Tag Archives: object

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Goethe’s Way Of Science. Excerpts and Reflections. 01.

Preface.

[Goethe's] ideas continue to influence science and related areas like the phenomenology of nature and the philosophy of science.

Goethe developed a method to encounter and understand the natural world more directly, intuitively, and intimately. This approach promises much for strengthening our love of nature and for helping us to better care for the natural environment and earth.

Introduction. One phrase that Goethe used to describe his method was delicate empiricism (zarte Empirie) – the effort to understand a thing’s meaning through prolonged empathetic looking and seeing grounded in direct experience.

Goethe argued that, in time, out of commitment, practice, and proper efforts, the student would discover the “ur-phenomenon” … , the essential pattern of process of a thing. Ur – bears the connotation of primordial, basic, elemental, archetypal; the ur-phenomenon may be thought of as the “deep-down-phenomenon”, the essential core of a thing that makes it what it is and what it becomes.

“The highest is to understand that all fact is really theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the basic law of colour. Search nothing beyond the phenomena, they themselves are the theory.”

 

This aspect of Goethe’s approach resonates with a core drive in me, that is to experience and describe that which gives rise to the phenomena appearing in awareness.

 

Goethe’s approach moves away from the reductionist thinking of positivist science and facilitates an increasing freedom and self-determination both for the researcher and for the thing he or she studies.

In our postmodern time of fragmentation and relativity, we must somehow find ways to bring our thoughts, feelings and actions in harmony with ourselves and with the world in which we live. … In this way perhaps we come to feel more care for the natural world, which answers back with meaning.

 

The approach to phenomenology which Goethe seems to be suggesting promises to bring about a deep experience of being with the ‘thing’ as it is in awareness. He seems to be suggesting that the “object of contemplation”, so to speak, can be approached directly through the senses and will yield its nature to the patient and attuned “observer”.

 

I have decided to “observe” using my hearing, listening and harkening capacities, specifically to two phenomenon. 1) the sounds that arise from deep within my being as life lives in me and expresses itself through sound, and 2) my son’s utterances of the seed syllable “mum” – which I have noticed can be intoned in myriad ways, I plan to pay extra attention to this phenomena as I engage this learning track on Goetheian science!

I hope to describe these sounds using images as well as words, I often experience sounds as vibrant fields of geometric shapes and colours, so I will try to share those observations as clearly as I can.

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PAL. Chapter 24. The Nature of Existence. pp.635-661.

 

The mind independent real is not the same as the feeling of realness, which is the affective residue that accompanies the outgoing stream of perception. This feeling in everyday objects derives from beliefs that help us to cope with the incapacity to tolerate unreality, once we have become aware that some events seem to be more real than others.

Since time is generated within a state, the “interval” between contiguous states is timeless for that person, though other minds might exist in the interstices of those states. The microgenetic theory of subjective time is consistent with the possibility of parallel worlds, a topic of lively debate in current physics.

States are not concatenated in chains, as in cognitivist theory or the casual sequence of arisings and perishings in Buddhist metaphysics. Rather, like the “pulse of consciousness” described by William James, states arise in overlapping volleys in the decay of their antecedents. We are neither aware of the process over which mind/brain states develop nor of the “gaps” between them. What we are aware of is the virtual duration elaborated by a comparison of phases within a single transition. It is a paradoxical feature of microgenetic theory, as in process metaphysics, that temporal epochs are created out of non-temporal phases that are “collated” after their traversal.

The intuition that the foundations of all knowledge rests on momentary intrinsic relations, bounded by physical unobservables, exposes the surreal quality of conscious experience. Those who are sensitive to this experience will have the impression that what is taken for real is like the thin, fragile elastic of a balloon, balancing constraints on its inner and outer surface.

… reality is not what is real, it is what is true – veridical – and the only way we have of turning the real into the true is to put the real into the form of a statement and then test whether or not the statement is truthful. How we test such truths is a complex matter, but they often involve negation, which achieves a relative truth by the elimination (sculpting) of a falsehood.

Thought and perception are modelled to nature by sensation and consensus, in either case, by adaptation. But the nature that is realised in thought and perception is not the nature that underlies that realisation. Whatever is conceived by the individual, or confirmed by others, distils to the activity of a single brain. … Just describing a process severs its relations and turns it into thing. But there are deeper problems in access to the physical brain than the inability to capture its dynamic nature.

… independent of their truth, scientific facts are riddled with, indeed are actualisations of, the values and beliefs of the observer. It is an important question whether facts are values, but the more general question is whether we should apply to physical nature those qualities of thought by which nature herself is known, or whether thought is external to nature and does not infect the observation and interpretation of physical data.

The rock bottom fact about fact is that nay fact is an objectified perception in a single brain. The relation of mind and brain is prior to an understanding of the relation of perceptual objects to physical entities, and the ultimate “fact” about the mind/brain state is that our knowledge of this state rests on experiential data. … The brain is merely a portion of nature that mediates our knowledge of the remainder. Facts are values through which we infer a reality common to all perceptions, or a reality on the other side of perception that is conveyed through the senses and verified by thought.

There is no compelling reason to believe that reality – even if it is ultimately non-experiential and unknowable – differs fundamentally from the thought life in which it makes its appearance.

In our time, this difficulty – the gap from mind to brain, from the ideal to the Real – has been avoided by reducing mind to brain or ignoring mind completely. The consequence of an extraction of mind from nature is that the psychic qualities of nature are not realised in the mind, that mind is not determined to be, as it is, a mirror of a psychic nature.

(emphasis mine)

Sensations, however, like the entities they point to, are extrinsic and non-experiential. In spite of the best efforts of science, they cannot be given a description that excludes the conceptual. … We have no idea what sensation is like. It is a speculation on the origins of a perception, a kind of fable on the connections of a mind with its body and the world.

Sensation is the proximate inference about nature. We feel (see, hear) perceptions, not sensations, so a sensation is an explanation of where perception comes from. … what we perceive is a though-up nature – one that is assembled or constructed, or one that actualises out of potential – but in both the outcome adapts to an inferential world of sense. The choice between a world of endogenous objects or one that is constituted by their sensory ingredients. In the former, the brain generates images that adapt to a noumenal world, in the latter, sense data build up entities in physical passage.

Acts and objects are initiated prior to the consciousness of an intention, or a perception. It takes time to create the world and to effect a deliberate action in that world.

Affect and reminiscence are not psychic additions to archaic or advanced perceptions. They are ingredient in the perception, or rather, the perception is ingredient in cognition.

