According to Ervin Laszlo, the coherence of the atom and the galaxies is the same coherence that keeps living cells together, cooperating to form life. When a complex system made up of many interacting parts is operating, sometimes an unexpected jump to a new level of complex organization happens. Our human body is made up of many such levels, each formed by another jump in complexity. Our lowest level of the cell jumps up a level to body tissue, to body organ, to body system and to the whole body. We are therefore formed with many onion skin like levels that all cooperate in complex ways to make one whole human being. It is really amazing how it all fits together.
At the same time, in the human realm of consciousness, we are – as far as we know – the only creatures able to contemplate who we are, why we are here and how we fit into the universe. We can even contemplate on the fact that we can contemplate about who we are and how we fit into the universe. This coherence also allows evolution to happen and that has enabled us to evolve from a microscopic bacterium right through to the complex beings that we are with all our mental, physical, emotional and spiritual capabilities.
Ervin Laszlo presents a theory that helps to tie both together. He proposes that the quantum vacuum –which we know contains all the information of our history from the Big Bang to now – is also consciousness. Everything in the universe therefore has consciousness; from a pebble to a tree, to a cloud, to a person. While this goes against the view of mainstream science, there are some highly respected scientists such as Freeman Dyson, David Bohm and Fritjof Capra, who support the idea that the universe is in fact conscious. Ervin Laszlo says that life happens because it comes from the quantum vacuum.
What is consciousness? Consciousness is about being aware of our own existence and the environment in which we live. So if one sub-atomic particle reacts in line with another particle somewhere else in the universe, we could say it is aware of what the other one is doing. In a way it is aware of itself in the universe. So, the question is: Is it enough to say all particles in the universe are conscious?
We are conscious of our existence and have evolved a brain able to access and use the consciousness held in quantum vacuum. Consciousness is yet another manifestation of coherence allowing a mass of nerve cells to co-operate and form a unified sense of self.
Ervin Laszlo equates this quantum vacuum with the Akashic Field of ancient Hindu spiritual tradition. The Hindu say the Akashic record is a field from which all the universe is formed and which holds all that ever was, is or will be. The Hindu also say that the Big Bang that started the universe, and the big crunch that will happen when the universe goes into reverse and collapses back into itself, is only a part of many cycles of universes, just like ours, appearing and disappearing, just like the subatomic particles in our world.
Ervin Laszlo states that information can be transferred from one cycle to the next, which explains how the precise numbers for gravity, electromagnetism etc. come to be so exact when there has not been enough time for these to have formed randomly. Those numbers are transferred from previous universes.
The Akashic Field, being the background to the subatomic worlds, also flows through the other realms of stars, galaxies and human life, and is an activating force in all those realms. It is the force moving the stars and galaxies and the spark that gives life to bunches of molecules, driving the power of evolution and giving us the ability to develop our consciousness and experience the unity of the universe.
Ervin Laszlo’s theory says we are therefore linked to all people who have ever lived, and we can get access to them by accessing the Akashic field. This can explain life after death, because the past has never gone away, telling us that the past is ever present in everything we do. It clearly points to a universe where all is one and everything is linked. And if we tune ourselves into the Akashic field, we can access abilities that appear to be supernatural, but are in fact completely natural. Activities such as meditation can help us plug into the Akashic field and become much more than we are at present. Science and spirituality do not need to be set against each other as we have tended to think for so long.
Ervin Laszlo links the world of science with spiritual traditions, presenting it in a seemingly clear and logical way, incorporating all the latest research in so many fields of scientific research and tying it all together into a wonderful cohesive theory that makes sense of so many strange and contradictory parts of the universe. It explains what is usually called the supernatural in natural terms, giving strong evidence for the truth of such things as clairvoyance, reincarnation and spiritual healing.
Information In the universe, states Ervin Laszlo, information is entirely basic. In the latest conception the universe doesn’t consist of matter and space, it consists of energy and information. Energy exists in the form of wave-patterns and wave-propagations in the quantum vacuum that fills space; in its various forms, energy is the “hardware” of the universe. The software is information. The universe is not an assemblage of bits of inert matter moving passively in empty space, it is a dynamic and coherent whole. The energy that constitutes its hardware is always and everywhere in-formed. It is in-formed by what David Bohm called the implicate order and what physicists now regard as the quantum vacuum or zero-point field (also called physical spacetime, universal field, or nuether). This is the in-formation that structures the physical world, the information we grasp as the laws of nature. Without information the energy waves and patterns of the universe would be as random and unstructured as the behavior of a computer without its software. But the universe is not random and unstructured; it is precisely in-formed. Would it be any less precisely informed, complex systems could not have emerged in it, and we would not be here to ask how this on first sight highly improbable development could have come about.
The answer science has to the ‘what’ question refers to an entangled, holographic, non-local connecting in-formation field in the cosmos. In his books – in greatest detail in Science and the Akashic Field – he discusses the evidence for this field and notes that the Hindu seers referred to it as Akasha, the fundamental element of the cosmos. In recognition of this feat of insight, he is calling the information field of the universe the Akashic Field.
But how does the scientific answer to the question regarding the fundamental significance of the spiritual experience relate to the answer given by religion?
For the world’s religions, the larger and deeper reality to which the spiritual experience connects us is a numinous, divine reality. It is either a spirit or consciousness that infuses the natural world (the immanentist view), or a spirit or consciousness that is above and beyond it (the transcendentalist claim). Traditional polytheistic religions leaned toward the former, while the Abrahamic monotheistic religions (with some exceptions) embraced the latter.
The difference between a divine intelligence immanent in the world and one that transcends it is not negligible, but it is still just a difference in interpretation. The raw data for both positions is the same: it is the spiritual experience, a quantum communion with universal oneness. In the Western religious perspective this is communion with the spirit that infuses the cosmos, identified as God. Deepak Chopra writes, “Spirituality is the experience of that domain of awareness where we experience our universality. This domain of awareness is a core consciousness that is beyond our mind, intellect, and ego. In religious traditions this core consciousness is referred to as the soul which is part of a collective soul or collective consciousness, which in turn is part of a more universal domain of consciousness referred to in religions as God.”
Our experience of the core consciousness of the world is ultimately an experience of the universal domain of consciousness Western religions call God. The experience itself, if not its interpretation, is the same in all religions, and in all religions it inspires a sense of oneness and belonging. Michael Beckwith affirms that “when you strip away the culture, history, and dogma of every religion, the teachers of those religions were teaching very similar principles and practices that led to a sense of oneness, that ended a sense of separation from the Whole.”
Science’s answer to the question of what the spiritual experience connects us to is immanentist. The information that underlies the universe, the Akashic Field, is part of the universe. This doesn’t mean that the immanentist position necessarily states the ultimate truth; it only means that science can only take an immanentist position. Scientists are limited to speaking about the natural world; they must leave speculation about transcendent realities to poets, philosophers, and spiritual masters.
It’s time to conclude. If the substance of the spiritual experience is always and everywhere the same, differences in its expression and interpretation are secondary and not a valid cause for conflict and intolerance.
The world to which our quantum brain connects us is fundamentally one, whether its oneness is due to an information field within the natural world or the work of a divine transcendent intelligence. To enter into communion with this oneness has been the quest of all the great teachers and spiritual masters. And to understand the nature of this oneness has been, and is, the ultimate quest of all great scientists.
Still today, physicists seek the one equation that would anchor their famous “Theory of Everything,” the theory that would account for all the laws of nature and explain everything that ever happened in our integrally whole universe. Einstein said that knowing this equation would be reading the mind of God.
About the Author
(image) David Storoy is a deputy head of a Norwegian interest organization in mental health care called White Eagle. His main work is in the community of Bergen as a consultant in the archive of building projects.
His main passion is practicing Vedanta teachings. Vedanta is called Science of Consciousness and he stopped chasing and searching for experience and now he is doing self-inquiry (reflections, contemplation, analyzing, logical thinking and systematizing) as a means of knowledge: Self-Knowledge of Vedanta teachings. James Swartz is his teacher and he has 40 years experience with Vedanta teachings. He has been influenced by Swami Chinmayananda and Swami Dayananda Saraswati. They follow and are influenced by a traditional Vedanta lineage.
Vedanta means end of knowledge and the source is mainly Upanishads. He is also grateful to Science and Nonduality and Deepak Chopra for the influence of following Vedanta teachings.
Source: The Consciousness Revolution
The Consciousness Revolution
Mar 6, 2022
by Ervin Laszlo The Laszlo Institute of New Paradigm Research
There is not only a revolution in the way our consciousness works, see my blog You can change your mindset, there is also a revolution in our very understanding of the nature of consciousness. There is a new concept emerging at the cutting edge of science and philosophy, and this concept is very different from the old established concept.
Consciousness is at the same time the most familiar and the most mysterious element of our life. Consciousness is mysterious because it is not clear what it is and where it comes from. Is the flow of sensations that makes up our consciousness generated in, and confined to, our brain? Or does it extend in some way beyond our body and brain? The new concept opts for the latter. And if the new concept is true, we are not what we thought we were, and the world is not what we thought it was. Consciousness in the new conception is more than a plaything of our imagination—it is the very substance of our beings. That of course is not the old concept, but /the heart of the new one.
Here I shall suggest the basic features of the new concept, but first I outline the old idea, so as to see the differences.
The old idea of consciousness
Until a few years ago, nobody other than deeply spiritual or religious people would have subscribed to the proposition that consciousness is more than a product of the workings of the brain. The accepted concept of consciousness was consistent with the physics of Newton. In the Newtonian universe, there is no place for consciousness. In the last count, all that exists in the universe are bits of matter moving in passive space and equitably flowing time. Consciousness is an epiphenomenon: something generated by real phenomena but is not real in itself. Consciousness is like the electricity generated by a stream of electrons in a turbine. The electrons are real, the turbine is real, but the electricity generated by them is a secondary phenomenon. It disappears when the electrons cease to move in the turbine. The existence of electricity is contingent on the working of the turbine, just as the existence of consciousness is contingent on the working of the brain. After all, consciousness can no more exists in a dead brain than electric charge could exists in a stationary turbine.
We do not see, hear, or taste electricity; we know it only by the effect it produces. This is said to be the same with consciousness. We experience the flow of sensations, feelings, and intuitions we call consciousness, but we do not perceive consciousness itself. No amount of scrutiny of the brain will disclose anything we could call consciousness. We only find gray matter with networks of neurons firing in sequence, creating the flow of electrons that generates the sensations we experience. When the brain is damaged, consciousness is distorted, and when the brain stops working, consciousness ceases.
For the classical concept there is nothing mysterious, about the presence of consciousness in the universe. Human consciousness is the product of the workings of the human brain.
The new concept of consciousness
The turbine concept of consciousness is a hypothesis and, as other hypotheses, it can be upheld if the predictions generated by it are confirmed by observations. In this instance, the relevant prediction is that when the brain stops working, consciousness will vanish This is confirmed by observation. People who are brain-dead do not possess consciousness.
The above claim does not admit of exceptions. We can no more account for the presence of consciousness in a dead brain than we could account for the presence of electric charge in a stationary turbine. Evidence to the contrary would place in question the basic tenet of the old concept. But evidence to the contrary does exist. It surfaces in rigorously protocolled experiments. There is real and credible evidence today that in some cases consciousness does not cease when brain function does.
The most widely known evidence is furnished by people who have reached the portals of death but returned to the ranks of the living. In some cases, their consciousness persists even when their brain functions are “flat.” Many temporarily brain-dead people report having had conscious experiences during their near-death episode. NDEs—near-death experiences—are surprisingly widespread: in some cases they are reported by up to 25 percent of the people who experienced a condition near physical death.
There are indications that conscious experience persists not only during the temporary cessation of brain function, but also in its permanent absence: when the individual is fully and irreversibly dead. These surprising experiences became known as ADEs: after-death experiences. The evidence for them is offered by mediums in deeply altered states of consciousness. In these trance-states they appear able to communicate with deceased persons. They “hear” the deceased recount their experiences after they have died and in some cases experience visual contact with them as well.
Reports of ADEs have been subjected to systematic scrutiny, exploring the possibility that the mediums would have invented the messages, or picked them up from living persons through some form of extrasensory perception. In a non-negligible number of cases, the theory that they were invented by the mediums or received by them in some nonordinary way could be ruled out: the messages contained surprisingly accurate information the mediums were unlikely to have accessed or invented themselves.
Given the mounting stream of evidence, we are logically obliged to accept that consciousness does not always and necessarily cease with the death of the brain that produced it. But, perhaps, the brain did not actually produce it? The new concept claims that consciousness is more than a product of brain function. “Our” consciousness is a local and temporary manifestation of a consciousness that is an element of the real world. More and more consciousness researchers, brain scientists, psychologists, and psychiatrists uphold this concept. Consciousness could and does exist beyond the brain.
In the new concept of consciousness, the flow of sensations we call consciousness is as real as energy, frequency, amplitude, phase, and information, and more real than “matter.” The brain is not a material turbine that generates consciousness, and consciousness is not its by-product. Consciousness is a real-world phenomenon. The brain is not its generator, only its receiver and transmitter.
Consciousness exists as a real phenomenon in the universe, and this phenomenon is universal; it is “one.” Famed quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger said that consciousness in the world does not exist in the plural: the overall number of minds in the world is one. In his last years, Carl Jung came to a similar conclusion. The psyche is not a product of the brain and is not located within the skull; it is part of the one-universe: of the unus mundus. In David Bohm’s quantum physics, the roots of consciousness are traced to the deep reality of the cosmos: the implicate order. A number of contemporary scientists, such as Henry Stapp, elaborate this concept. Consciousness, they say, is nonlocal: it is present throughout the universe.
The quantum scientists revive an ancient wisdom: We are connected through our participation in the world’s one-consciousness. This is a very different condition from being a separate entity with a separate brain producing a separate consciousness.
The new concept of consciousness is more than a theory of consciousness: it is a revolution in our understanding of being.
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
Source: Ervin Laszlo’s Akashic Field and The Dilemmas of Modern Consciousness Research
My Related Posts
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The Great Chain of Being
Indira’s Net: On Interconnectedness
Geometry of Consciousness
Charles Sanders Peirce’s Continuum
On Synchronicity
On Holons and Holarchy
Hua Yan Buddhism : Reflecting Mirrors of Reality
What is Yogacara Buddhism (Consciousness Only School)?
Mind, Consciousness, and Quantum Entanglement
Consciousness of Cosmos: A Fractal, Recursive, Holographic Universe
Law of Dependent Origination
Five Types of System Philosophy
Systems View of Life: A Synthesis by Fritjof Capra
Key Sources of Research
Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything
This book offers an original hypothesis capable of unifying evolution in the physical universe with evolution in biology; herewith it lays the conceptual foundations of “transdisciplinary unified theory”. The rationale for the hypothesis is presented first; then the theoretical framework is outlined, and thereafter it is explored in regard to quantum physics, physical cosmology, micro– and macro–biology, and the cognitive sciences (neurophysiology, psychology, with attention to anomalous phenomena as well). The book closes with a variety of studies, both by the author and his collaborators, sketching out the implications of the hypothesis in regard to brain dynamics, cosmology, the concept of space, phenomena of creativity, and the prospects for the elaboration of a mature transdisciplinary unified theory. The Foreword is written by philosopher of science Arne Naess, and the Afterword is contributed by neuroscientist Karl Pribram.
The Systems View of the World: The Natural Philosophy the New Developments in the Sciences
The Age of Bifurcation: Understanding the Changing World
Ervin Laszlo Gordon and Breach, 1991 – Bifurcation theory – 126 pages
The Connectivity Hypothesis: Foundations of an Integral Science of Quantum, Cosmos, Life, and Consciousness
Author Ervin Laszlo Contributor Ralph H. Abraham Edition illustrated Publisher State University of New York Press, 2003 ISBN 0791457850, 9780791457856 Length 147 pages
The Evolution of Cognitive Maps: New Paradigms for the Twenty-first Century
Volume 5 of World futures general evolution studies, ISSN 1043-9331 Editor Ervin Laszlo Edition illustrated, reprint Publisher Psychology Press, 1993 ISBN 2881245595, 9782881245596 Length 292 pages
System, Structure, and Experience: Toward a Scientific Theory of Mind
Human Values and Natural Science: Proceedings, Volume 3
Volume 4 of Current topics of contemporary thought Human Values and Natural Science: Proceedings, State University of New York College, Geneseo
Editors Ervin Laszlo, James Benjamin Wilbur Contributor State University of New York College, Geneseo Publisher Gordon and Beach, 1970 Original from University of Minnesota Digitized Jan 19, 2010 ISBN 0677139608, 9780677139609 Length 292 pages
Introduction to Systems Philosophy: Toward a New Paradigm of Contemporary Thought
Harper Torchbooks: Philosophy
Author Ervin Laszlo Edition illustrated Publisher Gordon and Breach, 1972 ISBN 067703850X, 9780677038506 Length 328 pages
Studies on the Conceptual Foundations: The Original Background Papers for Goals for Mankind
We Are in the Midst of a Global Transformation (pt. 2 of 2)
Prolific author and philosopher Ervin Laszlo discusses his most recent books, in which he outlines how the latest discoveries in science converge with spiritual insights and point to the ways in which society might evolve in ways that will help overcome contemporary crises.
Consciousness in the Universe is Tuned by a Musical Master Code, Part 3: A Hydrodynamic Superfluid Quantum Space Guides a Conformal Mental Attribute of Reality
Lifeworld, System, and Intersubjectivity: Jurgen Habermas’ Communication Theory of Society
Key Terms
John Dewey
George Herbert Mead
Theory of communicative Action
Social Interaction
Symbolic Interactionism
Action theory
Lifeworld phenomenology
Hermeneutic analysis
Conversational analysis
Ethnomethodology
Social constructivism
Dialogism
Discourse theory
Recognition theory
Objects relations theory
Communication
Language
Dialogical Intersubjectivity
Lifeworld vs System
Jürgen Habermas
Social theory
System
Lifeworld
Communication theory of society
Niklas Luhmann
Political power
Civil society
Dialogs
Dialectics
Self Culture Nature
Self Ritual Reality
Culture, Society, and Personality
First Person, Second Person, Third Person
AQAL Model of Ken wilber’s Integral Theory
Source: Intersubjectivity/ encyclopedia.com
Intersubjectivity
In its most general sense of that which occurs between or exists among conscious human actors, intersubjectivity is little more than a synonym for “the social.” As used by social scientists, however, intersubjectivity usually denotes some set of relations, meanings, structures, practices, experiences, or phenomena evident in human life that cannot be reduced to or comprehended entirely in terms of either subjectivity (concerning psychological states of individual actors) or objectivity (concerning brute empirical facts about the objective world). In this sense, the concept is usually intended to overcome an unproductive oscillation between methodological subjectivism and objectivism. The concept is especially predominant in social theories and theories of the self.
Although German idealist philosophers Johann Fichte (1762–1814) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) stressed the importance of intersubjectivity, the concept became influential in the twentieth century through the work of American social psychologist George Herbert Mead (1863–1931). Mead claimed that the development of cognitive, moral, and emotional capacities in human individuals is only possible to the extent that they take part in symbolically mediated interactions with other persons. For Mead, then, ontogenesis is essentially and irreducibly intersubjective. He also put forward a social theory explaining how social norms, shared meanings, and systems of morality arise from and concretize the general structures of reciprocal perspective-taking required for symbolic interaction. In short, he argued that intersubjectivity—understood specifically in terms of linguistically mediated, reflexively grasped social action—furnishes the key to understanding mind, self, and society.
Although the work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Ludwig Wittgenstein(1889–1951) was often more directly inspirational, Mead’s bold claim that self and society are irreducibly intersubjective has been rearticulated and supported by many distinct subsequent inter-subjectivist approaches. Action theory, symbolic interactionism, lifeworld phenomenology, hermeneutic analysis, conversational analysis, ethnomethodology, social constructivism, dialogism, discourse theory, recognition theory, and objects relations theory all take inter-subjectivity as central and irreducible. For example, Erving Goffman(1922–1982) insisted that we need a microanalysis of face-to-face interactions in order to properly understand the interpersonal interpretation, negotiation, and improvisation that constitute a society’s interaction order. While macro-and mesostructural phenomena may be important in setting the basic terms of interaction, social order according to Goffman is inexplicable without central reference to agents’ interpretations and strategies in actively developing their own action performances in everyday, interpersonal contexts. Harold Garfinkel and other ethnomethodologists likewise insist that social order is only possible because of the strongly normative character of a society’s particular everyday interaction patterns and norms.
Widely diverse social theorists influenced by phenomenology also center their analyses in intersubjective phenomena and structures. Most prominently, Alfred Schutz (1899–1959) sought to show how the lifeworld of persons—the mostly taken-for-granted knowledge, knowhow, competences, norms, and behavioral patterns that are shared throughout a society—delimits and makes possible individual action and interaction. In particular, he sought to analyze the way in which the constitutive structures of any lifeworld shape social meanings and personal experiences, by attending to the lifeworld’s spatiotemporal, intentional, semantic, and role typifying and systematizing dimensions. Other theories analyze different aspects of the lifeworld: how experience and knowledge is embodied (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), the intersubjective construction of both social and natural reality (Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann), the social construction of mind and mental concepts (Jeff Coulter), and the social power and inequalities involved in symbolic capital (Pierre Bourdieu). Finally, Jürgen Habermas emphasizes the linguistic basis of the lifeworld, constructing a theory of society in terms of the variety of types of communicative interaction, the pragmatic presuppositions of using language in order to achieve shared understandings and action coordinations with others, and the role of communicative interaction for integrating society. While acknowledging that some types of social integration function independently of communicative action—paradig-matically economic and bureaucratic systems—Habermas claims that intersubjective communication is fundamental in, and irreplaceable for, human social life.
Diverse prominent theories of the self are united in supporting Mead’s claim that the self is developed and structured intersubjectively. Martin Buber’s (1878–1965) distinction between the different interpersonal attitudes involved in the I-Thou stance and the I-It stance leads to the insight that the development and maintenance of an integral sense of personal identity is fundamentally bound up with the capacity to interact with others from a performative attitude, rather than an objectivating one. Mead’s claim is also developed in diverse theories of the self: Habermas’s account of interactive competence and rational accountability, Axel Honneth’s and Charles Taylor’s theories of interpersonal recognition and identity development, Daniel Stern’s elucidation of the interpersonal world of infants, and psychoanalytic object-relations theories stressing the dependence of the ego on affective interpersonal bonds between self and significant others.
SEE ALSOBourdieu, Pierre; Goffman, Erving; Habermas, Jürgen; Mead, George Herbert; Other, The
Benjamin, Jessica. 1988. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination.New York: Pantheon.
Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Trans. R. Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Buber, Martin. 1958. I and Thou. 2nd ed. Trans. Ronald G. Smith. New York: Scribner.
Coulter, Jeff. 1989. Mind in Action. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Goffman, Erving. 1983. The Interaction Order. American Sociological Review48 (1): 1–17.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Vol. 1 of The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1992. Individuation through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead’s Theory of Subjectivity. In Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays. Trans. William Mark Hohengarten, 149-204. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Honneth, Axel. 1995. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Trans. Joel Anderson. Cambridge, MA: Polity.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. The Child’s Relations with Others. In The Primacy of Perception, and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, ed. James M. Edie, 96-155. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Schutz, Alfred. 1962. The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson. Vol. 1 of Collected Papers. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.
Schutz, Alfred. 1962. Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, ed. I. Schutz. Vol. 3 of Collected Papers. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.
Schutz, Alfred. 1962. Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Brodersen. Vol. 2 of Collected Papers. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.
Stern, Daniel N. 1985. The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books.
Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Winnicott, Donald Woods. 1964. The Child, the Family, and the Outside World.Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin.
Christopher F. Zurn
Source: JÜRGEN HABERMAS / SEP
Habermas distinguishes the “system” as those predefined situations, or modes of coordination, in which the demands of communicative action are relaxed in this way, within legally specified limits. The prime examples of systemic coordination are markets and bureaucracies. In these systemically structured contexts, nonlinguistic media take up the slack in coordinating actions, which proceeds on the basis of money and institutional power—these media do the talking, as it were, thus relieving actors of the demands of strongly communicative action. The term “lifeworld,” by contrast, refers to domains of action in which consensual modes of action coordination predominate. In fact, the distinction between lifeworld and system is better understood as an analytic one that identifies different aspects of social interaction and cooperation (1991b). “Lifeworld” then refers to the background resources, contexts, and dimensions of social action that enable actors to cooperate on the basis of mutual understanding: shared cultural systems of meaning, institutional orders that stabilize patterns of action, and personality structures acquired in family, church, neighborhood, and school (TCA 1: chap. 6; 1998b, chap. 4).
Habermas’s system-lifeworld distinction has been criticized from a number of perspectives. Some have argued that the distinction oversimplifies the interpenetrating dynamics of social institutions (e.g., McCarthy 1991, 152–80). Others attacked the distinction as covertly ideological, concealing forms of patriarchal and economic domination (e.g., Fraser 1985). Habermas’s attempt to clarify the analytic character of the distinction only goes partway toward answering these criticisms (1991b).
Source: COMMUNICATIVE ACTION THEORY. A SYSTEM – LIFEWORLD COMPATIBILITY OR INCOMPATIBILITY?
3.5. System and Lifeworld
An important subtitle of Habermas’s theory is the concept of “lifeworld”. He used this concept inspired by Husserl (Brand, 1973, p. 143), who first used it in his work “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology”, and then by Schütz, who brought a new interpretation to the concept. For Husserl, the world of life is a space that exists before theory / science (Schutz, 1962, p.120), includes all entities, arranged in space-time dimensions, and and is the “soil” for all socail human experience (Husserl, 1970; Schutz, 1970, s. 116).
Habermas, on the other hand, thinks that the interactions between people in the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) do not take place in the consciousness of individuals (Husserl 1969: 12), but in a common space. The lifeworld (Habermas, 1971). According to him, one of the places where the negative effects of rationalization underlying modernity, such as cultural transformation, are seen most intensely is the lifeworld, which is an area of interpersonal interaction. Habermas, who attaches great importance to this sphere as the area where social rationalization takes place through language, argues that this area is occupied by the system and its subsystems such as power and money (Habermas, 1984d, Vol II: 318) and shows that this space is not rationalized sufficiently in a communicative sense (Habermas, 1984e Vol. II: 119, 173).
Husserl explains the reason behind his development of the concept of the “lifeworld” as an effort to find a solution to the separation of the objective- scientific field from the subjective lifeworld as the cause of an increasing crisis of meaning in the field of European science.
Habermas, on the other hand, states that he developed the concept of the “lifeworld” against the possible invasion of the private sphere, where agreement- oriented communicative action is carried out, from the system and its subsystems such as power and economy, which operate with reason for success. Because the system and its subsystems has the possibility to occupy private space in conflict situations that prevent his success (Habermas, 1984f II,: 318-331).
This means that, with the concepts of System and Life world, Habermas tries to explain how a two-level social structure can coexist. This effort is in fact the duality such as individual-society, subject-object, theory-practice, nomothetic-idiographic, natural sciences, social sciences and structure-subject, which both philosophy and sociology have worked on and tried to overcome. These oppositions appear, for example, as the opposition of science and social sciences in the Enlightenment, as the opposition of the nation-state, individual- society in the French revolution, and as the product of human development in the technological field in the industrial revolution, the opposition of the acting and transforming subject and the object connected to it.
The opposition Habermas tries to overcome or balance is the opposition of the system, which is the field of material production, and the life world, which is opposed to it and consists of the private and public sphere* where symbolic production is realized. Taking these two concepts together and explaining their contrasts will make the meaning of these concepts for communicative action theory more visible.
Habermas, in his two-strucrured social theory, explains the duality of symbolic and material reproduction of society through the “lifeworld” and “system” concepts.
“System and lifeworld are each evolutionarily and structurally differentiated social spheres, subsystems or even sovereign territories that are either systemically or socially integrated” (Habermas, 1981: 140).
For the structure of modern, differentiated societies, this means that the system and lifeworld exist in them as concretely separated systems of action and can be set in relation to one another (in the sense of: boundaries, primacy, superiority / subordination, mutual penetration interpenetration, mediatization, colonization.
The economy and the state administration are systemically integrated, formally organized sub-systems of purposeful rational action, which are driven by money and power as media of action release. They serve the material reproduction, disturbances of the same are to be understood as system crises or control crises. These systems are subject to the imperatives of increasing complexity. People have official roles and must seek certain goals, even if sometimes with ethical restraints.
The lifeworld on the other hand is the daily world that we share with others. This includes all facets of life, apart from organised or institution-driven ones. For example, family life, culture and informal social exchange. It is the sphere within which we lead much of our social and individual life (Habermas, 1984g, Vol. II: 126). It’s based on a implicit foundation of shared values and understandings. that give us the ability to perform actions that we know others will understand. Thus daily actions that we produce in the lifeworld are generally communicative in nature (Cooke, 1998).
If one follows the thesis of the colonization of the lifeworld, reifying effects only arise when systemically established obligations impose oneself into the lifeworld.
“It is not the uncoupling of media-steered subsystems and of their organizational forms from the lifeworld that leads to the one-sided rationalization or reification of everyday communicative practice, but only the penetration of forms of economic and administrative rationality into areas of action that resist being converted over to the media of money and power because they are specialized in cultural transmission, social integration, and child rearing, and remain dependent on mutual understanding as a mechanism for coordinating action” (Habermas, 1984h, Vol. II: 330).
Habermas’s goal with the rationalization of the lifeworld and the system is the rationalization of both in their own unique way. On the one hand, the structures of the system should become more complex by differentiating, on the other hand, the lifeworld should provide an environment for free and independent communication and ensure that the best arguments are accepted as a result of consensus. According to Habermas, this is a formulation that will ensure that the life-world and the system balance each other and will have a positive effect on their development.
Source: The problem of intersubjectivity in Western philosophy: Boundaries of the communicative approach
Source: The problem of intersubjectivity in Western philosophy: Boundaries of the communicative approach
Source: The problem of intersubjectivity in Western philosophy: Boundaries of the communicative approach
Source: The problem of intersubjectivity in Western philosophy: Boundaries of the communicative approach
Source: The problem of intersubjectivity in Western philosophy: Boundaries of the communicative approach
My Related posts
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Intersubjectivity in Buddhism
Meditations on Emptiness and Fullness
Self and Other: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity
Semiotics and Systems
Semiotic Self and Dialogic Self
Phenomenological Sociology
Phenomenology and Symbolic Interactionism
Individual Self, Relational Self, and Collective Self
Individual, Relational, and Collective Reflexivity
Boundaries and Relational Sociology
Semiotic Sociology
Kenneth Burke and Dramatism
Drama Theory: Choices, Conflicts, and Dilemmas
Drama Theory: Acting Strategically
Drama Therapy: Self in Performance
Dialog and Dialectics
Erving Goffman: Dramaturgy of Social Life
Victor Turner’s Postmodern Theory of Social Drama
Understanding Metatheater
Society as Communication: Social Systems Theory of Niklas Luhmann
Cybernetics, Autopoiesis, and Social Systems Theory
Frames in Interaction
Key Sources of Research
On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action.
Habermas, Jürgen (2002).
MIT Press.
Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity in Modern Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: A Study of Sartre, Binswanger, Lacan, and Habermas,
Author Roger Frie Edition illustrated Publisher Rowman & Littlefield, 1997 ISBN 0847684164, 9780847684168
In his Theory of Communicative Action, Jürgen Habermas proposes a theory of “communicative action” and sets it within a concept of society he calls “lifeworld.” In both his Theory of Communicative Action and later in Between Facts and Norms, Habermas describes the “lifeworld” as the basic conception of society, to be amended or supplemented only for cause. In addition, Habermas argues that in the course of social evolution, systems of economic and political action arise whereby action is coordinated by the consequences of self-interested action, rather than consensual understanding. This chapter explores Habermas’s idea of such “systems” based on his reading of Talcott Parsons. It also examines how Habermas integrates the lifeworld and system concepts into his model of system/lifeworld interchange. It argues that the critical model developed by Habermas in Theory of Communicative Action is more functionalist than straightforwardly normative.
