, the view that mind is nothing more than what matter is or that matter is life’s fundamental basis, and Spinoza surely does base his philosophy of mind around the nature of the body.
However, Spinoza refers mind AND body both back to the underlying “Nature”, which he describes in the first part of The Ethics “Concerning God” as “substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence, [and which] necessarily exists” (37). When Spinoza says that “the order of the active and passive states of our body is simultaneous in Nature with the order of active and passive states of the mind”, he is not saying that the order of states of the body happens before or causes the order of states of the mind (106). When he says that we conceive substance now under one attribute, now under another, he means that what fundamentally exists is the unified totality of the expressive power of nature or, as Coleridge might call it, the “infinite I AM” (Wu 691). To Spinoza, mind and matter are complementary attributes or aspects of our deep and fundamental being, which is neither fundamentally mind or fundamentally matter, but simply fundamental existence. The fundamental essence of Nature is largely a mystery due to our place in it, understanding mentally and travelling materially. For Spinoza above the spurious “inadequate ideas” of the imagination are the adequate universals, which emerge from comprehending the common characteristics to phenomena of experience. For example, if you think about a physics of the concerted relations between simple bodies impelling each other to rest and motion and between complex bodies holding constant proportions, or if you think about a psychology of the concerted relations between simple ideas and complex mental behaviour such as emotion or belief provide, then you think in terms of attribute-contingent universals. Our experience of the mind or of bodies can be formulated in terms specific to the way we perceive aspects of our ongoing existence, in terms that are constrained to the topic and which seem to exclude the other. That’s why Spinoza says that the body can neither make the mind think nor the mind make the body move, when it is obvious to those like Coleridge that this view is absurdity. Of course the order and connections within existence correlate mind and body, but Spinoza is claiming that how we understand and describe our reality tends to be conflated or obscured by the imagination. Properly to Spinoza, bodies can only be understood physically, and thoughts can only be understood psychologically, but the key escape from the plight of the imagination comes in realizing it is mere fancy to actually regard mind and body as thus separable, distinct species of substance instead of complementary aspects to a single, essential being of infinitely expressible form and power. Spinoza puts the intuitive grasp of Nature’s immediate power to express itself in many ways even above the adequate universals. Intuitively grasping that the essence of our existence is pure, unmediated expression into reality is the ultimate blessedness. To Spinoza, there is no other way than, so it is blessedness knowing, that Nature is infinite in power and expression, including complex physical and ideational structures.
Hence, by believing that body and mind are simply a dual expression of the united and unlimited power of nature, Spinoza aligns with Romantic panpsychism more than Coleridge sees. When I say “I AM”, I mean that in a bodily manner as much as psychologically. I would not be me without having grown up and felt everything, lived everything within a visceral, volitional, and emotional existence that expresses itself through the power to breathe and jump bodily beside other similarly breathing beings. I know these words quite accurately depict the immanent meaning and structure of my life, but still, I cannot but differentiate heavily between the notions of, say, a physical structure or a meaningful intention, like Spinoza recommends and Coleridge seems to resist. Coleridge wants to appeal to “common sense” but also refers to the uncompleted Productive Logos, in which he would aim to argue: “1. That all association demands and presupposes the existence of the thoughts and images to be associated. [and] 2. The hypothesis of an external world exactly correspondent to those images or modifications of our own being, which alone (according to this system) we actually behold” (RPO 133-4). Like what I said, I have inner awareness of my external bodily being. To put it in more ordinary language, I am real, and my body is real! It seems the conflict Coleridge has with Spinoza has to do with what language for the concepts they’ve both invented being too obtuse for Coleridge to see the proper parallels in their thinking. Dr. Timothy Brownlow, writing in an essay about Romanticism called “Only Connect” that was published online the University of Maryland Romantic Circles web journal, distinguishes between jargon that is either just specialized vocabulary of a certain group of communicators or jargon that is used in a way to “obfuscate the issues and intimidate the reader” intentionally, and he suggests that “whether the writers were up to mischief or not, they are often obscure” (Brownlow paragraph 5). Both Spinoza and Coleridge could be employing jargon, whether mischievously, and both aim to elucidate the way to sound understandings and blessed experiences. Coleridge, being a poet in the foray of philosophy, may be more inclined to play linguistically to his desired meanings than Spinoza the geometrical rationalist. If they had taken William Wordsworth’s advice to heart and spoke not jargon but language “which is uttered by men in real life under the actual pressure of those passions”, they may have realized that “no words which his fancy or imagination can suggest will be compared with those which are the emanations of [the] reality and truth” whose understanding they sought (Wu 526).
Making me think of Spinoza’s rejection of teleological design in nature and insistence on the necessary chains of organization and expression of natural power, Coleridge writes: “We might as rationally chant the Brahmin creed of the tortoise that supported the bear, that supported the elephant, that supported the world, to the tune of ‘This is the house that Jack built’ ” (RPO 134). I find that Coleridge quite satirically relates a determined chain of foundations to something as arbitrary and contingent as a house being built. He seems in these words to say that Spinoza’s story about necessity in nature is trite compared to the common sensible world of human needs we live in regardless of intricate Nature’s non-teleological determinacy. A house seems an imaginative product from human-borne purpose, or decided telos, not some result of infinite chains of causation.
He is keen to the critique of Coleridge: in the preface to part IV, Spinoza writes about human conception about the perfection of some objects, thinking back to the passage I quote at the beginning of this essay: “if anyone sees a work (…not yet finished) and knows that the aim of the author is to build a house, he will say that the house is imperfect…but if anyone sees a work whose like he had never seen before, and he does not know the artificer’s intention, he cannot possibly know whether the work is perfect or imperfect” (153). However, “when men began to form general ideas and to devise ideal types…and to prefer some models to others, it came about that each called ‘perfect’ what he saw to be in agreement with the general idea he had formed of the said thing” and when they foolishly apply this kind of standard to natural phenomena, “they believe that Nature has then failed or blundered and has left that thing imperfect” (Spinoza 153). Spinoza believes the world is perfect the way it is, regardless of what people do, whether they build a house, go to war, or spoil and waste valuable nature.
That would just not be the good way for us, for Spinoza means “by ‘good’ that which we certainly know to be the means for our approaching nearer to the model of human nature that we set before ourselves” (155). Per Spinoza, while we are firmly grounded in Nature’s endless chains of order, the good is yet relative to the stipulated models we set forth. Spinoza may insist that knowledge of determinations is relevant to knowing the way of nature, but “by virtue and power” such as would build a perfect house, Spinoza means “the same thing; that is…virtue, in so far as it is related to [a human], is [a human’s] very essence, or nature, in so far as [he or she] has power to bring about that which can be understood solely through the laws of [his or her] own nature” (Spinoza 156). I think Spinoza’s “virtue” matches Coleridge’s elevated sense of “imagination”, the prime power of human perception. Thus, in a way Coleridge’s view on nature does not differ too fundamentally from Spinoza’s, albeit they have very different articulations and emphases.
Reminiscent of the previous discussion and Coleridge reference, Mary Shelly wrote in her introduction to Frankenstein: “Every thing must have a beginning…and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. The Hindoos give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos” (Shelly viii). No teleological reason for the animals’ support of the Earth, the Eastern reference elucidates simply that an immutable (while animistic) order provides the set foundations of human reality, i.e. of culture. Frankenstein explores a perversion of the given ‘natural’ order of life: what happens when one exploits the chaos of imagination and proceeds to invention, birthing a creature all too human but the living dead? I think Frankenstein provides a good source for comparing the evils Spinoza associates with the imagination to the power, the inventive imagination of Coleridge.
The creature gives to the Dr. Victor a request for having him make a companion female creature: “My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor; and my virtues will necessarily arise when I live in communion with an equal. I shall feel the affections of a sensitive being, and become linked to the chain of existence and events, from which I am now excluded” (Shelley 106). This language reminds me of the Spinozistic picture of modes of being linked in infinite chains of temporal existence, the “order and connection” of things and ideas, and of the emotional nature of love as “the affections of a sensitive being”, prone to states of activity supportive or debilitating toward the achievement of “virtue.” According to Spinoza, we love more who we can relate with and share commonality and community with, and we hate more those parts and entities of our world that we regard as posing a risk to our joys, the destruction of our natural power. The creature and Dr. Frankenstein (not to mention most of Shelley’s fictional world of humans) abhor each other to great extent for the regarded differences and divisions between their natures. The fears and judgments of the creature’s social surrounding are more fanciful than warranted, especially noting of the creature-man his high intelligence and potential for compassionate blessedness.
On the thread of “equality”, Mare Shelley’s creature in Frankenstein eerily reminds me of what might be the converse of what her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote about women in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: Wollstonecraft notes that physiologically speaking women are the carriers of beauty but “in point of strength[,] in general, inferior to the male” (Wu 279). Frankenstein’s creature on the other hand is much uglier and stronger than an ordinary man. Another flash of relation comes in Wollstonecraft’s statement that “[women] are only considered as females, and not as a part of the human species, when improvable reason is allowed to be the dignified distinction which raises men above the brute creation, and puts a natural sceptre in a feeble hand” (Wu 279). The creature possesses that “dignified distinction” but for bodily inequalities, is outcast. If Frankenstein offers a feminist reading, it may be in the binary relation of Frankenstein’s creature to the female creature of patriarchal perspectives, electrified to sinister proportion with layers of “conduct and manners” (Wu 279). Spinoza brings something relevant to such a discussion because of the bodily emphasis in both Frankenstein and in feminist theory and of Spinoza’s emphasis that emotions and liberation from false ideas (such as the inferiority of women) are significantly tied to the bodily nature of the emotions and imagination. One could well chart the mental development of prejudicial attitudes in some individual with a reading along the lines of Spinoza’s ethical views.
The creature’s relationship with the family in the cottage in the woods, his reading of significant literature, his innocent if misguided desire for Victor to replicate the original work with the parts of a woman’s body, and of course his rejection from society, amongst other aspects to the fiction, all represent the creature as curious, desirous, and as bearing a burden of alienation due to a faulty and sinister notoriety. It is the “inadequate idea” of the people of the creature’s world that he is deemed evil when blameless for his creation and unrequested nature, and the negativity which results is probably unavoidable barring a greater possible love, i.e. adequate idea, that could arise to replace the hatred toward what most feel is perversion of nature. I would suspect Coleridge would hope it in “the living power…of all human perception” that he calls imagination for the society in Frankenstein to recognize the creature for his commonality and merits instead of judging with Spinozist imagination, which I better relate to Coleridge’s account of fancy, “a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space” (Wu 691-2). The creature himself with his strangest of origins is emancipated from that order, was the fancy of Victor Frankenstein. A person born alive can relate to the mind of the creature, but not to his body, so they cannot accept him as a true human equal.
Spinoza may well, having had a serious political philosophy, have forewarned had he thought about it against possible advances in cloning and genetic engineering experiments. He might have described the desire to breed by scientific manufacture smarter or less destructible bodies to be a perversion wrought by the spurious imagination upon our natural potential and drive. To want to ward off death or perfect our bodies by force seems to represent a great fear toward the more established methods of growth, learning, evolution, and dying ingrained in the chains of biological and social existence. Victor would have succeeded as a man had he gone back to his wife-to-be, Elizabeth, instead of forsaking an immanently active role in life, i.e. a life spent enriching the self and others born in the same fate (perhaps by studying science for the betterment of the living), for a passively engaged role in life, i.e. a life spent passively obsessing or unable not to express otherwise than obsession for the mysteries of death. There is a loss of freedom and a surplus of hate in a living based in lust imagining after the acquisition of success, product, and reward.
Think of the potential cultural problems with people changing genes to change skin colour to retrofit social images, or with people striving to eradicate mental illness traits by brain, genetic, and chemical modification with the possibility of making the species boring. These sorts of things are already beginning to happen in various regards (from skin whiteners to psychiatric meds and from selective abortions to lobotomies). When we disregard as undesirable or harmful the diversity of nature’s expressing which has built us into how we are, we run the risk of losing valuable differences and important limits. Of course people may claim to pursue these arguably destructive activities only to better their life. The essence of any living being is the endeavour to persevere in its own being, as Spinoza formulates his concept of conatus in the beginning propositions of part III, but the catch is if we twist our body and mind grossly out of our naturally evolved shapes and proportions, then we might destroy ourselves, as we learn from Spinoza’s basic physics in part II.
While The Ethics primarily aims to teach about the deep nature and about ethics for the human mind, imagination, and emotion, as the Romantic writers I’ve sampled seem also to take as an aspect of their projects, I want to emphasize a connection to Romanticism that I have only gave hints toward. I want to specify more precisely Spinoza’s link to contemporary ecological philosophy that shines an interesting light on the naturalist, environmentalist-like perspectives of the Romantics. I just mentioned one of the links, Spinoza’s physics in part II, “On the Nature and Origin of Mind”. The most interesting axioms are about composite bodies, which are united formations made from simple bodies, whose description very closely relates to Newton’s three great laws of motion of point masses. I think it is valuable to have Spinoza’s careful and precise words to ponder (pages 74-75):
Definition: When a number of bodies of the same or different magnitude form close contact with one another through the pressure of other bodies upon them, or if they are moving at the same or different rates of speed so as to preserve an unvarying relation of movement among themselves, these bodies are said to be united with one another and all together to form one body or individual thing, which is distinguished from other things through this union of bodies.
Lemma 4: If from a body, or an individual thing composed of a number of bodies, certain bodies are separated, and at the same time a like number of other bodies of the same nature take their place, the individual thing will retain its nature as before, without any change in its form.
Lemma 5: If the parts of an individual thing become greater or smaller, but so proportionately that they all preserve the same mutual relation of motion-and-rest as before, the individual things will likewise retain its own nature as before without any change in its form.
