Tag Archives: self

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Magellanism

authentic artistic productions
the avant garde…
whisper unconscious koens
subliminal social suggestions
haunting the ready, the restless…
prepares ground
for punctuated emergence

what is this light ???
a cascading series
of erotic creative toggles
which vitalize the preparation
of this special autopoesis
the poetry of our collective dance
becomes obvious
in these special glimpses
of the great remembering

it’s more than the eros
of pursuing the excellent questions,
the loving play and design
of cognitive gifts and exercise…
it’s more than the sacred reverence
of our sanga in practice,
this emergent suchness,
exhibiting delicious blended elements
of both…
ah !!

at this intersection of our experience
a fresh, new, and alive we-ness emerges
mysterious, gorgeous, seductive presentations
the stuff of this new manifestation
the resonance of our fresh social moment
this precious group
this shared new luminance
new containers are formed
already brimming,
with our splendid light

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The Birth of Isaac Babel

a listening homage to Richard Chadek sharing Nicole Krauss – in dialog.

I was there that day; the dark day Isaac Babel was executed. His crime was silence, and they could not bear it – I could not bear it.  He dared to confront us with our own emptiness through his private fascination with his private interiority. For days he would stare at pages of prose and poetry and music. He did nothing.  He made no contribution.  He did not move.  He did not act.  He shuffled through empty pages as though they meant everything.  As though this blankness was all important. People would ask him questions and his silence would only confront them with their own impotent ignorance.  His listening revealed us for who we were.  We hated him for it.

I was glad when they arrested him and tried him and eventually sentenced him to the ultimate silence that he seemed to love so dearly. It seemed fitting to rid this world of one who was so noisy in his quietude.  So I volunteered. I volunteered to shoulder the rifle, to chamber the round, to aim, to feel the pull of the trigger and the recoil in my shoulders as the bullets flew  from the barrels of our guns true and straight into the heart of Isaac Babel.  And then I fled like a wild animal in response to what I had done.

It was only after he was gone that I began to regret something that had gone missing in my life but was now returned. I realized that Isaac Babel had been reborn and resurrected in my own heart in ways I could never imagine.  I was incarnate in a way I had not been before.  I found that his silence was somehow my own silence that had gone so long unrecognized and so disowned.  And while I could not share his dedication to this discipline, neither could I avoid it entirely.  I found I was shrouded in mystery beyond words.

I was lost, but had been reborn – reborn as Isaac Babel.  This was an atonement – a redemption – a revelation.  And in that birth, the emptiness burned away and I found I had traded the darkness of my mind for the Star of the Age.

when you are lost
you climb to the firing range
without a lantern in your life
but the star of the age
and in the bright flash
an emptiness burns away
you trade the darkness of your mind
for the star of the age
surging away from the tower’s embrace
you race like a tiger
relentlessly lashing the days
and leave, in the wake of our wandering lives
the signs we are aging
the houses we drowned in the lake
while the shining world
believes that, inside of days
all the darkness of our lives
will meet the star of the age
while buildings fall
in silence and reverie
among the islands of our minds
among the stars of the age
oh shining world!
where nothing is happening
but what is in our minds:
the swelling stars of the age
but still, my love
the only relieving light
in the spinning darkness of our lives
is when I see you again
in the moonlight
in the starlight
in the sunlight
and I believe it again.

Shearwater, Star of the Age from Animal Life

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Harkening: Vulnerability and Listening

I would like to explore the relationship between listening and vulnerability.  “[O]ur hearing belongs to the sonorous field of Being; that it belongs to the matrix is sonorous energies, in and as which, Being manifests… since it belongs to the sonorous field, our hearing is appropriated by Being; as primordial opening out and laying down of the sonorous field … the Being of beings lays claim to our hearing, calling it to realize it’s given potential as an organ of the sheer vibrancy of the Logos.” Thus spake David Michael Levin.

There is something to this belonging.  Something primal.  Levin points to this as a kind of existential claim, but I am not so sure that it is so one-sided.  There is a kind of agency to listening – a moving outward – that requires a hazarding of ourselves in the midst of the cacophony. I’m not one who enjoys overwhelming sound. My wife and I joke that we are “noise intolerant” – we like peace and quiet.  To the extent that is violated, hearing becomes a painful and triggers a kind of anxiety and defensive moves of self protection.  Listening, it seems requires a different approach – a kind of naked vulnerability – a movement into potential discomfort.

