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[thesereveries]

Being reminded of love

Love has been on my mind. This theme has taken two forms. First is its dual manifestations in spiritual experience and our animal inheritance. Second is the manifestation of its lack in both egoistic hedonism and nihilism (especially as treated in Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus), which I’ll critique. After presenting these two parts, in conclusion I’ll sketch out a pathway out of the lack of love.

Part I

Spiritual experience

A recent conversation with a fellow student of philosophy got me thinking about what must be true of the mind in light of the fact that it is capable of spiritual experience. This person and I have both have undergone life-changing experiences, which we call spiritual. I never spoke about my one spiritual experience before with another person who understood, who has had his own. It was startling to find out that both of our experiences had the following in common.

First, we were overwhelmed by love. This was in both senses of being loved and loving others. It was overwhelming to an extent comparable to how we may cherish a lover before parting ways—this last call for lingering upon their beauty—or upon reuniting with a lover, with all its intensity. I couldn’t help but cherish every person I encountered like this, friend and stranger alike. I was shocked by the beauty of every person.  

Second, we found it impossible to feel fear or anxiety. This was the case even when we tried to work up in ourselves such negative emotion. For example, I would think about the dangerous objects of my past obsession, which had in always provoked terror—and I was shocked to find that imaging these did nothing. Normally terror-inducing scenarios bobbed up instead to the surface of my consciousness with as little obtrusiveness as a faint thought about the weather or a bit of corrected spelling.

Third, both of our fearlessnesses were due to our sensing our fates, standing before us. It was as if our lives had already happened, and our lives was good and true. So anything that happened now, which would otherwise be upsetting, could not perturb us; we knew that everything had its proper place in this whole. (And both of us came to terms, about two weeks later, that we had to reject this view; it was unacceptable to think that our lives were good, while those of so many were awful. This fellow philosophy student, however, was able to revive this view through his Christian faith, particularly the idea that God has a greater plan unknowable to us. I didn’t take that turn, and have continued to reject this view). 

Fourth, our spiritual experiences left us forever changed. While we eventually found ourselves back in places of fear, certain aspects of our lives, the most oppressive ones, were vanished. I remember it felt like I hadn’t even seen how my ankles were shackled, preventing me from walking, speaking, laughing. I could see how oppressed I had been once I was free. In this freedom, I was excited to try going into each place I had only dreamed of before, where I couldn’t go due to my past oppression—places like those of riding my bicycle, reading books, making friends, beholding the beauty of the sky. I remember actually going to these places was good as they seemed in my dreams. I knew I was safe at last, and I still know that.

In this recent conversation, we found how while he explained his spiritual experience in terms of Christian faith, I explained it in terms of love. He had found his way back to God, and I had found my way back to humanity, in both senses of my own humanity and humankind. (By the end of this conversation, I had a newfound appreciation of the phrase “God is love.”)

Our animal inheritance

I’d like to elaborate upon my explanation of spiritual experience in terms of love. Let’s take a quick excursion into the ethology of nonhuman primates. Chimpanzees, orangutans, and bonobos must belong to social groups (their tribes or bands) in order to survive. If ostracized, one will die. Moreover, they are keenly sensitive to each individual’s role in their groups. They track everyone’s ranking in a hierarchy of power. Not only is there an alpha male, but there are various levels of status descending from him, which can be earned through battle (As an aside: it’s pretty scary how well-defined and exact social hierarchy is for these primates; I hope that we humans need not be like this, despite of this as our animal inheritance). I can imagine there are other ways they understand each other’s roles, aside from power and deference. Perhaps members are recognized for being helpers, dreamers, fools, etc., but it’s difficult for scientists to empirically track these.

While this is speculative, I can imagine that our yearning for belongingness is based in this animal inheritance. We yearn not only for connection, but particularly, to be recognized for an essential role we have to others in our community—for others to admire us for what we do, and for them to need us. 

We have one chance to experience the perfection of this love: in being  infants. There, we are helpless. Our mother or father hold us in their arms. They cradle us and provide warmth. They protect us. We can no longer remember those days, but our bodies will remember that (a thought I’ll return to below).

Infancy is finite. Soon, we must leave mother or father. But I can imagine that for many nonhuman animals, upon this departure, there remains a constant promise of belonging to a community of love and protection. In contrast, our strange human ways have led us to a state in which we lack such community. There are many opportunities for any child in the U.S., for example, to be alienated. When this marks one’s youth, as an adult, one can fall back into it time and time again.

Here is my understanding of spiritual experience. All of a sudden, our body-memory of someone’s infallible love and protection envelopes us. Everything is aright—for the first time, since our infancy. While mother or father are absent, it is now humanity who is our protector. 

It is not only bliss of infancy that comes back. Wounds of alienation, the many wounds accumulated over the years, are healed. A shell is peeled back, and one emerges anew, as a being of love. Remember our animal inheritance. As animals, we are complete for the first time, which makes for what gets called “spiritual experience.”

Part II

Hedonism

I’ve been disturbed by another recent conversation. An acquaintance confessed to his egoistic hedonism. He believes that humans can pursue only their own pleasures, and this is the foundation of ethics. If someone claims to be altruistic, they must be self-deceived; in fact, they help others only for their own pleasure.

Camus

Also after hearing from a few people that Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus saved their lives, I read this essay. It was likewise disturbing. Camus claims that absurdity (i.e., the absence of any reason to continue on living) is inherent to the human condition. He thinks we shouldn’t commit suicide because, by struggling with this absurdity,  we can create value; and since intrinsic value is merely imaginary, this sort of self-created value does not pale to anything in comparison, but is worthwhile in its own right.

The false premise of both hedonism and Camus's existentialism

This variety of existentialism is as hedonistic and the position in ethics called egoistic hedonism. Either hedonistic philosophy is conceivable only when a thinker has lacked love. Compare this to learned helplessness. In old psychological experiments, dogs were frequently shocked in pens. For the first days, they’d howl and attempt escape, but after some time, they became motionless when shocked by the electricity, as if a depression had sucked life out of them. 

Love is a biological need, as much as food and shelter is, for humans and primates at least. In the absence of love, people become alienated at their core. It is not just that they feel alienated in certain situations. They lose access to meaningfulness, which is often social. They can’t see why they should do anything. Given our animal inheritance, desire is social. We desire something when we sense that others want it, too. Life is good when others need us. When people are alienated at their core, they disconnect themselves from everyone, and so lose the majority of desires.

In the absence of desire, there is depression. In depression, people might respond by clinging onto the few brute, raw pleasures, which don’t depend upon social meaning. Whether this pleasure is found in sex, drugs, video games, or other means that are often spoken about in terms of addiction, people immerse themselves in it, smearing it over their bodies, making it their worlds. Under this world, egoistic hedonism becomes intelligible.

This also makes egoistic existentialism intelligible. In the absence of social connection, hitting upon meaningfulness can only be a solitary pursuit. One picks up play-writing or rock-climbing, because one decide it is meaningful. Giving oneself to others, letting them need one—if some social good is valuable, it is only because one has chosen it as such.

My claim is that whatever the meaning of life is (or the foundation of ethics), it must be part of our animal inheritance of belonging to each another. This claim doesn’t ignore the is-ought gap. Moreover, to make this claim, I don’t need to rely upon positions such as that social collaboration is a precondition for reason itself (cf. Alastair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor), or that it is irrational to not care for others in one’s communities (cf. Christine Korsgaard). 

There is a more naturalistic route to my claim. If we humans preserved thriving social groups, as nonhuman primates do, it’d be impossible for us to feel that life is meaningless; and then, it’d be impossible for us to think that self-interest could be an ultimate good.

The concepts that support egoistic hedonism and individualistic existentialism are merely contingent. We humans have put each other into abnormal alienation. In that suffering, we are forced to try to make sense of what’s happening to us. People have told stories, like myths for explaining the cosmos, involving characters of selfish pleasure or self-fashioning of values. But there could be alternative, more truthful interpretations (like the one I’m giving here about egoism itself). 

Objection

One might raise an objection: Living in traditional societies have brainwashed us into intrinsic meaning in life (e.g., the moral code of a religion), and in modern society at last we are freed of such codes. Nihilism and hedonism are not ideologies, based upon immature reactions to our suffering. Rather, they are the hard truth we must stare into. 

Response

I don’t have a systematic argument in response. But here’s a preliminary reason to reject that objection. Sure, it is true that even if we didn’t arrived at this alienation which generates the compelling aura of nihilism and hedonism, and remained in our primate eden, it would still remain logically possible in that universe that nihilism and hedonism might be truthful. But that isn’t a good reason to think that the intrinsic meaningfulness of life, based in our belonging to one another, should be overturned. There are many logically possible things that ought not to be taken seriously, as standards against which our actuality should be measured. For example, as a secular person, while I can conceive of heaven and hell, this should not be taken as a serious contender of truth; I shouldn’t be skeptical about my naturalism. 

In sum, it is our alienating experiences which found the concepts necessary for egoistic hedonism and egoistic existentialism to be compelling. In a better world, we wouldn’t form these concepts, and so those false philosophies would either never be dreamt of, or if considered would be absurd. 

Part III

A call to action

In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus urges the reader to embrace absurdity and refuse the weak way out, suicide. This recommendation accepts a false premise, that life is intrinsically meaningless or absurd. Instead, I’d urge us to work for a better future where it is less likely for children to be lacking in love—so they never slip into that alienation necessary for meaninglessness to be intelligible in the first place. 

How can we make for this future? Specific recommendations are beyond me, but I have two overall ideas. First, we can think about how nonhuman primates live. We can imagine what contemporary forms of society could be “isomorphic” to their social structures. This isn’t to recommend being tribalistic; I’d bet there are ways of life that look very different from those of nonhuman primates but which nevertheless “sublimate” the desires, fears, and reliable ways of fulfillment that mark primate lives. As reading poetry to someone can be as erotic as sexual intercourse, or arguing with someone can be as aggressive as combat, there are surely certain social structures that could be feasible in our modern day that could be as fulfilling as those of primate bands, and that nevertheless accommodate a cosmopolitan, egalitarian ethos. 

Second, I reflect on my own and this fellow philosophy student’s spiritual experiences. I had this experience when I was 14 years old, following a conversation with a newfound soul mate from evening well into the morning. We shared our lives with one another and stood in each other’s worlds. Our souls became enveloped in each other’s. I had never experienced such trust before. This fellow student had their spiritual experience after praying incessantly for two months. I wouldn’t recommend either of our pathways as specific prescriptions, and I have trouble generalizing them from. 

I want to say that we need more unconditional love in our lives (either from concrete others or from imagined gods). But this can neither be manufactured nor directly pursued. An analogy: if one desires to be happy, one can’t become happy by aiming for this. Rather, one needs to desire undertaking specific activities, whose byproduct is happiness. 

I guess the first steps towards unconditional love might include forgiving all. I’m thinking about Father Zosima from The Brothers Karamazov: The worst criminal is not blameworthy. We are each responsible for their sins, even if they are imprisoned on the other side of the world. We purchase goods and treat each other carelessly, which have ripple effects leading to unpleasant living conditions for others. When they grow up in poverty or lack of love, it is only natural that they become cruel. As a pathway to trust others and to affirm our interconnectedness, hopefully this attitude of forgiveness and self-blame motivates action (it does in my life at least). To love others in our imagination is not the same as actually loving others. 

[thesereveries]

Repression

Imagine a woman suffering in late-19th century Austria. Let's call her Anna. Whenever her husband approaches her in bed, it becomes difficult to breath, and she wishes she weren’t alive. Why is this happening to me? she despairs. It doesn’t make any sense, for she loves her husband so. When Anna confides in her friends, they insist that this is to be expected, given her belonging to the more delicate sex. Or, they insist that she must be neglecting her religious duties, and she should pray more. This makes invisible the actual reasons. Unbeknownst to her, someone made her perform sexual acts when she was a small child. She can barely remember this, let alone be able to connect it up to why sexual activity comes with anxiety or depression.

Freud comes around. He convinces the intelligentsia that their culture is overly repressed. When people lose opportunities to figure out what they’re emotional about, this amounts to an obstacle dropped, stopping people from using their emotion as a pathway to discovering forbidden, significant parts of reality. Repression can allow forms of cruelty, like sexual abuse, to perpetuate. 

To address this situation, Freud offered a framework for making sense of our emotions in terms of various “complexes” (e.g, neurosis, hysteria) and methods for working out their causes (e.g., dream analysis, free-association). While I believe that the practice of unpacking emotion should be normalized, and Freud helped get us there, the exact diagnoses and methods he proposed are limited, and even dangerous (I’ll return to this below).

This wave of repression, which Freud responded to, arose from the moral codes of religious institutions. Sex is not a topic that could be talked about, back then. Now, there is another wave of repression. This time the wave arises from the practical codes of scientific institutions. Rather than being told that our depression and anxiety is caused by the natural order (e.g., Anna is told that her suffering is part of the innate relations between men and women), today we’re told that our emotional suffering is caused by serotonin imbalances, not getting enough exercise, or not eating right. We’ve swapped out one natural order for another. While such physical factors can influence our suffering, these are not the ultimate cause.

When we’re told that our emotional suffering stems from past trauma, this is better. But there are two issues with trauma talk. First, trauma is often mentioned as if it were a mechanical cause, as if we were clockworks, and our trauma is a loosened gear. A single past traumatic event, we think, can cause depression and anxiety. Belief in this causal picture is dangerous. It prevents us from realizing our freedom and from healing (an idea I’ll return to below). 

Second, emotional trauma is often conceptualized as a local, personal event, like a wound on one’s body. Trauma not like this. Rather, it is like a massive project collectively undertaken. Think of mass hysteria or mob mentality. Under our collective projects, we take for granted that there are certain goals, and that certain resources ought to be used to achieve these. Compare this to a cult whose members believe that they must pray in order to stave off the apocalypse. These people pray hundreds of times a day, and are even competitive with one another about how much they’re praying. None of them realize how their goal is pointless (there is no such thing as an impending apocalypse), or that their means are ineffective (even if an apocalypse could happen, praying won’t make a difference). Likewise, in our society at large, we’re all obsessed with certain aims, whose futility or danger to our well-being we can’t see. We waste our lives, without realizing it, as much as these cult members do.

Sometimes, these soul-sickening projects spontaneously arise and consume a society (think about torture practices in fraternities). Other times, they are designed by individuals abusing their power (think about cult leaders or the ultra-wealthy who hire lobbyists). Always, these soul-sickening projects are shaped by historical inequities and neglected infrastructure (think about racism and economic disparities). 

What are the collective projects, exactly, which explain our emotional traumas? While I’ll mention some tentative ideas later, in conclusion, in general it is difficult to identify them. The current wave of repression stands in the way. The path emotion could offer towards uncovering the wrongs of reality is blocked. Moral codes of religious institutions cut off this path during Freud’s day, and now the practical codes of scientific institutions have cut us off. 

The scientists are not at fault. Culture shapes all of us, so that we expect that, as long as we pay enough money, or swallow the right pills, we can be relieved. We demand technological fixes. It is easier on the conscience to believe that depression or anxiety is caused by the brain than to believe that we’re responsible for our suffering, that we’ve brought it upon ourselves. Repression is all the more tempting under this incentive structure. None of us want to believe that the cause of our suffering is something that no one can fix. 

