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The Solitary Self

Posted in books, from the reading room, philosophy on November 11, 2010| 3 Comments »

Mary Midgley is an English philosopher whose latest book, The Solitary Self [978-1-84465-253-2], develops a case she has laid out in previous books. I first read Mary Midgley in her Science and Poetry, which was so clear, readable and thought-provoking. In that book, she argued that the concept of atomism when applied equally to the parts of a person and to individuals within society didn’t make sense. She develops that argument here in a brilliantly focused attack on neo-Darwinists such as Dawkins, who, she argues, have reduced Darwin’s thought to the principle of survival of the fittest. Dawkins’ Selfish Gene being a classic example of such a world view – the world view that competition and fighting for individual advantage is the way of Nature, the way of human beings, and the way society should be run. The values they promote are the values of selfishness. She elaborates in detail, quoting from Darwin’s own writings, how humans are actually intensely social creatures.

In fact, you can’t reduce Mary Midgley’s arguments to simple sound-bites in the way the neo-Darwinists like to promote their ideas. This is because she completely accepts the complexity of life, and the inescapable conflicts at the heart of every human being.

I think this little book is terrific at putting the case for an understanding of the importance of collaboration, as much neglected in recent decades. She is also very strong on the irrationality of using reductionism to try to explain complex wholes –

One way and another, then, it emerges that, in general, the reductive thinking that theorizes about large-scale behaviour from analogy with the behaviour of small parts is not reliable or scientific.

Here’s one paragraph from her book, which I think, really does capture her most important argument.

All this later became part of a much wider campaign, conducted by thinkers such as Nietzsche and the existentialists, to exalt freedom above all other ideals, isolating modern individuals in pure and heroic independence. Like all such one-sided advice, this campaign ignores crucial aspects of our nature. It assumes that we are independent items, isolated brains, intelligent billiard balls that need no sustenance and could choose to live anywhere. But we are actually earthly organisms, framed to interact continually with the complex ecosystems of which we are a tiny part. For us, bonds, are not just awkward restraints. They are lifelines. Although we all need some solitude and some independence, total isolation is for us a desolate and meaningless state. In fact, it is about the worst thing that can happen to us.

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Flowers….the enlightenment of plants

Posted in from the consulting room, philosophy, photography on August 9, 2010| 3 Comments »

Seeing beauty in a flower could awaken humans, however briefly, to the beauty that is an essential part of their own innermost being, their true nature. The first recognition of beauty was one of the most significant events in the evolution of human consciousness. The feelings of joy and love are intrinsically connected to that recognition. Without our fully realizing it, flowers would become for us an expression in form of that which is most high, most sacred and ultimately formless within ourselves. Flowers, more fleeting, more ethereal, and more delicate than the plants out of which they emerged, would become like messengers from another realm, like a bridge between the world of physical forms and the formless. They not only had a scent that was delicate and pleasing to humans, but also brought a fragrance from the realm of the spirit. Using the word “enlightenment” in a wider sense than the conventionally accepted one, we could look upon flowers as the enlightenment of plants.

A New Earth. Eckhart Tolle. ISBN 978-0-141-03941-1

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Seeding as becoming

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, personal growth, philosophy, photography on June 9, 2010| 5 Comments »

When I saw this seed on the very verge of breaking away from the seed-head the other day I thought it wasn’t only beautiful, it was both wondrous and moving.

Here’s that moment we’ve all experienced where we break away to launch out on our own path. Here’s that moment where we commit to Life, to adventure, to exploration and growth and becoming.

Here’s that moment where Chance takes a hand and who knows where we’ll land next……onto comfortable, nurturing ground, or hard, stony ground?

Here’s where we fly off to embrace opportunities and difference. To find the new. To connect with whatever it is we haven’t connected with until now.

Here’s where we embrace change.

Here’s becoming…..

