Art, Zen, and Insurrection: Finding Personal and Social Change In The Art of Life Part III.1

PART III: Becoming an Existential Aesthetician: Integrating Imaginative Emotional Expression Into Daily Life

This is part III.1 of my essay 'Art, Zen, and Insurrection'. Part III is all about life as an art form and is titled 'Becoming an Existential Aesthetician: Integrating Emotional Expression into Daily Life'. Part III.1 is called 'Identifying Technical Theories Of Existence'. Here is a table of contents:

Part III: Becoming An Existential Aesthetician: Integrating Imaginative Emotional Expression Into Daily Life

1. Introduction

2. Art And Craft In The Social World

III.1. Identifying Technical Theories of Existence

3. The Technical Theory of Life: Modern Times and Overly Crafted Experience
4. The Technical Theory of Politics: David Harvey on the ‘Aestheticization’ of Politics

5. The Technical Theory of Society: John Gray and The Enlightenment’s Over-Reliance on Science and Technology

6. Technical Theories Of Existence As Tacit Mental Theories/Models As Status Functions As Ideology

7. Concluding Part III.1

Part III: Becoming An Existential Aesthetician: Integrating Imaginative Emotional Expression Into Daily Life

1. Introduction

Time to expound the main claim of this whole series of essays. I intend to argue that we can turn our lives into a work of art. Seeing as how I spent a little more than a hundred pages explicating Collingwood’s definition of art and the pragmatics of art, I now think I’m in a good position to explain how this possible. First, just to fill you in, Collingwood defines art as the conscious and imaginative expression of our emotions. Again, I gave this definition extended treatment, so if you really care, then check out Part I. But now I’m going to explain how it is that we can turn our lives into a work of art. I’m going to do this in three sections. First, I’m going to give a brief analysis of the two key terms that this section will be built around, art on the one hand, and craft on the other. Then I’m going to do what Collingwood did, I’m going to present a negative statement about what an artistic life is not. In The Principles Of Art Collingwood spends a bit of time refuting what he calls ‘the technical theory of art’, by which art is identified with craft. Similarly, I want to explain how I think there might be something like a ‘technical theory of existence’, in which life is identified as a craft of sorts. I’ll be identifying three technical theories of existence: that of life, that of politics, and that of society. In each case I’ll be exploring the question of whether these things should be identified simply as a craft, or if we would benefit more from defining them as an art, as a process of expression. That will be Part III.1, ‘Identifying Technical Theories Of Existence’. After the negative component I’ll begin a positive defense of this idea. I’ll be trying to explain how life can become an art form by talking about my inspirations for this idea, about the role of consciousness, language, minds, and choice. That will be Part III.2, ‘Defining The Aesthetic Theory Of Existence’. Lastly, I’ll be making some tentative statement about how we could potentially implement the aesthetic theory of existence. I’ll be discussing status functions, zen, and other ideas about the transformation of the self. That will be Part III.3, ‘Implementing The Aesthetic Theory Of Existence’. After that I’ll be introducing militaristic metaphors in Parts IV and V. That will be the insurrection component.

I think that the main issue I’m trying to tackle by writing about this is one that Collingwood thought incredibly important: the unification of moral philosophy and moral behavior, the unification of thought and action. He rejected the notion that moral philosophy has nothing to do with moral behavior. This was, evidently, the explicit claim of Collingwood’s contemporaries, and I fear that it is the implicit attitude of twenty-first century philosophy. In short, I hate the idea that moral philosophy would say: “I’ll tell you what moral living is. But don’t expect me to tell you how to do it.” Seems like pretty lame philosophy if you ask me. Adorno was also concerned that philosophy was losing its function as a guide to the good life. I’m trying to use philosophy to find a way to live well, as a way to becoming who I want to be. I think that conceptualizing life as an art is helpful, and that it might actually be a defensible idea. But in either case, that is the goal: to use philosophy to live a better life by explaining its potential affinity with art. But first, I want to explain how in our particular historical moment existence seems to be identified more so with craft.

Before I launch into the three subsections of this section, I would like to make a more general statement about the relationship between art and craft in the social world.

Disclaimer that applies to much of my writing: Please forgive my hyperbole. This is a mental exercise, and I don’t know if I believe what I’m about to write. What I do want is to find out what I’m capable of writing.

2. Art And Craft In The Social World

Now, in The Principles Of Art one of Collingwood’s main goals, perhaps his most important goal, is to clarify the distinction between art proper and craft. Craft is defined as the deliberate process of turning a raw material into a finished product based on a preconceived plan. There should be no real changing of the plan during the process of construction, so the finished product should turn out precisely as planned. Collingwood thought that art had become too heavily identified as a form of craft, so much so that the terms were becoming interchangeable. And just to note quickly, that representation, as in the deliberate creation of mental states in other people, is a form of craft. Art, for Collingwood, however, is not simply a craft or a matter of representation, but rather a process by which we imaginatively express our emotions. Art undoubtedly contains elements of craft, but they are not the same thing. In fact, craft is something that is used in service of art. Craft is only useful so long as it allows us to imaginatively express our emotions. As I said, I gave this definition of art an extended look in Part I.2 and I.3. But to rehash quickly, to imaginatively express our emotions means to use consciousness to extend the life of a particular experience or emotions. By focusing our consciousness on a raw emotional experience we are able to change it into something else, we elevate that experience to the level of imagination or idea. We are converting a raw emotions into something that is expressible through language (using the word language in the broadest sense). This is one way that art differs from craft: the process of expression changes the thing that is expressed, and therefore does not fit the definition of craft as the execution of a definite plan. So that is the distinction to grasp, art and craft. What is art, what is craft, how are they related, and why does it matter. It seems undeniable to me that there is a difference between art and craft, and that art has become largely identified as simply a matter of craft. But that can’t be the case. Again, this was what Part I grappled with.

Now the matter is to apply this distinction between art and craft to the concrete realities of the social world. How much does craft have to play a role in our social lives? How much can we make our social interactions become the imaginative expression of our emotions? What would that look like? What are the necessary forms of social craft that we need to engage with?How could social craft be used to make life an art? These are terms, these are the questions, this is what I want to figure out in Part III.

I will now begin parsing these questions by giving a closer look at the issue of craft in different aspects of existence.

III.1 Identifying Technical Theories Of Existence

Now, as I sad, in this section I’m going to be doing what Collingwood did in The Principles Of Art: I’ll be explaining how life, much like art, is incorrectly identified as a craft. The purpose of this is to provide a negative analysis that will lead into my positive analysis of what it would mean for life to be identified with art proper. So this section will be divided into four subsections. In the first three subsections I’ll be identifying three different ‘technical theories of existence’, i.e. three parts of contemporary American life that are thought of as crafts and should perhaps be thought of as arts. After that I’ll be talking about how these technical theories function below the radar, eluding people’s awareness. I’ll go through a process of comparing them to tacit mental theories, to status functions, and to ideology. So first the three technical theories, and then a closer look at how they might function in both micro and macro ways. As for the technical theories themselves, the first will be the technical theory of life, by which I mean that individual existences are thought of crafts, as the execution of plans. Second, I’ll be exploring the idea of a technical theory of politics, in which political behavior is identified with craft and representation rather than expression. For my writing on the technical theory of politics I’ll be drawing on David Harvey’s book The Condition Of Postmodernity and his discussion of ‘the aestheticization of politics’ in the 1980s. Thirdly, I’ll be looking at the technical theory of society as a whole, in which all of social organization is thought of in terms of craft. For that section I’ll be working with John Gray’s book Straw Dogs: Thoughts On Humans And Other Animals. In short, I’ll be moving from micro to macro, starting with how individuals lives are structured around the notion of craft, moving outward to the political sphere’s relationship with craft, and then even more macro by looking at society as a whole as it relates to craft. Onward