‘System, Lifeworld, and Habermas’s “Communication Theory of Society”’,
In his Theory of Communication Action, Jürgen Habermas talks about a “reconstructive social theory which employs a dual perspective”—the perspective of “system” and “lifeworld.” Habermas’s proposed theory “should explain how the reconstructed normative self-understanding of modern legal orders connects with the social reality of highly complex societies.” In developing the “communication theory of society” in which his “discourse theory of law” is to be situated, Habermas departs from his earlier understanding of the relation between system and lifeworld. This chapter explores Habermas’s concepts of system and lifeworld as well as his communication theory of society. It considers his “model of the circulation of political power”, which presents the idea of “civil society” as an elaboration of the lifeworld’s “private sphere.” It also discusses Habermas’s reference to the three “structural components” (culture, society, and personality) and argues that his notion of “system” and “lifeworld” is similar to the post-Parsons “autopoietic” systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. Finally, the chapter rejects the concept of lifeworld as separate social sphere.
Intersubjectivity and critical consciousness: Remarks on Habermas’s theory of communicative action.
Wagner, Gerhard & Zipprian, Heinz (1991).
Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 34 (1):49 – 62.
This chapter describes Jürgen Habermas’ approach to intersubjectivism, presenting his theories of communicative action and discourse ethics as a response to his own earlier call for a form of rationality that is suited to critical social theory. Some implications that Habermas’ ideas hold for leadership are considered. A number of practical and conceptual challenges to Habermas’ conclusions, which have been offered by writers who broadly share his intersubjectivist commitment, are outlined. These challenges are used to augment the understanding of intersubjectivist leadership already presented. The chapter ends with some general reflections concerning moral philosophy and leadership, which have been garnered from the three chapters of Part II.
A Habermasian perspective on joint meaning making online : what does it offer and what are the difficulties?
Hammond, Michael. (2015)
International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 10 (3). pp. 223-237.
The basic categories of Habermas’s theory are, then, those of a broadly conceived sociological theory of action, which, however, also incorporates social historical and system-theoretical, as well as structuralist elements. Although he borrows some concepts from Talcott Parsons (Holmwood, 2009) and often mentions Niklas Luhmann, his conception is closer to those of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens (Outhwaite, 2015).
What Habermas (1987b: 553) stresses is that system theories and theories of action ‘isolate and overgeneralize’ aspects of modernity (system and lifeworld, respectively). When, here and elsewhere, he emphasizes the role of language, he does not intend to reduce “social action to the interpretive accomplishments of participants in communication … assimilating action to speech, interaction to conversation” (Habermas, 1987a: 143). This is rather the way in which action is ‘coordinated.’
Intersubjectivity and interculturality: a conceptual link
Author: Xiaodong Dai Date: Jan. 2010 From: China Media Research(Vol. 6, Issue 1) Publisher: Edmondson Intercultural Enterprises
Intersubjectivity reflects the condition of all human existence and constitutes the basis of social communication. Interculturality opens up new social space and constitutes the largest and most productive platform for intercultural dialogue. This paper attempts to define intersubjectivity and interculturality, interpret their implications and analyze how they interact with each other. Intersubjectivity refers to the interpersonal connection between individuals who are attuned to one another and construct social relations. The polysemic nature of intersubjectivity suggests that it not only embodies mutuality and consensuses but also disagreements and tensions. In like manner, interculturality refers to the complex connection between cultures whose members negotiate to reach agreements and achieve reciprocal interactions. It implies commonalities and similarities as well as differences, contrasts and conflicts. Intersubjectivity and interculturality share a similar structure, but have different operational mechanisms. The key difference lies in their frames of reference. With more exposure to other culture/cultures, communicators can broaden their horizons, reduce cultural distance and further transform intersubjectivity into interculturality. In establishing interculturality, they need to be open to other cultures and transcend monocultural ways of thinking. Key words: intersubjectivity, transformation, interculturality
Communication as analytical unit in Luhmann and Habermas
Sergio Pignuoli-Ocampo1
1Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas y Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. (CONICET-UBA-IIGG). spignuoli@conicet.gov.ar
Convergencia vol.24 no.73 Toluca ene./abr. 2017
Reconstructive Social Theory: Habermas, Bhaskar, and Caillé
16th November 2016
This is a guest blog post by Professor Frederic Vandenberghe of Sociology in the Institute of Social and Political Studies at the State University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Frederic is a leading expert in the field of Critical Realism. He has been working on CR and the social sciences since 1994 when he completed his doctorate in Sociology from Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales. His work operates at the intersection of philosophy and sociology with a special interest in hermeneutics, phenomenology, and critical realism. He recently published a series of essays in a book titled, “What’s Critical about Critical Realism? Essays in Reconstructive Social Theory”.
Husserl and transcendental intersubjectivity: A response to the linguistic-pragmatic critique
Zahavi, D. (2001a).
(E. A. Behnke, Trans.). Athens, OH: Ohio UP.
Phenomenology and the problems of intersubjectivity.
Zahavi, D. (2001b).
In S. Crowell, L. Embree, & S. J. Julian (Eds.), The Reach of Reflection: Issues for Phenomenology’s Second Century. Purchased and downloaded at: http://www.electronpress.com
Individuation through socialization: George Herbert Mead‟s theory of subjectivity.
Habermas, J. (1995).
In J. Habermas (ed.), Postmetapysical Thinking. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 149-204.
Some further clarifications of the concept of communicative rationality.
Habermas, J. (1996).
In J. Habermas (ed.), On the Pragmatics of Communication. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. pp. 307-342.
Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy.
Habermas, J. (1997).
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Introduction: Realism after the Linguistic Turn.
Habermas, J. (2003).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (2008), Truth and Justification. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press. pp. 1-51.
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
Goffman, E. (1971).
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Reflections on the linguistic foundation of sociology: The Christian Gauss lecture.
Habermas, J. (1971).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (2001), On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 3-103.
Wahrheitstheorien.
Habermas, J. (1972).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (1984), Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. pp. 27-183.
Reflections on communicative pathology.
Habermas, J. (1974a).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (2001), On the Pragmatics of Social Interaction: Preliminary Studies in the Theory of Communicative Action. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 131-170.
Können komplexe Gesellschaften eine vernünftige Identität ausbilden?,
Habermas, J.(1974b).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (1976), Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. pp. 92-126.
Introduction: Some difficulties in the attempt to link theory and praxis.
Habermas, J. (1974c).
In J. Habermas (ed.), Theory and Practice. London: Heinemann. pp. 1-40. Forchtner Page |36
Towards a reconstruction of historical materialism.
Habermas, J. (1975).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (1979), Communication and the Evolution of Society. Heinemann: London. pp. 130- 177.
Habermas, J. (1976a). Überlegungen zum evolutionären Stellenwert des Rechts. In J. Habermas (ed.), Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. pp. 260-267.
What is Universal Pragmatics?
Habermas, J. (1976b).
In J. Habermas (ed.) (1979), Communication and the Evolution of Society. London: Heinemann. pp. 1-68.
A reply to my critics.
Habermas, J. (1982).
In J.B. Thompson and D. Held (eds.), Habermas: Critical Debates.
London/Basingstoke: MacMillan Press. pp. 219-283.
The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society.
Habermas, J. (1984).
London: Heinemann.
The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. II: Lifeworld and System.
Habermas, J. (1987).
Cambridge: Polity Press.
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures.
Habermas, J. (1990).
Cambridge: Polity Press.
The Gulf War: Catalyst for a new German normalcy.
Habermas, J. (1993).
In M. Pensky (ed.), The Past as Future. University of Nebraska Press. pp. 5-31.
Kollektive Lernprozesse: Studien zur Grundlegung einer Soziologischen Lerntheorie.
Adequate accounts of intersubjectivity must recognise that it is a social, cognitive, and affective phenomenon. I draw on Jürgen Habermas’ formal-pragmatic theory of meaning and of the lifeworld as an alternative to phenomenological approaches. However, his conception of the lifeworld reflects a cognitivist bias. Intersubjectivity cannot be adequately conceptualised merely in terms of our mutual accountability and exchange or reasons; the affective dimension of our social interactions must also be recognised. I propose to redress this shortcoming by taking account of empirical research on intersubjectivity, joint attention, and attachment. This leads me to suggest supplementing the three Habermasian validity claims to truth, normative rightness, and sincerity with a fourth, a claim to attachment, which fits with understanding the earliest infant interactions in terms of altercentric participation. Since an adequate account of the social nature of linguistic communication must do justice not only to the lifeworld as a shared background of intelligibility, but also as a background against which differences in point of view are articulated, I conclude with a brief look at the ontogeny of perspective. Keywords: lifeworld; intersubjectivity; validity claims; attachment; cognition; affect; perspective; J. Habermas; M. Merleau-Ponty
The close relationship between motion (bodily movement) and emotion (feelings) is not an etymological coincidence. While moving ourselves, we move others; in observing others move – we are moved ourselves. The fundamentally interpersonal nature of mind and language has recently received due attention, but the key role of (e)motion in this context has remained something of a blind spot. The present book rectifies this gap by gathering contributions from leading philosophers, psychologists and linguists working in the area. Framed by an introducing prologue and a summarizing epilogue (written by Colwyn Trevarthen, who brought the phenomenological notion of intersubjectivity to a wider audience some 30 years ago) the volume elaborates a dynamical, active view of emotion, along with an affect-laden view of motion – and explores their significance for consciousness, intersubjectivity, and language. As such, it contributes to the emerging interdisciplinary field of mind science, transcending hitherto dominant computationalist and cognitivist approaches.
COMMUNICATIVE ACTION THEORY.
A SYSTEM – LIFEWORLD COMPATIBILITY OR INCOMPATIBILITY?
Habermas’s interactionist cum dialogical intersubjectivity
Brandom’s discursive intersubjectivity
Transpersonal Psychology
Consciousness
Key Researchers
Jessica Benjamin
Judith Blackstone
Dan Zahavi
Roy Tzohar
B. Alan Wallace
Bill Waldron
Jeannine A. Davies
Brook Ziporyn
Gerald Dōkō Virtbauer
de Balbian, Ulrich
Loy, David
Joel Krueger
Joshua May
Evan Thompson
Brincat, S
Linda A. Chernus
G. E. Atwood
R. D. Stolorow
Lewis A. Kirshner
Christian de Quincey
Shaun Gallagher
Orange, D.M.
Alex Gillespie
Flora Cornish
Peter Buirski
Hanne De Jaegher
Vygotsky, Lev S.
Toma Strle
Merleau-Ponty M.
Buber, Martin
Mackenzie, Matthew
Source: The Buddhist Philosophical Conception of Intersubjectivity: an Introduction.
This paper serves as a retrospective introduction to a series of four tightly connected articlesFootnote 1published over the course of several issues in SOPHIA, all of which arose from a panel on the Buddhist Philosophical Notion of Intersubjectivity at the Yogācāra Studies Unit of the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR, Atlanta, 2015). The growing online access to academic journals seems increasingly to obviate the need to group thematically related articles in a special issue, but nonetheless, readers may wish for some guidance regarding the editorial reasons for grouping them in a series, the common concerns they address, and the ways in which they relate to each other. This brief introduction therefore outlines a possible framework for approaching these papers, and suggests a particular order in which they can be most profitably read.
The philosophical engagement with the issue of intersubjectivity—i.e., the shared nature of our experiences, in particular of the external world—has evident significance for an array of Buddhist concerns. Intersubjective experience is of interest not just for its role in bridging the self and others, but also because it allows (and for the philosophical realist, indeed reaffirms) an emergent notion of objectivity. Viewed on the one hand against the background of the Buddhist metaphysics of momentariness and causality, the critique of the self, and nominalism, and on the other hand in light of the Buddhist emphasis on the practical and social role of the Sangha and of meaningful salvific discourse, intersubjectivity poses a particularly tenacious explanatory challenge for Buddhist schools of thought. It is a curious fact, then, that despite the significance of this topic and its relevance to the Buddhist understanding of personal identity, otherness, and the nature of the life-world, it has received relatively little explicit attention in either Buddhist philosophical writing (see Garfield’s response paper on this point) or contemporary scholarship. As a corrective, the AAR panel and the set of articles that ensued from it—by Kachru, Prueitt, and Tzohar, and a response paper by Garfield—addressed this theme from various angles. The overarching question at the background of the discussion was whether there is a uniquely Buddhist conception of intersubjectivity, and if so what it entails and what are its expressions in the Buddhist philosophical conception of experience, language, and the life-world.
Aiming to situate these questions within a concrete and continuous intellectual and historical context, the papers focus on the Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda tradition as a case study. Taken together, they provide a diachronic account of the development of this particular Buddhist approach to the topic, by tracing continuity, disruption, and innovation as the outcomes of shifting intellectual agendas in the works of Vasubandhu and his commentators (Tzohar), Dharmakīrti’s thought (Prueitt), and Ratnakīrti’s response (Kachru).
While they are attuned to differences between the respective accounts of these thinkers, the papers all seem to suggest certain overlapping concerns. These concerns, and the ways in which they were addressed by the Buddhist thinkers, are spelled out and assessed in Jay Garfield’s response paper, “I Take Refuge in the Sangha. But how? The Puzzle of Intersubjectivity in Buddhist Philosophy Comments on Tzohar, Prueitt, and Kachru.” The most common concern, pointed out by Garfield, has to do with the need to account for and justify the possibility of intersubjective experiences under a view of phenomena as mind-dependent, and it is framed—not unlike the way it appears in the Western philosophical tradition—in terms of the perennial debate between the realist and the idealist. Another major if more subtle concern has to do with the question of meaning—in both the perceptual and the linguistic communicative realm—and how it can be construed intersubjectively so as to allow for shared perceptual content and efficacious actions, to account for successful and meaningful language use (in the constitution of norms), and to avoid the pitfalls of solipsism on the one hand or incommensurability on the other.
Dealing broadly with these concerns within the context of each thinker, the papers before us reveal the way in which intersubjectivity branches off into a range of fundamental questions in Buddhist metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind and language, all of which are deeply grounded in particular Buddhist conceptions—of, for instance, cosmology, the category of species, the concept of mind and the operation of language. In this respect, the emergent collective account of Buddhist intersubjectivity serves as a step toward much needed conceptual groundwork regarding this notion in its original context, that is, groundwork that takes into account the meaning of specific specialized terms and categories involved in this notion, and the way in which it conveys a complex set of cultural preferences and doctrinal premises.
My own paper in the series, “Imagine being a Preta: Early Indian Yogācāra Approaches to Intersubjectivity,” deals with the early Yogācāra strategies for explaining intersubjective agreement under a “mere representations” view. Thus, this paper presents the foundational tradition to which the other Buddhist thinkers react, and in this respect sets down the terms of the discussion taken up in the other three papers. Examining Vasubandhu’s, Asaṅga’s, and Sthiramati’s uses of the example of intersubjective agreement among the hungry ghosts (pretas)—an agreement explained by appeal to a shared karma—I demonstrate that the Yogācāra arguments should be understood as an ironic inversion of the realist premise; in other words, as showing that intersubjective agreement not only does not require the existence of external mind-independent objects, but in fact is incompatible with their existence. Under this account, I argue, intersubjectivity is not only possible under a “mere-representation” view but necessary for the coherence of the Yogācāra view. As Garfield observes about this Yogācāra reasoning, “it is the fact that external objects are imagined not by a single mind, but by many… that gives the argument its force, for that enables genuinely alternative realities to be compared to one another to demonstrate that reality, not hallucination, is mind-dependent” (Garfield, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-0708-7).
My paper goes on to explicate the emergent Yogācāra understanding of the life-world—as the outcome of the shared karma of all its beings—as a realm that is understood in terms of the self and others’ shared engagement in a common world. This has some affinity with the way the contemporary phenomenological tradition conceives of intersubjectivity, but unlike the phenomenological account, the Yogācāra takes the first-person perspective to be a product rather than the enabling condition of this engagement. Among the ramifications of this reluctance to privilege the first-person perspective, I argued, is a radical revision of the “shared” and “private” distinction as it is used with respect to experiences, both ordinarily and philosophically.
Exploring the later development of these themes from the perspective of Buddhist philosophy of language is the focus of Catherine Prueitt’s paper “Karmic Imprints, Exclusion, and the Creation of the Worlds of Conventional Experience in Dharmakīrti’s Thought.” The early Yogācāra attempt to uphold and justify intersubjectivity by appeal to shared karmic imprints (vāsanā) is the starting point for Prueitt’s paper, which explicates the way in which this strategy is used by Dharmakīrti (fl. c. 550–650 C.E.) to explain the absence of universals under his theory of apoha. While she traces the continuity between these two accounts, Prueitt points out important points in which Dharmakīrti departs from the early Yogācāra reasoning. For Dharmakīrti, she suggests, intersubjectivity was important not so much for defending a view of phenomena as mind-dependent but insofar as it was involved in the more fundamental question of how shared meaning—in its most fundamental function as concept formation—may be construed and normatively applied.
Prueitt’s paper demonstrates how, with the premise of the non-existence of universals, Dharmakīrti explains concept formation by tracing concepts ultimately to the mechanism of karmic imprints (which in turn are understood to be developed over countless lifetimes and continuously and recursively reshaped by ongoing actions). Couched in terms similar to those of the early Yogācāra account, according to Dharmakīrti, the extent to which individuals experience themselves as acting within a shared world (or not) depends on these imprints. Whatever is shared—manifested in terms of similar sensory capacities, habits, and aims—allows in turn for the judgment of sameness, that is, forms the basis for selectively collecting certain particulars (taking them as if having the same effects) under a single concept.
Prueitt’s argument goes on to show that Dharmakīrti’s appeal to karmic imprints also allows him to meet the critique (both traditional and modern) that his denial of the reality of the subject/object duality is incompatible with his theory of apoha. She concludes that Dharmakīrti’s reliance on karmic imprints on two distinct levels—one within the conventional world (i.e., concept formation), and one that constitutes the conventional world (i.e., the subject/object duality)—provides a round and complete account of intersubjectivity without relying on universals.
Proceeding to examine the changing conception of intersubjectivity within changing theories of mind in the Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda tradition, Sonam Kachru’s paper “Ratnakīrti and the Extent of Inner Space: An Essay on Yogācāra and the Threat of Genuine of Solipsism” traces the outlines of what may be described as a paradigm shift in the tradition with respect to the conceptual foundations of intersubjectivity.
The paper achieves this by focusing on the response by Ratnakīrti (990–1050 C.E.) to Dharmakīrti’s attempt to defuse the threat of epistemological solipsism, with particular attention to the former’s sensitivity to the conceptual preconditions of this problem, and to the ways in which his conclusions differ from Dharmakīrti’s.
According to Kachru’s analysis, Ratnakīrti’s critique, in essence, is that Dharmakīrti overlooks the fact that in framing the problem he is helping himself to an equivocation between two distinct concepts of mind (which, however, remain inactive in forming his solution to the problem). The first is a notion of mind that emerges out of our ordinary linguistic practices, and the second, a phenomenological concept of mind as phenomenal presence. Given the latter conception of mind, so goes Ratnakīrti’s argument—which, as Garfield notes, has interesting affinities with similar treatments of the problem of other minds in contemporary philosophy of mind and language, beginning with Wittgenstein—there is indeed no justification for applying the concept of “other minds,” but neither are there any grounds to speak of “one’s own mind” (because insofar as the phenomenological concept of mind is experienced as such, we have no room to meaningfully ask whether there is only one mind or many). Kachru’s essay concludes by considering which of the different ways we find in the Yogācāra-Vijñānavāda tradition to assuage epistemological solipsism we have reason to prefer, thereby exploring the impact these various theories of mind have had on the changing place of intersubjectivity within that tradition.
Notes
Guest edited by Roy Tzohar and Jake Davis, and include: Roy Tzohar, “Imagine Being a Preta: Early Indian Yogācāra Approaches to Intersubjectivity” Sophia 56 (2017): 337–354; Catherine Prueitt, “Karmic Imprints, Exclusion, and the Creation of the Worlds of Conventional Experience in Dharmakīrti’s Thought,” Sophia 57 (2018): 313–335; Sonam Kachru, “Ratnakīrti and the Extent of Inner Space: An Essay on Yogācāra and the Threat of Genuine of Solipsism,” Sophia 58 (2019): https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-0707-8; Jay L. Garfield, “I Take Refuge in the Sangha. But how? The Puzzle of Intersubjectivity in Buddhist Philosophy, Comments on Tzohar, Prueitt, and Kachru,” Sophia 58 (2019): https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-0708-7.
A Buddhist Philosophical Approach to Intersubjectivity
CFS Lecture by Roy Tzohar, Department of East Asian Studies, Tel Aviv University, Israel
In this talk I propose that there is a uniquely Buddhist philosophical conception of intersubjectivity, and explore some of its expressions in the Buddhist conception of experience, language, and the social realm. For the Buddhist philosophical schools of thought, intersubjective experiences were of interest not just for their role in bridging the self and others, but also because they allegedly involve an emergent notion of objectivity. Given the Buddhist metaphysics of momentariness and causality and the critique of the first-person perspective, intersubjectivity posed a particularly tenacious explanatory challenge for Buddhist thought. In discussing how this challenge was met, I focus in particular on the strategies devised by one Buddhist school, the Indian Yogācāra, to explain intersubjective agreement under a view of phenomena as mind-dependent. This explanation, I show, involved an ironic inversion of the realist premise, since it proceeds by arguing that intersubjective agreement not only does not require the existence of mind-independent objects but is in fact incompatible with their existence. By delineating the phenomenological complexity underlying this account, I unpack the emergent Yogācāra account of intersubjectivity along with its implications for the understanding of being, the life-world, and alterity, and argue that it proposes a radical revision of the way in which we conceive of the “shared” and “private” distinction with respect to experiences, both ordinarily and philosophically.
Roy Tzohar specializes in the history of philosophy with a focus on Buddhist and Brahmanical philosophical traditions in India. He is currently an assistant professor in the East Asian Studies Department at Tel Aviv University. He holds a PhD from the Religion Department at Columbia University (New York, 2011), and an M.A. in philosophy from Tel Aviv University’s Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students (Tel Aviv, 2004). His research, under the Marie Curie IRG fellowship, concerns intersubjectivity and language in the Indian Buddhist Yogācāra thought. His monograph “Meaning in the World and in Texts: A Buddhist Theory of Metaphor” is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
My Related Posts
Self and Other: Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity
Meditations on Emptiness and Fullness
Indira’s Net: On Interconnectedness
Third and Higher Order Cybernetics
The Great Chain of Being
Law of Dependent Origination
Key Sources of Research
The Buddhist Philosophical Conception of Intersubjectivity: an Introduction.
Buddhism has become one of the main dialogue partners for different psychotherapeutic approaches. As a psychological ethical system, it offers structural elements that are compatible with psychotherapeutic theory and practice. A main concept in Mahāyāna-Buddhism and postmodern psychoanalysis is intersubjectivity. In relational psychoanalysis the individual is analysed within a matrix of relationships that turn out to be the central power in her/his psychological development. By realising why one has become the present individual and how personal development is connected with relationships, the freedom to choose and create a life that is independent from inner restrictions should be strengthened. In Mahāyāna-Buddhism, intersubjectivity is the result of an understanding of all phenomena as being in interdependent connection. Human beings are a collection of different phenomena and in constant interchange with everything else. Personal happiness and freedom from suffering depends on how this interchange can be realised in experience. The article focuses on the philosophical psychological fundaments in both approaches and emphasises clarification of to what the term ‘intersubjectivity’ exactly refers. This clarification is essential for the current dialogues, as well as further perspectives in this interdisciplinary field.
Intersubjectivity in Mahāyāna-Buddhism and Relational Psychoanalysis.
RELATIONAL DHARMA: A MODERN PARADIGM OF TRANSFORMATION—A LIBERATING MODEL OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY
Jeannine A. Davies, Ph.D.
Vancouver, B.C
The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2014, Vol. 46, No. 1
Nondual Realization and Intersubjective Theory
Judith Blackstone
Chapter in Book The Empathic Ground, 2007
Intersubjectivity as an antidote to stress: Using dyadic active inference model of intersubjectivity to predict the efficacy of parenting interventions in reducing stress—through the lens of dependent origination in Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophy
Ho S. Shaun, Nakamura Yoshio, Gopang Meroona, Swain James E.
“CHAPTER 11 What Is the Buddha Looking At? The Importance of Intersubjectivity in the T’ien-t’ai Tradition as Understood by Chih-li”
Ziporyn, Brook.
In Buddhism in the Sung edited by Daniel A. Getz and Peter N. Gregory, 442-476. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780824843649-013
In this volume, volume 6, I will deal with insight and understanding, meaning and communication and intersubjectivity. (In an appendix I will include a number of -isms, cognitive biases and fallacies that might interfere in, with and distort these things.)
The latter is pre-supposed by, present, necessary and operating in all four of these notions when they are employed as verbs. I hope and intend to employ these words and explore them without the need for ghost-in-the-machine like mysterious, mystical and mythical ‘mental’ processes and organs such as ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’ but by means of different meanings, dimensions, levels of t notions of intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity enfolds (like a pregnant mother her foetus) insight, understanding, meaning and communication. Intersubjectivity is the beginning, the ground and reason for and the end of all meanings or sense that human beings could have. I am not interested in all the details of insight, experience, understanding, meaning, concepts and ideas, dialogue, discourse, interaction, communication (for example as speculated about by Habermas and his followers, Brandom et al). etc but merely the fact that these things require, assume, presuppose (different aspects, features, functions, processes, etc of) intersubjectivity. For those who are so inclined they could execute experiments (for example in the disciplines of philosophy, psychology, sociology, cognitive sciences, anthropology, etc) to establish that what I state here is a fact and not merely speculate. I will leave speculation - about the activities and nature of the first, second and third person (the public, etc) participants in the activities and process of communication, the question of second and third contingencies, or Habermas’s interactionist cum dialogical intersubjectivity and/or Brandom’s discursive intersubjectivity, the insufficiency of the former’s coordination and the need for synthesis, modes of structuration and the temporal dimensions of communication, threefold semiotic or twofold semiological structuralist theories of signs, theories of individualist or collective learning, action-directing models cultural models, pre-supposed structural features of the social relationships that are involved in communication, the structure parameters of for example the process of communication embedded in an intersubjective context (I would say all the following themselves are intersubjective), as discursive practice, including discourse, argumentation, communication, communication exchange, linguistic communication, everyday communication, interaction, etc - those, especially Continentals and those influenced by them, who suffer from the need for metaphysical speculation and to ontologize in complex terms about the most simple and obvious notions.
The reason for these attitudes of mine towards mental things, processes, organs, etc is that I do not believe they exist, apart from being umbrella-notions that refer to a number of undefined and not yet conceptualized meanings. They have their origins in uneducated, uninformed redundant myths and folk psychology. Their usage date back to almost pre-historic times in the evolution of human thinking and psychology and are conceptual remainders and linguistic left overs of primitive flat earth socio-cultural attitudes and beliefs.
I further need to make four points concerning my approach in this volume and my approach to or understanding of philosophy, they manner or style in which I write, especially in this volume and how I employ and interpret the nature and one function of intersubjectivity, both in this volume and in general. The latter I present as a kind of hypothesis and conclusion.
Institutionalized and internalized, competence intersubjectivity contain many user-illusions and an imaginary or manifest image of reality, including of themselves (Dennett and Sellars),. This can be contrasted we a comprehension or comprehensive, understanding intersubjectivity. It is possible and perhaps even necessary to transform or replace the competence intersubjectivity to a comprehension or understanding (scientific, Dennett and Sellars) image of reality and themselves.Ethics and morality and studies of ethics and morality deal with the reality of competence intersubjectivity (by means of socio-cultural practices that are derived from, based on an created by means of this restrictive, misleading, unreal, illusory, unrealistic intersubjectivity and the life-worlds associated with it) and human life-worlds constituted on the basis of and in terms of this intersubjectivity. This is why I am a nihilist, a libertarian, at least a minarchist or rather an anarchist and epistemologically a sceptic.
Kant’s things in themselves are similar to Dennett and Searle’s notions of manifest and scientific image. With my addition that we are socialized and internalize the competent, know how to do it, institutionalized manifest, everyday intersubjectivity, instead of the comprehension, insights and understanding knowing that, scientific intersubjectivity of all scientific disciplines.
Shoulder to Shoulder, Eye to Eye: Relationships in Buddhism & Psychotherapy
Polly Young-Eisendrath, Mark Unno
Barre Center for Buddhist Studies
Course Description:
Buddhist practices can be understood as inquiries into individual experience within a community, whereas analytic psychotherapy is an inquiry into mutual discovery through a dyadic relationship. While Buddhism invites us to investigate the subjective and objective worlds, psychotherapy especially invites us to investigate the intersubjective. In this program, we will explore both the resonances and divergences between psychotherapy and Buddhist practice in these regards, focusing on selected strands in depth psychology and psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and Zen, Pure Land Buddhism, and Vipassana Mindfulness, on the other. Themes of subjectivity, objectivity, and intersubjectivity will be especially helpful in thinking through Buddhism in a Western context, where the majority of practitioners are living in couple and family relationships. The program emphasizes both embodied practice and reflective inquiry.
Buddhist Notion of Intersubjectivity.
Bandyopadhyay, P. S. (Guest ed.), Tzohar, R. (Guest ed.), & Davis, J. (Guest ed.) (2019).
This paper disputes the claim that the so-called soul-body dualism finds its solution in the analysis of the intersubjectivity from the viewpoint of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology and in the concept of selflessness in the philosophy of Mahayana-Buddhism. The intentionality of instinctual drive as the passive synthesis provides the reason for Husserl’s intersubjectivity and the possibility of Buber’s I-Thou relation. The selflessness in this relation is the concept of Buber’s thou and in Husserl’s intersubjectivity lies in the interesting connection with the non-egological dimension of Buddhism.
“‘I’ Without ‘I am’: On the Presence of Subjectivity in Early Buddhism, in the Light of Transcendental Phenomenology”.
Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychotherapy (Book Review)
Title: Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychotherapy Author: Magid, Barry Publisher: Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2002 Reviewed By: Susan B. Parlow, Winter 2004, pp. 34-36
LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
Empathy and Consciousness
Evan Thompson
First a consulting report prepared for the Fetzer Institute (Kalamazoo, MI) that also served as the discussion paper for the meeting I convened at Fetzer on ‘The Intersubjectivity of Human Consciousness: Integrating Phenomenology and Cognitive Science’ (Sep- tember 24–27, 1999), and the second my opening address to this meeting.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, No. 5–7, 2001, pp. 1–32
Intersubjectivity Theory Revisited: A 30-Year Retrospective,
Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology and Contextualism, edited by G. E. Atwood, & R. D. Stolorow (2014). New York, NY: Routledge,
The author views the analytic enterprise as centrally involving an effort on the part of the analyst to track the dialectical movement of individual subjectivity (of analyst and analysand) and intersubjectivity (the jointly created unconscious life of the analytic pair—the analytic third). In Part I of this paper, the author discusses clinical material in which he relies heavily on his reverie experiences to recognize and verbally symbolize what is occurring in the analytic relationship at an unconscious level. In Part II, the author conceives of projective identification as a form of the analytic third in which the individual subjectivities of analyst and analysand are subjugated to a co-created third subject of analysis. Successful analytic work involves a superseding of the subjugating third by means of mutual recognition of analyst and analysand as separate subjects and a reap-propriation of their (transformed) individual subjectivities.
The relational unconscious is the fundamental structuring property of each interpersonal relation; it permits, as well as constrains, modes of engagement specific to that dyad and influences individual subjective experience within the dyad. Three usages of the concept of thirdness are delineated and contrasted with the concept of the relational unconscious, which, it is suggested, has the advantage of being both consistent with existing views of unconscious processes and more directly applicable to therapeutic concerns. Enactments and intersubjective resistances are viewed as clinical manifestations of the relational unconscious, and the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis results, in part, from altering the structure of the relational unconscious that binds analysand and analyst.
In this book, Lewis Kirshner explains and illustrates the concept of intersubjectivity and its application to psychoanalysis. By drawing on findings from neuroscience, infant research, cognitive psychology, Lacanian theory, and philosophy, Kirshner argues that the analytic relationship is best understood as a dialogic exchange of signs between two subjects—a semiotic process. Both subjects bring to the interaction a history and a set of unconscious desires, which inflect their responses. In order to work most effectively with patients, analysts must attend closely to the actual content of the exchange, rather than focusing on imagined contents of the patient’s mind. The current situation revives a history that is shaped by the analyst’s participation.
Intersubjective Systems Theory in Psychoanalysis – An Overview
George E. Atwood, Robert D. Stolorow, and Donna M. Orange are the core theorists of intersubjective systems theory, a form of psychoanalytic practice that focuses on the relational origins of mental distress and does so through the interpersonal and intersubjective relationship of the analyst and analysand.