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Seeing difference in the blink of an eye

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, philosophy, photography, tagged difference on June 7, 2010| 1 Comment »

I took these two photos 13 seconds apart, standing still. The peacock moved slightly forwards. And look at the difference!
Our world is constantly changing, and what beauty there is to be seen in noticing the changes!

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Time

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, life, philosophy, photography on June 3, 2010| 1 Comment »

We have this idea that time passes in a steady flow in front of our eyes, always at the same steady speed. We chop it into little pieces and call them seconds, minutes, hours…even days, weeks, months and years. But some philosophers show us how to think of time differently. Bergson’s concept of “duration” for example, which Deleuze picked up and developed further (using cinema as a tool to expand our thinking about time and movement).

So, here’s a couple of photos I took the other day ….

In the first one, I noticed the stone circle (don’t know the history of it, but I suspect it’s a pretty modern creation actually…) and behind them in the distance, the mountain range. What’s the life of a mountain range? How quickly, or slowly, does it change? What’s the perspective of a mountain? That last thought, brought to mind Herman Hesse’s short story about a boy who wishes he was a mountain (in the Strange News from Another Star collection).
Then, in the second one, I focused on the tombstones instead…..how they too have their own duration, and how they mark the shortness of a life, and the length of a memory.

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The Renewal of Generosity

Posted in books, from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, narrative, philosophy on April 25, 2010| 2 Comments »

I recently stumbled over Arthur Frank’s “The Renewal of Generosity” (ISBN 978-0226260174). Many years ago I read and was hugely impressed by his “The Wounded Storyteller”. It’s a great small book which is an important contribution to the struggle to create a better way of practising medicine in the 21st century. Doctors and patients are increasingly demoralised by the reduction of health care to technical procedures and the delivery of products (what Dan Siegel describes as “diagnose and drug” in his analysis of contemporary psychiatry). The everyday, subjective experiences of both patients and doctors are dismissed as irrelevant in the pursuit of measurement, targets and throughputs. Isn’t it some kind of indictment of our current health care that he can say this on page one –

My conviction is that at the start of the 21st century the foremost task of responding to illness and disability is not devising new treatments, though I’m grateful this work will proceed. Our challenge is to increase the generosity with which we offer the medical skill that has been attained.

That’s the word which really struck me – generosity. I think a lot about compassion and its central place in good health care, but I’ve not really considered the work generosity. It’s such a good word. Somehow it not only encompasses compassion but it contains within it a sense of enlarging life – my own life, and the lives of others to whom I am generous. It’s a welcoming, loving, life growing word. It’s a good word to bear in mind when considering “how to live”, how to find happiness and how to create well-being.

His key theme in this book is to weave together the teachings of ancient Stoicism (a much misrepresented classical philosophy I believe), with the case for dialogue. He primarily draws on the writings of the Stoics, of Levinas and Bakhtin.

The practice of medicine is a relationship between two people. What are we to call these two people? As a doctor, I’m fairly comfortable with the term, “patient”, but it bothers me that it seems to imply something passive, expecting the ill person to just be treated, and that contains the seeds of objectification – treating people not as people, seeing them as instances of disease, instead of persons who suffer. I hate the word “client”. It’s laden with commercialism and contractualism for me. However, Frank pulls a different set of words out of the bag and they hit me between the eyes –

The renewal of generosity will be hastened if participants in medical relationships think of themselves not (at least not only) as patients and professionals, much less as consumers and providers, but as guests and hosts.

Guests and hosts! He elaborates and explains, but I won’t share that here. Just think about this idea for a moment. I’ve never encountered it anywhere else. Wonderful.

I love so much of what he has to say about the importance of dialogue –

Dialogue suggests that the world is co-experienced by two of more people. Each one’s perspective is necessarily partial, and each needs to gain a more adequate sense of the world by sharing perspectives.

I wrote about that from a neuroscience perspective recently here.

The enlarging of perspective, or, in the other words, the attempt to see a more full picture demands dialogue. It prevents us from dismissing others through judgement and classification.