3. The Technical Theory of Life: Modern Times and Overly Crafted Experience

I have been doing all this reading, thinking, and writing on the role of art and craft in life for about three or four months now. In that time it has become much clearer to me how the notion of craft is present in my life and other people’s lives. When I look around me, when I talk to my peers, when I think about life, I see the notion of craft as an intrusive presence, sometimes as a hindrance. When I look at myself I feel myself grappling with the issue of craft and with one of its specific forms: representation. With both craft and representation we are attempting to create turn a raw material into a finished product based on a preconceived plan. But representation differs in that it is meant to create a certain idea or feeling in someone’s mind. So in this section I’m trying to explain how it is that life itself is conceived of as a form of craft. Sure, I can identify all kinds of little instances around me in which craft plays a role in life. But is it possible that much of life itself is identified with craft? There are two ways that I can see this being the case, two ways in which I see craft as a domineering force in my life. First, I see craft as playing a role in the way relationships are played out. Too often I find myself trying to craft my appearance, to represent my personality in certain ways to people. Second, I see craft as an issue in how we conceptualize life as a whole. I worry that life is thought of as something that must proceed by a plan, that life is thought of as a raw material that has to be converted into a certain preconceived end. Let me talk about these things in turn.

I’ve decided that this section is very personal, and so that I’m going to be speaking in very personal ways. This is something I’m doing for myself, something I’m doing to challenge myself to be more expressive, to be less concerned with social craft. So if I say we, I mean I. So I worry that relationships can proceed too rigidly along the lines of craft. I think this is true both in plutonic and romantic relationships.

When I first transfered from UMBC to the University of Maryland in the fall of 2006 I was living at my parents home and was completely horrified by my social prospects. I was living quite far away from College Park and had no sense of how to meet people, and I was insecure and depressed to boot. Things were not looking good for me. I had no idea how to meet people because I was completely fixated on the question of ‘what would I say? what am I supposed to talk about?’ I would plan out conversations in my head and want them to go that way. I would try to stick to these ideas of how a conversation ‘should go’. In retrospect I would say that I was implicitly expecting my social life to proceed along the lines of craft. I was expecting that I had to craft my image, my personality, and my interactions. It caused me enormous amounts of pain.

And perhaps even more importantly I was deadly afraid of expressing myself honestly. There were things that had happened to me, things that had really upset me, that I wasn’t even capable of expressing to myself. It reminds me of what Collingwood calls ‘the corruption of consciousness’: a state in which individuals are incapable of using consciousness to express the emotions, a state in which they simply avoid them through distraction and amusement. I think that my consciousness was corrupted. Furthermore, I think that my inclination towards social planning, my inclination towards craft, made it harder for me to showdown my emotions and exacerbated my inability to express myself, the corruption of my consciousness. So, in short, I was dominated by the idea that conversations were something that needed to be planned and then executed. I was completely incapable of expressing myself without knowing precisely what the outcome would be. Of course craft in the social world never worked out for me. But that didn’t stop me from trying. I can understand my personal experience in light of these ideas. It makes sense to me that art, as in imaginative expression of emotions, is the antidote to the corruption of consciousness. And frankly, I met a professor who was so good at expressing themselves that they allowed me to express myself. I work hard at expressing myself these days, and I think that I want to have a clear consciousness, a consciousness capable of chasing down the secrets I keep from myself.

My fixation with social craft also bled over into my attempts at romantic relationships. I tried to talk to girls that I thought were cute, I tried to think of what I could say, what I could do. But it never worked. I had countless awkward conversations with girls where I was just completely uncomfortable. I was simply incapable of coming up with social plans that would go further than a few words. Social craft really failed me in my romantic attempts because I was lacking any hint of art, any shred of honest expression. I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know how to simply express myself to someone without wondering why, what was the outcome, what was the plan I was trying to enact. ‘Could you be my next girlfriend? How should I present myself?’ These days I just want to express myself. I don’t want to plan out my relationships, I refuse to craft them. I will be aware of them, I will push myself to be expressive, and I will see what happens. Forget those plans for the world of friends and lovers. Just be honest with yourself, Riley.

I think that craft also plays a role in the planning of life as a whole. I experienced this mainly with college and with the idea of a degree. It seems like the expectation is get a degree that can make you money, go make the money. Life should be a plan. ‘I’m going to get an international law degree so I can tackle issues of shipping in China’ (Holla Miriax). And I’m not trying to be pejorative towards people who do that, to people who execute a life plan. Good for them, I bet there are elements of art in it. But the issue is a little more difficult for those of us who don’t have degrees that immediately translate into a career. I have a history degree. ‘What are you going to do with that?’ someone might ask. I’m going to die some day, I might reply. Or I could tell them about my vague ambitions to become a scholar, but that wouldn’t sound very planned. At Christmas I had a conversation with a family member about someone who had really ‘executed the life plan.’ They had goals and they fulfilled them, straight up, did it all. They described this person, however, as rigid in his worldview despite his success. I wonder how good it is to really have a life plan and to try and execute it. I wonder how easy it is. I suspect it is very hard. It seems like so many people end up doing all kinds of things that they never thought they would. It seems like it might be better to let ourselves drift into the world as expressive people, and not as crafted people. I can’t execute a life plan because my ambitions are too grand and too uncertain.

Now one issue is that It isn’t clear to me where this tacit technical theory of life comes from. Why is it that relationships and life are seen as things that ought to be planned. Collingwood, however, drops a few clues as to how craft plays a larger role in our social existence. He says that in the modern age art is overwhelmingly identified with craft, and that this confusion is exacerbated by modern disciplines like psychology and economics: To confuse art with craft, he says, "is actually the way in which most people nowadays think of art; and especially economists and psychologists, the people to whom we look (sometimes in vain) for special guidance in the problems of modern life" (19). I find it interesting how Collingwood references guidance in modern life, and how these disciplines are supposed to help us with our lives. How much do we still look towards these types of figures for guidance? How much do we think of economists and psychologists as wise individuals who would understand how life should be lived in these confusing times? But how dangerous is it that they are operating under an erroneous definition of art that identifies it as mere craft? Collingwood makes the confusion between art and craft in the modern age even more explicit when he says that “It is an error much encouraged by modern tendencies in psychology, and influentially taught at the present day by persons in a position of academic authority; but after all it is only a new version, tricked out in the borrowed plumage of modern science, of the ancient fallacy that the arts are a kind of craft” (34). Collingwood seems to think there are things going on in the modern world that encourage the confusion of art and craft.