Lemma 6: If certain bodies composing an individual thing are made to change the existing direction of their motion…and keep the same mutual relation as before, the individual thing will likewise preserve its own nature without any change of form.
Lemma 7: Furthermore, the individual thing so composed retains its own nature, whether as a whole it is moving or at rest, and in whatever direction it moves, provided that each constituent part retains its own motion and continues to communicate this motion to the other parts.
This could be a list of ideas pulled right from a general description of biological structures and of homeostasis, the balancing act or “same mutual relation” of an organism or ecosystem’s structure relative to the chemical components of the biological form of that “individual thing” that exchange between the thing and other things or between the thing and the environment, such as eating ‘food’ or breathing ‘air’. These propositions present Spinoza as possessing a very profound and intricate talent for reasoning about the nature of organisms. If his “intention had been to write a full treatise on body [or biology, he] should have had to expand [his] explications and demonstrations”. Philosophers of deep and social ecology have done just that, following Spinoza’s interesting and now to be understood as psycho-biological understanding of the emotions and human freedom: emotions are biological organizations of our body that portray our interactions with other mindful bodies, and freedom is the power to actualize our pre-evolved and still evolving biological and psychological power, which distinguishes us as human.
Some of the Romantics were keen to note in their industrializing societies that basic, stable, and necessary patterns in the living networks of Earth’s diversity were threatened by human activity, i.e. by the activity of our imagined and invented goals. They were also to various extents aware of the amazing, wondrous interdependence of living things. Dorothy Wordsworth, in her journals, spoke eloquently of nature: “…so divinely beautiful as I never saw it. It seemed more sacred than I had ever seen it, and yet more allied to human life” (Wu 585). She felt intimately connected to nature’s beauty, which is just the expression of itself, ultimately. It was perfect, in itself, and not because of any desire or ambition of her fancy to exploit it for her own ends. She also demonstrates that people in this era must have been starting ever more to notice, virtuously, the networks of life’s bounty and to notice, sadly, the sick advancement of human industrial economy: “an old man almost double…said leeches were very scarce partly owing to this dry season, but many years they have been scarce. He supposed it owing to their being much sought-after, that they did not breed fast, and were of slow growth” (Wu 586, my emphasis). This reveals an understanding and compassionate attention to the mutual relations of living things with humanity interacting, a desire to preserve the beings of nature and “hear the peaceful sounds of the earth” (Wu 587, her emphasis).
William Blake wrote poems with intimations of ecological and philosophical relation to Spinoza. First I will express the philosophical relation: the “giants” in Blake’s quote in the epigram of this paper remind me well of Spinoza’s two (really, infinite) overarching attributes by which we fundamentally understand the chains of being. Any particular body or mind in the world’s “sensual existence” is a particularization and instantiation following the giants’ all-originating nature or, precisely, the archetypes of extended and thinking substance. Blake’s title for this poem is “A Printing House in Hell”, hinting to me an image of the attributes as the plate and impressions used in the printing press of existence (Wu 212). Like Spinoza, Blake may hold that “God only acts and is in existing beings or men” (Wu 213). Second, some of Blake’s poetry also has an ecological dimension I can compare to Spinoza’s system. He asks in “The Tyger” “Did he who made the Lamb make thee? … What immortal hand or eye/ Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” (Wu 198). This poem calls to my mind Spinoza’s relation between “reality” and “perfection” and the relation between “good” and “evil”. To Spinoza, perfection and reality are names for the same thing, ultimately, just that perfection is often a word fancifully used to describe a perspective-oriented judgment whereas reality means actuality. Similarly, good and evil are mainly fancifully perspective-oriented but also refer, in reality, to the structure of relation between one thing in reality and the next. Blake notices that one idea of God, creation, perfection, and good implies that there is a paradox in the creation of a Tiger, which is an evil to the Lamb. As an even simpler question, we could ask why bodily pain at all exists if the origin of the whole world is perfect good. Blake, however, isn’t really asking this question; he always means much more than he says, often the opposite of what his words seem to point out. I think Blake’s interpretation is like Spinoza’s: the “Tyger Tyger burning bright” is simply a resilient expression of nature’s ultimate power to forge from the godly “hammer…chain…furnace…anvil” of pure, infinite existence (Wu 198). I think the appropriate answer to Blake’s question is resolutely that no one would dare to create such a dangerous beast, save for Nature exerting primal, diverse freedom.
I wanted here to talk especially about Spinoza’s connection to the age of the Romantics. I think I have succeeded in demonstrating some significant parallels between Romanticism and Spinoza’s system. I have connected him to Romantic philosophies of mind, intellect, and imagination (in Samuel Coleridge), to Romantic notions of emotion, blessedness, and community (in Mary Shelley), to Romantic ecological understanding (in Dorothy Wordsworth), and to Romantic ecological philosophy (in Blake). From here, I could move further into the future, relating Spinoza to the cultural and intellectual developments (and degradations) that have taken place in the history after the era of Romanticism. I touched on that in my discussion of Frankenstein, but could go on, space permitting, to discussions of twentieth century metaphysical, social, and ecological philosophies and movements, such as Fritjof Capra’s work, who is quoted in my epigram, that have interesting relations to both the Romantic impulse and Spinoza’s philosophy, and that demonstrate Spinoza’s and the Romantics’ influence to human thought is still very relevant in today’s social and ecological conditions.
Works Cited
Blake, William. A Memorable Fancy [A Printing House in Hell]. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Wu. 212-213. --“The Tyger.” Wu. 197-198.
Brownlow, Timothy. “Only Connect”. Essay. Romantic Circles—Romanticism, Ecology, and Pedagogy. Online publication. 30 Mar 2008 .
Capra, Fritjof. “Ecology and Community”. Brochure. Center for Ecoliteracy. 5 Dec. 2005 .
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Chapter 7”. Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions. Representative Poetry Online. 2005. University of Toronto. 25 Mar. 2008.. --“Chapter 13”. Biographia Literaria. Wu. 691-692.
Richards, Robert J. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Spinoza, Baruch. The Ethics and Selected Letters. Trans. Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1982.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. “Introduction”. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wu. 279.
Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Grasmere Journals. Wu. 585-588.
Wordsworth, William. Preface to Lyrical Ballads [extracts]. Wu. 525-527.
Wu, Duncan ed. Romanticism—An Anthology. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. ]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000020.htm2009-07-01T18:39:23Z2009-07-01T18:39:23ZNovelty and change are good.I am down. I don't want to be as inactive anymore.I am down. I don't want to be as inactive anymore.I await what will happen to NCN. I have been growing on my own, not visiting much, and I have still been growing. I liked it when I was on here a lot, and I have only more to add now that I have been elsewhere.
Let's keep making the new civilization...... network!
Yes. I will post a new essay soon. I will try to be more active. I enjoy this "service" where we have a meeting opportunity. I have been 'inactive' but I do stop by now and again. Peace all!
Brenden
p.s. http://www.mediafire.com/DecibalSalad
it is my music. enjoy.]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000018.htm2009-03-01T11:08:44Z2009-03-01T11:08:44ZLife for Living (essay on Cultural Psychosis) by Brenden MacDonaldThis essay was written over the last few years, touched up several times. Enjoy and be informed!This essay was written over the last few years, touched up several times. Enjoy and be informed! For what do the world and its life exist? I hope to live for my life, and therefore for the life around me that supports my every breath and need to express. What do we seek by name of freedom? I seek freedom to communicate and enjoy my ability to perceive meaning. I detest the “freedom” to be paid wages for bills to pay. What are we to make as our social objective, or in other words, what form of balance between desires should we value as the basis for peaceful relation? A prevalently lived out response to these questions is destroying diversity in our ecosystems and societies.
There are many inadvertent murderers that lack awareness as to resist behaving inappropriately; indeed they lack awareness of behaving with deadly results. They do not understand they are hurting themselves and others. This last statement indicates mental illness is present clouding their minds. Just as schizophrenics can be swayed by deluded confusion and inadvertently strike out at their self and environment, so can “normal people.” My position in this essay is that something inadvertent has occurred in the general thinking of humanity, and that this is what has led us to striking out at a delicate web that simply cannot withstand the activity considered as desirable in our general thinking.
The primary difference between schizophrenia and what I name here as cultural psychosis is that in more ways symptoms in the first mainly comprise an internal syndrome, and thus schizophrenia is more related to our bodies and can be helped thru medicine. Cultural psychosis on the other hand comprises symptoms mainly acted out interpersonally. The context for this psychosis is not the context of biochemistry, but language itself, our bridge between persons and foundation for culture. To describe a whole society as culturally psychotic then means to say that that society at large identifies with the world thru language that is disconnected from appropriate interpretations of reality.
“To dissolve in the primordial matrix of life, this is sanity.” These words call out to the Western traditional and current global socioeconomic systems, words from Henryk Skolimowski in an essay entitled Forests as Sanctuaries. Such a social context exists in our world that we regularly condone such practices as depriving opportunity and health to our children and their children by means of environmental and social destruction for profit, if not indeed rape and pillage for profit. I refer to both our technological residues and our desperate condition of social relations. With wars of various kinds of genocide occurring worldwide, we must consider we have the wrong agendas!
Even though this idea is not defined by any widely accepted psychological, anthropological, or sociological theory, I think our society has become culturally psychotic. I have no widely accepted theory to mention, but I for one have come to see along with Riane Eisler that our “dominator style” of interaction is the primary source of warfare and oppression.
I also believe Terrence McKenna in what he said in Food of the Gods of conscious purpose in this unfolding life, that there will be more beauty and ecstasy possible when we embrace an “archaic revival” in relation to what Riane Eisler described as a “partnership” society, one which embraces compassion and sustainability in peaceful relations, those between ecosystem and humanity and between every human. We probably need that kind of society to be heartened enough for desiring and appreciating the profound art of life.
Ecologists, artists, scientists, and activists have by my standards adequately sought by various approaches to demonstrate a rhythm of peace that is basic and accessible compared to our world’s warring, so I need not here specify evidence such as centuries of peace and vast artistic, spiritual, and technological evolution in partnership societies and partnership activity within dominator societies. Riane Eisler did this brilliantly in The Chalice and the Blade. A position in this essay is that ancient dominator systems of thinking were flawed, or psychotic, in terms of their approaches to peaceful relation, and that is why we describe recorded history as the rise and militaristic fall of empire-civilizations. Otherwise, our world would not have seen so many urgent crises and disparities. Let us proceed to assess how this dominator social value is expressed to see if we can find ways to ‘dissolve in life’ and overcome insanity. We need to change in order to survive on Earth.
Personally, I am more philosophically scared of never overcoming differences than I would be of all out nuclear and bio-chemical/biological warfare (during which I would be more mortally scared for my life.) At least after that, we would not in heart, I believe, have a choice except to cooperate if any tattered beings survived at all. Never overcoming differences would make conscious experience depressed and suicidal, and indeed conflict between our thinking systems and social or ecological ways of health possibly led to the initial delusions surrounding the holocausts and near-nuclear-fallouts of past and present societies. What is it about our thinking systems that builds flaw into how our social systems interact with themselves and the world?
Now, if at the widest and most horrendous levels of human interaction our thinking systems allow entire organized nations, transnational corporations, and religions to condone war, ecological death, and oppression in the name of “freedom, growth, and truth”—we ought to expect aberration and pathology in the narrower levels of human interaction. We ought to expect to see the large scale decay of whole social institutions as contextually defined by the small scale creators and maintainers of those institutions.
We ought to expect that things are really farg’d up in all sorts of human relationships at the level of interpersonal contexts. That our society at large behaves by accepted convention in a culturally psychotic manner, as evidenced by injustice and strife, suggests that many “normal” individuals behave pathologically due to dogmatically learned and excessively expressed dominator values. The primary symptom of cultural psychosis is the expression of systemic disorganization in thinking that entails a drastic misinterpretation of the needs of the world, as illustrated in behaviours exemplified by our socio-ecological tyrannies. I am guessing a large majority of individuals hearing this now were born in such a context that they were routinely taught to communicate and understand in culturally psychotic ways or, in other words, excessively dominator-style influenced ways.
Let us test that premise: you likely agree with me that freedom, growth, and truth are amiable. Well, working with that, growth on Earth occurs to life in the truth of freedom with many options for symbiosis! Let us proceed with the way I’ve used these terms into an abstract view of Earth and human life. I wonder how this ‘truth’ about Earthly life’s natural ‘growth,’ by means of ‘freedom’ in living, equates to commonly held aphorisms, such as “there is no free lunch,” “no pain, no gain,” “another day, another dollar,” “just bill me,” and don’t forget ‘another rat race to the daily grinder’ if you kindly let me add to two familiar phrases. The relationship between these aphorisms and the words freedom, growth, and truth is not beautiful enough to even be deemed paradoxical; they are simply expressive of an unreasonable and delusional interpretation occurring in an individual’s linguistic relationship with the world and others. Do you agree that the true nature of life is to grow in an awesome freedom, even if not understanding my diagnosis of contemporary global culture?
You see, in the long term the sunlight hits Earth and then the plants need to give us food or they will not survive in many cases and we will not survive having not eaten. Symbiosis seems to be a predominant order of Earth’s healthy life. Instead of “working for the result of pay as a means of living,” “cooperate for life as a means of experience.” Reducing your life to affairs of cost-based contexts shows an example of culturally psychotic thought at the interpersonal level, and paying to live and knowing only costs and low wages does not dissolve one into life.
Interpersonally, our social value as beings has become a crude matter of economic worth, a matter of hours we must with fear of starvation give to others, and a matter of things in nature we find and withhold from others who need them, until a time being when (essentially) imaginary numbers have rolled our bank account’s way. In the conventional scenario of “needing money for living,” I am reminded of psychological ideas about communication recognizing that language as naturally expressed often denotes a perception of context and of dynamic processes of communication. An example to make this familiar with you is a person who says “they make me angry and sad.”