These theorists, all of whom are practicing psychoanalysts, have rejected the Cartesian version of self as a unitary, isolated entity, and have likewise rejected mental illness as an intrapsychic dysfunction. In their model, which relies heavily on phenomenological philosophy as its explanatory foundation, the patient’s troubles (excluding organic disease or physical trauma) exist only within the experiential and relational contexts in which they developed.
There are two powerful and often implicit beliefs that underlie most current psychotherapeutic models: (1) the Myth of Modeling, “a way of thinking which over-emphasizes the conscious, cognitive, rational and technique based aspects of the psychoanalytic encounter” (Mikko Martela and Esa Saarinen, 2008), and (2) the Myth of the Isolated Mind (Stolorow and Atwood 2002), a remnant of the Cartesian dualism that has infected Western philosophy until the middle of the 20th Century and still is embedded in modern psychology.
Intersubjective systems theory (IST, or intersubjectivity theory) proposes that minds are not isolated, unitary things that exist as individual entities, as though in a vacuum. Rather, minds exist within interpersonal and intersubjective relationships, beginning at birth (and even before) with the attachment bond to the mother, and they develop within interpersonal, intersubjective, relational contexts.
Here is a wide-angle definition of intersubjectivity from Alex Gillespie and Flora Cornish (2009):
Gillespie, A. & Cornish, F. (2009). Intersubjectivity: Towards a Dialogical Analysis. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 40:1; 20-46.
Intersubjectivity is central to the social life of humans. Thus, unsurprisingly, research pertaining, either directly or indirectly, to intersubjectivity spans many research areas of psychology. In developmental psychology it lies just below the surface of widely used concepts such as decentration (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969), theory of mind (Doherty, 2008) and perspective taking (Martin, Sokol and Elfers, 2008). In neuroscience, intersubjectivity has recently become a popular topic with the discovery of “mirror neurons” which are thought to provide a neurological basis for imitation, theory of mind, language, and social emotions (Hurley & Chater, 2005). In the field of comparative psychology, there has been a surge of interest in intersubjectivity, in the form of investigations of possible perspective-taking amongst, for example, monkeys (Tomasello, Call and Hare, 2003) and scrub jays (Emery & Clayton, 2001). Intersubjectivity, going by various names, is also central to research on communication. Phenomena such as addressivity, double voiced discourse, and dialogue are deeply intersubjective (Linell, 2009). Intersubjectivity has also been identified as important in small group research because it has been found that mutual understanding within small groups creates increased efficiency, reliability and flexibility (Weick & Roberts, 1993). Research on self and identity has long emphasised the importance of Self’s perceptions of Other’s perceptions of Self (James, 1890; Howarth, 2002). In the field of counselling, much therapeutic effort is directed at resolving misunderstandings and feelings of being misunderstood both of which indicate dysfunctional intersubjective relations (Cooper, 2009). (p. 20)
Unfortunately, intersubjective theory falls into an area of overlap between psychology and sociology, and the insularity of each has precluded any serious cooperation in terms of research. Most of the research has been done in the realm of psychology and philosophy (especially by Stolorow and Orange).
Mind, as understood by current developmental research, is a relational construction. As we have discussed previously, there is no subjectivity without intersubjectivity and there can be no intersubjectivity without subjectivity (Buirski and Haglund, 2001). That is, subjective worlds of personal experience are inextricably embedded in intersubjective systems. When viewed from a systems or contextual perspective, distinctions, like those between one-person and two-person psychologies, are revealed as too limited because worlds of personal experience encompass more than just the two people involved. (p. 4)
Kenneth Gergen (Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community, 2009) offers another way of looking at this, specifically at the therapeutic relationship within a relational context.
We now turn to the therapeutic relationship itself. From the present standpoint, how are we to understand the relationship between therapist and client, its potentials, and its efficacy? In responding to this question, we are invited to think beyond the tradition of bounded being in which the aim of therapy is to “cure” the mind of the individual client. The metaphors of the therapist as one who “plumbs the depths,” or serves as a mechanic of the cognitive machinery must be bracketed. We also set aside the causal model in which the therapist acts upon the client to produce change. Rather, we are invited to view the therapist and client as engaged in a subtle and complex dance of co-action, a dance in which meaning is continuously in motion, and the outcomes of which may transform the relational life of the client.
Consider the situation: Both therapist and client enter the therapeutic relationship as multi-beings. Both carry with them the residues of multiple relationships. Therapists bring not only a repertoire of actions garnered from their history of therapeutic relations; they also carry potentials from myriad relations stretching from childhood to the present. Likewise, clients enter carrying a repertoire of actions, some deemed problematic, but alongside a trove of less obvious alternatives. The primary question, then, is whether the process of client/therapist coordination can contribute to a transformation in relationships of extended consequence. Can their dance together reverberate across the client’s relational plane in such a way that more viable coordination results? This is no small challenge, for the client’s plane of relationships is complex and fluid. (p. 282, Kindle Edition)
Much of IST is based in philosophy. Stolorow and his collaborators believe that in order to make sense of the therapeutic relationship, we need make objects of our subjective beliefs about the mind. If we believe in a unitary, isolated mind, we are going to relate to our clients as objects to be fixed, to see their pain as faulty scripts that we have the expertise to reprogram.
But if we believe in the social construction of mind within its physical, intrapsychic, intersubjective, and environmental contexts, then we are more likely to approach the client with a relational and co-constructive perspective on the therapeutic process, where healing comes from relationship and process (for example, the co-transference process).
This is how they explain the need for self-analysis:
Atwood, G.E., Stolorow, R.D. & Orange, D.M. (2011, Jun). The Madness and Genius of Post-Cartesian Philosophy: A Distant Mirror. Psychoanalytic Review, 98(3), 263-285.
In studying the psychological sources of philosophical ideas, we go against a pervasive opinion in contemporary intellectual circles that is rooted in Cartesianism. This opinion, perhaps surprising in its prevalence so long after the life and death of Descartes, arises from a continuing belief—one could almost say a mystical faith—in the autonomy of the life of the mind. The products of the mind are in this view to be treated as independent, self-sufficient creations, verified, falsified, or otherwise evaluated according to criteria that exist apart from the personal contexts out of which they arise. Any attempt to bring considerations of origin to bear on the understanding and development of intellectual works is seen to exemplify the unforgivable fallacy of ad hominem reasoning. It is therefore said that the study of the individual details of a thinker’s life, although perhaps of some limited interest as simple biography, can in principle have no relevance to the broader enterprise of the development or evaluation of that thinker’s work in its own terms. Intellectual constructions are claimed to have a life of their own, freely subsisting in the realm of public discourse, above and beyond the historical particularities of specific contributors’ personal life circumstances. (p. 264)
Our thesis here is that the task of self-analysis must be extended to the philosophical premises underlying psychoanalytic inquiry which, like all specific theoretical ideas in the field, also necessarily embody the analyst’s personal forms of being. Our approach to this great task is to study the individual worlds of selected post-Cartesian philosophers, with the aim of comprehending the psychological sources of each thinker’s specific repudiation of Cartesian doctrines. We hope to use the insights gained in this study as a distant mirror to which we may turn for a clarifying glimpse of how our own departures from the Cartesian view also reflect the patterns of our specific personal worlds. It is our additional faith that such an undertaking of self-reflection carries with it the possibility of the opening up of new pathways of inquiry for our discipline and the enrichment of psychoanalytic practice. (p. 266-267)
The following quotes are from Stolorow (in an interview) on the practice of IST in a clinical setting, which is it becomes useful for me as a clinician. It is important to note that there is no uniform body of technique to which all proponents of ITS adhere, nor is there any standardized or manualized series of interventions. If there is one thing upon which they all agree it’s that every treatment is unique and must be created anew by its participants. So even Stolorow is only speaking for himself here, not for all the other advocates for ITS.
Stolorow, R., & Sassenfeld, A. (2010, Summer). A Phenomenological-Contextual Psychoanalyst: Intersubjective-Systems Theory and Clinical Practice. Psychologist-Psychoanalyst: APA Division 39, Psychoanalysis; 6-10.
I describe intersubjective-systems theory as a “phenomenological contextualism.” It is phenomenological in that it investigates organizations or worlds of emotional experience. It is contextual in that it claims that such organizations of emotional experience take form, both developmentally and in the therapeutic situation, in constitutive intersubjective contexts.
Developmentally, recurring patterns of intersubjective transaction within the developmental system give rise to principles that unconsciously organize subsequent emotional and relational experiences. Such unconscious organizing principles are the basic building blocks of the personality. They show up in the therapeutic situation in the form of transference, which intersubjective systems theory conceptualizes as unconscious organizing activity. The patient’s transference experience is co-constituted by the patient’s unconscious organizing principles and whatever is coming from the analyst that is lending itself to being organized by them. A parallel statement can be made about the analyst’s transference. The interplay of the patient’s transference and the analyst’s transference is an example of what we call an intersubjective field or system.
From an intersubjective-systems perspective, all of the clinical phenomena with which psychoanalysis has been traditionally concerned: manifest psychopathology, transference, resistance, therapeutic impasses, therapeutic action, emotional conflict, indeed, the unconscious itself are seen as taking form within systems constituted by the interplay between differently organized, mutually influencing subjective worlds. (p. 6)
And more from the 2010 interview with Sassenfeld:
One’s philosophical presuppositions, and one’s awareness or unawareness of them, can have a monumental clinical impact. For example, the Cartesian objectivist analyst who sees himself/herself as treating deranged isolated minds and correcting “distortions” of what he/she “knows” to be true can unwittingly retraumatize his/her patients by repeating devastating early experiences of massive invalidation. On the other hand, the phenomenological-contextualist analyst, in seeking to understand and make sense out his/her patients’ experiences in terms of the contexts of meaning in which they occur, no matter how bizarre these experiences may seem to be, helps to create a therapeutic bond in which genuine psychological transformation can gradually take place. (p. 6-7)
But this does not lead inevitably to some form of navel-gazing relativism.
A phenomenological, contextualist, perspectivalist stance, although embracing a fallibilistic attitude of epistemological humility and a level epistemological playing field in the therapeutic situation (no one has privileged access to truth and reality), should not be confused with postmodern nihilism or relativism. Relativity to context and to perspective is not the same thing as a relativism that considers every framework to be as good as the next. Pragmatically, some ideas are better than others in facilitating psychoanalytic inquiry and the psychoanalytic process. Moreover, we do not abandon the search for truth, that is, for lived experience.
Intersubjectivity theory holds that closer and closer approximations of such truth are gradually achieved through a psychoanalytic dialogue in which the domain of reflective awareness is enlarged for both participants. Truth, in other words, is dialogic, crystallizing from the inescapable interplay of observer and observed.
My own phenomenological orientation did not, by the way, originate in Kohut’s self psychology. Its origins go back to a series of studies that George Atwood and I conducted in the early and mid-1970s investigating the personal subjective origins of four psychoanalytic theories. These studies were collected together in our first book, Faces in a Cloud, which was completed in 1976 (although not published until 1979), one year prior to the birth of Kohut’s self psychology. In the concluding chapter of our book, we reasoned that, since psychoanalytic theories can be shown to a significant degree to be shaped by the personal subjectivity of their creators, what psychoanalysis needs to be is a theory of subjectivity itself–a depth psychology of personal experience broad enough to encompass, not only the phenomena that other theories address, but also these theories themselves. We christened pur proposed framework “Psychoanalytic Phenomenology,” but that appellation never caught on. It was that framework that gradually evolved into intersubjective-systems theory.
A phenomenological emphasis does not in anyway entail abandonment of the exploration of unconsciousness. Going back to the father of philosophical phenomenology; Edmund Husserl, phenomenological inquiry has never been restricted to mere description of conscious experiences. Phenomenological investigation has always been centrally concerned with the structures that unconsciously organize conscious experience. Whereas philosophical phenomenologists are concerned with those structures that operate universally, a psychoanalytic phenomenologist seeks to illuminate those principles that unconsciously organize individual worlds of experience. Such principles include, importantly, those that dictate the experiences that must be prevented from coming into full being, that is, repressed, because they are prohibited or too dangerous. Intersubjective-systems theory emphasizes that all such forms of unconsciousness are constituted in relational contexts. The very boundary between conscious and unconscious (the repression barrier) is seen, not as a fixed intrapsychic structure within an isolated mind, but as a property of ongoing dynamic intersubjective systems. Phenomenology leads us inexorably to contextualism. (p. 7)
According to Orange (1995, p. 8), “Intersubjectivity theory sees human beings as organizers of experience, as subjects. Therefore it views psychoanalytic treatment as a dialogic attempt of two people to understand one person’s organization of emotional experience by ‘making sense together’ of their shared experience” (p. 26)
Another note of clarification is needed here. Although ITS makes a point of the co-transference and the co-creation on the intersubjective space, there is not full equality in the relationship. I, as the therapist, am talking less than my client and offering questions, clarifications, or interpretations when I do speak, while the client is telling me the story of who s/he is and how it feels to be in that subjective space.
In practice, what a ITS psychotherapist says in a session may look no different than what any experienced psychotherapist might say in a session. Buirski (2005) notes:
I try to articulate my grasp of the other’s subjective world of experience, which is what I believe most good therapists, regardless of theory, do most of the time. Perhaps the difference lies in the inverse: what distinguishes the therapist working from the intersubjective systems perspective from the therapists working from other orientations is to be found more in what they do not do or say than in what they actually do or say. For example, we try to avoid taking an objectivist stance, assuming that we are privy to some greater authority or knowledge than the other. And we avoid pathologizing, which is revealed by a focus on the person’s maladaptive behaviors or motives, like his masochism. Instead we wonder about how the person’s striving for health might be obscured by behaviors or motives that appear self-defeating. (xvi-xvii).
Finally, the following comments from Stolorow come from a 1998 article/response to another author (George Frank) who had raised objections to the ITS model. This piece is an attempt to explain the foundational ideas of intersubjective systems theory more clearly (and to discredit the critic). Stolorow and his collaborators were getting a lot of push-back from more traditional psychoanalytic therapists who thought they were staging a coup (they were, really, bringing a whole new perspective into the psychoanalytic and therapeutic equation). There are many similar articles from the 1990s, including some from Donna Orange, as well.
Stolorow, R.D. (1998). Clarifying the intersubjective perspective: A reply to George Frank. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 15(3), 424-427. doi: 10.1037/0736-9735.15.3.424
In response to Frank, G. (1998). The intersubjective school of psychoanalysis: Concerns and questions. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 15(3), 420-423. doi:10.1037/0736-9735.15.3.420
I have quoted almost all of the article since it was short and the material is less coherent without the full context.
First, the collaborators of intersubjectivity theory have not sought to create yet another “school of psychoanalysis,” if what is meant by that phrase is a fixed metapsychological doctrine with accompanying rules of technique. Rather, the intersubjective perspective offers a unifying framework for conceptualizing psychoanalytic work of all theoretical schools. The hallmark of our viewpoint is a clinical sensibility emphasizing “the inescapable interplay of observer and observed” (Orange, Atwood, & Stolorow, 1997, p. 9). It is not our aim to have our theory replace Freud’s “as the theory that can explain the psychological life of humans” (Frank, 1998, p. 420). On the contrary, intersubjectivity theory exists at a different level of abstraction and generality than does Freud’s and other psychoanalytic theories, in that it does not posit particular psychological contents that are presumed to be universally salient in personality development and in pathogenesis. It is a process theory offering broad methodological and epistemological principles for investigating and comprehending the intersubjective contexts in which psychological phenomena, including psychoanalytic theories (Atwood & Stolorow, 1993), arise. It also provides a framework for integrating different psychoanalytic theories by contextualizing them. From an intersubjective perspective, the content themes of various metapsychological doctrines can be de-absolutized, de-universalized, and recognized as powerful metaphors and imagery that can become salient in the subjective worlds of some people under particular intersubjective circumstances (Orange et al., 1997).
Second, we have never made the absurd claim, which Frank attributed to us, that “there is no objective reality” (Frank, 1998, p. 421). We have instead consistently maintained that objective reality is unknowable by the psychoanalytic method, which investigates only subjective reality as it crystallizes within the intersubjective field of an analysis. Frank was correct when he concluded that from our point of view the analyst has no privileged access to “what is really going on between patient and analyst.” All psychoanalytic understanding is interpretive. This means that there are no neutral or objective analysts, no immaculate perceptions, no God’s-eye views of anything. Intersubjectivity theory holds that closer and closer approximations of “what is really going on” are gradually achieved through an analytic dialogue in which the domain of reflective selfawareness is enlarged for both participants. There is no danger of solipsism or of relativism here, only a contextual, perspectival, and fallibilistic epistemology (Orange, 1995) that consistently “opens our horizons to expanded possibilities of meaning” (Orange et al., 1997, p. 89).
Third, Frank was incorrect when he inferred that our intersubjective contextualism means that we “have moved away from” (Frank, 1998, p. 422) our focus on the invariant principles that unconsciously organize experience:
Some may see a contradiction between the concept of developmentally preestablished principles that organize subsequent experiences and our repeated contention that experience is always embedded in a constitutive intersubjective context. This contradiction is more apparent than real. A person enters any situation with an established set of ordering principles (the subject’s contribution to the intersubjective system), but it is the context that determines which among the array of these principles will be called on to organize the experience. Experience becomes organized by a particular invariant principle only when there is a situation that lends itself to being so organized. The organization of experience can therefore be seen as codetermined both by preexisting principles and by an ongoing context that favors one or another of them over the others. (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992, p. 24)
Fourth, Frank confused the aim of analysis with the method of analysis when he mistakenly concluded that we advocate “analyzing] the interaction between patient and analyst to understand the nature of that interaction” (Frank, 1998, p. 422). From our perspective, the aim of an analysis has always been the illumination of the patient’s world of personal experience, but the method of investigation must continually take into account its own exquisite context sensitivity:
The development of psychoanalytic understanding may be conceptualized as an intersubjective process involving a dialogue between two personal universes. The goal of this dialogue is the illumination of the inner pattern of a life, that distinctive structure of meanings that connects the different parts of an individual’s world into an intelligible whole. The actual conduct of a psychoanalysis . . . comprises a series of empathic inferences into the structure of an individual’s subjective life, alternating and interacting with the analyst’s acts of reflection upon the involvement of his own personal reality in the ongoing investigation. (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984, p. 5)
[Intersubjectivity theory] views psychoanalysis as the dialogic attempt of two people together to understand one person’s organization of emotional experience by making sense together of their intersubjectively configured experience. (Orange et al., 1997, p. 5)
Fifth, contrary to Frank’s misperception, there is nothing in our view of psychoanalytic investigation that could result in “ignoring the patient’s history” (Frank, 1998, p. 423):
Clinically, we find ourselves, our patients, and our psychoanalytic work always embedded in constitutive process. Process means temporality and history. To work contextually is to work developmentally. To work developmentally is to maintain a continuing sensibility to past, present, and future experience…. [It] affirms the emotional life of persons who have come from somewhere and are going somewhere. (Orange et al., 1997, p. 77)
Sixth, it is clear, I hope, that Frank (1998) seriously mischaracterized our views when he claimed that we “abandon” the intrapsychic world or adopt “an extreme position contra Freud’s intrapsychic orientation” (p. 423). I close with an explicit statement of our position on this matter:
We must emphasize, because we are often misunderstood on this point [!], that the intersubjective viewpoint does not eliminate psychoanalysis’s traditional focus on the intrapsychic. Rather, it contextualizes the intrapsychic. The problem with classical theory was not its focus on the intrapsychic, but its inability to recognize that the intrapsychic world, as it forms and evolves within a nexus of living systems, is profoundly context-dependent. (Orange et al., 1997, pp. 67-68)
Martela, M. & Saarinen, E. (2008). Overcoming the objectifying bias implicit in therapeutic practice – Intersubjective Systems Theory complemented with Systems Intelligence. Unpublished manuscript.
“Intersubjectivity and Physical Laws in Post-Kantian Theory of Knowledge Natorp and Cassirer”
Edgar, Scott.
In The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer: A Novel Assessment edited by J Tyler Friedman and Sebastian Luft, 141-162. Berlin, München, Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110421811-007
Based on the work of Alfred Schutz, this article develops a theory of intersubjectivity—one of the basic building blocks of social experience—and shows how such a theory can be empirically leveraged in sociological work. Complementing the interactionist and ethnomethodological emphasis on the situated production of intersubjectivity, this paper revisits the basic theoretical assumptions undergirding this theory. Schutz tied intersubjectivity to the way people experience the world of everyday life: a world that he held as distinct from other provinces of meaning, such as religious experience, humor, or scientific reasoning. However, as this article shows, such neat distinctions are problematic for both empirical and theoretical reasons: The cognitive styles that define different provinces of meaning often bleed into one another; people often inhabit multiple provinces of meaning simultaneously. Intersubjectivity may thus be simultaneously anchored in multiple worlds, opening a host of empirical research questions: not only about how intersubjectivity is done in interaction, but about how different kinds of intersubjective experiences are constructed, how multi-layered they are, as well as opening up questions about possible asymmetries in the experiences of intersubjectivity.
SYLLABUS: INTERSUBJECTIVITY
PSYA-240
3RD YEAR, SPRING, 2019
Karen Schwartz, Ph.D.
Husserl,intersubjectivityand anthropology
Alessandro Duranti
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Anthropological Theory
2010 Vol 10(1): 1–20 10.1177/1463499610370517
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory Of Cognitive Development
Intersubjectivity Theory Revisited: A 30-Year Retrospective:
Chernus, Linda. (2017).
Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology and Contextualism, edited by G. E. Atwood, & R. D. Stolorow (2014). New York, NY: Routledge, 157 pp.,
Psychoanalytic Social Work. 24. 1-8. 10.1080/15228878.2017.1346516.
Correspondence: Thomas J. Csordas, University of California San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, Social Sciences Building 210, La Jolla, CA 92093-0532, USA E-mail: tcsordas@ucsd.edu
Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D. and George E. Atwood, Ph.D.
(1996). Psychoanalytic Review, 83:181‐194
The Intersubjective Perspective
(1996). Psychoanalytic Review, 83:181‐194
Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D. and George E. Atwood, Ph.D.
In our early psychobiographical studies of Freud, Jung, Reich, and Rank (Stolorow and Atwood, 1979), we found that psychoanalytic metapsychologies derive profoundly from the personal, subjective worlds of their creators. This finding, which has a powerfully relativizing impact on one’s view of psychological theories, led us inexorably to the conclusion that what psychoanalysis needs is a theory of subjectivity itself‐a unifying framework that can account not only for the phenomena that other theories address but also for the theories themselves.
Our own proposals for such a framework (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992), have undergone a significant process of development during the past two decades, culminating in what we have come to call the theory of intersubjectivity. The central metaphor of our intersubjective perspective is the larger relational system or field in which psychological phenomena crystallize and in which experience is continually and mutually shaped. Our vocabulary is one of interacting subjectivities, reciprocal mutual influence, colliding organizing principles, conjunctions and disjunctions, attunements and malattunements‐a lexicon attempting to capture the endlessly shifting, constitutive intersubjective context of intrapsychic experience, both in the psychoanalytic situation and in the course of psychological development. From this perspective, the observer and his or her language are grasped as intrinsic to the observed, and the impact of the analyst and his or her organizing activity on the unfolding of the therapeutic relationship itself becomes a focus of analytic investigation and reflection.
Intersubjectivity theory is a field theory or systems theory in that it seeks to comprehend psychological phenomena not as products
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of isolated intrapsychic mechanisms, but as forming at the interface of reciprocally interacting worlds of experience. Psychological phenomena, we have repeatedly emphasized, “cannot be understood apart from the intersubjective contexts in which they take form” (Atwood and Stolorow, 1984, p. 64). Intrapsychic determinism thus gives way to an unremitting intersubjective contextualism. It is not the isolated individual mind, we have argued, but the larger system created by the mutual interplay
between the subjective worlds of patient and analyst, or of child and caregiver, that constitutes the proper domain of psychoanalytic inquiry. Indeed, as we have shown, the concept of an individual mind or psyche is itself a psychological product crystallizing from within a nexus of intersubjective relatedness and serving specific psychological purposes (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992).
Psychological Development and Pathogenesis
Intersubjectivity theory is both experience‐near and relational; its central constructs seek to conceptualize the organization of personal experience and its vicissitudes within an ongoing intersubjective system. It differs from other psychoanalytic theories in that it does not posit particular psychological contents (the Oedipus complex, the paranoid and depressive positions, separation‐ individuation conflicts, idealizing and mirroring longings, and so on) that are presumed to be universally salient in personality development and in pathogenesis. Instead, it is a process theory offering broad methodological and epistemological principles for investigating and comprehending the intersubjective contexts in which psychological phenomena arise. With regard to psychological development, for example, we have proposed that the “organization of the child’s experience must be seen as a property of the child‐caregiver system of mutual regulation” (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992, p. 23) and that it is the “recurring patterns of intersubjective transaction within the developmental system [that] result in the establishment of invariant principles that unconsciously organize the child’s subsequent experiences” (p. 24). The concept of intersubjectively derived unconscious organizing principles‐what we term the realm of “the prereflective unconscious” (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992)‐is our alternative to the notion of unconscious instinctual fantasy. It is these unconscious
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ordering principles, forged within the crucible of the child‐caregiver system, that form the basic building blocks of personality development and that constitute the quintessential focus of psychoanalytic investigation and interpretation. The essence of psychoanalytic cure lies in the establishment of new, alternative principles for organizing experience, so that the patient’s experiential repertoire becomes enlarged, enriched, more flexible, and more complex (Stolorow, 1994).
Increasingly, we have found that those principles that unconsciously organize patients’ experience of affect are of the greatest import clinically. From early recurring experiences of malattunement, patients have acquired the unconscious conviction that their unmet developmental yearnings and reactive feeling states are manifestations of a loathsome defect or of an inherent inner badness. Qualities or activities of the analyst that lend themselves to being interpreted according to such automatic meanings of affect, confirm the patient’s fears and expectations in the transference that emerging feelings will be met with disgust, disdain, disinterest, alarm, hostility, withdrawal, exploitation, and so on, or will damage the analyst and destroy the therapeutic bond. The investigation and illumination of these invariant meanings as they take form within the intersubjective dialogue between patient and analyst can produce powerful therapeutic reactions in liberating the patient’s affectivity and in strengthening the patient’s capacities for affect tolerance, integration, and articulation. We regard such expansion and enrichment of the patient’s affective life as central aims of an analytic process.
Any pathological constellation can be understood, from our perspective, only in terms of the unique intersubjective contexts in which it originated and is continuing to be maintained. “The intersubjective context,” we have contended, “has a constitutive role in all forms of psychopathology” (Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood, 1987, p. 3), and “the exploration of the particular patterns of intersubjective transaction involved in developing and maintaining each of the various forms of psychopathology is…one of the most important areas for continuing clinical psychoanalytic research” (p. 4). The proposition that psychopathology always takes form within a constitutive intersubjective context calls into question the very concept of psychodiagnosis (Atwood and Stolorow, 1993). What is diagnosed, from an intersubjective perspective, is not the patient’s
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psychological organization seen in isolation but the functioning of the entire therapeutic system. Similar considerations apply to the question of analyzability, which cannot be assessed on the basis of the patient’s psychological structures alone but must be recognized as a property of the patient‐analyst system‐the goodness of fit between what a particular patient most needs to have understood and what a particular analyst is capable of understanding.
Conflict Formation and the Dynamic Unconscious
The foregoing conceptualizations of development and pathogenesis are well illustrated by our formulation of the intersubjective origins of intrapsychic conflict:
The specific intersubjective contexts in which conflict takes form are those in which central affect states of the child cannot be integrated because they fail to evoke the requisite attuned responsiveness from the caregiving surround. Such unintegrated affect states become the source of lifelong inner conflict, because they are experienced as threats both to the person’s established psychological organization and to the maintenance of vitally needed ties. Thus affect‐dissociating defensive operations are called into play, which reappear in the analytic situation in the form of resistance….It is in the defensive walling off of central affect states, rooted in early derailments of affect integration, that the origins of what has traditionally been called the dynamic unconscious can be found.
(Stolorow et al., 1987, pp. 91‐92)
From this perspective, the dynamic unconscious is seen to consist not of repressed instinctual drive derivatives, but of affect states that have been defensively walled off because they evoked massive malattunement from the early surround. This defensive sequestering of central affective states, which attempts to protect against retraumatization, is a principal source of resistance in psychoanalytic treatment. We wish to emphasize that the shift from drives to affectivity as forming the basis for the dynamic unconscious is not merely a change in terminology. The regulation of affective experience is not a product of isolated intrapsychic mechanisms; it is a property of the child‐caregiver system of reciprocal mutual influence (Beebe, Jaffe, and Lachmann, 1992; Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). If we understand the dynamic unconscious as taking form within such a system, then it becomes apparent that the
boundary between ‐ 184 ‐
conscious and unconscious is always the product of a specific intersubjective context.1 This idea of a fluid boundary forming within an intersubjective system continues to apply beyond the period of childhood and is readily demonstrated in the psychoanalytic situation as well, wherein the patient’s resistance can be seen to fluctuate in concert with perceptions of the analyst’s varying receptivity and attunement to the patient’s emotional experience.
Transference and Countertransference
Our intersubjective view of conflict formation has been incorporated into our conceptualization of two basic dimensions of transference (or two broad classes of unconscious organizing principles) (Stolorow et al., 1987). In one, which we term the development, or following Kohut (1984), the selfobject dimension, the patient longs for the analyst to provide development enhancing experiences that were missing or insufficient during the formative years. In the other, called the repetitive dimension, which object relations theorists have attempted to capture metaphorically with such terms as “internal objects” and “internalized object relations,” and which is a source of conflict and resistance, the patient expects and fears a repetition with the analyst of early experiences of developmental failure.
These two dimensions continually oscillate between the experiential foreground and background of the transference in concert with perceptions of the analyst’s varying attunement to the patient’s emotional states and needs (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). For example, when the analyst is experienced as malattuned, foreshadowing a traumatic repetition of early developmental failure, the conflictual and resistive dimension is frequently brought into the foreground, while the patient’s developmental yearnings are driven into hiding. On the other hand, when the analyst is able to analyze accurately the patient’s experience of rupture of the therapeutic bond, demonstrating an understanding of the patient’s reactive affect states and the principles that organize them, the developmental dimension becomes restored and strengthened, and the conflictual/resistive/repetitive dimension tends to recede, for the time being, into the background. Alternatively, at other times, the patient’s experience of the analyst’s understanding may heighten the conflictual and resistive aspect of the transference because it stirs the patient’s walled‐off
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longings and archaic hopes, along with dread of the retraumatization that the patient fears will follow from the exposure of these longings and hopes to the analyst. In still other circumstances, it is the repetitive dimension of the transference that is resisted because the patient fears that its articulation will jeopardize a precariously established and urgently needed selfobject tie to the analyst. For us, the essence of transference analysis lies in the investigative and interpretive tracking of these and other shifting figure‐ground relationships among the various dimensions of the transference as they take form within the ongoing intersubjective system constituted by the patient’s and analyst’s interacting worlds
of experience.
The foregoing description of the shifting figure‐ground relationships among dimensions of the transference applies not only to the patient’s transference but also to the analyst’s transference, usually termed countertransference. The larger system formed by the interplay between transference and countertransference is a prime example of what we call an intersubjective field or context. Transference and countertransference together form an intersubjective system of reciprocal mutual influence.
From the continual interplay between the patient’s and analyst’s psychological worlds two basic situations repeatedly arise: intersubjective conjunction and intersubjective disjunction (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). The first of these is illustrated by instances in which the principles organizing the patient’s experiences give rise to expressions that are assimilated into closely similar central configurations in the psychological life of the analyst. Disjunction, by contrast, occurs when the analyst assimilates the material expressed by the patient into configurations that significantly alter its meaning for the patient. Repetitive occurrences of intersubjective conjunction and disjunction are inevitable accompaniments of the therapeutic process and reflect the interactions of differently organized subjective worlds.
When the analyst is able to become reflectively aware of the principles organizing his or her experience of the therapeutic relationship, then the correspondence or disparity between the subjective worlds of patient and analyst can be used to promote empathic understanding and insight. In the absence of reflective self‐awareness on the part of the analyst, such conjunctions and disjunctions can seriously impede the progress of an analysis. When the principles
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unconsciously organizing the experiences of patient and analyst in an impasse are successfully investigated and illuminated, however, we have found that such analysis can transform a therapeutic stalemate into a royal road to new analytic understandings for both patient and analyst (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992).
