Subject: What if metaphysics is not explicit?
Dearest!
Last week I talked about how a brain in the human animal had to learn two concepts from others: “I” and “her”, and perhaps even “she”.
I like this metaphor.
B&L talk about an asymmetry between objective and subjective reality. Reality is the “known” part of experience. We talk in knowledge and language but convey the affective and subjective state. All we can do is talk knowledge about reality. All we can recognise is knowledge, meaning. And all that count is attached as flying kites to those words.
At that point a thought approached me and asked to be watered.
We have this ghost in the annals of philosophy called metaphysics. Any projected reality beyond the immediately visible. It has served as justification for natural laws, a reality behind the reality that explains why the laws work.
Just like the “I” which has an objective reality both in the individual and in society - namely what I know about myself and what society as such knows about myself - and the reality accent it was internalised with, then why not metaphysics? We use the word according to the social laws. But we act through an understanding that was forged elsewhere. Is metaphysics the world that appears solid? Is metaphysics, I mean not the signifier, but the signified, the world bound to epicycles and orbits and biology?
Philosophers are busy denying metaphysics while the ghost of it has almost free rein in every page ever written.
Is it conceivable then that you can completely abandon metaphysics (the signifier) and still allow it sovereignty in unspoken cognition?
How do you silence an internalised ghost? And more so, one that you have iconoclastically purged already!
♥︎
Things were getting stranger by the minute.
Philosophers talk about reality. That talk messes with the wiring of the brain, and now she had a language for that. Emotions are strongly involved in the question of reality. Is the love of one’s family real? Is it merely “real”? Subjectively real? Metaphysically real? Or is it REAL (the signified, not the signifier)? Playing with a scalpel amongst the sinews of affection will certainly get everyone involved.
A lot is at stake, and hence, people argue philosophy, fight over it, wage wars over it. We call those religous wars, but they are wars over sinews.
Every page written leaves the reader with a new internalised reality, and hence, a new subjective landscape.
She went outside, scared of touching the surface of the ocean. She understood why The Holy Ghost remained aloof over that dark tangle of undercurrents and magnificent basins of emotion.
She felt like she was losing control of something through understanding, not in spite of it.
She kicked a stone into a deeply cut channel of a nearby stream, almost waterless for the time being, but she heard the stone splash.
“Nell”… what could possibly be said about her? She felt lucky for being unknown in the wider literature. No digital trail identified her, no public blunders marred her reputation.
But she knew that she knew her, and Patricia too knew her, but luckily not in the same way. She needed to know some parts of herself like Patricia knew her, including the whole shebang of emotions and reality accent.
Identities
There is no such thing as “a thing” in any society. Everything consists of what we know about it and how we experience it, where the latter is the end result of the socialisation process which created the knowledge, situations and affections that we recognise as “the thing”.
The same goes for identity.
Identity is personally experienced but socially fabricated.
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY - 3.3 - THEORIES ABOUT IDENTITY
Identity … stands in a dialectical relationship with society.
However strange it may sound that we do not ourselves define what constitutes our identity, we can usually attest that we spend considerable energy negotiating with our surroundings about the proper version of our identity.
We may, in defiance, walk away protesting a common knowledge that we are lazy or inept at what we do, but the objective reality has made its impression on us. Next time we hear a critique of our work, we immediately know that everybody will perceive it as connected to that reputation.
Identity types are the recognisable typifications that are produced socially. We recognise others through them, and often also strive to shed some and attain others as part of our negotiated self image. Another trick is to appropriate the types and overlay them with new overtones. I drive like a woman: sensibly and cautiously.
By separating identities from their types, there is no need to resort to the term “collective identity”. The interplay between them is a dialectical one: they shape each other.
Societies have their own theories, which must be studied as sociological phenomena, like our current sociology must be.
Any theoretical discipline that seeks to explain an identity is a psychology. Whether or not it fits with our own psychology is irrelevant.
A theory of reality (theirs, not ours) may underpin the society’s theory of identity in important ways that make it clear that we should not separate them:
A psychology interpreting certain empirical phenomena as
possession by demoniacal beingshas as its matrixa mythological theory of the cosmos, and it is inappropriate to interpret it in a non-mythological framework. Similarly,a psychology interpreting the same phenomena in terms ofelectrical disturbances` of the brain has as its background an overall scientific theory of reality
She felt the need to split the note in two. At this point, what B&L did was verily exciting to her nascent sociologists’ gaze. They embarked on an analysis of psychology as a discipline within society. Psychology as a mechanism serving a purpose in relation to the intersection of identities and society.
