Introducing the philosophy of radical temporality
Radical temporality is a phrase I concocted to refer
to what I see as common elements in the ideas of four writers: Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Eugene Gendlin and George Kelly. The first two authors come from the continental philosophical tradition, Kelly was shaped primarily by American pragmatism, psychoanalysis and positivism, and Gendlin’s influences included all of the above approaches.
This orientation addresses and dissolves many of the issues that dominate this forum:
realism vs relativism, the relation between mind and body, subject and object, affect and cognition and the so-called hard problem of consciousness.
Every philosophy can be located as a reaction to a contrasting point of view, and radically temporal perspectives define themselves most precisely via their
departure from a range of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology that includes hermeneutic and radical constructivisms, 4EA (Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended, and Affective) cognition, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of corporeal intersubjectivity, autopoietic self-organizing systems theory and American pragmatism.
So what’s so radical about radical
temporality? There are a number of ways in which it differs from the above approaches, but I want to mention only one here.
Radically temporal thinking abandons functional
distinctions between cognition-intention and affect-feeling. Kelly said : “the classical threefold division of psychology into cognition, affection, and conation has been completely abandoned in the psychology of personal constructs. There is no ego, no emotion, no motivation, no
reinforcement, no drive, no unconscious, no need.”(Kelly 1955) It is not that affect, emotion and intention vanish from Kelly’s model, but rather that Kelly finds a way to integrate the aspects of behavior these terms point to. We don’t need extrinsic sources of motivation to push or pull us, or determine direction, because we are always already in motion.
Heidegger’s version of this integration between feeling and thought is the equiprimordiality of Befindlichkeit ( attunement) and Understanding. Like Kelly, he eliminates categorical distinctions between sensation, perception, cognition, willing, desiring and affect.
What makes this integration of feeling and thinking possible is the abandonment of the thinking of experiencing as a relation between subject and object as separate entities or states , in favor of a single referential differential whose two poles are the subjective and the objective aspects of awareness. This differential implies a different notion of time than the conventional one that underlies everyday thinking as well as the natural sciences.
Everyday time is a past present and future as separate units, based on the idea of an endless sequence of identical nows. Radical time is a past which is changed by the present it functions in , and this present anticipates beyond itself. This complex structure defines a single moment, not three separate time positions.
Comments (39)
Um, :chin: I don't think this is so different to an ontology as an evolving process of self organization, except in respect to the role time plays in the process. You give time greater importance as a singular connected dimension / element, where "all time effects all other time all of the time " - Einstein . It seems largely a valid view, however I would interpret the time element simply as change, where time is a measure of change, where self organization occurs relative to the change experienced. I would be interested in your conclusions from this perspective of time - what can we do with it? How does it change things? Can the present change the past and shape the future? We only ever experience the present. I imagine unforeseen emergence would be a problem?
This really doesn't make much sense I'm afraid.
Thiese attempts to meld a certain interpretaion of Buddhist thinking with complexity and dynamical systems approaches, without putting into question objectively casual pre-suppositions of physics. You say time is change, but this notion presupposes, like the physical view of time, that change is what happens to things, that events occur IN time ,as if time is an indedendent axis placed upon events or objects that subsist in themselves first and then interact. For Heidegger, a moment of time is not a punctual 'now' point."Of course, the question of "being-in-
time" is exciting, but it was also raised prematurely. The question is
exciting specifically with regard to natural science, especially with the
advent of Einstein's theory of relativity, which established the opinion
that traditional philosophical doctrine concerning time has been shaken
to the core through the theory of physics. However, this widely held
opinion is fundamentally wrong. The theory of relativity in physics does
not deal with what time is but deals only with how time, in the sense of
a now-sequence, can be measured. [It asks] whether there is an absolute
measurement of time, or whether all measurement is necessarily relative,
that is, conditioned.* The question of the theory of relativity could not
be discussed at all unless the supposition of time as the succession of
a sequence of nows were presupposed beforehand. If the doctrine of
time, held since Aristotle, were to become untenable, then the very
possibility of physics would be ruled out. [The fact that] physics, with
its horizon of measuring time, deals not only with irreversible events,
but also with reversible ones and that the direction of time is reversible
attests specifically to the fact that in physics time is nothing else than the
succession of a sequence of nows. This is maintained in such a decisive
manner that even the sense of direction in the sequence can become
a matter of indifference."
"If you ask a physicist, he
will tell you that the pure now-sequence is the authentic, true time. What
we call datability and significance are regarded as subjective vagueness,
if not sentimentalism. He says this because time measured physically can
be calculated "objectively" at any time. This calculation is "objectively"
binding. (Here, "objective" merely means "for anyone," and indeed only
for anyone who can submit himself to the physicist's way of representing
nature. For an African tribesman, such time would be absolute nonsense.)
The presupposition or supposition of such an assertion by a physicist
is that physics as a science is the authoritative form of knowledge and
that only through the knowledge of physics can one gain a rigorous,
scientific knowledge. Hidden behind [this presupposition] is a specific interpretation
of science along with the science's claim that a specific form
of viewing nature should be authoritative for every kind of knowledge.
[The scientist has not asked] what this idea of science itself is founded
upon nor what it presupposes. For instance, if we talk about time with
a physicist sworn in favor of his science, there is no basis whatsoever to
talk about these phenomena in an unbiased way.:
I don't agree with everything Thiese says, but the central theory seems good. He acknowledges determinism but adds an element of randomness to every interaction, which seems to be the correct interpretation - the domino must fall, but it can fall with a skew to the left or right. This view fits well with evolution where randomness creates emergent properties and natural selection culls the non viable ones. At the same time two processes of self organization are interacting in a process that must self organize. Not in a subject object relationship, but in a peer to peer one.
Whilst I reference Thiese, it is my interpretation - sorry, but its the only way I can do this.
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Joshs
If a body is in motion, then it is experiencing change. If a body is in motion immersed in an environment that is in motion, then change is ubiquitous - self organization runs counter to the change, and maintains an integrated self, but with an element of randomness that contributes to the evolution of the self.
I can agree with the notion of time as it is so practical and useful, but I don't believe our biological or cellular consciousness understands time so much as change. But lets put this aside for now, and tell me more, as the gist of what you are describing sounds very interesting.