In this language the person denotes his or her perception of the process of emotion and action generation, namely that others are to be held accountable for one’s internally generated response to what’s happening. This is in effect a proposal of a very specific Newton-like cause-effect psychological mechanism of an instinctual kind. Avoiding the severe philosophic argument of mind-body duality and nurture-nature duality for a paper concerning social values, I will here proceed from a notion of this living universe as a free will zone, so the claim ending the preceding paragraph does not convince me.
Rather, “I respond to them with anger and sadness” when for example confronted by communication that denies my freedom. Those responses are warranted by the communicative purpose of sending a message to others so they can know, understand, and help me with carrying actions forth. We have not so benign and fatal a situation as “they simply control the responsibility for my actions and feelings.”
We can draw formal analogy to the ideas surrounding “needing money for living” as we have indication of interpersonal communications disconnected from the relevant reality. Just as we do not literally have mechanical “buttons to push” that let other people control our every emotion and response, the results of life do not rely upon a cosmically-ordained-as-necessary financial transaction, life for money instead of life from sunlight, blooming naturally. Life is not “paid for” by anything to grow; that would be a malapropism uttered by the ignorant.
Likewise it is ludicrous to say there are “no funds” for a given human endeavour. This claim of “no funds” is a linguistic run-around, a psychological self-brainwashing that in reality implies not enough willingness and desire for an endeavour in upper levels of conscious networks to make action-executive decisions for a workforce to “carry it out” (they got billions to look for and carry rocks out of mines.) I am talking for example about political leaders and chief executive officers not caring enough about investing energy and resources into the environmentally sustainable technologies. They sputter “sorry, there are few too little funds to exist,” and maybe God foregoes salvation until the final payment for your soul has transacted. Whoops, that was supposed to be the devil, not the good guy charging you your life excessively! Yuck! Only an economic system based from a pervasive ethical egoism symbolized externally as money would have this world where children are not simply fed.
Maybe, if you do not agree and instead think it is a priori necessary that you must pay for lunch and you think our form of economy is legitimate, and if you disagree it is stipulated by conscious convention with terrifying consequences, you are likely also to be in steadfast denial of your possible cultural psychosis. I know I am yet recovering, and I even have a job to pay for university education! Talk about cognitive dissonance! (I urge you; talk about it! Communication about understanding helps us respond to the needs of our world!) I want to work for free at being a good human. Will I starve? If you do not understand this wording and argument to begin at all to consider it, then we are in a scarier predicament of language than I thought!
That was a test; remember? I was attempting to test a premise that you may have been born into cultural psychosis, and I illustrated this using a comparison between two situations where we are flawed in thinking, the situation where one thinks others are responsible for their feelings and the situation where one thinks money is more than a stipulation: a necessary component to achieving our needs. This situation of symbolic bondage exemplifies the primary symptom I have identified as belonging to cultural psychosis, and I’d like you to try to identify more: a disconnection from relevant reality concerning peaceful relation, how we abstractly “deal” with each other, to mutter another dirty word of our psychotic culture. You may be inclined to describe myself in these terms for seeming so pretentious, but remember the ecologists, activists, scientists, and artists who have sought to demonstrate the flaw in thinking I am speaking to. We embody a growing cultural murmur of cultural healing with very little resistance except for the philosophic/ideological variety, and we are consistently gaining support from more of Earth’s citizens.
Today, a very limited few openly resist the idea that a continually healthy ecosystem would be good for human life, even if we do not yet see the answer to the problems posed by the untied states of environmental decay and greedy individuals incorporated. We support the environment even if we do not agree there indeed is an inappropriate conscious purpose expressed by human choice that underlies the problems. I have argued that we were born into harmful misinterpretation about living reality, because I do not want to think of my social brethren just as cruel and intentionally hostile to others in their world. As our mentally ill were once considered just flawed or willingly insane, we now recognize such illness as representing more pressing forces than simply character defects.
We all know living and healthy eco- and social-systems are important although many do not understand or accept the problems that face them, and I foresee inevitable and ongoing changes until more endorse the idea that a peaceful relations based in saner concepts of freedom, growth, and truth will be good for us. That is, emerging is a system of thinking about others based in the ecological concepts and this is good for human life. Pursuit of the nonliving (like for stockpiles of gold, oil, and abstract impersonal wealth) are quite responsible for environmental and social disregard, and this deficit of sane activity is actually nurturing a butterfly of social ecological revolution. This is not a new idea, yet nonetheless urgently required at greater depths in our world.
It might sound strange to refer to greed as part of a cultural psychosis instead of as character defect, but I wonder how greed could not be wrapped in the symbols of a mind in its listening to its desires. Because we are so encultured and enlanguaged as we are as children, culturally psychotic individuals might not have a situation of aware command in their lives. (I know myself to have endured much confusion in remembering simply how to breathe fully while society taught me how to know many things to buy.) Eco-dissonant actions may emerge from latent preconceptions of our symbolic thoughts about the world.
Our strain of cultural psychosis holds inconsistent with the natural aims of symbiotic life yet those afflicted often retain exuberance and love for experience. They become overwhelmed and obsessed with thought patterns that are acted out as to appease reckless desires for sensory experience and this psychosis entails a misperception and dysfunction in our relationship with Earth. Such individuals see the world in a narrow light of “resources for making wanted stuff,” and they are limited by their refusal to acknowledge the urgency of achieving sustainable living and limited by refusal to acknowledge the nature and needs of intricate biological networks.
One narrow light, merely in language and of no effective substance, the culturally psychotic use to illuminate the topic of worldly life is insistence that money holds the world together and makes things happen. Belief in money’s necessity is like belief in other’s supreme power over your well-being or actions because you might tend to respond in certain ways to specific messages and objects (think advertising and shopping).
These confusing social values imply a tacit agreement to put, in place of simply living, being confined without resistance to tenets of symbolic stipulation. We have habits of language battened to biological needs now shadowed by the malformations of language and self-concept. The biological needs are accurately substantial whereas our stipulation delusional of “you won’t eat until you pay me” or even worse, “you will die unless you meet my expectations of you to constantly and forever use my symbols to direct your life.” With cultural genocide, oppression, and slavery in nearly every region of “civilized” AND/OR “developing” planet Earth, I hope we recognize our global system as sick, culturally psychotic, and disconnected from workable peaceful relations. Insane are our symbols and language, shared experience, and global economic agendas. I don’t have enough money for life though I have enough life for living! ]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000017.htm2008-08-26T04:23:23Z2008-08-26T04:24:49ZThe Bird Cage of SpiritThis poem I wrote over the last several years, editing it slowly.
I hope you enjoy it and learn something from it!
It is about my experience of schizophrenia and what I feel like inside myself: like a beautiful bird who could be flying but whose spirit is trapped in a cage.
I don't feel l...This poem I wrote over the last several years, editing it slowly.
I hope you enjoy it and learn something from it!
It is about my experience of schizophrenia and what I feel like inside myself: like a beautiful bird who could be flying but whose spirit is trapped in a cage.
I don't feel like I'm trapped now, except in the society which I mention in the poem. But I'm an activist and a writer, so I have ways to the means with which to interact with that society, hopefully changing it for the better!!
Without further ado, here is the poem:My mind breaks things apart and sequences impossible order to the meaningfully spontaneous. I perceive a strange message conveying while break-mind intervenes, inadvertently, “breaking the spirit’s focus from mind and body,” one sense I have of schizophrenia. Blinded by internal events too intense, I easily wander lost seeking reasons outside for my beautiful dreaming deep within.
A shared realm entertains transformation, and I abide by the dynamic of biology, mind, emotion, and soul. Those reversed call for freedom, response, articulation, and creativity.
If I ever forget my spirit, my freedom, and reduce merely my dimensions to three, break-mind squeezes my breath closed, forces a halt. I needed to accept a cosmic origin, that I'm not just a meaningless chance. If this world follows only physical mechanism, and no soul-space has a you-essence, where could real love live and who’d wait for true love?
To escape the clutches of unstopping nihilist reduction in this real struggle for sane meaning and in this yearning for my source, my mind found a door to open and I could let in my imaginings, to find the embrace of spontaneous expression. And I could watch on this side of the door, as this side of the world did turn into a magic poem I could read. The door to spirit slid open for me, and I could disappear out there completely, until then leaving it open, letting the cool and warm airs of spirit fill my world, airs of that open world that help fill physics with life, with vitality, with my breath ongoing, for the drawing and passing of air entices life into our midst. Pursue the lessons, oh, the joys, of symbiosis!
Schizophrenia for me has been a war against myself and those devices planted in my brain, but hold on, because I am not paranoid! I planted them myself; they’re devices for repression and devices for delusion. One invents a device when a method of thinking is discovered, a method to organize meaning. Keeping in mind that I’ve never been able to well organize my room, my sentences, or organize my future, one could easily see the potential confusion for my mind released to wild nature. I feel at odds with my environment, extremely feel odd for sure. Do you want to know my biggest delusion? I believed our society was one grand illusion, for I couldn’t believe in extreme impiety, the kind of society itself broken from reality, the kind of society abhorrent to social, emotional, or racial inclusion, a society that stomped Earth’s biodiversity and stomped on fellow global citizens in holy wars of greed and creed. I became so deluded, because I wouldn’t believe in true evil. I made up a story that some god had weird plans, and now forgetting that, I still won’t agree to see evil thru to its end.
Please: if you dig this poem, go to dance and sing some music, and make love, communicate. In my waiting out storms schizophrenic, I longed to experience this world’s sunlight again. Feel the amazing release of your light, deeply profound in every moment because, really, you see, I’ve been meaning to explore and surrender to experiential discovery.
Gaia asks for tears, you pheonix, so heal Earth with love on a never-ending quest. Seek freedom in the sadness for the beauty that we are; go emerge, you can fly free from your cage.... ]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000016.htm2007-12-01T18:59:29Z2007-12-01T19:00:25ZInsights toward SanityThis essay is about my case of schizophrenia, some interpretation of my symptoms, and some reflections about how to be healthy as a schizophrenic.This essay is about my case of schizophrenia, some interpretation of my symptoms, and some reflections about how to be healthy as a schizophrenic.My first doctor, a practicing psychiatrist, tells me I am an excellent case of schizophrenia, high-functioning and well-adjusted. She told me that I’m lucky for my ability to converse in psychiatric discourse at a somewhat intellectually matched level with her. She said she’s never known a patient who was so knowledgeable and en-languaged about his condition; in addition, before I got very sick, I had always done well at school, had been open to volunteering in my school and community, and had also possessed a healthy dose of teenage angst to change my world. Before I saw any doctor for it, I had already self-diagnosed and learned much on my own, feeling that schizophrenia intriguingly and weirdly challenged my mind, at least before I totally lost connection with reality.
Schizophrenia is a chronic form of psychosis, described by psychiatrists as a drastic disconnect from socially shared mental and emotional reality. The presence of delusions and hallucinations characterizes psychosis. Delusions are persistent, often destructive beliefs held onto in spite of any provided rational evidence to the contrary. For example, I had a delusion once that weather like the wind could be directed by my thoughts. Hallucinations on the other hand are perceptions that occur to an individual’s senses, but which are not really based in an external stimulation of the senses. My delusion about the wind was not a hallucination because I really felt the wind moving. A dream, for instance, is technically a hallucination, because what we see in a dream is not really where one physically sleeps. For the schizophrenic, voices and strange objects might be perceived just like when one is dreaming, but these perceptions occur in waking life when there is no outer source for them. The difference between delusions and hallucinations is the same difference between belief and sense perception. The two relate as perceiving events through the senses provides material for a belief about events to form. This idea figures into my overall ideas on the subject of schizophrenia in a significant way.
Before I was severely ill, my mind slowly filled with weirdness. I remember during my teenage angst that I felt a need to express certain views, but I felt none would listen to what I most wanted to say. I felt alone and developed a habit of imagining myself in conversation with the others that I really wanted to speak to. It was a tactic to test out concepts and simply explore by myself what I wanted to say, since I did want to say a lot. It occurred to me eventually that I almost literally heard speech of my friends and argumentative quarries when I imagined their responses. I thought in isolation about what exactly I might say if I were to open up and express issues important to me. I would go for a walk out back behind my house into the forest, find a spot, and pace back and forth while imagining and muttering under my breath both my words and the words of others. The experience gave me an eerily realistic sense of meaning that was exchanged and developed through the imagined dialogue.
This progressed until I could not shut off the perception of imagine-hearing others make statements, even when with them at school. I began to make up responses and follow-through statements in the direct midst of actual conversation. It happened when I would walk by a group that was talking, and the “sound” of these extra statements began to feel a lot like my own thoughts but attached to other personalities than my own. I had been reading ancient to new-age spirituality as well, and at the weirdest times, I imagined with some disbelief that I might actually share thoughts with others. The characters seemed consistent, and the thoughts kept appearing in my mind without any impetus or desire of mine to think about them, but I also didn’t resist when I thought I could learn from it as I initially intended by testing out hypothetical conversations.
My last year of high school in 2002 went like this. Later that summer, however, a real trauma occurred(1), and I became even more disconnected from reality than during school. I gained so such emotional stress that while not going into the story, I can say a situation completely debilitated my already faltering psyche. I could no longer contain my already rampant imagination or maintain rationality. I started hallucinating extremely, totally blinking out with huge memory gaps and not noticing even several days going by—at that point I desperately needed help. And, it was at that crisis point that the struggle with my delusions truly began. How in high school I became prone to psychosis will elucidate the later points I make about schizophrenia. I think it is important to keep in mind that inadvertent ideations tend to confound schizophrenics; right before I got sick and in the midst of it, I felt I could not at all stop the flood of my thoughts.