Facing up to this fact, however, is not all doom and gloom. We’re partly responsible for our own and each other’s suffering. While no individual can save us, we can save each other. 

How are we to do this? I think that while it’s useful to appeal to the psychoanalytic tradition, we ought not revive this tradition. Psychoanalysis places too much weight on the power of introspection and one-to-one therapy. It is committed to that our suffering ought to be accompanied by certain symptoms and is normally caused by certain stock narratives (e.g., specific phobias and fetishes; forgotten childhood sexual trauma). 

Moreover, this tradition promotes that emotional suffering is a clinical or medical issue, as opposed to a personal, societal, or spiritual issue. When it’s made medical, we’re encouraged to think that only medical experts can help us. Psychoanalysis limits us. In contrast, when emotional suffering is made a personal or societal issue, we’re encouraged to look into the matter ourselves, or with our friends and family. We’re given the creative license to make discoveries; scientists can’t figure this out for us, because their methods are tailored for understanding biology, not the mind and soul.

We ought to shift the weight, instead, onto the power of culture, community, and family. We ought to see how what authorities tell us about the nature of our emotional suffering can engender certain symptoms. Consider the history of hysteria and multiple personality disorder. Both consist in a set of behaviors, deemed as a scientifically or medically legitimate disorder in society. When people were diagnosed with these, they suddenly found themselves beset by the symptoms named by the scientists. Once these disorders were debunked by scientific authorities, these symptoms virtually vanished from society (Hacking 1995). So we shouldn’t think that any particular “complexes” or disorders named in psychoanalytic theory are scientifically legitimate. When people seemed to have these disorders, their symptoms were “brainwashed” into them by authority figures, like therapists and psychiatrists. There is a lesson to take away from this bit of history: The forms of our suffering are malleable to the touch of authority, or the people we trust. 

In light of the complexity and open-endedness of emotional suffering, we ought to stay curious about the causes of our suffering. There is no mechanical cause, like a screw gone loose in one’s head. Any event in the world which contributes to our suffering has causal power only insofar as we have perceived and made sense of it. For example, a mother sees in her neighborhood a man open-carry a gun. This strikes fear in her heart; in the past, she lost a child to gun violence. In contrast, fellow gun owners will be delighted by this very sight of open-carry in the neighborhood. No stimuli can have emotional power without our backgrounds giving stimuli this power, any more than random words can amount to a story without an author arranging the words into a story.

We are each like an author translating a story from a foreign language. The story is our sensed reality, and the foreign language is the world itself. Moreover, culture will impose certain aesthetic sensibilities, which affects the choices the translator makes. Similarly, our culture imposes certain desires and expectations, which affects how we uptake events and determines whether we suffer in consequence. So we should be humble before any cause that we (or a therapist or psychiatrist) has identified as the cause of our suffering. Any conclusion we’ve made should be only “for the time being.” 

I can’t write this post without emphasizing that repression can be good, even essential to well-being. Often, we’re not equipped with the background knowledge—or willingness to look beyond what’s comfortable—necessary for figuring out the causes of our emotion truthfully. By being curious about our emotion, sometimes we can end up believing that we’ve figured things out, which only reinforce a prior delusion. By repressing, in contrast, we can prevent a deranged author of our lives, who is invisible from us, from writing forth the details of the world in which we find ourselves, like characters of this author's creation. When should we repress our emotion, and when should we be curious? It is very difficult to know. All we can do is to be experimental in our approach and open-minded when trying to piece together the effects. 

Above all, it is key to doubt psychiatrists and therapists. These professionals are trained in the practical codes of scientific institutions, as priests are trained in the moral codes of religious institutions. Trusting these authority figures pulls wool over our eyes and makes us deeply repressed, to an extent which allows cruelty to perpetuate beneath the surface. Back then, when priests ruled over our emotional suffering, such cruelty included incest and sexual abuse (which Freud focused upon). Today, if I may hazard a bet, such cruelty includes extreme self-centeredness and loneliness. We believe that rationality is a matter of self-interest, and that we should unequivocally prioritize an individual's autonomy above all else in cases of ethical ambiguity—as if we could be absolutely autonomous, as if culture doesn’t influence us.

There is much to be said about what we should do, in light of this current wave of repression. Minimally, we need to be curious about our emotional suffering and courageous in finding what's there. We need to turn towards people who know us personally, and not only to people who know us clinically (whether they are a priest or psychiatrist). Loving each other and de-clinicalizing emotional suffering would be a beginning to push against this wave of repression and to stop perpetuating the cruelty this wave hides.

Bibliography & further reading

Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Translated by James Strachey. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. New York: Norton, 1989.

Hacking, Ian. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Harrington, Anne. The Cure within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine. Paperback ed. New York: Norton, 2009.

Tomasello, Michael. Origins of Human Communication. The Jean Nicod Lectures 2008. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2008.

Williams, Bernard. “From Sincerity to Authenticity.” In Truth & Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2002.

[thesereveries]

The feeling of possibility

Anne Carson’s essay Eros the Bittersweet (1986/2023) has been on my mind. I read it about a month ago. I’ve started Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving Atocha Station (2011). It has unexpectedly catalyzed these ideas, to the extent that I now need to write about them. 

Carson examines the nature of the erotic. It is separation from the beloved. This distance both beckons the imagination to let paint forth its fantasies of perfection and ensures that nothing in Reality could challenge this painting to be anything else but manifestly real. In effect, whatever we imagine gets to be experienced as happening in real life, in the absence of anything of Reality which could counter or contrast it. We can then lose ourselves to a euphoria, which becomes inaccessible once we acknowledge Reality and stand behind its guardrails. Yet, this separation from that which we imagine causes pain, as much as it causes euphoria. The imagined perfection is distant and merely possible, not achieved. Carson analyzes Sappho’s use of “bittersweet” (or a more literal translation from the ancient Greek “sweet-bitter”) illustrates this double-facedness of eros.

Compare this to Lerner’s first-person narrator Adam. He is a poet and skeptical of anyone who claims that poetry can change one's life. The closest Adam has gotten to this happens only when a fragment of a poem is quoted. In reading fragments, he can sense the possibility of the perfection of the poem, which is absent. He can lose himself to this feeling of the possible. 

I’d like to explore further this possibility of perfection, and particularly the feeling of it, which is perhaps the most intense beauty we humans can find. What is this feeling? How is it possible? What does it do to us? Is it good?

(For my philosophical work, these questions amount to an indirect way of probing whether our sense of reality vs. unreality is a binary or a spectrum, admitting degrees of uncertainty regarding what's real in between. A spoiler: I’ll vindicate that it’s a binary).

What is it?

Let’s start with the descriptive question. Lerner’s protagonist and Carson’s Sappho are both addicted to a certain feeling of possibility. This feeling does not happen whenever we register that something is possible. Not all possibilities are created equal. Take the following examples:

Imagining having a child. This is tender and wondrous. 

Imagining myself as a squirrel, scampering up trees and stashing acorns. This is amusing.

Imagining that humans may destroy the earth. It’s difficult for me to rile up a feeling. The possibility feels opaque, like my own death. 

Imagining losing my arms in a freak accident. This is scary.

When I’m anxious, telling myself that everything will be okay (which objectively isn’t guaranteed and so merely possible). This possibility falls flat. I remain on-edge.

When I’m anxious, telling myself this is an opportunity for gaining insight into the workings of the mind. This possibility becomes my reality. It shifts my mood, and my situation is suddenly focused and bright. 

The beautiful feeling of the possible, as described by Carson and Lerner, seems closest to (1) and (6). These cases share the following properties:

What we imagine shimmers as a “live” possibility. (Compare this to William James’s contrast between “live options” and “dead choices” in The Will to Believe (1896). Live options engage our emotions. We sense that much is at stake. In contrast, dead choices are formal and rational).

What we imagine is desirable.

For example, I know that I could have a child, which explains the practical immanence or “live” character of the possibility in (1). For (6), I have gained philosophical insight from suffering before, which likewise explains the “live” character of this possibility. Moreover, I desire a child, as much as I desire having new insights into the mind.

Examples (2)-(5) lack these properties, although in different ways. I know that it is practically impossible for me to become a squirrel in (2). It is merely a logical possibility, and even more, pretend or make-believe. I imagine myself as a squirrel with knowing that this is contrary to reality. It has a "dead" character, given that I know it is not part of this world. While I know that it is a practical possibility for humans to destroy the earth in (3), I don’t sense this as likely to happen within my lifetime, or the lifetimes of the individuals I know and care about. So it doesn’t have immediate personal stakes. Moreover, I lack past experiences comparable to this possibility, which I otherwise could’ve relied upon for making more vivid my imagining.

In contrast, in (4) losing my arms is relatively more vivid. I have past experiences of getting injured, and I can use this as seed for imagining forth the more extreme possibility. This possibility also has personal stakes for me. It is more like (1) and (6) with regards to the “strength” of the feeling of the possibility. But it lacks the property of being desirable. This stops it from feeling beautiful or expressive of perfection, as poetry and eros achieve according to Carson and Lerner.

Example (5) is similar to (3). In both, I know that there is an appropriate emotional response to be had to the practically possible, and even immanent situation I imagine. In (3), it is terror at the face of the destruction of the earth, and in (5), it is peacefulness in the face of that everything is okay. Yet I fail to achieve the appropriate emotional responses. There is a certain disconnect between what I know and what I feel. So these feelings of possibility are weak, in contrast to the overwhelmingly strong feelings of possibility in poetry and eros. 

Let’s draw conclusions. Not all feelings of possibility are alike. A feeling of possibility can be...

Merely logical, rather than practical. This is most easily achieved by making-believe. Supposing propositions contrary to reality for the sake of argument fits under this. One might not want to call this make-believe because we make something up for an epistemic purpose rather than for amusement, but functionally it is like make-believe. (2) is an example of this.

Practical, but nevertheless weak or vague, because we don’t have immediate personal stakes in it, as in (3), or we lack past experiences which could supplement vivacity to the imagining, as in (3) and (5). Or, the possibility may be undesirable so that we’re repelled by it, which keeps the possibility vague, as in (4).

Beautiful (as well as practical). Other adjectives that apply: exciting, intoxicating, overwhelming, enlivening. Poetry and eros take us there, as well as everyday cases of imagination like (1) and (6).

How is it possible?

Let’s focus on the beautiful feeling of possibility. Example (1) is more intense on this front than (6) is. In imagining having a child in (1), not only do I desire this, but it is the consummation of a yearning that has been with me all my life (implicit in this imagining is having a child with my beloved; this would be, to use a child’s terminology, “finding true love”). In contrast, in imagining that I might make progress on my philosophy by being anxious in (6), the desirability of this is mundane. Everyday I work on my project of understanding the mind. In other words, the desires in (1) and (6) differ with respect to how epic it is. A desire can be more or less fantasy-driven, while nevertheless being practical or part of real life, as opposed to make-believe.

Something might seem strange at this point. When we read poetry, we know that it is not factual. It is literature, not nonfiction, or a sort of make-believe. So how can the possibilities it evokes be felt as practical? Take some examples:

“Oh my love take me there./ Let me dwell where you are./ I am already nothing./ I am already burning.”—Euripides’ Orestes, trans. Carson (2009)

“Over and over he calls out among the dark chestnut trees./ Until the animal responds/ faintly, from a great distance,/ as though this thing we fear/ were not terrible.”—Glück’s Averno (2006)

These are lines of poetry, which is a form of make-believe perhaps, but nevertheless we might feel overwhelmingly beautiful possibilities. Here is a way to resolve the puzzle. We know that poets generally express truths of the world or the human condition. Poets don’t merely make things up for amusement or amazement, as in the science fiction or fantasy genres. In ancient Greek poetry, for example, while we know that the gods are mythological, we also know that people made them up in order to channel their real-life hopes and fears. We can see ourselves in these gods. 

So a line of poetry can stir up depths of practical and beautiful possibilities, which are urgent and intoxicating. Lerner’s protagonist Adam says that he is moved most when fragments of poetry are decontextualized. This may reflect that when a line is isolated, there is no context that could’ve primed us to register it as make-believe. We are freed to feel the content as expressive of reality.

What about the fact that poetry can convey unpleasant scenes, which if happened in real life, would be horrible? This is an old question, one Aristotle asked about tragedy. Here is an answer. We have past experiences that resonate with the horrible scene depicted. In reading this poetry, we feel understood. Moreover, with the virtuality of the scene, we have the space and time to appreciate the scene for further details, for beauty even, which we hadn’t noticed when the comparable event happened in real life. In real life, too much is urgent and obligatory, so that we can’t attend to such details and potential beauty.

What does it do to us?

How do beautiful feelings of possibility move us? Can it change our lives, and if so, in which ways? 

In writing this essay, I’ve realized that my habits of doing philosophy and journaling are (not so thinly disguised) forms of dowsing myself under beautiful possibility. They are my means of escape from ordinary life. 

Doing philosophy of mind is a matter of overwhelming my awareness with beautiful, abstract beings—namely, the beings which are the powers of the mind and the dynamics between them. I utter to myself, emotion, reason, consciousness, imagination, our sense of possibility… They are beautiful not unlike how a painting of a landscape is beautiful. Any painting is more abstract than the landscape itself. It does away with the messiness of particularity and makes room for the essential and beautiful (spatial relations between elements; color dynamics; tension and direction). The abstract beings I get to behold in doing philosophy bring me into the beautiful feeling of possibility.

Journaling is not dissimilar. I do away with the messiness of oscillations and anxieties of ordinary life. In writing, I get to illuminate certain aspects of reality over others, namely those which are desirable or conducive for my aims. I’m the author; I partially determine what reality becomes in my experience. So reality comes to feel like home as long as I'm writing; it is the product of my desire, of what’s most familiar. Ordinary life, in contrast, is alienating; there I may often feel left out, in the cold dark.

I know as a fact that doing philosophy and journaling has changed my life for the better. This is in conjunction with finding love and community, however. I cannot say which has a bigger role to play in my returning to life and regaining my humanity.

At the least, getting to be suspended within the sensational realm of beautiful possibility can’t be all self-deception. Maybe it is here, uniquely, where we can gain insight and motivation which is key to our forging paths into the right directions.

In ordinary life, we constantly get distracted by events which catch our attention. We can’t keep track of a clear thread of purpose, comparable to what we can achieve as long as we're using language (in thought, imagination, writing, or reading). Language use delivers in pristine form beautiful possibilities.

Also, in ordinary life we may not dare imagine certain possibilities, which seem too unreachable. Refraining from imagining these possibilities is a defense-mechanism, against failure. But in using language, we can enter the depths of realms of possibility. Particular possible situations encountered in ordinary life and appraised relative to ordinary life which seem unreachable can suddenly be appraised relative to other possibilities. This lets them greet us as gleaming with vivacity, regarding how practically feasible they are. 

Perhaps above all, a difference is that in using language, that which is brought up as possible seems to come in from the outside, even if it is ourselves who is saying it. Once something is spoken out loud or in inner speech, this implies both a speaker and a listener, and one can occupy both positions at once. As soon as a speaker is demarcated, this makes room for that the speaker might be more authoritative than ourselves. We are more likely to be able to be convinced, compared to in ordinary life where we have meandering thoughts, and it is evident that it's only we, as unreliable as we know ourselves to be, who fabricate these notions. 