The therapeutic action of psychoanalytic interpretation is something that takes form within a specific intersubjective interaction, to which the psychological organizations of both analyst and patient make distinctive contributions. The analyst, with an awareness of his or her own personal organizing principles and their codetermining impact on the course of the therapeutic relationship, contructs, through sustained empathic inquiry, an interpretation of the meaning of the patient’s experience that enables the patient to feel deeply understood. The patient, from within the depths of his or her own subjective world, weaves that experience of being understood into the tapestry of unique mobilized developmental yearnings, permitting a thwarted developmental process to become reinstated and new organizing principles to take root. Psychoanalytic interpretations thus derive their mutative power from the intersubjective matrix in which they crystallize (Stolorow, 1994).
Some Technical Implications
Psychoanalytic theories that postulate universal psychodynamic contents also tend to prescribe rigid rules of therapeutic technique or style that follow from the theoretical presuppositions. Freudian drive theory, for example, prescribes for the analyst a “rule of abstinence.” The more general and encompassing nature of intersubjectivity theory, by contrast, allows for much greater flexibility, so long as the analyst consistently investigates the impact of his or her own techniques, style, and theoretical assumptions on the patient’s experience and on the course of the therapeutic process. This greater flexibility frees analysts to explore new modes of intervention and to discover hitherto unarticulated dimensions of personal experience.
The doctrine of intrapsychic determinism and corresponding focus on the isolated mind in psychoanalysis has historically been associated with an objectivist epistemology. Such a position envisions the mind in isolation, radically estranged from an external reality that it either accurately apprehends or distorts. Analysts embracing
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an objectivist epistemology presume to have privileged access to the essence of the patient’s psychic reality and to the objective truths that the patient’s psychic reality obscures. In contrast, the intersubjective viewpoint, emphasizing the constitutive interplay between worlds of experience, leads inevitably to an epistemological stance that is best characterized as “perspectivalist” (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992; Orange, 1994). Such a stance does not presume either that the analyst’s subjective reality is more true than the patient’s, or that the analyst can directly know the subjective reality of the patient; the analyst can only approximate the patient’s psychic reality from within the particularized scope of the analyst’s own perspective. A perspectivalist stance has a profound impact on the ambiance of the analytic situation, in that it is grounded in respect for the personal realities of both participants. Liberated from the need to justify and defend their experiences, both patient and analyst are freed to understand themselves, each other, and their ongoing relationship with increasing depth and richness.
Some Common Misunderstandings
In order to bring the assumptions underlying our theoretical framework more sharply into view, we close with a discussion of four common misunderstandings of the intersubjective perspective that we have encountered in dialogues with students and colleagues (Stolorow, Atwood, and Brandchaft, 1994).
1. The misunderstanding based on the fear of structureless chaos. The first misunderstanding involves a reading of our work as containing a claim that there is no psychic structure, pattern, or organization of personality that does not derive entirely from immediate, ongoing interactions with other people. Our vision of the individual person is thus seen as a portrait of an essentially formless void, radically vulnerable to and dependent on the shaping influence of events occurring in the interpersonal milieu. This misreading, exemplified by one critic’s characterization of our book Contexts of Being (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992) as promoting a “myth of the structureless mind,” fails to take into account the organizing activity that the individual contributes to every intersubjective field in which he or she participates. Here intersubjectivity theory is being interpreted as destroying the basis for concepts of
character, psychic continuity, the ‐ 188 ‐
achievement of regulatory capacities, and the development of complex psychological organizations. This misreading and criticism arise, we believe, because of a commitment on the part of such critics to what we have called the myth of the isolated mind (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). Within the thinking of theorists of the isolated mind, the stability of character and of self‐experience becomes reified as a property of a mind or psyche having internal structures that exist separately from the embeddedness of experience in constitutive intersubjective fields. It is as if the isolated‐mind theorist cannot imagine a stable character or psychological organization unless it is pictured inside a spatialized mental apparatus or perhaps even inside the physical boundaries of the cranium. Intersubjectivity theory, which specifically dispenses with all such ideas, thus raises the specter for these theorists of falling into structureless chaos.
This misunderstanding involves an interpretation of what we call a constitutive intersubjective field as an all‐determining interpersonal milieu in which the individual is totally the product of interactions with others. Again, this interpretation ignores the contribution of that individual to each intersubjective transaction that occurs. Intersubjective fields are, by definition, codetermined and thus cocreated.
Let us consider in this connection the analytic dyad. According to the older, classical traditions in psychoanalysis, psychological structure and the processes and mechanisms of psychopathology are located inside the patient’s mind. This isolating focus of the classical perspective fails to do justice to every individual’s irreducible engagement with others and blinds psychoanalytic clinicians to the specific ways they are implicated in the phenomena they observe and seek to treat. The intersubjectively oriented analyst, by contrast, while committed to illuminating the unconscious organizing principles the patient brings to the analytic encounter, also understands that the psychopathological phenomena that are seen to unfold do so within an intersubjective field that includes the analyst as a codetermining influence.
A variant of the misunderstanding based on the fear of structureless chaos appears in a similarly mistaken conception of our view of the process of psychological development. Here our standpoint becomes confused with a naive environmentalism according to
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which the child’s psychological growth is interpreted as entirely the product of the shaping influence of external interpersonal events. The intersubjective view of psychological development embraces what Wallace (1985) terms “intersectional causation.” At any stage the child’s formative experiences are understood to emerge from the intersection of, and to be codetermined by, his or her psychological organization as it has evolved to that point and specific features of the caregiving surround. In this model, the development of the child’s psychological organization is always seen as an aspect of an evolving and maturing child‐caregiver system.
2. The misunderstanding based on the fear of surrendering one’s personal reality. The second misunderstanding concerns the epistemological stance of intersubjectivity theory and the problem of truth and reality. As we have said, a defining feature of our thinking lies in our not assigning any greater intrinsic validity to the analyst’s world of reality than to the patient’s. This is in contrast to an objectivist epistemology that posits an objective external world, a true world to which the analyst is presumed to have access. Corresponding to this latter stance, a goal of treatment inevitably materializes involving the bringing of the patient’s experiences into alignment with that objective reality. Such a goal appears in the notion of correcting transference distortions.
The misreading we are discussing here is the interpretation of our refraining from granting absolute validity to the analyst’s reality and not to the patient’s as somehow containing an injunction to analysts not to have a theoretical framework to order clinical data. It appears that our critics on this point cannot envision holding to their theoretical ideas without conferring upon those ideas an absolute validity, or at least a greater measure of truth than is ascribed to the patient’s ideas. The specter here is of losing a grip on any assumptions at all, of the dissolution of the analyst’s personal reality, leaving the analyst adrift in a sea of uncertainty, perhaps in danger of being swept into the vortex of the patient’s psychological world. A key distinction lost in this misunderstanding is that between holding an assumption or belief and elevating that assumption to the status of an ultimate, objective truth. Once such an elevation has taken place, the belief necessarily escapes the perimeter of what can be analytically reflected upon. Intersubjectivity theory contains a commitment to examining and analytically reflecting upon the impact of
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the analyst and his or her theories, as well as that of the patient’s organizing principles, on the analytic process. This means that there can be no belief or idea that in principle escapes the field of potential analytic investigation, even including the ideas of intersubjectivity theory itself (see Atwood and Stolorow, 1993).
3. The misunderstanding based on the fear of an annihilating ad hominem attack. The third misunderstanding pertains to our tendency to explore the formative psychological background of various ideas we discuss and criticize. An objection is sometimes raised on our analysis of the myth of the isolated mind, because of our focus of this doctrine as a symbol of alienated self‐experience (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992). We argued that the image of the isolated mind is a genuine myth in the sense of being a symbol of pervasive cultural experiences involving an alienation of the person from the physical world, from social life and engagement with others, and from the nature of subjectivity itself. We suggested further that this alienation exists for the purpose of disavowing a set of specific vulnerabilities that are in our time otherwise felt as unbearable. This discussion of alienation and the need to disavow vulnerability is not intended as an attack on theoretical viewpoints that embody the myth of the isolated mind; it is rather an attempt to explain why it is that an idea that has so manifestly hindered the development of psychoanalysis could nevertheless have maintained such a tenacious hold on thinkers in our field.
An ad hominem argument is one that seeks to dispose of a proposition or idea by pointing at the individual who espouses it. It would be an example of such a fallacious argument if we were maintaining that doctrines incorporating the idea of the isolated mind ought to be rejected simply because of the personal alienation and evasions of anguish shown by those who promulgate them. Clearly the value of a psychological or philosophical system needs to be assessed in relation to issues and traditions larger than the personal characteristics and events in a thinker’s life. The separation of the life out of which an idea originates and that idea itself is, however, not as clean as one might think in a discipline concerned with illuminating subjectivity; in fact, we view the total isolation of the personal context of origin from assessments of value and validity as still another manifestation of the alienation afflicting our field. We (Stolorow and Atwood, 1979) have addressed this issue as follows:
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It would be incorrect to view an explication of the personal realities embedded in psychological theories as giving no more than an account of the conditions of their genesis. Every [such] analysis delimits, in content as well as origin, the view being studied. It seeks not only to establish a relationship between the theorist and his works, but also to determine the particularization of scope of the theory, and hence to delimit its generality and validity. (pp. 22‐23).
Faces in a Cloud: Intersubjectivity in Personality Theory (1993) discusses the ways in which theories of personality symbolically crystallize central dimensions of the personal subjective world of the theorist, and the critical importance of the study of such relationships to the further development of personality theory. The concept of intersubjectivity was clearly implicit in the studies described in this work in that they pictured various theories as, on the one hand, reflecting the empirical domain of human experience to which they were addressed (more or less adequately) and, on the other hand, as also reflecting the psychological organization of the theorist. This is a prime example of what is meant by the idea of intersubjectivity.
4. The misunderstanding based on the fear of anarchy in the analytic relationship. The fourth misunderstanding pertains to the implications of intersubjectivity theory for the conduct of psychoanalytic treatment. A cardinal feature of the intersubjective perspective is the view of the analytic relationship in terms of an interaction between the subjective worlds of analyst and patient. The parity we ascribe to the worlds of patient and analyst at the level of abstract conceptualization of the therapeutic dyad becomes, however, misinterpreted as implying symmetry in that relationship at the level of concrete clinical practice. Here the authority ordinarily assumed by the analyst collapses, as the patient is thought to acquire a voice equal to that of the analyst in setting the conditions of the treatment. The theoretical vision of interacting subjective worlds thus becomes transposed into a picture of the decisions affecting the patient’s treatment being made on an egalitarian, democratic basis. The ultimate extreme of this overly concrete misinterpretation of intersubjectivity theory is the loss of the very distinction between patient and analyst. If the worlds of both participants are fully engaged in the analytic process, it is said, then what is left to tell us which of the two is the patient? If the life themes structuring the analyst’s world need to be constantly borne in mind as they impact on
the therapeutic process, ‐ 192 ‐
it is asked, whose analysis is it anyway? The disciplined practice of psychoanalytic treatment thereby threatens to dissolve into confusion and anarchy.
It seems to us that these misunderstandings arise because of an insufficiently abstract interpretation of the principles of intersubjectivity theory. The intersubjective perspective contains few concrete recommendations as to technique or style in the practice of psychoanalytic therapy; indeed, it is a perspective intended to be broad enough to accommodate a wide range of therapeutic styles and techniques, so long as the meanings and impact on the treatment process of these various approaches are made a focus of analytic investigation and reflection. The authority of the analyst is not comprised in any way by the adopting of an intersubjective standpoint, nor does this perspective necessarily introduce any confusion into the analytic dyad as to which participant is the patient. The asymmetry between analyst and patient seems to us to inhere in the very definition of a professional therapeutic relationship. The interacting meanings of this inherent asymmetry for the patient and the analyst may, of course, represent an important focus of analytic inquiry in the therapeutic dialogue.
Note
1 In addition to the prereflective and the dynamic unconscious, we have described a third intersubjectively derived form of unconsciousness‐the unvalidated unconscious: experiences that could not be consciously articulated because they never evoked validating responsiveness from the surround (Stolorow and Atwood, 1992).
Acknowledgment
This article contains material previously published in Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Life, by R. Stolorow and G. Atwood (Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1992), and in The Intersubjective Perspective, edited by R. Stolorow, G. Atwood, and B. Brandchaft (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1994). We thank the publishers for giving us permission to reuse this material.
References
Atwood, G. and Stolorow, R. (1984) Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
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Atwood, G. and Stolorow, R. (1993) Faces in a Cloud: Intersubjectivity in Personality Theory, 2nd ed. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Beebe, B., Jaffe, J., and Lachmann, F. (1992) A dyadic systems view of communication. In N. Skolnick and S. Warshaw, eds. Relational Perspectives in Psychoanalysis, Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Kohut, H. (1984) How Does Analysis Cure? A. Goldberg and P. Stepansky, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Orange, D. (1994) Countertransference, empathy, and the hermeneutical circle. In R. Stolorow, G. Atwood, and B. Brandchaft, eds. The Intersubjective Perspective. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Stolorow, R. (1994) The nature and therapeutic action of psychoanalytic interpretation. In R. Stolorow, G. Atwood, and B. Brandchaft, eds. The Intersubjective Perspective. Northvale: NJ: Jason Aronson.
Stolorow, R. and Atwood, G. (1979) Faces in a Cloud: Subjectivity in Personality Theory. Northvale: NJ: Jason Aronson.
Stolorow, R. and Atwood, G. (1992) Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundations of Psychological Life. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Stolorow, R., Atwood, G. Brandchaft, B. (eds.) (1994) The Intersubjective Perspective. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson.
Stolorow, R., Atwood, G., Brandchaft, B., and Atwood, G. (1987) Psychoanalytic Treatment: An Intersubjective Approach. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Wallace, E. (1985) Historiography and Causation in Psychoanalysis. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Article Citation [Who Cited This?] Stolorow, R.D. and Atwood, G.E. (1996). The Intersubjective Perspective. Psychoanal. Rev., 83:181‐194
Atwood, G. and Stolorow, R. (1984) Structures of Subjectivity: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Phenomenology. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.
RUNNING HEAD: DIALOGICAL ANALYSIS OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY
Intersubjectivity: Towards a Dialogical Analysis
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Intersubjectivity, Subjectivism, Social Sciences, and the Austrian School of Economics
Gabriel J. Zanotti* Professor of Philosophy of Economics
Universidad of del Norte Santo Tomas Aquino Argentina
Journal of Markets & Morality
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READING BETWEEN THE MINDS: INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERNISM FROM ROBERT BROWNING TO HENRY JAMES
by Jennie Hann A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland May 2017
Intersubjectivity, Spirituality, and Disappointment in Group Therapy for Loss
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A DISSERTATION PRESENTED BY PAUL JULIAN TO THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE SUBJECT OF PHILOSOPHY HARVARD UNIVERSITY CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS JANUARY 2017
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Body, Self and Others: Harding, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on Intersubjectivity
Brentyn J. Ramm
Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy, Witten/Herdecke University, 58448 Witten, Germany; Brentyn.Ramm@uni-wh.de
Published in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 38 (1), 2006
The Empathic Ground: Intersubjectivity and Nonduality in the Psychotherapeutic Process
Judith Blackstone
2007
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Psychoanalytictreatment: An intersubjective approach.
Stolorow, R. D., Brandchaft, B., & Atwood, G. E., (1987).
Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
Contexts of being: Theintersubjective foundations of psychological life.
Stolorow, R. D., & Atwood, G. E. (1992).
Hillsdale, NJ:
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Worlds ofexperience.
Stolorow, R. D., Atwood, G. E., & Orange, D. M. (2002).
New York: Basic Books.
Workingintersubjectively: Contextualism in psychoanalytic practice.
Orange, D. M., Atwood, G. E., & Stolorow, R.D. (1997).
Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
Progressive stages of meditation on emptiness.
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Amherst, NY: Humanity Books.
Yogacara Buddhism and Cognitive Science: (De-)constructing Duality
Presented by Professor William Waldron at the Centre of Buddhist Studies, University of Hong Kong, on January 16, 2015.
The Dynamics of Intersubjectivity
Edited by Faten Haouioui
This book first published 2021 Cambridge Scholars Publishing
RUNNING HEAD: DIALOGICAL ANALYSIS OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY
Intersubjectivity: Towards a Dialogical Analysis
Alex Gillespie1 Department of Psychology University of Stirling Stirling FK9 4LA UK Tel: + 44 (0) 1786 466841 alex.gillespie@stir.ac.uk Flora Cornish School of Health Glasgow Caledonian University Glasgow G4 0BA UK
Why altered states are not enough: A perspective from Buddhism.
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The No-Self Theory: Hume, Buddhism, and Personal Identity
Author(s): James Giles
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Insight Knowledge of No Self in Buddhism: An Epistemic Analysis
Awakening to Wholeness: Aikido as an Embodied Praxis of Intersubjectivity
2019
As a lifelong practitioner of Aikido, known as the ‘Art of Peace,’ the author reflects on how cultivating one’s ‘mind and body coordination’ through this defensive art develops embodied non-dissention. This principle is expressed and observed through calmer, more harmonious interaction with others and one’s entire life sphere. A non-competitive art that emerged in modern Japan from the deep spiritual values of its founder, Morihei Ueshiba (O Sensei) Aikido teaches one to blend with an attacker’s movements and ki (‘life force’ or ‘energy’). In the context of moving from ‘first person’ to ‘second-person’ contemplative education practices, this chapter explores through the lens of Aikido the implications of intersubjectivity as a double-bind paradox: How can dualistic consciousness of subject-object dichotomy apply itself to resolving human conflicts while inherently operating from a position of dualism that creates such conflict in the first place? Put yet another way, if one inhabits a dualistic consciousness regarding ‘other’ subject-objects then by the logic of such consciousness, one cannot be intersubjective, and hence, one cannot practice non-dissention. Reflections from Aikido pedagogy and training offer a transformative approach to relationality, one that offers contemplative education a model by which to transcend the habitual conditioning of subject-subject consciousness toward peaceful dialogic interconnectedness. The contention is that contemplative education practices in this way approach more engaged—and not split—intersubjectivity. Through a series of vignettes and explication, the author presents Aikido as a contemplative way of being and living that demands an intersubjective, second-person model of engagement. Thus, this model is based on the view of cosmos as interdependent relationality.
SELF-TRANSCENDENCE THROUGH SHARED SUFFERING : AN INTERSUBJECTIVE THEORY OF COMPASSION
2016
The value of compassion has often been appraised in terms of its benefits to the recipient, or its contribution to civil society. Less attention has been paid to the positive effect it may have upon the protagonists themselves, partly because compassion ostensibly appears to involve mainly dysphoric emotions (i.e., sharing another’s suffering). However, driven by the question of why traditions such as Buddhism and Christianity esteem compassion so highly, in this article, a theory of compassion is proposed that focuses on its transformative potential. In particular, I argue that compassion inherently involves a process of self-transcendence, enabling people to enter into an intersubjective state of selfhood. Drawing on Buddhist and Christian ideas, I then suggest that this intersubjective state is not only an antidote to the protagonists’ own suffering, but can accelerate their psychospiritual development. Thus, the article offers a new perspective on compassion that allows us to fully appreciate its transpersonal and transformative potential.
Intersubjectivity as an antidote to stress: Using dyadic active inference model of intersubjectivity to predict the efficacy of parenting interventions in reducing stress—through the lens of dependent origination in Buddhist Madhyamaka philosophy
2022
Intersubjectivity refers to one person’s awareness in relation to another person’s awareness. It is key to well-being and human development. From infancy to adulthood, human interactions ceaselessly contribute to the flourishing or impairment of intersubjectivity. In this work, we first describe intersubjectivity as a hallmark of quality dyadic processes. Then, using parent-child relationship as an example, we propose a dyadic active inference model to elucidate an inverse relation between stress and intersubjectivity. We postulate that impaired intersubjectivity is a manifestation of underlying problems of deficient relational benevolence, misattributing another person’s intentions (over-mentalizing), and neglecting the effects of one’s own actions on the other person (under-coupling). These problems can exacerbate stress due to excessive variational free energy in a person’s active inference engine when that person feels threatened and holds on to his/her invalid (mis)beliefs. In support of this dyadic model, we briefly describe relevant neuroimaging literature to elucidate brain networks underlying the effects of an intersubjectivity-oriented parenting intervention on parenting stress. Using the active inference dyadic model, we identified critical interventional strategies necessary to rectify these problems and hereby developed a coding system in reference to these strategies. In a theory-guided quantitative review, we used this coding system to code 35 clinical trials of parenting interventions published between 2016 and 2020, based on PubMed database, to predict their efficacy for reducing parenting stress. The results of this theory-guided analysis corroborated our hypothesis that parenting intervention can effectively reduce parenting stress if the intervention is designed to mitigate the problems of deficient relational benevolence, under-coupling, and over-mentalizing. We integrated our work with several dyadic concepts identified in the literature. Finally, inspired by Arya Nagarjuna’s Buddhist Madhyamaka Philosophy, we described abstract expressions of Dependent Origination as a relational worldview to reflect on the normality, impairment, and rehabilitation of intersubjectivity.
Meditation Effects in the Social Domain: Self-Other Connectedness as a General Mechanism?
2014
Recent theories and findings in psychology and neuroscience suggest that self and other are interconnected, both on a conceptual and on a more basic bodily-affective representational level. Such self-other connectedness is supposed to be fundamental to empathy, social bonding and compassion. Meditation techniques – in particular mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation – have been found to foster these social capacities. Therefore, this contribution brings together both fields of research. In a first step, we examine self and other from the perspective of psychology and neuroscience, integrating findings from these fields into a dimension of mental functioning anchored to self-centeredness and self-other-connectedness, respectively. In a second step, we explore how mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation may act differentially upon this dimension. Finally, by referring to a recent experiment from our lab, it is illustrated how research hypotheses can be derived from this framework. Such investigations could help to comprehend meditation effects in the social domain, and more generally, further the scientific understanding of self and other.
Decentering the Self? Reduced Bias in Self- vs. Other-Related Processing in Long-Term Practitioners of Loving-Kindness Meditation
2016
TLDR
Preliminary evidence is provided that prolonged meditation practice may modulate self- vs. other-related processing, accompanied by an increase in compassion, which is needed to show if this is a direct outcome of loving-kindness meditation.
Abstract
Research in social neuroscience provides increasing evidence that self and other are interconnected, both on a conceptual and on an affective representational level. Moreover, the ability to recognize the other as “like the self” is thought to be essential for social phenomena like empathy and compassion. Meditation practices such as loving-kindness meditation (LKM) have been found to enhance these capacities. Therefore, we investigated whether LKM is associated to an increased integration of self–other-representations. As an indicator, we assessed the P300 event-related potential elicited by oddball stimuli of the self-face and a close other’s face in 12 long-term practitioners of LKM and 12 matched controls. In line with previous studies, the self elicited larger P300 amplitudes than close other. This effect was reduced in the meditation sample at parietal but not frontal midline sites. Within this group, smaller differences between self- and other-related P300 were associated with increasing meditation practice. Across groups, smaller P300 differences correlated with self-reported compassion. In meditators, we also investigated the effect of a short LKM compared to a control priming procedure in order to test whether the state induction would additionally modulate self- vs. other-related P300. However, no effect of the priming conditions was observed. Overall, our findings provide preliminary evidence that prolonged meditation practice may modulate self- vs. other-related processing, accompanied by an increase in compassion. Further evidence is needed, however, to show if this is a direct outcome of loving-kindness meditation.
Decentering the Self? Reduced Bias in Self- vs. Other-Related Processing in Long-Term Practitioners of Loving-Kindness Meditation.
In this paper, we start exploring the affective and ethical dimension of what De Jaegher and Di Paolo (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6:485–507, 2007) have called ‘participatory sense-making’. In the first part, we distinguish various ways in which we are, and feel, affectively inter-connected in interpersonal encounters. In the second part, we discuss the ethical character of this affective inter-connectedness, as well as the implications that taking an ‘inter-(en)active approach’ has for ethical theory itself.
This paper is part of a paper series on the Buddhist Notion of Intersubjectivity, published in this journal from 2017 to 2019, guest-edited by Roy Tzohar and Jake Davis. Readers are recommended to view these papers in the following order:
Tzohar, R. 2017. ‘Imagine Being a Preta: Early Indian Yogācāra Approaches to Intersubjectivity.’ Sophia, 56, 337–354;
Prueitt, C. 2018. ‘Karmic Imprints, Exclusion, and the Creation of the Worlds of Conventional Experience in Dharmakīrti’s Thought.’ Sophia, 57, 313–335;
Kachru, S. 2019. ‘Ratnakīrti and the Extent of Inner Space: An Essay on Yogācāra and the Threat of Genuine of Solipsism.’ Sophia, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-0707-8;
Garfield, J. L. ‘I Take Refuge in the Sangha. But how? The Puzzle of Intersubjectivity in Buddhist Philosophy Comments on Tzohar, Prueitt, and Kachru.’ Sophia, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-019-0708-7.
“The Self-Effacing Buddhist: No(t)-Self in Early Buddhism and Contemplative Neuroscience.”
Verhaeghen, Paul.
Contemporary Buddhism 18 (2017): 21 – 36.
Essential Others on the Path to Enlightenment: The Importance of Intersubjectivity in the Visuddhimagga’s Presentation of Progress along the Path
The term Agathotopia applied to the set of thoughts and to the semiotic doctrine of Peirce was the theme of the PUC/SP Philosophy doctorate thesis in 2008, in which occasion we defended this attribution to the vast, complex and original system that dialogs in a very particular format with systems previous to it: occidental Greeks (mainly Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Stoics), and Medievals (specially Duns Scoto and the oriental Arab Avicenna), moderns (specially Descartes), and others closer to him in time and history of philosophy, such as the British Spencer, the Germans Kant, Schelling and Hegel, whether all of them because they also contemplated the cosmology and the anthropology in their phenomenological, epistemological and ontological principals, whether because they sought harmony or questioned the relationship between the universal and the individual, the ideal and the real, the general and the particular, the mind and matter, whether they deal with metaphysics, mathematics and logic and even, whether because they contemplated the Goodness — Beauty, Good and Real, the classical triadic relation found by Peirce in the Normative sciences and in the Summum Bonum (Bacha 1998 2003; Engel-Tiercelin 1993; Parker 2003; Pfeifer 1971; Santaella 2000; Silveira 2003/2007; Sini 2006)
Source: Theatre at the Birth of Semiotics: Charles Sanders Peirce, François Delsarte, and Steele Mackaye
Source: Theatre at the Birth of Semiotics: Charles Sanders Peirce, François Delsarte, and Steele Mackaye
Source: Peirce, Pragmatism, and The Right Way of Thinking
Source: Peirce, Pragmatism, and The Right Way of Thinking
Source: Peirce, Pragmatism, and The Right Way of Thinking
Source: Peirce, Pragmatism, and The Right Way of Thinking
Source: Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Value
Values as Norms in the Normative Sciences
The 19th-century philosophy of value emerged from economics, esthetics, and ethics (Rescher, 2017, pp. 8-9). Both Lotze and Hartmann developed their theories of value mainly in the domains of ethics and aesthetics.
For Peirce, aesthetics and ethics are only the first two of three philosophical sciences of values. The third is logic. The three constitute a triad of sciences that Peirce established within his general system of the sciences under the designation “normative sciences”. Peirce did not claim to be the inventor of the term but attributed it to Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834): “The word normative was invented in the school of Schleiermacher. The majority of writers who make use of it tell us that there are three normative sciences, logic, esthetics, and ethics, the doctrines of the true, the beautiful, and the good, a triad of ideals which has been recognized since antiquity” (“Ultimate Goods”, CP 1.575, 1902). The broader framework of this triad is Peirce’s general classification of the branches of philosophy as follows:
Philosophy has three grand divisions. The first is Phenomenology, which simply contemplates the Universal Phenomenon and discerns its ubiquitous elements, Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, together perhaps with other series of categories. The second grand division is Normative Science, which investigates the universal and necessary laws of the relation of Phenomena to Ends, that is, perhaps, to Truth, Right, and Beauty. The third grand division is Metaphysics, which endeavors to comprehend the Reality of Phenomena. Now Reality is an affair of Thirdness as Thirdness, that is, in its mediation between Secondness and Firstness. (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”; CP 5.121)
Phenomenology is not concerned with norms or values since its “business is simply to draw up an inventory of appearances without going into any investigation of their truth” (“Why Study Logic”, CP 2.120, 1902). Metaphysics is not concerned with values either since it is “that branch of philosophy which inquires into what is real […] regardless of whether anybody thinks it is true or not” (“Reason’s Conscience”, NEM 4:192, 1904).
Normative science, by contrast, is concerned with value insofar as it is “the science of the approvable and unapprovable, or better the blameable and the unblameable”, Peirce wrote in 1905 (“Adirondack Summer School Lectures”, MS 1334: 36-37). Although formulations such as these suggest dualisms, Peirce argues that it is a “widely spread misconception” to believe that the aim of the normative sciences is to decide
what is good and what bad, logically, ethically, and esthetically; or what degree of goodness a given description of phenomenon attains. Were this the case, normative science would be, in a certain sense, mathematical, since it would deal entirely with a question of quantity. But I am strongly inclined to think that this view will not sustain critical examination. Logic classifies arguments, and in doing so recognizes different kinds of truth. In ethics, too, qualities of good are admitted by the great majority of moralists. As for esthetics, in that field qualitative differences appear to be so prominent that, abstracted from them, it is impossible to say that there is any appearance which is not esthetically good. (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”; CP 5.127, 1903)
Instead of dualisms, Peirce’s normative sciences study “the laws of the relation of phenomena to ends” (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”, CP 5.123, 1903). Ends are “the essential object of normative science” (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”, CP 5.130, 1903). The ends differ in each of the three normative sciences. “Esthetics considers those things whose ends are to embody qualities of feeling, ethics those things whose ends lie in action, and logic those things whose end is to represent something”, a formulation which shows that logic meant semiotics (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”; CP 5.120-150, 1903).
Yet, dualisms cannot be entirely ignored in value judgments. However, whereas ends and ideals pertain to the category of thirdness, dualisms are a matter of secondness, the category of conflict and confrontation. Peirce solves this clash between his two phenomenological categories in the normative sciences by recognizing it as a phenomenon of secondness in thirdness. Opposites, such as good vs. bad, are phenomena of secondness, even though we encounter them in the domain of thirdness concerned with final causes. Dualisms are most apparent in ethics, “the study of what ends of action we are deliberately prepared to adopt” (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”; CP 5.130, 1903). Logic is less concerned with dualisms. “Every [moral] pronouncement between Good and Bad certainly comes under Category the Second; and for that reason such pronouncement comes out in the voice of conscience with an absoluteness of duality which we do not find even in logic” (“Lectures on Pragmatism IV: The Reality of Thirdness”, CP 5.111, 1903; my emphasis).
In aesthetics, however, Peirce argues, dualisms and value judgments become altogether superfluous since “there is no such thing as positive esthetic badness; and since by goodness we chiefly in this discussion mean merely the absence of badness, or faultlessness, there will be no such thing as esthetic goodness” (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”; CP 5.131, 1903). Pure esthetics, as Peirce conceives it, is not a science concerned with values. As Peirce sees it, “There is no such thing as positive esthetic badness; and since by goodness we chiefly in this discussion mean merely the absence of badness, or faultlessness, there will be no such thing as esthetic goodness” (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”; CP 5.132, 1903).
Thus, pure aesthetics can do without dualisms. It is a domain of pure thirdness without any secondness. “I venture to think that the esthetic state of mind is purest when perfectly naive without any critical pronouncement, and that the esthetic critic founds his judgments upon the result of throwing himself back into such a pure naive state—and the best critic is the man who has trained himself to do this the most perfectly” (“Lectures on Pragmatism IV: The Reality of Thirdness”, CP 5.111, 1903). Consequently, Peirce even has doubts whether pure esthetics, as he conceives it, should still count as a “normative” science at all. In addition to his doubts concerning the disappearance of value judgments in aesthetics, there are his doubts as to the applicability of the notion of “ends” in pure aesthetics, “because an end—the essential object of normative science—is germane to a voluntary act in a primary way in which it is germane to nothing else. For that reason I have some lingering doubt as to there being any true normative science of the beautiful” (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”, CP 5.130, 1903).
Source: Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Value
Normative Judgments as Value Judgements Guided by the Ideal of theSummum Bonum
The sense in which the normative sciences deal with values is the sense in which their norms, according to Peirce, are ideals, guided neither by necessary laws nor by dualism, but by “norms, or rules which need not, but which ought, to be followed” (“Why Study Logic?” CP 2.156, 1902).