In a state of recovery since becoming psychotic in the Fall of 2002, I attest to the following point: without many kinds of help, I would not have had the ability when totally convinced of my delusions and hallucinations to overcome them. A nightmare of horrors deeply daunts the individual who becomes severely schizophrenic. I happened to be watching TV the late night that the ambulance took me away, and at that crisis point, I thought that the television images and words were talking metaphorically about me. Around the same time, I experienced hallucinations of people that I talked with, so vivid that I could see colour in their eyes, feel their breath, and feel the touch of their hands and arms. With schizophrenia, an individual experiences profound changes in the function of his or her mind, and these changes have a potential to disrupt mental life by making it unmanageable and unbearable; they no longer share the reality had by everyone else. Luckily, the people I hallucinated were friendly and non-threatening to my emotions, which was a relieving way to emerge from the trauma that occurred within real events(1). Although, talking to people who weren’t there and unaware of what was happening, I was in a sick state. Psychosis intensely affects perception and imagination, leaving one susceptible to startlingly vivid hallucinations and intensely held delusions. Recovery must be guided with sensitive care, because insight toward sanity for a psychotic hardly derives from the distortion of insanity. All I can remember is one room and its two windows, a forest I sought out of the top of a mostly opaque window and a hall with desks around the corner out another. The door was kept locked unless I was given a pill to take. I was there a whole week, and I remember taking the med only once. They said (as I later heard) that I was often seen talking and looking around as though interacting with people. Apparently, I was cooperative with treatment, but I had no idea where I was. A grounded mind supported by good knowledge is the essence of recovery for a schizophrenic. I needed grounding alright. For the times I remember, I felt like I needed electrical grounding.
Recovery began for me as it does for most Canadians that become psychotic: I received the attention of a psychiatrist and then encountered psychiatric methods of treatment, beginning first and foremost with medication. Doctors, informed by science and not personally swayed by the torrents of a psychosis, have useful knowledge, and their help for grounding the afflicted begins in giving them a medicine. Anti-neuroleptics or anti-psychotics, as they are called, most directly aid schizophrenia by controlling what has become the chaotic chemistry of the brain, full of processes that doctors can associate with hallucinations and delusional impulses. Different drugs help various individuals by balancing their brain chemistry, thereby helping to balance their minds by controlling and limiting what manifests to perception. This medical knowledge grows and improves the chance of recovery for schizophrenics who have access to the most effective drugs(2).
Medicine at least allows recovery to begin, but the afflicted individual must, I believe, attain also a coherent mental framework to make chemical treatment effective. No schizophrenic individuals will be okay if given only adequate doses of some pill but are then deposited in the street before working through their onset and lingering psychosis. I responded well to medicine and my hallucinations faded. Medicine indeed helped to settle my teetering mind, but much was yet amiss.
After my initial hospitalization and “settling” closer to sanity as the nurses and doctors described, I was still convinced by some strong beliefs that I only later learned referred to the unreal. I realized at some point that real people had not seen the things I hallucinated, but I still thought the visions were more substantive than waking dreams. Delusions still swayed my judgment to a bad end, for example discontinuing the stabilizing med. Utterly convinced by my experience right before the first ambulance ride to a psych ward, I consciously supported my delusions. After watching TV that time feeling so powerfully that it was about me, I readily convinced myself any image through my senses could carry a metaphorical message like the TV had seemed to. In the hospital, medication ended the strong and active hallucinations that had onset during severe psychosis, but an inclination to form delusions remained. I did not yet doubt the hallucinatory images or feelings that had occurred, so like ghosts in my memory, the response lingered of looking for a message like the one imagined from the TV. Choosing to stop taking my med and spending a whole night watching TV again like that, I required a second hospitalization to “settle” again, but I started to recognize the presence of persistent delusions. They did not dissipate even as my heart and mind grew calmer and as my thoughts composed some measure of reason. Exploring the confused, I entered confusion, unable to understand. I needed more help than a pill, because even on it, I could inappropriately desire the alternative to its settling effect.
Where pills do not and cannot reach, I have found the mind responds to aberrant perception by intentionally creating and maintaining delusions. In recollection, many delusions and strange concepts came to me directly from trying to figure out or think through the weirdness of various hallucinations and feelings that invaded my unadjusted and untreated, schizophrenic mind. In the period during high school, feelings dwelled in me and led to preoccupations, which I think might have advanced the neural pathways needed for hallucination, my mental future at which the spontaneous inner conversations hinted. In the period during my hospitalizations, the perceptual symptoms grew more hallucinatory, and the near-delusions from high school evolved and shifted with my changing perceptions. The conversations and thoughts of others I imagined happening inside me during high school were overridden during psychotic onset by more intense feelings that a worldly separate thinker was communicating straight into my thoughts. The base perceptions underlying my beliefs changed drastically, in the nature of how thoughts appeared to my mind: the thoughts coursing through my mind grew even more intrusive and automatic. My explanations kept changing in a struggle. Instead of fake-talking in my head to my friends, or thinking I maybe heard my friends’ thoughts telepathically, I began to think my mind totally invaded by a foreign communicating entity or spirit.
Consider another case of strange perceptions: most people who ingest psychedelics to create hallucinatory images tend to avoid strange beliefs that persist after the chemicals are flushed from the system. When a person using a drug forgets that the drug causes what they perceive, they may become prone to cognitive disorder. Doctors describe “toxic psychosis” as a result of some drug use where the user “does not come down” as anticipated. People are susceptible in this way because they usually try to explain and understand objectively what is happening to them, which will not likely succeed for an experience not based at all in objective reality. Being literally convinced of a hallucination can prolong it chemically in the brain, I figure. I see an analogy: not knowing oneself is dreaming prolongs the perception of dreams or to say that more familiarly, discovering that oneself is dreaming often immediately rouses one from slumber. The brain works in mysterious ways and can make the mind strange when creating representations to the mind that are not based in sense stimulation.
Hallucinations for the schizophrenic generally occur over a far longer period of time than for a psychedelic user or a dreamer, so one afflicted tends to struggle a long and arduous time trying to reconcile a coherent worldview. Memory and thoughts of a drug user or dreamer can turn into specific albeit loony perceptions that are sometimes incredibly meaningful to the experiencing mind, and the long-term experience of schizophrenia fills a mind like some dreams do with meaning to comprehend or think about. The biggest problem I believe exists for schizophrenics in thinking the ‘waking dreams’ are real and in working on with ‘the faculty of reason’ to reinforce the imagined but inappropriate ideas of some principles or facts that are supposed by the schizophrenic to explain intrinsically bizarre or hallucinatory perceptions. I believe the delusional response requires deep psychological and cognitive treatment to offset perhaps years of intentional but unbalanced thought tendency. This is my best sense of my own case with schizophrenia at the very least, but I know it’ll hold to some others.
Because delusions are a mental response(3), any treatment can have little lasting effect until one is convinced of the truth despite being also swayed by feelings. For schizophrenics, some kind of truth or some insight must develop before they possibly clarify or abandon what is untrue and insane. Coherent thought breaks down when one believes totally in a different reality than the one shared, and reparation in logic and in understanding needs correct and true ideas as well informing the ill mind.
Faulty beliefs seem to me to form in articulate and rational-like streams of thought. They appear more verbalized into language and actively put together compared to odd feelings just bubbling up or absolutely bizarre hallucinations presenting themselves suddenly. For example, some people have intense paranoia and work hard to ideate complicated conspiracies because of a recurrent, unintentional feeling that they are being strangely stared at by complete strangers. After the peak of my own disarray, I continually perceived creepily profound meanings in ordinary statements, or built strange meanings myself into what I witnessed. I cannot yet comfortably watch TV without seeing at least a potential for the meanings that used to flow in with clear meaning to my mind as directly as I hope these words communicate my experience to you.
I thought for a while that every word I received could metaphorically convey a message, and this intense feeling gave me the reason to seriously speculate about an entity or aliens directly communicating with me. I thought some entity could reach through time to coordinate events to enfold me in a rapture of symbolic learning. No kidding! Reading, radio, TV, and conversation with others—these seemed to flow in a continuously meaningful and never-ending message to myself. Sometimes what people said took on such significance in my mind that I felt the extreme meaning I gleaned in some statements could be rationalized through the existence only of powerful, indeed omnipotent beings. I transferred at various points between the angst-ridden desires in high school to speak my mind toward the unavoidable perception of an intangible entity’s speaking of its mind through my consciousness. I would not imagine that the profound meaning could simply be in my mind, so I made up pseudo-theories that aberrant perception seemed to validate easily. I did not accept my own mind’s inner work, disposition, or personality, what have you, as the possible source for these feelings which were so strong.
Mine was a breakdown of interpretation. To understand what happens during the perception of events, people use language, or to say it another way, if asked we can usually give some words that clearly convey the sensed meaning of our experience. Similarly to ordinary speech, delusion formation in schizophrenia involves mentally active expression, but about a strange perceptual world. I’ve hinted consistently at a distinction between communicative expression and passive perception, and I find it is an essential distinction for me to investigate in my ongoing recovery from untruth. I keep clear to myself that there is a big difference between having a spontaneous thought or perception and then deciding which thoughts to nourish with faith in an external to me (like the entity). A schizophrenic must, to overcome, not only question whether what they actually see or actually hear is also actually real, but question as well whether they are thinking as clearly as they could be. Philosophy class makes me laugh when someone asks “what’s this thing people call reality? What if, really, all life is but a dream?” Hah, I’ve questioned that, but it dug way deeper.
In my mind I know that mainly good ideas, some given by friends or my doctor and some gained myself, have helped me sort through the surrealism and hold on to some sound reason. I attribute my recovery to many factors, but I want to emphasize the overcoming of delusions, reiterating it was hard because they stuck around far beyond medical treatment and awakening from hallucination. I’ll speak of one delusion I overcame and of how I overcame it: to avoid believing in higher beings (or whatever) to explain strange encounters of strange meaning with ordinary people, I held instead to the idea that my mind can quickly glean profound meanings. These meanings once seemed to specially arise for me, but genuinely, they arise from my mind. I now imagine a hyperactive subconscious in conversation with itself to be my mind when I get a little schizophrenic. This idea is so much more comfortable than thinking seriously and mysteriously that you (someone, anyone) are not truly yourself at least for a moment that another being, one interested in me, speaks through you. Weird, eh? With a mental choice I offer a weird part of my experience a poetic response instead of a delusional response. Luckily, I still get the old feeling of wonderful and exhilarating meaning sometimes, but a few insights toward sanity help me have these interesting experiences and also keep sane inside them.
Not every schizophrenic is so lucky with their course through the disorder. The Public Health Agency of Canada released(4) A Report on Mental Illness in 2002, the same year I was diagnosed. In the relevant chapter, it says “the chronic course of the disorder contributes to ongoing social problems. As a result, individuals with schizophrenia are greatly over-represented in prison and homeless populations.” Further, the report says between 2 and 3 out of 5 schizophrenics attempt suicide and about 1 succeeds. As a rough average, about 1 in a 100 individuals in the general population faces a life of schizophrenia. If Malaspina (the school I attend) had 8000 students, anywhere in the range from 45 to 140 individuals with the illness might walk by me daily on campus. My doctor asked me once to tell her if I had delusions that would not go away so she could consider raising my dosage of meds. She worries for me, because she knows from trying to help them that many schizophrenics never get over their lingering psychosis. I shared more of my own perception of how I’ve done so well because I consider my own mind more invaluable than my meds for stopping delusions.
I told my doctor this summer more thoroughly that the medicine never surely stopped the delusions, and she seemed sort of aghast for just a moment wondering if I had been lying to her about feeling better. The meds have stopped the most vivid hallucinations as well as allowed me to sleep, but the crux of my recovery conjoining these vital parts of it are recurrent choices of how to respond to strange feelings, and the delusional response weakens gradually. Sanity is with- in -sight, to play a little friendly word salad! Ah, I find so much joy when characteristics of schizophrenia, like a far-reaching imagination and play with language, two abilities which used to hurt my mind as symptoms, can now be used for beneficial expression. I would like more people to have a general knowledge about how delusions form, because I find the process so integral to individual suffering. It would be good for more people to know better how to engender that grounded mental framework that guides the disrupted and distorted individual to inner peace. We schizophrenics need real help out of illusions.
Footnotes: 1) A thorough enough account for understanding the events which took place goes quite beyond the scope of this writing, and exploring them would surely distract the reader from what I seek to emphasize. The events lacking mention do not pertain to what herein I have to say about schizophrenia and the delusional response. 2) Different drugs work with varying degrees of success for different individuals. My doctor says sometimes a mixture of various medications is necessary for some. 3) I allude to in discussion of my “high school conversations” but never explicitly state that sentences and words can appear in a hallucinatory fashion like when hearing voices in the head, but I do hold an important distinction between sentences that might pop into mind as hallucinations and between delusions which I primarily conceive as statements consciously derived by meticulous, reason-guided articulation about what might first pop into the mind unabated as raw perception or feeling. 4) The report can be found for reading online. ]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000015.htm2007-02-10T13:05:57Z2010-11-21T20:52:56ZTo Inspire an Adequate Response...This is a paper I wrote for my First Nations Literature class.
I haven't been around on NCN for a while and thought I should show my face and contribute something. Hello all!
I hope you appreciate the thoughts!This is a paper I wrote for my First Nations Literature class.
I haven't been around on NCN for a while and thought I should show my face and contribute something. Hello all!
I hope you appreciate the thoughts!
To Inspire an Adequate Response…
Joseph Dandurand’s play, Please Do Not Touch The Indians, conveys a dark history in Canada that many do not fully conceive the extent of. Cultures of colonization historically ac-cepted and sought to legally justify the forcing of most indigenous cultures in Canada into condi-tions today deemed deplorable, which writers like Dandurand explore. In his play that inspires respect for those impacted by past and present conditions, Dandurand subverts both colonial as well as contemporary patterns of oppression by exploring Canadian history from the telling per-spectives of characters who received the dark side of that history.