Not all is good when it comes to prolonging one's time with the beautiful feeling of possibility, however. Perhaps my habits of journaling (and maybe also philosophy) can encourage delusion. This would be the case if the beautiful possibilities I summon are implausible and driven by wish-fulfillment, rather than by caring for the truth.

Moreover, the beautiful feeling of possibility can cause frustration and fear. While we have an upsurge of motivation, it can be difficult to find steps we may presently take. This is especially the case if the desired possibility awaits in the far distant future or is abstract in character (e.g., imagining having a child with one’s beloved; imagining radical freedom). Then, motivation slips away once we no longer attend to the language which conveys this possibility. As soon and we stop using language, ordinary life hits us with all of its confusion. (Compare: reading self-help can be invigorating in the moment. But it fails to bring long-term changes. Once one puts the book down, it feels like amnesia, like one hadn’t felt any of the hopes which the book had aroused). One can get into a habit of escapism with poetry, literature, or fantasizing (maybe even also doing philosophy). Ordinary life can become unbearable, and the beautiful feeling of possibility is needed all the more for one to desire to continue on living.

Bibliography & further reading

Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. Princeton, NJ Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2023.

Carson, Anne, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, eds. An Oresteia. New York: Faber and Faber, 2009.

Glück, Louise. Averno. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

Green, Mitchell S. Self-Expression. Oxford : New York: Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, 2007.

Harris, Paul L. Trusting What You’re Told: How Children Learn from Others. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Lerner, Ben. Leaving the Atocha Station. Minneapolis: Coffee House press, 2011.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Imagination: A Psychological Critique. Translated by Forrest Williams. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962.

———. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. New York: Routledge, 2004.

[thesereveries]

Fantasy and reality-checking

Introduction

Most of us have experienced at some point of another anticipation for a desired event, to only be disappointed once it happens. For example, my dad and I have a joke/tradition where when we reunite, we rile each other up for how exciting it’ll be to eat doughnuts together (a food forbidden by my mother). Then, once we get our hands on one, we’re always disappointed. It’s a piece of dough.

The imagination has a hand behind that which we take to be reality. While how good a doughnut tastes is low-stakes, many parts of this reality based upon the imagination are significant. The imagination paints forth, from our standpoint, what goes on in other people’s heads, the consequences of our actions, the past and future. Someone may be depressed because they sense as real that they have no place in this world and no future. People may be pro-life because they sense as real that stopping the development of an embryo amounts to murdering the future person who this embryo would otherwise become.

The imagination can paint forth what appears to be reality behind our backs, and with a madness which we might be unable to detect, as long as we don’t face up to the kind of situation that could put it to the test. Sometimes, it’s relatively straightforward to reality-check. When my dad and I fantasize the doughnut, we can buy one and eat it. This will check whether our fantasized doughnut is faithful to the real doughnut or not. 

But as it will turn out, it can be very difficult to arrange for situations that can do this job of reality-checking. That which is counter-evidence to a belief for one person may justify that very belief for another person. Trump’s being prosecuted in court is counter-evidence to the belief that he’s innocent for some people, and it’s justification for that he’s innocent, and the government is corrupt, for others.

Roadmap

The theme of this blogpost will be: Why do certain fantasies stubbornly remain under the guise of reality? In other words, what makes it possible for a person to remain living in what is obviously a fantasy world, when they often encounter situations which obviously serve as reality-checks? 

Addressing this question has upshots. It’ll turn out that whether somebody’s world is fantasy or not, and whether a situation should serve as a reality-check or not, is far from obvious. There may be no fact of the matter of whether a person is delusional or sane. Moreover, it’ll turn out that while predictive processing models of cognition can shed light on this issue, it’s incomplete, and we must turn to issues of emotion and selfhood to make progress.

Lenient and stubborn fantasies

It’s curious how the imagination can maintain its fantasies under the guise of reality, even when we put ourselves under situations which should reveal the delusional character of the fantasy. For example, G has been infatuated with a woman. One might think that when he lies in bed and fantasizes about how this woman is in love with him, his fantasy should be reality-checked once he meets her in-person. One might think that the fact that she doesn’t love him should come up in this in-the-flesh encounter. But it doesn’t. He reads her gestures as expression of her desire for him, when for anyone else, these gestures would obviously amount to ordinary cordiality. 

Or, consider another example. G has body dysphoria. He perceives his body as flabby, even though he’s a gym rat and is muscular by anyone’s standards. One might think that G's fantasy that he’s flabby should be dispersed once he encounters other people, who can see his body non-delusionally. But once he enters public spaces, he reads other people’s glances at him as expressing abhorrence at his flabbiness. This reinforces the status of his fantasy as reality. In live, perceptual encounters, he gains all the evidence for that he is disgustingly flabby.

Sartre calls emotion a sort of “magic,” where what we desire in our emotion comes to reorganize the appearance of the world, so that the situation that we believe ourselves to be in is one which satisfies our desire. It indeed seems magical, how our minds project the fantasies of the imagination out in the world as reality.

Why are some fantasies lenient and others stubborn?

It’s easy for my dad and I to reality-check our doughnut fantasy by eating one and tasting its blandness. But it’s very difficult for G to reality-check his fantasy of his flabbiness or of the woman's desire for him. What makes for the difference? Why are certain fantasies easily eliminable from our sense of reality, while others stubbornly remain there?

Predictive processing

One might think that a predictive processing model of cognition could explain this. On this model, we perceive the world in terms of a model of the world that resides in our brain. Our brain predicts what’ll happen, on the basis of this model and incoming stimuli. We perceive what has been predicted. So one might think that G's model includes that he’s flabby. Whenever the stimuli of his body in a mirror, or other people seeing his body, occur, this model renders these stimuli in the form of his flabbiness. In this way, G’s experiences reinforce his model of the world and keep making him see fantasy as reality. 

But this will not explain the relative stubbornness or leniency of a fantasy. When my dad and I expect that the doughnut will taste amazing, and we bite into one, it tastes bland. Why doesn’t this expectation, this part of my mental model, shape my perception, when G's expectation shapes his perception?

Our ways of life and senses of self

We need to go beyond the tools offered by predictive processing to address this issue. Let’s look rather to the issue of our emotions—the values and way of life that make us who we are.

It’s less likely that a person will be able to see the error of their fantastical world if their fantasy is more existentially important to them. Consider that we all have our ways of life. We live by certain principles of what we need to do in order to survive, to upkeep our identity and sense of self. For example, I see myself as a good partner. A part of my identity is having my boyfriend be part of my life, and I in his. If we were to break up, it'd be very painful. It’d feel like losing a part of myself, or that the world is coming to an end. Of course, any of us can change our senses of self and world; we’re adaptive creatures. But at any moment, we’re driven to protect and preserve our current identity, just as we’re driven to maintain our bodily homeostasis.

If a person’s fantasy is bound up with their sense of self, with the daily activities that supply them purpose and worth, it’ll be less likely for them to uproot it from their world. This is because removal of this fantasy would feel like dying. G, for example, has grown up in such a way that he perceives himself as needing to be masculine in order to be of worth before the eyes of this world. His sense of self consists in his daily activities of exercising, weighing himself, and sticking to a strict diet. To stop doing this would be tantamount to becoming worthless.

This is just one example of addressing the question of why certain fantasies stubbornly wear the guise of reality, while others can be easily revealed for their delusory character. There is more that can be brought to light. I can’t explore this in full here.

Why do we form the explanations of error that we do?

We can broaden the question from this issue of stubbornness/lenience. More generally, whenever there is "error" in a prediction, why is a certain explanation of this error generated by the brain, over other potential explanations? For example, when somebody tells G that he looks muscular, this is in tension with his self-perception of flabbiness. He registers this speech as a lie. Why does he explain this speech in terms of that the person is lying, rather than that his self-perception is wrong, and the person tells the truth? As explained above, this has to do with how motivated G is; that his fantasy continue wearing the guise of reality is critical for him to preserve his identity.

My discussion above suggests that the explanation ultimately given by the brain will be one we’re motivated to formulate. What sorts of motivations are salient under this context? I've discussed the motivation to preserve our identity. There are likely other motivations at play, as well. For example, there might be a basic hedonic drive to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, regardless of one's identity.

There may be forces that go beyond motivation. Different fantasies have different subject matters; G’s is about his body shape, and my dad and mine's is about how good doughnuts taste. G's subject matter concerns the external world; the shape of his body is a physical aspect of the world. My dad and mine's concerns a subjective preference; taste is not part of the external world. Maybe because G's fantasy has gotten a hold of what appears to be external reality, it is more stubborn. If a fantasy has a subject matter that is obviously based in mere subjective taste, in contrast, perhaps it's easy to get rid of.

This is only a preliminary answer to the question. So much could be said, and it's difficult to get starting points on this. When I face such muddy views, methodologically, I tend to think the question I’m asking isn’t the best one. I’d like to look for analogous questions, which might provide better guidance.

There is a solid literature out there on emotion regulation. That literature highlights another question, which may be analogous: Why when we attempt to regulate our emotions, sometimes re-appraisals work, and other times they don't? For example, if I have a phobia of snakes and see a garter snake, even if I tell myself that this kind of snake is harmless, I can’t calm myself down. In contrast, if I'm worried when a friend who doesn't call me at our scheduled time, I may tell myself that there's no need to worry, that something unexpected probably came up. This down-regulates my worry, and I feel calm.

Emotion regulation at least shows that a missing variable in predictive processing models of cognition is our personal agency. That paradigm for understanding the mind does not distinguish between predictions that are automatically generated by the brain, on the one hand, and those that we personally rile up, on the other hand. Studying emotion regulation, moreover, asks us to enter the first-person perspective of the individual who is regulating their emotion.

This is useful methodologically. This anchors us into considering all of the factors that bear upon why a person has the emotions they do, when faced by a certain event, why they respond to this emotion as they do, and why their responses may succeed or fail in regulating their emotion. In contrast, studying predictive processing models alone just asks us to think about relative weights of different hypotheses embedded in a mental model. This language of information-processing doesn't give us clues or leads into all the kinds of factors that are relevant to explaining why a certain hypothesis has the weight it does.

Are we all delusional?

We have different worldviews. For example, some liberals think that conservatives are delusional, and some conservatives think that liberals are delusional. Who is right? 

Delusion isn't based upon facts

It turns out to be tricky, if not downright impossible, to have an objective measure for whether someone is delusional or not. This is because there’s often some coherent worldview in which something we deem to be mere fantasy or delusion could hold up as rational. For example, we might think it’s delusional for G to spend hours at the gym every day to stay good-looking. But once G spends an hour at the gym, and then he pushes himself to spend many more hours, it’s actually possible that he could fail to push himself further, and that he stop going to the gym, so much so that he actually would become flabby and obese. When G works out for an hour, he may “see” this possibility of becoming obese “in” his presently doing a deadlift, just as my dad and I "see" the most wonderful gustatory experience "in" a doughnut, or a pro-life advocate “sees” a living person "in" the fact that an embryo has just been conceived.

Is it delusional that G thinks it’s possible that he could become obese? We might think it is highly improbable, and his behavior reflects that he thinks it is probable. On this basis, we might call him out as delusion. But in other cases, we think that risk-adverse behavior is rational even if the probability of the bad event’s happening is very low. For example, it is highly improbable that AI will take over the world, but if that did happen, it’d be very bad. So many people think it’s rational to take precautions against this bad but improbable event. 

G might think that becoming obese would be very bad, not unlike how bad it’d be if humanity were destroyed. We might think that he’s irrational for evaluating this potential event in such an extreme manner. But it’s difficult to assess rationality at this point. Perhaps G has had experiences where he was socially outcasted for being chubby. Social ostracization can in fact lead to death; historically, humans left behind would die on their own. 

We may think, yet again, that this is irrational. If G were obese, he could still make friends and have loved ones. But he might be preoccupied by the possibility that culture could change to the point that people with obesity would be actually socially condemned. Or, he might think it’d be practically impossible for him to make friends if he were obese. It’s not guaranteed after all.

While it can be useful to examine a less politically or emotionally charged example (so we can examine the issue in a clear-eyed way), let me extend this analysis to a current event: the abortion debate. Are people who think that an early stage embryo counts as a person delusional? There is no fact of the matter that they violate by holding this position. The embryo indeed could become a person, while it presently is not a person whatsoever but just a conglomeration of cells. Is there great risk or harm done in stopping the development of this embryo? The magnitude of this harm will depend upon what prior values one has: the value of heeding to a divine plan vs. the value of protecting a woman's life, for example. Holding either value does not violate any matters of fact (assuming that, given our limited human standpoint, it's impossible to rule out that there is no such thing as a certain way the world should unfold, like a "divine plan" of some sort.)

Delusion is based upon values

It’s difficult to assess whether a person is objectively delusional because, at the end of the day, how bad we think a potential event would be is subjective. How bad something is depends upon our interests and values.

Moreover, at a certain point, it’s very tricky, if not impossible to evaluate the likelihood of a potential event. How likely is it for G who has never been obese before to have a fulfilling social life if he became obese? This depends upon many variables, such as how culture might change, and which communities and geographical region he might move to. With these uncertain variables, we cannot confidently arrive at a probability estimate. Similarly, how likely is it for an embryo to become a person whose life is worthwhile? This also depends upon many uncertain variables.

Often, we end up calling someone delusional for practical reasons or personal values. A person’s worldview is offensive in light of our own. Or, their behavior is harmful to their well-being. This is perhaps the only way by which we can justify our calling someone delusional.

To sum up:

While it’s common sense to think that we can check our fantasies by returning to reality, it isn’t so simple. Certain fantasies may have structured our sense of reality, so that perceiving and acting in the world just reinforces the grip our fantasy has over us.

Fantasies are lenient and can be easily brushed aside when they don’t have much bearing upon our emotions and sense of self. In contrast, fantasies are stubborn when we rely on them for our sense of purpose and worth in the social world.

How lenient or stubborn a fantasy is also seems to depend upon whether its subject matter is something that can appear as obviously part of reality to a person, or something that cannot (and is rather part of one's subjective preferences, for example.)

It can be very difficult, if not downright impossible, to objectively assess whether someone is delusional or not. Calling someone delusional is a matter of reinforcing our own worldview and values, or of encouraging a future where our own worldview is dominant. 

Questions left open:

Does the literature on emotion regulation actually speak to that on predictive processing?

If it does, how could predictive processing models accommodate this factor of our personal agency? This is likely to be difficult in information-processing terms. Our own agency does not seem to be a factor that causally drives experience on par with other causal factors, like past conditioning or the risk assigned to an event. Our agency consists in our own consciousness. It is the window we have onto anything in the world, including our past conditioning or assessments of risk.

Relevant literature & further reading

Clark, Andy. “Whatever next? Predictive Brains, Situated Agents, and the Future of Cognitive Science.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36, no. 3 (June 2013): 181–204.

Gross, James J. “Emotion Regulation: Current Status and Future Prospects.” Psychological Inquiry 26, no. 1 (January 2, 2015): 1–26. 

Harris, Paul L. Trusting What You’re Told: How Children Learn from Others. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.

Haugeland, John. Dasein Disclosed: John Haugeland’s Heidegger. Edited by Joseph Rouse. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010.

Parrott, M. “Delusional Predictions and Explanations.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72, no. 1 (2022). 