Brene Brown suggests that vulnerability is a form of courage and that courage (born of the French word “couer”) is a form of wholeheartedness. Thus to enter the world with vulnerability is to enter with a kind of wholeheartedness, and that wholeheartedness seems woven into particular forms of listening to require a radical openness.  This putting down of defensive barriers opens one to a kind of receptivity (listening) that allows the interior processes to rearrange themselves in harmony with what is being heard. This re requires a kind of radical openness – as Otto Sharmer would suggest – an open mind, an open heart and an open will – which become a preconditions for a capacity to listen well.

This openness seems not to sit idle or passive, but moves with the kind of anticipation into the middle of things. It welcomes the cacophony and the contraction of noise intolerance becomes a field of awareness that allows for profound shifts of development. It requires a kind of undoing of one’s assumptions and perspectives in a sonic dismantling of the preconceived and already structured. To listen closely is to be undone. To be undone is to be reborn. To be reborn is to be saved. To be saved is to be sanctified. Thus in listening when moves into the holy and can begin to appreciate grace in ways that can seem more immediate those graces offered by the complexity of sight. Listening becomes a mode of practice to see the world in new ways.

This vulnerability or wholeheartedness recognizes that a breaking open and falling apart of self (before its reconstruction) goes with the territory. In his gentler forms involves the recognition that the boundaries between what is hearing, what is heard in the hearing itself are at best blurred.  He can go much further in recognizing the ways we tease apart foreground and background noise and how our attention moves from one thing to the next in the sonorous field.  And if we are listening closely, we can find the very foundations of our sense of self challenged by the way sound moves in and through us.  This is dangerous work.  This movement outwards – the willingness to risk something of one’s self in the world and to be undone by the world – is one of the core dynamics of vulnerability. This kind of listening goes first and doesn’t wait for permission to be vulnerable – it forgoes the requirement of safety to be vulnerable (first on faith, but then in the recognition that the only safety there is comes from this kind of egoic risk).

This is not sitting behind the gates in fortified and invincible stillness (though that may be a good place to practice – on the cushion as it were), but a looking for the existence of silence/stillness in the middle of swirling form – in the marketplace as it were – and again that willingness be undone/remade in new forms as the “world tests the calm fluidity of your body from moment to moment, as if it believed you could join its vibrant dance of fire and calmness and final stillness, As if you were meant to be exactly where you are, as if like the dark branch of a desert river you could flow on without a speck  of guilt and everything everywhere would still be just as it should be.As if your place in the world mattered  and the world could neither speak nor hear the fullness of its own bitter and beautiful cry  without the deep well of your body resonating in the echo. Knowing that it takes only that one, terrible word to make the circle complete, revelation must be terrible  knowing you can never hide your voice again”.

Listening, in that sacred place of vulnerability, becomes a kind of repentance – a metanoia – and thereby an an invitation to make manifest the epiphany of divine grace in its guise as the ordinary.

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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 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 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 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 13. From Intention to Obligation. pp.359-381.

 

There are many ways to trace the transition from self to world, or from the subjective to the objective pole of the mental life, such as from dispositions and implicit beliefs through concepts to objects, from dreamless sleep through dream to perception, from the first budding of a thought to a concrete action, from a personal value to an impersonal duty.

The continuum from personal responsibility to guilt over a broken promise, to moral outrage and a demand for punishment over an unfulfilled obligation, is as much an illustration of the transition from self to world as that from value and intention to conduct and coercion.

One can say that the transition from a disposition, to an intention or resolution, to a promise with an obligation involves an increasing objectification of the will. Specifically there is a progressive surrender of agency from an intrapsychic to an extrapersonal locus. One could also say that the exo-centric values depositing in an object carry with them a feeling of agency that is transferred from the self to the other. In this way, intention objectifies in the other as obligation.

Take the resolution of the arhat to achieve personal salvation versus the obligation of the bodhisattva to strive for the salvation of others. Both are dedicated, but in the latter this dedication is referred outward as a social responsibility. … the transition from self-betterment as a good in itself, to self-betterment as a means to the good of others, i.e. a subtle bias in object-concepts or means/end relations, seems less important than the fact that the ends and means are both expressions of character.