Varela(1999a) says the solid self is an illusion. Instead, "...lots of simple agents having simple properties may be brought together, even in a haphazard way, to give rise to what appears to an observer as a purposeful and integrated whole".
Ratcliffe, another writer in the enactive embodied cognitive tradition, says emotion and embodiment are “‘incorporated as essential components in cognition”, but emotion and cognition are clearly not identical; “...emotions and moods are not explicitly cognitive but neither are they independent of
cognition”(Ratcliffe 2002, p.299). They originate as bodily sensations structuring cognition from
outside of it. Emotion and cognition can 'conflict' and emotion can “override cognitive
judgement”(p.299).
It seems that for Varela and Ratcliffe , intention is a capacity for manipulating objects of thought, but
emotion, as conditioning valuative valence, provides the criteria for such processing. He is
apparently not able to find the resources strictly within what he thinks of as intentional thought to
de-center thinking processes, because he treats cognition as tending to form temporarily
self-perpetuating narratives which can distort or keep out contradictory input from the world. So
he relies on the body, in the form of emotion cues, to come to the rescue and bring the stalled
cognitive apparatus back in touch with a dynamically changing world. The mechanism of
emotion is assumed to intervene in order to infuse a stagnant narrative with a new direction and
meaning.
Ratcliffe(2002) asserts: “Without emotional responses, one is not uprooted from a coherent
interpretation of events...”(p.306). Although these emotion cues are claimed to be inseparably
linked with conceptual processes, this linkage amounts to more of a concatenation between
pre-existing states than a more radical indissociability. This may be due to the belief that feeling
originates developmentally within the individual independently from cognition, as action
readiness circuits that, Panksepp(1998) claims, are “completely biological and affective but...,
through innumerable sensory-perceptual interactions with our environments, [become]
inextricably mixed with learning and world events”(p.303).
Ratcliffe shares with other contemporary accounts of affect and emotion
what I call the ‘adaptationist’ presumption that meaning is shaped in a semi-arbitrary way by
inputs which come to influence it from a pre-existing outside. I don’t think Ratcliffe’s model of
affectivity has abandoned the naturalist pre-suppositions animating Damasio’s (2000) claim:
“...as a result of powerful learning mechanisms such as conditioning, emotions of all shades
eventually help connect homeostatic regulation and survival values to numerous events and
objects in our autobiographical experience”(p.54). According to this thinking, physiological
processes of feeling adapt and co-ordinate with a partially independent cogitative environment,
authorizing adaptationism as a causal explanation of origins.
Viewed as an adaptation, emotion is linked to a milieu outside of itself (cognition) and with
which the logic of the bond is indirect, partially arbitrary in the sense that it is capable of being
made irrational, as is supposedly the case with nonadaptive mutations. There is a partial
independence assumed between the participant aspects of reciprocally adaptive interactions. The
cobbling can be uncobbled unilaterally. Emotion can aid reason, but can also be dysfunctional.
According to a long-standing Western tradition, affect, feeling and emotion are connected with movement , action, dynamism, motivation and change. Affect is supposedly instantaneous, non-mediated experience. It has been said that ‘raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, qualitative, passive, a surge, glow, twinge, energy, spark, something we are overcome by. Opposed to such ‘bodily’, dynamical events are seemingly flat, static entities referred to by such terms as mentation , rationality, theorization, propositionality, objectivity, calculation, cognition, conceptualization and perception
The radically temporal approaches of Derrida, Heidegger, Gendlin and Kelly reject this adaptionist view of the relation between feeling and intention-cognition. They begin from a different motivational principle than that of causal interaction between little bodies(neurons, particles, etc). They dont begin from the notion of 'body' or 'object' at all,, but from something more primitive and fundamental than a body or object. Their argument is that treated body and mind as a system of reciprocally causal elements leads to a notion of human behavior that is at the same time too polarizing and too arbitrary.
In Gendlin’s model, the awareness and intending of something is a single differential crossing between one’s implicit past and what occurs into it, rather than a neutral bridge between separate entities: “the usual flat "is" and the separated "of" are replaced by a single implying-occurring pattern.”
“The currently underlying conceptual system leads us to assume that what exists is always something that can be presented before us. So there are always two, what exists and also us, the before whom. Contact with anything real is assumed to be by perception. Perception (or even more narrowly, sensation) is supposed to be the beginning. Perception involves a split between a here and a there. We sense here what is over there. Perception involves an inside and an outside; we sense in here in the body what is out there, outside, ‘external’ to us. I call this the ‘perceptual split’. The here-there generates a gap, the space between the here and the there. This space is supposed to contain everything that exists. To ‘exist’ means to fill some part of that ‘external’ space."
How does treating body and mind as a system of reciprocally causal elements lead to a notion of human behavior that is at the same time too polarizing and too arbitrary?
Such views lead to the idea that individual behavior is pushed and pulled this way and that in arbitrary ways by internal bodily feeling and social cues, practices, norms.
Kelly(1955) says: “You can say [a person] is what he is because of his cultural context. This is to say that the environment assigns him his role, makes him good or bad by contrast, appropriates him to itself, and, indeed, his whole existence makes sense only in terms of his relationship to the times and the culture. This is not my belief...”
Kelly (1955) opposes personal construct theory to perspectives which see a person “helplessly suspended in his culture, and is swept along with the tides of social change”.
Quoting Joshs
Lacan has offered a scheme of time that achieves similar results by different means. It is not about an intention, being, and self that transforms itself to be itself due to inherent, pre-given mechanisms of 'radical time.' Differently, paradoxical features of time appear due to a gesture of change, transformation, or subversion from the outside. We are not born possessing a-priory
structure of time. One becomes the social and temporal being via the process of interpellation or its modifications.
"A crucial feature of the graph is the fact that the vector of the subjective intention quilts the vector of the signifier's chain backwards, in a retroactive direction: it steps out of the chain at a point preceding the point at which it has pierced it. Lacan's emphasis is precisely on this retroactive character of the effect of signification with respect to the signifier, on this staying behind of the signified with respect to the progression of the signifier's chain: the effect of meaning is always produced backwards, apres coup" (Slavoj Zizek. "The Sublime Object of Ideology.") Our present experiences can decisively determine our past and future due to the displaced processes of socialization.The event of the traumatic and supressed submission to the law and an acceptance of its demand for conformity may continually structure our temporality.