It felt awkward, reading a theory about another theory which made it clear that the first theory itself was a theory about itself too. If sociology (and psychology) serves a legitimising purpose of anything, including building bridges between clusters of knowledge and thereby anchoring several aspects into a stable whole, then that theory served a social purpose, irrespective of its other purposes.
Psychology as a legitimising theory
Let’s identify the various needs involved when an individual seeks the assistance of a psychologist.
Professional members of society (psycho-analysts or witch doctors) construe a body of theory in accordance with the explanation of reality itself. What exists can serve as an explanation; what does not exist cannot.
Society’s own dominant narrative must remain inviolate from the conclusions that could result from a meeting between professional and individual. The modern psychologist will explain the neurosis of the patient as a collision between behaviour handed over from evolution and civilisation as it has evolved out of economic and historic forces. They may be in conflict, but both halves of the explanation have reality.
Demons have not, unless we talk about a case of possession in Haiti. The two pairs, psychology + reality, cannot be separated.
The reality that forms the basis for most institutions in society is not challenged.
These people [Western urban city people] simply do not have an identity capable of producing phenomena that could be so interpreted.
The demons, if such there are, seem to avoid them. On the other hand, psychoanalysis is unlikely to be adequate for the interpretation of identity problems in rural Haiti,while some sort of Voudun psychology might supply interpretative schemes with a high degree of empirical accuracy
An individual crisis needs to be understood by both the individual and society. The advent of pathologies - explanations as to what the problem is - which matches the overall ontology of the society serves as a shared vocabulary. The patient can see himself as being a neurotic or possessed by a demon, and so can the professional and the entire society.
Notice also how the habitualised actions shine through. It’s not that a New York psychologist cannot see why Voodoo might pertain to a native of Haiti in some useful way. The problem is that her social reality did not come into existence as a result of typification of habitualised actions involving Voodoo - neither her subjective knowledge, nor the objective knowledge of her society. The entire prehistory, which consists in procedural knowledge and later legitimations, is missing from her perspective. Adopting a different cultural reality would stun her actions. “It may be true,” she would say, “but what am I to do? Perform an exorcism?” This notion of truth would even be wrong. The reality of it consists in its dialectical prehistory, producing a complex of knowledge that natives immediately respond to - affectively and cognitively. She does not.
However, just because Western psychologists do not share the background reality, it does not mean that they cannot study and use the objective criteria.
A Haitian ethnologist can empirically discover New York neurosis, just as an American ethnologist can empirically discover Voudun possession. The presupposition for such discoveries is simply that theoutside observer is willing to employ the conceptual machineryof the indigenous psychology for the inquiry at hand. Whether he is also willing to accord that psychologya more general epistemological validity is irrelevantto the immediate empirical investigation.
Objective knowledge is objective. A good deal of what stops us is, of course, that we reject such objective knowledge as being inherently false and hence, not knowledge. “Sure, we can pronounce the verdict that Roger is possessed, but it’s just meaningless words. What does it mean deep down where things get real?”
She sent the notes hoping Patricia would bite. She was not one for ignoring an ontological incongruence. She would still assert that empirically concluding a theory was right, without also maintaining that the reality of the theory was right, was meaningless.
Later that night she got a late call from Patricia.
P: “Hi, sweet Nell! Did I call too late again?”
N: “Let me pop a couple of caffeine pills, and I can talk all night. No, I can’t, but imagine I could.”
P: “I just wanted to talk very briefly about that empirical aspect B&L brought up.”
N: “I think I know what.”
P: “I guess you do: Isn’t their definition of empiricism odd?”
N: “What’s odd about it? If you are an empiricist, you do not desire to prove anything is real.”
P: “I know… And still, why do you do anything at all? It’s funny the way the world develops, isn’t it? First we believe in God and mighty miracles. Then the urge to explore the physical world grips us, and deism wells up and allows scientists to unify their activities with their faith and a space to do their own discoveries. Then Hume starts to talk about sophistry and illusion. On top of that, the Enlightenment and its écrasez l’infâme witch hunt and so on. Now we have abandoned even the experimental world as no more real than any other.”