We assume that perceptions do not appear spontaneously but result from the physical impressions of sense-data. Similarly, the products or contents of conscious mind have a history that must be included as part of conscious experience. Not all inferences should be included in experience, , but direct experience is only a portion of what is experienced. The inferred is its major part. It has to be said that in this area the search for precision can be fatal to certainty. At least one can agree that if inference depends on experience, the fully non-experiential, for example, the nature of the noumenal reality, is beyond inference.

One might add that experience is for things that appear to be stable (objects) or changing (events), not for the change out of which things materialise. Transition gives rise to feeling, but it is the feeling, not the transition that is experienced. Lacking an awareness of genuine change, we have no experience of that which is essential and uniform in mind and nature. Moreover, if experience and the experiencing self are deposited by change, we do not have experience, we do not have a self. Experience is not a possession; selves and experience are creations of process. The experience of the self for that moment is, for the moment, what the self is. While experience and the thoughts or inferences that flow from it are all that we can know, experience, even so broadly defined, in respect to the non-experiential nature of change, does not include what is essential for its own manifestation.

(emphasis mine)

The feeling of community within which individuality develops can be regained by regression to an earlier phase in thought. The mark of this feeling – compassion – is concealed beneath the pretence of autonomy. Alienation is of course the price of too forceful an individualism.

The characteristics of the organic are unity of feeling, dependence of the parts on the whole and self-replication, but with respect to these properties there is no sharp transition from inorganic to organic life.

(emphasis mine)

The organic is characterised by needs to which elements are subordinate. Needs involve the direction of energy. The physical-chemical bonds that establish the energy of the base constituents of inorganic matter have no prevailing direction. The energetic cycles of organism have a direction. … the direction does not aim at an object, it merely deposits the object toward which it seems to be pointing.

It happens that the global often evades description while the local is self-evident.

(emphasis mine)

… one can say the universe is a whole to parts that only seem to be particulars because the whole is incomprehensible and the whole part relation is imperceptible.

It seems that what gives an object an organic unity is less in the synchronic relations that appear to keep it together, than the diachronic relations through which organic systems grow.

… the notion of entities as epochal packets of energy aligns the inorganic with the glimmerings of organism. The importation of change into matter enlivens the inorganic with creative energy and is the transition to living matter.

Physical nature is continuous with organism as the non-cognitive world is continuous with mind. Indeed mind is its final realisation. Reality is mind in the process of becoming aware of itself, the product of world organism that enfolds all forms, all changes, of greater or lesser degree of development.

What is ultimately real is what exists. Change, time and realtionality are the measure of existence.

The entity does not actualise out of nothing or non-existence. The universe is a continuous process of becoming. Were becoming to cease, the universe would not exist. But between the arising and perishing of a becoming, “between” potentiality and actuality, the process is not yet temporal, thus not yet an existent. The ordinary concept of reality as a collection of instantaneous events – the “solid” particles of the older physics – is inconsistent with the interpretation of existents as epochs. The epoch encloses phases that, being non-temporal, do not exist until they are traversed. For an entity to exist is for it to have a minimal duration, i.e. for becoming to actualise into being. A physical instant is an imaginary section through this becoming.

What it comes to is that the world is either a self-realisation and we live in a kind of cognitive bubble chamber, or the mind is a fiction and the world, including the brain, is vast, unobservable spectacle in the void.

To maintain that one can assume an objective perspective is coherent only if nature is mind, so the perspective does not sacrifice psychology to achieve objectivity.

Problems with materialism beyond the derivative and uncertain sources of perceptions and the construction of entities in an “empty” hypothetical space, includes the “time” taken by – and the how of – the transmission and combination of the senses to a unified object. To invoke a mechanism for the unification of experience – the reintegration of that which science had fragmented – illustrates the improvisation of present-day thinking in psychology. Such postulates ignore other aspects of perception, e.g. object recognition, familiarity, constancies, conceptuality and category membership. In sense-data theory, the overwhelming contribution of mind to perceptual objects is secondary and post-perceptual. In microgenesis, this contribution is preliminary or pre-perceptual.

The notion of the real is meaningless without mind. The relation of appearance to reality is that of mind to physical nature. Appearance is unreal only in relation to objects perceived as more real, or entities inferred as ultimately real. However, real and unreal apply to perceptual images or objects, not physical entities. This may not be the case with fact or truth, for we do not speak of objects or entities as being timelessly real, as we do of truth. Yet in spite of all the arguments concerning “timeless truths” , at least since the famous sea battle of Aristotle, it is difficult to understand how such terms take on meaning in the absence of mind.

… the real is not a limit on existence.

We can agree that the unknown is a swamp of superstition and false belief that is that is slowly drained by science. But can we also agree that the unknowable may well be a reservoir of mystery at the limits of scientific explanation?

The microgenetic theory of mind applied to actualisation in the physical world entails a manifold of nature unified at the onset of an epoch that gives rise to novel particulars. Diversity does not combine to unity but, like speciation in evolution, is the outcome of of an individuation of the whole.

Followed deeply enough, a psychic nature, or a subjective universe, is a metaphysics of evolutionary psychology.

Historically, the view of an individual as a vehicle through which the forms of nature actualise preceded the idea that experience is what the self experiences. If we strip away the superstition that overlays animism, and its ornamentations in magical thinking and everyday life, and accept the bare primitive intuition of mind in nature as a kind of unmediated truth, we are left with a sophisticated theory of reality that asks what features of psychic life are present in the world and how those features are elaborated in the human mind.

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PAL. Chapter 22. The Illusory and the Real. pp.579-602

 

The thought-objects of perception which are presupposed in the common thought of civilised beings, are almost wholly hypothetical. The material universe is largely a concept of the imagination which rests on a slender basis of direct sense-perception. – Whitehead (1932)

All experience has an illusory quality, from a vision of the starry firmament to mathematical objects at the smallest scale. Yet the illusory or phenomenal nature of experience, which is at the heart of many great philosophical systems, escapes the minds of most ordinary people, who live their lives as if the self and world are fully real and material.

Illusion is an endogenous image that carries with it features of a terminal cognition. It appears to be an alteration in an external object because the image is close to full objectification.

Hallucination and illusion are incomplete perceptions, while a perception is a fully exteriorised hallucination, guided by sensory constraints. Admittedly this is an exceptional view of the world. It is not surprising that those who see the world in this way, i.e. as an extension of the mind, are tempted to look for another, more dependable image of the real, such as that of physics or the absolute, or a noumenal world beyond experience.

Illusions are not limited to those we perceive and study, but are found in all aspects of daily life. They include such fictions as object stability in a world of flux, time as linear rather than recurrent, change as an external relation between objects rather than intrinsic to the object formation and being as thing-like rather than a category that enfolds a becoming. On these foundations, the whole edifice of mind develops, and with it, the gap from self to world, the emergence of the present moment and, around it, past and future, and the feeling of intention and desire.