From what I gather you want to abolish traditional notions of time in favor of a present moment, where a system is in reciprocal motion with its surroundings. Altering the notion of time would indeed be a radical shift in paradigm, with far reaching consequences, so I would be very interested to see how this might pan out.
I don't see a need to abandon emotion as an essential underlying element - it is my understanding that it is precisely emotions that orient us in the moment, that differentiate one moment to the next, that provide impetus to behavior, consistent with the philosophical zombie argument, and the authors you cited.
As far as emotion is concerned, it’s not a question of abandoning what it stands for. Rather , it is about integrating it with cognition in a more compete way than is currently being done. Here is the complete version of a paper of mine that addresses this precise issue. The title is : A phenomenological critique of existential
feeling.
https://philpapers.org/rec/SOFAPC-2
[quote=wiki] Some psychologists have suggested that PCT is not a psychological theory but a metatheory because it is a theory about theories.[/quote]
I think it is more interesting than that. It proposes psychology as a literally self constructing discipline. The psyche develops as a psychological understanding of social relations - of self and (m)other. It is a meta theory but it is also a psychological theory in its own right that constructs itself as man-the-psychologist. This makes it radically anti-authoritarian; 'we are all psychologists' is an empowering mantra that does not impose itself as the only way to understand people but suggests instead that perhaps the understanding one already has of oneself and others can be enriched ... But alas it does not lend itself to social manipulation, and so is not politically or financially expedient.
It was Kelly himself who wrote “ Some have suggested that personal construct theory not be called a psychological theory at all, but a metatheory. That is all right with me. It suggests that it is a theory about theories, and that is pretty much what I have in mind. But I hope that it is clear that it is not limited to being a metatheory of formal theories, or even of articulate ones. “
Don Bannister’s discovery of Kelly’s work and his importation of it into Britain was a game changer for a whole
generation of psychologists who felt utterly stifled by the stranglehold positivism had on the British psychological scene in the 1950’s.
Thanks for the link. Sorry to reply so late, the house is full of visitors, and happy new year to you.
I found your paper impeccably written and well cited with authors I was not deeply familiar with, so it was a bit of a philosophy lesson for me, and I read it several times. I was disappointed in that whilst emotion and feeling is mentioned often, the connection was not made that feelings are either painful or pleasurable, and that the intentional aspect of being is always one of either avoiding pain or seeking pleasure, or thereabouts. We are a pain avoiding, pleasure seeking creature, and in my understanding this is the carrot and stick that provides impetus to behavior. Depression is the absence of pleasure in life, and the absence of pleasure is the presence of pain. Treatment is normally by way of antidepressants, but most people have worked this out themselves, to some extent, and so we have a substance using / abusing world. This, and many other similar insights, lead me to believe that emotions ( feelings that are painful or pleasurable ) are the primordial force that glue and drive an embodied system. I have oriented it in change, but it ultimately needs to be understood as an evolving system over time, so your temporality is interesting. I would agree that being needs to be understood as a system in motion and one that is constantly evolving, but whilst this is an important and somewhat neglected aspect of being, I don’t think it is the driving force of affectivity or intentionality. Sorry, but I think “emotionally driven self organization” is a more compelling argument.
How to treat time is another question? I call it change and that solves my time problem ( for now ), but I tend to agree and may at some time in the future dabble with your Radical Time - Quoting Joshs
- I think this would be the correct view from an idealist perspective. We tend to ruminate on an imaginary recollected past in anticipation of an imaginary projected future, in the present moment. We self organize by highlighting the good, and downplaying the bad, in the hope ( intention ) of a better future ( more pleasurable / less painful ) . So this image of a radically temporal being strategically anticipating a “ happy” future is one I can relate to.
I think , in this game to get partial agreement is a win. It takes a long time to develop some sort of understanding, and once developed it is very difficult to shift.
This still sounds like feeling is a mechanism
separate from thinking-cognition, as if we can manipulate it independently of cognition, or even remove it. This is what many researchers who make use of self-organization models believe. Ratcliffe cites William James’ description of how sterile and directionless a cognitive system would be without the orienting impetus of affect. I think this is a failure to understand what feeling and thinking mean. From a radically temporal perspective, talking about experiencing without affect is like talking about experiencing without time.
The reason I don’t talk about affect in terms of pleasure and pain is that they imply a scheme of reinforcement. I don’t view affectivity as reinforcement. Instead , I follow George Kelly. He said we are always in motion, from moment to moment, meaning change in experience, not physical movement. Each new moment of time is a new, never before occurring event. We don’t directly perceive events, we construe them. That is, we assimilate each new event to a pre-existing internal scheme
of understanding. At the same time, that pre-existing internal scheme must slightly alter itself to accommodate itself to the novelty of each new event. So each construal is equal parts assimilation and accommodation. More specifically , it is a differential structure, organizing each new event as a dichotomous or bipolar dimension of appraisal, determining each new event in terms of a way in which it is like previously construed events
and a way in which it differs from those previously construed events.
The important thing to understand is that the whole
construct system functions integrally as a unified whole in the construing of events. This is important in understanding how Kelly treats affect. For Kelly the aim of construing is to anticipate what lies ahead. The construct system is wholly oriented around anticipation. It is not designed this way by some arbitrary inner mechanism or evolutionary adaptation. Anticipation is an a priori feature of subject -object interaction in time.
So each new event is both familiar to us in some
respect, else it would be invisible to us, and different from our previous experience. But some
events we make sense of better than others. That is to say, we can align some new events in a rich manner along multiple dimensions of similarity with respect to our construct system. Other events lie mostly outside the range of convenience of our system. That is, our system is impermeable to these events. This is where affect comes in. Affect is simply the organizational state of the system with the respect to its effectiveness at assimilating a new event. Put differently, affect is how much sense new event makes to me. If my construct system is struggling to assimilate an event, to make sense of it in terms of likeness to what I already understand, if I only experience the event in terms of incoherences, then my experiencing will be one of chaos and confusion. This is what anxiety is for Kelly. If I anticipate that an event may lie outside the range of convenience of my system , this is threat. So basically all affective terms for Kelly describe my relative success or failure to make sense of my world. It is important to understand that feeling is not a RESPONSE. to such success or failure, not a mechanism that detects such organizational changes after the fact and then relays them to one’s consciousness in the guise of kinesthetic or proprioceptive receptors. Feeling simply IS the organizational dynamics as they are directly experienced.