The characters of the play are one white tourist, three animals—a wolf, a raven, and a coyote—and two wooden Indians with an appearance “not quite traditional but more of a Holly-wood taste” (7). The overt plot of the play consists in “Tourist” emerging upon stage to represent the others in a medium like photography, painting, or film while ignorant that when offstage, the others communicate and reminisce upon events in their past. The characters other than the tourist are the tormented ghosts of devastated Native individuals who were deprived of peace by murder-ers of an oppressive culture. Throughout the play, the characters fondly remember bearable parts of their lives and later in the play painfully remember the events that ended their mortal lives. Via characters whose memories are archetypal of real abuses that occurred toward Natives, Dandu-rand teaches to his audience a dark side of Canadian history such as terrifying experiences that happened in residential schools and army-perpetrated massacres.
In his essay “The Hearts of Its Women: Rape, Residential Schools, and Re-membering,” Ric Knowles comments on what he interprets as a primary focus of First Nations Literature, not-ing that many Native playwrights have quoted the traditional Cheyenne saying that “[a] nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground” (Knowles 245). Knowles com-ments that
[the] most pervasive feature of current Native writing … seems to be the impact of “Resi-dential schools—past, present, and future” (18) on Native Children. These are the Chris-tian-run schools to which First Nations children were taken by force, removed from their communities, and denied access to their languages and cultures, by government decree for over a century from the mid 1800s until the 1970s. (Knowles 245).
That means some people currently alive have living memory of this disservice, but Joseph Dandurand is young enough that his knowledge of the greatest material abuses in Canadian his-tory come from the memories and stories of others. Perhaps, the greatest value of Dandurand’s writing comes in the very fact of his continuing to tell stories of abuse in history even when per-sonally beyond it, for unless people continually retell these stories of past colonization, some may lapse and hurt others again. In an essay that talks about the impact on children of colonization called “The Children of Tomorrow’s Great Potlatch,” Ernie Grey writes as a member in the Cheam band of the Sto:lo nation that “[we] dream of the day when First Nations people and whites will sit together to take part in a great potlatch. Before this happens, the whites must learn more of the First Nations history, because understanding is essential to create solutions and har-mony” (Grey 150). Immediately following this statement, Grey includes a quotation from Chief Joe Mathias that “[the] Indian Act of 1876 shattered the lives of the aboriginal people of Canada,” and Grey continues to state “those most profoundly damaged were the children of the First Na-tions people” (Grey 150, 151). Colonizers strove hard to disrupt healthy human growth.
Sister Coyote, a character of Dandurand’s play, represents this history as a child taken from home and put in school. Her heart stomped hard to the ground, Sister Coyote relates her ex-perience in the school, “being beaten and kicked around,” and then she describes a priest viciously raping her while telling her frighteningly gross lies: “he hurt me real bad, all the time telling me I was his gift from the lord and that I should never tell anyone. He raped me and then he smacked me across the face and told me to never tell anyone or else God would punish me” (49). This priest attempts to conquer Sister Coyote’s heart by crushing her to subordination by his desires and reduces her to such a state that she kills herself with a belt discarded by him while exploiting her.
Grey informs his reader with a quote from Dr. Neil MacDonald of the University of Mani-toba that when children were when taken from their parents’ shelter, they were “assigned a num-ber and unceremoniously herded into cattle cars for transport to the residential school” (Grey 151). Values of the kind pervaded in real life that in the play allowed the priest to attack and dis-miss the importance of Sister Coyote. Dr. Neil MacDonald wrote about an incident at one “Fall round-up” of children when they were taken to go to residential school:
The women ran alongside the cattle cars until they found their child or children. They grabbed the hands of their children and refused to let go, thus preventing the train’s depar-ture. The RCMP constables responded by climbing up the sides of the cars and stomped on the hands of the mothers, breaking their grips and some of their hands and fingers. (Grey 151-2).
All sorts of horrors abound in the colonizer’s historical treatment of First Nations people, horrors whose diversity and quantity forces upon one the realization that Canadian history in-volves entrenched systematic oppressions. “Real, material technologies of colonization,” the phrase Ric Knowles uses to describe rape and sexual violence, exist in many forms as shown by the preceding story and the story of Sister Coyote (Knowles 245). Spiritually dismissive atti-tudes—the kind acted upon Natives by the various modes of destructive colonization—run to-gether with assimilation, “ethnic cleansing[,] and cultural genocide” (Knowles 246).
Nothing but spiritually dismissive attitudes could result in a whole society systematically oppressing, injuring, and attempting to assimilate another. Wooden Woman, another tormented ghost of Dandurand’s play, relives her memories of being a Native mother at a time when “battle” went on—when dressed in “blue US cavalry” purposefully hunted Native groups to scalp and massacre any dark-skinned man, woman, or child they could find (42). In a culturally autobio-graphical vein that also imparts visceral emotions, Wooden Woman tells that “[the US cavalry] slit their throats, the youngest of the children, slit their throats and tossed their small harmless bodies into the hole” (48). She relives an attack as she hides with her child waiting for the dark-hearted men to find her. The attackers annihilate her sanity—frighteningly stomping her heart to the ground: “They were coming to kill me and take my hair. My child wouldn’t stop screaming so I took some dead leaves and gently pushed them into her mouth” (51). Eventually the crying child suffocates, which itself most powerfully torments Wooden Woman’s soul while in limbo with the other characters.
Colonial patterns of oppressors must include delusional self-rationales for acting out these torments, rationales which I refer to with the phrase spiritually dismissive attitudes. Colonialists needed to strongly imagine their Native hosts as worth very little in order to have the moral ability to so mercilessly ravage and malign. To feel sane while murdering or raping someone else, peo-ple who deem themselves “good and civilized” or at least “right” must force their minds to contort reality into severe delusions of dichotomy between self and other. Such a colonial dichotomy surely lent philosophical support to both the “legitimized” abuse upon Natives by Canadian law and the preservation of residential schools until the 1970s, within 35 years of today. Dandurand subverts colonial dichotomies of worthy human versus denigrated primitive by relating to us com-pelling first-person perspectives of innocent, intelligent Native people impacted and devastated by savage colonizers.
By informing his audience in a carefully symbolic way about this side of Canadian history, symbols which I’ll explain in the next paragraph, Dandurand also subverts something he per-ceives continuing to happen now. I have noticed a phenomenon that some people do not fully conceive the extent of a dark Canadian history, tending to believe Canada to be a forerunner of international peace with nothing under its belt but innocuous good will. A look within, however, such as the look given by Dandurand and the critics I have mentioned, reveals a great deal of so-cial decay that festers under the surface of everyday contemporary life. The most desperate colo-nial actions thrum in a time just now behind us. Today, our governments renounce such cultural decay, but I suggest contemporary values have not instantaneously and easily changed between generations. No reason other than to merely recite the past exists for Native playwrights to go back, again and again, to the subject of lingering suffering unless hazy, decayed contemporary values provide such a reason to tell stories that instruct societies away from destructive behaviour.
Whereas life memories of the Native characters in Please Do Not Touch The Indians pri-marily express the emotional hell perpetrated upon Natives by colonialism in the past, the charac-ter simply called Tourist most vividly symbolizes the contemporary persistence of sick values be-hind past atrocities. The title of the play is the same statement that reads on a sign initially hang-ing around Wooden Man’s neck, a kind of sign to tell tourists not to touch, because they might damage what they touch. Tourist spends much of his time onstage taking images of the Native characters while not knowing or touching at all upon the horrific lives they lived before becoming spirits in limbo. I think Tourist symbolizes intended efforts of the colonial project and can pro-vide insight into the strange phenomenon I discussed concerning Canadians not fully understand-ing the extent of suffering perpetrated through their history. I feel the presence of an analogy oc-curring somewhere between Tourist’s ignorance of the Natives’ deeper lives while striving to have a beautiful image to keep of them and the way contemporary Canadian society carries forth its history. I think Dandurand subverts contemporary social prerogatives by making a damned fool of Tourist, especially when at the end of the play he stunningly directs the Hollywood-ized enactment of the horrific massacre that Wooden Woman lost her life and child to. If elements of contemporary society genuinely are as negligent as Tourist in their evaluation of history and of cultural identities, then Dandurand subtly presents a strong case for a re-evaluation of contemporary social agendas.
As example of how contemporary Canadian society responds to its history, I have my own experience to offer. I went through elementary school instructed by teachers that Native culture was a) interesting to know about, b) worthy of respect, c) as good as other cultures and d) impor-tant to my Canadian heritage. Beyond seeing examples of art and technology and beyond doing crafts, I do not recall an equivalent amount of sincere discussion about highly problematic values that currently linger from a dark history of systematic cultural attack. Elizabeth Mary Furniss wrote her thesis dissertation for a doctorate of philosophy in the department of anthropology and sociology at UBC, and its name is In the Spirit of the Pioneers: Historical Consciousness, Cul-tural Colonialism and Indian/White Relations in Rural British Columbia (1997). She claimed “the power that reinforces the subordination of aboriginal peoples in Canada is exercised by ‘ordinary’ rural Euro-Canadians whose cultural attitudes and activities are forces in an ongoing, con-temporary system of colonial domination” (ii). On Vancouver Island having grown up in the rural town of Ucluelet (with a population around sixteen-hundred, a couple hundred of which are Na-tives mostly on a reserve) before living in the city of Nanaimo, I attest that I bear witness to more “subordination” in everyday racial attitudes in Ucluelet than Nanaimo, and I also attest that ‘both sides’ often construe their ideas as perfectly “ordinary” and reasonable. Issues of subordination sometimes entered secondary school classrooms, but I mainly remember being told dates of armed conflicts and being told about the activity of trade routes in distant regions. Although the official mandate is that Aboriginal and Euro-Canadian culture should peacefully coexist in Can-ada, I think the current state of moral affairs and the current state of public education lag and do not adequately supply the data and testimonial—such as Native authors like Dandurand convey—that will expose to youth the real problems opposed to a cultural peace.
I think we still linger near the beginning of a transitional period toward peace, considering residential schools ended only within 35 years of the present day. Canada is still discarding the oppressive, destructive values and learning the constructive, compassionate ones, and as long as stories keep spinning, we will learn. Luckily, First Nations Literature grows in popularity, and I see only Native writers that, like Dandurand, well know history and intentionally work with con-structive goals in mind toward a peace for those impacted in various ways throughout history and to this day. The history of our land and people reveals its shades, both light and dark, to us upon our today reaching—striving—beyond the causes of suffering in literature and charitable remem-brance.
...Please do not forget the Indians.
Works Cited Dandurand, Joseph A. Please Do Not Touch The Indians. Candler, NC: Renegade Planets Publishing, 2004. Furniss, Elizabeth. In the Spirit of the Pioneers: Historical Consciousness, Cultural Colonialism and Indian/White Relations in Rural British Columbia. Ottawa, Ontario: UMI Dissertation Services, 2001. Grey, Ernie. “The Children of Tomorrow’s Great Potlatch.” In Celebration of Our Survival: The First Nations of British Columbia. Ed. Doreen Jensen and Cheryl Brooks. Also BC Studies no. 89. 1991. Knowles, Ric. “The Hearts of Its Women: Rape, Residential Schools, and Re-membering.” Performing National Identities: International Perspectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre. Ed. Sherrill Grace and Albert-Reiner Glaap. Vancouver: Talon Books, 2003. ]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000014.htm2005-12-02T19:49:32Z2005-12-02T19:50:37ZWhat does it mean in? Exploring the domain of materialism.Hello there, you with eager free minds that some philosophers would tell you that you don't have. I've been busy busy with my second year of university, but I've written lots and would like to share. Here is my final essay for Phil 361 - philosophy of mind!
EnjoyHello there, you with eager free minds that some philosophers would tell you that you don't have. I've been busy busy with my second year of university, but I've written lots and would like to share. Here is my final essay for Phil 361 - philosophy of mind!
Enjoy
In this paper I intend to show that certain arguments about the nature of the mind need careful revision in their thinking of the world's substrate – that which we call the 'material.' I think that materialism can help make sense of this world and of minds, but not in the current state it finds itself. In this essay, I challenge the notion that materialism needs to mean that minds cannot exist in an efficacious way, and I challenge, for materialism to adequately make sense of the world and our place in it as made of matter, it will need to accommodate more in the concept of matter than a descriptive account of only physical structure colliding and moving around. I argue in the paper that there is an adequate material account, in the workings, for a world that behaves much as we physically observe and predict it to while at the same time conceiving that this material world can allow the decisions and awareness of an experience that we at least undeniably have linguistic descriptors and a sense of being in for. I think those descriptors are accurate and that the sense of being is beautiful and personal, and this shapes the intent behind the words of my essay to proceed in a such a way as to find that our sense of our life as developed can reflect the natural way we really are in the cosmos, that is indeed made of matter.
What does it mean to propose as contemporary science might that the understanding is sufficient that every human is "nothing but a physico-chemical mechanism" like philosopher David Armstrong does (Morton, 206)? It is bold of materialism to suppose all including mind consists of matter and its energetic and lawful state such that we could give "an account of the nature of the mind which is compatible" with materialism (Morton, 225).
However, it is a little reckless and, to be shown in this paper, unscientifically presumptive of materialism to suppose that 'matter', 'energy', 'material energy', or at any rate 'the effective and integral substance at hand' can only be physically mechanical and classically describable in its natural process – i.e. that statements about conscious selves, who are observed conjoined to a physical bodily structure yet who seemingly choose to act, are meaningless and irrelevant to the real dynamic mechanisms underlying the necessary processes of anything in existence. More than that, whatever the case may be our quite undeniably biological/living existence includes in the stronger use of the word a sense of entanglement of things that feel and think they are, and materialism needs to accommodate our experience of the world. In understanding a universe of matter, I wonder what 'a world inhabited by beings' means – what 'feeling music' might mean...