A biding promise may be carried out reluctantly, with little resolve, or be broken, while a resolution that approaches a vow can have considerable force. A moment of resolve can re-define a life.

There are situations in which the moral thing to do is withdraw a promise to a person who is later exposed as unworthy, or if the conditions that motivated the promise no longer apply; for example, an oath to defend one’s country in a war of conquest, a promise to give financial aid to a person who comes into a fortune etc.

The many ways of extracting promises from people, or placing them under an obligation, are the fabric of a society woven together by a trust that obligations will be respected. An abuse of trust is exploitation. … A contract is only as good as the good will of the parties that honour it.

The admonition, to thine own self be true, entails that we avoid making a promise that conflicts with the best of our values. Then the keeping of the promise will not do violence to one’s character. The same is true for the breaking of a promise that is impetuous or foolish.

In a sense, there are three selves in a promise, one representing personal advantage or egoist desires, which may or may not be concordant with the agreement, the other, empathy, compassion, loyalty or obligation, the exocentric values, where the needs of the other are represented, and a third that represents the ideal self, the ideal for that individual, which may or may not be of high ethical quality. The ideal self represents the individual’s idea of what sort of person he would like to be, a construct of aspiration in the dispositional matrix of the core self. The guilt over a bad promise kept, or a good one broken, is the friction of these discordant voices.

From an evolutionary perspective, punishment of social reprobates is comparable to the elimination of the unfit in animal populations. Society takes the place of the physical environment and eliminates organisms who exceed some conventionally accepted deviation from the norm. Ideally, a person who commits a crime should accept, even welcome just punishment, though in the highly individualistic, hedonic and egocentric societies of the west, it is rare that a person accepts responsibility for his actions, still more rare that he accepts the punishment that goes with the verdict.

Threats and rewards, as expectations, are the psychic equivalent of dangers and opportunities. A threat places egoist and other-centered values in a precarious balance, while reward is mainly bound up with self-centered ones.

Praise and punishment, success and failure, are equilibria of self and other that arise in psychological constructs central to character, identity and trust.

As time goes by, the objectivity of the constructual element in the promise may replace the subjectivity of loving.

Customs are implicit accords of values shared in a group over some portion of its history. … It is an implicit agreement by the subject to act in conformity with the culture to encourage closeness in feeling and conduct, and discourage separation and divisiveness.

A promise that is based on virtue, for example giving to charity, donating blood, food, clothing, helping the sick, can and should become so customary that an obligation is unnecessary. In contrast, an unusual custom that is inconsistent with egoist desires, e.g. revenge for a neighbour’s injury, an unjust bequest , may require a promise for its execution. For some , these are major distinctions. To me, they are the shadings of core values that differ in the degree to which obligations – for self and other – are instilled early or acquired late, the degree to which assents are unique or shared, an their extent of publicity, compulsion and enforcement.

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PAL.Chapter 11. What is a good act? pp.301-334

Morality lies in the capacity to choose and the responsibility that comes with decision, but choice depends on values embedded in character. Desire and conflict are manifestations of such valuations, while the final moral act is an adaptation of the psychic to a social world of duty and commitment.

… the tendency in moral philosophy has been to slice off psychology, eliminate the psychic precursors of action and focus on conduct, its context and justification. Psychology is individual covert, inferential, messy and complex, while action for the most part is clear and explicit.

Certainly, for a moral subjectivism, the antecedents of an action are fundamental.

The goal of a moral philosophy is a human psychology that incorporates a personal judgement of one’s acts and aspirations, ideally, a self-realisation of the better portion of one’s character.

Intentions are primary to resolve or disambiguate values and choices.

Choice is central to moral action, but there are desires without (explicit) choices, choices without acts, and acts without choice, though there is an implicit choice in every thought and act.

There is a qualitative difference in form between thinking a thing and saying or doing it.

Each moment, action resolves a mix of personal values, past experience, present conditions and future expectations, even if the person is revealed to be someone he himself does not admire.