… it takes only a little insight in a spell of vertigo, when the world spins around one’s head, to remind us of the subjectivity of all so-called veridical perceptions.

The partition of experience into subject and object is an important fiction but not the most fundamental. That of substance is deeper, more pervasive and responsible for the illusion of subject and object. The subjective phase of thought lays down the self and its will, the objective phase lays down concrete actualities. The progression to definiteness is an aim to stability. The shift in quality in a progressive individuation is the basis for the division of experience into self and object.

If substance is primary, change is unreal, if relations are primary, substance is illusory. … The distinction of substance and process, or being and becoming, dissolves when substance is conceived as being-as-the-category-of-becoming, and becoming is conceived as process over a temporal extensibility that is framed by a category, and category is conceived as a duration of relations, the awareness of which is obscured for the sake of stability. … The mind chunks experience (Miller, 1956) into things, selves, ideas, propositions, the perceptual and logical solids that articulate and anchor the “all is in flux”.

(emphasis mine)

Reality is different than existence. The concept of reality presumes a match from mind to world. The concept of existence is independent of verification. The non-existent cannot be real, while a thing must first exist in order to be real, so that reality presumes existence.

The truth is in the relation not in the relata.

An acknowledgement of the ambiguity or uncertainty of truth is the first step in their honest pursuit. In fact, ambiguity may inhere in the truth if the dialectic employed in its discovery extends into the truth that is discovered.

The interdependence of all things, and the dependencies within all things, remind us that we are sets of constitutive relations embedded in still larger sets. There is an implication of such observations for moral philosophy, in that the artificiality, tentativeness and transience of autonomy speak against egoism and isolation, and provides a meta-physics that reinforces an ethics of generosity, shared experience and the primacy of community.

(emphasis mine)

… the gradient from doubt to conviction, or from an awareness of a falsehood to certainty in an error is determined not by a relation to fact but by the experiential quality of the object. Coherence, not correspondence is the psychological determinant of belief.

The distinction of the real and the unreal rests on a confusion of categories. It may be a confusion we have to live with, but at least it should be acknowledged.

… real things are hardly what they seem, not because they are misperceived, or because they are shadows or phantoms, but because what we observe, and what we infer behind our observations, are entities modelled on our experience with inner states that are opposed to external events, when the external is not the real world but the final segment of the mind/brain state that objectifies as “reality”.

The duration of the present, the unity of the self, the subject/predicate relation in language, and so on, create illusions that can only be exposed by the most ruthless and uncompromising skepticism.

The real is a covert process of creation that we mirror as spectators or participants. It is not that objects are unreal but that the real in objects is missed and, with it, the groundlessness, i.e. emptiness in the Buddhist sense, of all claims, all entities and all objects of desire.

The distinction of the illusory and the real depends on whether the intrinsic relationality of an object is part of its description. The consequences of a failure to address the dual aspect of objects and of accepting the phenomenal as real, whether in the abrupt sacrifice of a life for the sake of an important belief of the gradual pursuit of a trivial one, is life as if appearances matter. That is not to say that the appearances do not matter, for an object can matter whether or not it is real.

An object is a combination of category and process.

The real lies in the knowledge that all objects consist of a simultaneous being and becoming.

We live with being and becoming, the insubstantiality of process and appearance, the intangibility of relations and categories, yet we must also live as if the categories are necessary and real.

… if all things develop out of value, any attack on intrinsic value is a perversion. Thus the enlightened soul does not seek to import or extend value into the world, but rather, apprehends and strives to enhance a world that is literally shimmering with value in all its objects.

(emphasis mine)

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PAL.Chapter 21. The Moral Dimensions of Aesthetic Experience. pp.554-577

 

Mind is the sole self-intelligible thing, and therefore it is entitled to be considered the fountain of existence. - C.S. Peirce

An ordinary object is an encounter, an artwork is an experience. … Ordinary objects can become works of art when perceived from a certain point of view. The difference is one of emphasis, not kind. How this difference is understood depends on a theory of perception.

The belief in an inner and outer world and the springs of behaviour that stem from such a belief are implicit, covert, and deeply ingrained in the psyche.

Are the neocortical zones the standard model loci of initial processing, or do they mediate endpoints of perception as postulated in microgenetic theory?

For microgenetic theory, the quarrel is with the standard model of perception, not action, for perception is interpreted in the same way as production, as an expressive activity that goes out to the world. … The point is that objects take on aesthetic value not by an addition of psychic qualities, but by an accentuation of those qualities as segments prior to their objectification.

From a temporal standpoint, the object includes, as part of what it is, all the phases traversed in its perception, including the subject. That is, the object “out there” has a microtemporal structure that includes earlier phases that lay down the subject. We speak of subject and object, but to be more precise, they are subjective and objective segments in the same act of cognition.

People are quicker to note differences than similarities. However, instead of demarcating and analysing, one finds if one looks more closely that what appear to be distinct nodes in a category, or separate domains of function, are gradations with indistinct borders that are constantly changing and merging.

Value is the bridge form aesthetics to ethics. Central to the continuum is the concept that value is allocated at different segments and in different proportions to the transition form self to object, from drive and intrapersonal desire as one polarity, to attention, then realness and extrapersonal worth at the other. In the compromise of other-centered self-denial and drive-based egoism, the subjectivity of conceptual feeling, in art or ethics, confronts the objectivity of custom and/or approval.

A perception is an adaptive model of the world. The stability of this model is due to its recurrence.

The object is more alive when the life of the artist or observer is engaged.

The timeless objects of aesthetic contemplation become actual through the observers emotions and ideas, while the living things that have our moral attention incite a timeless obligation to protect and trust.

The saint embodies in his acts the ideal of goodness, genius embodies in its works the ideal of beauty. In art, self-realisation trumps obligation, in ethics, in the saintly or compassionate person, they are aligned.

Language tends to fractionate feeling and dispel it over time, art concentrates feeling with greater immediacy. Unlike art, which has been increasingly liberated from mimicry, even tradition and communicability, language cannot escape realism without becoming incoherent or ejaculato.

The attribution of mentality to an artwork or natural object, i.e. the presence in the object of the creative power of a genius or a god, is a species of animistic thought, but it is the first step in a transition from aesthetic to moral concepts.

In that beauty is contemplative and goodness is instrumental, the relation of beauty to morality is like that of perceptual commitment to conceptual obligation. In this respect, there is a comparison of philosophy to life, or theory to behaviour, which is the relation of thought to action, choice to decision, need to satisfaction.