Ratcliffe, Matthew. Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World. Philosophical Psychopathology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Translated by Philip Mairet. Routledge Great Minds. London ; New York: Routledge, 2014.

Waal, Frans B. M. de. “The Integration of Dominance and Social Bonding in Primates.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 61, no. 4 (1986): 459–79.

[thesereveries]

Poor Things, (2023) Yorgos Lanthimos

I saw this in the theater recently and was moved. It’s initially confusing to figure out what this “movement” consists in. The film is packed with psychedelic colors, upsetting events, and sexual scenes; it's quite stimulating. So I’d like to tease out what went on in my mind and heart, whose rustlings were soft but painfully good.

Here are the basics of the plot. A crazy scientist, who sees science as the means for bringing about a more just future (a moral that is endorsed and that I appreciate, as a side-note), brings a new human into the world. Her name is Bella. She is enclosed in the body of a beautiful woman. We see Bella grow up, psychologically, from a newborn level of babbling and lack of motor control. We witness her discover sexual pleasure and become obsessed with engaging in sexual activity as much as possible, until she discovers reading, whose stimulation attracts her just as much, which is something to which we’ve become numb. We see her first moment of understanding the injustice on which her life is based and her horror, which is also something to which we’ve become numb. We see men fall in love with her, become envious of her love for living, or desire to destroy her.

The film evoked in me a memory. When I was 15, I woke up from a numbness that had been going on for many years. I experienced, for what felt like the first time, what it was like to be able to go on a walk—to see the beauty of the sky, feel the satisfaction of breathing, and delight in the energy coursing through my body. I experienced what it was like to talk to another human and to enter the amazement of how we make possible in each other new ideas and delight, out from thin air. I imagined all of the activities I couldn’t wait to experience "for the first time," once I got home: bicycling, painting, and so on. 

Since then, there've been some moments that involve "waking up. They aren't as totalizing as this first awakening, but they are made possible by their pooling into the grooves of this first awakening, imprinted upon my mind. The most recent one I remember happened a few months ago. I was stunned by the beauty of words with which I’ve been transacting all along in my research: "emotion," "the unconscious," "experience." Their abstraction was vivid and beautiful like music. It was as if each word were its own orchestra, playing melodies I can barely hear through the obfuscation of the finitude of my mind, but which I know is out there.

Here's a way I’ve made sense of these awakenings: It’s a silver lining of having lived under a stretch of numbness over my childhood. Today, I get to experience things for the first time with the body and mind of an adult, capable of making sense of and valuing these things in light of humanity and history. The “first times,” for most people, occurred in childhood, where cognizing things, like the acts of walking and friendship, in as penetrating of a way, simply isn’t accessible. Maybe this is an ad-hoc rationalization of a life narrative. Or maybe there’s truth here. I’ve been told that it’s astonishing how much energy I have, or ridiculous how enthusiastic I can get over random things. This way of being, which I can't help, is a trajectory that was set by that first awakening at age 15.

Bella’s situation is somewhat analogous to this. Since she’s growing up in an adult’s body, people have feelings and thoughts towards her as if she were any adult. This provides circumstances for her to grow, which are impossible for normal adults (with adult, not infant, minds), as much as for normal infants (with infant, not adult, bodies.) She registers adult events (e.g., being the object of infatuation for other men; hearing philosophical ideas that can change how everything seems; learning about slavery) from the place of full-force curiosity of an infant.

This readily provides a contrast to how most of us inhabit the world. We assume that what will happen is familiar, so we do not notice much in what happens and aren’t changed. We feel stifled in our lives, by the everyday rhythm of anticipatable dissatisfactions and satisfactions.

In contrast, when Bella looks at the same occurrence as we do, she reaches for more. She doesn’t demand for more, in the sense of self-entitlement. Rather, she simply takes as a fact of reality that there is more, and that her world shall be overturned by meeting it. This theme of renewal through living is echoed in the fact that Bella’s body is her mother’s, and her mind belongs to the baby with whom her mother was pregnant. She is both mother and daughter. We see Bella curious to find out more about who her mother was, this person whose body is hers, and to whom she owes her life. I love this as a dramatic metaphor for renewal in any of our lives. Our pasts may become as distant and different from who we are now, as Bella’s mother is to Bella. Transformation can happen to a life. Moreover, this is not an insular process. Our motherhood of our future selves depends upon the love and intimacy we have with each other.

I thought that Bella stands as an “antidote” to the sort of depression and anxiety with which the alarmingly increasing proportion of people in the U.S. get diagnosed. While one can't just choose to be like Bella, perhaps one can begin to enter places of meaningfulness like hers by assuming that one knows nothing, while practicing the bottom line of trusting and being kind to others. 

I haven’t explored any “morals” that are unusual or complex here. I get the sense that this film is simple in this way. But its simple ideas are important ones, and the delivery is fun and engaging.

[thesereveries]

“Light: Island and Sea I (o/c 131)” (1971) Jon Schueler

I recently saw this piece at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh. I haven’t been so captivated by monochromatic pieces before. This one, it did something to me…

The painting is strictly representational. The sky looks like this in these regions. But the painting also takes one to places of understanding that have nothing to do with fog, cloud, or sky.

As one looks longer, Schueler’s extraordinary, subtle brushwork emerges. The whole painting consists in very tiny strokes, sparking off into all different directions. They propel the eye like beginnings of paths or trailheads, which arise from moments at which these tiny strokes accidentally align in their directions.

This was mesmerizing. These little paths took me all across the painting, and even into the painting. Many paths seem to pivot behind another, and following them, one submerges in invisible realms. One resurfaces at later chance moments. There was a certain wonder to it all. The points at which the brushwork buckles, opens forth into a path, and breaks off into another other paths, seem as accidental as nature is. These paths refuse to serve as clues as to the artist’s intentions, or why and where any of them are placed where they are.

This accidental character does not imply randomness. Rather, the painting is expressive. I could feel the artist’s heartbeat, right up against mine, as I stood there. Schueler lets us become beguiled by fog, cloud, or sky. I could feel how close this is to our becoming beguiled by the mind, by its moods, thoughts, fears. Schueler foregrounds how the sky consists in nothing, that all is shifting. I could feel how close this is to our pleading for our knowledge of the ephemeral nature of consciousness to disperse some unpleasant experience.

Triumph and loneliness are felt in equally intense measures in this painting. There are infinite, teeming beginnings of paths. Any of these paths could be taken, to the extent that one's eye motion, this movement of the will, renders this beginning, this potential, into an actual path. But one refrains from doing this. There are too many beginnings. The brushwork is too fine, feathery, and dispersing. The painting captures this. One feels triumphant in dissolving one’s mind and in beholding the beauty of its infinity.

But the painting also captures something else. There is nothing. You are nothing, and thereby nothing can accompany or surround you.

I walked into this gallery after a few days of being enraptured by Scotland’s landscapes, particularly at the Isle of Arran. The gallery was curated under the theme of Scotland’s landscapes. This was perfect timing. I only wish that more often I could enter places of art whose themes are related to something that has been caught my heart of late. I wonder whether I could've had this experience with Scheuler's painting if I hadn't had this personal connection.

[thesereveries]

Addiction, phobia, and akrasia

An idea has followed me for a while. Time and time again, it neatly explains things I encounter in everyday life. I’ll sketch this idea here. Hopefully, the dissertation I’m working on will accomplish a more detailed articulation of this idea.

In a nutshell: Our sense of what is real (i.e., manifest reality) is not always determined by probabilities we know. Instead, it can be determined by what has emotional force over us, regardless of whether we know that it is probable, improbable, or downright impossible. 

Case studies

Let’s anchor ourselves in examples. A friend (let’s name him Fyodor) is a lottery addict. He has done research on the improbability of winning and tries to rid himself of this addiction. He knows he has a 1 in 14 million chance. In spite of this, after he loses any lottery round, he can’t help but feel like he might win next time. So he continues to buy ticket after ticket. Every time he has a chance to enter the lottery, he is overwhelmed by excitement. He is practically salivating, from imagining all that he could do with hundreds of millions of dollars: the many luxury estates he’d own, the power he’d have over his enemies, etc. He then catches himself in this delusion and fights his compulsion to buy another ticket by reminding himself how winning is practically impossible. But this fails to quell his impulses. He still feels as excited as ever. While such excitement would normally imply that one is optimistic about one’s chances, that is not the case for Fyodor. He knows his chances are 1 in 14 million, which is pessimistic.

Take another example. A friend (let’s call her Charlotte) is terrified of spiders. She has done all her homework and researched how the spiders that appear in her apartment must be harmless. Yet, whenever at home she sees a spider, she is overwhelmed by terror. Her heart races, and she feels the impulse to run away. She fights this compulsion by reminding herself of the research she’s done, that this spider is harmless. But she still feels as terrified as ever. While this fear would normally imply that one believes that the spider is dangerous, that is not the case for Charlotte. She knows that the spider is safe.

These two examples are mostly parallel. Fyodor and Charlotte both know the sober facts of their situations. Fyodor knows that under no circumstances does it make sense to be excited about winning the lottery. Charlotte knows that under no circumstances does it make sense to react with terror at a harmless spider. The two examples diverge upon one point. Fyodor knows, rightfully so, that he has a chance of winning, even if this chance is very slight. Charlotte seems to know, in contrast, that it’s impossible for this spider to be dangerous. Let’s dog-ear this point of difference for now; it’ll become relevant later.

My proposal

Manifest reality is not always determined by probabilities we know, but rather by what has emotional force over us. What is “manifest reality”? As seen in these examples, what we sense as real can come apart from what we believe is real. 

How different are the “fabrics” of manifest reality and of belief? Quite different. We believe in propositions, whose fabric is conceptual and linguistic. Fodor believes that he has 1 in 14 millionth of a chance of winning. This proposition of his belief draws upon concepts and picks out a determinate state of affairs.

In contrast, it’s unclear what exactly is going down in Fyodor’s manifest reality, which causes his frenzy of excitement and seeming optimism, in spite of his belief. Does he sense as real the apparent state of affairs that he is likely to win? Or that while it’s unlikely, he is a lucky guy, and is certain to win someday? 

There seems to be a range of propositions that could be attributed to Fyodor’s manifest reality, which all explain his excitement and compulsive behavior. It goes beyond my scope to offer a hands-down argument here, but I’m arguing in my dissertation that manifest reality is nonpropositional and pre-conceptual. What’s real to us is partially amorphous and indeterminate, and always unconscious, so that there is a range of beliefs we could arrive at by reflecting upon it and bringing it to conscious awareness. 

Why it’s tricky to talk about manifest reality

Whenever we talk or think analytically, we need to use language. Maybe it’s even the case that in order to become conscious of some state of affairs, we also must use language. If manifest reality is nonpropositional, this means that we must interpret it, where we face a range of creative options, in order to make it conscious. 

How should we think about these propositions we arrive at for making sense of manifest reality? For example, how should we talk about what went down in Fyodor’s manifest reality which explains his excitement and compulsive behavior at purchasing the ticket, against his belief that he ought not to?

A proposition that could explain this would be “I’m likely to win.” If this were manifestly real, obviously Fyodor would get all excited. But this butts heads with his belief that it’s practically impossible to win. To describe his manifest reality this way would imply a contradiction. This would open questions as to how anyone could transparently believe in contradictions, given that rationality obeys the law of non-contradiction. 

It’d be better to describe Fyodor’s manifest reality in terms of that he could win, rather than he is likely to win. This is consistent with his belief. That he could win is a proposition at a level of generality consistent with either that he is likely to win, or that it is practically impossible to win. 

It is crucial, however, not to take this general proposition as literally what manifest reality consists in. It is just a model. Take a metaphor: A man may model for an artist. The artist’s drawing of this man is not the same as the man himself. The drawing is made up of paper and ink, whereas the man is a person of flesh and blood. Likewise, while we can talk about manifest reality in terms of propositions, manifest reality isn’t itself made up of propositions. It’s rather made up of something else, which I haven’t yet adequately addressed. This is a large undertaking on its own, and I hope to continue on with it in future blogposts.

An objection

One might balk at my positing this new concept, manifest reality. This is unparsimonious. Belief is all that’s needed for explaining our experiences and behavior. One might think that Fyodor doesn’t actually believe that it’s practically impossible for him to win the lottery, which explains why he gets so excited and compulsive. 

Distinguish between probabilities we arrive at through reading and research, on the one hand, and probabilities we arrive at through first-hand experience, or brute trial and error, on the other hand. One might think that there’s nothing unusual going on in Fyodor’s and Charlotte’s cases. It’s just that they don’t actually believe in the probabilities they’ve learned, because they’ve only read textbooks to arrive at this knowledge. So I’ve misrepresented their cases by claiming that they believe these probabilities. In contrast, if they had learned about these probabilities through first-hand experience—if the world itself hit them again and again with the relevant information, and so their mental models of the world updated correspondingly—they would really believe in the probabilities. 

While Fyodor can mentally rehearse the words in his head, that "it’s practically impossible to win,” this mental rehearsal is a type of imagining or inner speech, which doesn’t entail belief. We can talk about anything we want; we talk about vampires and elves, without believing in these one bit. So by this explanation, there is no reason to posit some psychological entity like “manifest reality.” Everything that had seemed puzzling can be explained by the distinction between actual belief and apparent belief which is actually imagination under disguise.

My response

This explanation will not do. Fyodor sincerely endorses as true that he has 1 in 14 millionth of a chance of winning. This is belief. The idea that there could be different kinds of belief, on the basis of different ways of arriving there (e.g., through reading vs. first-hand experience) has merit. But calling them both belief is unhelpful. Belief is defined in relation to truth. Whatever it is which Fyodor senses as real is something which he could attempt to represent in propositional thought (e.g., “it’s likely I will win”), and he would reject such propositions as false. It is not belief. But it spurs his excitement and compulsive behavior.

This is why it’s worthwhile to erect a concept like manifest reality, or the collection of what we sense to be real. This doesn’t violate a principle of parsimony, but we’re forced into this position given the facts of our experience. 

Lessons for everyday life

There are many real-life cases in which we believe that something is impossible, and yet that thing operates as real and unleashes havoc upon us—as if it were possible, or even straightforwardly actual, contrary to our belief. Consider this sampling of everyday cases, which share the structure of Fyodor’s and Charlotte’s cases. Fred was raised in a devoutly Christian household which bans premarital sex. As an adult, he has become an atheist. Yet, he feels guilt whenever he has premarital sex. A child Dora is fearful of monsters under her bed. She trusts her parents, who convince her that it’s impossible for any monster to exist. So she believes that it’s impossible for there to be a monster under her bed, and yet she still senses a lurking presence and trembles in fear. Or, consider how we’re raised to believe that it’s impossible for a person to be dumber or poorer simply be virtue of their skin color. Yet we display behaviors of “unconscious racism” or “implicit bias,” which indicates that we sense as real their inferiority, contrary to our belief (and Reality, beyond whatever we sense as real).