It has to be conceded that “free will” comes at a price; once confronted with indecision, one is already in trouble, the more so if choices have equal weight. The greater the menu of options, the multitude of perspectives, the detachment, the less a person is likely to commit to a single path of action. The openness obligated by reason becomes a sanctuary for moral retreat. Reason confronts options exposed in the suspension of action and a withdrawal from objects.

We can begin by putting reason aside, for it does not help us to act. Knowledge is essential in providing conceptual alternatives, but it must be implanted in values for the right act to arise. … An emotional push is necessary for choice.

… the failure to search for error, a too hasty leap to the truth, or an easy acceptance of dogma – scientific, philosophical or religious – are marks of intellectual dishonesty and an attack on truth itself.

To act with an internalised social conscience is to be morally scrupulous. Darkness should remind us of light, the Buddhists say, and in the same sense the knowledge of life’s gifts ought to be tinged with a melancholy for their loss, for oneself and for others.

… detachment is less the assumption of another perspective than the capacity to entertain multiple perspectives, as in a dialectic, in which personal interest is neutralised by deference to alternative points of view. Ambiguity is the antidote to dogma and error. This entails a categorical perspective that does not capitulate to rival attitudes but surrounds them.

… conscious knowledge of right and wrong is not so much a prescription for action as a justification for actions motivated by the values through which knowledge was installed by the experience. … The idea that the knowledge of right and wrong can tell one what to do is sheer causistry.

Goodness may derive from a sense of duty or responsibility, but most people think it ought to flow naturally from character. … Goodness as obligation uncouples feeling from action when the impulse to self-interest is overcome.

Duty as motivation exacts a response by way of values; but duty as mere obligation is coercive and thus intrapsychically inert.

With the primacy of action, agency, thought and desire are subordinate to conduct. What them becomes of moral theory if the feeling of passivity to a thought, say in obsession, or that of agency in voluntary action, turn out to be phenomenal by-products of act- and object -realisation, not measures of actual control?

(good question!)

Even in the best of people, the examined life cannot fail to discover traces of moral corruption. We must account for our acts, and injuries to others, but it is the inner life that calls us to judgement.

The problem for subjectivism is to import greater significance to the psychic precursors of action, and to bring action back into the mind of the subject where it arises, rather than displace it into the world where it has its effects.

I think the ought of duty or obligation will continue to be a confound for a naturalist theory of value unless the necessity in virtue can be shown to be grounded in the is of natural process. Duties must be conceived as psychological constructs, values in ones character, not motives or brakes on conduct.

Goodness of character is to rightness of conduct as potential to actual, not universal to particular.

In mathematics, the numerical concept of ‘one’ has a formal identity across applications … This is not true for a real entity, which does not remain unaltered when it is separated from its context in order to compare it to similar entities in other minds or the same mind at different times. Every actuality actualises a unique qualitative ground.

The right becomes the good when conduct recedes from the objective surface of the mind to its sources in subjectivity.

Authenticity points to the unconscious moral tendencies of the individual that actualise valuations in the self-concept. Morality applies to the resolution of character and choice, the reconciliation of an authentic yet unconscious self with the decision and freedom to choose that are necessary to informed moral conduct.

What gives a person pleasure or makes one happy is not necessarily good in a moral or aesthetic sense. The dissociation of pleasure, desirability and the good is such as to vitiate theories of pleasure, happiness and desirability on the basis of goodness.

Desire is a conceptual feeling that arises in the “drive-representations” that lay down the self and its conceptual feelings or value categories. Desirability is desire that moves value outward from self to object. Desire specifies value in the desirability of the object. Desirability is the desire for an object of worth, since not all objects of worth are desired. Desirability straddles the subject/object transition. Because of its greater proximity to the object, desirability relates more to preference or taste that to desire, which is closer to drive-based affects.

The passage of what is desired, to what is desirable, to what ought to be desired corresponds to a shift from the subjectivity of desire to an intermediate phase of desirability, and then to an objective valuation of the act or object. The ought begins in the extraction of desire form drive, and continues in a progression toward the object, in desirability, which is “half way” from desire to worth, then concludes with its full objectification in the valuation of external objects.

The objectivity of object value, the feeling of obligation as (usually) external and the subjectivity of desire are interpreted as reversible and interactive, whereas subjectivity objectifies in a unidirectional becoming.