Universality is sameness over difference, in space, time or context. However there are no exact repeatables. Each entity individuates a relational whole, so supra-ordinate or categorical universals are as fictitious as isolated particulars. The idea of an absolute repeatable is motivated by a desire to introduce conceptual stability into a world of change.

The enduring self in relation to the succession of acts is a relation of a category to instance, perhaps it is even the nucleus of the idea of universal and particular.

The concept of a generic category opposed to a particular instance arises as a whole/part relation in time consciousness. The temporal incrementation of spatial wholes, or the elaboration of succession out of simultaneity, is the creation of time order out of non-temporal wholes.

… consistent with the microgenetic account of the sculpting that occurs in every act of cognition. The process of specification leaves the category behind as the part individuates.

The relation of the good to good and bad acts, like that of perfection to genius or corruption, is also a relation of the ‘timeless’ to the temporal.

A population is not involuntarily subjugated by rulers that arise within its ranks. Its beliefs and values create the conditions in which the corruption and oppression flourish.

Ultimately, ethics and aesthetics fuse in a life of self-realisation. What is at stake is authenticity of character.

Microgenetic theory is the basis of an account of ethical conduct and aesthetic feeling in the recurrent specification of acts and objects out of the self, i.e. as self-realisations of character and personality. … The starting point is the description of the mind/brain as a process of self-realisation.

From a process standpoint, art and conduct move from subjective wholes to objective parts. In both, the subject feels the centrality of personal value and motivation. However, the subjective is revived in recreating an artwork, which is vetted fro its power to induce this revival in others and the depth of feeling evoked. Conduct is also vetted by those who revive the act in the imagination according to their valuations, but unlike an artwork, conduct is not revived concretely, only a judgement of its context and consequences. This leads to external judgements in conduct, internal ones in art.

 

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PAL. Chapter 20. Thought and Memory. pp.531-551.

It is merely assumed that perception provides the material for memory, and that memory – reciprocally – provides the material for feeling and thought. This approach has been justified by the presumed need to study memory apart from its relation to other aspects of cognition, which have their own sub-systems and separate lines of observation and experimentation. This trend towards increasing analysis, compartmentalisation and localisation – the triumph of the “splitters” over the “lumpers” – is the bugbear of modern day psychology.

… it is one thing to analyse a whole into its parts, and quite another to re-unite the parts once they have been separated.

Prospective memory is a recurrent thought about the future, and thus a dialectic of thought and memory on the axis of time. A thought of a prior experience that is accompanied by a feeling of pastness, repetition and familiarity is as much a memory as an idea, while memory becomes thought when it departs form reproduction and its content is not evidently perceptual.

We think that “real” experience is the basis of memory, whereas an imagined experience is a kind of thought, or a dream. Memory is grounded in experience, but actual or objective experience is not necessary for a memory, and with respect to experience, the distinction of memory, dream and thought is not sharply drawn.

The dream-time of the myth does not contradict the serial order of the conscious present. Rather, the myth informs or merges with the perception as part of the reality of present experience.

The historical past, whether or not it is remembered and whether or not one can say it actually occurred, leaves it mark on consequent events in the same way that the past leaves its unconscious effects on thought and behaviour. Indeed, invented or misconstrued events can be more vital to behaviour in the present than true facts. What exists in the personal past is, for the subject, as for historical consciousness, what is actively remembered, and this varies with the state of the person at the moment of acquisition and/or recall.

In everyday life, we know that the recall of an event is effected by feeling, novelty and familiarity, interest and semantic or conceptual relations. What is not generally recognised is that this is also true of what we perceive. Value and meaning are guides to perception.

… the self is as much a product of memory as what is remembered.

The theory of generative grammar proposed infinite creativity in language production, though most people are limited to one or two conversations, and tend to repeat themselves endlessly within the topics of their interest. The categorical nature of perception limits novelty to unfamiliar objects, i.e. those which seem outside the usual categories. The novelty of any object or thought is not felt acutely because it resembles in some respect the objects and thoughts we have previously experienced. The priority of the categorical over the particular gives the feeling of the habitual that pervades most aspects of life.

The greater the feeling of stasis on reproduction, the closer the object to perception and memory. The greater the feeling of change within a replication, the closer the object to thought. The novelty that pervades all material and mental process involves a departure of memory into thought. There is a precedence of becoming over being. The stability of category over process entails the relaxation of the activity of thought into the solidity of being. Now, replication or memory predominates.

A memory is felt more like an obligation. An intention is more like a desire.

Agency does not arise form the momentum to the present but is enhanced as the self goes out to objects. The shift in attitude depends on the subtle accentuation and degree of completedness at serial points in the actualisation process. The temporal direction of an intention is closely related to the prospective or retrospective character of memorial experience.

Agency enters intention to the extent that we desire what we remember, either to repeat a prior experience or, in prospective memory, to posses an object that recurs in thought. The relative freedom of intentionality from desire tends to align the former with the “reflective faculty”. This is partly its appeal to philosophy as the criterion of mentality, much as syntax for many linguists is the hallmark of language.

In the intentional state, one object – idea, memory – is selected as a focus of interest from all other possible foci. This interest is a sign of value. Unlike desire, in which feeling is centered in the self, or worth, in which feeling is centered in the object, interest occurs with weak desire in an object of modest worth as a state of feeling in which self and other have equal share.

The productivity of thought, as with all acts of cognition, begins with conscious or unconscious reproduction. In perceptual experience, sense-data constrain thought to model the world.

… prospective memory, which combines past, present and future – memory, thought and expectation – in a siungle cognition. The microgenetic account of this state holds that the revival of a familiar content in a present thought concerning a future event can be interpreted in terms of a sigle process of thought-development which, by way of intrinsic constraints in the phase-transition, tends towards the reproduction of prior contents, while the growth of the content over successive recurrences is a measure of the degree to which the constraints of habitual thinking are relaxed, so that revision or expansion of content can occur.

A chief irony is that reflection on past or future tends to detach the individual from the vividness of the present, while immediacy of experience is felt by those who are reflectively engaged in life as it passes.

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PAL. Chapter 19. Thought and Action. pp.509-530

 

The analogy is with the choice of a word … we have the experience of searching for the right word. … We may even have the initial letter or sound, and search of r the phonological content. The feeling of agency that occurs with the search is not a volition applied to the “retrieval” of the word from memory, but rather, the feeling of agency arises in the process of word specification. A search that is within an object or semantic category is not merely linguistic, but ideational. A conceptual search is also agentive, though it is marginally intentional, since the object of the search is imprecisely known. In both cases we struggle to find the right word, or capture the concept it vaguely subtends, or we mine the concept for its most befitting, alluring or poetic realisation.