The sundering between manifest reality and belief also explains akrasia, or weakness of the will. For example, we’re raised under a consumerist society. We’ve done research so that we believe that it purchasing items made by children in oversea factories is undesirable. Yet when we sees a nice gadget for sale, we feel the compulsion to put it in our cart and consider purchasing it. Or consider we believe that failing to do laundry is undesirable; that binge watching television when a deadline is coming up is undesirable; and so on. Akrasia may be taken as a variety of the case in which belief in the impossibility of something leaves no dent upon that thing’s manifest reality. Charlotte believes that it’s impossible for the spider to be dangerous, and we believe that it’s impossible for binging television to be good for us, and yet our behaviors are not impacted by this belief. Our behaviors are rather driven by an unconscious manifest reality of the danger of the spider, or of the goodness of binging. 

Traditionally, akrasia is seen as paradoxical in philosophy. The ease by which such examples may be proliferated should be taken as a sign that something has gone wrong with our understanding of akrasia. Reason obeys the law of non-contradiction. We should find a way to understand akrasia that avoids positing transparently contradictory beliefs. My concept of manifest reality does just this.

Where does our manifest reality come from?

Given that what we sense as real determines our emotional and behavioral response, as well as how our mental models of the world get updated, now we may ask: Why is it that certain things have such an emotional grip over us? For example, why does seeing the opportunity to buy a lottery ticket trigger such intense excitement in Fyodor? A full explanation must be contextual, idiosyncratic to a particular case under consideration. Nevertheless, there are general forms of explanation, or general variables for making sense of this, to be identified. Here are some preliminary variables

First, humans, as animals, are evolved to get strongly emotionally activated by certain types of stimuli more than others, and to have this emotional activation more likely be of certain individual emotions than others. For example, we are likely to get fearful of snakes and cockroaches; and fear is easily extended to anything that seems to threaten our existence. We are also likely to feel drawn towards things that benefit our existence, like acquiring wealth and goods, or having sex and eating.

Second, humans, unlike other animals, can have a very diverse array of interests and desires; we can come to experience a certain fear, like an impending deadline, as in effect having the same value for our existence as something that’d threaten our biological survival, like a tiger. Likewise, we can come to experience a certain desire, like watching television, as having in effect the same overall value for our existence as something that’d aid our biological survival, like retreating from a dangerous situation.

Third, there are cultural, economic, and political variables which explain why one person ends up having a certain fear with as much forcefulness as fear of a threat to one’s biological survival, while another person does not. There are certain cultures where spider phobias are virtually absent. Likewise, these cultural variables would explain why one person ends up having a certain desire with as much forcefulness as desire for some good to one’s biological survival, while another person does not. Not all people across eras have been driven by the inexhaustible desire to scroll through one’s phone, or to purchase excess items, which are not related to basic vitality. These cultural, political, and economic variables impact how our parents raise us and how individuals in our developmental environment, like peers and teachers, treat us. These family or developmental variables are also crucial for a full explanation of why we come to be especially emotionally reactive to certain stimuli, and thereby come to sense certain things as real or immanent, even if these are obviously unreal or improbable to us by belief.

To sum up:

There is a need to posit some explanatory entity like “manifest reality.” If we rely only on “belief,” we end up with paradoxes.

Manifest reality may be loosely defined as containing whatever we sense as real. It is unconscious and ambiguous It triggers our emotion and behavior. 

Why we sense as real certain things rather than others can be explained by at least three variables: (1) Biological constraints, (2) Past experiences of having this biological energy channeled or “sublimated” under certain forms (e.g., lottery tickets or spiders) which are not directly related to biological survival, and (3) The cultural, political, and economic constraints that explain how we become capable of having such experiences that “sublimate” biological drives.

Questions left open:

What is the best way for modeling the content of manifest reality, given that the content itself is not propositional? I’ve introduced here the constraint that we should model it in terms of propositions which do not contradict one’s beliefs. Often, this means that we should model it in terms of propositions that are more general than our specific and complex beliefs. But there is much more to be said here. In previous posts, I’ve shown that the fabric of manifest reality is highly dynamic and malleable. This means that it needs to be understood as unfolding over time, and achieved through our constantly sensing and responding to what we’ve sensed as real. That in turn means that our agency and freedom is critically a co-author of manifest reality, alongside with the co-author of the world itself, independent of how it is manifested in experience. There are top-down and bottom-up constraints upon manifest reality.

What is the relationship between beliefs that stand contrary to what we sense as real, on the one hand, and that which we make-believe or fantasize about, on the other hand? When I make-believe that the dog in the park is actually a unicorn, this is an active psychological event. It’s a mental action. This implies that I absolutely cannot sense as real that the dog is actually a unicorn. A part of my manifest reality is that I’ve made this up. This is unlike Charlotte’s case, in which she didn’t make up that the spider is dangerous. It just showed up to her that way. She had no choice. There is more to be said here.

How does this discussion relate to cases in which we don’t seem emotional at all, but contemplate something that involves possibility or uncertainty? For example, I might wonder whether my partner will go on a run with me this weekend. I might wonder whether the Big Bang theory is true. Do the things I wonder about here (e.g., a future event, an event potentially happening now, an event in the deep past) show up to me as real, or as unreal/make-believe? Or is there another category regarding the experiential quality of something’s reality that such cases reflect, a category that can’t be neatly reduced to one of the two of this binary between manifest reality and unreality?

Relevant literature & further reading:

Bekoff, Marc. “Social Play in Coyotes, Wolves, and Dogs.” BioScience 24, no. 4 (1974): 225–30. https://doi.org/10.2307/1296803.

Deweese-Boyd, Ian. “Self-Deception.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2021. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2021. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/self-deception/.

Frijda, Nico H. The Laws of Emotion. Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007.

Harris, Paul L. The Work of the Imagination. Wiley-Blackwell, 2000.

LeDoux, Joseph E. “Emotion, Memory and the Brain.” Scientific American 270, no. 6 (1994): 50–57.

Reddy, Vasudevi, and Gina Mireault. “Teasing and Clowning in Infancy.” Current Biology 25, no. 1 (January 5, 2015): R20–23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.09.021.

Sorce, James F., Robert N. Emde, Joseph J. Campos, and Mary D. Klinnert. “Maternal Emotional Signaling: Its Effect on the Visual Cliff Behavior of 1-Year-Olds.” Developmental Psychology 21, no. 1 (1985): 195–200. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.21.1.195.

[thesereveries]

A love letter to writing

I mentioned in my previous philosophy post this important question: How can we better regulate emotion? Changing the trajectory that a bare affect takes, in its development into a particular emotion over another, is not just a matter of changing how you feel inside. What's at stake is how you "sculpt" manifest reality (i.e., which particular objects and situations, rather than others, show up as part of the reality you see around you).

In this post, I'd like to explore the role that writing can have in sculpting manifest reality, as well as confess up to how much I love writing. Writing is a basic capability made possible by the human condition—just as having a body is made possible by our condition, so that we can pick things up, move things around, and touch one another. I love how writing, this capability, is given to us just by being human, and I love what it brings to our lives.

(As a side-note: When people use ChatGPT, as a short-cut replacing writing for themselves, we may wonder whether this is good or bad. This question is part of the motivation behind this post. I want to think through exactly what is lost from one's life, when one offloads the task of writing to somebody else or an AI.)

I feel most alive when I write. Ideas spill forth from my fingertips. It is magic. It is creation, discovery, and intimacy, all at once. (The only other activity that rivals writing, for me, is being together with people I love. There, the same kind of creation, discovery, and intimacy happens, a thought I'll return to below). What explains this magic of writing, and does its effects linger beyond the moments in which writing happens, or enter manifest reality for the long-term?

I had a realization back as an undergraduate. At the time, I was on medical leave. I was rediscovering my relationship to the world via doing philosophy and writing, day by day. The realization begins with the fact that the possible ways we may move, at this present moment, are governed by the general circumstances we face at this moment. We are determined by our circumstances. This is no shocker. The responsibilities and tasks that call for our attention, the threats and uncertainties that tense our bodies for preparation, etc.—all of this places constraints on what we will see, think, feel, and do.

But in turn, we can determine these circumstances, by exerting our will or agency. Thoughts and imaginings, which we create, can occupy the role of external circumstances. By choosing our thoughts and imaginings, we in effect choose the directions into which our possibilities are constrained.

My realization was that writing is perhaps the most profound way we can fully determine our possibilities of being. When you are immersed in writing, your attention is overtaken by all the objects, situations, and ideas that you are writing about. These things you write about serve the role of external circumstances, directing what you think, feel, and do next. When you are determined by what you are writing about, this amounts to directing what you write next. That next moment of writing, in turn, provides new objects, situations, and ideas. These serve as further circumstances, determining the possibilities of your being, or directing you into certain paths of thought, feeling, and action.

And so the feedback loop, this dynamical cycling between the world and the self, goes on. Only when you write, the world that comes into being is totally created by you. This contrasts all other moments of being alive, where you face circumstances that were not made by you, and these circumstances direct you "from the outside." You don't write forth the presence of the sky, or its blue color; or, your hunger or childhood. But while writing, you create everything that is "external" to you and directing your being.

This also differs from reading, watching videos, or engaging in any other "virtual" realm. When we do these, we don't create that which is unfolding before our eyes. The external circumstances, here, that direct us are "from the outside," just as the physical world is. The difference between the natural world and these virtual or artistic realms is that the latter are created by other people. If artwork, these realms are made with incredible care and purposiveness. This gives our engagement with artwork a role that's as profound as that of writing ourselves, although it is different. (I'll examine our engagement with artwork in a future post.)

Also writing differs from painting, or making art of some non-linguistic medium. Writing is nevertheless closely related to these, if not even continuous regarding certain aspects. I like to paint in my free time. When I paint, the visual form flowing from my hand serves as my external circumstances, which is determining my possibilities. But here, I don't stand within a linguistic mode. Rather, I am full of feeling and curiosity, which is not about anything in particular. That which is determining me, when I paint, is more sensory- or feeling-based, like biting into a ripe peach and feeling the sweetness suffuse. Or watching sunlight dapple through tree leaves and skip across your skin. These sensations fill us with feeling, but are not about anything else, out there in the world.

The power of language use, as in writing, is that it can deliver particular objects, situations, and ideas, from out there in the world. Language is like a microscope, telescope, or periscope. It brings us into contact with otherwise spatially or temporally distant parts of the world, or abstract parts that usually cannot be felt. When standing within a linguistic mode, our desires peek up and turn towards such parts of the world. The external circumstance that determine our possibilities, when we are writing, consist in such meaningful parts of the world—rather than in bare sensations, as when we are painting, dancing, or making music.

This power of writing, I've just described, may suggest something disturbing. That you create the world that "creates" or determines you, in turn—this may bring to mind the image of a snake eating its own tail. It stirs up ideas of insularity, self-absorption, or even solipsism. But these ideas do not, in fact, follow. In writing, we are suspended up and away from the reality surrounding us. Our attention is freed up. We have the space and clarity to access a wider array of ideas, desires, and perspectives, in the realm of writing. When we are constantly hit by the responsibilities and demands of daily life, we simply don't have the bandwidth to notice, let alone choose, perspectives that are far away from the present ones, consuming us.

So in writing, we have the freedom to notice and adopt perspectives that differ from our own. Your consciousness is like a medium, into which different perspectives, of all the people and ideas you've encountered in your life, can wander. So when you write, and create the circumstances that in turn create your being, this is not an insular feedback loop. Other people's voices and ideas enter your bloodstream, and are partly responsible for which circumstances you create.

This metaphor of other people's voices swirling in your head is limited, however. It's not that there's literally another person, whose perspective becomes yours, when you write. Rather, a very complex combination arises from the treasure trove of your past encounters with other people. Stored in your consciousness are everything from outlines of perspectives, fleshed-out ideas from particular perspectives, random ideas you've barely understood, and important ideas that you've developed cherished. There are many varieties of things that relate to "the perspectives of others" that are found in your consciousness. When you write, these all collide and combine. Moreover, your own will or agency is always the medium, or to use another metaphor, the glass of the window, through which any of these components of perspectives are viewed. Your agency is not just one element among others that combine; it resides at a higher level, like the glass of the window, which "colors" all the things that are viewed through the glass.

So in writing, you have the most freedom to access diverse perspectives. You can let these in, to inform what you care about. A dissolved, expanded, or impersonal "self" arises from your being, when you write.

It is curious to note the difference between talking to ourselves, in thought or speech, on the one hand, and writing, on the other hand. Thought is limp. When I think about ideas, it's all a haze, as in contrast to when I write about these same ideas. Take an analogy: when you look at a landscape through your memory, this is far more limited than if you stepped into the landscape. Only when you're really there can you run through its grass and play with its insects and wildflowers. Thought, without writing, is like memory. Writing is like actually being there.

Why is thought so impoverished? Writing involves individual words, that can be arranged into extensive and exquisite buildings, via syntactical structure. Thought does not afford such creation; it is amorphous and murky. Writing, moreover, leaves its trail on the page. You can see where each turn of an idea occurred, and how these turns all relate to one another. You attain a razor-sharp, bird's eye view, of all details of an idea at hand. Thought is not like this. Ideas are constantly lost and emptied out, when we're thinking, because memory can only hold so many items at a time, and there's no external reinforcements to supplement memory.

This is not to say, however, that there's no proper place for thought. At early stages in exploring an idea, it is good to restrain the idea to the realm of thought. Committing to words too early can take you down paths that turn out to be misguided, and it is difficult to backtrack. It is difficult to forget what you've experienced, and regain a budding idea, its pure form, full of untarnished potential.

What about when we speak to ourselves, using words and syntactical structure? Does this possess the power of writing? It doesn't in my experience, although this might not be universal. When I speak to myself in words, ideas fade out of memory, just as they do in thought. So I cannot keep in sight the full idea, the lay of the land, when I speak to myself. Moreover—and perhaps more profoundly and puzzlingly—when I speak to myself, I do not find myself in a state of intimacy, as I do when I write. This intimacy that pervades me, when I write, is similar to the intimacy of being with a friend or lover.

Here, I'm at the limits of my understanding. I don't know why this intimacy is built into the writing experience. A guess is that, to draw on an earlier idea, when I write, the voice that takes hold of me is not exactly my own, if I define "my own voice" in terms of who I feel myself to be when I go about daily life. A different self emerges in writing, one which is dissolved, expanded, and impersonal. Maybe I feel this interpersonal intimacy when writing because I am "seen" by these perspectives of people other than myself, whose voices entwine and emerge forth, under the guise of my agency. This is the oceanic "oneness with the other," whenever I write, and am both seen and created by all of these people.

Finally, I'd like to return to the connection between writing and sculpting manifest reality (which amounts to regulating emotion.) Roughly put, there are two kinds of writing: we can write with the aim of representing and exploring reality ("nonfiction"), or we can write to make things up ("fiction" or "make-believe".) Each kind has a distinctive power. Understanding the power of writing fiction requires that I explain topics that are unrelated to writing itself, namely the relationship between make-believe and consciousness. So I'll save this discussion for a future post. It'll turn out that making things up can transform our manifest reality in ways that speaking or writing sincerely cannot. Being in pretense can be more powerful than being realistic, when it comes to re-sculpting the reality we see, as counterintuitive as that sounds.