… the self is anything but rational, reason being an endpoint in the passage from meanings to words. For most people, rationality is a rare achievement. … The residual value in abstract and “affect-free” concepts must then be looked for in the value underlying the so-called pure reason.

Naturalism does not equate the good with hedonism, which is antithetical to morals, nor does it appeal to social ecology, or the behavior of sub-human primates, or the imperatives of “selfish genes”. Self-preservation does not translate to pleasure-seeking as the expense of others. The self goes out into the world and fills it with value; it does not accrue value for its own needs.

(emphasis mine)

Loyalty is an affective bias; goodness is impartial. A preference based on kinship, affection, tribe, ethnicity, is rational from the standpoint of self-interest but counter to moral logic.

Truth has empirical and logical grounds, these grounds are thought to be the basis of conviction, but the certainty of truth, i.e a belief that the truth is true, requires the subjectivity of belief to impact on the presumes objectivity of fact.

Beauty differs from truth and goodness in that it may arouse neural configurations that respond to balance, averaging or whole/part relations. This may explain the immediacy of the perception of the beautiful.

As to the association of the ideal good with reason, the good is reinforce by logic but not dependent on it. … In logic, thought retreats from the particular to the idea behind it, or the re4altions between ideas. Logic cannot instruct us how to act in a given circumstance. Logic does not usually tell us what we do not already know. … It is better at refutation than assertion.

The relation of the individual to society might correspond to the part/whole relation in beauty, but individual good is often achieved as the cost of much suffering, while the good of the many demands the sacrifice of the few. At least in this way, the part/whole relation of beauty differs from the one/many relation in society.

The universal is immanent in every particular.

(emphasis mine)

The aha experience, the sudden apprehension of a profound truth, the awareness of time and space in the perception of nature, the apprehension of deep order, symmetry and perfection that gives the experience of the sublime, for truth or for beauty, do not occur with the recognition of the good. Nor is there the same degree of cynicism. Because the good is a secondary construction, a good act raises questions of intent that do not occur for truth and beauty.

Goodness is conceived as the whole of its relations. If objects are relational there is no demarcation of object an property. The bundle of properties that constitutes an act of goodness is a complex of relations. The idea of the good as an object with properties rests on the distinction of substance and quality, or subject and predicate, for the property has to be a property of some object.

The good is not a natural, physiological (culture-independent) category like beauty or colour, or a consensual fact-based category like truth.

… the perception of colour, though subjective, is independent of personality, whereas goodness is directly related to character.

Any property is a category of sub-types, but this is especially so with goodness where the property has both a subjective and an objective aspect.

Even the most obvious property of goodness needs to be contextually decontaminated. An unselfish parent can ruin a child, generosity can degrade the feeling of self-worth, etc. As with truth or beauty, the good is illustrated and taught by examples, but the category of the good rests more precariously than truth and beauty on its concrete illustrations.

The presence of covert emotion in reason, or the ability to rationalise feeling, implies that reason itself has an affective tone. The ideal develops out of the conceptual feeling as an experience of the pre-object category. Put differently, ideals are created out of categories as rational aims that can supplant the affective aims of desire. When an ideal becomes the goal of a desire, the affective element dissolves in an object into which it can discharge, while the rational element reatins the meaning in a concept that is unspecified as to content and intention.

It is not a simple matter to desire a generality, a universality or an ideal that is not accented by some instance of possibility.

… the desire for the category is more like a yearning or a longing, which is a waiting for the object to clarify, while a desire directed to an object embodies the wish to have it: it excludes similar objects and suffers the fear of its loss. Just as we generalise an ideal from the particular in the good objects of desire, we seek an ideal love or in life the particular in the category.

The good is not a natural category, like beauty, nor a logical one like truth, which enfold instances of their expression, but an artifice derived from its examples. … Goodness is a conventional category abstracted from its examples not prior to them.

As an ideal self, the good is a subjective possibility that aims at self-realisation. That is, the categories that specify the particulars of conduct can themselves be idealised at subjective or objective polarity. … On this view, one’s moral duty is not to conform one’s conduct to the ideal good, but to realise in all acts the ideal self.

(emphasis mine)