For lack of better terms, in my being and thoughts I contend that materialism is accurate insofar that it is ontologically compatible with the negative constraint upon any theory of a material world that it must formally contain a potential for (or be conceptually compatible with) the existence of real unities that feel that they're a certain way how one is occupying and aware of a physical existence almost like music being in. Science must not only be able to predict observations, but be consistent with all available observations, so that includes the observation of sentience, active conceptualization of events that occurs when interacting with the world, as occurs in the perspective of what we generally recognize as the sentient living. We need this conceptualization to know how to walk around a place, for instance. Sight of things is used to navigate. And things are matter. It needs to fit somehow.
This is not to say that all observations and concepts are of a physical world represented in forms made apparent to senses: our existence includes observations of an ideal world of events represented in forms apparent to another level than bodily sense, a different level of conscious content than the level of biologically structural sensations (e.g. retina rainbows, nose roses). Our empirical experience includes a sense of existing persons and meaningful, emotional relationship in addition to what are just observably structural (physical=enduring of spatial dimension, apparent beyond yourself) aspects of this world, all this energy. Keep in mind, no physicist can tell you what energy is that is said to underlie or become all things. Is it at least also an ability to change something, like we think of the dispositions of matter underlying the observations of something physical or like we appear to do from within our own bodies? I contend for materialism to be true that consciousness needs to be deemed an inherent and natural form of material energy in a state that is legitimately described as having awareness and self-direction, and I find it implausible to entertain notions that every sense of 'the world as material energy' excludes persons, feelings, desires as eliminative materialists pose.
If this is a problem, making a distinction between energies when either physically observable or conscious, we should observe that meaning and structure are evident in this world and are evidently energetic; both the structure and meaning of others that interact with us have the potential to change our body and mental consideration, as energy was roughly conceptualized above. To be ontologically compatible with persons, the specific task of materialism is then to understand how transforming, enduring physical matter can accommodate and transform because of flexible consciousness that is expressly non-physically observable yet still conceived of as essentially 'material' and that allows our bodies and social lives to endure, a matter of direct experience.
The question may be, for some, how matter the world we have may arise into forms that we can call conscious. How does matter function in a particular sentient way, as we evidently have human bodies interactive with reflection and seeming options for being ways; not just being such as seen: physical – how can matter be more than that, more than observable structure? Undeniably, matter must involve (at least seemingly) sentient choices; the world of matter is observed to be and sentience makes sense of the human world of art and emotion lived materially as we know it; we are materially conscious entities, by all reports and observations. Mental states exist and correlate with behaviour in a sensed meaningful way but the world is material and observations of the brain correlate to observed and reported behaviour as well; therefore mental states seem to be brain states, related to them somehow at least. There seems with the neurological evidence to be a necessary relationship implied between what is observed as structure in space and what we all have to be aware of. But what is the actual state of the brain – i.e. what is the form or nature of the material energy that is associated with our perceptions of the physical brain?
To answer this question we must first adequately understand what we mean by matter, because linking the mind to the brain requires understanding how certain forms of matter simultaneously exist with observable structure while sensing a conscious unity – i.e. forms of matter we call aware creatures. Understanding the nature of matter is to the materialist a way to have insight into the nature of mental states about one being in the material world – that is, knowledge of matter gives insight into our lives, i.e. finding out the nature of observably structural processes that are holistically organized into what's considered an individual that senses interactions of those structural processes as specially and meaningfully united in relationship and function. Thus, understanding matter's correlation to unities is the key to understanding how "matter dreams", as physicist and writer Fred Alan Wolf spoke in an interview about his book The Dreaming Universe, which is the logical implication entailed by a materialist view since the world includes real persons as we are conscious of ourselves as being.
I'm obviously taking to heart the arguments of consciousness and intentionality and proceeding in argument as though these are automatically the case. I seemingly can't help but feel and articulate that I'm purposefully connected to and aware of my experience as a human being, and I think materialism has done a weird thing by considering these feelings of consciousness and intentionality as problems to fit in somehow to the view that all is material energy. I think that functional unity is similarly a problem for these 'weird' materialists, and I also think these problems are rooted in a mistake of the 'weird' materialist. They have exceedingly believed Newton's paradigm, that all is particles bouncing around independently of any holistic, conscious, or intentional organization. His view of matter is simply inadequate as accounted by contemporary physics, and it's only within that old theory that our sense of ourselves having beliefs and intentions is not allowed a causal manner in behaviour. In today's physics unlike Newtonian physics, the ability for holistic organization that is required by consciousness is present, so materialism has another course in dealing with the philosophy of the mind: Instead of the old problem of reconciling a seeming paradox of fitting a particles- that-bounce-around physics with a unity-that-functions-intentionally psychology, we have the task of seeing how the new physics is constituted for the existence of consciousness.
Since matter is seen today as quantum in nature, by all relevant experiments and as explored in neat technologies, and since our (material) bodies rest at night and produce worlds for us to dream, we must conclude that the essence of materialism's substance – what's beneath the 'observable structure': the quantum state – that this essential matter in our reality has properties making consciousness capably achieved. Further, to make a natural sense of such things as human art, emotion, and sensuality, it must be somehow that in living forms the material existence includes a genuine personal interactivity with conscious representations. Complex material organisms must be somehow self-reflectively whole in order to naturally and simply explain why humans might do a thing that can easily be described in terms of, for instance, desires. What I'm saying here is that when considering the collections of physical particles that are seen to make living things up and when considering that these collections have evolved on Earth to feel and work with aspects of themselves and their surrounding environment, then we must allow the notion that some specially evolved ensembles of physical particles just have consciousness and interactivity as naturally emergent material behaviours; I'm saying here that, in addition to the laws of physics, certain ensembles also naturally behave like we humans do.
To use a different meaning of the word matter with an obvious connotation to my ideas, I'm assuming that life matters as much to the underlying dynamics of our bodily actions as do those physical laws holding our bodily actions. It might seem strange to some materialists that I could speak of matter this way, but I insist. It seems undeniable to suppose that our physical systems materially project individuals, persons who are whole. To see how a physics could entertain such wildly contrary terms such as 'sentience as a material process of wholeness' there is a specific task.
For this task, a historical review and its revision: we must discover why the materialist concept has become associated with a universal deficit of efficacious mental processes. The state of the material brain is thought of (even to this day) by some materialist philosophers in exceedingly simple models that are quite formally inadequate for understanding matter's unity in consciousness. The brain can be observed as specialized regions of activity composed of neurons and complex pathways enmeshed into a whole organism's metabolism, which in turn dissected can be observed a composite of molecules composed of protons, neutrons, and electrons that simply move and react with each other. There is a destructive audacity (with concern to scientific inclusion of minds) of some materialist philosophers to suppose we can adequately consider these dynamic building components in this way as "logically independent local entities", as a physicist I am about to talk about describes, that have no holistic relationship like the kind our empirical experience of wholes requires, as I have argued (Stapp 6.1).
Many materialist philosophers speak of the nature of the mind as though we need to conceive it as necessarily a mysterious tag-on to blind matter that just collides and melts together mechanically until weird forms of as-yet-unaccountably organized chemical reactions say they feel it happening to them, but that it happens totally without reference to the desires that they say they have, they who are these organized machinelike mechanisms feeling sentient mechanism, according to this retired view of 'necessarily blind and broken-to-pieces world'. Materialism like this, proceeding from the notion that matter observed of parts and separation cannot be whole between our discrete observations, doesn't know where to go but to deny our sensed place of commanding our lives, but paradoxically anyways, 'minds' watch their bodies behave and successfully mechanically describe those observations, so that we could think we were even ghostlike in the matter that we always see behave with order. This problem with minds is because this kind of mechanical understanding only allows small structural parts to affect their immediate neighbours by means of regular rules, and this understanding has no possible description relevant to the sense of unities, things that work as wholes, like a person.
But wait! This is materialism applied to the mind as per the classical understanding of physics. Henry Stapp, an established physicist of the University of California, stresses several relevant points about the mind/brain relationship in his essay Why Classical Mechanics Cannot Accommodate Consciousness but Quantum Mechanics Can, the central point namely being in the title of the essay. In the first line of the introduction, he writes that "classical mechanics arose from the banishment of consciousness from our conception of the physical universe. Hence it should not be surprising to find that the readmission of consciousness requires going beyond that theory" (Stapp 1.1). Of classical mechanics in the next section, he writes "The fundamental principle in classical mechanics is that any physical system can be decomposed into a collection of simple independent local elements each of which interacts only with its immediate neighbors" (Stapp 2.2).
However, "it has become clear that the revolution in our conception of matter wrought by quantum theory has completely altered the complexion of problem of the relationship between mind and matter" (Stapp 1.3). He stresses that the classical understanding of matter is in conflict with understanding of the mind as capable of holding or beholding unity, and he stresses the inadequacy of the view that "the simple empirical fact of the matter is that brains are made out of neurons and other cells that are well described by classical physics" (Stapp 5.1). Instead, "the processes that make brains work the way they do depend upon the intricate physical and chemical properties of the materials out of which they are made: brain processes depend in an exquisite way on atomic and molecular processes that can be adequately understood only through quantum theory" (Stapp 5.3).
To see how philosophers have confused the classical model into their ideas of the mind, it is necessary to understand the limit, reach, and origin of the classical models. In the space around us containing the objects of the world that are apparent to us, they are observed in such a way as proceeding 'mechanically' – i.e. precise things happen such as apples falling on our heads when we sit under apples trees in harvest season. The sense of the word 'mechanical' is very different when one shifts from classical to quantum understanding, and the quantum understanding indeed gives us better predictions of when and how those apples will fall. At the present moment however, there is no genuinely clear consensus on how to interpret the implications and mechanisms of quantum mechanics, but regardless, accomplished physicists are insisting that the classical view is inadequate for understanding subatomic physics and hence the human brain, and Henry Stapp argues that the contemporary mind/body problems about machine vs. human as we have them have actually arisen because of belief in the fundamentally inadequate classical model of matter. Moreover, Stapp uses math to demonstrate that the quantum description is holistic in nature and argues that in this way it seems that quantum mechanics might be quite conceptually compatible with a sense of whole persons than the classical model. It still needs work, however, to see how it might fit and one may ask of my ideas why the classical model could be wrong, in the sense that there are just blind parts bumping each other around. To show this, I'll talk about the nature of classical description and discuss how it was derived.
In Newtonian/classical physics we symbolize our perceptions of apples (i.e. the weight of one in our hand) as mass, m, and symbolize our perceptions of their motion as acceleration, a. In our perceptions and language, forces move matter. Sitting under the apple tree, and having an apple fall on your head will illustrate that a force on an apple accelerated it. Newton went on to describe a universal law of gravitation, that all free-falling material bodies in the universe are observed to be attracted together in an orderly and precise manner. This is to say, in the most empirical sense, that we have always perceived the same relationships when observing matter. No matter how we subjectively see it, the matter itself is seen changing precisely around us; that's what classical physicists have stressed, correctly mind you.
This means that transformations occurring within our observations of matter are describable in mathematical terms and relationships. Carefully, the observed things of the universe put in mathematical terms refer to employing measurements of observed things, which are only symbolically used delimitations of acts of perception – i.e. a legitimate but unlikely measurement standard could be that the symbol "a metre and a half" is stipulated to represent the perception of the height of some arbitrarily selected human, so that every subsequent act of perception may measure (or compare by empirical resemblance with another perception) to find the length of an object in metres. Nearly everything we can perceive with our bare eyes, ears, and hands and instruments is classically describable in some way, which means mathematical terms can be created of events that are always in themselves consistently continuous and punctuated with changes. This is an important way to articulate what 'scientific knowledge of objects' is, because even though we are considering real objects, the classical description refers only to the fact that, like the apple falling, the world has been sequentially ordered insofar that we can symbolize our perceptions of its motion and change.
Consequently, to say some event within perception proceeds classical mechanically is to say that changes in observable structure happen as though it were a mathematical machine, and in a deep sense this says only that there is a regularity to our perceptions of any event's process that has already begun. Reasoning from just the domain of classical description, scientists cannot reasonably assert that consciousness is entirely excluded from the essential dynamic mechanisms and existential nature of the real substance that all life on Earth is occupying and transforming for life's growth. Empiricist David Hume, for one, would not let the assumed view of classical physics be rationally and universally attributed to the causality of all things. That goes too far, and indeed contemporary physics has shown that classical mechanics only well describes events at the level of objects we immediately perceive, like apples. It also well describes the 'physical machinery' of computers and any discrete state system. However, classical mechanics was shown early in the twentieth century to utterly break down when applied to the atomic scale. It was seen that there is genuinely no regularity of the classical sort in the underlying scales of matter, indeed it was even seen that in quantum activity there is no way any longer to even adequately conceive of the material state as being just physical, as meaning just observably structural following definite courses.
Instead of seeing observable particles just bouncing around, the quantum mechanical aspects of matter are modelled in terms of "objective tendency" and "actual event", which will be talked about later because of required depth to do so adequately, but Stapp says "Bohr resolved this problem of reconciling the quantum and classical aspect of nature by exploiting the fact that the only thing that is known to be classical is our description of our perceptions of physical objects" (Stapp 5.4; his italics). The processes underlying our actions are not classical and we need to expand our views to see how consciousness may be naturally the way we feel it is, while matter is it somehow. Stapp argues that our quantum conception naturally accommodates our notion of consciousness, because unlike in classical models, the description of systems of matter is necessarily holistic, like our thoughts and beliefs, which means:
In this [new quantum] theory [of the brain] there is no abandonment of the normal psychological conception of our mental life. It is rather the classical theory of matter that is abandoned. In the terminology used by Churchland, folk psychology is retained, but folk physics is replaced by contemporary physics (Stapp 4.7).