For now, let's look at the power of writing earnestly. When we write about reality, this puts us in touch with the parts of reality that we're writing about. Our bodily affect and emotion can be triggered by those parts of reality, as opposed to the parts of daily life that have preoccupied us, prior to writing. For example, I worry over whether I've exercised enough this week, when I missed my usual jog. I tell myself, in inner thought, that this is irrational; I can return to my routine next week, and this deviation will make no difference in the long run. But the fearful affect remains sticky, distracting me from my projects. So I turn away from merely thinking. I go to my laptop and begin to write. In writing, I make pristine the reasons why I feel upset. I show to myself why these reasons are ill-founded, and I raise the facts that imply that all is well. The act of writing changes my affect and emotion, and thus re-sculpts my manifest reality. Previously, the reality I saw contained that something has gone wrong. Now, this reality is freed of that, and undisturbed, I may now go forth and pursue my projects.

Why can writing have this power, where thought cannot? This is explained by ideas mentioned earlier. In writing, we most completely detach ourselves from the world of daily life; and free of the demands of daily life, we can luxuriate in this newfound, open space, and notice more diverse perspectives and ideas. This means that we're more likely to be able to access parts of reality that can undermine the previous reasons for having a certain emotion. We have more resources, in writing rather than in thought, that can let us dismantle previous parts of manifest reality, so we can replace these with more truthful parts.

Moreover, in writing, we have access to a wider array of perspectives or voices. It is more likely that we'll hit upon a voice that is authoritative, that our bodily affect will heed to. In thought, there is just your own voice, and perhaps a few others that are in your immediate vicinity of interest. These few voices may fail to be authoritative; when they speak, your affect is not convinced, and continues running amok. These options afforded by thought are impoverished, compared to those afforded by the act of writing.

What do I mean, when I say that in writing, other people's voices may become your own? How literally do I mean that? As explained earlier, it is not literal: rarely do particular people's perspectives enter our own spontaneously. That happens only if we deliberately aim to emphasize with a particular other, or to write from their perspective. But there is something more subtle that goes on in writing, which is very significant. There are overall "tones" of people's voices, which may enter our voice in writing. Such "tones" may include how much gravity or authority a voice has; or alternatively, how distant or meager it sounds. This fact is connected to that not all attempts at regulating our emotions, by reasoning with ourselves, will succeed. Whether it does can largely hinge upon whether we have been close with people who regard us highly, or who love us, and whether we trust these people, or take them as having gravity or authority. It is the voices of people who've been integral in our lives that most readily become our own, when we write. It they were abusive or untrustworthy, it is difficult to be able to change our manifest reality in ways that align with our values, even when we write. But this issue takes us to philosophical issues that goes beyond the scope here. I will explore this some other time.

To sum up:

We can create the external circumstances, which in turn, create our possible thoughts, feelings, and actions, when we write.

Writing gives us powerful distance from daily life, so that we are freed to access a wider range of interests, ideas, and perspectives.

Writing has syntactical structure and conceptual possibilities, which surpass those of thought. Writing overcomes the limitations of memory, under which thought is subjected.

Lingering questions:

What does writing fiction or make-believe do to us, as opposed to writing in earnest?

What happens to us, when we read someone else's work (or engage with other artistic media), as opposed to when we write for ourselves?

What are these "voices" that we open ourselves to, when we write? Where do they come from, and what power do they have over our manifest reality?

Literature that inspired these ideas:

Alderson-Day, Ben, and Charles Fernyhough. “Inner Speech: Development, Cognitive Functions, Phenomenology, and Neurobiology.” Psychological Bulletin 141, no. 5 (September 2015): 931–65. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000021.

Clark, Andy. “Language, Embodiment, and the Cognitive Niche.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10, no. 8 (August 2006): 370–74. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.06.012.

———. “Word, Niche and Super-Niche: How Language Makes Minds Matter More.” THEORIA. Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de La Ciencia 20, no. 3 (2005): 255–68.

Fernyhough, Charles. Vygotsky, Luria, and the Social Brain. Oxford University Press, 2010. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195327694.001.0001/acprof-9780195327694-chapter-3.

Garfield, Jay L. Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

O’Madagain, Cathal, and Michael Tomasello. “Joint Attention to Mental Content and the Social Origin of Reasoning.” Synthese 198, no. 5 (May 2021): 4057–78. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02327-1.

Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

Tomasello, Michael, and Hannes Rakoczy. “What Makes Human Cognition Unique? From Individual to Shared to Collective Intentionality.” Mind and Language 18, no. 2 (April 2003): 121–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0017.00217.

[thesereveries]

Nymphomanic (2013), Lars von Trier

This film has a special place in my heart, which makes it difficult to talk about. That the film is filled with pornographic scenes and is highly controversial makes it even more difficult to talk about. But this film's impact upon me is so unusual that I will nevertheless give a go at writing about it.

I've watched it three or four times at this point. Upon my first viewing, I was so disturbed by the pornography that I skipped portions of it, and barely attended to the film itself. I nevertheless felt a striking kinship with the film, that it spoke about the secrets of my life; this bewildered me, since there are no culturally legible addictions, let alone a sex addition, that I can see in my life. Why this kinship then?

Only upon the second viewing did I become desensitized to the pornographic aspect of the film, so that I could attend to its narrative and aesthetic details. Here are the ways it moved me. In the plot, we follow Joe from her childhood to adulthood, which she recounts in a frame story; she has been found bruised and bloodied in the street by an elderly man, Seligman, who takes her to his home and nurses her back to health. Seligman is shocked by her state and is keen to hear about her life; and it seems that she is just as keen to disclose it. She has never talked to anyone about her life narrative before, and her life is full of guilt and pain.

This frame story thus is suggestive of the archetypal situation of confession, where someone who is guilty speaks to someone whom is open, non-judgmental, and good. We quickly learn that Seligman is a bachelor, lives a quiet life, and finds pleasure in pursuits of the intellect and arts, which ticks off the boxes for filling the "priest"-like role. We can imagine that Joe has been in despair regarding the chaos and sin of her life, and she hopes that Seligman may give her life meaning, or certainty, either of her redemption or ultimate condemnation, by virtue of his act of hearing her life story—we audience members of the film are also in Seligman's position. Joe places her life before us, as much as she does before Seligman.

Seligman is a good candidate for this role. Unexperienced in sexual affairs, he lacks experience that would make him prone to evaluating Joe's life in light of cultural narratives and norms regarding sex. Instead, he can evaluate her life on the basis of her pure intentions and ways of being, stripped from the surface layer of the detail of being a sex addict. This gives us an inlet into seeing her life from Seligman's perspective, or from what we might imagine his perspective to consist in.

The power of confessing to such an "unbiased" listener is immense. At various points throughout the film, Joe is astounded when Seligman doesn't condemn her, after she shares a particularly atrocious deed she's committed. She furiously self-condemns, to only elicit a wholly other sort of response from Seligman. He insists that she is not to be blamed. Even more, some sexual, inhumane, or cruel act of hers may be mapped onto features of some work in religion, art, or intellectual achievements of human history. For example, when Joe speaks of the clothing she wore as a teenager to lure men into having sex with her, Seligman connects this up with the technique of "nymphing" in fly fishing, which he explains is a special art that humans have perfected, and which allows us to be immersed in the beauty of nature. When Joe recounts her first orgasm as a child, Seligman connects this to a religious scene from the Bible. When Joe speaks of three men that she especially enjoyed having sex with during a period of her adult life, and describes the differences between their ways of approaching her, Seligman maps this onto the three "voices" found in his favorite of Bach's fugues, which he believes is the achievement of perfection in polyphony music.

Sometimes these connections are downright hilarious; they are purposefully over-the-top, and reflect both Seligman's naivete and the absurdity of the narrative. But these connections always have an edge of sincerity, and push us over to wonder: What is the relationship between forms of bodily or sexual pleasure and aesthetic pleasure, had towards the arts and intellectual pursuits? The film does not force upon us an answer as crass as that this is a matter of sublimation (as a Freudian perspective would have it.) Rather, the film leaves the question open. It made me think that bodily and sexual pleasures may be experienced in ways that elevate them to the position of high, aesthetic pleasure. Joe's reckless pursuit of sexual pleasure may also be understood as her overflowing with openness and desire for life—some of the most intense and profound experiences of life are found in sexual encounters, and sex is literally the origin of life. Intellectual and artistic pursuits are likewise manifestations of openness and desire for life; scholars submit themselves to nature, to understand it, and artists devote themselves to examining human life, to reveal new meanings within it.

This also can get us to think, more broadly, about the power of our being beheld by another person. Others can see new aspects of our pasts, making new meanings of our lives. When we are perceived by them, their insight transforms our lives, like how artists may renew old materials. This possibility, of renewal or redemption, is found in interpersonal experiences (whose epitome is confession, but also has many everyday varieties) as much as it is found in the practice of making artwork and engaging with it. Just as Seligman provides a way for Joe to transform her life, our viewing of this film provides a way for us to transform our lives.

There's another theme I'd like to think through: the meaning of addiction. Joe may be seen as a slave to her thirst for sexual pleasure. This thirst is so tremendous that, against her will, she forgoes all other responsibilities and pursuits that are necessary for having a fulfilling life. She cannot maintain friendships, or any relationship founded on recognition and concern for that matter, because of this addiction. With men, she is always on the lookout for sexual opportunities, so she can't see them as individuals, which is a precondition for friendship. Women are fearful and envious of her, given her sexual power, so she can't make friends with women either. The outcome is that Joe is socially isolated. She cannot escape her loneliness. Perhaps this makes her all the more addicted to sex, as a temporary or illusory escape; it is a vicious cycle.

The film shows how addiction, generally, can lead to such social isolation. It is not that Joe desires to abuse people; this is a consequence of her addiction. But this doesn't mean that she's not responsible for her wrongdoings. Her life turns out horribly; the film leaves us in a murky state, where we both feel sorrowful for her, but also think that she deserves the awful turns of events in her life, since these are only predictable consequences, given her choices.

To bring up the thread of the earlier thought: Seligman's listening to Joe's life opens forth a new meaning to her addiction. She's not just a prisoner of her body. She may be seen as an agent who endorses the sexual desires of her body, and actively satisfies these. From this angle, Joe is very powerful. Many men and women are under her thumb. But there is no way to work around the tragedy of her loneliness. Regardless of whether Joe is seen as powerfully embodied or as a prisoner of her body, she is incredibly lonely. There is no other way of seeing this loneliness; it is intrinsically horrible. So the film has an interesting evaluation of addiction. Our ethical relations to each other matters most; the highest value in life is love and care. An addiction or perversion is bad only insofar as it incapacitates us from love.

I will not spoil the ending, but the event there is likewise highly ambiguous in meaning; Joe may be seen as immensely powerful, or a desolate, pathetic victim. Another issue that is too complicated for me to dive into here: the relationship between gender and sex. There's a lot to think about, regarding how the fact that Joe is a woman has both constrained her life and made possible certain aspects of her life. How would her life have turned out, if she were a man? Is it possible for people categorized as women, and those categorized as men, to experience nymphomania in the same way? What are the implications of the fact that nymphomania is particularly gendered, as compared to other addictions?

This film is incredibly beautiful in its composition and colors, in portraying nature, sunlight, people, and life. The aesthetic pleasure from this beauty is mixed in with the uneasy bodily pleasure we viewers might feel, from the pornography of the film. Undergoing this, as viewers of the film, is interesting; this personal experience mirrors the theme of the film, of questioning the relationship between high art or intellectual pursuits, on the one hand, and sexual pursuits, on the other. Not only may this elevate our embodied lives, by having us see it as art, but this also bites at high art. What is the value of art? Not all of it is sincere and good, to say the least. While many people think that this film is neither sincere nor good, I do, however, and would encourage skeptics to try engaging with it.

It is all too common to respond to guilt and shame regarding bodily and sexual pleasures by saying that we should own it and be proud of it. Moreover, merely saying and thinking something is different from having one's life be changed according to what one thinks. This film provides a more nuanced path forward. There are many ways one can go about relating to bodily and sexual pleasures; some can be unethical or unthinking, and others, which relate it to artwork and intellectual work, can be more interesting or ethical. Moreover, this film doesn't merely give us these ideas to think about. Art in general gives us embodied experiences, of the imagined realms represented; undergoing these experiences is more powerful than merely thinking about ideas.

[thesereveries]

Affect and emotion

Here is the first of a series of posts, that'll take us into understanding how the mind works. A good starting point is to understand emotion. Why is that? Emotion can be thought of as our "lizard brain," or the animalistic core around which our humanity is set. Our more sophisticated faculties, like reason, imagination, and language use, are built on top of emotion. What we can possibly do with language and reason is held at the mercy of the workings of emotion, just as the possible architectural moves of a building project is held at the mercy of the foundation and geological features of the ground, in which the building is set. In order to properly understand how any part of the mind works, it is key to first understand this foundational part, the emotional mind.

Nonhuman animals and prelinguistic human infants have emotions. A dog howls, and a baby cries. These creatures are conscious of the world. We might even say they cognize the world, insofar as they perceive not brute sensory data, but they register objects as having certain meanings. A lurking shadow is threatening to a dog or a baby, and it makes either of them cry. We typically think that meaning comes from language; we human adults use language to describe and cognize the world. But I will show that emotion is the most primitive, foundational engine of meaning, which populates the reality that a creature sees. Understanding this emotional meaning will be key for understanding language- or reason-based meaning that we human adults are capable of creating and manipulating. Our possibilities of freedom and creation, of negotiating with the cultural norms and nature that we're born into, arise from the tension between emotional and language-based meaning, as we will see over the series of upcoming posts.

To start off, let me propose my model for understanding emotion. Emotion and affect can be cleanly distinguished. They are as different as someone's hand's flopping about, as a mere bodily motion, from their intention to say goodbye, which fuels the motion. Here's a first go:

Emotion = Affect + Agency

Affect may be understood as all your bodily sensations swarming about at a given moment. Say you're going on a walk. Suddenly, a shadow looms over your path. Your heart accelerates, and hands sweat. The feeling of your beating heart and sweating hands may be understood as the affect of this first moment. Then, you are compelled to look behind you, to see who or what is casting this shadow. You see that it is a good friend, sneaking up on you. The first moment is replaced by a second moment. Your heart calms down, and you join in with the laughter. Now, your bodily sensations include a calm heart beat, a pleasant warmth, and other sensations associated with being humored and happy. These sensations may be understood as a new affect, which is embedded under the overall emotion of being humored or happy.

It may be tempting to describe your affect in the first moment as embedded under the emotion of fear. You suspected that something bad might happen, that something threatening might be standing behind you, which casts this shadow. Whether or not it is appropriate to say that you were indeed fearful at this first moment is tricky. It might even be arbitrary, to ask this question. The answer depends upon whether we want to say that you consciously registered that there was a threat in your surrounds. Depending upon the situation, you might have really believed there was a threat; but, you might not have, and rather been only in a neutral position regarding that matter. Instead, all you had were the sensations of your thumping heart and sweating hands, as well as the impulse to turn around and see what's there. If that was all that was going on in your consciousness, at that first moment, there was no emotion yet. Instead, there was simply affect present, waiting to develop into emotion, once you figure out what's going on.

This leads into what I mean by "agency" in the schema "Emotion = Affect + Agency." Once you're struck by an affect, or once your body is overtaken by certain sensations, you are compelled to figure out why you're feeling this way. (Why is that? This would take us down a rabbit hole, and will be the subject of a future post.) To figure out what's going on, you'll undertake certain actions: You'll look for possible sources of this feeling/affect, and you'll interpret what you see as comprising a certain situation, fixed by a certain narrative. This interpretation element is particularly interesting. In the example above, once you look behind and see your friend, it looks like there is no moment of pause at which you can kick back and interpret what's going on. Rather, in your experience, it seems that you're just faced by the brute matter of fact that your friend is there.