Kelly(1961) writes:
“In some respects validation in personal construct theory takes the place of reinforcement, although it is a construct of quite a different order, Validation is the relationship one senses between anticipation and realization, whereas in conventional theory reinforcement is a value property attributed to an event.
I hope you can see how this notion of feeling differs from a reinforcement mechanism that signals pleasure and pain. In such a model, pleasure and pain are no more than a dumb bodily system of feedback sensors.
In Kelly’s model, on the other hand, what we call pleasure and pain points directly to the varying fortunes
of our meaning system in its attempts to cope with a world that always , from moment to moment, presents it with new features. So how does feeling, as this experiencing of the relative effectiveness at assimilating events, relate to such notions as cognition and perception? Each new event, as a way of being alike as well as different with respect to my construct system, appears to me both in terms of its coherence and its content. These aspects are not separate from each other. What something is construed to be, in terms of its intentional or cognitive content ( a shoe , for instance) and its relevance for me, are both implied, simultaneously, in the construing of it. We don’t just see a shoe, we see a shoe in the midst of our relevant, purposeful, goal-oriented engagement with the world. The shoe emerges for us in its meaningfulness out of that context of goals as useful or not useful, surprising or not surprising, important or insignificant, strange or not strange.
Quoting Joshs
Or like there is cellular consciousness in communication with an extracellular consciousness. Feeling is an internal feedback loop - like one self organizing system talking to another one. There is a layering of systems that have to agree via a common language. The brain evolved onto an already established sophisticated system. All living systems harness energy via a proton gradient - a very sophisticated system equal to a windmill harnessing electricity. This is the level of sophistication at the very basis of life - Descartes has a lot to answer for!
Quoting Joshs
I think Piaget was influenced by Kelly, and subsequently proved we construe things. Recent research suggests brain structure evolves to accommodate new thinking.
Quoting Joshs
An instance of consciousness would be as follows:
1: Senses input information
2: Information is integrated to reason
3: Reason is experienced
4: Experience is translated to emotion
5: Emotion is translated to a feeling
6: A feeling is located as a point on a pain / pleasure spectrum
7:The point on the pain pleasure spectrum causes affect
I'm not suggesting its a simple linear process, many instances of this can occur simultaneously, memory can input information, but this cascade of elements occur together and in this order. Reason has implications, and implications are painful, neutral, or pleasurable - it is anticipative.
Quoting Joshs
Yeah, but in my understanding it is not dumb, but an essential element all the layers of the system understand.
I tend to understand things in terms of an embodied system, where emotion is the common link the whole system understands. Prior to brains there could not have been cognition as we know it, but there may have been emotion in the form of a bias to be one way rather then another - an emotional gradient. I believe, this emotional gradient still dominates self organization, which consciousness is. Neurotransmitters such as dopamine, noradrenaline, serotonin and histamine have been identified in plant life, and microorganisms - Roshchina Victoria V. ( 2001). So emotions seem to be the basis of self organization, rather then something that results from it.
For me, the philosophical zombie argument seals the deal - without emotion there would be no consciousness, or life. This is not to dismiss your argument entirely. It is an important and valid perspective in the consideration of being, but its not a holistic solution, and I don't find your explanation of feeling compelling. A feeling is something painful or pleasurable or something in between - this is its significance, that it is painful or pleasurable, where historically extreme pain resulted in death.
Not much had changed by the end of the 60's when I was studying. Kelly appeared briefly in the undergraduate curriculum, Laing, Janov, Rogers, were far too revolutionary and only to be studied by torchlight under the bedcovers in secret.
Speaking of Janov and Rogers, have you come across The Feeling therapy Centre? What is it about psychology that makes it so prone to horror? Their first book, by the way, might be of interest to you, if only as a warning against hubris.
Do we perceive raw data and synthesize reason out of it or do we perceive events already pre-interpreted by us? In other words, do we hear a series of acoustic pitches or do we hear the train whistle and only later, as a derived d artificial act, dissect it into objective data pieces? You said we are anticipating beings. Do we reach out to the things we perceive with expectations and anticipations? Do those expectations co-create the perceived object or can we separate ‘raw’ perceptual data from our expectations and anticipations?
If I am in a room and the lights are suddenly turned off , is the violation of my expectation for continued illumination the result of a translation of reason into emotion, or is my surprise a direct perception, prior to any translation?
If your ability to experience affect were eliminated, describe to me what it would be like to function as a reasoning person. Give me an example of how you would interact with others at a party. Would you be like Mr Spock?
Quoting Joshs
Initially we we must integrate novel information into our personally constructed reality, then subsequently we recognize it in terms of our integration of it.
Quoting Joshs
No we can not separate raw data from the constructs we use to interpret it, and yes I appreciate that the very essence of construct creation is an anticipation of a future world. The thing is - I would be indifferent about construct creation, or a future world if feelings were not painful or pleasurable, and I was not affected by them.
Quoting Joshs
I cannot conceive of a situation of consciousness that would not incur the cascade of elements previously mentioned. I don't believe in direct perceptions, things are construed. If you felt surprised - what caused it? The light turning off, or your cognition of the situation? That you did not anticipate it would create some anxiety about your construction of the situation. The person standing next to you may not have been surprised.
Quoting Joshs
If I were not affected, then I would be indifferent - I would stay in the spot I found myself in- catatonic, until I died and disintegrated. There would be little difference between myself and a dead person. You could try to rouse me, by slapping me, or dunking me in cold water, or what ever physical means you could think of - I would be unresponsive as I could not feel any pain or pleasure - I could not feel anything - I would be completely out of tune with the world.
Attunement - Heidegger - it is an emotional attunement in my understanding - it occurs for all life. Every moment of consciousness has its corresponding feeling, this is what primarily tunes us to the world, not the cognitive constructs.
I believe the role of anticipation is very important, yet not well understood. It is not well understood because it falls outside the possibility of observation and scientific understanding. If what is anticipated is a future event, and if the anticipation affects the way that one perceives what is presently happening, then we have to account for how a future event acts as a cause at the present. So you describe a system of construing which acts in a way such that future events have causal power over what is presently occurring, through the means of anticipation.