As I’ve been saying, the confusion of art and craft concerns me because I fear it encourages to live a life that is weighed by planning, a life that isn’t quite expressive enough, a life that puts pressure on us to ‘execute a life plan’. Furthermore, I fear that it introduces an unhealthy amount of generalization into our experiences. Psychology and economics make a living off of describing things, describing our patterns, our tendencies. And of course this is all very useful, it gives us a much richer knowledge of things. But it also damages our ability to express ourselves, and therefore makes it more difficult for us to live an artistic life: “The reason why description, so far from helping expression, actually damages it, is that description generalizes. To describe a thing is to call it a thing of such and such a kind: to bring it under a conception, to classify it. Expression, on the contrary, individualizes” (112). An artistic life would be one that regarded its own experiences as individual, as novel, as nuanced, and not as simply general. I don’t want to live a general, archetypical life, I refuse. Just like an artist, I want to get “as far away as possible from merely labeling... emotions as instances of this or that general kind,” and rather go to “enormous pains to individualize them by expressing them in terms which reveal their difference from any other emotion of the same sort” (113). That is what I want from my life. I want to express myself by particularizing my emotions and my experiences. I refuse to believe that I am archetypical or general.

So that is basically the explication of the ‘technical theory of life’ that I want to give. I’m pleased that I made this a personal section, because that is what it is. I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that I felt that craft was sometimes an intrusive presence in my life. So I talked about some of my experiences where I felt overwhelmed by the task of expressing myself, how I felt hindered by my focus on crafting my relationships. Then I talked about how I felt a similar anxiety or frustration with the way life is structured around ‘life plans’ in which we choose a major and it sets our path. Lastly I presented some of Collingwood’s quotations in order to show that he thought that craft was encouraged by the modern world and that it invaded more aspects of life than just art. Now I”ll discuss the technical theory of politics and of society.

4. The Technical Theory Of Politics: David Harvey On The ‘Aestheticization’ Of Politics

I had this idea about a technical theory of politics while I was reading David Harvey’s book The Condition of Postmodernity. A most fascinating book that makes some compelling claims about how postmodernism is a historical condition that was brought about by a switch from a Fordist-Keynesian economic model to a new model of flexible capital accumulation that is characterized by a less stable permanent working force, the growth of fictitious forms of capital, and more corporate power, among other things. Harvey believes that this switch to more flexible modes of capital accumulation brought about a new round of ‘space-time compression’, meaning that the way we experience space and time has been altered. Because of this wave of technological and economic change we think of the world as a much smaller place, we think of it in more abstract ways, and generally our experience of space and time is very different.

One hallmark of these different changes is what Harvey calls ‘the aestheticization of politics’. The phrase is actually Walter Benjamin’s, who I need to read soon. But the idea is generally that politics is no longer about transparency or honest expression, but is rather about representing things in different ways than they actually are. I believe Benjamin was concerned with the way that the Nazis were representing themselves in certain ways and actually doing other things. Harvey uses this idea of the aestheticization of politics to talk about the Reagan administration and the disparity between their rhetoric and the realities of the country during those years. During the Reagan administration record numbers of people became unemployed, became homeless, went below the poverty, lost their health insurance, and so on. There were all kinds of things that went terribly wrong in that period: “Between 1979 and 1986, the number of poor families with children increased by 35 percent, and in some large metropolitan areas, such as New York, Chicago, Baltimore, and New Orleans, more than half the children were living in families with incomes below the poverty line” (Harvey, 331). Harvey says, however, that the Reagan administration did not receive much criticism for these faults. Rather, they are regarded as one of the last great traditional administrations, lauded as the conservative heros of the 1980s. Harvey says that this is so because aesthetics, as opposed to ethics, is the dominant way that the Reagan administration handled itself. They made an effort to make themselves look good, to have a strong and identifiable rhetoric, and not to enforce moral values. “A rhetoric that justifies homelessness, unemployment, increasing impoverishment, disempowerment, and the like by appeal to supposedly traditional values of self-reliance and entrepreneurialism will just as freely laud the shift from ethics to aesthetics as its dominant value system” (Harvey, 336). The aestheticization of politics is therefore the concealment of bad policy with pleasant rhetoric.

I have issue with this phrase, however. Because I think that when they talk about the ‘aestheticization of politics’ they might be identifying aesthetics primarily with craft. Because to me what Harvey seems to be describing is that politics has been infiltrated craft and representation. It is not an expressive that characterizes the politics that Harvey describes, but rather a crafting and representing. Collingwood is adamant that aesthetics must first and foremost deal with the issue of expression, with the creation of aesthetic objects, with the aesthetic experience, and not with the issue of beauty. Aesthetic theory as the theory of beauty is fully rejected by Collingwood as a vestige of the notion that art is a sort of craft. Harvey, however, seems to be implicitly endorsing the identification of art as a sort of craft. What he describes in the Reagan administration is undoubtedly political craft and representation, not aesthetic expression. Furthermore, Harvey speaks of aesthetics and ethics as if though they are antithetical. Which I certainly do not think is the case. I think Collingwood thought that a proper understand of aesthetics could undoubtedly lead to moral behavior. If we are expressing ourselves in genuine ways, if we are engaging in the aesthetic activity, then we are engaging in a pursuit of truth and morality. If we had a true aestheticization of politics we could unify ethics and aesthetics.

If this is correct, if the notion of ‘the aestheticization of politics’ that Harvey and Benjamin speak of, is founded on an improper definition of the aesthetic as a form of craft, then what we might be dealing with is not an aestheticization of politics, but rather a technical theory of politics in which it is thought of as simply a matter of craft and representation. All this smoke in mirrors and politics, all this rhetorical deception, I refuse to call that aesthetic. That idea is so polluted with the technical theory of art that it is insane. If this is true, then what we might really need is a ‘true aestheticization of politics’, in which politics becomes a matter of an individual genuinely expressing their emotions and thoughts. A true aestheticization of politics would be the antidote to this technical theory of politics in which it is just a matter of representative deception. This is a very interesting idea to me. Because the aestheticization of politics is a very key idea for Harvey, and probably for Benjamin. But to me it seems so obvious that it is functioning under the technical theory of art. I wonder what a true aestheticization of politics would look like, what it would look like for aesthetic expression to enter the political world.

But anyways, that is all I’d like to say about the technical theory of politics. It seems to me that defining aesthetics properly might have some political implications, which I’ll be looking at more in Parts IV and V. But for now I want to say that this seems like another way in which craft has infiltrated the social world and has numbed us to any genuine sense of aesthetic value. To talk about the aestheticization of politics is a false definition of aesthetics, and it is another way that the technical theory of art has become a technical theory of existence. Now I’ll talk quickly about the technical theory of society as a whole.

5. The Technical Theory of Society: John Gray and The Enlightenment’s Over-Reliance on Science and Technology

My main inspiration for this idea of a technical theory of society is John Gray’s work in Straw Dogs, and the little bit that I have read of Enlightenment's Wake. John Gray is a political philosopher at London School of Economics who writes on problems of contemporary society and political philosophy. One of his major criticisms of contemporary work is that few philosophers or politicians are willing to question the values of the Enlightenment. In particular, Gray believes that contemporary thinkers clings to the ideal of “subjecting all human institutions to a rational criticism and of convergence on a universal civilization whose foundation is autonomous human reason” (Gray, 1995, 24). Gray believes that the strict adherence to these abstract ideals of reason and justice prevents political philosophers from having any real impact on the present. Because if we are so concerned with ‘justice’ and ‘man’ in the abstract we will have no way of apprehending the realities of our current political and social situation. Similarly, in Straw Dogs, Gray attacks secular liberal humanists for their over-reliance on science and technology as forces of social good. He says that the Enlightenment projects faith in reason, science, and technology has given people the idea that we can solve all of societies problems, that we can cure all the diseases, that salvation for everyone is possible. Gray sounds awfully nihilistic at times. But that doesn’t mean he is pessimistic. It means that he believes we are operating under erroneous assumptions about the social and political world, and that they need to be destroyed so that we can begin to think freshly about these problems. And for Gray, overcoming the legacy of the Enlightenment is one of the most important tasks. We can’t keep thinking that abstract and rational liberal values will be able to apply to every situation in the world, because clearly they won’t.