But the fact that you respond with being humored and delighted indicates that you have read more into the situation, than just that your friend is there. You must also have read into the situation that your friend has good intentions, that perhaps this is an expression of your friend's fondness for you, of your closeness, etc. All of this explains why you feel delighted, rather than upset. In contrast, let's imagine the situation differently: the friend that appeared behind you wasn't a good one, but rather a weird person with whom you're loosely acquainted. In that case, your fear-like affect from the first moment might transform not into delight, but rather into anger or bewilderment. You can't tell why he snuck up on you, you might feel slighted, that your privacy has been violated.

In other words, the emotions that we end up in, after we start off at a moment of affect, are tell-tale signs, for what our minds must be "reading into" reality. Freud said that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. But we can stay at a more local level, and moreover, travel to a destination that's more important. Emotions are part of everyday experience, and they are the royal road to revealing what we must be assuming or taking to be part of reality. If perception gives us what we take is physically part of reality (e.g., the existence, colors, and shapes of concrete objects), emotion gives us what we take is part of reality, which is not physical in character, but rather is meaning-based in character. We constantly assume that certain backstories hold of the situations we encounter, that certain intentions are behind a person's behavior, that certain consequences are likely to follow, given an incident, etc.

It can be difficult to know what we're assuming is real on these fronts. Sometimes, it is unpleasant to face up to what we take to be real; we might be bigoted or pathetic, or what's out there is just really scary or depressing. Sometimes, what we take to be real is just so complex or abstract, and it's practically ineffable. So it can be difficult to identify what our emotions are; but emotions will still be our starting points for unraveling what we're reading into reality.

Another way of putting this: what shows up as real to us (what I'm calling "manifest reality") includes not just the physical presence of things, but also the presence of meanings of those things. Not any meaning we imagine forth will show up as real. If it was in fact your close friend who turned out to be the one standing behind you, and you in fact feel delighted, you may nevertheless try to imagine him as creepy (as a joke perhaps.) When you imagine your friend as being creepy, you don't actually start feeling anger or bewilderment; your state of happiness persists. This reflects that you can't manage to get this meaning of the situation that you imagine to fit into reality. This piece of imagining refuses to "click" with reality. It stays as a piece of mere imagination. (Compare this with another example: I may try to imagine that I'm actually a mermaid, but I can't actually get myself to believe this. If I did, I'd be quite excited and compelled to rethink my entire life. But this doesn't happen. Rather, I'm humored by imagining forth this make-believe.)

But sometimes our deliberate imaginings or thoughts can indeed "click" with reality; they end up transforming what is showing up as real. For example, maybe you have a crush on this friend. This compels you to wonder if his pranking you is an expression of his fondness for you, his flirtation. With this this in mind, you imagine that he has a crush on you; imagining this is pleasurable, because this is the outcome you desire. Once you imagine this forth, your emotion changes. It's no longer just happiness, but it's impassioned excitement, or even triumph. This emotion is a telltale sign that your sense of reality now includes the piece that your crush reciprocates his feelings. This piece of reality explains how you can be so intensely excited. If you didn't "read" this meaning into reality, you'd merely feel ordinary happiness at seeing your friend.

Let me add one more detail to this example, to tie this picture of agency together, as found in the schema "Emotion = Affect + Agency." Say that while you have a crush on this friend, you know that you shouldn't. Maybe you suspect that this crush could precipitate an affair, and you want to avoid that. With this motivation in place, you may challenge your initial piece of imagination, that your friend likes you back. You may tell yourself, or imagine forth, that in fact this friend's sneaking up on you is not flirtation. You remind yourself that your friend is a prankster in general, and does this to everybody. Once this imagining is in place, it "clicks" with reality—it is as if the content of your imagination now has slipped out from the mere realm of imagination, and inserts itself into very world you see around. Now, the intense excitement calms down. Your affect changes. You instead come to feel an emotion of sadness; it's a bummer he doesn't like you back. Then, in this calm state, lacking excitement, you think about how this effort you're putting in is a matter of responsibility. It's in your friend's interests, as well as your own. This thought, in turn, transforms your affect into an inner warmth, and you no longer feel sad, but rather satisfied or contented.

To sum up, here are the points illustrated by this example:

First, it is useful to distinguish between affect and emotion. This distinction serves as a reminder of how, even when we feel overcome by intense feelings, this feeling/affect could serve as telltale signs of various, different situations, going down in the world. The situation that we end up seeing as responsible for our feeling serves as the subject matter of our feeling, or what this feeling is all about. That determines how our feeling will develop, and what new bodily sensations will arise. That will, in turn, determine what emotion we ultimately find ourselves in, and which situations enter the reality we see.

Second, which situation we converge upon isn't hoisted upon us by the world alone. We have some say in which situation we identify, and thereby what emotion we end up in, and what shows up as real. Once our body is overtaken by a certain feeling, this typically triggers us to to look for certain things, which we intuit caused this feeling. (We may conduct this "search" by scanning the environment, retrieving facts in memory, or imagining future possibilities.) Usually, the gravity of habit and social norms direct this search. But we can intervene. We can willfully reorient our attention, by acts of deliberately imagining forth or reminding ourselves of our values, relevant facts, or what we hope to see in the future.

There are some metaphors traditionally used to make sense of how we can redirect the developmental trajectory of an affect into a certain emotion, and correspondingly, what we see as happening in reality (or straightforwardly put, emotion regulation). You are a rider upon an elephant. You can be more or less skillful in handling where the elephant goes, and what it does. The elephant, in this case, stands for the emotion, and I'd add that it also stands for whatever is showing up to you as part of reality. Emotion and manifest reality are two sides of the same coin. The world that appears to a subject partially depends upon the mental state of that subject. So any emotion comes with a state of the experienced world.

Another metaphor may be introduced, which adds crucial detail to the notion of skillfully handling an elephant (although this will mix metaphors). You can think of yourself as a politician, whose subjects are largely unthinking and bumbling around; they are driven by impulse and will settle for anything that satisfies their desires, or scratches their itches. You can be more or less skillful in your rhetoric, in convincing your subjects that some desire of theirs has indeed already been satisfied, by a certain policy you've established. Or, you may promise new policies, and bring them about. On this metaphor, the politician is the deliberate or voluntary mind—your own, inner voice and actions. The unthinking subjects, on this metaphor, stand for affect. Rhetoric stands for your attempts to regulate this affect. Changing the public's perception of a policy already in place stands for the emotion regulation attempt of reminding yourself of certain facts about your life. Promising new policies stands for the emotion regulation attempt of motivating yourself to undertake new actions, or to bring about changes in our situation.

This leaves open some crucial questions, which I'll address in future posts. For example:

What will make a piece of rhetoric more convincing or powerful? In other words, what predicts whether an attempt at regulating emotion, and changing what shows up as real in your surrounds, will be successful?

What explains why you find yourself overwhelmed with a certain feeling/affect, rather than another, when you face a certain object or situation? (Two people can respond to the same thing in very different ways; some people love to dance, and others find it terrifying, for example.)

When attempting to regulate emotion, how does undertaking bodily action to change the environment compare to adjusting your perspective on what's already happening, as two overall modes of regulation?

What are different strategies for deliberating bringing into the reality you see certain objects or situations, rather than others? In this post I focused on emotion regulation as such a strategy. But are there other primary strategies?

A teaser: Talking to people we trust, writing, and playing games of make-believe (which underlies our engaging with artwork, telling jokes, being ironic, playing video games, and more) are all key strategies. These might be understood as different "rhetorical strategies," on par with those of talking to yourself, reminding yourself of certain facts, or imagining certain future possibilities. It'll turn out that sharing your experiences with other people—our communication and communion—is perhaps the fundamental source of rhetorical power. Convincing yourself works insofar as it draws upon powers derived from other people who have convinced you. We "internalize" each other's voices.

Here's literature that has informed the views presented here:

Green, Mitchell S. Self-Expression. Oxford : New York: Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, 2007.

Harris, Paul L. Trusting What You’re Told: How Children Learn from Others. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.

Harris, Paul L., Emma Brown, Crispin Marriott, Semantha Whittall, and Sarah Harmer. “Monsters, Ghosts and Witches: Testing the Limits of the Fantasy-Reality Distinction in Young Children.” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 9, no. 1 (1991): 105–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-835X.1991.tb00865.x.

Scherer, Klaus R., and Agnes Moors. “The Emotion Process: Event Appraisal and Component Differentiation.” Annual Review of Psychology 70, no. 1 (2019): 719–45. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-122216-011854.

Walton, Kendall L. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990.

[thesereveries]

Introduction: Philosophy

Here, I'll embark on a new project. I'd like to write about philosophical ideas that I believe have therapeutic power. For the better or worse, I've taken my life's purpose to be a matter of advancing human understanding of how the mind works, so that we are enabled to better navigate it all. At any moment, we start off from within our minds. The mind is the door that lets in only certain objects and situations, to show up in our experiences. The mind determines which ideas will drive us, shaping each other's lives and the world.

What does it mean to better navigate this seas of the mind (to change metaphors)? One way to think about this is that much of our mind is mandatory and imposed. We, like seafarers, are at the mercy of the sea's waves and weather. The mind, in interaction with the world, will throw upon us certain situations, and deluge us in certain desires.

But this picture is incomplete. We aren't passive victims, before our minds. Let me add to the metaphor: Our situation is as if God were real. When we beg before God, sometimes this changes God's mind. Sometimes God listens and turns the weather around, making it possible for us to glimpse unexpected horizons and sail in new directions.

To put it literally: Our agency is always partially behind the making of the reality we see (which I call "manifest reality," distinct from reality as it stands unperceived.) Of course, we never have complete control over manifest reality. Our hands are just one contributor among the millions of causal forces that contribute to creating the present moment of our experience. The natural world, the forces of culture and history, the economics and politics of our day, the parents, friends, and enemies who shaped our childhoods—all of this contributes to manifest reality, or what we see around ourselves right now.

This deepens our understanding of how we can better navigate the mind. The question may be framed: How can we insert our creativity or will, amidst these millions of causal forces beyond us, to make the reality we see? There is much we must accept. But there is also much we can do. We'd be benefitted to know exactly what we can do, and exactly which fruits can be expected of our attempts. Or, to continue with the metaphor above, this project may be understood as: How can we most effectively appease God, so that God will transform this world in the ways that'll satisfy our needs or bring about our dreams?

I'm a philosophy doctoral student, currently writing my dissertation. My research springs from this motivation to draw a map of the mind, to help us in our navigation. Why am I on this blog? Academic philosophy forces one to think and write in ways that are inaccessible to the public (I think there is good reason for this, but that is a tangent I won't take up here.) The constraints of academic philosophy, moreover, force one to slow down, so that it can take years, or even decades, for an idea to be published. In contrast, I can draw up ideas quickly in the venue of this blog. I can also ensure that my drawings are accessible. I don't have much experience so far at writing for the public—and moreover, my ideas are still tentative—so everything found here will be works in progress. But maybe these ideas, in their early stages, can still be helpful. So I'll be sharing them.

[thesereveries]

The Whale (2022), Aronofsky

I'd like to attend to, and let unfold, a couple of themes/ideas of, as well as my personal reactions to, Aronofsky's film The Whale. First, as a side note: This is the second movie within the past few months I've cried from -- in contrast, for a good decade of my life, I've been unable to cry from any artwork, even movies that seem to be more directly on the nose regarding what seems to concern and matter to me. I wonder whether it's that I'm just seeing better movies now, or whether I've changed in ways that allows for more crying -- that is a separate issue to think about.

A major theme of the film is the significance of honesty and sincerity. The protagonist, the unnamed man (who we are invited to think of as "the Whale"), lauds honesty as a very important virtue. When he knows that he is going to die very soon, from his obesity, he tells his students (which he teaches virtually, in the absence of showing his face) that writing clearly or beautifully doesn't matter. All that matters is to tell the truth, to make clear what one really thinks and feels. We can imagine why honesty matters so much to him; he grew up in a conservative, religious community, is gay, and had to keep that hidden. Or, he even might've denied that in himself, or failed to notice it out of self-deception, for the sake of being capable of liking himself, and having self-respect, if his perspective had been formed by the religious values around him. Only when he finally entered his first relationship with another man did he experience actual happiness and love for the first time; he had never felt seen for who he was, and seen as beautiful, until this relationship. He likely understood this discovery as a matter of achieving honesty or sincerity to who he is; and so honesty is coupled with transcendence into happiness and love, in his eyes.

But he lacks all sincerity and honesty in a critical way. He pushes out of his mind that he is dying; he knows that he is dying, and in a way looks forward to it. But it is nevertheless terrifying, and even worse, he knows he is being irresponsible and leaving his daughter behind, alone in the world, through accepting his death. These terrifying and shame-inducing aspects of knowledge of his death lead him to hide evidence of his dying. For example, when he does an internet search for the significance of his blood pressure, and sees it indicates imminent death, he immediately shuts down his computer.

Moreover, he has never left his apartment for the past nine years. The immediate reason is that anyone who sees him immediately reacts with disgust. All his life, he has felt disgust towards himself, for being gay, and possibly he has been perceived as disgusting for that, before he became obese. Thus his sense of being perceived as disgusting possesses a particular power in his life; it makes him feel acutely despondent and horrible. But in effect, hiding himself like this is a dire form of dishonesty. Going unperceived, he never has to receive information regarding how unhealthy he is; the disgust others feel in reaction to his person is not unwarranted. This disgust reflects that something is perverted, wrong, or unhealthy. By going unperceived, he can live in the lie that he is fine, that he is okay.

I'd also like to think about the protagonist's friend and nurse, who we later discover is the sister of the man who was the protagonist's lover, and whose death marked the beginning of his progression into extreme obesity. This nurse reveals, near the end, that she never believed that people can save each other. She says this when questioned why she doesn't try to save her friend, the protagonist. This implies that she thinks that when people are self-destructive, this is rooted so deeply, or is fated, so that no one can stop them, even those who dearly love and care for them. She likely came to form this view from her inability to help or "save" her brother, the protagonist's deceased lover. I can imagine that it'd be especially tempting for her to form this view because it may serve to defend her image of herself -- she didn't fail, or she wasn't lacking. Her inability to save her brother is no fault of her own; it's rather the natural outcome of basic facts of how humans work.

This leads to another theme of the film: the different manifestations of love, and the roles that these can play. The protagonist genuinely perceives his daughter (who he abandoned nine years ago) as "amazing." He "loves" her insofar as he admires her so much, and sees such goodness in her. In contrast, the protagonist's ex-wife, the mother of his daughter, genuinely believes that the daughter is evil. The mother has lost hope in the daughter's possibilities, and accepts her as a fundamentally bad person. The mother might do this because she is generally a cynical person; moreover, she is an alcoholic. It's possible that being cynical allows her to stick with her bad ways, and not feel bad about them; the world just sucks generally, and so she's not any worse for it.

But the mother has been present in her daughter's life over all these years, doing all the things parents do. In contrast, the protagonist, the father, was absent. Maybe he is able to see her as "amazing" because he had the luxury of never having to do the hands-on work of raising her. It can be easy to see goodness in matters if one has an active imagination and never has to make significant interaction with the matter, so that that matter's inner nature never has to be revealed. So perhaps we should not be so horrified at the mother for thinking so lowly of her daughter, and giving up on her in a way.