Except that for Heidegger the cognitive and attunement are not separate constructs or processes. They are co-implied aspects of a single event, the event of transition that is how I am thrown into a world
moment to moment.
Quoting Pop
I’m with Heidegger on this:
“ Hearkening is itself phenomenally more primordial than what the psychologist "initially" defines as hearing, the sensing of tones and the perception of sounds. Hearkening, too, has the mode of being of a hearing that understands. "Initially" we never hear noises and complexes of sound, but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle. We hear the column on the march, the north
wind, the woodpecker tapping, the crackling fire.
It requires a very artificial and complicated attitude in order to "hear" a "pure noise." The fact that we initially hear motorcycles and wagons is, however, the phenomenal proof that Da-sein, as being-in-the-
world, always already maintains itself together with innerworldly things at hand and initially not at all with "sensations" whose chaos would first have to be formed to provide the springboard from which the subject jumps off finally to land in a "world." Essentially understanding, Da-sein is initially together with what is understood.”
I wonder if you might agree with Ratcliffe’s formulation of existential feeling as the ever-present background that shapes and organizes intentionality.
“ According to Damasio, background feelings are ever-present, although ordinarily tacit. They serve to structure the everyday ways in which we encounter the world, the basic ways in which we find ourselves in the world:Ratcliffe 2002, p.298) Damasio wrote:”. . . I am postulating another variety of feeling which I suspect preceded the others in evolution. I call it background feeling because it originates in “background” body states rather than in emotional states. It is not the Verdi of grand emotion, nor the Stravinsky of intellectualized emotion but rather a minimalist in tone and beat, the feeling of life itself, the sense of being.” (1995, p. 150)
Ratcliffe fleshed out his approach with elements drawn from the phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Heidegger:
“Both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty add that localized experiences of possibility presuppose a more-enveloping orientation, a sense of belonging to the world. When I see or think about something, when I am afraid of something, and when I am in a bad mood about a wider situation, I already find myself in the world, in a way than differs in kind from intentional experiences in one or another modality (e.g. imagining, perceiving, or remembering something). This ‘world' is presupposed by intentional states of whatever kind with whatever content. We can think of it in terms of a possibility space, a receptivity to types of possibility.”“Things are experienced as significant to us, as mattering to us, in various different ways, something that involves a sense of the possibilities they offer.” (Ratcliffe, 2020)
“...what Heidegger in Being and Time calls ‘Being-in-the-world' is exactly what we gain reflective access to by performing the phenomenological reduction...This conveys much the same broad conception of ‘world' that we find in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty:...something that we are already practically, unreflectively immersed in when we experience something, think about it or act upon it.” These globally structured patterns of existential feeling amount to “ ‘ways of finding oneself in the world'. As such, they are what we might call ‘pre-intentional', meaning that they determine the kinds of intentional states we are capable of adopting, amounting to a ‘shape' that all experience takes on.” (Ratcliffe 2015
Yes indeed. Not only that, future events have causal
power over my past, because my past as it participates in forming my present is reshaped by my anticipations. This is why Heidegger says that “Having been arises from the future.”” Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general."
I would say that there is a problem here. It is not the case that your past is reshaped, only your memories of it are reshaped. This reshaping of your memories is not actually a recreating of your past, it's simply something new which comes along at that time of reshaping, a change of mind. And, when we look at our anticipations in a similar way, it's not really the future events which have causal power, it's the way that we are thinking about them at the present time, the present anticipation, which has causal power. All the causation is occurring at the present, and nothing in the past, or future, is affected at all.
I didn't mean them to be interpreted as separate aspects, but as primary and secondary ones. We are one integrated system.
Quoting Joshs
I am surprised. Heidegger is suggesting we can switch modes of consciousness at the interpretive level of consciousness such that we interpret something differently to what we normally would. A light ray strikes our retina and sends a signal to the brain for interpretation, and we are free now to interpret this in a novel way?
I think you need to initially cognize what you are interacting with, and what else is there other then personal constructs to do it with? Initially you have to construe it as a sound. No?
Quoting Joshs
Yes, something like this. The way I understand it is that every instance of consciousness is unique in the absolute sense, so it has to be evaluated - compared to every other instance of consciousness we have ever experienced, such that we can know where we stand in our personally constructed reality. This is not possible cognitively - we do not have the computational power to constantly cognitively compare every moment to every other one we have ever encountered. So we evaluate every moment to an emotion, that is a feeling, that is a point on a pain pleasure spectrum, and this way we know emotionally the significance of the present moment. Thus we are oriented in our personally constructed reality.
BUT, I wouldn't say this is primarily our ontological position. I am actually warming to your Radical Temporality. We are a becoming, or an evolving process, rather then a being, in my view. I'm not sure if its pretty or not?
Quoting Joshs
I cannot get past the idea that ultimately everything only matters in terms of the pleasure or pain it provides us.
Quoting Joshs
If you agree with my assertion above, then it puts a whole different light on these constructions. I think primarily we have to orient ourselves in our personally constructed reality, and the only way to do that, that I can see, is to evaluate each moment emotionally - each moment has its own feeling.
PS. In the moment, not only the past , but also the future is imaginary.
Here’s another quote and then I’ll try to interpret.
For we certainly believe ourselves to be directly acquainted with another person's joy in his laughter, with his sorrow and pain in his tears, with his shame in his blushing, with his entreaty in his outstretched hands, with his love in his look of affection, with his rage in the gnashing of his teeth, with his threats in the clenching of his fist, and with the tenor of his thoughts in the sound of his words. If anyone tells me that this is not “perception,” for it cannot be so, in view of the fact that a perception is simply a “complex of physical sensations,” and that there is certainly no sensation of another person's mind nor any stimulus from such a source, I would beg him to turn aside from such questionable theories and address himself to the phenomenological facts. (Scheler 1973, 254 [1954, 260];
Let’s compare this to recent approaches in visual
perception. From writers like O’Reagan and Noe, we know that when we look at a visual scene , very little of it is actually there in front of us. We look at a three dimensional chair, but all we actually see is one perspective on it. Our brains fill in the rest of the details from memory and anticipations of what we’re are
likely to see if we change the position of our eyes, head or body with respect to the object.