To me this has a few things in common with the distinction between art and craft. First and foremost, it sounds to me like the Enlightenment was preoccupied with a technical theory of society: that we needed to come up with a plan and rationally enact it through the raw materials of society. For the Enlightenment the creation of the ideal society is merely a matter of craft. John Gray doesn’t seem to think that this is possible, however. He believes that the adherence to these abstract ideals of the Enlightenment has prevented political philosophers from really reckoning with the concrete problems that face politicians nowadays. This brings me to two further connections between Gray’s work and Collingwood’s work on aesthetic theory. First, the issue of generalization and particularization. Second, the relationship between art and the attitude of modernity. Collingwood is clear that art is all about particularizing things; labeling is to be avoided at all costs. Gray, similarly, is chastising political philosophers for relying too heavily on abstract and general terms like ‘man’, ‘reason’, ‘justice’, and so on. Now if we were to embrace a more aesthetic notion of politics and society then perhaps we would be more able to recognize the nuance of political and social issues, thus making better decisions that weren’t confined by the analytical concepts of the Enlightenment. This leads perfectly into the relationship between art and the attitude of modernity. Collingwood claims that aesthetics is about grappling with the particulars of our time and place, about apprehending our own age and working within it. This is one reason that particularization is so important: it allows us to grapple with the nuances of our own age, it allows us to have a modern perspective on ourselves, and our society. I think that John Gray would agree based on his argument that political philosophy is inert because of the hope “that human begins will shed their traditional allegiances and their local identities and unite in a universal civilization grounded in generic humanity and a rational morality.” And that because of this philosophers “cannot even begin to grapple with the political dilemmas of an age in which political life is dominated by renascent particularisms, militant religions and resurgent ethnicities” (Gray, 1995, 2). In short, if political philosophy is to contribute to the ongoing struggle of society it needs to abandon its adherence to the generic principles of the Enlightenment and learn to grapple with the particular realities of the contemporary world. To me it sounds like social and political philosophy needs to embrace aesthetic values of particularization and grappling with the present.

Thus there seems to be something like a technical theory of society that has come out of the Enlightenment. We still believe that society can be transformed from a raw material into a universal and rationally moral society. But clearly society cannot be crafted like a table. I don’t know precisely what an aesthetic theory of society would look like, except for the emphasis on particularization of the contemporary that I described above. But it seems obvious that the technical theory of society is a thing, and that the Enlightenment gave rise to it. I look forward to reading the rest of Enlightenment’s Wake.

Now that I have run through the three technical theories of existence, that of life, that of politics, and that of society, I now want to explore how they would function in individual minds.

6. Technical Theories Of Existence As Tacit Mental Theories/Models As Status Functions As Ideology

Now that I have identified these three technical theories of existence I have to ask myself how they function, how they are disseminated among individual minds, through what mechanisms they work, how they function both on the micro and macro levels. So I’ll be vaguely examining these categories in terms of three different ideas: that of tacit mental theories/models, that of status functions, and that of ideology. Here I go.

So one thing I am fairly concerned with is how these things would function in individual lives, how they would work in individual minds. And I am fairly convinced that individual minds engage with the world in terms of tacit mental theories and mental models of reality. This idea of tacit mental theories is a current vein of analysis in contemporary philosophy of mind. While the notion of mental modeling is an idea from neuropsychology. In both cases the idea is that there is a structure to our thoughts and perceptions, that we have certain unconscious theories that we rely on to understand ourselves and other people, or that our brain models reality in certain ways. So that what we experience in the world is not necessarily the actual world, but our perception of the world as filtered by our tacit theories and mental models. This is why Chris Frith claims that ‘perception is a fiction that coincides with reality’. These technical theories of existence, therefore, would have to exist in some way in our tacit theories and mental models. David Harvey actually hints at this idea. I think he is drawing on Frederick Jameson’s idea of ‘cognitive mapping’, which sounds similar to mental modeling to me: “The transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation, such as it has been, ought to imply a transition in our mental maps, political attitudes, and politics institutions.... There is an omni-present danger that our mental maps will not match current realities” (Harvey, 305). So we have to think about how our individual experiences are structured by these technical theories of existence. I think it would be useful to think in these terms just so that we can analyze our own perceptions and thoughts more carefully. How often does craft inform your model of reality?

So the next question is this: if my mental models are what influence me to perceive the relationship between life and craft in this way then what constitutes my mental models? Where do they come from? One answer I have is that they are constituted by the sea of status functions that regulate our social life. I was at work the other day talking to a friend about this. A box had been moved from a shelf. The box had been on this shelf the entire time i have worked there, so to see this shelf without the box was a startling thing. I was like whoa, I have always expected that box to be there, and now it isn’t. I told my friend that my model of reality had been broken a little, and that I had to reconfigure it. He then pointed out that it had been a status function: all of us at the cafe had implicitly decided that that shelf was designated for that particular box. So I began to perceive the relationship between status functions and mental models. Our models of reality are constituted by the status functions that constitute our social reality. Change the status functions and we change our mental models. So then don’t these technical theories of existence probably have status functions that constitute them? And so therefore they exist in our mental models because they exist as status functions? Probably. Sounds abstract, don’t know how to clarify this right now.

Now what about ideology? What is ideology? How does it work? Well recently I have been keen on Slavoj Zizek’s definition of ideology as a sort of unspoken structure to the world. He says that ideology is politeness, it is habit, it is all of the things that we do without realizing that we do it, or it is all the things that we notice but pretend we don’t notice. Ideology is above all a structure to our experiences. This sounds an awful lot like how status functions, and how mental models work. I think that there is a relationship between all these things, between our mental models, between status functions, and between ideology: they are different manifestations of the same social structure. Mental models are the individual manifestation, status functions are their linguistic constituents, and ideology is the manifold collection of status functions and mental models.

So then, the technical theory of existence must therefore operate on all of these levels, it must in some ways be ideological, it must exist in terms of status functions, and it must exist in our minds as mental models.

7. Concluding Part III.1

So, then this is all I will write for Part III.1. I’ve tried here to clarify the tension between art and craft in the social world. I’m trying to explain how it is that our lives can become an aesthetic project, a project or imaginatively expressing ourselves. But before I explain that positively I had to undertake this negative component of explaining how it is that existence is largely identified with craft. So I explained how there is such a thing as a technical theory of life, of politics, and of society. I tried to argue that our lives and our relationships can sometimes be thought of as crafts, as something that needs to be planned and executed, thus moving it further away from simply emotional expression, removing it from an aesthetic life. I tried to explain how politics, too, had become a matter of craft and representation, and how it too was distanced from aesthetic expression by this emphasis on craft. Finally I tried to explain how society itself had fallen victim to craft, how the Enlightenment project made us believe that society can be transformed from a raw material into a preconceived plan based on generalities. Finally I explained how these technical theories of existence would function in terms of mental models, status functions, and ideology. In all three of these areas I believe that we would benefit from introducing a proper conception of aesthetics into the picture. Perhaps then we could regard our lives as a process of expression, and not a process of enacting a plan. We could regard politics as something that would be about expressing beliefs, about expressing ethic, rather than simply representing things. And we could perhaps think of society as something to be founded on expression and not on crafting. Let me now undertake a positive defense of this idea that our life can become a process of expression, a work of art. I want to explain how life itself can become an art form.