Ends, for Peirce, are final causes (Santaella, 1999), and philosophical final causes are ideals, which imply ultimate values. The norms of logic, according to Peirce, consist in “the control of thinking with a view to its conformity to a standard or ideal” (“Basis of Pragmatism”, CP 1.573, 1906). The norms of ethics have their “root in the nature of the human soul, whether as a decree of reason, or what constitutes man’s happiness, or in some other department of human nature” (“Why Study Logic?” CP 2.156, 1902). In aesthetics, the norm is the ultimate value of the ideal of a summum bonum [highest good as a goal]. “Within this principle is wrapped up the answer to the question, what being is, and what, therefore, its modes must be. It is absolutely impossible that the word ‘Being’ should bear any meaning whatever except with reference to the summum bonum” (“Partial Synopsis of a Proposed Work in Logic”, CP 2.116, 1902).
The values of the three normative sciences are interrelated in a way that the ultimate value of aesthetics, i.e., its summum bonum, is the supreme value of all. Since “esthetics is the science of ideals, or of that which is objectively admirable without any ulterior reason” (“A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic”, CP 1.191, 1903), its values of firstness are then, so to speak, passed on to the secondness of ethics and the thirdness of logic. “Ethics, or the science of right and wrong, must appeal to Esthetics for aid in determining the summum bonum. It is the theory of self-controlled, or deliberate, conduct. Logic is the theory of self-controlled, or deliberate, thought; and as such, must appeal to ethics for its principles” (ibid.).
The conception of an aesthetics that embodies an ultimate ideal that is also valid for ethics and logic is the distinctive mark of Peirce’s axiology. Ethics is founded on aesthetics insofar as self-controlled ethical conduct cannot find its justification in its moral judgements as such. It needs to find some ulterior justification for its values, and this ulterior value is the supreme one of the summum bonum. The reason why the values of logic are based on the ones of ethics are that “a logical reasoner is a reasoner who exercises great self-control in his intellectual operations; and therefore the logically good is simply a particular species of the morally good” (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”, CP 5.130, 1903). In this way, logic, being based on ethics, which in turn is based on aesthetics, is also based on the ideals of the summum bonum.
An ultimate end of action deliberately adopted—that is to say, reasonably adopted— must be a state of things that reasonably recommends itself in itself aside from any ulterior consideration. It must be an admirable ideal, having the only kind of goodness that such an ideal can have; namely, esthetic goodness. From this point of view the morally good appears as a particular species of the esthetically good. (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”; CP 5.130, 1903)
Ultimately, the normative sciences are thus not only guided by three different kinds of value. At their root is only one, which is the supreme value for all. “The morally good will be the esthetically good specially determined by a peculiar superadded element; and the logically good will be the morally good specially determined by a special superadded element. […] In order to analyze the nature of the logically good, we must first gain clear apprehensions of the nature of the esthetically good and especially that of the morally good” (“Lecture on Pragmatism V: The Three Kinds of Goodness”, CP 5.131, 1903).
Aesthetics and Ethics are interdependent on each other
Steps to an Ecology of mind
Why do good? Why be moral?
Do good because its a good value for a virtuous person
Do good out of compassion and love for others
Do good because it is good for one’s self
Do good because world outside is none other than yourself. (Vedantic Perspective)
Aesthetics
of Design
of Arts
of Performance Arts
of Rituals
of Traditions
of Narrative Arts
of Culture
of Architecture
of Actions
of Thoughts
of Senses
of Emotions
of Values
of Experience
Key Terms
Virtues
Values
Aesthetics
Arts
Morals
Ethics
Good ness
Art and Morals
Aesthetics and Ethics
Beauty and Goodness
Ist person and 2nd Person
Integral Theory
Ken Wilber
Self, Culture, Nature
I, We, It/Its
Immanual Kant
Wittgenstein
Sameness and Otherness
Difference
Boundaries and Networks
Hierarchy and Networks
Plato and Aristotle
Action Learning
Reflexive Action
Social Ethics
Communities of Goodness
Environmental Ethics
Inter-objectivity
Inter-subjectivity
Subject and Object
Phenomenology and Hermenutics
Virtue Ethics
Development and Relations
Internal vs External
Individual vs Collective
Culture, Society, and Ethics
Narrative Arts
Intentions and Actions
Sewa and Service
Altruism
Philosophy of Arts
Aesthetics of living culture
Traditions, Rituals, and Culture
Classical Education
Arts and Humanities
Dance, Music and Performance Arts
Universals
Transcendentals
Ethnomethodology
Nondual Vedanta (Advait Vedanta)
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Value Theory
Virtue Theory
Art Criticism
Taste, Style, Manners
Relational
Aesthetics and Relatedness
Consciousness
Nondual Awareness
Interconnectedness
Ethics as Aesthetics: Foucault’S Critique of Moralization of Ethics
This study found a new idea of ethics to bridge the gap between morality and aesthetics. This new idea is called aesthetics morality. This study concluded as follows: 1) ethics as morality is in the form of teleology, deontology and virtue ethics; 2) ethics is a synthesis of aesthetics and morality; and 3) ethics is aesthetics in the form of care of the self.
Ethics as Style: Wittgenstein’s Aesthetic Ethics and Ethical Aesthetics
An inquiry into Wittgenstein’s ethics and aesthetics has to start with the following questions: Can an aesthetics and/or ethics be extracted from his philosophical texts at all? If yes, what kind of aesthetics and/or ethics does Wittgenstein offer beyond his well-known aphoristic comments on the subject? Finally, how can we understand the meaning of his claim that ‘‘ethics and aesthetics are one’’? This article responds to the above questions by presenting an account of Wittgenstein’s ethical aesthetics and aesthetic ethics, elucidating both through the prism of his notion of style as ‘‘general necessity seen sub specie eterni.’’ It explains how logical necessity implodes within the limits of propositional language to open onto the realm of style, within which ethical necessity is to be understood in terms of aesthetic life-form and aesthetic expression is to be understood in terms of ethical enactment.
Es ist klar, daß sich die Ethik nicht aussprechen läßt. Die Ethik ist transzendental. (Ethik und Ästhetik sind Eins.)
[It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one.)] Ludwig Wittgenstein
Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection
This book brings together a number of new essays in an area of growing concern, namely the intersection or overlap of aesthetics and ethics. Recent developments aside, for the past thirty years or so in Anglo-American philosophy, aesthetics and ethics have been pursued in relative isolation, with aesthetics being generally regarded as the poorer, if flashier, cousin. The attention aestheticians have recently given to moral aspects of art and art criticism, and that ethicists have recently paid to aesthetic aspects of moral life and moral evaluation, give hope of ending this rather artificial isolation, though without necessarily forcing us to accede in Wittgenstein’s gnomic dictum that “ethics and aesthetics are one.”
The intersection of aesthetics and ethics can be understood to comprise three spheres of inquiry. The first is that of problems or presuppositions common to aesthetics and ethics, the two traditional branches of value theory. The second is that of ethical issues in aesthetics, or in the practice of art. And the third sphere is that of aesthetic issues in ethics, theoretical and applied.
As it turns out, the concerns of the present collection do not span the full intersection of aesthetics and ethics as just explained. For reasons of both unity and manageability, the decision was made to foreground aesthetics in the present venture. The result is that the essays fall under the first and second, but not the third ways of understanding the intersection of the two fields.
2 – Three versions of objectivity: aesthetic, moral, and scientific
How does the objective validity of aesthetic judgments compare with the objective validity of moral judgments and scientific beliefs? There are two traditional answers. According to one, aesthetic and moral appraisals both utterly lack the cognitive authority of scientific inquiry, since neither kind of appraiser has access to a fact independent of her own judgments and neither is in a position to claim that all who are adequately qualified would share her judgment. For example, emotivists deprive both aesthetic and moral judgments of both kinds of objectivity. According to the other tradition, well-formed aesthetic and moral judgments have the same cognitive authority as wellformed scientific beliefs, because in all three realms the judgment maker is often in a position to assert a truth independent of her judgments, in a claim to which all adequately qualified inquirers would assent. For example, Kant puts the three realms on a par in both ways.
Each of these traditions has distinctive liabilities, which jointly suggest the need to explore a third alternative. The debunking tradition, depriving both aesthetic and moral judgments of all the authority of science, is hard to reconcile with the pervasive aspirations to truth and interests in impersonal argument of apparently rational people engaged in moral and aesthetic judgment. On the other hand, the claims to universality in the elevating tradition often seem wishful thinking.
Elsewhere, I have defended a view of morality and science that rejects the association in both traditions of rational access to appraiser-independent truth with epistemic universality.
With much art, we are naturally inclined to speak of it in moral terms. Especially when considering things like novels, short stories, epic poems, plays, and movies, we seem to fall effortlessly into talking about them in terms of ethical significance – in terms of whether or which characters are virtuous or vicious, and about whether the work itself is moral or immoral, and perhaps whether it is sexist or racist. Undoubtedly, poststructuralists will choke on my use of the phrase “naturally inclined,” just because they do not believe that humans are naturally inclined toward anything. But that general premise is as needlessly strong a presupposition as it is patently false. And, furthermore, I hope to show that my talk of natural inclinations is hardly misplaced here, for we are prone to respond to the types of works in question in the language of moral assessment exactly because of the kinds of things they are.
Moreover, we do not merely make moral assessments of artworks as a whole and characters in particular; it is also the case that these moral assessments are variable. That is, we find some artworks to be morally good, while some others are not; some are exemplary, while some others are vicious and perhaps even pernicious; and finally other works may not appear to call for either moral approbation or opprobrium. So, though we very frequently do advance moral assessments of artworks, it is important to stress that we have a gamut of possible evaluative judgments at our disposal: from the morally good to the bad to the ugly, to the morally indifferent and the irrelvant.
Problems at the Intersection of Aesthetics and Ethics
The Intersection of Aesthetics and Ethics
Ever since the publication of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the concept of taste has been severed from its moral sense and reduced to a merely aesthetic one.1 Since then two trends have predominated in moral philosophy. The first is a rationalist view of ethics, which proposes the need to subsume particular actions under universal laws. Deontological and utilitarian theories both have this paradigm in common. The second is the refraction of this position, which marginalizes any discussion of moral feeling as a psychological question of emotivism or subjectivism.2 This trend of positivism dismisses feelings as mere emotive states, questions of psychology, subjective, and therefore not binding.
In order to recapture the aesthetic dimensions of moral experience, one needs a view of aesthetics that is not limited to reflections on the beautiful and sublime in nature or art and that is not reducible to an allegiance to taste and manners; and one needs a continuity principle that enables reflection on morality to be true to experience. Two process philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead and John Dewey, present a metaphysics of experience which enriches ethics by illustrating the aesthetic dimensions of moral experience. Where the traditions outlined above view reason as the pivotal faculty in navigating the moral landscape, process philosophy emphasizes the aesthetic categories of feeling and imagination as operative in moral experience.
Those skeptical of “aestheticizing morality” often invoke the show-stopping reference to the Nazi Regime, one which consciously and politically recruited aesthetic ideals toward the crystallization of immorality.3 This is the Reductio ad Hitlerum to which the title refers. Fascism and Nazism in particular habituated a marriage between politics and aesthetics, and took up the goal of making politics a triumphant and beautiful spectacle.4 Art, music, and aesthetic symbols were recruited as instruments toward fulfilling this goal.5 Nazi Germany held “countless historical pageants, Volk festivals, military parades, propaganda films, art exhibitions and [erected] grandiose buildings”6 in order to exemplify “the fascist desire to invent mythic imperial pasts and futures,”7 while stirring the passions of the people for its war efforts. The Nazis denounced any allegiance to liberal political texts such as the Versailles Treaty “in favor of decisive political action based on fatal aesthetic criteria — beautiful vs. ugly, healthy vs. degenerate, German vs. Jew.”8 It is warranted to invoke this as the problem for those who “aestheticize” morality. The Nazi problematic, illustrated by an analysis of two films surrounding the immorality of the Nazi Regime, James Ivory’s The Remains of the Day (1993) and István Szabó’s Taking Sides (2001) illuminates the limitations and failures of the tendency to “aestheticize” morality. These films help show the nuances that reside at this tense intersection between aesthetics and ethics. However, tension between aesthetics and ethics, as depicted by the two films, dissolves once one’s understanding of aesthetics ceases to be reductive and narrow.
The aesthetic dimensions of moral experience in the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and John Dewey provide a basis for defining the continuity between ethics and aesthetics. For Whitehead, an aesthetic vision which builds on insights of his descriptive metaphysics enables us to see moral experience as aesthetic. For Dewey, the imagination works on the possibilities at hand in order to resolve morally problematic situations, and the grist for the imagination’s mill is experiential, perceptual, and aesthetic, not merely rational or conceptual. Thus, the broad use of aesthetics advocated herein enables us to draw moral distinctions in the face of Nazi atrocities instead of blindly serving the ideal of artistic creation. Nor does it reduce aesthetics to a fetish for manners. Rather, as including imagination, perception, taste, and emotion, an aesthetic orientation to ethics can encompass the limits posed by these films, and it can morally condemn the Nazi Regime and avoid the Hitler-reductio.
A.N. Whitehead at the Intersection
A sketch of Whitehead’s metaphysics is necessary in order to show how the foundations for moral action may be subsumed under the category of aesthetic experience. According to Whitehead’s systematic metaphysics, the world is a process of becoming. It is ultimately composed of self-creating “actual occasions.”9 The act of self-creation is the “concrescence” of an actual entity, “the final real things of which the world is made up.”10 Thus an “entity” describes an occasion or event in the mode of concrescense, the act of an occasion having prehended its environment. Events create themselves by virtue of their interdependence. The mode of relation each entity has toward others and toward its possibilities in general is “feeling.” “Prehensions” are the feelings which each entity has of its environment, which includes the entire universe, as each entity pulsates and vibrates throughout the cosmos in its process of self-creation.11 Since Whitehead holds that relations are more fundamental than substance, these prehensions constitute the actual entity. Where in traditional metaphysics, substance is primary and the relations among substances are described as secondary attributes, in Whitehead’s description entities are internally related, constituted by their relations. In this process metaphysics, relations are not secondary but primary in that they constitute the entities. When an actual entity prehends its environment, the entity constitutes itself and makes itself what it is.12Each entity serves as the subject of its own becoming and the “superject” of others, imparting itself to other entities in their becoming.13 Actual entities, in process metaphysics, are events, occasions in time, and always situated in a complex, interdependent environment of other entities. Thus, Whitehead’s speculative metaphysics is relational, not atomistic.
This speculative picture of reality lends itself to reflections on moral experience, including an account of Whitehead’s theory of value. In Process and Reality, Whitehead’s theory of value uses strong aesthetic language. He describes intensity of experience as “strength of beauty”: the degree of feeling in an occasion’s prehension of its environment. 14 Further, as John Cobb notes, “The chief ingredients [to beautiful experience] are emotional.”15 The actual entity prehends its environment, feeling its aesthetic surrounding in a chiefly emotional comportment. Because the locus of value is the intensity and harmony of an experience and the emotional sphere contributes chiefly to beautiful experience, emotion need not be corralled by reason, but channeled toward the achievement of beauty. Further, Whitehead shows that philosophers who treat feelings as merely private are mistakenly taking a phase of concrescence to be the whole of experience. For Whitehead, “there is no element in the universe capable of pure privacy.”16 The impossibility of pure privacy undermines the conceptual option of positivists and others who atomize and privatize feeling in order to dismiss its role in moral experiences as subjectivism or emotivism, both of which result in relativism.
Moral experience and aesthetic experience work dialectically: “The function of morality is to promote beauty in experience,”17 but emotions inform morality by adding to the value of experience. Sensation and emotion are not passively received, private reifications; instead, they seamlessly compose the environment we inhabit. Cobb contends that “the purely aesthetic impulse and the moral one exist in a tension” and that “the good aimed at for others is an aesthetic good — the strength of beauty of their experience.”18
Whitehead writes:
In our own relatively high grade human existence, this doctrine of feelings and their subject is best illustrated by our notion of moral responsibility. The subject is responsible for being what it is in virtue of its feelings. It is also derivatively responsible for the consequences of its existence because they flow from its feelings.19
That our existence flows from our feelings reveals the foundation of moral action on aesthetic, αἰσθηματικός, “sensuous” experience. When Whitehead contends that our moral actions flow from our feelings, he places a primacy upon our emotional comportment. The main contribution we make to others is our spirit or attitude.20This spirit is a comportment and temperament, an angle of vision. If our vision is broad and seeks to contribute to the strength of beauty of others’ experience, it is continuous with moral experience. Moral vision is attitudinal and acting according to calculation, deliberation, and reason, while poor in spirit, is not moral action. Whitehead posits a theory of value where our goal is to realize a strength of beauty in our immediate occasions of action. Taking a calculating attitude towards future consequences endangers this goal.21 It is misleading to think that one can calculate rationally toward that best action.22 Rather, such moral rationalism can justify activity that we feel is inhumane, evil, ugly, unjust, and wrong. It can sever means from ends and justify that which our sentiments would impeach.
Whitehead’s speculative metaphysics, by using humanistic and aesthetic language, includes a description of moral experience. Occasions of activity become harmonious with their environment by acting in the service of beauty. Actions emanate from feelings, and right action is not the function of rational deliberation, but of whole-part relations, of fitting the variety of detail and contrast under the unity of an aesthetic concrescence. Whitehead’s is a seductive account of reality, but nowhere in it do we find something like evil. Those skeptical of such an aesthetic description of moral experience may ask, “Where is the Holocaust in this picture?” Thus, below a recourse to two films about Nazism, aesthetics, and morality enables the skeptic to reexamine the continuity between ethics and aesthetics and consider a broader, less reductive, understanding of aesthetics itself. Before addressing this question, another account of how process philosophy maintains continuity between ethics and aesthetics is in order.
John Dewey at the Intersection
In order to outline Dewey’s description of the aesthetic dimensions of moral experience, a cursory illustration of the continuity at work in his metaphysics of experience and theory of inquiry is in order. Dewey described the generic traits of human experience as both precarious and stable.23 Indeterminate situations produce the conditions of instability.24 Subjecting a precarious situation to inquiry constitutes it as problematic, enabling an agent to identify possible means of resolving the situations within the constituent features of the uniquely given situation. Our employment of imaginative intelligence directs our activity in an effort to resolve the situation by rearranging the conditions of indeterminacy toward settlement and unification.25
In a manner similar to Whitehead, Dewey refers to the creative integration of the entire complex situation with the term “value.”26 One constituent in the activity of unifying the problematic situation is the end-in-view, which functions as a specific action coordinating all other factors involved in the institution and resolution of the problem. The value is the integration and unification of the situation. When the end-in-view functions successfully toward the integration of the situation, the resultant unification is a “consummatory phase of experience.”27 Dewey wrote, “Values are naturalistically interpreted as intrinsic qualities of events in their consummatory reference.”28 Their naturalistic interpretation renders the experience of value and the process of valuation continuous with other natural processes. That is, the ends-in-view, whether or not these are moral ideals, do not exist antecedent to inquiry into the complex, historical, and uniquely given situation, as the rationalists would have it. The general traits of moral experience are found within aesthetic experience — dispelling the need dichotomize experience into the cognitive and the emotional — because values are qualities of events.
The ability to examine the aesthetic dimensions of moral experience depends on the way Dewey defines an aesthetically unified and integrated experience as consummatory. The consummation refers to the experience of the unification of meaning of all of the phases of a complex experience.29 Thus, the aesthetic experience gives a holistic meaning to the precariousness of its parts. The value of an experience, including moral value, refers, as in Whitehead’s description, to whole-part relations and the unification of various elements therein.
Art is the skill of giving each phase its meaning in light of the whole. Art unifies each function of the experience, giving reflection, action, desire, and imagination an integrated relation both to each other and to the possibility of meaningful resolution.30 Thus, Dewey refuses to parcel out a separate faculty at work in isolation in any meaningful experience, whether that is reason in cognition or emotion in sympathetic attention to a friend. The consummatory experience is one in which we employ imaginative intelligence in appropriating aesthetic, felt elements of experience above and beyond their immediacy and one in which the instability of their immediacy is seen imaginatively as a possibility toward its meaningful integration.31
Thus, artful conduct includes moral conduct, but in a way that both avoids the need to import ideals transcendent to our experience and gives moral ideals their reality in the meaning that ensues in the consequences of their enactment. The features of artful conduct inherent in moral behavior concern the ability to see possibilities in the elements of precariousness, “to see the actual in light of the possible.”32 Where the rationalist searches for a universal concept to justify a given, isolated action whose justification could be known but not felt, the moral imagination enables the agent to envision in her environment the constituent possibilities in order to reconstruct the situation.
Both Whitehead and Dewey treat moral experience as continuous with the aesthetic experience of intensity, meaning, unification, and harmony found in the consummatory phase of experience, or in Whitehead’s terms, in concrescence. Both treat vision and imagination, not calculative rationality, as operative in navigating morally problematic situations. The general trend running through these process philosophies that maintains continuity between ethics and aesthetics concerns whole-part relations. The individual in morally charged situations must harmonize her particular conduct to the whole of her environment broadly construed. She must imaginatively find the proper fit of her conduct with her greater cultural context. If she succeeds, she harmonizes her experience and the part coheres with the whole. Value, harmony, and stability ensue. Whitehead and Dewey describe our moral experience at a sufficient level of abstraction, one which could include the hosting of a dinner party or the conducting of an orchestra. Each part must cohere with the whole — harmony is the motivating ideal.
Much like Whitehead, Dewey gives us a processive account of reality which seems to cohere with personal experience; however, Dewey’s description of the pattern of inquiry has been accused of being so broad and vague that the Nazi resolution of the Jewish problem could be described according to it..33 The Germans under Hitler constituted their situation during the Great Depression as problematic. Their economy was in shambles, and their national pride was wounded. They found within their situation the constitutive elements, marginally-German, supposed conspirators and enemies of all sorts, to employ in resolving their situation. They achieved a sort of integration of their experience and a distorted sort of harmony in armament and invasion to reincorporate native Germans outside of their truncated borders. They consciously recruited aesthetic ideals and played on the national emotions of soil and blood. Thus, according to the Hitler-reductio, to condemn morally their actions with the language of Dewey or Whitehead is no easy task. The reductio causes moral philosophers to long for universality in any of its rationalist iterations.
The philosophical depiction of aesthetic experience, of which moral dimensions compose a part, is problematic if individuals acting under aesthetic norms, guided by manners and in service of harmonizing part-whole relations, engage in outright immorality or shy away from moral duty in the face of evil. This is the “British” problem because to highlight it, we must attend to the British characters in The Remains of the Day. While much has been written on the film (and the Ishiguro novel upon which it is based), about the role of class and the symbolic nature of British imperial politics, the film also serves as an excellent test case for the continuity between aesthetics and ethics.34 The setting of The Remains of the Day, the aristocratic estate of Darlington Hall in rural England, announces an aesthetic emphasis on beauty and order which persists throughout the film. Most of the action in the film occurs in the pre-war 1930s, but the film flashes forward to the post-war 1950s to show “present” character interactions. The central characters are an emotionally-repressed butler, Mr. Stevens (Anthony Hopkins), his superior and owner of the estate in the 1930s, Lord Darlington (James Fox), and his fellow caretaker of the estate, Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson). The problematic relationship between aesthetic orientation and morality comes into view by focusing on Lord Darlington’s demeanor throughout the events of the 1930s, and Mr. Stevens’s comportment to the politically and morally problematic events that unfold at Darlington Hall.
Lord Darlington had a friend in Germany against whom he fought in the First World War, with whom he intended to sit down and have a drink after the war. But this never happened, as the German friend, ruined by the inflation that ensued in the post-Versailles Weimar Republic, took his own life. Lord Darlington exclaims to Mr. Stevens, “The Versailles Treaty made a liar out of me.” Darlington laments that the conditions of the treaty, (debt reparations, guilt clause) were too harsh: “Not how you treat a defeated foe,” as Darlington puts it. With this as his proximate motivation, Lord Darlington uses his influence to broker the policy of appeasementtoward Nazi Germany. It appears that Lord Darlington puts manners before moral duty. He hosts the delegates from Germany, France, and the United States at his home, and they dine dressed in black tie, served by the army of under-butlers commanded by Mr. Stevens.
One is tempted to view Lord Darlington’s behavior as kind, if not for other telling incidents. He temporarily agrees to employ two Jewish refugees at his estate, and it is made clear to the viewer that he understands the dangers they faced in Germany and that his home is serving as a sanctuary. However, after reading the work of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Lord Darlington orders that two German, Jewish maids should be discharged, as he considers their employment inappropriate for his German guests. Mr. Stevens carries out the order without reflection, while Miss Kenton threatens to resign in protest, but fails to follow through out of self-admitted weakness.35 Thus, Darlington knew of the Nazi policies in Germany, understood the potential plight of the maids, but fired them anyway in service of behavior “appropriate” for his German guests.
Darlington’s elevation of manners above duty reappears as he cannot even tell his godson (Hugh Grant), whose father has died and who is soon to be married, about the birds and the bees. He asks Mr. Stevens, his butler, to do it for him. Darlington seems unwilling to confront the issue of sexuality as it offends his Victorian manners and sensibilities. Thus, manners, while they can be seen as the outward display of inner character, here get in the way of the more difficult, unmannerly, and inappropriate conduct commanded in the face of negotiation with the Germans, the employment of the Jewish maids, and the acceptance of surrogate fatherly duties.
Mr. Stevens’s motivations are more opaque to the audience. He is so univocally driven to serve and fulfill his duty to Lord Darlington, that he almost fails to portray any moral subjectivity.36 But as the head butler, his service is also for the aesthetic ideals of orderliness and cleanliness. The prospect of a dustpan being left on the landing frightens him, such that he rushes to retrieve it before his employer notices his shortcoming. Mr. Stevens’s single-minded focus is best displayed when his own father, also an employee, is dying. Stevens attends to the dinner of the foreign delegates without pain or pause, while his own father lies on his death bed. His relationship with Miss Kenton, central to the development of his character, reveals his coldness, emotional repression, and narrowly driven service toward aesthetic ends. Miss Kenton first extends kindness to Mr. Stevens by putting flowers in his office, but he asks that they be removed so as not to distract him. She falls in love with Mr. Stevens and ends up in tears when she tries to break through his emotional wall and communicate her love to him. But he ignores her and asks to be excused to attend to his duties. Before her eventual departure and engagement to another man, she insults Stevens out of manifest distress that he has never expressed any emotional interest in her, but he still remains unmoved. After his reunion with her in the 1950s, Stevens departs for Darlington Hall in a deluge of rain. Kenton cries, but Stevens, still fails to demonstrate any feeling and only raises his hat out of politeness. While Stevens’s class-based subordination could explain his failure to fulfill his duty to his father, his coldness to Miss Kenton illustrates that he was a cold rationalist in service of aesthetics — thinly defined aesthetics.
Reflecting on Mr. Stevens’s relationship to Miss Kenton reveals two sides of the problem at the intersection of aesthetics and ethics. First, because he serves only the aesthetic ideals of order, beauty, and cleanliness, he does a disservice to the human and intersubjective dimensions of moral experience. He is polite but inattentive and stoic in the face of obvious human suffering, from the firing of the Jewish maids, to the death of his father, to the jilted and regretful Miss Kenton. Does this pose a problem for the continuity between aesthetics and ethics? Stevens serves beauty at the cost of moral duty but also interpersonal sympathy. Since an emotional angle of vision is the necessary condition for attending to moral circumstances, his aesthetic orientation is too narrow. While he has an aesthetic ideal as his motive, he has a rational methodology to achieve it. He acts in each situation as if subsuming his particular action under the universal conceptual criteria of serving beauty and order. He does not allow his actions to flow from his feelings as Whitehead would prescribe. His contribution to others is his spirit, but this is a cold, deliberate, and rational spirit. Thus, with Mr. Stevens as a test case, a conception of aesthetic experience needs to be broad enough to include emotional comportment. Failing to do so through operating in service of a narrow ideal of beauty reveals an impoverished sense of aesthetics which results in immorality.
American Congressman, Mr. Lewis (Christopher Reeve) of The Remains of the Dayserves as a pivot to the American problem at the intersection of aesthetics and ethics discussed at length below. Laughed at as nouveau riche by the British delegates, Lewis attends the conference with the intent of resisting the policy of appeasement. Because he fails to recruit the French delegate, Dupont d’Ivry (Michael Lonsdale), to his side (D’Ivry is busy attending to his sore feet), Mr. Lewis resorts to making an impolite toast at the black tie dinner. He argues in favor of the Realpolitik of professionals, rather than that of “honorable amateurs,” which is his epithet for the noblemen in his company and the Lord who is his host. In his toast “to the professionals” he embodies the moral high ground against the Nazis and the unmannerly and barefooted behavior of a stereotypical American on aristocratic soil; thus he hammers in the wedge that separates manners from morals. Apparently, Americans stand up for right against wrong even at the expense of politeness and pretty conduct. Lewis is a representative character for those skeptical of continuity between aesthetics and ethics. He knows that aesthetic ideals, when reducible to the appreciation of good taste and mannerly behavior, can dull moral distinctions. Yet he fails to unify the precariousness of his situation in a manner which Whitehead or Dewey describe.
The American Problem at the Intersection: Taking Sides
Taking Sides tells the story of Dr. Wilhelm Furtwängler, (Stellan Skarsgård), one of the most respected German conductors of the 20th century, who chose to remain in Germany during the Nazi regime. After Germany’s defeat, he fell victim to a ruthless investigation by the Allies. The major in charge of the investigation is a stereotypically uncultured American, Major Steven Arnold (Harvey Keitel), who works in the insurance business. Arnold tries to uncover how complicit Furtwängler was. Furtwängler was appointed to the Privy Council, he was Hitler’s favorite conductor, and Goebbels and Goering honored him. However, he never joined the Nazi party, he helped numerous Jews escape, and several witnesses testify that he tried to protect Jewish musicians under his direction.
The audience is left to judge Furtwängler morally. On the one hand, Arnold has the moral high ground. The Nazis perpetrated the Holocaust, and the Allied victory ended it. Justice awaits the guilty. But Major Arnold is no Congressman Lewis, who has the outward appearance of a British Peer but falls short of their mannerly conduct only by degree. Arnold is a bullying interrogator, somewhere between the caricature of an ugly American and a down-to-earth pragmatist who thinks musical genius is no excuse for collusion with Nazism, and he is willing to employ an overbearing rudeness to expose this. For Arnold, the question is all about strength of will, and he deems Furtwängler weak. However, Arnold seems to misunderstand most of Furtwängler’s replies to his questions, and at times, his interrogation seems like self-righteous taunting and badgering. The viewer is left wondering whether the distressed conductor or the clinched-fist interrogator is acting more like a Nazi.
In one telling exchange, Furtwängler claims that art has mystical powers, which nurture man’s spiritual needs. He confesses to being extremely naïve. While having maintained the absolute separation of art and politics, he devoted his life to music because he thought through music he could do something practical: to maintain liberty, humanity, and justice. Arnold replies with sarcastic disdain, “Gee, that’s a thing of beauty. […] But you used the word “naïve.” Are you saying you were wrong in maintaining the separation of art and politics?”37 Furtwängler replies that he believed art and politics should be separated, but that they were not kept separate by the Nazis, and he learned this at his own cost. Furtwängler is in an obvious bind here. He cannot hold the following propositions together without internal contradiction: (1) Art has mystical power which nurture’s man’s spiritual needs; (2) Art and politics should be kept separate; (3) Art can maintain liberty, justice and humanity; (4) Art was not kept separate from politics during Nazi rule in Germany, and this was a bad thing. If art nurtures man’s spiritual needs, but art must be kept separate from politics, are man’s spiritual needs distinct from questions of community and well-functioning societies? Put otherwise, can music perform its practical function of maintaining justice, while being separate from politics? It would not seem so.
In what follows this interrogation, Arnold accuses Furtwängler of weakness, of selling out to the Nazis for ordinary petty reasons of fear, jealousy of other conductors, and selfishness. Arnold’s two subordinates are offended by his demeanor and his denigration of a national artistic genius and hero. His assistant eventually refuses to participate. She claims that Arnold is embodying the demeanor of the S.S., which she witnessed firsthand. But Arnold shows her a film of corpses being bulldozed into mass graves, and he tells her that Furtwängler’s friends did this, and by virtue of the fact that Furtwängler actually helped some Jews escape, he knew what they were doing.