With this in mind, we may ponder on what answers might be feasible to the many questions historically asked about the nature of human life and the nature of matter that must as I have argued be understood as accommodating us, or that we must understand how the form of material existence in humanity's case is consciousness. There is an obvious old question to ask of this view: in what way would the consciousness of human matter be distinguishable from the non-human-consciousness of ocean, star or rock matter? Do we have a special dignity of choice that other material forms do not have?
Henry Stapp has an insight into this direct question given in an appendix of his essay, but a little more about the nature of quantum mechanical description is necessary. Quantum mechanics is an account of material processes. In classical mechanics, there were just static entities moving with utterly deterministic absolute inevitability, but Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Schrödinger's equation illustrate that the connection between particular states of matter is not linear and direct in the same way as classical models do. Instead, Schrödinger's equation describes matter with probabilities where, between particular states, matter is in a flux of "objective tendencies" each with a similar ability to be the case until Schrödinger's wave function of probabilities collapses and an "actual event" occurs (Stapp 4.6). Stapp says "contemporary quantum theory does not have any definite rule that specifies where the collapses occur" (Stapp B.1). It is assumed that in quantum systems like radioactively decaying matter that these collapses are occurring randomly. So the question for human status in the material cosmos becomes the question of whether this potentially random decision- swerving of a system of subatomic matter can somehow become the choice of a sentient entity inherent in that system, say, a brain.
To realize our dignity, Stapp employs a principle inter-crossing his discipline of physics into evolutionary biology and asks a question of survival advantage; an argument can be constructed like this:
1. The choice of matter's collapse into "actual events" is left physically open, free of determinism in any kind of classically mechanical sense of necessary outcome, of absolute inevitability (Stapp 4.6). 2. There is a great deal of evidence for the evolutionary principle, stated in its most general sense that traits eventually emerge in life forms which confer adaptability and success to them. 3. "The question arises: Is the placement of the collapses at high-level classical branches, as specified in our model, favorable to survival of the organism? If so, then there would be an evolutionary pressure for the collapse location to migrate, in our species, to this high-level placement. . . .It would be advantageous to its survival for the organism to be organized so that whatever fundamental property induces collapses occurs in conjunction with the top- level templates for action" (Stapp B.2).
In other words, for survival of life forms the "fundamental property" or reason that changes occur in each of the physical parts we are reducible to might "migrate" so that the reason our whole life form changes "occurs in conjunction" with possibilities relevant to our whole life form's survival. In Stapp's view of the mind, "top-level templates for action" would be these sets of material possibilities that we perceive with a sense of volition and involvement, and the quantum collapse is the effect of our choice: we see a particular action. We can adequately suppose "the determination of where the collapses occur is fixed not by some a priori principle but by habits that become ingrained into nature" (Stapp B.2, his italics). Thus far, it would seem the state of physical uncertainty between positions of matter might be actually, in higher organisms at least, the state of sentient decision-making. It would help us survive to not be utterly random, to be aware and in command of a little bit of the process of our lives, it would strongly seem, wouldn't it? Most of biology would stand as is, because so much of our living process could be entirely 'habitual' in Stapp's view, like the beating of our hearts and digestion of food. What we breathe for our heart and eat for our gut to move around our body, however, might as argued here be left up to us in the form of a genuinely mental choice.
This view of the philosophy of mind draws together physics and evolutionary biology in a way that speaks of an elevated universe that has it in itself to be alive and feel that: it seems a function of material states to be either unbound by life (being perhaps random) or to be bound as a living whole (being perhaps wild or willing) while this living whole/unique material state becomes conscious as a feature of the evolution of a world with a profound material nature. Stapp argues that a more coherent and encompassing account of the world is arrived at if we expand from the classical view where consciousness is "non-efficacious and hence of no relevance to the survival of the species" (Stapp B.4). Instead, conscious dignity might be a natural outcome of the basic rules that allow all things to occur, just like all the nifty physical effects we've discovered from those rules that some philosophers have heralded as the beginning of liberation from mental concepts; instead, we have a simpler understanding of how minds might operate than the classical model requires. The impression of an 'idea for action A or B' or of a 'choice A or B to make' might be akin, materially, to a quantum state that as described before has similarly arise-able possibilities for physical state A or B; then the collapse occurs where we want it to because the potential for collapse has somehow become a sentient event. This would, at least, seem to possess some kind of naturalistic sensibility; it fits with our view of us and our very successful view of matter, and these views are joined in a way to be yet far more vastly explored by scientists and philosophers.
If all this indeed has relevance to the materialist philosophies of mind, we should look at how three such theories cope with the idea of natural psychology that I evidently assume viable. "Supporters of the identity theory argue that psychology will be reduced to neuroscience. Functionalists claim that psychology will be autonomous of neuroscience. And a third answer… psychology will be eliminated by neuroscience" as said by Peter Morton (Morton 335). Neuroscience is the description of physical observables correlated to experiential contexts; it is the fitting of what we see the brain doing to what we say is going on, in a gist. For instance, two precise spots in the left side of your head (Broca's speech center) will each light up on magnetic scans at different times you are aware of the words 'cup' and 'orange'. The 'you are aware of' part is the language of psychology.
The identity theory's reduction to neuroscience would mean there is some 'spot' or process in the matter of the brain that is identical to our minds so that the brain can have "a purely electro-chemical account" as David Armstrong says in The Nature of Mind" (Morton 225). The concepts I've been developing can clearly criticize the philosophical foundation of such a claim, namely the assumption that neuroscience (as purely electro-chemical) is the proper account, but current neuroscientific description is mainly limited to the classical level description that is bunk. I have been arguing that the 'material' account of the brain is deeper than a "purely electro-chemical" account or the account of physical observables. Armstrong himself says "this [pure account] is not to say that in the future new evidence and new problems may not come to light which will force science to reconsider the physico-chemical view of man" (Morton 225). I have argued, along the lines of Henry Stapp, that the quantum understanding forces this already, and have even in this essay attempted to begin to describe hypothetically what that quantum material process of the brain that we call ourselves might be like. Identity mind-matter theory need not reduce psychology, but rather expand neuroscience to the level of quantum brain-nature; "it would seem imprudent to ignore the holistic aspect of matter that lies at the heart of contemporary physics when trying to grapple with the problem of the connection of matter to consciousness" (Stapp 3.12).
Saul Kripke responds to and also criticizes the suppositions of the mind/brain identity theory in Identity and Necessity. To go about this, he introduces the conception of various expressions as rigid or nonrigid designators, and he does this in order to clarify what kind of identity the mind/brain must be. An example of a rigid designator that Kripke gives is 'the square root of 25', which is rigid because 5 is necessitated by the expression; the square root of 25 could not be other than 5, as long as we are not arbitrarily using language. The rigid designation of an expression forces some other concept to be the case; it's about necessarily linked concepts. In Kripke's example, we are using a concept of a number's 'square root,' a concept which involves finding the dimensions of a square that has the original number's area. One way to schematize finding 'the square root of 25' is thus:
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There are 25 dots arranged in a square (the number 25 represented as a square, if you will,) and letting the 'root' of a square be considered its side in mathematics, lo and behold there are 5 dots on each side; therefore 'the square root of 25' rigidly designates '5' because of the necessity of the concepts that have been formed about numbers. Even though this is all made up by a meaning and relationship we give to words like number, square and root, the concepts are necessary beneath the words, rigidly, because of their reasonable meaning. A rigid designator is "a term that designates the same object in all possible worlds" (Morton, 244). No matter what world one is in, 5 x 5 (will always) = 25. Rigid designation is about understanding the only possible way there is to understand given the existence of objects referred to by concepts – i.e. if numbers exist, then Kripke's rigid example is also true.
This is the opposite from nonrigid designators. Before introducing the example Kripke uses, I'll approach the idea from what it entails conceptually in contrast to rigid designation. If a rigid designator means that an item is always necessarily referred to by an expression, then a nonrigid designator means what is referred to by an expression does not need to be the case, or that the identity of the referred object is contingent on something but is not necessary because of the idea of the first expression that does the referring. The rigid designation of mathematical expressions is contingent on nothing because they are necessary given the concepts. Nonrigid designators refer to something actual that could have been other than it was given an alternative way things happened to occur. Nonrigid designation is not to do with concepts fitting with concepts like rigid designation is. Kripke's example is 'the inventor of bifocals.' Even though this statement refers in particular to Benjamin Franklin, someone else could conceivably have invented bifocals instead of him and this stands in contrast to 5 only that must be the square root of 25.
Kripke applies these designations to scientific claims of identity such as "mind is brain" and that 'heat is molecular motion.' Kripke notes that in scientific conventions, identity statements about the nature of the world are viewed as contingent, that heat could have been something else, and this means, by Kripke's terms, that 'heat' is a nonrigid designator of 'molecular motion.' In other words, conventional science might say that the concept of heat does not necessarily entail the concept of molecular motion, as highlighted by the antiquated caloric theory of heat, and this goes for the mind-brain identity too. To say mental states are contingently identical to brain states is to suppose that it could rather have been the case that the mind is a disembodied homunculus that unnaturally forces otherwise blind matter into a marionette-like life-form. The supposition is that concepts such as heat/motion and mind/brain are not rigid like 'the square root of 25'/5 is.
The supposition that Kripke directly criticizes in his essay is that heat can be adequately conceived as a caloric fluid rather than molecular motion, which would extend to other scientific claims about the world. He attempts to realize how the concept of molecular motion is necessitated by the concept of heat instead of contingent upon, which would solidify and ground scientific claims while highlighting that we can interpret things incorrectly by thinking in terms of 'what could or might cause something' instead of 'what needs to fit what we observe as orderly and think of as reasonable'. Kripke says heat's contingency doesn't follow because circumstances cannot be adequately imagined such that heat is not molecular motion. He says that some thinkers only thought that heat could be different, and only because, Kripke claims, the sensation of heat was confused with the concept of heat. Those who would say the caloric theory is conceivable are only thinking about the sensation of heat.
When we rub our hands together quickly (moving), the sensation of heat develops as some of our energy is literally 'moved' between our palms. When we light a fire (by moving sticks and dry grass or flint and rock, for example) and watch the burning matter move more quickly into the air with light that moves into our vision as well, the sensation of heat develops again. What's going on here are empirical experiences of motion that have customarily been associated with heat for the sensation they produce. The sensation of heat we acquire necessitates nothing, but we attribute the concept of molecular motion to all occurrences of heat. The caloric theory of heat was only accounting for another substance that would possibly cause a sensation of heat. The concept we have of molecules with lots of kinetic energy causing slower molecules to speed up is necessarily identical to heat, because that is how our concept of it works. This is just his example, and this argument extends to all claims of scientific discovery; if a thing is actually existent, it is necessarily ordered and the terms of any identity statements concerning things in the world must be conceptually entailing of other in rigid designation, like those square roots.
In the arguments for strict identity of the mind and brain, an identity between what we feel in the inside and what we see from the outside, Kripke then says that because the things in the world are necessary, mental states also are necessarily identical to brain states. With this said, the problem is widened for conventional materialist arguments about the mind and brain, as I have attempted to overcome, for the arguer "has to show that these things which we can imagine are not in fact things we can imagine" (Morton 248). He says this because he concludes the concepts of mind and brain as necessarily identical must necessarily entail each other and conventional materialism "can't imagine" in small independent parts the holistic concepts of personhood. If the mind/brain identity is true in some unconventional way such that it is the case, then mental states rigidly designate brain states in a clear-conceptual way like heat/motion. Kripke is actually saying that the identity theorist's position is that the concept of brain states necessarily lead to mental states and that mental states without brain states would be inconceivable. Therefore "it would have to be a deeper and subtler argument" for materialists to show that our built-up concepts of minds, thoughts etc "are not in fact things we can imagine" because these are what conventional materialism expressly denies ontological existence of. I hope to have proposed such a deeper and subtler argument or at least a start for one.
We "can't imagine" how the square root of 25 would not be 5, given the meaning of the words, but we can imagine minds whose choices create actions and whose reasons form concepts, given the meaning of the words. Thus for Kripke, "the conclusion of this investigation would be that the analytical tools we are using go against the identity thesis and so go against the general thesis that mental states are just physical states" (Morton 248; my italics). The identity between mind and brain must be necessary, Kripke argues, but it doesn't seem to be as direct as an A stands for B when one says mental states are brain states, when as concepts mind entails feeling and brain entails observable structure. These basic concepts must be inseparable as neuroscience does indeed show, but they are also not definitional of each other as is, no matter how one conceives them, at least looking through what "has ever appeared in any materialist literature" except for recent strides by Stapp, Wolf, and many contemporaries I have read (Morton 248). So again, the neuroscience in the identity theory needs to evolve. The quantum theory of the mind comes closest so far as any materialist theory in finding a conceptual linkage between physical and conscious states of matter.
To go on to another materialist theory, the functionalist says the language of psychology is autonomous of neuroscience. Functionalists say that cognition and awareness are functions of living matter processing information in a certain computational way that produces representation. If the function is such that the brain's processing is both observable as behaviour/actions/etc to the outside, thus being the output of the living function, and intentional with selecting choices, thus being the input of the living function, then this theory is somewhat coherent with what I've been proposing in terms of the quantum state of wholeness. That might be the function for any material system and would indeed be autonomous of neuroscience because it merely considers our particular structure; other systems of matter might conceivably be psycho-functional if they can be quantum wholes as we are. Because neuroscience deals in classical descriptions, the psychology of language is autonomous of neuroscience; in this way what I'm saying coheres with some of the claims of functionalism. However, the psychology of language by the presently explored theory would not be autonomous of quantum behaviour. We just don't have that kind of neuroscience yet though, except that the quantum understanding of mind likely involves, as explored, the way our thoughts and quantum descriptions both speak of holistic relationships, and conceptual linkages will hopefully arise that will allow us to discover that our sensed existence is a reasonable one in a universe of abundantly and profoundly behaving material.