Empathy And Language: Particularization, Generalization, And Restructuring Default Thought

Table of Contents:

1.Introduction: Empathy And Language

Part I: Defining The Problem: Tension Between The Inclinations Of Language And Empathy

2. The Issue: Language As Dulling Empathy

3. Language And Generalization

4. Empathy And Particularization

5. The Solution: Putting Language Towards The Expansion Of Empathy

Part II: Defining The Solution

6. The Problem Of Autopilot: The Intuitive Nature Of Social Life

7. Intuitive Behavior As Structured By A Priori Assumptions And Mental Models

8. Intuitive Empathy As Requiring The Restructuring Of Mental Models

Part III: Enacting The Solution

9. Exploring Our Mental Models: Personal Archeology

10. Modifying Our Mental Models: Intellectually Buttressing Empathy

10a. Empathy And Experience

10b. The Humanities And Acquiring Synthetic Experience As Expanding The Empathic Palette

11. Re-Internalizing Our Mental Models: Mindfulness As A Mental Model

12. Conclusion: The Paradox Of Empathy And Language

1. Introduction: Empathy And Language

In this essay I’m going to be breaking down the relationship between language and and empathy. I think that language interacts with empathy in both negative and positive ways. First I want to summarily deal with the negative component: I want to analyze how language reduces our ability to empathize with other people. I’ll then start moving towards a more detailed analysis of this issue and my proposed solution. I’ll discuss language and its tendency to generalize, and how this inclination towards generalization can dull our sense of empathy. I’ll then contrast this by discussing the importance of particularizing in empathy. After that I will give a quick look at how language can be used to expand our capacity for empathy. Those four sections will comprise Part I called ‘Defining The Problem’. After that I’ll start analyzing a possible solution to this problem of empathy and language. The first step in this will be analyzing how social relations (in which empathy matter) are typically conducted. The short answer is that they are conducted intuitively, on ‘autopilot’ so to speak. So I’ll be trying to address this issue of how it is that our use of language and empathy exists on a largely unconscious, default sort of frame of mind. I’ll then corroborate this idea by discussing some neuropsychology on how the brain models reality for us. I’ll then try to explain how we can go about changing our mental models. I believe that if we are to successfully use language to improve our capacity for empathy we have to be using it to change our unconscious behavior, we have to be using it to alter our mental models that tacitly govern our feelings, thoughts, and actions. Those three sections will constitute Part II ‘Defining The Solution’. After that I’ll spend some time explaining how we can actually engage in this process, how we can use language to alter our mental models of reality so as to make our default behavior more empathic. I’ll do this by explaining how we have to explore, then modify, then re-internalize our mental models.

Sounds awfully abstract (as usual). But I think what I’m talking about is fairly serious. It matters how much empathy is a part of our default, autopilot behavior. If we are naturally empathic then we might have a richer and more rewarding social life. Perhaps all this business about empathy actually has something like political implications. I’m writing this partly so as to clarify issues I want to tackle in ‘Art, Zen, and Insurrection’. Here I go.

Part I: Defining The Problem: Tension Between The Inclinations of Language and Empathy

So in this section I’m going to be trying to define the problem of empathy in human life. The issue that I want to examine most closely is the way that our capacity for language interacts with and hinders our capacity for empathy. First, the issue generally. Second, the potential solution. Third, language and generalization. Fourth, empathy and particularization.

2.The Issue: Language As Dulling Empathy

So as I’ve been saying, the big issue is that language can dull our capacity for empathy. I sat down the other day in front of a book called The Age Of Empathy. I don’t know what the author argues, but the title suggests that he thinks that there is some sort of innate human capacity for empathy, and that this is somehow going to play a role in our lives. I also find this sentiment in other writers. Marco Iacoboni, the author of Mirroring People: The Science Of Empathy And How We Connect With Others, also lauds the human capacity for empathy, saying that it is one of our defining features (along with other social animals). Alvin Goldman, in Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, And Neuroscience Of Mindreading, also believes that empathy is a crucial part of how people interact with one another. This is no doubt the case. Mirror neurons exist, the enactment-imagination exists, simulation theory seems like a viable theory of mind. But I don’t think that there is quite as much empathy evident as I would like. It seems like people are harsher than that, that they are more dominated and consumed by their own lives than these authors let on.

So what is this lack of empathy in America all about? What is going on that is making it easy for people to bypass empathy and judge people in other ways? How could this supposed human tendency, natural human trait, be muddled or forgotten in this way?

This doesn’t mean that language has no place in empathic thought. On the contrary, I think that language can be used to make us more empathic. That is my solution. But before I elaborate the solution of how language can buttress empathy I would like to focus on two differing qualities of language and empathy: their inclination towards generalization and particularization, respectively.

3. Language and Generalization

So I think that the main thing that prevents language from being easily compatible with empathy is that language tends to generalize things. I think it has something to do with language and the way that language gives us new ways of looking at the world. I think that language simplifies people for us, it labels people for us, and it makes it so that we don’t have to spend much time trying to empathize with people. If we are too wrapped up in believing that a person is a criminal, or is crazy, we don’t need to pay much attention to the particulars of their experience. If we can label someone then we don’t need to go past that label: the label, the word, can stand in for any type of nuanced picture of that person themselves. I think these are the issues with language that Zizek is getting at when he refers to ‘the violence of language’. Language disfigures things, it alters them, both in our perception of them and in their perception of themselves. We can’t label something and act like we aren’t changing that thing in the process of labeling it. A friend referred to this as a Heisenbergian uncertainty phenomenon: we can’t label something without altering it, we can’t observe something with the aid of language without changing it. And unfortunately, I think that using language to classify in this way prevents us from engaging with empathy as much as we could or should. Furthermore, I think that our culture is overloaded with language and symbols. They are everywhere. We have names and labels for everything, and most of those labels have implicit value judgments. I think that our society in particular is one in which language might be drowning out empathy.

It is this ability for language to generalize, its tendency to over simplify things, that causes it to drown out our capacity for empathy. I think the problem with language and generalization will become a little clearer if I explain how empathy requires particularization.

4.Empathy and Particularization

While language is typically used in terms of generalization, I think empathy should be thought of more in terms of particularization. Because when it comes to emotions, empathy, and emotional sensitivity, language comes across as very generalized and doesn’t do very much to help us empathize with people. We speak of ‘anger’, ‘sadness’, ‘confusion’, ‘anxiety’, ‘irritation’, and so on, as if though they were simple, static, and self-evident feelings. But they are far more complex and nuanced than that. At one point in The Principles Of Art Collingwood says that every emotion we feel is always different than the one that came before it. I might feel ‘angry’ and it might be similar to other angers I have felt in the past, but each time it is wholly new, wholly different in its particular cause and manifestations. Emotions are not general, as we like to think, they are nuanced, particular, and embedded in complex social situations.

If we were to take pains to recognize the nuance of emotions I think that people would be more likely to empathize with others. If we were to recognize that emotions are very dependent on our social situation, our context, our history, then we might take these things into account on a more regular basis, and we might empathize with people on a more regular basis.