N: “Hence the reason we do anything at all: Because it is what the human insect does in a society. Act according to what is real. But it feels wrong when we are in it, does it not? To knowingly reject some reality and still perform its roles because they are empirically founded.”
P: “Yes. It seems absurd to realise a system predicts observations which you can operate by, without believing in the reality behind it. I mean… "
N: “I know what you mean: Now we not only do not believe in it, we outright think it is untrue.”
P: “Yes! Like saying ’this lie works’.”
N: “And conversely, what does that say about our own beliefs?”
P: “It seems to suggest that until the question of reality comes up, our beliefs are most real. Not until we start to actually ponder about things, or contrast them with other cultures, do we develop an idea that, ‘Yeah, I guess this is the best candidate for being real’. And that makes it less real than before we confronted it with the question.
Real does not mean ‘stronger evidence’. It means maximum affective velocity, full throttle, don’t look back, leap into the world kind of cognition.”
N: “It is striking how things fall into place given a different definition of reality. That’s a big win for sociology.
If we compare with the very complicated explanation B&L provide in chapter 3.3 about the dialectical relationship between society and psychology, it becomes apparent that we can’t really keep working with ‘real’ as meaning real except we must retain that emphasis that we put into real because that is the affective part, the one our mind adds into the mix.”
Nell rolled over on her stomach in bed and looked at her document: “Here is the rest of my note:”
Dialectics between a psychology and reality
So much for what a reality can do for a psychology.
What can a psychology do for a reality?
A psychology is dealing with matters of identity, i.e., objectified knowledge about who we are. A psychology is a vocabulary full of powerful words that must be learned. Because of the huge potency of the material, this learning sits closer to primary than secondary socialisation. Psychologies are bodies of theory melting disjoint areas of the world together into one whole, what we call a legitimisation.
However,
their realizing potency is particularly great because it is actualized by emotionally charged processesof identity-formation. If a psychology becomes socially established … it tends to realize itself forcefully in the phenomena it purports to interpret.Its internalization is accelerated by the fact that it pertains to internal reality, so that the individual realizes it in the very act of internalizing it.
The powerful words reach deeper than our own feeble attempts at explaining who we are. We start to talk about demonic possession or neuroticism instead.
Note that our symptomatology fluidly adapts:
Indeed, it is possible that, given a certain biographical context, signs or symptoms will be produced by the individual himself.
The Haitian will ... produce ... signs of possession, whilethe New Yorker will construct his neurosis in conformity with the recognized symptomatology.
So we do it consciously for a reason? We fake it to get social benefits?
No. We apply the categories and knowledge internalised.
This has nothing to do with ‘mass hysteria’, much less with malingering, but
with the imprint of societal identity types upon the individual subjective reality of ordinary people with common sense.
And yes, it implies that we bend our behaviour in the direction of our understanding.
N: “Psychologies are large waves of knowledge crashing into other waves of knowledge in the collective databank of society, spearheaded by quantities of articles, discussions, conferences and private talks.”
P: “From society’s perspective, they are larger than individuals. They are resilient to individual attacks but are shaped dialectically anyway.”
N: “And they shape as much as they are shaped. They produce the reality in which their vindication can occur. This is not a guaranteed process. The reality they produce is different from the psychology depending on that reality. The psychology can be disaffirmed experimentally.”
As we have indicated, verification comes by confronting psychological theories and psychological reality as empirically available.
Psychologies produce a reality, which in turn serves as the basis for their verification.
In other words, we are dealing here with dialectics, not tautology.
P: “We are really global workspacing’ it, aren’t we?”
N: “Say again?”
P: “We spend so much time introspecting our untold signified’s that we almost stumble when walking. Do we even know how to look out? This cognitive science idea that the hallmark of consciousness is our ability to look at our own cognition and speak about it; we are running amok on that.”
N: “I have never felt less conscious in my entire life?”
P: “Oh, we feel conscious, but we do not feel like ‘us’. I am not me, I am thoughts devoid of my personality, and that too is learned. Neither of us can find that self which is not learned.”
Nell felt sad, and she sighed too loudly.
P: “I still love talking to you.”
Nell subdued her weeping and cleared her throat.
N: “I will never forget my vow to you to keep talking about what matters.”
They hung up, and Nell curled up in bed and felt both lucky and lonely. Actually, and Nell couldn’t possibly know this, so did Patricia.
•P•A•R•A•D•O•X•