In other words, our mind primes perception to see what we believe we should see and then provides that information alongside what we are
actually seeing. Optical illusions where we see a complete figure where there was only a partial
pattern are examples of this, and so is what happened s when we read. We will swear that a complete word was present when in fact only some of the letters were actually there.This is because we anticipate the next letter in a word, the next word in a sentence, etc.
Even before we see the first letter of the first word of a text, we are already primed for the fact that there will be a text to look at , simply by the act of going to the message app on the phone or reaching for the book.
We hear the train whistle rather than a complex of auditory data because in the context we find ourselves in, we expect there to be a train nearby. If a train whistle
blows when we are on flying on a plane , we will likely not at first recognize it as a whistle. Instead, we will
interpret what it sounds like in relation to our context on the plane. Maybe we will think it is a crying baby, not because the interpretation begins after the sound , but because it begins even before the sound.
So perception is as much filling in as it is building up.
Quoting Pop
One can read Racliffe’a model of existential feeling as oriented along a binary of meaningfulness vs lack of meaning. Situations and people can appear more or less enticing , exciting, appealing, salient. You could
say that he keeps your notion of pleasure but re-interprets pain as meaninglessness. Depression isn’t a. experience of painful sensation, it’s an inability to care about the world or find meaning in it.
Like you, Ratcliffe explains the perceived
salience of events by virtue of an interaction between intentional meanings and bodily felt sensations which reinforce and orient cognition.
Kelly, like Ratcliffe, sees the affective binary in terms
of construed meaningfulness-coherence vs emptiness-chaos-confusion, but he sees this as inherent in intentional organization rather than as depending on the feedback from the body.
Yes , I agree entirely. The established mental apparatus is entirely geared towards a future world, and anticipates it as something recognized, from past experience. The expectation is for more of the same, so what tends to be perceived is more of the same.
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Pop
Perhaps I haven't explained myself sufficiently.
Even when we incur pain , it is to avoid a potentially still greater pain, such as going to war to avoid tyranny, or going to an unsatisfying job to avoid homelessness. We also incur pain for the greater good as this is ultimately pleasurable within our meaning system - as we could not live with the guilt ( pain ) if we didn't. We tend to work it out such that what action we take yields the greatest happiness, least misery, or thereabouts as best we can given the resources and options on hand, within a personal meaning system. We try create a "happy ever after" - where happiness is a pleasurable emotional state. No?
I don't see it as a binary situation. Every thought lands on what I see as an emotional gradient, is either painful or pleasurable and this causes affect. It is like a circular self perpetuating mechanism that drives the system.
I think we differ mainly in the weight we give to emotions, this results in different outcomes. I suspect this would be reflective of our personal makeup in some way such that we are unlikely to agree on this issue.
PS. I am only just beginning to understand self organization, but my early impression is that it is ubiquitous in the universe, and contingent upon a bias to self organize rather then not. A bias is an emotion, so I'm wondering if emotions are a force.
I wonder how you'd react to the idea that the dynamical interplay of memory, anticipation and the current context that goes into perception must be inscribed into a Cartesian notion of time as successive instants. Yes, there is a dynamical interplay of these things, and a reciprocal co-constitution of the agent and environment in perception, but when do its generative events occur? What does the reciprocal-co-constitution evolve with respect to?
You mean in Heideggerese or in normal english? I think it makes good sense in Heideggerese. Out of Heideggerese I think it's the observation that when people interact with something, their current disposition/mood colours that interaction. If I'm worried I'll think about different things than if I'm not worried. If I'm feeling horny my body will be sensitised differently than if I'm feeling contemplative. If I'm hungry at the supermarket the food is more tempting. Similarly, if I see tempting food, I can become hungry.
Putting that in Heideggerese requires rephrasing it in a manner that doesn't separate people from something.
*fdrake dons his pedantic Heideggoggles*:"people interact with something", as if people were separate from the interaction and what they interacted with. It's better to say that people inhabit their surroundings (and even their own body) differently depending upon their mood. And vice versa. That "and vice versa" is equiprimordiality; moods couldn't make stuff seem different if stuff seeming different couldn't affect moods.
*fdrake dons a stronger pair of pedantic Heidegoggles*: SEEMING? WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN, ME?
"Events understood as interaffectings of interaffectings, working within and beyond relations
among presumed temporary essences (conceptual, affective-bodily, interpersonal), do not achieve their gentle integrative continuity through any positive internal power. On the contrary, they simply lack the formidability of static identity necessary to impose the arbitrariness of
conditioning, mapping, mirroring, grafting and cobbling, on the movement of experiential
process.
Feeling, the event, the inter-bleeding of subject and object, transformation without form: all of these terms reference the same irreducible ‘unit’ of experience, concealed by but overrunning what bodies, dispositions and other states are supposed to do. A ‘single’ state (whether so-called conceptual or bodily-affective) is already a panoply of intimately changing variations and momenta of felt meanings, in(as) the instant it is accessed, infusing the allegedly conceptual with feeling (and the sensate with intentionality) from within its very core, embodied before any consultation with a separate bodily ‘outside’."
It is impossible to deny the richness and validity of this outline of time. Yet, it could be beneficial to compare and contrast this approach with Deleuze's philosophy of time. For Deleuze, there are three fundamental syntheses of time, so that each one becomes the foundational grounding for the next. The first, the living present, has similar formal features with your 'radical time' so that the past and the future present operative dimensions. Deleuze's third synthesis of time, having past and present as dimensions of the future, may become a better model for understanding how the primacy of affect and an operativity of the event of the present are ultimately opened towards outside. Developing Deleuze and Guattari's line of argumentation, Brian Massumi goes so far as to propose that the event's processes are not merely self-retaining transcendental a-priory but are doubled and mutually presupposed by exterior power relations.
"On the infra-level, what is at issue is a veritable becoming, a bringing into determinant existence of something prefigured only on the run, in the upswell of as-yet unformed potential. Modulating or manipulating what comes of this level constitutes an extreme form of power: the power to bring to be; the power to make become; the power to harness qualitive transformation. I call it ontopower." (Brian Massumi, "The principle of unrest"). Does Massumi contradict himself? He also asserts: "The concept of affect is tied to the idea of modulation occurring at a constitutive level where somethings are doing, most of the unfelt….There are no subjects that are pre-constituted, but the emergence of the subject, or its re-emergence and reconstitution…" (Brian Massumi, "Politics of affect"). This conceptualization of affect is quite similar to yours. Yet, it could be challenging to show that the event's autopoietic emergent processes and the immanency of valorization matrices of our neoliberal conditions are interdependent upon one another to exist.
of perception is the gestalt structure.