I guess what I’m getting at is the level of creativity and imagination that is required to really empathize with someone. If we want to understand someone’s thoughts and feelings in complex and rich ways we can’t revert to generalization and labeling. We can’t say ‘oh well she feels sad because her boyfriend broke up with her’, or ‘he is just sad because his dog died’. because that doesn’t do justice to people’s experience. They are so much more complex than that! And while perhaps those words capture the core of it, they don’t capture the nuance of it. So empathy, creativity, and the imagination pretty much go hand in hand. That is why I’m talking about empathy as requiring particularization. We have to push ourselves to treat other people’s experiences as particular, not general.

My life feels pretty god damn particular. I am ‘sad’ sometimes, ‘elated’ at others, even ‘excited’. But why?! You think I live this general existence in which it is just easy, simple, and fun to be a barista? Doing what I do because working for money is what you do?! Outrageous! I feel incredibly contingent, dynamic, complex, weird, uncomfortable, particular. I think and hope that other people also feel complex and nuanced. I hope that other people are turned off by generalization. I hope other people feel robbed of their nuance when they are labeled.

Anyways, this essay is ranty, not academicy. Good.

I think that if we want to empathize with people then we need to recognize that emotions are particular, that empathy requires creativity, imagination, and most importantly, particularization. Now let me try to explain how language can assist us in this quest for particularizing, creative empathy.

5.The Solution: Putting Language Towards The Expansion Of Empathy

So the task is therefore to make it so that language is used to expand our capacity for empathic thought. But how to do this? How to make it so that language loses its overly generalizing nature and acquires instead a sensitive and nuanced view?

Well I guess right now I think that there would have to be two parts to this process of re-empathizing language, re-sensitizing language. We would first have to attack the overly generalized social taxonomies that we work with so as to reveal how they give us an over-simplified perspective. That would be the negative component. Second, we would have to undertake a positive process in which we equipped ourselves with a set of concepts that were more prone to particularizing rather than generalizing.

As for the negative component of attacking our current set of concepts. To me this is the proper project for nihilism. I continue to believe that nihilism is ultimately a positive philosophy that contributes to the larger project that I am searching for, that is bubbling in me. In this case, it is clear that nihilism contributes something to this project of overcoming our overly-generalized set of social labels. I have written on several occasions about how nihilism is the elaboration of certain forms of meaning that are meant to escape other forms of meaning. This is precisely what I am saying we need to do in order to put language at the service of empathy. If we want to be able to use words to become more empathic, and the issue is that words can make us less empathic, then we have to engage in this process in which words are able to help us escape the domination of words. It is articulation that is in search of the ineffable. It is words that are meant to make us better at feeling emotions.

As I explained in the previous section, words have the tendency to generalize our experiences and our perceptions. If we are too quick to label things then we will be dulled to the nuance of our experience. Words get in the way of accurate perception of ourselves and others. So the negative component of this project has to be about overcoming the overly-generalizing nature of words. And I think that nihilism can help us do that. I think if we are willing to use history to attack our vocabulary we would be able to see how inadequately it captures our and other’s experiences. I think that nihilism is an integral component to mindfulness in modern America.

But what about the positive part of the solution? Well, the issue is still that words are often overly-general, but we still have to use words. So what we need to do then is come up with a way of using language that manages to avoid dangerous levels of generalization. We need to reacquaint ourselves with how very particular and nuanced language can be. We need to particularize language. We need to be careful about synonyms and about labels. I’m not saying we can avoid generalization entirely. We just need to be mindful about how we are using language. We need to recognize it as limited but not give up on it entirely. I’m sorry I can’t say this more clearly. But I suppose the issue is that what we require is creativity, is brand new words and ideas, new understandings of things. So I can’t really tell you what this looks like because what it looks like doesn’t exist yet. We need to be creative with the way we think of ourselves and the way we think of others. We somehow need to go about particularizing the language we use.

This isn’t very clear, I realize. But I think that this is a very important thing. I think we need to care about how language prevents us from being empathic, and we need to consider how to use language to become more empathic. Like I said, it has to be creative, so I can’t be precise about what this looks like. But it has to involve both a negative and a positive component–it has to be about attacking our current concepts and about particularizing a new set of concepts. But I would now like to turn to the way I see this as happening within an individual mind. I’d like to give an analysis of how individual minds work and relate to language and empathy in the social world. Hopefully this will help me articulate how I feel that I am trying to go about this process of using language to become empathic.

Part II: Defining The Solution

So in this section I want to do a little bit of work to explain how this process could be undertaken. I think that this has been a major task of mine for the last number of years. This is a very personal essay for me because I feel like have been working so hard at using my intellect to become more empathic and compassionate. I hope that I am not just talking bull shit. I hope that I have really done this. I don’t want to ooze intellect, I want to ooze gentleness, love, compassion, and empathy. I want to be everyone’s mirror. Because I want people to be my mirrors. So I hope that the things that I’m about to talk about will explain how I think of this issue, how I think that things can happen, and how things can change. So first I’m gonna talk about how social life is intuitive, we just do it, we don’t reflect, we just do it. The problem therefore becomes modifying our intuitive behavior. In order to do this I think we need to reckon with how our intuitive behavior is structured, we have to identify our tendencies, our habits, because we have to modify those. So I’m going to talk about the notion of a priori thought and that of mental models. Then I’ll be talking about how intuitive empathy requires the restructuring of models.

6. The Problem Of Autopilot: The Intuitive Nature Of Social Life

Now, I think the problem with this idea of using language to make us more empathic has to do with the intuitive nature of social life. We don’t operate consciously most of the time, we operate on autopilot. We just do things. We walk around living our lives unreflectively for the most part. I just do my thing, I laugh, I smile, I talk to people, all with minimal reflection or conscious thought. I hope this is true for the rest of you as well. I hope you feel that life isn’t all about consciousness, but is about being intuitive. This clashes with some of my other concerns, because I also think consciousness, mindfulness, and all this is very important stuff. But we can’t be ever vigilant. Sometimes we lapse into unreflective behavior. And I should say that I think we are behaving unreflectively most of the time. It is more appropriate to say that sometimes we lapse into consciousness, not the other way around. Autopilot is what we do. Think of driving, think of most our lives.

So the issue becomes modifying autopilot. Changing the way we behave has to come back to changing our default, intuitive, autopilot behavior. But how?! How to change our heart of hearts! Our core of cores! How to feel that we are modifying our intuitive behavior? Well, the first step has to be conceptualizing intuitive behavior adequately. But first a digression.

What am I doing with this writing? What is this language doing to me and to you? Does it feel particular to you? Does it feel general to you? Is my language doing an adequate job of explaining how I want language to bring us empathy and not generalization? Does it seem like this language is doing anything for empathy? I think it is for me. I think the more I push myself to grapple with this problem the more empathic I become. I hope. I am engaging in this articulation to get at the ineffable empathy that I want. I want your emotions. I don’t want you to become my words. I want my emotions to become your emotions. I want my words to become your heart.

Now let me try to more clearly conceptualize intuitive behavior

7. Intuitive Behavior As Structured By A Priori Assumptions And Mental Models

I think that if we want to get a grip on our intuitive behavior, so as to modify it and make it more empathic, we need to have an adequate conceptualization of intuitive behavior. As I said above, I think we need to grapple with the structure of our intuitive behavior. We can notice that we have certain tendencies, there are trends to my behavior. I say certain things, I make certain sounds, I do certain things on a regular basis. My intuitive behavior is structured in certain ways. So how to think of this? Well, I have two alternatives. The first comes from R.G. Collingwood’s notion of the a priori imagination. The second comes from Chris Frith’s discussion of mental modeling.