The moment of supposed revelation for the viewers of the film comes by way of archival footage, in which Furtwängler is shown shaking hands with Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels after a concert. Furtwängler’s face reveals the complexity of emotions at work — placidness, fear, and contempt. Furtwängler wipes his hand on his leg, revealing his disdain for his patron, but remains reserved and inoffensive. At once the viewer feels he is redeemed, because his true feelings for Goebbels and the Nazi project are revealed, but Furtwängler’s weakness is evident, as Arnold would have pointed out. Ultimately Furtwängler served the harmonious sensibility of artistic creation. Indeed, throughout the film the German admiration of him is severe, especially when contrasted to Arnold’s unimpressed frankness with him. The German temperament and faithfulness to aesthetic appreciation is manifest in a scene where the German audience stands in the rain, listening to Furtwängler conduct a symphony. To leave would offend, and service to the aesthetic ideals cannot give way to pragmatic considerations — how “American” that would be! One imagines Arnold thinking “what insensible dolt stands in the rain to listen to music?” Perhaps Congressman Lewis’s willingness to offend at the black tie dinner can be seen as a middle ground between Arnold’s bullying and Furtwängler’s and Darlington’s inverted values. However, this might only translate conduct into class, hiding the one true moral question beneath another layer of social convention. Arnold would insist that knowing where your salad fork belongs may not prevent you from colluding with murderers.
The Continuity between Ethics and Aesthetics
For both Whitehead and Dewey there are no universal moral situations. Our occasions of experience are always contextual and specific, never occurring in vacuous actuality. But this calls for a more general approach to descriptive ethics, not a more particularized prescription of universal moral laws. Both philosophers begin with a description of the general traits of experience and each uses highly aesthetic language. Each treats imagination and vision, not rationality, as operative in navigating morally problematic situations. Whitehead, by making feeling a metaphysical category, gives emotion a primary role; Dewey, in collapsing the gap between scientific, practical, and moral inquiries, gives imaginative intelligence primacy.
Neither of our two films presents the ideal character, with an emotional comportment and an intensity of experience able to serve as the causally efficacious and morally demanding superject in its environment. Nor do they offer a character of superior imaginative intelligence who finds and applies the elements of her problematic situation as means toward the valuable integration of meaning. This is not a surprise. England appeased the Nazis; the Holocaust occurred and so did the very limited prosecution of the guilty by the Allies afterwards. Furthermore, ugly, but welcomed, Americans plodded onto European soil either on the model of Major Arnold, at worst, or on that of Congressman Lewis at best. (He eventually buys Darlington Hall and retains Mr. Stevens as his butler, but he installs a ping-pong table there, of all aesthetic affronts). Does the “American” problem recur in summer retreats to European museums and cafes? Americans plod, loud and entitled, over the artistic feats of the Continent, and their European hosts translate aesthetic missteps into moral offense.
Where did each character fall short, and what did their shortcomings reveal about the intersection of aesthetics and ethics? Lord Darlington employed his servants to erect a mannerly and orderly veneer between him and that which is ugly. However, he can be viewed as a tragic figure because his mild manners and sensitivity to common cultural (and aesthetic in the narrow sense) values with the Germans were used against him. He ended in disgrace as the news of his involvement in the appeasement was publicized by the press. But his heightened sense of manners disabled him from confronting the soil of moral problems as he did not want to get dirty — (that’s what the servants are for). The head butler, Stevens, was not the emotionally comported or spontaneously active character tacitly advocated for by Whiteheadian ethics, but the coldly rational and deliberative agent serving a narrow aesthetic end. Miss Kenton and Furtwängler demonstrated a weakness of will in the face of wrong-doing, and for that they are condemned, not by an aesthetic measure, but by a pragmatic one. Their beliefs were their propensities to act, and their inability to act revealed a weak belief in their moral ideals.38 But the American characters are not morally pure. As the victors, the
tools they had at their disposal to resolve their situations were ready at hand, and they too were constituted by their prehensions of their environment. Denigrating an artistic genius does not show the service of a moral ideal, but only the privileged position of Major Arnold of judging Furtwängler’s weakness from outside his context.
These films do illustrate the tension at work at the intersection of aesthetics and ethics. While both films depict the limitations and failures of the tendency to “aestheticize” morality, they do not prove the need to import a falsely universal moral ideal antecedent to the experience of a particular problematic situation in order to judge right from wrong. Insofar as the tools needed to make these judgments are had in experience, they have been, accurately described by figures like Whitehead and Dewey, in aesthetic language. The Reductio ad Hitlerum only succeeds if the meaning of aesthetics is deflated and reduced to something much narrower than either Whitehead or Dewey intended, such as reflection on artistic creation. The broad use of aesthetics advocated here does not fail to draw moral distinctions in the face of Nazi atrocities while blindly serving the ideal of artistic beauty or mere manners. Rather, as including imagination and emotion, an aesthetic orientation to ethics encompasses the problems posed by the characters’ shortcomings, even if their moral shortcomings run parallel to their heightened aesthetic and misguided sensibilities.
Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, (London: Continuum, 2006), 31. Nöel Carroll makes the further claim that because of Kant’s aesthetic theory and its interpretation, twentieth century philosophers have neglected the ethical criticism of art. (Noël Carroll, “Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview of Recent Directions of Research,” Ethics, Vol. 110, No. 2 (January 2000), pp 350). ↩︎
Thomas Alexander, “John Dewey and the Moral Imagination: Beyond Putnam and Rorty toward a Postmodern Ethics,” Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, Vol. XXIX, No. 3, (Summer 1993), 373. ↩︎
For a complex examination of this problematic, see George Kateb, “Aestheticism and Morality: Their Cooperation and Hostility,” Political Theory, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Feb., 2000), pp. 5-37. ↩︎
See Noël Carroll, “Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview of Recent Directions of Research,” Ethics, Vol. 110, No. 2 (January 2000), pp. 350-387. Carroll highlights the problematic relationship between ethics and art criticism by examining the immorality and aesthetic value of The Triumph of the Will, among other artifacts. ↩︎
Boaz Neumann, “The National Socialist Politics of Life,” New German Critique, No. 85, Special Issue on Intellectuals (Winter, 2002), p 120. ↩︎
Paul Betts, “The New Fascination with Fascism: The Case of Nazi Modernism,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Oct., 2002), 546. ↩︎
Betts, “The New Fascination with Fascism,” 547. ↩︎
Betts, “The New Fascination with Fascism,” 547. ↩︎
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, (London: The Free Press, 1978), 18. ↩︎
Gouinlock, John Dewey’s Philosophy of Value, 150. ↩︎
Gouinlock, John Dewey’s Philosophy of Value, 151. ↩︎
Gouinlock, John Dewey’s Philosophy of Value, 152. ↩︎
Alexander, “John Dewey and the Moral Imagination,” 384. ↩︎
Richard Posner*, Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy*, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 45. Posner claims that pragmatism, via Darwinism, has nurtured philosophies including Nazism. ↩︎
See, for example, Meera Tamaya, “Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day: The Empire Strikes Back,” Modern Language Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2 (spring, 1992), pp. 45-56. Tanaya focuses on the relationship between Darlington and Stevens as one of colonizer and colonized, subject and object. ↩︎
See Geoffrey G. Field, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). ↩︎
See McCombe, “The End of (Anthony) Eden: Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day” and Midcentury Anglo-American Tensions,” 78.↩︎
See Page R. Laws, “Taking Sides by Ronald Harwood; India Ink by Tom Stoppard,” (review), Theatre Journal, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Mar., 1996), pp. 107-108. Laws makes note of the fact that the Nazis used art in the service of politics. ↩︎
Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers (1958-1966), Vol. 5, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, eds., (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), 400. ↩︎
References:
Alexander, Thomas. “John Dewey and the Moral Imagination: Beyond Putnam and Rorty toward a Postmodern Ethics.” Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society. Vol. XXIX. No. 3. (Summer 1993).
Betts, Paul. “The New Fascination with Fascism: The Case of Nazi Modernism.” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37. No. 4. (Oct., 2002).
Carroll, Noël. “Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview of Recent Directions of Research.” Ethics. Vol. 110, No. 2 (January 2000), pp. 350-387.
Dewey, John. Later Works Vol. 1, Ed. Boydston, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.
Dewey, John. Later Works Vol. 10. Ed. Boydston, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.
Dewey, John. Later Works Vol. 12. Ed. Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.
Dunkel, Harold B. “Creativity and Education,” Educational Theory. Vol. XI. No. 4. (1961).
Field, Geoffrey G. Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.
Gadamer, Hans Georg. Truth and Method. London: Continuum, 2006.
Gouinlock, James. John Dewey’s Philosophy of Value. New York: Humanities Press, 1972.
Ivory, James. The Remains of the Day. Merchant Ivory Film, 1993.
Kateb, George. “Aestheticism and Morality: Their Cooperation and Hostility.” Political Theory. Vol. 28. No. 1 (Feb., 2000), pp. 5-37.
Neumann, Boaz. “The National Socialist Politics of Life.” New German Critique. No. 85. Special Issue on Intellectuals (Winter, 2002), pp. 107-130.
Peirce, Charles Sanders, (1958-1966) Collected papers. Vols. 1- 6, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, eds., (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press).
Posner, Richard. Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Szabó, István. Taking Sides. Paladin Production S.A., 2001.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. London: The Free Press, 1978.About the Author:
Seth Vannatta earned his PhD in philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Morgan State University, where he won the university award for research and scholarship in 2012. He studies the history of philosophy and American philosophy and is interested in philosophy’s relationship to other dimensions of culture including law, politics, education, and sport. He is the author of Conservationsim and Pragmatism in Law, Politics, and Ethics(Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and editor and contributor to Chuck Klosterman and Philosophy: The Real and the Cereal (Open Court, 2012). He has published articles in The Pluralist, Contemporary Pragmatism, The European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, Education and Culture, and others.
Notes on Ecological Aesthetics and Ethics
By David George Haskell
A sense of beauty is a rigorous, perhaps even objective, foundation for environmental ethics. Our human aesthetic judgment integrates many strands of experience: intellect, emotion, bodily senses, and all we know from our interactions with others, both human and non-human others. From this integration, we understand the good.
Of course, an aesthetic sense is subject to the whims of desire, passing fads, and superficial impressions. So a well-grounded ethic depends for its rigor on a mature sense of aesthetics. By “mature,” I mean a sense of aesthetics that emerges from many years of lived relationship with a place and its community of life, both human and non-human. Such experience allows us to “unself” our judgment into the wider experience of the community. Our aesthetic and then our ethic will thus emerge not just from the limited confines of our own self, but from the knowledge that lives within the networks from which communities are made.
Once we—collectively—have an integrated sense of aesthetics, we can begin to discern what is beautiful and what is broken about a place, and, from there, I believe we can begin to form an objective—or near-objective—foundation for ethical discernment. Answers emerge from the community of life itself, filtered through human experience and consciousness.
What do I mean by that? Years of experience in a particular place will open us to the lives of other people and other species in that place, so our sense of aesthetics will incorporate their realities. Once we have that, we have a ground for moving forward and making ethical decisions that are actually deeply rooted in the physical, biological realities of a place, rather than coming only from abstractions of a seminar room or dogmas in a philosophy born in another ecosystem.
Aesthetics is often presented as something that’s very subjective, divorced from the reality of the world. In fact, it’s the exact opposite. A sense of ecologic aesthetics comes from a very gritty, sensually rich experience that has its tendrils in the realities of a place.
None of this can answer the ethical nihilist who poses the question, “So, what? Ethics are vaporous illusions carved into the human nervous system by evolution.” But if some ground for ethics does exist in this universe, then a sense of aesthetics can, I think, help us find this ground by a process that fully acknowledges and embraces our existence as evolved members of ecological communities. This is a fully biological foundation for ethics.
On a practical level, if we try to answer questions about how to live in particular places without first listening to the realities and particularities of the place itself, our answers are going to be unmoored and will have terrible consequences. Understanding how to live ethically in a place is an extraordinarily complicated, important, and difficult challenge. Moving forward with answers that are not based on deep engagement with a place and its inhabitants is a recipe for disaster. So action in the world demands, first, a practice of listening.
Religious and philosophical traditions have known this for many millennia: contemplation and action go together, just as the inhale and the exhale go together. Monastic communities are deeply contemplative, but also have engaged in action in the world—whether that action is caring for other people in hospitals, or agricultural action, or caring for the sick. This history evinces the truth that we need open, contemplative spaces within our lives, especially lives of action. I think there’s a hunger for that kind of open space. Without it, we feel a desperation and a feeling that we’re up against the wall without a good way forward. Contemplative practices create spaces for new ideas, new connections to emerge. That sounds like a rather goal-oriented way of putting it, but I do think that one of the fruits of contemplation is an increased ability to come up with new ideas or to see old ideas in a new light.
In the environmental community, there are some instances of people making decisions about the fate of ecosystems when the decision-makers have never experienced the ecosystem at stake. When NGOs, governments, or businesses have decision-making structures that are divorced from the lived experience of a place, then the outcomes will most likely not be good for that place or the people in them. We need to bring lived experience of ecosystems back into the decision-making process.
Call: Aesthetics and Ethics in the Digital Age – British Society of Aesthetics Conference
Submissions are invited for the upcoming conference British Society of Aesthetics: Aesthetics and Ethics in the Digital Age. The conference will take place on 27th and 28th May 2021 in Cambridge, UK.
The aim of this conference is to explore some developments in recent practice that raise new and interesting questions for the philosophy of art. Artists, working independently in different parts of the world, are creating new forms of technological interfaces and experimenting with the biological, the nano and the digital. At the heart of all their works is a deep ethos of balancing the aesthetic and the ethical in how we relate with others and our environment, whether in the same physical space or as distributed bodies. The spheres of the arts, sciences, and (in particular) technology overlap both to explore and to attempt to change the way in which we live in the world. These artistic practices raise questions about the interaction between aesthetics and ethics that go beyond those familiar to us in discussions over the past decade or so.
Abstracts of up to 1000 words should be submitted as an email attachment to Satinder Gill (spg12@cam.ac.uk) and Derek Matravers (derek.matravers@open.ac.uk). Please include the talk title, author’s name, affiliation and contact details in the body of email; and please write “BSA Conference Submission” in the subject line. Abstracts should outline a talk lasting 25 minutes, on a topic related to the topic of the conference. The deadline for submissions is the end of 31st December 2020.
There will be no registration fee for the conference. UK-based contributing speakers will be encouraged to apply for the BSA Travel Stipend to cover travel and accommodation costs. The conference will adhere to BPA/SWIP Good Practice Scheme.
The relationship between aesthetics and ethics has long been the topic of scholarly debates, from Kant’s (1928[1790]) insistence that the experience of beauty involved disinterested contemplation and, subsequently, the separation of aesthetics from ethics, or Wittgenstein’s (1961[1889]) enigmatic proposition that ‘ethics and aesthetics are one’, to the numerous enquiries into the ethical aspects of art and art criticism or the aesthetic aspects of moral life and moral evaluation (e.g. Bourdieu 1984, Foucault 1985, 1986, Eco 1986, Eagleton 1990, Guattari 1995, Korsmeyer 1998, Levinson 2001, Rancière 2006, Osborne and Tanner 2007). How has anthropology related to these debates? Thompson (2006[1973)], Bateson (2006[1973)], or Boone (1986), for example, in the tradition of a holistic anthropology, have analysed local concepts of beauty and illustrated the ways in which these concepts articulated with religious and moral values. Gell (1998), to give another example, through his notion of the artwork as an index, which enables the observer to make causal inferences about the artist’s intentions, has theoretically paved the way for inquiries into the morality of intentions. Furthermore, how can anthropology contribute to these debates, especially in light of its increasing interest in ethics (e.g. Lambek 2010, Faubion 2011, Robbins 2013, Keane 2013, 1014, Fassin and Lézé 2014, Laidlaw 2014)?
Participants have been invited to address the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in anthropology and to consider the following questions: i) do the definitions of aesthetics and ethics currently in use in anthropology help or hinder us in our reflections on their relationship? ii) when are the questions of aesthetics and ethics similar? iii) what kind of theoretical framework is appropriate for reflecting on this relationship? (e.g. value theory; then the questions might be: how does aesthetic value relate to the notion of value generally? how does ethical value relate to the notion of value generally? are these types of value incompatible?) iv) what kind of ethnographic topic is appropriate for reflecting on this relationship? (only those where there is an explicit expectation that aesthetic principles are guided by ethical considerations, such as Qur’anic art and Islamic fashion?) v) should a third term, that is, politics, be also taken into consideration in order to better understand the relationship between aesthetics and ethics?
Broadly construed, Aesthetics and Ethics concerns the relationship between art and morality. Here we ask: Can artworks provide moral knowledge? Can artworks corrupt and instruct morally? More narrowly construed, the category concerns the relationship between aesthetic and moral value. The chief question is this: Do moral flaws with works of art constitute aesthetics flaws? In addition, we can ask if aesthetic value is morally significant. This last issue has important implications for environmental ethics.
Key works
The most important collection on the topic is Levinson 1998. The majority of the work on the topic is in essay form, but there are a few influential books. Gaut 2007 is an important, recent monograph.
Introductions
Although a bit out of date, Carroll 2000 provides an excellent overview of the area. Gaut 2001 is also an excellent introduction.
AESTHETICS & ETHICS: OTHERNESS AND MORAL IMAGINATION FROM ARISTOTLE TO LEVINAS AND FROM UNCLE TOM’S CABIN TO HOUSE MADE OF DAWN
In recent years, American Studies have taken a turn toward the political. However, although poststructuralism and deconstruction have undermined numerous of the moral-philosophical dogmas of the Western metaphysical tradition, many of the political claims that the revisionist turn in American Studies has voiced still rest, if tacitly, on these moral and ethical assumptions. As the latter often collide with the theoretical axioms that inform these revisionist works, some resort to what one could call the “pathos of marginality” and rather vague concepts of “otherness.” Moreover, these political-ideological readings often completely blot out aesthetic aspects, as these are suspected to be carriers of implicit and hegemonic strategies of representation.
In the first part, this study analyzes what role “otherness” plays in the most influential moral-philosophical approaches to date – from Aristotle and the Neo-Aristotelians (Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum) via Kantianism and its deconstructors (Jean-François Lyotard, J. Hillis Miller) to the works of Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas – and sheds light on its highly problematic status in Western notions of justice. Moreover, on the background of these analyses it examines the role that aesthetics plays not only for, but within these approaches, with a special focus on what task literature is accorded to dramatize the clash of sameness and otherness.
Starting from a revised notion of the sublime, the second part “applies” the different approaches to four American novels: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, and examines how far the moral-philosophical systems carry to elucidate these texts. What becomes clear is that none of these works can be captured in their complexity by either one moral philosophy or one political agenda, in that every literary “exemplification” of such theory inevitably falls prey to the treacherous dynamics of the example – a dynamics that inhabits literature and haunts ethics, and that defies literature’s instrumentalization by either ethics or ideologies.
Keywords: American Studies, Aesthetics, Ethics, the Sublime, the Other, Otherness, Immanuel Kant, Jean-François Lyotard, J. Hillis Miller, Martha Nussbaum, Alasdair MacIntyre, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Herman Melville, Billd Budd, Richard Wright, Native Son, N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn, Ecology.
Contents
List of Abbreviations for Reference Works
Introduction
American Studies Today
Enter (And Leave): The Aesthetic
Difficult Neighbors: Ethics and Aesthetics
The Novels
I. The Kantian Legacy of Deconstruction
1. Kant – for Example
2. The Ethics of Reading and the End of History
2.1. Ce dangereux exemple…
2.2. De Man’s Demands
2.3. …close the gap!
2.4. Giving the Li(f)e to Miller’s Lie
3. Toward a Politics of the Sublime: Jean-François Lyotard
3.1. The Idea of the “Idea”
3.2. Lyotard Just Gaming?
3.3. The Sacrificial Sublime
II. The Return of Aristotle: Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum
4. Going Back Home: MacIntyre and the Greek Polis
4.1. The Price of Historicization
4.2. The Polis Rebuilt
4.3. Virtual Ethics and Virtuous Reading
4.4. Ethics, Practice, and the Narrative Unity of a Human Life
5. A Mind too Refined to be Touched by an Idea: Martha Nussbaum’s Aristotelian Liberalism
5.1. Aristotle and the Virtues
5.2. The Tragic Muse as Éducation Sentimentale
5.3. The End of Tragedy and The Limits of Identification
III. Approaching the Other: Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur
6. Oneself for the Other: Emmanuel Levinas
6.1. Facing The Other
6.2. Ethics, Politics, and Literature
6.3. The Other Sublime
7. Oneself as Another: Paul Ricoeur
7.1. Toward a Narrative Ethics
7.2. Narration and Alterity
7.3. A Tragic Encounter – Narrating the Other
IV. Toward an Ethics of Literature
8. Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
8.1. How to Turn a Thing Into a Man, or: Categorical Imperative vs. Golden Rule
8.2. Sentimentalism as Aesthetic and Ethical Strategy
8.3. The Economy of Religion and Politics
8.4. Face/Off
9. Herman Melville: Billy Budd, Sailor
9.1. Phronimos Goes To War
9.2. Literature, Responsibility, and Political Philosophy: Hannah Arendt and Paul Ricoeur
9.3. (Ef-)facing the Other – Melville’s Silences, Ethics, and War
9.4. Singular Madnesses, Maddening Singularities: Vere, Billy, and the “Hebrew Prophets”
10. Richard Wright: Native Son
10.1. Polis into Metropolis, or: How to Identify with a Rat
10.2. Whose Narrative Is It, Anyway?
10.3. The Racial Sublime
10.4. Re(w)ri(gh)ting Native Son, Or: Who’s Afraid of Bigger Thomas?
11. N. Scott Momaday: House Made Of Dawn
11.1. Polis into Pueblo, or: How to Identify with a Bear
11.2. “Evil Was”: Balance, Control, and the Ethics of Myth
11.3. To Kill or Not to Kill
11.4. Excursus: Is there an other Other? Toward an Environmental Ethics
This post is an extension of my last post on Aesthetics and Ethics. How narrative arts such as Literature, Novels, Poetry, Films and Dramas interact with moral ethical concerns and emotions of human beings.
Martha Nussbaum on Emotions, Ethics, and Literature
by Ana Sandoiu
Martha Nussbaum has been recently described as a “philosopher of feelings” and indeed, throughout her career, she has written on disgust, shame, desire, sex, patriotism, love, empathy, and most recently, anger. According to Nussbaum, there is ethical value in emotions, and we are wrong to ostracize them outside the sphere of philosophical relevance. Understanding our emotions helps us build a morally just society and relate to one another in a way that is deeply respectful and moral. It helps us extend our humanity toward people we have previously rejected as “the other,” and is a crucial part of building a healthy democracy.
Emotions are extremely significant to our efforts of living a good life. In Love’s Knowledge(1990), Nussbaum maintains that feelings have unrightfully been banished from philosophy under two equally false pretexts. Critics have either portrayed them as these blind, irrational impulses that have nothing to do with cognition and have to be strictly controlled by the reins of rationality, or maintained that if they do have any cognitive value and can indeed tell us something about the world, what they tell us is simply false. The first objection equates an emotion with an instinctual appetite, an animal need, a mere bodily function. Yet, Nussbaum argues, we can agree that grief, for instance, is very much different from hunger, and in fact due to developments in anthropology, cognitive science, and psychology, this view has become antiquated. Besides, we don’t need scientific evidence to acknowledge that grief cannot be compared to hunger, as grief is sustained by a variety of assumptions with epistemic value. Which leads us to the second set of objections.
Emotions do have cognitive value, so it should only follow logically that they must have some ethical value as well. To continue with the example of grief, the experience of the feeling presupposes the belief that someone has been lost, that the loss is irrevocable, that the person lost had tremendous and irreplaceable value, etc. To give another example, Nussbaum’s account of anger unfolds the various assumptions that underlie this emotion, amongst which the idea that there is some kind of cosmic balance that has been upset when a person has been wronged, and that directing his or her fury at the wrongdoer will somehow restore that balance.
Some emotions encompass beliefs about the world that upon scrutiny do indeed turn out to be wrong, but this is precisely why we need to take them seriously and subject them to careful investigation. It can be expected that upon discovering that certain emotions are unwarranted or unfounded, we will discard them, just as we do with beliefs when we discover they are false. Some emotions are indeed irrational, but so are a vast number of beliefs, yet it has never occurred to philosophers to banish beliefs from philosophy altogether. Furthermore, it is inconsistent, Nussbaum argues, to discredit emotions as insignificant and untrustworthy, while simultaneously recognizing that a change in one’s feelings also brings with it a change in one’s beliefs (see, for instance, the role emotions play in advertising or politics). We are wary of a political discourse suffused with emotions, as it can be much more effective than one that fully ignores our feelings. The Sophists, masters of rhetoric that they were, knew and fully embraced this, but Nussbaum points out that they weren’t the only ones. Pre-Socratic philosophers and poets were much more supportive of an entanglement between art, emotions, and philosophy, before Socrates/Plato came along and drew a dichotomy between them (pp. 14–15).
“Belief,” Nussbaum writes, “is sufficient for emotion, and emotion necessary for full belief” (p. 41). If a person believes that X was the most important person in her life, and X died, then that person will be affected by grief. If she doesn’tbelieve in the significance of X, she will not experience grief. Conversely, if a person maintains that she is a feminist, for instance, and witnesses an act of abuse against women and yet has no reaction (i.e., outrage), this would make us question the sincerity of that person’s convictions. We should admit, along with Aristotle—a philosopher Nussbaum reveres and draws significantly from—that emotions are “discriminating responses closely connected with beliefs about how things are and what is important” (ibid.). Sometimes, they might be even more reliable as our moral compasses than detached intellectual judgements, since they embody our most deeply rooted views about the world.
If emotions indeed have cognitive value, why do we still reject them? Nussbaum suggests that the main objection brought to emotions is that “they involve value judgements that attach great worth to uncontrolled things outside the agent; they are … acknowledgements of the finite and imperfectly controlled character of human life” (p. 42). To counter this vulnerability, Western philosophy has aspired to a kind of self-sufficiency, a belief that nothing bad will ever happen to those who do everything right.
In the uncertain world of ancient Greece, being human was seen as both supremely beautiful and fatally doomed. In a world governed by capricious gods, man felt subjected to tuche(fate or luck, or as Nussbaum explains it, that which just happens to a person as opposed to that which is her own doing). Many thus aspired to regain some form of control, some way to escape being at the mercy of tuche. This control came in the form of Platonic, rational self-sufficiency. Use your reason and you will be in touch with the divine forms. Nothing bad can happen to a good person. This rational self-sufficiency aspires to make “the goodness of a good human life safe from luck through the controlling power of reason” ([1986] 2001, p. 3). At its roots lies Socrates’s claim that a good person cannot be harmed, as expressed by Plato in the Apology (41c-d).
Nussbaum urges us to recognize, along with the Greek tragic poets, that mankind is fragile. In TheFragility of Goodness (id., p. 5), she writes that her position acknowledges
That I am an agent, but also a plant; that much that I did not make goes towards making me whatever I shall be praised or blamed for being; that I must constantly choose among competing and apparently incommensurable goods and that circumstances may force me to a position in which I cannot help being false to something or doing some wrong; that an event that simply happens to me may, without my consent, alter my life; that it is equally problematic to entrust one’s good to friends, lovers, or country and to try to have a good life without them—all these I take to be not just the material of tragedy, but everyday facts of lived practical reason.
These “everyday facts of lived practical reason” may be central to morality, but unfortunately, our lives are limited. Building on Aristotle’s views in his Rhetoric and Poetics, Nussbaum reminds us that “we have never lived enough” and that our experience is “too confined and too parochial” (1990, p. 47). Fortunately, however, there is something that can compensate for the inevitable shortness of our lifespan and the limited breadth of human experience: literature.
Literature extends our life and our experience, “making us reflect and feel about what might otherwise be too distant for feeling” (ibid.) One of the main points of literary art is to present us with moments where “habit is cut through by the unexpected” (p. 43), testing our aspirations to live a good life through events outside of our control. This way of reading becomes a way of moral learning, a way of training ourselves to recognize the important features in a moral situation. No prefabricated principle can help us here, but we can only learn experientially, step by step, guided by the novel.
Nussbaum describes moralities that are exclusively based on general and universal principles as “ethically crude” (p. 37) and instead proposes the view influenced by Aristotle, which focuses on practical wisdom. General principles can only help us so much, and, following Aristotle’s analogy between ethical judgement and the arts of a navigator, there will always be the “unexpected” to face, our version of the Greek tuche, and inevitably, principles will prove insufficient. Here is where perception will prove more useful, defined as the ethical ability to discern the important features of one’s particular situation. Perceptions, in combination with a healthy dose of moral responsibility, are the ethical antidote to principles. We should bear in mind that “perception without responsibility is dangerously free-floating, even as duty without perception is blunt and blind” (p. 155).
Literature widens our experience and expands our moral imagination. It gives us the opportunity to vicariously explore seemingly infinite instances of lived practical reason. In her essay “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible,” Nussbaum makes the case for the novel as a “paradigm of moral activity” (p. 148). It gives us the uniquely privileged position from which we can explore situations deeply, but from afar. It allows us to be emotionally involved while also maintaining neutrality. In this sense, we inhabit a place that is “both like and unlike the position we occupy in life” (p. 48), perfect for awakening ourselves to moral perceptions. Much like a rehearsal before the live show, novels give their readers the opportunity to explore ethically demanding situations from a place of safety.
James’s novel The Golden Bowl serves as an example of a literary piece that provides the reader with moral perceptions, those nuanced insights into some of the infinitely varied instances of human existence. Because of the privileged position that the literary form of the novel offers, “Most of us can read James better than we can read ourselves’’ (p. 162). It is only once we’re aware of these fine complexities and reach a state of “perceptive equilibrium” that we can hope to act morally. To ignore the particularities, the contingencies and the “context-embeddedness” (1990, p. 38) of human experience is to be morally blind. “By themselves, trusted for and in themselves, the standing terms are a recipe for obtuseness” (p. 156). Instead, to respond with the right emotions “at the right times, with reference to the right objects, toward the right people, with the right aim, and in the right way, is what is appropriate and best, and this is characteristic of excellence” (Aristotle EN 1106b21-23, quoted in Nussbaum, 1990, 156). Analyzing The Golden Bowl, Nussbaum puts forth the two main characters of the novel as two moral agents, two people who managed to act altruistically toward each other without relying on rules and concepts of duty, but instead “improvised” with the particulars given to them. Perceptions assume priority over rules, and the particulars of a situation over general principles.
Artistic narratives are sometimes the only possible way of rendering life in an accurate fashion:
Certain truths about human life can only be fittingly and accurately stated in the language and forms characteristic of the narrative artist. With respect to certain elements of human life, the terms of the novelist’s art are alert winged creatures, perceiving where the blunt terms of ordinary speech, or of abstract theoretical discourse are blind, acute where they are obtuse, winged where they are dull and heavy. (1990, p. 5)
Nussbaum invites us to suppose, along with Proust, that ‘The most important truths about human psychology cannot be communicated or grasped by intellectual activity alone: powerful emotions have an irreducibly important cognitive role to play” (p. 7). If we combine this with the assumption that there is an organic connection between form and content, then novels emerge as a unique medium for truth-telling. Style is not incidental to the content it aims to convey, Nussbaum suggests, but rather the adequate fit between form and content is almost absolute, in the sense that once something is appropriately conveyed in a rich artistic form, it cannot be expressed equally well in, for instance, rigid academic terms. Paraphrasing in a completely different style will fail.
If we accept all of the above, is there anything left for the philosopher to do? Should Nussbaum herself not have written the 400-pageLove’s Knowledge because the novels she writes about speak for themselves?
Firstly, it was necessary to explain—philosophically—why not taking novels seriously would be a great loss to philosophy. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, once again inspired by Aristotle, Nussbaum does advocate a philosophical style that, while different from the expressiveness typical of literary texts, can also be “their natural ally” (p. 18). While the critical skills proper to philosophy can be substantially helpful, it is imperative that philosophy assumes a much more modest role.
Philosophical commentary should only gesture toward concrete particulars, nudging us toward responsible perceptions, providing a mere “sketch” or “outline” of the “salient features of our moral life” (p. 161). The awareness that such an outline does not contain life itself, but can only “quote life” as it were from the literary text, places philosophical commentary in a “posture of sufficient humility” (ibid.).