“Each point in its turn can be perceived only as a figure on a background. When Gestalt theory
informs us that a figure on a background is the simplest sense-given available to us, we reply that this is not a contingent characteristic of factual perception, which leaves us free, in an ideal analysis, to bring in the notion of impressions. It is the very definition of the phenomenon of perception, that without which a phenomenon cannot be said to be perception at all. The perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field’.” (Phenomenology of Perception, p.4)
When Merleau-Ponty says a figure appears against a background, we can understand this to mean that the background is the system(ensemble, constellation, environment, setting, scene) that the figure belongs to. Figure -ground together form a ‘spontaneous arrangement of parts’ in which , ‘its parts together make up a whole to which each is related without leaving its place’
(Phenomenology of Perception, p.16). The figure cannot be understood outside of its role in this
systematic totality . The ensemble has properties which are irreducible to those of the assembled
elements.
In sum, Merleau-Ponty makes internally centered structure irreducible. Gestalt is a founding
configuration. The significance of this fact for the present discussion is that Merleau_Ponty's gestalt configurations sit smack dab in the middle of the retention-presncing-protential structure of temporality. So what , you say? Is this a problem? It depends. Lets make clear the effect of the primitive of sense content being treated as irreducible gestalt. The 'fatter', the more complex the content we begin from in determining subject-object experiencing, the more powerfully such content acts a a resistance to change, and the more polarizing and arbitrary change must be. Put differently , how intimate, integral, coherent and self-consistent the minute to minute and day to changes in my exeriencing are allowed to be is a direct function of the way the irreducible primitive of content is modeled.
The question, then is whether MP's gestalts are indeed irreducible primitives of meaning or whether they are derived abstractions hiding within their 'fatness' a more intricate structure of sense. Similarly, we must ask whether the irreducible primitives of content in Deleuze and Massumi are not in fact over-determined abstractions resulting in a model of inter-personal change that is too arbitrary and violent.
Derrida can help us out here. The point where Derrida steps in is before you get to start with your structures and then show how they relate to each other. He breaks apart the ability to claim that there is a structure of any kind ( or force, energy, power, quality) in the first place that isn't already divided within itself prior to its claim to be an itself.
The practical significance of this is not only to unravel the presuppositions of psychoanalytic
models , not only to problematize Foucaultian or social constructionist notions of a socially
created subjectivity determined and redetemined by cultural interchange( and Deleuze's approach
I think belongs to this zone), not only to recognize the site of culture within the so-called subject
even before expose to a social-linguistic community, but to situate the place of this decentering even before a single mark or fold can claim to be an entity ,an itself.
What Eugene, Gendlin, Geoge Kelly, Heidegger and Derrida have in common is that they don't being with gestalts, patterns, configurations, flows, concepts that interact with each other to form bodies and worlds. They begin from something more intricate, a simple referential differential. Not a difference between concepts or pattern or any other form, but differences of differences of differences.
How should this make any pragmatic difference in how we understand interhuman relations, affect, etc?It makes a great deal of difference. There is nothing in Deleuze like Gendlin's or Heidegger's or Kelly's ongoing thread of pragmatic thematic self-belonging that characterizes my continually changing relation to my self moment to moment, day to day. That's because he begins too late. What is reified content for him is temporal process for these authors. There is nothing in Deleuze that allows for the fact that each of us in social relations maintain a thread of assimilative self-continuity above and beyond the way that we are mutually shaped in interaction with others. There is nothing in Deleuze
that recognizes that affect and intention are the same thing, not interacting elements
Quoting fdrake
Not really. Where is the equiprimordiality of attunement and understanding to which Josh is referring -- in Being and Time or anywhere else? And how does it reduce to something like "feeling and thought" being integrated? Heidegger never talks like that. But what does it mean anyway? Is it simply saying that the mind/body and subject/object dichotomy is a construction of the West that we can go beyond? Alright, fine. Say that, then. Heidegger actually says that. The rest is just interpretation.
Incidentally, your quote of Heidegger seems unrelated to what you're saying. There he's in the middle of discussing the meaning of phenomenology.
In the interest of beating a dead horse and explaining a terrible joke I made at the same time.
I summarised the claim that moods and interpretation are equiprimordial out of Heideggerese with:
Quoting fdrake
I used the quote to highlight the criticism Heidegger has of using "seeming" vocabulary to describe phenomena...
Rest of this post is is in merciless Heideggerese.
..because "seeming" is privative with regard to disclosure and phenomenon need not be.
Regarding the equipromordiality of attunement and understanding. Two existentialia are equipromordial (or co-originary) when each founds the other - in more transcendental vocabulary each is a condition of the possibility for the other.
There is direct textual support for the claim:
I don't think @Joshs is misinterpreting Heidegger by claiming attunement and understanding are equiprimordial. If you want to push on the idea that mood is a mode of attunement and not the existentialia attunement as such, and therefore there's a case to be made that mood isn't equiprimordial with understanding, I'd be game to talk about it. But I don't think it's super necessary considering there's direct textual support for the interpretation that attunement and understanding are equiprimordial.
In my translation it's "state of mind" -- but regardless, I don't see how this relates to "thinking and feeling" being integrated. What Heidegger is talking about here is one aspect of being-in-the-world, namely "being-in," of which understanding and state-of-mind are two constitutive "ways." This is on the way to re-interpreting it all once again as care (Sorge), and then care as temporality. All very interesting, but I still don't see how any of this is related to Joshs' post.