When action is required, all the predictions go out the window. The action may or may not be reasonable, or justifiable in retrospect, but it is not determined or sanctioned by a pre-packaged logic or an unconscious rationale. The unconscious has a logic of its own that differs from the a of consciousness. The unconscious impulse is often in defiance of reason.

We would not expect the “same” person to act impulsively on one occasion and deliberately on another when the occasions are similar. To the extent that actions are consistent, they show that a change in character is glacial compared to that of circumstance.

The configuration that discharges in a spontaneous act undergoes individuation when the act is postphoned. The resting valence of the ego- and exo-centric dispositions may then fluctuate as one set gains the ascendancy. In principle, a delay permits further specification of the dominant value-set, perhaps more often muting expression than enhancing it, as contemplation or persuasion sorts out the most judicious, advantageous or moral course to follow.

The contrast of spontaneity and deliberation is that of automatism and freedom. This contrast is central to the relation of thought to action.

In certain cases, the very occurrence of deliberation, in replacing action with thought when action is required, is a species of immorality.

The value configuration undergoes a gradual evolution with age and experience, hopefully in the direction of a lessening of egoism. However, at any stage in life, unless the individual undergoes a personal crisis or a spiritual conversion, the equilibrium of self and other is unlikely to dramatically shift simply though learning.

When a decision is distributed over many people with differing views, or when one person holds beliefs and values that are incompatible, or if one set of values does not predominate, conflict or compromise is inevitable. The individual is paralysed by indecision, action is replaced by consensus, diplomacy becomes an end in itself. Strong character, purpose and determination at one extreme, blind faith, totalitarianism, mob action at the other, enjoy a certainty that is not shared by a democracy of opinion which, by its own edict, cannot satisfy every claim.

An impulse that is delayed and replaced by language and/or thought does not easily recapture the passion or dedication of the act that was postponed, unless the intervening phase serves, in a single-minded way, to shore up the initial impulse.

Conscious choice arises when a phase prior to the individuation of an action is retarded in its transit, so that the phase of selection, not the act that is selected, becomes a focus of reflection.

The postponement that takes unconscious commitment to conscious choice is consistent with the evolutionary principle that the “higher” (later) is not a cognitive or evolutionary add on, but a branching of “lower” (earlier) uncommitted stages.

Too many avenues of self-realisation dissipate the intensity of voluntary feeling, while a lack of options, if not coerced, or a habit of repetition, discharges (the self) directly in the act. An examination of the micro-structure of choice, (Brown, 1996) affirms that concepts are not conveyed, but survive into consciousness, as deliberation or indecision uncovers the covert struggle in their actualisation.

The values of self and other are co-temporal in their origination, and continuous in the process leading from self to object. When two egocentric desires or values clash independent of the needs of others, the choice is non-moral. When ego-and exo-centric values clash, the choice is moral. Since values derive from drives, which are adaptive, the origin of every value supposes a social factor.

Only when a person is oblivious to his own motivations can an act be considered an end in itself.

Each act of cognition, taken as a momentary state, specifies an aim. The aim – goal, end – becomes clear as it is realised. The conscious aim is not the construct that initiates the action. That some aims are ends and others are means stretches the causal theory of conduct over a concatenation of acts. From the standpoint of process theory, the distinction of ends and means is probably barren of import. The means/ends distinction requires a reconstruction over a series of acts of those that can be considered means and those that can be considered ends. In fact, the end of each act, conceived as a means to a subsequent act or a terminus of the current one, is in both instances the aim of its actualisation.

The lack of conflict, the naturalness of an action, not its rightness, is a mark of authenticity or coherence. … We perceive a spatial or synchronic coherence in the interlocking pattern of everyday objects. This coherence depends on the seeming immediacy of perceptual contact. Another, deeper coherence concerns the temporal or diachronic pattern through which the spatial elements are derived. Action is diachronic, though it becomes sychronic in the agents perception. Diachronic coherence is felt or intuited, not directly perceived.

The conceptual and the material, like the mental and the physical, are symbiotic concepts. The one supposes the other, to which it is a response. A fixation on facts as building blocks can suffocate an ambiguity that may be our best approximation to truth. Assertion and refutation seem to be the sole paths to knowledge, but what sort of truth survives? A negation, unlike a refutation, constrains; it does not reject but exposes the nugget of truth that remains after a mountain of error has been excavated. The limits of any theory are at stake when anything is described, for a description is a piece of the theory that supports it. For every category, there is another just beyond its contours. Every statement plumbs the depths of the presuppositions on which everything depends.

(emphasis mine)

We do not attribute the same degree of volition to immoral acts as moral ones, regardless of whether they are spontaneous or deliberate. This dissociation introduces mercy and compassion into the system of justice, but makes no sense at all from the standpoint of human psychology.

The self may have some independence from its causal inheritance, through contingency and the duration of the present, but intention still collapses into character.

Values enrich those [personality] constructs that incline the self to personal or social ends. They facilitate dispositions to configure concepts and their implementations in words and acts.

The option of choosing right from wrong and the intention that inheres in an act of choice are an origination myth on the unknown antecedents of acts. Like any myth, this one survives and is perpetuated because it satisfies human needs, agrees with common sense and is necessary for justice, but also because it discharges a society of the responsibility for creating its own saints and monsters.

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PAL. Chapter 18. Efficacy and Illusions. Pp 486-508.

 

Choice is a fork in the road of value that gives direction to agency and intention. The feeling of agency is value flowing from the self into action.

Actions go out to the world from the self as occasions of will or desire. Objects and events come to the self as occasions of interest or accident.

… a deeper understanding of freedom, choice and efficacy entails a radical re-thinking of the perceptual process, no less than that of action, since the feeling of agency is largely perceptual.

Agency and choice come to the fore in action, especially in verbal imagery (inner speech), as an accentuation of penultimate phases in the language act. This experience is central to the feeling of conscious choice, intention and desire.

In perception and action, there is a progressive analysis of character (self) to choice (selection), decision (specification) and effectuation.

… the concept of god’s agency is derived from the feeling of human intention, as the perception (theory) of object causation is derived from the feeling of agent causation.

The transition from potential to actual is causal if it is divisible into intervening phases, but this does not apply if potential and actual are part of – as stem to leaf – the same entity. Potential perishes at the moment of actuality, not successively at each phase in the path to the actual, since potential at each phase is part of the actuality it leads to, i.e. part of the epoch of its actualisation. Potential and actual are successive phases in a single momentary existence.

The origin of agency in early cognition is also the beginning of a theory of subjective time.

The control of the object that is the seed of agency is less a projection of human thought onto nature than an elaboration of indeterminateness in natural process.