…no final, finalising discourse that defines anything once and forever. No last word can be said about this you, whose horizons of possibility remain open.

“whose horizons of possibility remain open”……how often do we forget that? How often do we squash hope with the illusion of certainty? How often do we practice as if we know exactly what a treatment will bring about for the person undergoing it? Having open horizons of possibility is a characteristic of healthy living.

We have other good reasons for dialogue apart from sharing our perspectives to gain a fuller picture. We use dialogue to value the other.

…the moral demand of dialogue is that each grant equal authority to the other’s voice……it’s being willing to allow their voice to count as much as yours

[doctors] are taught monological medicine: the doctor is the one cognitive subject in the consulting room, and the patient is an object for that cognition.

Identification with others requires giving up monologue.

The other element which we have to consider when we focus on dialogue is the other part of the doctor-patient (or host-guest) relationship – the carer. I think our system of medicine dismisses this almost entirely. The focus on “randomised controlled trials” is a focus on the statistics of groups. Once a drug or treatment is “proven” it seems to be irrelevant who delivers it, or how. Yet that’s not our experience when we are ill. Who the doctors and nurses are is important to us. How they talk, how they listen, how they treat and care for us. The idea that its the treatment which is important and the not the person administering it seems inhuman to me.

We can keep the question before us: what do they think about how I am imagining them? and we can believe that what they think matters.

We should honour patients’ stories, not dismiss them as “subjective” or “anecdotes”. They matter.

Finally,

…the person who we see ourselves revealed to be is seen most fully in others’ responses to us

Isn’t that so true? What have you seen of yourself in others responses to you today?

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Indra’s net

Posted in from the dark room, philosophy, photography on September 13, 2009| 1 Comment »

I spotted this be-dew-elled spider’s web this morning and immediately thought of Indra’s Net.
Interestingly, the entry about Indra’s Net on wikipedia illustrates the following quote by Alan Watts with a very similar image.

Imagine a multidimensional spider’s web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image

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Three Ages of Knowledge and Understanding

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy, science on June 24, 2009| Leave a Comment »

The contemporary French philosopher, Luc Ferry’s book, “What is The Good Life?” (ISBN 978-0226244532), is an interesting but quite difficult read. I’m not sure I’ve really grasped the whole of his argument, but it seems to involve developing awareness of the “singularities” in life, by which he means the unique, particular events, which draw our consciousness out to farther horizons so we see the transcendent in the immanent.
I won’t rehearse the detail of his arguments here, but the final section of the book considers the idea of two “modernities” as (apparently) described by Ulrich Beck in his “Risk Society” (ISBN 978-0803983465) (another one for the reading list). I haven’t come across this before and I think it was a particularly interesting take on the progress of science and society.
Ferry describes three ages of science, with only the latter two covering “modernity”. The First age was a time where the “contemplation of the order of the world and comprehension of the structure of the cosmos” were linked. The consequence of this link was that knowledge and values were intrinsically connected, “in the sense that, in itself, the discovery of the intimate character of the universe implies an emphasis on certain practical aims for human existence.” The Second age began with the Enlightenment, and, he says, was characterised by an indifference to values – “science describes what is, it does not speak of what should be”. This age, says Ferry, has only begun to decline in the last few years of the twentieth century. I’ve certainly read a perspective like this before, but the next stage is where it gets especially interesting. If you read my post about “Metaphors we live by”, the contrasting of an “objectivist” position with a “subjectivist” one (this latter exemplified by the Romantic focus on feelings and passions) does, I think, describe these two contrasting worldviews. In fact, as Luc Ferry also points out, there is a reaction against science from people who are still more attracted to the agenda of the Romantics. The point he goes on to make is one I haven’t read anywhere else. It is that the Third age (or second “modernity”) is characterised by self-criticism or self-reflection.
His argument is this – in the Enlightenment thinking scientific rationalism –

….promised to free people from the religious obscurantism of centuries past and at the same time to provide them with the means to make themselves, in Descartes’ famous phrase, into the “masters and possessors” of a universe that they could use and exploit at will in order to realise their material well-being.