Heidegger wrote:
“ In terms of fundamental ontology it can also be expressed by saying that all understanding is
essentially related to an affective self-finding which belongs to understanding itself. To be affectively self-finding is the formal structure of what we call mood, passion, affect, and the like, which are constitutive for all comportment toward beings, although they do not by themselves alone make such comportment possible but always only in one with understanding, which gives its light to each mood, each passion, each affect. Being itself, if indeed we understand it, must somehow or other be projected upon something. This does not mean that in this projection being must be objectively apprehended or interpreted and defined, conceptually comprehended, as something objectively apprehended. Being is projected upon something from which it becomes understandable, but in an unobjective way. It is understood as yet pre-
conceptually, without a logos; we therefore call it the pre-ontological understanding of being."(Basic Problems of
Phenomenology)
Gendlin writes:"Heidegger says that Befindlichkeit refers to what is ordinarily called "being in a mood," and also whatis called "feeling" and "affect." But Heidegger offers a radically different way of thinking about this ordinary
experience. Befindlichkeit refers to the kind of beings that humans are, that aspect of these beings which makes for them having moods, feelings, or affects. But Heidegger thinks about this human being in a very different way than mostpeople do, and so he also thinks about mood and feeling very differently."
Matthew Ratcliffe writes :
“ schematic causal interaction between body states and meaning intentions.
Ratcliffe writes;
“...a mood is not an intentional state but a condition of possibility for intentionality .According to Heidegger, moods are not intentional states that encompass a wide range of objects. Rather, they are modes of Befindlichkeit, ways of finding oneself in the world. This, he says, is presupposed by the intelligibility of intentionally directed experiences, thoughts and activities: „: “The mood has already disclosed, in every case, Being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct oneself towards something” (Heidegger, 1962, p.176/ 137). A central characteristic of Befindlichkeit, in its various modes, is that it determines the ways in which things can matter to us and, therefore, the kinds of intentional state we can adopt.” (Ratcliffe 2012)
Quoting Joshs
Are you equating understanding and thought (in the sense Heidegger means, in the sense of "apprehension" and "disclosure" [aletheia])? Because otherwise I still fail to see how this relates to the above quotation of yours, to which I initially referred. What Heidegger is talking about here is the pre-ontological (pre-theoretical) understanding of being.
I try to understand your points and your enthusiasm about Gendlin, Kelly, Heidegger, and Derrida. Honestly, I am more familiar with Derrida's works than the rest of them, and we could discuss Derrida's philosophy of time in more detail. We could take his essay
"Before the law" as an example of his conceptualization of time, differance, and identity.
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Joshs
No doubt, your group of thinkers have contributed a lot to understanding the founding of 'continually changing relation to yourself moment to moment, day to day.' By the way, I hope that you agree that your conceptualization of time is not an absolute and ultimate truth that should be accepted by everyone. It is an influential and interesting phenomenological perspective that can match well with one's experience of time and operate as an orienting grounding for a few domains of science and psychology. Yet, what is at stake here is not how the philosophy of time can serve as a better foundation for understanding a more significant number of texts or writing academic papers. It is not just about the ontological or epistemological foundation of apprehension of our time, answering the question: What is our time? It is more about an ethical question: How should one live in our time? You claim that your 'radical time' could help us maintain ‘a thread of assimilative self-continuity.' That means that one should be extremely attentive to one's most profound, usually indiscernible mental processes. The result could be the achievement of a culminating gestalt, of discovering and preserving one's authentic identity. (Despite all your claims that your philosophy is beyond any subjectivity). Yet how is this program related to our social realities, to our ordinary identities that we need to play out continually?
I do not see (so far) how you can bridge the gap. It looks like you misunderstand or misinterpret how Deleuse starts. He does not begin from separate entities or processes, but develops a transcendental empiricist dialectics of virtual and actual. When he writes: "As for the third time that uncovers the future: it signifies that the event and the action have a secret coherence that excludes the coherence of the self. It has become equal to them, and they shatter it into thousands of pieces, as if the bearer of the new world were taken up and dissipated by the shattering of what it, in the multiple, gives birth to. The self is equal to the unequal in itself", he lays out an ultimately different (from yours) existential program: one should not maintain and preserve any stable identity. Why? Because they are not authentic anymore. They are created and reproduced primarily for valorization or utilization purposes. They are pre-given and pre-programmed. One cannot discover or retain any authentic experience. One should live in 'the middle of things.' Has an almost inaccessible experience of death become the most authentic experience?
Understanding is initially inexplicit, indefinite, undifferentiated totality of relevance in which something is still veiled. Being falls prey to, gets tempted by, and lost in beings as understanding is modified into interpretation. Interpretation develops understanding into the 'as' structure of 'this as this'. Definite conceptuality, perception and theory are all modes of interpretation and thus are all derivations of primordial understanding.
I see understanding and all its derivative modes as conveying the ‘content’ aspect of experiencing, the ‘what it is’ Dasein falls prey to, and attunement as conveying the ‘how it is’ aspect, how what I fall prey to affects me.
Self organisation is spherical – the nucleus is empty. There is no central or enduring self, the self is the state of an evolving system at any given time.
Quoting Joshs
The state of the system changes at the crossing, and so does the self . In the absolute sense “the self” changes from thought to thought – Radical Temporality :clap:
He is absolutely right. I could t agree more. I want to take his direction further. If you radically dissolve the basis of identity , you don’t end up with power relations or relations of force or a subjectivity created and recreated like a ping pong ball through conditioning by the social milieu. If your starting point is deconstructed enough, it has too little force to lead to the kind of political model that Deleuze offers. A truly mobile self - transforming self will be founded on such an insubstantial basis that there will be nothing to prevent it from appearing to be radically self-consistent. A conservative retreat from Deleuze, which is what the above quote is referring to , sees a substantial self. Many different philosophies of dialectical self-transformation , such as Hegel and Marx , begin from such a substantial base , and it shows. They are dominating, violent and arbitrary compared to what Deleuze and Foucault accomplish. But a philosophy to the left of them dissolves even Deleuze’s
claim to an irreducible violence in experience.
Quoting Number2018
It’s not about maintaining a thread of assimilative self-continuity. It’s about recognizing that this is always already the case for everyone. It is built into the very structure of temporality. Put differently , radically temporal approaches are more effective at understanding others, as individuals and as groups, than Deleuze’a approach. What he would see as arbitrary , they would perceive a finer order hiding within.
As a ‘psychotherapeutic’ approach , Deleuze would look for how individuals are defined and created by their positioning within a social arrangement. Radical temporal approaches see the social rearrangement as secondary and derived in relation to the social movement that already defines the individual.
Let me know if you are familiar with John Protevi’s work, and if you see it as consonant with Deleuze’s. We could analyze his psychological model in relation to Heidegger et al.