The argument that advanced forms exist in earlier ones in statu nascendi is also the critique of an evolutionary account of consciousness and value. Purposefulness achieves its aim when it terminates. The aim is not given beforehand.

Agency in organism is the basis of a theory of object-causation. Intentionality in organism, as nature individuates still further into human thought.

The distinction of cause and effect in object-causation is parallel to the distinction of self and world in agent-causation. In the former, such problems as the demarcation of the cause, its transition to the effect or the attribution of contingency to accidental causation resist analysis by the methods of the very theory they subtend. Since they cannot be explained by the doctrine of external relations, they vitiate the theory. A theory that cannot explain its core assumptions is vacuous, not merely incomplete. A persistent incoherence is close to an unacknowledged refutation. Similar problems bedevil agent-causation, but here, contingency translates to free will and the connection of cause to effect is even more obscure.

The experience of direct knowledge of our inner states is in striking contrast to the indirect knowledge of ignorance that we have of the series of co-temporal states of the world and other minds. The immediacy of awareness for our won thoughts does not occur for the internal states of other objects or the thoughts of others, unless one accepts the possibility of mental telepathy. (emphasis mine) The conscious anticipation of a coming state and the feeling of agency and intention contribute to the continuity from one state to the next.

The other side of a lack of direct knowledge of processes linking the succession of states in the world is the inference of lawfulness in physical passage, whether due to probabilities, causal necessity or divine guidance. Since ordinary objects do not contain selves that can intercede in the flow of world events, they are inferred to be the outcomes of a causal series that, in principle, traces back to the beginnings of the universe. … For example, we tend to postulate hidden causes (motivations, conflicts, etc.) to explain the actions of others, which they believe are freely chosen.

While the presence of choice in nature is consistent with some interpretations of process metaphysics, the feeling of choice in nature is sensed primarily in the “primitive” thought of animism and dream cognition. The uncertainty in quantum theory is ordinarily interpreted not in terms of choice but of probabilities which collapse, retroactively, into causal effects. If mental causation (agency) is impressed on the order of natural events as object causation, free will might extend into the world as choice, either as contingency or in the belief that god intervenes in the stream (cycle) of change. In any event, our concepts of objective change have their sources in physical experience.

In sum, freedom in non-cognitive nature, as well as in the brain state, is grounded in contingency or probability or creative advance, yet the concept of object causation is inherited from human agency, just as the concept of probability is inherited form human choice. The potential, the novelty and the possibility are so forceful an experience with an image in the mind survive in the contingency of external objects. The feeling of volition that is lost as the object exteriorises is replaced by the feeling of a causal force that is extrinsic to the observer. The will exteriorises with the object as its causal power. The free will that imposes certainty on indecision becomes the power of causation tha imposes necessity on contingency.

I think the causal theory of nature is a strong extension of the feeling of agent causation to external objects, while contingency in nature is a weak extension to objects of the feeling of choice, possibility and personal freedom. There is a complementary relation between, on the one hand, the rigid laws of macrophysics and the uncertainties at the quantum level with, on the other, the certainty of agent-causation and the freedom – creativity, uncertainty etc. – of personal action. … The “laws” of the mind that give the objects of perception (and science) become the physical laws that govern mind independent entities as well as mind.

(emphasis mine)

The sense of self as persistent over time is the result of a positive illusion of a prolongation of its arising and a negative illusion of a lack of incessant perishing. The replication of the arising over the perishing of each moment swamps the perishing and accentuated event recurrence, transforming events into objects, while the obscuration of the perishings by the new arisings accounts for the hardening of objects into substances that appear permanent. The stability of the self mirrors the illusion of a dynamic will, as stability and flux achieve a compromise of permanence and relationality, or inflexibility and change. The will cuts across the perceptual boundary of mind and world.

An object cannot be what it becomes until it becomes what it is, but it cannot become what it is until it is already that object (category). Creativity is the realisation of what in some sense one already knows, as contingency is the realisation of what is not known until it is realised. The juxtaposition of the agency of self-realisation with the contingency of perception extends the novelty of basic entities to the freedom of the will, and extends the freedom of the will to possibility in the world.

To say, I am the other, is literally true.

Reality is given by a conspiracy of the senses, as scientific objectivity is given by a consensus of opinion, not by the intrinsic properties of what is perceived.

(emphasis mine)

Action, especially altruistic action is neutralised by objectivity, as decision, however rational, is not decided by reason.

Self and act are one state.

Reality is the process of individuation, the transformation of wholes-to-parts, and the categories that turn such transformations into stable forms.

The belief in one world of private experience and another of public events is deeply entrenched. To think otherwise borders on mysticism, to feel otherwise is psychosis. The “gap” from mind to world is fundamental to the entire edifice of western thought. Yet the assumed confrontation of the self with objects that are, in fact, tributaries of the observers mind is an error only slightly less pernicious than the separation of mind from physical nature.

The creative would seem to be the “highest” expression of free will, as habit and repetition are its nadir. But the creative is not a product of the self, for the self is recreated with its contents. Process is creative at every phase.

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PAL. Chapter 17. Luck and the Pursuit of Happiness. Pp457-483.

 

In utilitarian ethics, happiness is an impersonal measure of the quantity of the pleasure in the greatest number of people, though personal happiness is pleasure in the free exercise of personality. … Virtue is a quality, happiness is a state.

An obligation that has not been assimilated as a personal value is not a genuine desire. To the extent it is not internalised, it is felt as coercive and according to the degree of resistance, it is an obstacle to happiness.

Virtuous actions that strive for the greatest good may elicit resistance or punitive action, nor do they necessarily lead to happiness or satisfaction, which probably depends less on one’s accomplishments in the world, or for others, than on the intimate rewards and pleasures of daily life.

… individual agency is diluted in the “group mind”.

The calculus of the utilitarian is closer to the morality of states than an ethics of character.

One can ordain a homogeneity of goods, but not of desires.

The more impersonal the perspective, the more axiomatic the rule, the more artificial the methodology … , and the more the morality becomes a meta psychological attitude distinct from its affective base.

A detached perspective reduces self-interest and should increase the moral value of an action, but it is engagement, not detachment, that aligns moral feeling with right conduct. Self-denial and detachment are an insufficient foundation for happiness and no warrant for moral conduct.

The move from intrinsic to extrinsic relations is the shift from personal value, which is qualitative, to impersonal fact as a quantity.

Those who do not struggle to survive are more prone to depression and more likely to kill themselves. In this regard, even illness and disability are not barriers to happiness.

Happiness consists in the ability and opportunity to seek that which one desires. It is the enjoyment of a subjective aim, an alignment with the forward-going process of life, a finding that contrasts sharply with the Buddhist concept of desire as the source of suffering and the extinction of desire as the source of happiness.