This way of thinking easily contributed to the politics of democracy and nation-states –

The chief business of the new scientifico-democratic nation-states was the production and distribution of wealth. However, we are now witnessing a significant change because –

Today it is no longer nature that engenders the major risks for humankind, but scientific investigation; thus it is no longer nature that we have to tame, but rather science. For the first time in history, science furnishes the human species with the means for its own destruction

Even if we don’t feel threatened by the potential harms of nuclear and chemical technologies, we are afraid of what might happen if they were to fall into the hands of terrorists. “Control of the uses and effects of modern science is slipping out of our hands, and its unbridled power is worrisome.”

This “process without a subject” in a globalised world of technology that no worldwide governance has yet managed to control makes the framework of the nation-state and, along with it, the traditional forms of parliamentary democracy seem strangely cramped. No republican miracle caused the clouds of Chernobyl to stop at the frontiers of France. For their part, the processes that govern economic growth and the financial markets no longer obey the dictates of the people’s representatives, who now struggle to keep the promises they have made to the electorate.

It’s interesting that he wrote this about seven years ago, before we experienced the current crisis in the world economic system.
What does he advocate, in terms of the project to spread the good life amongst human beings?

A re-integration of values and knowledge, and, especially a renewed focus on what’s special about human life as a part of nature, not apart from it. This strikes me as very true.
There’s definitely a part of me drawn to the Romantic values of the subject, to a respect for feelings and a belief that a life without passion is a life only half lived (at best!), but there’s also a part of me keenly drawn to science. (It’s just that I find the current flavour of materialistic scientism desperately empty and unsatisfying). I think that’s why I’m drawn both to the Lakoff and Johnson “experientialist” idea, and this idea in Luc Ferry’s book about the scientific method developing through self-criticism and self-reflection. Both are attempts to understand what it is to be human, fully immanent within nature, but with a constant capacity for transcendence.

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The significance of metaphors

Posted in from the reading room, life, philosophy, science, tagged linguistics, metaphor, philosophy on June 15, 2009| 7 Comments »

“Metaphors we live by” written by Lakoff and Johnson. (ISBN 0-226-46801-1) ……..
I often muse about what makes a human being, human? Or what makes a human being fully human? Consciousness is clearly one of the characteristics. Language is another. And imagination is a third. Perhaps it’s because I’m interested in these phenomena that some time back I bought “Metaphors we live by”. Our ability to handle metaphors and symbols intrigues me, and I wanted to understand better how we use metaphors so the title caught my eye. However, when I flicked through it, it struck me as a bit technical and even dry. I thought it was a book about linguistics, an area of study which does interest me, but one which I find can be difficult to grasp. So I put the book aside in my giant collection of “interesting books to get round to reading one day”. I’m not quite sure I pulled it off the shelf recently. Oh, yes, actually I do remember why, but the explanation is going to have to wait till another post. (cryptic, huh?) I guess that old adage of there being a right time for everything must apply to books, because this time, I started into it and couldn’t stop. I’ve marked it up. I read and re-read chapters. I’ve skipped to the back, delved into the middle, read it from cover to cover. I find it compelling and convincing. And I can’t figure out why I didn’t take to it first time round.
It’s actually an incredibly difficult book to summarise. Usually when I write a review like this I paste in a few passages from the book to illustrate what it’s like. But I’ve collected so many passages I find it hard to pick only a few!
Here’s the gist of their argument. By studying human communication they claim to have discovered that metaphors are not simply a word or language game, but much more fundamentally, they are conceptual. By that they mean we think in metaphors, we understand using metaphors, and, indeed we understand the world and our place in it through metaphors. I didn’t need convinced about that. I already thought that metaphors were the basis of thought. However, they take the whole project to an entirely different level by studying the types of metaphors which are most prevalent in our thinking and communicating. With way too many examples to share here, they illustrate clearly and convincingly that the basic, fundamental metaphors we use haven’t appeared randomly, but are developed out of our interactions with the physical and the cultural worlds in which we exist. In other words, they are develop from our interactions with time and space, and our interactions with other people and creatures. This, I think, is the key. It allows them to develop an argument they call “the experientialist myth”, proposing it as a better way to understand life than the opposing myths of “objectivism” and “subjectivism”. (Time for a quote or two from the book)