In The Idea Of History Collingwood discusses what he calls the a priori imagination. He says that when we observe certain things our mind fills in gaps in evidence for us. When we look at a box of matches on the table all we see is two or three sides of it, but our mind automatically perceives it as a fully three-dimensional object with all of its sides. Same thing when we look at a table. All I see right now the top of my table, and a little bit of the legs. But my mind automatically knows that the table has an underside, that it has two legs in the back of it. In these ways my thoughts simply unfold a priori, they unfold automatically based on my assumptions about the physical world. This also applies to the social world. When I see people dressed in certain ways, when I see them doing certain things, it is very easy for me to simply have intuitive judgments of them. I assume that they act or think in certain ways. I see someone holding a door as I approach, for example, I assume that they are holding the door for me. Or I see a guy dressed in a certain way, I automatically make certain assumptions about him. Not that I mean to. I just have all these intuitive understandings of how things work in the physical and social world. I assume a lot of things without knowing it. My thought unfolds a priori because it is structured in certain ways. I think that this same idea can be spoken of in terms of how our brain models the world.

In Making Up The Mind: How Our Brain Creates Our Mental World Chris Frith discusses how our brains models reality for us. He talks about it in terms of ‘getting ahead through prediction’. That our brain wouldn’t be able to deal with complex information if it was simply receiving input all the time. On the contrary, the brain models reality, attempts to predict it, so that it can deal with it more efficiently. This is why he says that ‘perception is a fiction that coincides with reality’. What we are dealing with is not raw perception of reality, but our brains constructed model of reality. This is why sometimes we wake up at night and we think we see a person in the room, only for them to disappear when we turn on the light. Perception is not passive, it is active and constructive. Our brain builds reality for us, it doesn’t simply perceive it. Many of our social interactions likely function on these mental models. We perceive things to happen in certain ways, we categorize in certain ways, based on models. We think of ‘men’ and ‘women’, ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ people, ‘black’ or ‘white’ or ‘asian’ people. It doesn’t matter how fluid these categories are or how much they blend because our brain has locked them in as a model of reality. Our perception goes along these lines.

The most important point is that these models are not innate and static. They are not hardwired, but are rather cultural. In The Brain That Changes Itself Norman Doidge has an appendix called ‘The Culturally Modified Brain’. In that section he explains how our exposure to culture changes the way that we perceive reality. A good example is that Inuit are able to perceive upwards of 100 shades of snow. Because they have more than 100 words for snow, their experience registers that on a certain day this kind of snow was around. Culture determines what we do and what we do not perceive. Because the brain is plastic and changes based on our experiences, our mental models of reality are formed by our exposure to culture. Because our models of reality are culturally crafted this means several different things. First, it means that our intuitive behavior is not static, essential, or hardwired, but is rather plastic and culturally determined. This means that we have hope of changing. Second, this means that our mental models are likely overly-generalized by our cultures tendency to label and categorize. In short, if our overly generalized mental models are cultural and not essential, then we have the potential to change them, and overcome our reliance on overly generalized thought. Let me explore this more fully.

8. Intuitive Empathy As Requiring The Restructuring of Mental Models

I’ve made some important connections about how it is that intuitive behavior is structured. Now to bring this back full circle to the issue at hand. If we want to become more empathic, and we want to use language to become more empathic, then we have to think of it in terms of mental models and their restructuring. This is because our behavior in the social world is primarily intuitive, and because that intuitive behavior is structured by our mental models of reality. So if we want to become more empathic we have to be willing to restructure our intuitive thought. We have to be willing to grapple with our culturally determined models of reality and to recognize the ways that they either encourage or discourage empathy. As I said above, I think that our mental models of reality are overly generalized and categorized, because I think our society is overly categorized. The task is thus to create new mental models that would make us intuitively more open to empathy and particularization of experience.

Now that I have defined the solution as using language to 1. identify our existing cultural models, and 2. to create new mental models that would make us more empathic, let me try to explain how this could be done. How can we enact this solution?

Part III: Enacting The Solution

So, in order to enact this solution I think we need to take three distinct steps, all of which will blend in some kind of weird reflective process. But I think that nonetheless I can identify three distinct steps in this process. First, we need to grapple with our already determined models of reality. Because the bottom line is that we already think certain things, have certain mental models, simply because we were raised in a certain cultural and historical situation. Second, after having discovered our already existing models, we need to go about modifying those models so as to have them more under our control. Finally, we need to engage in a process of reflection in which those new models are internalized and can change our intuitive behavior.

9. Exploring Our Mental Models: Personal Archeology

So this first step of exploring our already determined mental models I think can be called ‘personal archeology’. It is as if though we are digging up parts of ourselves that are submerged deep in our mind. The structures of our thought have the quality of being hidden from us. They are elusive, they lie below the surface and influence us without our knowledge. So what we have to do is dig them up. We have to expose them. We have to go down deep into ourselves and figure out ‘why the hell do I think this way? Why the hell do I think any way at all?’ And this is a question that has to be historical in nature. Because our culture is historically created, and our mental models are cultural, it follows that our mental models are also historical. Duh.

This phrase personal archeology is actually inspired by Michel Foucault’s notion of historical archeology, the archeology of knowledge. I think that Foucault’s notion of archeology is actually something like the archeology of the unconscious of society. The archeology of our mental models of reality. It is an archeology of our perception of reality. I think that Foucault’s work does a huge amount of this work for us. It can show us why we think of sexuality in the ways we do, why we think of crime, medicine, insanity, all of that, in the very particular ways that we do. So the first step in overcoming categorization’s hold on empathy is to perform an archeology of our mental models of reality. Then we will have determined why we are thinking the way that we do. We will understand our own generalization in new ways. And hopefully then we will be able to move past those overly-general forms of thinking. Maybe then we will be able to see more then ‘men’ and ‘women’ who are ‘sad’ or ‘angry’, but rather particular people dealing with unique circumstances and emotions. We will then maybe we will be able to intuitively engage in a particularizing form of empathy rather than an over-generalized glossing of empathy. Now for the modification.

10. Modifying Our Mental Models: Intellectually Buttressing Empathy

So after we have exposed our already existing mental models the task becomes the modification of those models. Once we have dealt with our set of culturally formed concepts we can potentially go about changing how we relate to them, and thus the way we relate to ourselves and others. As I’ve been saying, that I think our culture encourages insensitive and unempathic engagement with other people. So once we have realized the way that our culture’s use of language encourages this insensitivity, how do we go about becoming more empathic? Well, I think the answer lies primarily in experience. Because empathy is all about experience.