Even if one accepts that fairness or generosity is a pre-requisite for moral conduct, the appeal to common sense rather than argumentation exposes gaps in the analysis that are fatal to the principle. A philosophy that avoids psychology by positing givens just when psychological explanation is required may constitute an edifice that is logically consistent all the way down, until it arrives at its own foundations.

We cannot derive a feeling from a rational argument.

A person can have immense pleasure on hearing a new piece of music for which he has not yet developed a desire. Even solitude is a source of inestimable pleasure. Such observations raise questions for any theory of pleasure that depends on the value of its objects.

A moral duty or rule as a guide to conduct is inadequate, and inorganic, in that it attempts, by fiat rather than by example, to induce people to share in what is a spontaneous impulse of innate empathy.

Feelings are tributaries of drive that transition will into action in combination with object-concepts.

An action cannot be severed from the private states of those involved, but engages character intrinsically at all phases, not as a subjective quality added to an objective fact. Specifically, the principle of greater happiness cannot implant an obligation in an agent irrespective of his private states when the effect of his conduct is assessed by an appeal to the private states of others.

The concept of luck, contingency and probability relate to objects in the world, not psychic events. The concepts of agency, certainty and choice relate to processes in the mind, not events in the world. Fate is an overarching concept that removes agency in a way that luck does not.

The fact that the present, as it becomes past, can be revised from a future perspective undermines the stability of an outcome-centered moral theory. We use our best judgement with the knowledge at hand, but a good act can be reinterpreted as a bad one, and the reverse, as conditions change. Luck is also like this.

The genetics of constitution and the accidents of parenting are a bit like karmic transmission, though displaced later in maturation, where one is a product of an ancestral complex, yet posses some degree of freedom for self-betterment or the capacity for degeneration. That intrinsic constitutive luck is essential to character would seem inarguable, since the installation of exocentric values depends so heavily on experience in childhood and on the moral instruction and example of parents.

For the individual, self-justification is primary, moral or rational. Ideally, he should be his own judge and jury, though an appraisal by others is essential for punishment, as well as to modulate the self-serving effects of denial, forgetting and rationalisation.

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PAL. Chapter 15. Moral Conflict. pp.407-430

 

From an external standpoint, an obligation is independent of what the subject wants to do, but for the subject, there is no felt obligation if it is concordant with his desire. When the ought and the want coincide, the ought drops out. The conflict between the ought and the want is part of the sense of obligation, which is the feeling that one should or must do something for the self or for another person that is contrary to one’s desires.

The ‘good’ thing to do may be consistent with character, but it may not be the ‘right’ thing to do. The good is centered in character, the right in conduct. The good is closer to intentions, the right to outcomes. If the immediate outcome is good, and its subsequent repercussions bad, the decision might have been good, i.e. based on good intentions, yet the action might have been wrongly chosen. In contrast, a decision based on value stems from character. It is what is considered the right and natural thing to do regardless of the outcome, regardless of whether it is “objectively right”, assuming that could be determined at the time of the action.

If the moral logic of a computer could be programmed in advance with a hierarchy of valuations, and could calculate the probability of the most favourable outcome rather than the antecedents of choice, motivation or personal repercussion, would this help the individual decide what to do? And does this mode of thought have anything in common with human cognition?

… from a biological point of view, the prospective direction of responsibility to a child, which is the forward direction of evolution, outweighs the retrospective direction to parents, who are irrelevant from an evolutionary, i.e. reproductive, standpoint.

If moral statements are neither true nor false, true statements do not lead to moral obligations. A statement of truth is itself al kind of action, a verbal act, and does not lead to another motor or verbal action. Action is not the outcome of truth, but a means to clarify uncertainty. It aids in the closure on indecision. In this respect, an action is itself a test of the truth of a statement, thus it is a kind of truth, or a search for truth. One could also say that the finality, irrevocability and definiteness of an action add a new truth to what previously existed.

There is much to be said for the notion that the most fundamental facts are errors that enjoy their truth from the limits of our capacity to refute them. Science attempts to test a belief for its truth, though a profound truth, as Niels Bohr once remarked, may not contrast with an error or a falsehood but with another profound truth.

Subjectivism is neither impersonal nor egocentric. Social adaptation sees to that. Impersonality is achieved, not by objectivity or rationality, but through empathy, self-denial and acts of “imaginative fusion”.

Morality is, finally, an obligation to one’s ideal self or the best of one’s character.

Logical arguments are an uncertain guide to the thought process, as are the choices that emerge from them. We tend not to sound a position too deeply or rationally, but rather take it on a ‘gut’ feeling and then seek arguments to support it. William James wrote that philosophy is more a matter of passionate vision than reason, the reason coming afterwards as a justification.

… the masses absorb and tacitly condone the values responsible for their own shame or subjugation.

The obligations of convention have the force of moral duties precisely because they are internalised in character, even if they are independent of knowledge or agency at the time the action occurs. …

A person is ultimately responsible for his own character regardless of the choices available when he acts, and he should be held accountable for that character even if he denies responsibility.

Self-examination involves a scrutiny, so far as possible, of the unconscious values driving conduct. The goal of a moral education is to instil values that are life enhancing and humanitarian, that preserve individualism and at the same time enlarge the self-concept with other-directed concerns.

A desire is intentional. The self is antecedent to and directed toward an object. Desire is the feeling of a relation of need or want that is directed from the self toward an object or to the concept of the object. … An obligation differs from a desire in having the self for its object. The self feels an obligation, but it is the self that is obligated. The object of the obligation is not the action the self is obliged to perform, but is directed to the self.

Desire and obligation arise in the self, but their actualisation-bias has a different course. Desire corresponds to the agentive or voluntary feeling of an action, obligation to the passive or receptive feeling of a perception. … A loyalty is some combination of the two, namely an obligation that feels like a desire, in which the self has a commitment to the obligation. In loyalty, the self feels as much an agent as an object.

 

The compulsion of obligation is linked to an external, perceptual and impersonal object. The agency of loyalty is linked to an internal, active and personal act. This reflects a bias to perceptions that exteriorise and become independent, or a bias to actions that are self-realisations.

There is a continuous transition in the feeling of outer and inner in relation to the structure of agency, from enforced to compassion, from obligation to desire, from the duty to serve out of necessity to the wish to please out of love. The ought becomes the want as extrinsic constraints on egoism internalise as voluntary commitments.

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PAL. Chapter 14. Taste and Manners. pp.383-406.