It will be interesting to see if more philosophers embrace this newly defined role. Given the reaffirmed importance of emotions in our ethical lives, and the significance of artistic narratives, the philosophical style, as reimagined by Nussbaum, is presented with new requirements. It must clarify in a way that is enriching, explain without being oppressive, and illuminate the fineness of human experience while still protecting its fascinating multiplicity. The readers of Love’s Knowledge will hopefully agree that in terms of style and philosophical commentary, Nussbaum herself has managed to live up to the standard that she so graciously elevated.
Ana Sandoiu is a writer, researcher & philosophy lover living in Brighton, UK. She also writes on her personal blog, On a Saturday Morning.
Martha Nussbaum’s far-reaching ideas illuminate the often ignored elements of human life—aging, inequality, and emotion.
By Rachel Aviv
Martha Nussbaum was preparing to give a lecture at Trinity College, Dublin, in April, 1992, when she learned that her mother was dying in a hospital in Philadelphia. She couldn’t get a flight until the next day. That evening, Nussbaum, one of the foremost philosophers in America, gave her scheduled lecture, on the nature of emotions. “I thought, It’s inhuman—I shouldn’t be able to do this,” she said later. Then she thought, Well, of course I should do this. I mean, here I am. Why should I not do it? The audience is there, and they want to have the lecture.
When she returned to her room, she opened her laptop and began writing her next lecture, which she would deliver in two weeks, at the law school of the University of Chicago. On the plane the next morning, her hands trembling, she continued to type. She wondered if there was something cruel about her capacity to be so productive. The lecture was about the nature of mercy. As she often does, she argued that certain moral truths are best expressed in the form of a story. We become merciful, she wrote, when we behave as the “concerned reader of a novel,” understanding each person’s life as a “complex narrative of human effort in a world full of obstacles.”
In the lecture, she described how the Roman philosopher Seneca, at the end of each day, reflected on his misdeeds before saying to himself, “This time I pardon you.” The sentence brought Nussbaum to tears. She worried that her ability to work was an act of subconscious aggression, a sign that she didn’t love her mother enough. I shouldn’t be away lecturing, she thought. I shouldn’t have been a philosopher. Nussbaum sensed that her mother saw her work as cold and detached, a posture of invulnerability. “We aren’t very loving creatures, apparently, when we philosophize,” Nussbaum has written.
When her plane landed in Philadelphia, Nussbaum learned that her mother had just died. Her younger sister, Gail Craven Busch, a choir director at a church, had told their mother that Nussbaum was on the way. “She just couldn’t hold on any longer,” Busch said. When Nussbaum arrived at the hospital, she found her mother still in the bed, wearing lipstick. A breathing tube, now detached from an oxygen machine, was laced through her nostrils. The nurses brought Nussbaum cups of water as she wept. Then she gathered her mother’s belongings, including a book called “A Glass of Blessings,” which Nussbaum couldn’t help noticing looked too precious, the kind of thing that she would never want to read. She left the hospital, went to the track at the University of Pennsylvania, and ran four miles.
She admired the Stoic philosophers, who believed that ungoverned emotions destroyed one’s moral character, and she felt that, in the face of a loved one’s death, their instruction would be “Everyone is mortal, and you will get over this pretty soon.” But she disagreed with the way they trained themselves not to depend on anything beyond their control. For the next several days, she felt as if nails were being pounded into her stomach and her limbs were being torn off. “Do we imagine the thought causing a fluttering in my hands, or a trembling in my stomach?” she wrote, in “Upheavals of Thought,” a book on the structure of emotions. “And if we do, do we really want to say that this fluttering or trembling is my grief about my mother’s death?”
Nussbaum gave her lecture on mercy shortly after her mother’s funeral. She felt that her mother would have preferred that she forgo work for a few weeks, but when Nussbaum isn’t working she feels guilty and lazy, so she revised the lecture until she thought that it was one of the best she had ever written. She imagined her talk as a kind of reparation: the lecture was about the need to recognize how hard it is, even with the best intentions, to live a virtuous life. Like much of her work, the lecture represented what she calls a therapeutic philosophy, a “science of life,” which addresses persistent human needs. She told me, “I like the idea that the very thing that my mother found cold and unloving could actually be a form of love. It’s a form of human love to accept our complicated, messy humanity and not run away from it.”
A few years later, Nussbaum returned to her relationship with her mother in a dramatic dialogue that she wrote for Oxford University’s Philosophical Dialogues Competition, which she won. In the dialogue, a mother accuses her daughter, a renowned moral philosopher, of being ruthless. “You just don’t know what emotions are,” the mother says. Her father tells her, “Aren’t you a philosopher because you want, really, to live inside your own mind most of all? And not to need, not to love, anyone?” Her mother asks, “Isn’t it just because you don’t want to admit that thinking doesn’t control everything?”
The philosopher begs for forgiveness. “Why do you hate my thinking so much, Mommy?” she asks. “What can I say or write that will make you stop looking at me that way?”
Nussbaum is drawn to the idea that creative urgency—and the commitment to be good—derives from the awareness that we harbor aggression toward the people we love. A sixty-nine-year-old professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago (with appointments in classics, political science, Southern Asian studies, and the divinity school), Nussbaum has published twenty-four books and five hundred and nine papers and received fifty-seven honorary degrees. In 2014, she became the second woman to give the John Locke Lectures, at Oxford, the most eminent lecture series in philosophy. Last year, she received the Inamori Ethics Prize, an award for ethical leaders who improve the condition of mankind. A few weeks ago, she won five hundred thousand dollars as the recipient of the Kyoto Prize, the most prestigious award offered in fields not eligible for a Nobel, joining a small group of philosophers that includes Karl Popper and Jürgen Habermas. Honors and prizes remind her of potato chips; she enjoys them but is wary of becoming sated, like one of Aristotle’s “dumb grazing animals.” Her conception of a good life requires striving for a difficult goal, and, if she notices herself feeling too satisfied, she begins to feel discontent.
Nussbaum is monumentally confident, intellectually and physically. She is beautiful, in a taut, flinty way, and carries herself like a queen. Her voice is high-pitched and dramatic, and she often seems delighted by the performance of being herself. Her work, which draws on her training in classics but also on anthropology, psychoanalysis, sociology, and a number of other fields, searches for the conditions for eudaimonia, a Greek word that describes a complete and flourishing life. At a time of insecurity for the humanities, Nussbaum’s work champions—and embodies—the reach of the humanistic endeavor. Nancy Sherman, a moral philosopher at Georgetown, told me, “Martha changed the face of philosophy by using literary skills to describe the very minutiae of a lived experience.”
Unlike many philosophers, Nussbaum is an elegant and lyrical writer, and she movingly describes the pain of recognizing one’s vulnerability, a precondition, she believes, for an ethical life. “To be a good human being,” she has said, “is to have a kind of openness to the world, the ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control that can lead you to be shattered.” She searches for a “non-denying style of writing,” a way to describe emotional experiences without wringing the feeling from them. She disapproves of the conventional style of philosophical prose, which she describes as “scientific, abstract, hygienically pallid,” and disengaged with the problems of its time. Like Narcissus, she says, philosophy falls in love with its own image and drowns.
In several books and papers, Nussbaum quotes a sentence by the sociologist Erving Goffman, who wrote, “In an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports.” This sentence more or less characterizes Nussbaum’s father, whom she describes as an inspiration and a role model, and also as a racist. He was prejudiced in a “very gut-level way,” Nussbaum told me. “It was about shrinking and disgust.”
For the past thirty years, Nussbaum has been drawn to those who blush, writing about the kinds of populations that her father might have deemed subhuman. She argues that unblushing males, or “normals,” repudiate their own animal nature by projecting their disgust onto vulnerable groups and creating a “buffer zone.” Nussbaum thinks that disgust is an unreasonable emotion, which should be distrusted as a basis for law; it is at the root, she argues, of opposition to gay and transgender rights. Her work includes lovely descriptions of the physical realities of being a person, of having a body “soft and porous, receptive of fluid and sticky, womanlike in its oozy sliminess.” She believes that dread of these phenomena creates a threat to civic life. “What I am calling for,” she writes, is “a society of citizens who admit that they are needy and vulnerable.”
Nussbaum once wrote, citing Nietzsche, that “when a philosopher harps very insistently on a theme, that shows us that there is a danger that something else is about to ‘play the master’ ”: something personal is driving the preoccupation. In Nussbaum’s case, I wondered if she approaches her theme of vulnerability with such success because she peers at it from afar, as if it were unfamiliar and exotic. She celebrates the ability to be fragile and exposed, but in her own life she seems to control every interaction. She divides her day into a series of productive, life-affirming activities, beginning with a ninety-minute run or workout, during which, for years, she “played” operas in her head, usually works by Mozart. She memorized the operas and ran to each one for three to four months, shifting the tempo to match her speed and her mood. For two decades, she has kept a chart that documents her daily exercises. After her workout, she stands beside her piano and sings for an hour; she told me that her voice has never been better. (When a conductor recently invited her to join a repertory group for older singers, she told him that the concept was “stigmatizing.”) Her self-discipline inspired a story called “My Ex, the Moral Philosopher,” by the late Richard Stern, a professor at the University of Chicago. The story describes the contradiction of the philosopher’s “paean to spontaneity and her own nature, the least spontaneous, most doggedly, nervously, even fanatically unspontaneous I know.”
Nussbaum is currently writing a book on aging, and when I first proposed the idea of a Profile I told her that I’d like to make her book the center of the piece. She responded skeptically, writing in an e-mail that she’d had a long, varied career, adding, “I’d really like to feel that you had considered various aspects of it and that we had a plan that had a focus.” She typically responded within an hour of my sending an e-mail. “Do you feel that you have such a plan?” she asked me. “I’d like to hear the pros and cons in your view of different emphases.” She wasn’t sure how I could encompass her œuvre, since it covered so many subjects: animal rights, emotions in criminal law, Indian politics, disability, religious intolerance, political liberalism, the role of humanities in the academy, sexual harassment, transnational transfers of wealth. “The challenge for you would be to give readers a road map through the work that would be illuminating rather than confusing,” she wrote, adding, “It will all fall to bits without a plan.” She described three interviews that she’d done, and the ways in which they were flawed. Among other things, they hadn’t captured her devotion to teaching and to her students. One of the interviews, she said, had made her “look like a person who has contempt for the contributions of others, which is one of the biggest insults that one could direct my way.”
For our first meeting, she suggested that I watch her sing: “It’s the actual singing that would give you insight into my personality and my emotional life, though of course I am very imperfect in my ability to express what I want to express.” She wrote that music allowed her to access a part of her personality that is “less defended, more receptive.” Last summer, we drove to the house of her singing teacher, Tambra Black, who lives in a gentrifying neighborhood with a view of the churches of the University of Chicago. It was ninety degrees and sunny, and although we were ten minutes early, Nussbaum pounded on the door until Black, her hair wet from the shower, let us inside.
Nussbaum wore nylon athletic shorts and a T-shirt, and carried her sheet music in a hippie-style embroidered sack. Her fingernails and toenails were polished turquoise, and her legs and arms were exquisitely toned and tan. She stood beside Black’s piano with her feet in a ski-plow pose and did scales by letting her mouth go completely loose and blowing through closed lips.
The first aria she practiced was “Or sai chi l’onore,” from “Don Giovanni,” one of the few Mozart operas that she has never run to, because she finds the rape scene reprehensible. As she ascended in pitch, she tilted her chin upward, until Black told her to stop. She excelled at clarion high notes, but Black thought that a passage about the murder of the heroine’s father should be more tender. “Can you make it a little more pleasant?” Black asked.
The next aria was from the final act of Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” which Nussbaum found more challenging. She had to embody the hopelessness of a woman who, knowing that she can never be with the man she loves, yearns for death.
“Put a little longing and sadness in there,” Black said. “Don’t give too much too early.”
Nussbaum softened her tone for a few passages, but her voice quickly gathered force.
“You have too much power,” Black told her. “Save a little for the end.”
“I’ll have to work on that,” Nussbaum said, her eyes fixed on the sheet music in front of her. “It’s difficult to get all the emotions in there.”
Hours later, as we drove home from a concert by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Nussbaum said that she was struggling to capture the resignation required for the Verdi piece. She couldn’t identify with the role. “I feel that this character is basically saying, ‘Life is treating me badly, so I’m going to give up,’ ” she told me. “And I find that totally unintelligible.”
When Nussbaum was three or four years old, she told her mother, “Well, I think I know just about everything.” Her mother, Betty Craven, whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower, responded sternly, “No, Martha. You are just one person among many.” Nussbaum was so frustrated by this response that she banged her head on the floor.
Her father, George Craven, a successful tax lawyer who worked all the time, applauded her youthful arrogance. He thought that it was excellent to be superior to others. He liked to joke that he had been wrong only once in his life and that was the time that he thought he was wrong. The Craven family lived in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in an atmosphere that Nussbaum describes as “chilly clear opulence.” Betty was bored and unfulfilled, and she began drinking for much of the day, hiding bourbon in the kitchen. Nussbaum’s younger sister, Gail, said that once, after her mother passed out on the floor, she called an ambulance, but her father sent it away. Nussbaum’s half-brother, Robert (the child of George Craven’s first marriage), said that their father didn’t understand when people weren’t rational. “It was an emotionally barren environment,” he told me. “You were supposed to just soldier on.”
Nussbaum spent her free time alone in the attic, reading books, including many by Dickens. Through literature, she said, she found an “escape from an amoral life into a universe where morality matters.” At night, she went to her father’s study in her long bathrobe, and they read together. Her father loved the poem “Invictus,” by William Ernest Henley, and he often recited it to her: “I have not winced nor cried aloud. / Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed. . . . I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.”
Her father’s ethos may have fostered Nussbaum’s interest in Stoicism. Her relationship with him was so captivating that it felt romantic. “He really set me on a path of being happy and delighted with life,” she said. “He symbolized beauty and wonder.” Gail Busch found her father’s temperament less congenial. “I believe he was probably a sociopath,” she told me. “He was certainly very narcissistic. He was extremely domineering and very controlling. Our mother was petrified for most of their marriage.” Busch said that when she was a young child her father insisted that she be in bed before he got home from work.
Nussbaum once wrote of Iris Murdoch that she “won the Oedipal struggle too easily.” The same could be said of Nussbaum herself. Busch told me, “There were very few people that my father touched that he didn’t hurt. But one of them was Martha, because they were just two peas in a pod. I know that he saw her as a reflection of him, and that was probably just perfect for him.”
Nussbaum excelled at her private girls’ school, while Busch floundered and became rebellious. In an interview with a Dutch television station, Nussbaum said that she worked so hard because she thought, This is what Daddy’s doing—we take charge of our lives. Of her mother and sister, she said, “I just was furious at them, because I thought that they could take charge of their lives by will, and they weren’t doing it.”
Nussbaum attended Wellesley College, but she dropped out in her sophomore year, because she wanted to be an actress. Playing other people gave her access to emotions that she hadn’t been able to express on her own, but, after half a year with a repertory company that performed Greek tragedies, she left that, too. “I hadn’t lived enough,” she said. She began studying classics at New York University, still focussing on Greek tragedies. She came to believe that reading about suffering functions as a kind of “transitional object,” the term used by the English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, one of her favorite thinkers, to describe toys that allow infants to move away from their mothers and to explore the world on their own. “When we have emotions of fear and pity toward the hero of a tragedy,” she has written, “we explore aspects of our own vulnerability in a safe and pleasing setting.”
Nussbaum felt increasingly uncomfortable with what she called the “smug bastion of hypocrisy and unearned privilege” in which she’d been raised. She had spent her childhood “coasting along with assured invulnerability,” she said. In a class on Greek composition, she fell in love with Alan Nussbaum, another N.Y.U. student, who was Jewish, a religion she was attracted to for the same reason that she was drawn to theatre: “more emotional expressiveness,” she said. She associated the religion with the social consciousness of I. F. Stone and TheNation. Her father, who thought that Jews were vulgar, disapproved of the marriage and refused to attend their wedding party. Robert Craven told me, “Martha was the apple of our father’s eye, until she embraced Judaism and fell from grace.”
Four years into the marriage, Nussbaum read “The Golden Bowl,” by Henry James. She kept thinking about Maggie Verver’s “wish to remain, intensely, the same passionate little daughter she had always been.” She was so captivated by the novel that she later wrote three essays about the ways in which James articulates a kind of moral philosophy, revealing the childishness of aspiring to moral perfection, a life of “never doing a wrong, never breaking a rule, never hurting.” Nussbaum told me, “What drew me to Maggie is the sense that she is a peculiarly American kind of person who really, really wants to be good. And of course that’s impossible. She has a particularly demanding father, and, in order to be fully herself with her husband, she has to leave her father and hurt him, and she just had no way to deal with that. She was not prepared.”
Nussbaum entered the graduate program in classics at Harvard, in 1969, and realized that for years she had been smiling all the time, for no particular reason. When her thesis adviser, G. E. L. Owen, invited her to his office, served sherry, spoke about life’s sadness, recited Auden, and reached over to touch her breasts, she says, she gently pushed him away, careful not to embarrass him. “Just as I never accused my mother of being drunk, even though she was always drunk,” she wrote, “so I managed to keep my control with Owen, and I never said a hostile word.” She didn’t experience the imbalance of power that makes sexual harassment so destructive, she said, because she felt “much healthier and more powerful than he was.”
She soon drifted toward ancient philosophy, where she could follow Aristotle, who asked the basic question “How should a human live?” She realized that philosophy attracted a “logic-chopping type of person,” nearly always male. She came to believe that she understood Nietzsche’s thinking when he wrote that no great philosopher had ever been married. “I think what he was saying is that most philosophers have been in flight from human existence,” she said. “They just haven’t wanted to be entangled.” She rejected the idea, dominant in contemporary philosophy, that emotions were “unthinking energies that simply push the person around.” Instead, she resurrected a version of the Stoic theory that makes no division between thought and feeling. She gave emotions a central role in moral philosophy, arguing that they are cognitive in nature: they embody judgments about the world.
One of her mentors was John Rawls, the most influential political philosopher of the last century. He stuttered and was extremely shy. She said that one day, when they were eating hamburgers for lunch (this was before she stopped eating meat), he instructed her that if she had the capacity to be a public intellectual then it was her duty to become one.
Utilitarian and Kantian theories were dominant at the time, and Nussbaum felt that the field had become too insular and professionalized. She was frustrated that her colleagues were more interested in conceptual analyses than in attending to the details of people’s lives. While writing an austere dissertation on a neglected treatise by Aristotle, she began a second book, about the urge to deny one’s human needs. In “The Fragility of Goodness,” one of the best-selling contemporary philosophy books, she rejected Plato’s argument that a good life is one of total self-sufficiency. She argued that tragedy occurs because people are living well: they have formed passionate commitments that leave them exposed. She began the book by acknowledging:
I must constantly choose among competing and apparently incommensurable goods and that circumstances may force me to a position in which I cannot help being false to something or doing something wrong; that an event that simply happens to me may, without my consent, alter my life; that it is equally problematic to entrust one’s good to friends, lovers, or country and to try to have a good life without them—all these I take to be not just the material of tragedy, but everyday facts of practical wisdom.
Nussbaum describes motherhood as her first profound experience of moral conflict. Her pregnancy, in 1972, was a mistake; her I.U.D. fell out. She had just become the first woman elected to Harvard’s Society of Fellows, and she imagined that the other scholars must be thinking, We let in a woman, and what does she do? She goes off and has a baby. Nussbaum carried on for nine months as if she weren’t pregnant. She ran several miles a day; she remained so thin that her adviser told her she must be carrying a “wind egg”; she had such a rapid delivery—with no anesthesia—that doctors interviewed her about how she had prepared for birth. She told them that “Lamaze was for wimps and running was the key.” She brought Aristotle’s Politics to the hospital. Her husband took a picture of her reading. She was at a Society of Fellows dinner the next week. “I wanted everyone to understand that I was still working,” she said.
Alan Nussbaum taught linguistics at Yale, and during the week Martha took care of their daughter, Rachel, alone. “Among the good and decent men, some are unprepared for the surprises of life, and their good intentions run aground when confronted with issues like child care,” she later wrote. They divorced when Rachel was a teen-ager. When Nussbaum joined a society for female philosophers, she proposed that women had a unique contribution to make, because “we had an experience of moral conflicts—we are torn between children on the one hand, and work on the other—that the male philosophers didn’t have, or wouldn’t face up to.” She rejected the idea, suggested by Kant, that people who are morally good are immune to the kind of bad luck that would force them into ethically compromised positions. She told me, “A lot of the great philosophers have said there are no real moral dilemmas. Well, we were saying, ‘No woman would make that stupid mistake!’ ”
Nussbaum left Harvard in 1983, after she was denied tenure, a decision she attributes, in part, to a “venomous dislike of me as a very outspoken woman” and the machinations of a colleague who could “show a good actor how the role of Iago ought to be played.” Glen Bowersock, who was the head of the classics department when Nussbaum was a student, said, “I think she scared people. They couldn’t wrap their minds around this formidably good, extraordinarily articulate woman who was very tall and attractive, openly feminine and stylish, and walked very erect and wore miniskirts—all in one package. They were just frightened.”
This was the only time that Nussbaum had anything resembling a crisis in her career. I was eager to hear about her moment of doubt, since she always seemed so steely. Projecting a little, I asked if she ever felt guilty when she was successful, as if she didn’t deserve it. “No—none of that,” she said briskly. “I think women and philosophers are under-rewarded for what they do.” After she was denied tenure, she thought about going to law school. “The doubt was very brief,” she added. “I thought about law school for about a day, or something like that.”
Instead, she began considering a more public role for philosophy. One of her mentors, the English philosopher Bernard Williams, accused moral philosophers of “refusing to write about anything of importance.” Nussbaum began examining quality of life in the developing world. She was steered toward the issue by Amartya Sen, the Indian economist, who later won the Nobel Prize. In 1986, they became romantically involved and worked together at the World Institute of Development Economics Research, in Helsinki. At the institute, she told me, she came to the realization that “I knew nothing about the rest of the world.” She taught herself about Indian politics and developed her own version of Sen’s capabilities approach, a theoretical framework for measuring and comparing the well-being of nations. Her earlier work had celebrated vulnerability, but now she identified the sorts of vulnerabilities (poverty, hunger, sexual violence) that no human should have to endure. In an Aristotelian spirit, Nussbaum devised a list of ten essential capabilities that all societies should nourish, including the freedom to play, to engage in critical reflection, and to love. The capabilities theory is now a staple of human-rights advocacy, and Sen told me that Nussbaum has become more of a “purist” than he is. When it comes to judging the quality of human life, he said, “I am often defeated by that in a way that Martha is not.”
Nussbaum went on to extend the work of John Rawls, who developed the most influential contemporary version of the social-contract theory: the idea that rational citizens agree to govern themselves, because they recognize that everyone’s needs are met more effectively through coöperation. Nussbaum argued that Rawls gave an unsatisfactory account of justice for people dependent on others—the disabled, the elderly, and women subservient in their homes. For a society to remain stable and committed to democratic principles, she argued, it needs more than detached moral principles: it has to cultivate certain emotions and teach people to enter empathetically into others’ lives. She believes that the humanities are not just important to a healthy democratic society but decisive, shaping its fate. She proposed an enhanced version of John Stuart Mill’s “aesthetic education”—emotional refinement for all citizens through poetry and music and art. “Respect on its own is cold and inert, insufficient to overcome the bad tendencies that lead human beings to tyrannize over one another,” she wrote. “Public culture cannot be tepid and passionless.”
By the late nineties, India had become so integral to Nussbaum’s thinking that she later warned a reporter from The Chronicle of Higher Education that her work there was at the “core of my heart and my sense of the meaning of life, so if you downplay that, you don’t get me.” She travelled to developing countries during school vacations—she never misses a class—and met with impoverished women. She said she felt as if she were “a lawyer who has been retained by poor people in developing nations.”
In the sixties, Nussbaum had been too busy for feminist consciousness-raising—she said that she cultivated an image of “Doris Day respectability”—and she was suspicious of left-wing groupthink. Once she began studying the lives of women in non-Western countries, she identified as a feminist but of the unfashionable kind: a traditional liberal who believed in the power of reason at a time when postmodern scholars viewed it as an instrument or a disguise for oppression. She argued that the well-being of women around the world could be improved through universal norms—an international system of distributive justice. She was impatient with feminist theory that was so relativistic that it assumed that, in the name of respecting other cultures, women should stand by while other women were beaten or genitally mutilated. In “Sex and Social Justice,” published in 1999, she wrote that the approach resembles the “sort of moral collapse depicted by Dante, when he describes the crowd of souls who mill around in the vestibule of hell, dragging their banner now one way now another, never willing to set it down and take a definite stand on any moral or political question. Such people, he implies, are the most despicable of all. They can’t even get into hell because they have not been willing to stand for anything in life.”
In 1999, in a now canonical essay for The New Republic, she wrote that academic feminism spoke only to the élite. It had become untethered from the practical struggle to achieve equality for women. She scolded Judith Butler and postmodern feminists for “turning away from the material side of life, towards a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest connections with the real situations of real women.” These radical thinkers, she felt, were focussing more on problems of representation than on the immediate needs of women in other classes and cultures. The stance, she wrote, “looks very much like quietism,” a word she often uses when she disapproves of projects and ideas.
In letters responding to the essay, the feminist critic Gayatri Spivak denounced Nussbaum’s “civilizing mission.” Joan Scott, a historian of gender, wrote that Nussbaum had “constructed a self-serving morality tale.”
When Nussbaum is at her computer writing, she feels as if she had entered a “holding environment”—the phrase used by Donald Winnicott to describe conditions that allow a baby to feel secure and loved. Like the baby, she is “playing with an object,” she said. “It’s my manuscript, but I feel that something of both of my parents is with me. The sense of concern and being held is what I associate with my mother, and the sense of surging and delight is what I associate with my father.”
She said that she looks to replicate the experience of “surging” in romantic partners as well. She has always been drawn to intellectually distinguished men. “I suppose it’s because of the imprint of my father,” she told me one afternoon, while eating a small bowl of yogurt, blueberries, raisins, and pine nuts, a variation on the lunch she has most days. Her spacious tenth-floor apartment, which has twelve windows overlooking Lake Michigan and an elevator that delivers visitors directly into her foyer, is decorated with dozens of porcelain, metal, and glass elephants—her favorite animal, because of its emotional intelligence. “I used to observe that my close female friends would choose—very reasonably—men whose aspirations were rather modest,” she told me. “That works out nicely, because these men are really supportive of them. I’ve thought, Wouldn’t it be nice to have romantic and sexual tastes like that? But I certainly don’t.”
After moving to the University of Chicago, in 1995 (following seven years at Brown), Nussbaum was in a long relationship with Cass Sunstein, the former administrator for President Obama’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and one of the few scholars as prolific as she is. Nussbaum said that she discovered her paradigm for romance as an adolescent, when she read about the relationship between two men in Plato’s Phaedrus and the way in which they combined “intense mutual erotic passion with a shared pursuit of truth and justice.” She and Sunstein (who is now married to Samantha Power, the Ambassador to the United Nations) lived in separate apartments, and each one’s work informed the other’s. In an influential essay, titled “Objectification,” Nussbaum builds on a passage written by Sunstein, in which he suggests that some forms of sexual objectification can be both ineradicable and wonderful. Straying from the standard line of feminist thought, Nussbaum defends Sunstein’s idea, arguing that there are circumstances in which being treated as a sex object, a “mysterious thinglike presence,” can be humanizing, rather than morally harmful. It allows us to achieve a state that her writing often elevates: the “abnegation of self-containment and self-sufficiency.”
Nussbaum is preoccupied by the ways that philosophical thinking can seem at odds with passion and love. She recognizes that writing can be “a way of distancing oneself from human life and maybe even a way of controlling human life,” she said. In a semi-autobiographical essay in her book “Love’s Knowledge,” from 1990, she offers a portrait of a female philosopher who approaches her own heartbreak with a notepad and a pen; she sorts and classifies the experience, listing the properties of an ideal lover and comparing it to the men she has loved. “You now begin to see how this lady is,” she wrote. “She goes on thinking at all times. She won’t simply cry, she will ask what crying consists in. One tear, one argument.”
Nussbaum isn’t sure if her capacity for rational detachment is innate or learned. On three occasions, she alluded to a childhood experience in which she’d been so overwhelmed by anger at her mother, for drinking in the afternoon, that she slapped her. Betty warned her, “If you turn against me, I won’t have any reason to live.” Nussbaum prayed to be relieved of her anger, fearing that its potential was infinite. “I thought it would kill somebody,” she said.
Anger is an emotion that she now rarely experiences. She invariably remains friends with former lovers, a fact that Sunstein, Sen, and Alan Nussbaum wholeheartedly affirmed. In her new book, “Anger and Forgiveness,” which was published last month, Nussbaum argues against the idea, dear to therapists and some feminists, that “people (and women especially) owe it to their self-respect to own, nourish, and publicly proclaim their anger.” It is a “magical fantasy,” a bit of “metaphysical nonsense,” she writes, to assume that anger will restore what was damaged. She believes that embedded in the emotion is the irrational wish that “things will be made right if I inflict suffering.” She writes that even leaders of movements for revolutionary justice should avoid the emotion and move on to “saner thoughts of personal and social welfare.” (She acknowledges, “It might be objected that my proposal sounds all too much like that of the upper-middle-class (ex)-Wasp academic that I certainly am. I simply deny the charge.”)
For a long time, Nussbaum had seemed to be working on getting in touch with anger. In the nineties, when she composed the list of ten capabilities to which all humans should be entitled—a list that she’s revised in the course of many papers—she and the feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon debated whether “justified anger” should make the list. Nussbaum was wary of the violence that accompanies anger’s expression, but MacKinnon said she convinced Nussbaum that anger can be a “sign that self-respect has not been crushed, that humanity burns even where it is supposed to have been extinguished.” Nussbaum decided to view anger in a more positive light. “I thought, I’m just getting duped by my own history,” she said. In an interview a few years later, she said that being able to express anger to a friend, after years of training herself to suppress it, was “the most tremendous pleasure in life.” In a 2003 essay, she describes herself as “angry more or less all the time.”
When I asked her about the different self-conceptions, she wrote me three e-mails from a plane to Mexico (she was on her way to give lectures in Puebla) to explain that she had articulated these views before she had studied the emotion in depth. It was not full-fledged anger that she was experiencing but “transitional anger,” an emotional state that embodies the thought: Something should be done about this, in response to social injustice. In another e-mail from the air, she clarified: “My experience of political anger has always been more King-like: protest, not acquiescence, but no desire for payback.”
Last year, Nussbaum had a colonoscopy. She didn’t want to miss a workday, so she refused sedation. She was thrilled by the sight of her appendix, so pink and tiny. “It’s such a big part of you and you don’t get to meet these parts,” she told me. “I love that kind of familiarization: it’s like coming to terms with yourself.”
Her friends were repulsed when she told them that she had been awake the entire time. “They thought it was disgusting to go through the procedure without their consciousness obliterated,” she said. She wasn’t surprised that men wanted to be sedated, but she couldn’t understand why women her age would avoid the sight of their organs. “Here are the same women who were inspired by ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves,’ ” she told me. “We said, ‘Oh, let’s not shrink from looking at our vaginas. Let’s not think, Our periods are disgusting, but let’s celebrate it as part of who we are!’ Now we get to our sixties, and we are disgusted by our bodies again, and we want to be knocked out.”
Nussbaum believes that disgust “draws sharp edges around the self” and betrays a shame toward what is human. When she goes shopping with younger colleagues—among her favorite designers are Alexander McQueen, Azzedine Alaïa, and Seth Aaron Henderson, whom she befriended after he won “Project Runway”—she often emerges from the changing room in her underwear. Bodily functions do not embarrass her, either. When she goes on long runs, she has no problem urinating behind bushes. Once, when she was in Paris with her daughter, Rachel, who is now an animal-rights lawyer in Denver, she peed in the garden of the Tuileries Palace at night. (Rachel was curt when we met; Nussbaum told me that Rachel, who has co-written papers with her mother on the legal status of whales, was wary of being portrayed “as adjunct to me.”)
Nussbaum acknowledges that, as she ages, it becomes harder to rejoice in all bodily developments. Recently, she was dismayed when she looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize her nose. Sinking cartilage had created a new bump. She asked the doctor who gives her Botox in her forehead what to do. “He is a minimalist,” she told me. “He’s very artistic.” He fixed the problem by putting filler above the tip of her nose. It wasn’t that she was disgusted. “But I do feel conscious that at my age I have to be very careful of how I present myself, at risk of not being thought attractive,” she told me. “There are women like Germaine Greer who say that it’s a big relief to not worry about men and to forget how they look. I don’t feel that way! I care how men look at me. I like men.”