The myth of objectivism reflects the human need to understand the external world in order to be able to function successfully in it. The myth of subjectivism is focused on internal aspects of understanding – what the individual finds meaningful and what makes his life worth living. The experientialist myth suggests that these are not opposing concerns.

Within the myth of objectivism, the concern for truth grows out of a concern for successful functioning. Given a view of man as separate from his environment, successful functioning is conceived of as mastery over the environment. Hence the objectivist metaphors KNOWLEDGE IS POWER and SCIENCE PROVIDES CONTROL OVER NATURE.

The principal theme of the myth of subjectivism is the attempt to overcome the alienation that results from viewing man as separate from his environment and from other men. This involves an embracing of the self – of individuality and reliance upon personal feelings, intuition, and values. The Romanticist version involves reveling in the senses and feelings and attempting to gain union with nature through passive appreciation of it.

The old myths share a common perspective: man as separate from his environment.

The experientialist myth takes the perspective of man as part of his environment, not as separate from it. It focuses on constant interaction with the physical environment and with other people. It views this interaction with the environment as involving mutual change. You cannot function within the environment without changing it or being changed by it.

Do you get the idea? It’s a kind of division between the rationalists and the Romantics, with the claim that metaphor builds a bridge between reason and the imagination and gives us a third way. One which neither denies objective reality, not gets lost in subjective relativism. In the process, this “experientialist” way, shows how there are no Absolute truths out there discoverable without an understanding based on cultural systems, but keeps the project of the imagination and feelings grounded in our interactions with the world.

Objectivism takes as its allies scientific truth, rationality, precision, fairness, and impartiality. Subjectivism takes as its allies the emotions, intuitive insight, imagination, humaneness, art, and a “higher” truth.
The proportions of our lives governed by objectivism and subjectivism vary greatly from person to person and culture and culture. Some of us even attempt to live our entire lives totally by one myth of the other.

How do you think it is for you? Are you more drawn to objectivism’s allies, or subjectivism’s?

I find both main strands of their case very convincing. The more you look for it, the more you become aware of the pervasiveness of metaphor, and the more you study it, the clearer it becomes that conceptual metaphors are grounded in our experiences and interactions. Their experientialist myth appeals to me much more than either of the other two older myths. It strikes me as more true. I also think it allows a much more robust defence against scientism than romanticism ever did.

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Bridges, paths, connections….

Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, philosophy, photography on May 25, 2009| 2 Comments »

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how everything is connected. Amy wrote a post about the relationship between Deleuze and Guatarri’s rhizomatics and social networking today (we’re often in tune that way!) I’m also reading Michael Frayn’s “The Human Touch” which wonderfully explores our embedded, connected existence, the centrality of our subjective perspective, and our active participation in the creation of the world we experience. The chapter I just read was entitled “Why the marmalade?”, a crystal clear examination of how we attempt to explain events (all explanations are partial, developing, multiple). This is the same ground of thought I’m also reading in an ancient two volume set of Alexander’s “Space, Time and Deity” which I just got through abebooks, having read about his work in Michael Ward’s “Planet Narnia” where he described how C S Lewis took on board Alexander’s idea about two kinds of experience – enjoyed and contemplated.

Well, I could go on….see how once you start to a pull at a thread you find it’s connected to everything else?

Here are some bridges and paths which caught my eye recently……