10a. Empathy and Experience

In Simulating Minds Alvin Goldman discusses simulation theory of mind. He posits that we understand people by an extended form of empathy which he calls simulation. He discusses what he calls ‘experience-deficient simulation’. Meaning that when certain people try to imagine how someone feels, it becomes incredibly hard to imagine their feelings if you have never had a similar experience. People with a damaged amygdala, for example, cannot feel anger, and therefore have a very hard time understanding why other people are feeling angry. This extends more generally to the issue of empathy. I believe there is something called experience-deficient empathy. When we don’t have experience with other people it becomes very hard for us to feel for them, to empathize with them. If we don’t know what it is like to be poor it is easy for generalization to step in and just tell us that they are lazy or stupid. We might not realize how hard it is to pull ourselves out of a bad economic situation because our experience doesn’t give us a very rich palette to empathize with them. I think that in our culture we might have very narrow experiences. We don’t always get a sense of how dynamic and weird people’s lives can be. They can have such weird experiences. Life can be so hard. But we might not experience that directly. Wealthy people might not have much experience with poverty. Straight white people might not have much experience with feeling alienated and abnormal. And like I said, that could prevent us from being able to empathize with people. It might encourage us to simply label and categorize people and not empathize with them. The issue then becomes acquiring as much experience as possible so as to expand our capacity for empathy. So how to get experience?

10b. The Humanities And Acquiring Synthetic Experience As Expanding The Empathic Palette

So what we really need in order to become more empathic is experience. We need to have lots of experience so that we can feel for more people in more situations, so that we don’t so quickly revert to linguistic categorization, but can more readily experience people’s emotions for ourselves. I like to think of this as the expansion of the empathic palette. If empathy depends on our experiences, then there must be a certain body of experience that we use to engage in empathy. This is what I’m calling the empathic palette. So how to get experience? How to expand our empathic palette?

I think that we can get experience from more places than just life. Of course, living life has to be our first way of acquiring experience. We have to talk to people, we have to go places, do things, meet people. So first of all experience has to come from real life, and most importantly from relationships with other people. Other people are the bread and butter of life. So experience in reality is other people’s experiences. The mingling of experience. The sharing of experience! What a delight it is to know that others too are alive and breathing with their dynamic and painful lives!

But apart from real life and other people’s real experiences, we can acquire experience from language itself, from reading and writing. I think that there is such a thing as synthetic experience. Alvin Goldman corroborates this idea in Simulating Minds by showing that the imagination invokes the actual qualities of experience. When we imagine being sad our brain is identical to when we actually feel sad. That means that imagining things is almost as good as actually doing them. So then, doesn’t the humanities suddenly take on a vital new importance? The humanities becomes an enormous store of synthetic experience. Think of all the worlds we could visit through language: fictional worlds, historical worlds, contemporary foreign worlds. There is an enormous store of experience out there in the humanities that we can tap into. And I think if we are willing to take that world seriously, if we are willing to read it with a potent imagination, we will be gaining access to all kinds of experience that will aid us in our quest for empathy.

In this way the humanities could be a way to intellectually buttress our capacity for empathy. We would be learning a new set of terms to think of people in. Historical terms, fictitious terms, empathic terms. These synthetic experiences would then transport into the real world and change the way that we engage with other people.

The modification of mental models therefore comes back to the acquisition of certain types of experience. And I think that the humanities can provide us with synthetic experience that will make us capable of empathizing with more people in a variety of situations. This is all an intellectual and linguistic process. We would be thinking hard about our own thoughts and experiences, and would be reading lots of things. But this is an instance in which intellectual work is meant not to make us smarter, but to make us more sensitive and empathic. This would be intellectual work that would change our intuitive behavior and make us more empathic. This is articulation that would be expanding our capacity to understand the ineffable world of emotions and experience. But this deliberate process wouldn’t be everything. Because we would have to make sure that these linguistic processes worked their way into our unconscious, intuitive world. That is the topic of the final section.

11. Re-internalizing Our Mental Models: Mindfulness As A Mental Model

So once we have dug up our old culturally determined models, and once we have gone about the process of modifying them through the acquisition of synthetic experience, how would we re-internalize them? How would we be sure that these newly constructed models would make it into our intuitive lives? Well, I think that the answer has something to do with reflection and rumination. We would have to be willing to daydream about these issues, let them float in our mind in uncertain ways, let them just be. But I think that if we were to reflect on these things carefully, take time to let them sink in, we would be able to internalize these things.

The main thing that I would want this to do would be to make us mindful. It would ideally enable us to pay attention to our experience and other people’s experiences in attentive ways. We would be more sensitive, more loving, more particularizing about how we treated other people. But there is tension between the issue of mental modeling and that of mindfulness. Mindfulness is about overcoming our overly-generalized perspective. Mindfulness believes that concepts and words get in the way of accurate perception. So how is it that mindfulness and mental models can both be possible? I think that this can be the case. But only if we recognize that mindfulness itself can be a mental model of the world. Mindfulness, though, would be a model of the world in which we are far more open to how particular people’s experiences our, how particular lives are, and how much imaginative effort it takes to really empathize with people. So then this is a task: to create a mental model of the world that is open enough to enable mindful observation. We need to encounter all kinds of different experiences and people so that we can say ‘holy shit none of these generalizations are adequate. I can’t believe how nuanced people and the world are and how hard I have to work to appreciate their complexity’. We need to be able to create a model of reality that is aware of the limitations and danger of language. Only then will our intuitive behavior be able to be constantly empathic and sensitive.

12. Conclusion: The Paradox Of Empathy And Language

So that is that. I don’t know how I feel about this essay. I think it is all over the place and lacks continuity. I started out by trying to define the problem. I wanted to explain how there is tension between the tendencies of language and empathy. I think that language is more inclined to make us generalize, to simplify things. While empathy, on the other hand, has a lot more to do with particularization, with appreciating the nuance of things. I then tried to outline a solution in which language itself could be used to help us become more empathic. I said that it had to address the intuitive nature of social life, so the issue thus becomes modifying our default behavior, our intuitive thoughts and actions. I then explained how our intuitive behavior is structured by a priori assumptions and mental models of reality. I then explained how our capacity for empathy would therefore have to be expanded by restructuring our mental models. I then tried to explicate how we would go about restructuring our mental models. I tried to claim it would be three part process of exploring our old mental models, then altering them through the acquisition of synthetic experience, and finally the internalization of these new models through reflection and mindfulness. The goal would ideally be a mindfulness in which we were able to appreciate people as nuanced individuals that needed to be treated as particulars and not generalities or labels.

The hardest part of all of this is the way that language is paradoxically the thing to battle and the weapon that we are battling with. We need to overcome the tendency of language to dull our perception, to make it too focused on generalities, categories, archetypes, and so on. But the only way to overcome this aspect of language is to use language itself. We have to use language to attack the generality of our culturally determined language. We have to be creative with language to change our mental models of reality. We have to use language to enable empathy and mindfulness. This is so confusing to me.

This paradoxical nature of the relationship between language and empathy. They are both so necessary. They go hand in hand. Yet language can overrun empathy if we aren’t careful. And we can’t use language to simply replace our categories. We have to use language to overcome our categories. We have to use language to overcome language. It is so confusing. If articulation of empathy is ever done for its own sake we are making a huge mistake. Articulation of empathy is only useful if it puts us in touch with the ineffable, the inarticulable world of emotions. Articulation of empathy must leads to the transcending of language, and into the realm of the ineffable.

Original notes:

The notion of water should be in here. We should talk about submerging and raising. Because the water metaphor is helpful.

It seems like it does have to come back to the issue of mental modeling. The main concern should be the way the language changes our mental models, guides our assumptions, guides our interactions.

So it has to come back to this paradoxical idea of creating a model of mindfulness that would allow us to be compassionate.

Hmm. Using language to alter things. To change our models. To restructure our a priori thought.