The film leaves us wondering as a whole: Is it possible for people to save each other? Can love really be powerful enough as to save or transform a life? Clearly, the protagonist, before his lover committed suicide, experienced this power of love. For the first times in both of their lives, they were happy; they no longer felt disgusting and wanted to die all the time. But his lover did kill himself eventually. So this leaves the matter uncertain, of whether love really can be so powerful. Moreover, as the audience, we are left wondering what might happen to the daughter, after the protagonist dies from his obesity, in front of her very eyes, which is horrific. She is left to a mother who believes that she is evil. But before her father dies, he expresses just how much he admires and loves her. Can knowledge that someone saw this in her actually be efficacious as a positive force in her life? Given all that we know of these characters, I think we're left in a pretty pessimistic state about her.

There is one interaction between two characters, where one "saves" the other -- but strangely, this interaction is unintentional, and the intention was more likely to humiliate and destroy the other, rather than to save them. Namely, the daughter attempts to humiliate an evangelizing boy who reveals to her that he stole money from his church at home and ran away, and believes he is now disowned by them. The daughter secretly records his speech and takes photos of him smoking weed, and sends this to his family. They make contact with the boy, telling him that they love him; he is overjoyed and will return home. The daughter, in effect, saved him from a trajectories that could go to very dark places.

This seems to imply that revealing the truth, or the protagonist's favorite virtues of honesty and sincerity, might have this life-saving power. Maybe our love for one another cannot help us, but the truth can. This is speaking quite poetically. Obviously, while love portrayed pretty pessimistically in this film, it must be a case-by-case basis, regarding whether we can save each other by loving and caring for one another. Interestingly, however, the film does not involve examples where sincerity and honesty have negative effects, or are inert; it seems that whenever characters clarify misunderstandings, it is always a positive thing.

Now I'd like to go into my personal reactions to this film. I found myself crying frequently at the beginning of the film. No emotionally poignant events were happening. I was confused at why I was crying. I felt disgust at seeing this extremely obese man, but also there was something more than disgust; I just felt overwhelmed, in a way which I lack emotion words to describe. I tried to figure out why I was crying during the film and soon latched upon this explanation: I was seeing the object of my phobia and terror realized in concrete form. This has been the terror that has most dominated and shaped my life, that in the past has been the source of my greatest suffering, and that today explains who I am. This is the terror of losing control and becoming fat in such a way that people in general, humanity itself, finds me disgusting, and rejects me. I had a taste of this as a reality when I was 10 years old, when my two closest friends throughout childhood abruptly ended their friendships with me, for the reason that I am fat and ugly. I believe that, implicitly or unconsciously, I came to assume that being fat is the cause of my being unlikeable, and that I was indeed unlikeable. I came to assume the converse: the thinner I was, the more likeable I'd become. From that followed my anorexia.

I've never been obese. As a child, I was a bit overweight, but in the way that many children are, which is more often described as chubbiness. When I was at my lowest weight, that almost killed me, I still had the hallucination or delusion that I could become fat to the extent of eliciting automatic disgust in others who see me. I didn't have a visual image in mind of exactly how fat my body would have to be, to be disgusting in this way, but rather this delusion consisted in a basic proprioceptive state, where my body felt large and fat in a way that didn't imply exact or numerical dimensions. So seeing this film -- it was my first time I ever clearly saw this thing I was most terrified of, this thing that drove all of my self-starvation and obsessions and suffering. This thing was shown in a concrete form, in the form of the protagonist. And I could feel in myself the disgust I had towards his physical form, and see the disgust other characters have towards him.

It's hard to describe the exact emotion this evoked in me. It wasn't fear that I'd become like that; I've moved past the more extreme anorexia I had in the past. It wasn't vindication or triumph in that my fear was rational; obviously it was not, insofar as I was never at risk of becoming as fat as the protagonist. But it was an explanation, a justification, of my suffering, in a certain way; it is true that people who are extremely fat are disgusting. The few times I've binged and gained weight in my past - while I was not at risk of gaining weight to any unhealthy extent (I've never even gained enough to be at an average weight), it was nevertheless possible (logically, nomologically) that I could gain weight to become like this obese man. In some possible world, maybe that could happen, even if no close possible worlds could admit of this. My terror, this phobia, was perhaps grounded in this logical possibility.

This, of course, does not make my phobia rational; we should fear only that which is imminently possible, or that which we have good reason to think might occur. Moreover, we should respond to our fear by mitigating circumstances that would enable the feared outcome to happen, while also acting upon and maintaining all other conditions that are important for our well-being (this I did not do). But seeing the protagonist of this film, as a concrete realization of the object of my phobia, which I had never visualized or interacted with before - maybe the best way to describe my emotion is by offering an analogy. It was like hearing the full song of which one could remember only a few notes. It was also like physically getting on one's knees and looking under the bed, to see that there are no monsters, if one is a child who had believed or felt like there were monsters. So simultaneously, I felt the awe at suddenly being handed the full picture, of which I had only known a part all my life (and a part that has been so significant - it had shaped my life more than any other force perhaps), on the one hand; and on the other hand, I felt the certainty and relief that my fear is ungrounded, that I am a silly goose.

Here's another personal reaction I had to the movie: I was brought to seeing how lucky I am. I felt great relief and security. My dad has seen everything. He has seen all I've done, all that I've feared and obsessed with and wanted, at my the lowest points in my life. This is unlike the protagonist's situation; he was unseen for nine years, and that allowed him to become so disgusting and self-destructive. So I am safe, and will continue to be so, since now I do not do any of the things I had done, and into the future, would welcome intimate others to seeing all the facets of my life and being.

Moreover, from my experience, love and caring can indeed save lives. My dad saved my life through his love. While the film expresses that love tends to lack this power, perhaps this portrayal may be intentional, in making we audience members believe that if the characters loved and cared more, they could've saved each other. At least I am goaded to think this, and feel ever more determined that if I ever find myself in circumstances in which I'm in the position to love and care for someone who is in a very dark place, I will not lose hope in the possibilities of helping them leave that place.

[thesereveries]

The Bride (1970), Joan Brown

I saw this piece at SFMOMA earlier this month. I was dumbstruck for a while; the imagining hit me, of this place of mind the artist might've been in, painting this when getting married. I adore the painting's details: the brightly colored fish in the sky, the cake-like ribboned dress, the rat on the leash, the poppies across the field.

The playfulness of the imagery and bright colors -- at first I thought this was deliberately cheeky. The artist must've known, I thought, that the present act of getting married was responsible for manically shedding this delight across her world -- and that this act could have this power only because she hadn't yet lived through the marriage. It just happened. A pure possibility just actualized; like a newborn, with all of life ahead of it, without any evidence that any dark turns should happen. But the artist, I thought, despite this self-awareness, must be overwhelmed by her delight; and moreover, there is indeed no evidence that her rejoicing could turn out to be inappropriately held. So she let herself feel it all, and painted this piece as an expression of her rejoicing.

Then I read the plaque, and my curiosity was perked further, by the detail that Brown took the rat to symbolize a dark past that she had overcome, and that poppies symbolize eternal love. I wonder if she had overcome this past as a precondition for finding herself at this place of marrying someone; or whether she expected her marriage as rather a condition for her overcoming. I also wondered just how straightforwardly hopeful she was in her marriage; the painting is undeniably an expression of manic joy, or a promise of infinite possibilities of goodness (which are perhaps synonymous). Does its silly imagery indicate either a tone of self-caricaturing, or such a pitch of purity of her joy, that it can only be expressed in child-like terms?

[thesereveries]

Alyosha, from The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Dostoyevsky

I'm rereading Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov at the moment. Boy, is this experience a new one. The characters are so crisp that they feel real in almost the same way that a person feels real after you meet them and remember them. I was particularly startled when Alyosha was introduced in chapter 4. Certain descriptions particularly stood out. No one can dislike him; instead, his presence has a certain magnetic attraction. A special sort of attractiveness: either he does not notice how others might perceive or evaluate his views and behaviors; or, if he does notice this, he cannot care about it. The effect of this is that he is able to love others freely and fiercely. He is abhorred when his middle school classmates show lewd pictures of women, or speak crudely about women, for example. He sticks his fingers in his ears and covers his eyes, until his classmates grab his hands and try to force him to hear and see. In spite of this, Alyosha does not change his views or behaviors, and his classmates eventually leave him alone and respect him.

It is interesting to think about how the dimension of how much someone is emotionally sensitized to how others evaluate them varies across individuals. Usually, if someone is particularly sensitized to this, they also tend to have less self-confidence, even if they do not express this. They'll be rhetorically savvy, to come off as especially smart or attractive given the circumstances, or to cover up any movement that they fear was just negatively evaluated. In contrast, if someone is inert to this, they will just do what they love, and say what is truthful to them. In other words, often how much we worry about how others think of us correlates with how much self-confidence we have, and how honest we are.

This is all commonsense. But meeting Alyosha brought me to understand this in a deeper way, and to notice how it might track with parts of my character. It was moving to hear about Alyosha's experiences in his youth. Even more striking is now, how his father Fyodor relates to him. Fyodor is also magnetically attracted to Alyosha; perhaps his son is the only person in the world that he sincerely likes. His son is the only person in the world who can set a clearing where his soul may come out. Fyodor knows he is not judged or hated by Alyosha (perhaps this capacity to be non-judgmental of others is the twin to the capacity to not be sensitive to judgmentalness of others). Fyodor can look directly at himself under this light; he does not have to rationalize or be overly proud of his dissolute behavior, for there is no antagonizing force of looking down upon him by others, which he must fight.

It is also quite mesmerizing to think of how Alyosha might be this way, how he may be so loving. His brothers have Fyodor as a haunting figure in the background; Dimitri and Ivan know that their lives originate from this dissolute man. They cannot have faith in the world; their own maker is a horrible person, so the world generally is a horrible place. At an unconscious level they might believe is also somewhat made by their father (or at least they might be more sensitive to seeing negative aspects of the world, those aspects which are most keenly manifested by their father). In contrast, Alyosha remembers most strongly his mother. Even though she died when he was a small child, her voice, the light that falls on her face, her hands -- it remains sensorily immediate to him. His mother was a good person. Her goodness, moreover, is expanded, made ever more perfect, given that she is dead. She lives only in Alyosha's imagination and memory; as non-existent, only representations of her may remain, and the mind can enchant representations. Alyosha has his imagination of his mother, which he takes to just be his mother, as his maker, as the source of his being and the world.

I was brought to think about how I am an odd mixture of (at least what I think or hope to be) Alyosha-like confidence, with respect to a certain domain of my life, and the polar opposite of this confidence, with respect to another domain of my life. It is most natural for me to doggedly aim at the truth, whenever I find myself in earnest conversation. I sometimes have to remind myself that this might be off-putting to others, especially if they might associate disagreement with personal antagonism; so I might express, a bit too freely, my fondness for my interlocutor, through other topics and means, to set the context for any disagreement on idea or theory.

But there's another domain in my life where I lack confidence. It is much different than times of my youth now, but still catch myself worrying about my value and worth, on the basis of anxieties pertaining to this domain. This worrying comes alongside with my sometimes evaluating others with respect to this domain. While I do sometimes evaluate others on the basis of how sincere they are when it comes to aiming at the truth -- or whether they are good at this pursuit -- the ways by which I undertake these two sorts of evaluation differ, it seems. I rarely evaluate others for their intellect and intellectual sincerity with spite; the pre-reflective assumption is that if someone seems to be bumbling about on this front, this is because they don't have as much background experience as I do, or they are more well-rounded and so haven't dedicated as much time to this as I have. But here and there I will catch my mind being spiteful at others for their scoring upon this domain with which I am sensitive. My mind does this, moreover, when I feel particularly low or worried regarding this domain myself. This is all to expand on the commonsense notion that confidence is had with respect to domain; it is rare for a person to be confident in every single aspect of their life.

So a reason why I do not worry about my intellect when I am in conversation is that I already trust myself as capable of aiming at truth and getting closer to there. In contrast, I worry about myself with respect to this other domain because I do not trust that I am situated at a high place there.

Where does such self-trust come from? For Alyosha, it seems that he was born not being sensitive to how others perceive him generally. I know people in my life who are like this. Of course, one is never born with this capacity, but it is achieved. I've gotten much feedback from the external world that I am indeed capable of inching towards truth. Strangely enough, I have never gotten feedback from the external world that I'm not doing so hot in this other domain. But I can see that during my youth, I received constant feedback that I am subpar there, feedback handed to me by how I perceived myself and my circumstances. No one made comments about me with respect to this domain; no life experiences happened that force the explanation that I'm subpar in this domain. But plenty of everyday experiences happened that were neutral enough, or had enough random data points, that my mind could connect up this imaginary constellation, that my mind could show me apparent evidence that I was lacking in this domain.

It would be good to learn to trust myself in this domain. Reading about Alyosha gives me this notion of trust in oneself, of knowing something is right so deeply that no one and no circumstance can shake it. Alyosha is generally so inspiring; I remember when reading The Brothers Karamazov in high school, I saw him as my role model, for being compassionate and non-judgment to all, perhaps even especially to those who aren't doing so great, who are lonely or unliked.

[thesereveries]

Introduction: Art

Here's what I'll be doing at this blog. First, I'd like to practice articulating unusual or special experiences of artworks. What do I mean by articulation? I'd like to make determinate sense out from the relatively indeterminate but nevertheless richly contentful experiences had by virtue of engaging with artworks. Why do I want to do this? I hope that if I practice articulating my experiences of artworks, this could, in turn, give greater detail and articulation to future pre-reflective experiences of artworks. I know that generally, at least, this holds; in my doing of philosophy, the more I've practiced writing out my philosophical ideas, the more intricate my pre-reflective philosophical thoughts become. Or, also consider the practice of dream-journaling, where articulating one's dreams aids one's capacity to remember more details of dreams.

(At this moment, I lack any background art criticism and art history at the moment. I plan on reading into these areas, so hopefully limitations in my thought, due to this lack, will be temporary).

My dissertation deals with the concept of make-believe. Experiences we have when we are immersed in an artwork are best understood in terms of our playing a game of make-believe, in the same style as games of make-believe that children play. As a toddler might pretend that a banana is a telephone, and babble into this fruit, an adult might pretend that the imaginary world found in a film is part of the real world, and tell their friends about the make-believe emotions they feel in response to the make-believe events happening. I'm interested in this concept of make-believe insofar as I want to get a finger on something that I believe has been hidden for a long time, which is the key to refining our folk psychology: Whenever we experience anything at all, it must show up to us as either real or unreal (a category whose paradigm case is make-believe).

Understanding make-believe, this negative space around the concept of real life (or what we sense to be part of reality), is half of the job for my dissertation. By articulating my experiences of artworks, this might also provide phenomenological fodder for making sense of what goes down in our experiences of make-believe, as opposed to real life. How do experiences of art feed back into how we go about real life? How do real-life experiences shape our encounters with art? To what extent are aesthetic and real-life experiences substantially different? I'll be keeping these questions in the background. They'll come to the foreground in my philosophical writing, the second category of posts that can be found here.