In a new book, tentatively titled “Aging Wisely,” which will be published next year, Nussbaum and Saul Levmore, a colleague at the law school, investigate the moral, legal, and economic dilemmas of old age—“an unknown country,” which they say has been ignored by philosophy. The book is structured as a dialogue between two aging scholars, analyzing the way that old age affects love, friendship, inequality, and the ability to cede control. They both reject the idea that getting old is a form of renunciation. Nussbaum critiques the tendency in literature to “assign a ‘comeuppance’ ” to aging women who fail to display proper levels of resignation and shame. She calls for an “informal social movement akin to the feminist Our Bodies movement: a movement against self-disgust” for the aging. She promotes Walt Whitman’s “anti-disgust” world view, his celebration of the “lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean. . . . The thin red jellies within you or within me. . . . O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul.”
At a faculty workshop last summer, professors at the law school gathered to critique drafts of two chapters from the book. Nussbaum wore a fitted purple dress and high-heeled sandals, and her blond hair looked as if it had recently been permed. She appeared to be dressed for a different event from the one that the other professors were attending. As she often does, she looked delighted but not necessarily happy.
In one of the chapters, Levmore argued that it should be legal for employers to require that employees retire at an agreed-upon age, and Nussbaum wrote a rebuttal, called “No End in Sight.” She said that it was painful to see colleagues in other countries forced to retire when philosophers such as Kant, Cato, and Gorgias didn’t produce their best work until old age.
The libertarian scholar Richard Epstein raised his hand and said that, rather than having a national policy regarding retirement, each institution should make its own decision. “So Martha, full of vim and vigor, can get offers from four other places and go on and continue to work,” he said.
“Sure, I could go and move someplace else,” she said, interrupting him. “But I don’t want to.” If she were forced to retire, she said, “that would really affect me psychologically in a very deep way. And I have no idea what I’d do. I might go off and do some interesting thing like be a cantor. Or I might just get depressed.”
“Martha, it’s too autobiographical,” Epstein said. His concern was not that “Martha stays on. It’s that a bunch of dead wood stays on, as well, and it’s a cost to the institution.”
When another colleague suggested that no one knew the precise moment when aging scholars had peaked, Nussbaum cited Cato, who wrote that the process of aging could be resisted through vigorous physical and mental activity. Her celebration of this final, vulnerable stage of life was undercut by her confidence that she needn’t be so vulnerable. She said that her grandmother lived until she was a hundred and four years old. “Why do I have my outlook?” she said. “It’s a matter of the habits you form when you are very young—the habits of exercise, of being active. All of that stuff builds to the sense of a life that can go on.”
Not long ago, Nussbaum bought a Dolce & Gabbana skirt dotted with crystal stars and daisies. “It had a happy look,” she told me, holding the hanger to her chin. She planned to wear it to the college graduation of Nathaniel Levmore, whom she describes as her “quasi-child.” Nathaniel, the son of Saul Levmore, has always been shy. Saul told me, “Of my two children, this is the one that’s the underdog, and of course Martha loves him, and they talk for hours and hours. Martha has this total belief in the underdog. The more underdog, the more charming she finds them.”
Nussbaum has taken Nathaniel on trips to Botswana and India, and, when she hosts dinner parties, he often serves the wine. When I joined them last summer for an outdoor screening of “Star Trek,” they spent much of the hour-long drive debating whether it was anti-Semitic for Nathaniel’s college to begin its semester on Rosh Hashanah. Their persistence was both touching and annoying. Just when I thought the conversation would die, the matter settled, Nathaniel would raise a new point, and Nussbaum would argue from a new angle that the scheduling was anti-Semitic.
Recently, when I had dinner at Nussbaum’s apartment, she said she was sorry that Nathaniel wasn’t there to enjoy it. We sat at her kitchen island, facing a Chicago White Sox poster, eating what remained of an elaborate and extraordinary Indian meal that she had cooked two days before, for the dean of the law school and eight students. She served me heaping portions of every dish and herself a modest plate of yogurt, rice, and spinach.
I mentioned that Saul Levmore had said she is so devoted to the underdog that she even has sympathy for a former student who had been stalking her; the student appeared to have had a psychotic break and bombarded her with threatening e-mails. “I feel great sympathy for any weak person or creature,” she told me. She mentioned that a few days before she had been watching a Webcam of a nest of newborn bald eagles and had become distraught when she saw that the parent eagle was giving all the food to only one of her two babies. “The other one kept trying to eat something, and didn’t get it!” she said. “I thought it was possible that one of the eagles was getting weaker and weaker, and I asked my bird-watcher friend, and he said that kind of sibling rivalry is actually pretty common in those species and the one may die. I was really upset by this.”
“Isn’t that the sort of dynamic you had with your sister?” I asked.
“Yeah, it probably is,” Nussbaum said, running her finger along the rim of her plate. “It is, I guess.” She said that her sister seemed to have become happier as she aged; her musical career at the church was blossoming. “Well, this is what we’ll have to talk about in class tomorrow,” she said. “Can guilt ever be creative?” She licked the sauce on her finger. “ ‘Guilt’ might not even be quite the right word. It’s a kind of sorrow that one had profited at the expense of someone else.”
We began talking about a chapter that she intended to write for her book on aging, on the idea of looking back at one’s life and turning it into a narrative. “Did you stand for something, or didn’t you?” she said. She said that she had always admired the final words of John Stuart Mill, who reportedly said, “I have done my work.” She has quoted these words in a number of interviews and papers, offering them as the mark of a life well lived. The image of Mill on his deathbed is not dissimilar to one she has of her father, who died as he was putting papers into his briefcase. Nussbaum often describes this as a good death—he was doing his work until the end—while Nussbaum’s brother and sister see it as a sign of his isolation.
She said, “If I found that I was going to die in the next hour, I would not say that I had done my work. If you have a good life, you typically always feel that there’s something that you want to do next.” She wondered if Mill had surrendered too soon because he was prone to depression.
“It does sound a little bit final,” she went on, “and one rarely dies when one is out of useful ideas—unless maybe you were really ill for a long time.” She said that she had been in a hospital only twice, once to give birth and once when she had an operation to staple the top of her left ear to the back of her head, when she was eleven. It poked out, and her father worried that boys wouldn’t be attracted to her. “I just enjoyed having this big bandage around my head,” she said. “I was acting the part of Marley’s ghost in ‘A Christmas Carol,’ and it made quite an effect.”
She stood up to clear our plates. “You’re making me feel I chose the wrong last words,” she called out from the sink. She returned with two large cakes. “I think last words are silly,” she said, cutting herself a sliver. “Probably the best thing to do with your last words is to say goodbye to the people you love and not to talk about yourself.”
The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 46, Issue 1,
January 2006, Pages 82–95,
Published:
01 January 2006
Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection
edited by Jerrold Levinson
The Ethical Criticism of Art: A New Mapping of the Territory
Alessandro Giovannelli
The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature
edited by Noël Carroll, John Gibson
Art and Ethical Criticism
Elizabeth Burns Coleman
Pages 375-376 | Published online: 21 May 2010
Narrative and the Ethical Life
Noël Carroll
Book Editor(s):
Garry L. Hagberg
Recent Approaches to Aesthetic Experience
NOËL CARROLL
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Vol. 70, No. 2 (SPRING 2012), pp. 165-177
Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama
By Gerould, Daniel, Cawelti, John G., Brooks, Peter, Richard Abel, Elsaesser, Thomas, Charles Affron, Robert C. Allen, Ien Ang, John Belton, Jean-Loup Bourget, Charlotte Brunsdon, Noel Carroll, Alan Casty, Pam Cook, Naomi Greene, Chuck Kleinhans, Ana M. Lopez, Ruth McCormick, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Christopher Orr, Ellen Seiter, Christian Viviani, Linda Williams
Art and Ethical Criticism
edited by Garry L. Hagberg
Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition, An Anthology
edited by Peter Lamarque, Stein Haugom Olsen
Resuscitating Ethical Criticism: Martha Nussbaum and the Moral Significance of the Novel
Because the poet traffics in mimesis, ungoverned by reason, appealing to the irrational part of the soul, this makes it right for us to proceed to lay hold of him and set him down as the counterpart of the painter, for he resembles him in that his creations are inferior in respect of reality, and the fact that his appeal is to the inferior part of the soul and not to the best part is another point of resemblance. And so we may at last say that we should be justified in not admitting him into a well-ordered state, because he stimulates and fosters this element in the soul, and by strengthening it tends to destroy the rational part, just as when in a state one puts bad men in power and turns the city over to them and ruins the better sort. Precisely in the same manner we shall say that the mimetic poet sets up in each individual soul a vicious currying favor with the senseless element that cannot distinguish the greater from the less, but calls the same thing now one, now the other. – Plato
I spoke of the novel as an especially useful agent of the moral imagination, as the literary form which most directly reveals to us the complexity, the difficulty, and the interest of life in society, and best instructs our human variety and contradiction. – Lionel Trilling
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. – Oscar Wilde
You know you’ve arrived when your likeness appears on The Simpsons or on MTV’s Celebrity Death Match, and while I don’t expect philosophers to show up on either of these shows any time soon (despite the notable publication of The Simpsons and Philosophy), for those interested in the intersection of aesthetics and ethics we have recently seen the next best thing: a survey article by Noel Carroll on art and ethical criticism in the journal Ethics. Of course, any arrival marks the end of an absence, and as Carroll points out in the opening paragraphs of his essay, the recent flood of work on the ethical criticism of art puts an end to a surprising dearth of work on the part of Anglo-American philosophers in this area. Surprising, not only because connections between ethics and aesthetics were central to much philosophy from Plato through the end of the eighteenth-century, but also because outside of Anglo-American academic philosophy, the ethical “interrogation” of art (and artists) has been steadily mounting for much of the twentieth-century. Precisely because it is the work that has seen most development in the last ten to fifteen years, and in order to help make this overview manageable, discussion here will be limited to what I see as the two most robust areas of renewed interest in Anglo-American philosophy of an “analytic” bent: research pertaining to the role of art and aesthetics in the development of moral imagination and understanding; and work on the relationship between moral and aesthetic values.
A great deal of this recent work in aesthetics has emphasized the connection between art and moral understanding, a connection long thought important, but as noted, largely neglected during the better part of the last two centuries. This neglect can be attributed to, among other things, zealous attempts to define and defend the intrinsic value of art, attempts which shun any whiff of an instrumentalism that sites the value of art in its didactic or ethical effects. But as contemporary critics of this approach often stress, the resulting aestheticism, the purpose of which was to save art from moralizing, is itself too often a form of reductive and blinkered formalism. The task some of those working in contemporary aesthetics have set themselves is to understand and characterize the relationship between art and ethics in a way that avoids the weaknesses of both instrumentalism and aestheticism.
In this endeavor aesthetics has been met halfway by ethics. Until fairly recently, the dominant strains in British and American philosophical ethics have been Utilitarian and Kantian. The central debates were over whether ethics should be characterized in deontological or consequentialist terms, with a shared focus on impartial principles designed to regulate self-interest for mutual advantage, and disagreements centered around the structure of moral intentions and obligations and the moral relevance of the consequences of actions.
But more recently there has been a renewed interest in what is commonly referred to as “virtue ethics”. In the tradition of Aristotle, virtue ethics focuses more on the long-term development of moral agency-including character, moral emotions, and the perception of salient details of particular moral contexts-than on finely tuned general principles intended to entail impartial outcomes in particular cases. The difference in approaches is sometimes cast as between an ethics of obligation vs. an ethics of character. This shift dovetails nicely with the recent efforts in aesthetics, since one element central to Aristotelian ethics is precisely what engagement with art has long been claimed to provide: a means to imaginative perception, feeling, and understanding Peter Lamarque provides one characterization of this trend, referring to the Wittgensteinian school of (literary value and) ethics (also represented by D.Z. Phillips and R.W. Beardsmore) as follows:
It is not the central task of ethics to formulate and apply general principles but rather to stress the particularity of moral situations and the idea that profound moral disagreements reside not in a difference of beliefs but in different ways of looking at the world. The argument is then brought to bear on literature with a parallel more or less explicitly drawn between a moral agent on the one hand and a competent reader on the other. The idea is that the moral agent and the reader both in effect confront complex moral situations with both called upon to adopt an imaginative perspective on those situations which should yield in the one case a moral judgement or appropriate action and in the other a moral insight or revised way of seeing. A competent reader might hope to learn from the literary work not by formulating a derived moral principle but by acquiring a new vision or perspective on the world.The list of recent and contemporary philosophers who stress the close connection between aesthetic and moral perception and understanding is long one, including among many others Wayne Booth, Noël Carroll, Gregory Currie, Richard Eldridge, Susan Feagin, Peter Lamarque, Peter McCormick, Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, Frank Palmer, John Passmore, and Hilary Putnam. Most of the discussion by these authors focuses on narrative art, usually narrative fiction in the form of poetry, literature, drama and film. Also common to these accounts is their rejection of a central role for propositional knowledge vis-à-vis the moral relevance of art. Instead, it is claimed variously that art “shows” rather than “tells” us morally relevant features of the world, illuminating the importance of feeling, reflection and the perception of particulars in the moral evaluation of character and situation (esp. Murdoch, Nussbaum, Palmer, and Passmore), is especially well-suited to modifying our moral concepts (esp. Carroll, McCormick, and Putnam), and exercises the very imaginative capacities necessary for making sensitive moral judgments (esp. Booth, Currie, Feagin, and Lamarque). Each of these sorts of claim is intended to highlight ways in which the appreciation of art engages and refines capacities necessary for sound moral understanding and judgment, stressing that what is morally valuable about such art is inherently bound up with its aesthetic appreciation.
While most of the early work in this area tended to valorize the moral benefits of sensitive engagement with works of art, recent work has also stressed the potential dangers of imaginative commerce with art-particularly narrative art-in those cases where the work in question encourages or mandates imaginative identification with, or mental simulation of, morally deficient or pernicious points of view. Although little has been made of this as of yet, taking seriously the morally disruptive or destructive power of art (even while bearing in mind its virtues) may have significant consequences for one’s attitudes regarding censorship and arts education. That is, given the nature of the kinds of views developed and defended in current research, it becomes increasingly difficult to take seriously the ethical benefits of imaginative engagement with art without acknowledging its potential dangers as well. I expect to see increased discussion of this issue in the coming years.
Given that recent efforts have centered on close connections between imaginative engagement with works of art and moral understanding, it is perhaps unsurprising that the other main focus of research and debate has been the relationship between aesthetic and moral value, and by extension, the relationship between aesthetic and moral judgment. The debate here has centered on the question of whether the moral and aesthetic values of works of art are independent, or, alternatively, at least on occasion interdependent.
Consider the case of Marquis de Sade’s Juliette. Here, Sade offers a narrative which appears to endorse the notion that sexual torture is erotic and amusing. In this case, the “successful” understanding of the narrative (in the sense that we see things as the author would have us see them) would entail some distortion or perversion of our moral understanding, on the assumption that sexual torture is not, or at least should not be, either amusing or erotic, and that persons should not be treated merely as means to one’s own sadistic gratification. It may be said, then, that because Juliette prescribes a response to its subject matter that is ethically inappropriate, it is a morally flawed work.
The question then arises whether the fact that Juliette is morally flawed (because it endorses a morally defective perspective which prescribes a morally inappropriate response to its subject matter) in a manner that undermines its narrative intent (morally sensitive audiences should not respond in the manner prescribed by the work) means that it is thereby aesthetically flawed as well (and for that very same reason). The question is a surprisingly difficult one to answer. For, on the one hand, it seems intuitive to say when a work fails to merit a prescribed response, it has to that extent failed aesthetically. Thrillers that do not thrill, comedies that are not humorous, and tragedies that are not tragic fail in some respect, and that failure, given that it is internal to the nature and aims of the work, would appear to be an aesthetic one. Since Juliette fails in a respect internal to the aims of the work, it would also appear to be an aesthetically flawed in this regard. And the explanation for this failure is that the work is morally flawed. So the work is both aesthetically and morally flawed, and for the same reason.
On the other hand, however, a thriller that fails to thrill (say) is aesthetically flawed precisely because of its failure to thrill; why it fails to thrill would seem to be extraneous to the aesthetic issue, viz., that it fails. It may fail to thrill because the pacing is off; it may fail to thrill because the dialog is weak; or it may fail to thrill due to some moral defect, e.g., the putatively sympathetic protagonist is in fact morally repugnant, such that the audience doesn’t have sufficient sympathy with him or his plight to care about what happens to him or take a positive interest in the outcome of the storyline. In each case we have an aesthetic failure-a thriller that fails to thrill-with different explanations for this failure: pacing, dialog, moral misstep. In the latter case, it is mistaken to say that the thriller’s aesthetic defect (its failure to thrill) is “the same as” its moral defect (its prescription to sympathize with a repugnant character). Indeed, it would be mistaken to identify the failure to thrill with any of the explanations for that failure. Likewise, it is mistaken to identify the aesthetic defect in Juliette (its failure to warrant its prescribed response) with its moral defect (its endorsement of and invitation to share a morally corrupt perspective).
It is important to note that whether one supposes that moral and aesthetic values and judgments sometimes overlap, or steadfastly maintains their conceptual independence, there is one thing that most of those currently writing on aesthetics: works of art have multiple dimensions of value, including not only aesthetic and moral values, but historical, sociological, political, anthropological and other sorts of values as well. My own view (a view certainly shared and articulated by others, but not always made apparent in the literature) is that for the sake of clarity, the value matrices that converge in works of art ought to be referred to as artistic value (or “overall artistic value”). Artists are concerned with more than the expression of aesthetic values in their work, and so too are critics and philosophers of art. It is clear, in this sense, that moral values are sometimes artistic values, whether or not they are sometimes aesthetic values (which, as indicated above, is a more vexed question). A work of art that is aesthetically excellent, historically significant, and morally profound is a better work of art, overall, than one which is only some or none of these things (assuming of course that we hold the various achievements in the varieties of value constant across cases). This helps explain, in part, why judgments about artworks are so often contested. When one pays attention to the specifics of criticism or praise, one often finds that disputants are talking past each other: one is touting the excellence of a work while the other is decrying is triviality, but it will often turn out that the former, say, is focused on the work’s historical significance and moral fortitude, while the latter is considering only a specific set of aesthetic values relevant to the genre. Again, whether or not one believes varieties of value may sometimes merge, it is important to be mindful of their differences, so that evaluations are commensurable.
In closing, it should be noted that in addition to the topics discussed above, much interesting work has recently been undertaken on emotional engagement with artworks (including moral emotions), on a variety of relationships between works of art and simulation theory, imagination, and identification (where a great deal of this work has bearing on our understanding of the moral relevance of art), and on a variety of other topics. This is of course only the beginning, but a promising one, and I would wager that interest in the intersection of ethics and aesthetics has not only arrived: it is here to stay.
Ken Wilber explores the three fundamental discernments of the human mind: the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. Ken discusses how all three are simultaneously parts of a single indivisible whole, yet each possesses its own means of disclosing and verifying knowledge.
“To understand the whole, it is necessary to understand the parts. To understand the parts, it is necessary to understand the whole. Such is the circle of understanding. We move from part to whole and back again, and in that dance of comprehension, in that amazing circle of understanding, we come alive to meaning, to value, and to vision: the very circle of understanding guides our way, weaving together the pieces, healing the fractures, mending the torn and tortured fragments, lighting the way ahead—this extraordinary movement from part to whole and back again, with healing the hallmark of each and every step, and grace the tender reward.”Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit
What is the Good, the Beautiful, and the True?
The concept of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True is one that dates all the way back to antiquity, finding its first expressions in the Bhagavad Gita and the teachings of Plato, and later conceived by Aristotle as three of the primary transcendent properties of being — properties that both represent the three primary categories of knowledge, as well as the ideal forms within those categories. Although our understanding of these three irreducible dimensions has evolved quite a bit over the millennia (we no longer understand them as perfect platonic forms existing somewhere outside of time, but rather the natural product of the three fundamental perspectives we use to perceive reality), this perennial notion has proven just as useful today as ever before.
A Brief History of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True
The story of the Big Three is the unfolding of human knowledge itself.
In premodern times, these three value spheres existed in a state of undifferentiated fusion — the Good was not different than the True, which was not different than the Beautiful. All three were collapsed into a single monological view, tightly controlled by a particular sovereign power (the Church, the King, etc.). This allowed each value sphere to dominate and control the others. Galileo was prevented from pursuing science (the True) because it came into conflict with the prevailing mythological religious morals of the time (the Good). Michelangelo had to be very careful about the types of figures he represented in his art, because Art and Morals were not yet differentiated. This is not holism or integration; this is undifferentiated fusion.
In modern times, beginning largely with the Renaissance, the spheres of Art, Morals, and Science began to be properly differentiated. Freed from the yoke of authoritarian control, each sphere was now allowed its own jurisdiction and its own methods for generating knowledge — and as a result, knowledge began to flourish at an exponential rate. New forms of artistic expression exploded into being. New methods of scientific validation allowed us to separate objective fact from subjective belief, resulting in the emergence of physics, chemistry, biology from the pre-differentiated amalgam of hermetic alchemy. These value spheres were not only accelerating their own acquisition of knowledge, they were also exerting an accelerating pressure upon the other spheres — for example, differentiating “I” from “We” allowed for the rise of individual rights and freedoms that could not be impinged or taken away by the state, the Church, etc., which in turn resulted in the proliferation of new philosophies of moral goodness based on these new principles of egalitarianism and individual dignity. By being properly differentiated, the three value spheres were transformed for the very first time into genuine turbines for the advancement of human thought.
But what happens when we take differentiation too far? Simple: it becomes full-on dissociation. Our entire body of knowledge becomes broken, flattened, and fragmented. The feedback loops created among the three differentiated spheres begin to break down, and every major tract of human knowledge begins to lose sight of the others, overextends its purview, and reasserts itself as the central authority of all that is knowable. Divorced from all notions of a common universal context, a new fundamentalism begins to take shape — not the brute fundamentalism of an un-differentiated central authority (all forest, no trees), but a somewhat more insidious fundamentalism of dissociated and disconnected nodes (all trees, no forest).
This is the postmodern condition many of ourselves now find ourselves in, where the many pathologies of dissociation run rampant — including all the usual ten-dollar terms like scientism, cultural constructivism and relativism, systemic reductionism, aesthetic infantilization, epistemic collapse, and “post-truth” politics.
From fusion to differentiation to dissociation — this is the story of human knowledge so far, the story of the human condition itself.
Integrating the Big 3
Which brings us to today, on the precipice of yet another monumental leap of understanding. A new kind of integrative thinking is now beginning to emerge from the smoking ruins of postmodernism, one that seeks to recognize, honor, and include all the numerous branches of Art, Morals, and Science while recognizing them as multiple facets of a single living gem. This integrative thinking is guided by three general principles:
“Everyone is right” (non-exclusion) “Some are more right than others” (enfoldment) “If you want to know this, do that” (enactment)
We wil explore these three principles of integral thinking in a future video clip. But for now, it is sufficient to note that, when all three principles are brought to bear, a very simple but deeply profound question arises: “How can we describe reality in such a way that all these verifiable perspectives on Truth, Goodness, and Beauty can be included?”
The Integral Vision is our very best answer to that question — our very best hope to overcome the painful fragmentation of our lives and the world around us, to bridge the ever-widening gaps between us, and to unfold the bright grain of truth in every perspective.
By opening yourself to this new integral wave of thinking, knowing, and being, you are able to more fully tap into the enormous spectrum of experience available to you. And the more fully you can experience reality, the more freedom and fullness blossoms in your life. Integral is a means by which you can see—and feel!—that somehow, everyone is right in their various interpretations of reality. Or, put another way, “no one is smart enough to be wrong all the time.” The Integral vision draws upon all the very best ideas throughout history—East and West, pre-modern, modern and beyond. It synthesizes all of our accumulated knowledge and wisdom in such a way that we can see very real patterns emerge right before our very eyes, patterns that connect all the various aspects of our lives, weaving together the many strands of our lives into a deeply meaningful whole.
The Integral Vision helps to refine and empower our own perspective of the world, while opening us up to all the infinite perspectives around us, so we may share fully and freely in the most comprehensive view of reality possible. It allows us to become an undeniable force of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the world, in our relationships, and in our own timeless heart.
In today’s confrontational and connected world, communication is the key strategic act. This book uses drama theory—a radical extension of game theory—to show how best to communicate so as to manage the emotionally charged confrontations occurring in any worthwhile relationship. Alongside a toolset that provides a systematic framework for analysing conflicts, drama theory explains why people need to listen to, and rely on, their feelings to help shake themselves out of fixed, unproductive positions and to find new ways of solving tough problems.
This guide provides a sufficient grounding in the approach to enable you to apply it immediately for your own benefit and for the benefit of those with whom you work. A host of inspirational examples are included based upon actual situations in social and personal relations, business and organisational relations, defence and political management. These will give you an entirely fresh way of seeing how power is exercised in everyday interpersonal exchanges and a greater critical awareness of such factors as subtext and plotholes in public narratives. Using this approach you will be able to overcome the dilemmas of credibility and disbelief to build compelling messages that underpin your strategic intent. Moving beyond the vague platitudes of concepts like emotional intelligence, drama theory will also help you to avoid the pathologies that bedevil the process of managing conflicts and find ways of achieving authentic resolutions.
Integral Life Practice: A 21st-Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance, Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening
From Preface of the book
Welcome to the world of Integral! The fact that you have picked up this book means that you are ready to begin not just thinking about Integral but practicing and applying it as well. This is a truly momentous occasion, to judge from the developmental research itself.
Developmental models are in general agreement that human beings, from birth, go through a series of stages or waves of growth and development. The lower, earlier, junior stages are initial, partial, and fragmented views of the world, whereas the upper stages are integrated, comprehensive, and genuinely holistic. Because of this, the earlier stages are often called “first tier,” and the higher stages are called “second tier.”
The difference between the two tiers is truly profound. As pioneering developmental researcher Clare Graves put it, with second tier an individual “goes through a momentous leap of meaning.” That leap is what Integral is all about—Integral Thinking and—yes—Integral Practice. At the Integral stages of development, the entire universe starts to make sense, to hang together, to actually appear as a uni-verse—a “one world”—a single, unified, integrated world that unites not only different philosophies and ideas about the world, but different practices for growth and development as well.
Integral Life Practice is just such an integrated practice, a practice that will help you grow and develop to your fullest capacities—to your ultimate Freedom and greatest Fullness in the world at large (in relationships, in work, in spirituality, in career, in play, in life itself). ILP is about developing your greatest FREEDOM from the world—freedom from your limitations, freedom from fragmentation, freedom from partialities—and your truest FULLNESS in the world—a fullness that includes and embraces all the seemingly partial aspects of yourself and your world into a seamless, whole, ultimately fulfilled life. Freedom and Fullness—to transcend all of life and to include all of life, unfolding and fulfilling your greatest capacities—is what Integral Life Practice is about.
As such, this “transcending and including” contains modules that address practices for the body, mind, spirit, and shadow dimensions of your own being. Because it is inclusive, this practice contains a distilled and condensed series of practices that are taken from premodern, modern, and postmodern approaches to growth and development. It is an “all-inclusive” practice in the sense that it takes the very best practices from all of them, and puts them together in a larger framework that uses—and makes sense of—all of them. Premodern practices include the world’s great wisdom traditions and the meditation practices that drive them. Modern practices include scientific studies of human growth and ways to induce it. Postmodern practices include a pluralistic and multicultural composite map of the human territory—the territory of you—and ways to include (and not marginalize) all of the important dimensions of your own being (physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual—in self, culture, and nature).
Putting all of these together creates a “cross training” for human growth and spiritual awakening, a cross training that dramatically accelerates all of its dimensions—body, mind, spirit, and shadow—producing faster, more effective, more efficient practices than were ever possible prior to this time. It is the comprehensive, truly holistic, extraordinarily inclusive nature of Integral Life Practice that makes it the simplest practice you can do to truly wake up. Other approaches have part of the puzzle and therefore give you partial practices (and partial successes), whereas Integral Life Practice gives you a composite and comprehensive practice that covers all the essential bases, increasing the effectiveness and quickness of each, compared to when they are practiced alone. It is the dramatically increased speed and effectiveness of ILP that is one of its hallmarks.
ILP is practicing from the leading edge of evolution itself, from the Integral stages and waves that are just beginning to evolutionarily unfold in humanity at large. Being grounded in these Integral stages, ILP embodies, emerges, and attracts individuals to the same stages that produced it. Put differently, Integral Life Practice is a second-tier practice—it comes from second-tier, and it draws consciousness itself to second tier. Thus, it trains both “altitude” and “aptitude”—altitude or vertical growth in consciousness, and aptitude or specific training in horizontal capacities. All of this is included in the Integral Life Practice, which the following pages will fully train you in. In short, ILP is a practice aimed at helping you discover your own “momentous leap of meaning,” a leap that will radiantly affect every aspect of your life.
So, once again, welcome to Integral. One of the advantages of this particular book is the team of writers that created it. They have a broad and fully qualified exposure to Integral Life Practice, both in its theory and in its actual practice. The writing team is an integration of the richly different backgrounds and perspectives of the co-authors. Although I did not write any of these chapters myself, I fully participated in the writing and its review, and oversaw the integration of the various perspectives and experiences of the writers, reaching across generational and typological differences. That’s what Integral Life Practice is all about—integration— and that is one of the many strengths of this book. The style turned out to be accessible, transparent, and covering difficult topics with an easy-to- understand clarity and humanity. I’m very happy with the results, and proud to put my name on it.
Integral Life Practice is, as the name implies, the practice aspect of Integral Theory. Integral Theory, in both its original form and critical alterations of it, has had a profound impact on several million readers around the world. If you want to just do Integral Theory and not also Integral Practice, that is fine. (Integral Theory is itself a mental praxis, and it summarizes practices in all of the major dimensions—it is a composite Map of the world’s most important methodologies.) But if we take that composite Map and turn it into a composite Practice, the result is Integral Life Practice, a practice that is therefore grounded in the very best of Integral Theory itself. For this reason, ILP is a truly ground- breaking and leading-edge evolutionary practice for waking up.
Thank you for picking up this book and beginning your own “mo- mentous leap of meaning.” If you are ready, then let’s get started!
Ken Wilber Denver, Colorado, Winter 2008
Integral Cross Training in
Body
Mind
Spirit
Shadow
Work
Ethics
Relationships
Creativity
Soul
Here are a few more possible reasons for engaging an ILP:
• Embracing and working with crisis, pain, or suffering
• Becoming a better person—on all levels, in all areas
• Living with integrity and excellence
• Getting over yourself
• Waking up!
• As a way to understand everything or make sense of it all
• Living according to your highest ideals
• Becoming more fully alive and creative
• Finding and/or living your deepest purpose
• Loving and caring for others more fully
• Making your highest contribution
• Communing with life, the universe, and Spirit
• Participating in the evolution of consciousness
• Because you’re in love with the Mystery (or God)
• No specific reason—it’s just what you’re drawn to do
Many people come to ILP after an experience with a specific type of practice, which, at a certain point, no longer seems full or inclusive enough. ILP makes room for you to bring everything to the path:
• You may have experience training for physical excellence or com- petitive sports.
• Maybe you’ve disciplined your mind and emotions for peak per- formance in business.
• Perhaps you’ve practiced yoga or meditation, maybe even for decades.
• You may have done deep psychological exploration, facing your shadow and exploring your deep psyche.
• You might have come to practice out of your deeply felt devotion to God or a beloved teacher or guide.
• Maybe your interest in ILP comes through your scholarship, in- sight, and thirst for understanding.
Integral Life Practice is . . .
The Ultimate in Cross-Training, working synergistically on body, mind, and spirit in self, culture, and nature.
Modular, allowing you to mix and match practices in specific areas or “modules.”
Scalable, adjusting to however much—or little—time you have, down to the 1-Minute Modules.
Customizable to your individual lifestyle—you design a program that works for you, and adapt it on an as needed basis.
Distilled, boiling down the essence of traditional practices— without the cultural or religious baggage—to provide a highly concentrated and effective form of practice for post-postmodern life.
Integral, based on AQAL technology, an “All Quadrants, All Levels” framework for mapping the many capacities inherent in human beings.