This function of abundant material making mind might be like a quantum "probabilistic automaton", to borrow the term of Jerry A. Fodor used in What Psychological States Are Not and apply it in the context I've been working with (Morton 333). The nature of the brain as a quantum "probabilistic automaton" may be such to overcome the problem that "psychological states of an organism cannot be put into correspondence with the computational states of an [non-quantum] automaton" (Morton 333, 334). This problem comes from the notion that our computational states (thinking through 3 plus 11 for instance) are unlike those of an automaton because "the mental states of a person can at best be specified by a finite approximation" (Morton 334). When we choose between alternatives, we don't select from a list of infinite potential computations, like computers essentially have at their disposal save for memory limitations. Moreover, we don't store our knowledge or compute by working in lists such as " 'the belief that 1+1=2,' 'the belief that 2+2=4,' 'the belief that 3+3=6' and so forth" like a mechanical automaton like conventional computers would (Morton 334).
In going with the idea that we're functions of matter, we may be "quantum automatons" (which incidentally is a term also found in Wolf's The Dreaming Universe in the concluding chapter that discusses what he speculates is the consciously material state that we are, it seems.) The brain considered by a quantum-educated functionalism would not quite be a discrete state system although all its states are observed by us as classical events in the world, i.e. actions like coming to be in the state of running are seen by observations to be classically describable, but asked, "they chose to run." Not a discrete state system or an automaton like that, the quantum-computational function of the brain would involve our sentient selection from the "habits ingrained into nature" like Stapp speculates (B.2). An implication of this is that a computer could conceivably be built to function in a quantum manner and perhaps have strong A.I., but the task will become like cellular biologists trying to recreate the conditions for the origin of life; a huge time of evolution came before us to reach to our level of consciousness. Training a quantum system to learn with a sense like us at any communicative level to a human would require immense complexity, presumably as things have turned thus far, with us. I think we might have to build a 'thinking computer' slowly by adding more matter to a system trained a certain way from the start like our cells must have behaved while evolving into multi-cellular organisms that have holistic behaviour and representation.
Then there is the materialism that seeks to eliminate the language of psychology. The language of psychology is a language of unities, of individuals, thoughts, choices, behaviours, and so also is the language of quantum mechanics about selection, unities – thus there may be a theory of matter compatible with ordinary mind, classical mechanics the language needing to be eliminated when dealing with the mind. An adequate language may be in human cases a language of vast symmetry with what is still being discovered of the language of matter that works well for technological pursuits, this deep quantum sense that deems processes as "automatically holistic" (Stapp 3.11). Such a language may be quite familiar, while we might even see that our natural language about ourselves will evolve so in our mind's eye its meaning will reflect our material knowledge that fits with us.
On the other hand, in Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain Patricia Smith Churchland sees the way we naturally talk about the mind as "folk psychology" and claims that we need to "revise and improve upon" it (Morton 356). She also calls this "intuitive psychology" and says that it is what "shapes our conception of ourselves" (Morton 355). It is the language of how we explain the 'inside' of human "behaviour as the outcome of beliefs, desires, perceptions" etc. that consist in the conscious objects inside the holistic entity I have argued for (Morton 355). This psychology is viewed by Churchland in a similar vein as how I've described "folk physics" or classical physics as arrived at in attempts to similarly shape a conception of things we saw 'outside' us; Churchland writes that "insofar as it enables us to make sense of and explain a certain range of phenomena, folk psychology resembles the folk physics" (Morton 356).
We remember what Stapp said about folk physics being replaced by contemporary physics and that the folk psychology was only stipulated to be ruled out and expelled from conception of the material universe in the extension of the classical paradigm to all levels. Churchland speaks of Newtonian physics in her essay as the better system from folk physics, but that's not quite up to date and what is perceived as her newer ideas have been shown to be what's inadequate, that consciousness needn't have been banished in the first place.
Churchland goes on about these folk theories: "what is important is not that they originated in self-conscious construction, but that in their explanatory and predictive role they function as theories" as Churchland writes; in other words, specific ways we talk about ourselves are similar to the level of description of "folk physics" in that the way these theories talk is as a theoretical account, a conceivable explanatory paradigm only (Morton 357). Therefore, she argues, it is possible that our current psychological language arose to a similar inadequate extent as classical mechanics, and that we might have no grasp on the actual dynamic mechanisms of living and worldly events when employing either folk physics or psychology.
However, I would like to add that our music, poetry, and spontaneous intellectual/emotional contributions do originate in self-conscious construction, in a way that these theories are capable of being known only after being alive and feeling alive. I don't think our concepts and psychological language arose as just a theoretical account. I have been arguing for the case that conceptualization is an energetic state in the form of awareness, in the material world and in a material entity. In other simpler words, I think feeling alive or feeling a world, things, others, the barest sense of anything at all is enough for us of reason to realize that what is a material world being eaten and turned into biological life has livid awareness of this fact, indeed we do! While I disagree with some of Churchland, there is value to be had as in nearly every being's perspective and articulation of what they feel.
In particular Churchland speaks about the relation between our folk psychological explanations (such as linking "believes that p" to a behaviour) and between "numerical attitudes", for instance, that can be mathematically related (such as linking "has a masskg of n" to an observation of momentum) (Morton 358). When we have beliefs and desires about behaviour, there is a rational connection instead of a causal connection between them; there is a "rational-in-the-light-of" relation between my knowledge of how light switches operate, my desire to read at night, and the behaviour of turning the light switch on (Morton 359). For Churchland, the causal conditions of these rational actions are neuroscientific, and she also notices how our "mental states referred to in the explanation of behaviour" are alleged as "indispensable for psychology but unfathomable by neuroscience" because "they form a semantically coherent system, as opposed to a causally interconnected system" (Morton 359). She says mental states "are about things, they can be true or false of the world, and they stand to one another in logical relationships such as entailment and contradiction (Morton 359). She writes that if the semantics of mental states conform to logical relations, and since "logical relations cannot be reduced to causal relations", then the psychology of mental states is autonomous of the causal relations that are deemed materially based.
Kripke's critique of the identity thesis meshes here in that 'logical relationships such as entailment' must apply to the mental states in relation to the brain or 'causally interconnected' states because of the rigid designation of scientific concepts about the world, as he argues. It seems then that logical relations indeed cannot be reduced to causal relations but instead be required by them. Therefore, the logical relations between mental states as known might be required by our brain's state. Indeed, Churchland distinguishes that "the generalizations of psychology are emergent with respect to neurobiological theory" and in the theory I present this is blaringly evident, considering the discussion about survival advantage, for instance (Morton 360). There are "biological relations" to consider as the causal interconnections for our mental states and an element of consciousness would do well for living things, and seems to perhaps fit well, as per quantum materialism (Morton 360).
This essay has expounded that the dynamic process of the brain is quantum-mechanical and thus, it would seem that with contemporary physical theory there is allowance for some minds of the sort we are familiar with. Materialism needs to be structured and understood so it allows us to realize that it is the case that we have real mental lives within our metabolic connection and interplay to life and the environment that is beyond. It seems fundamental in our reality that life and consciousness embody a material of vast potential for intricacy and sentient representation. The concept of material life is not so strange; considering our nourishments and sensualities and they way living bodily seems quite good, we need to be aware material, for any sense of reasonability to last. If this is the case – I mean, if it is rigidly the case that we are naturally in active participation with our material being that lives rationally and metabolically – then the whole universe naturally and necessarily instantiates life and emergent consciousness. Instead of to call it 'just observable', Life lives to really feel something.
Works cited.
Morton, Peter, Ed. A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind – Readings With Commentary. Broadview Press Ltd.; Peterborough, Ontario: 1999.
Stapp, Henry. "Why Classical Mechanics Cannot Accommodate Consciousness but Quantum Mechanics Can." PSYCHE 2(5) May 1995. .
Wolf, Fred Alan. Common Ground Interview – The Dreaming Universe. the link is hosted on under the name "What are dreams made of?" No date posted. ]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000013.htm2004-12-16T19:40:51Z2004-12-16T19:42:03ZOn use of experience and reasonHey all. I've moved in and am attending classes, 2nd year university! Yay! English and Philosophy are fun! Here are some thoughts I wrote after thinking about a philosophy lecture.Hey all. I've moved in and am attending classes, 2nd year university! Yay! English and Philosophy are fun! Here are some thoughts I wrote after thinking about a philosophy lecture.Apparent avid communication exposes a light on reality that I think cannot be denied. When I look at the world and reflect on this, I see that human events and contexts are caught in a ‘neat’ way. I see that the keyboard and screen before me are undeniably bound by use in coordination with – here’s the important part - an intent of communication.
Philosophers debate what this intent might be, an intent that arises in a material world of precise ordering and seeming intellectual supplication, but that such an intent exists is really of no question. Any proposition must fail that does not charitably account as ‘intended’ what meaning we glean thru our communication, and must fail because you’re receptive to these words, expressive with your response, and meaningful. I assume this, drudgingly that is, because I feel I rather know others are coming across to me!
Is the ‘intent’ behind every event one kind? For example, in such forms as mechanical or magical (the former implies law-consequent necessities and the latter implies creations from our rules,) do either of these alone govern the outcome of every process and pattern that happens? Whatever the case, that intent must be at least partially cognitive, as to account for apparent meaning. The bodies respond to physical law yet minds are our domain, and a sense of communication easily verifies this. The ontological status should not be in doubt. Can’t you hear me??? I do not think all argument here depends on merely proving the extent of physics in our behaviour. There’s more to our world and us, seemingly.
I say this because to be realistic we must respect notions that our lives are physically embodied and that experience and expression in our psyche are enmeshed within interactions of that embodiment. Yet notions also are to be respected that at one important level of these interactions, sentience must be seen to guide results. I believe meaning and perception CANNOT be inherent or hidden in cause-effect material transitions. Human expression certainly uses those transitions however. I feel that what I believe is that this life is unbearable to live and impossible to understand if we restrain from acknowledging the status of our creative faculties.
I know some of our process must have what are deemed ‘mechanical’ restraints. By the above paragraphs it would be that my position entails that somehow for living systems of a particular sentient tuning, the mechanical restraints allow ‘say’ in the subatomic ‘decisions’ that, I argue as to make sense of our lives, we must infer as quite bound by sentient intent. I can only find sense in ordinary language that “there is what we intend to communicate and what we do communicate.”
I can only find sense in assuming we drive toward creating things like creative technology for personal and widespread discovery, rather than by means of the necessities of an overriding underlying force. I guess I see a pertinence to the notion of identity. I see that a living spiritual force that is you and is me underlies the actions of the bodies we ride in. Your messages make no sense if you don’t mean them is what I’m getting at. Eliminative materialism must fail, because you make sense to me sometimes!!! Does this sound weird or philosophically unsound a bit?
To be honest, I can’t imagine how, logically, someone might assume our thoughts have no momentum besides the physical momentum of particles in our brain. Minds are NOT physical. I believe thoughts are embodied physically and can be observed by scientists as happening in our brains, sure… but physical process is ‘blind.’ We behold beauty, bear witness to others’ messages, and we feel so much we cry now and then. “We” are not physical beings. We are spiritually anchored, physically enmeshed, and I believe this is undeniable if one seeks charity in their assessment of this world and if one seeks to avoid despair and delusion.
I don’t think we’re being used by any merely inalterable deity or physical logic, if there could be such things. I think we use our experience and reason for creation in a world for us to share. I see it in people talking to each other, desiring to share a unique perspective. I can imagine neither someone or something calling or necessitating the shots before all happens as we perceive our willing it.
The undeniable way we experience the world and reason about it entails wonder. All these many observables of the universe, our artifacts, those symbolic and technologic, must be properly regarded as belonging to our intentional use. The faculties of scientific inquiry have fallen to a dire state when only physical mechanism is assumes possible in explaining nature. Our avid communication must be seen as integral to nature, not as a byproduct of a nature that doesn't think.
Even Occam’s razor insists in our personal autonomy. What’s simpler than assuming we mean what we say and that from us do our intentions arise. Considering our actions must teleologically regarded beyond ordinary physical mechanics, then a natural way of describing human events is thru "a mechanics of magic.” Magic is your voice unanticipated nor contained within blind molecular motion. Choice acted upon is magic upon the flesh. ]]>http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v373/__show_article/_a000373-000012.htm2004-09-22T23:22:48Z2004-09-22T23:22:48Z
This essay explores the role of story-telling about food in culture and its importance to knowledge about sustainability and cultural tradition.
This is the first of two essays about Spinoza's philosophy and its application to other thinkers and other thoughts. The essay below this one is focused on the contemporary state of ecological imagination, and this one is devoted primarily to re-interpreting Spinoza and Romanticism together, with just passing, though hopefully insightful, reflection on the current day.Brenden MacDonald
This poem I wrote over the last several years, editing it slowly.
This essay is about my case of schizophrenia, some interpretation of my symptoms, and some reflections about how to be healthy as a schizophrenic.My first doctor, a practicing psychiatrist, tells me I am an excellent case of schizophrenia, high-functioning and well-adjusted. She told me that I’m lucky for my ability to converse in psychiatric discourse at a somewhat intellectually matched level with her. She said she’s never known a patient who was so knowledgeable and en-languaged about his condition; in addition, before I got very sick, I had always done well at school, had been open to volunteering in my school and community, and had also possessed a healthy dose of teenage angst to change my world. Before I saw any doctor for it, I had already self-diagnosed and learned much on my own, feeling that schizophrenia intriguingly and weirdly challenged my mind, at least before I totally lost connection with reality. 
This is a paper I wrote for my First Nations Literature class.