 

The relation of custom to law on the objective side,. Or the relation of an implicit agreement to the publicity of obligation and enforcement, can be examined in other activities that differ from moral feeling, and yet provide arguments for a psychological theory of value in relation to intrinsic process: specifically, taste and manners. … We will see that a refined taste is closer to aesthetic perception, while manners are closer to moral conduct. … Manners are moral actions that are ingrained in tradition, taste is a perceptual appreciation of the quality that owes to a tradition of knowledge and judgment.

Genius does not necessarily revise taste but instills its own works in that which taste condones, or expands ion order to appreciate. The step from taste to innovation is like that from prodigy to genius. One is the perfection of the available, the other, a capacity to extend it.

A democracy of opinion is the shipwreck of taste, for it leads to defining the good as an average of preferences, not a model towards which they should advance. … the judgment relies on pre-processing phases in the original perception. The discrimination of the good and the beautiful that we associate with taste, or its correlates in the field of manners, such as courtesy, tact , and discretion, are implicit judgments of what is better or preferable within a category.

Preference is a felt bias to an object. Taste certifies or justifies the bias. Aesthetic feeling penetrates the object, and preference is a sign of this feeling, whether or not it is supported by justifications.

Generally an aesthetic object can only approach a standard set by another object in the same category. The standard is the ideal for its time, its style, its language etc. In morals, the standard is not extracted from the object or action, but to a varying extent, is exemplified by it. The ideal of ethics is unrealisable. There will always be a gap between the actual and the ideal, between the unknowable motives that drive an action, the feelings that accompany it and conduct in relation to virtuous character or an ideal of moral probity.

Valuation generates desire, which creates worth in ordinary objects. Worth trickles out of desire into the value of an ordinary object. … The emphasis upon feeling in preference accounts for its greater subjectivity, the emphasis on conceptuality accounts for the grater objectivity of taste.

The more emphatic the conceptuality, the more detached the emotional response.

In the fact that taste, not preference, can be disputed, the worth of the object is similar to the value of moral objects, since values can also be controverted. Worth becomes an object of choice in aesthetics when a perceptual judgment is required, and an object of choice in ethics when what is required is a judgment leading to or justifying an action.

An evaluation entails a comparison, but not precisely between objects, rather, within their common infrastructure. The infrastructure then actualises the objects to evoke the sensibility of the comparison. The judgment then, is not an addition to the object but a revival of content bypassed in the immediate perception. … Taste is a derivative of the initial perception that objectifies value in relation to knowledge articulated by learning in a specific domain of experience.

In aesthetic discernment, there is also an intentionality that informs an objectified judgment of what is better or more beautiful, or what should be desired, which is then endorsed by taste.

The determination that a certain individual is exceptional, or deserves unusual respect or deference, or merits reward for unusual skill, beauty etc., is compatible with taste in the comparison of the instance to the class, but it does not satisfy the criteria that would extend taste to ethics.

Taste and manners are not motivated by judgments, which are outcomes, but by their conceptual and affective precursors. Judgments are constraints on the refinement of other peoples sense of taste, but for the subject they are expressive features, not higher order assessments

What matters is not the surface product – the preference, the taste – but the context, knowledge and intention behind it.

A naturalist theory of the good holds that the object of the good is part of the act directed to it, i.e. the good act is continuous with, and ingredient in, the agent.

Taste can become a judgment that bridges into law or obligation. … The “political correctness” of a work of art can be imposed by force upon the artist, by threat or insinuation, or it can affect the artist more subtly in the attitudes of the artistic and intellectual community.

Art and life are in constant flux, and aesthetic (and moral) values are called into question when the lack of a precedent is an intimidating factor that prevents the taking of a strong aesthetic stance.

Good taste, good manners and good conduct are variations on a theme of goodness from the aesthetic to the moral. The value that promulgates taste is cultivated, in morals it is imbibed. The authoritative in taste – what is ‘great’ in art or literature – is comparable to the dictates of custom – what is right in conduct – in that a person is taught how to perceive or act.

In seeking links from taste to aesthetics from manners to morals, or from taste to manners, a subtle difference in emphasis can decide the category of a given act of cognition. This may be a bias to action or perception, to context and generality on the one hand, selectivity on the other. One may incline to privacy or publicity, to aesthetic or moral values, to the creative or receptive, to the perfection of the timeless or the corruption of the temporal, to the inorganic or to the living. Thus custom drives conduct in many aspects of moral and non-moral life.

Unlike the refinement of taste, as a sub-class of aesthetics, or an elegance of manners, as a sub-class of ethics, goodness and beauty are often closer to simplicity. … The consensus of taste is the validation of individual preference by those who “know what is best”. This is not the other-centeredness of goodness. It is a reliance on the opinion of a select group of others, not a concern for their welfare.

Manners are incidental to moral choices because they are benign expressions of character, and irrelevant to the particulars of a given choice. The fact that manners so readily dissociate from character suggests that, as far as virtue is concerned, they are not ingredients but accoutrements. … Ideally, they should be fluid tributaries that flow from the depths of character, little morals that become fixed in rules of gracious conduct.

Sincerity is a measure of the authenticity of moral conduct, while in taste, we accept that it is more indicative of personality and not a sign of character.

In shame, dishonour, humiliation, ridicule, the conscious self suffers an injury in relation to its ideal. The offense is internalised as a powerful refutation of a positive self-valuation. The damage to self-esteem is a ‘negative; value that must be ‘excised’ for the self to heal. The extent of damage to the self concept depends on the importance or value of the other in the life of the injured party.

… as taste represents aesthetic categories in relation to preferences as affective habits, so manners represent categories of ethical conduct fixed in routines. And as taste extends the bounds of aesthetics to all object classes, including scientific objects, so do manners extend the bounds of ethical conduct into rituals of little moral interest.

The points below are vital to bear in mind as they apply specifically to the situation in which so many of our peers find themselves – this is the version of manifest reality with which we currently have to contend.

The origination of a novel approach outside a field is often easier to accept than a transformation within one.

The masses, lay or professional, favour those who amuse them, moving from one amusement to another seeking novelty as a surrogate for depth. … It is not an exaggeration to say that barely 1% of those in any field are responsible for transmitting the higher art of the discipline to the next generation or extending it into novel areas. … Most careers exploit the known, some extend it, still fewer transform it. The question is whether, for creativity, the critical mass of ordinary work is a hindrance or a necessity. One also wonders about the need for a coterie of connoisseurs, even in an age of mediocrity, to vet a work of originality, should it appear.

It is often remarked that in an age of the global village, it would be exceptional if genius was overlooked, since everyone has access to just about everything. But a tidal wave of trivia swamps the solitary voice.

The mediocre is not innocuous, it distorts the capacity of the public – even the professionals – to appraise quality.

The ideals of the great are not hostage to the whims of the public, but seek an audience of peers, if only a few in a generation.