I’d certainly like life to be simpler. To have fewer, less disparate goals. More modest aspirations. I’d prefer not to feel the often-straining, draining pressure of too many competing obligations and expectations.
But at the same time … I can’t, don’t want to give up those goals and hopes, abandon vital personal and professional responsibilities.
For me, at least, a fulfilling life is not a simple life. I sometimes tell myself that if I had to do it all over again, I’d make choices that would increase the likelihood I’d be able to simplify things … Yet, I know deep down that I’d probably make the same choices, entailing the same struggles to complete my PhD dissertation, find a permanent academic job, get grant money, balance work and family.
The issue may generally boil down to living life, while learning how to be aware of living life. Which intrinsically entails being able to live life–with all of the conflicting, inevitably imperfect choices we have to make–while also making time and space to reflect over life and death. And … while learning how to represent, remember, and constructively communicate about said reflection. I have this much in common with artists from a much more ancient tradition. Continue reading Fast and Slow, Near and Far, In Between→
How does the process of culture influence democratic participation and social fairness?
Declaration of Independence, by John Trumbull (1819), oil on canvas. Much of the early public discourse aimed at mobilizing political support for independence and particular aspects of constitutional organization of legislative representation and executive and judicial power was philosophical and legal in form, emphasizing logical deduction from first premises.
We usually take it for granted that concepts of democracy and justice are so overarching–so encompassing over the structure and maintenance of social order–that they have an independent, fixed, objective definition. This is certainly a practical narrative. As long as things are OK for most citizens of those societies institutionally defined and overtly committed to democracy and rule of law, the notion that our access to legislative, executive, and judicial decision-making is fundamentally fair … well, it’s quite convenient to confuse fundamental political fairness with the experience of not being treated unreasonably unfairly in daily life.
In other words, notions of social fairness and justice have a tendency to take an unmarked symbolic form in relation to the markedness of unfairness and injustice. The succinct, iconic narrative that the system is basically–or at least sufficiently–fair … this is easy for us to tell ourselves, easy to think. It diverts our attention from pervasive instances in which local, regional, or national governing institutions–with claims to sovereign powers over their jurisdictions–actually abuse their power and unfairly harm civilian individuals or groups. It diverts our attention from the ways in which governing institutions unfairly ignore or flaunt legal protections and democratic accountability.
The production of kolam designs is traditionally done by women in Tamil Nadu, India, to welcome guests while beguiling and trapping evil spirits. Alfred Gell, in his ground-breaking work on the anthropology of art (1999), notes that the hierarchical and sometimes-fractal structure of the kolam design exerts agency on social beliefs and practices that constitute household formation, the family’s connection to wider society, and cosmological conceptions of order and chaos. Thus, artistic products stand in an asymmetric, partially reciprocal, non-nested hierarchical relationship to the beliefs and practices that exert agency on these products. Photo cropped from user Arulraja’s contribution to wikipedia.org, “Kolam in front of the House during House warming in Tamil Nadu.”
The Material Process of Being in–and through–the Symbolic Matrix
This post is the next-to-last in my five-part series on Anthropology and Philosophy. Of course, the general theme of how these two disciplines have and may interconnect is rather open-ended. I’ve chosen to focus on particular issues that really strike me as highlighting:
parallel trends between disciplinary specializations and between the disciplines that could productively be drawn together–e.g., insights into the open-endedness and consequent, inevitable logical inconsistencies of both formal and everyday logical representation systems;
issues and insights from anthropological research that can benefit philosophical inquiry–e.g., Rappaport’s (1979) argument that in complex self-regulating systems, the most relevant Aristotelian level of causality is that of formal cause, underscoring the relationships among the system components; and
how the theme of biocultural connections can further contribute to a broader, interdisciplinary understanding of human existence and experience.
This post deals partly with the second theme. This is really a post about how the late British anthropologist Alfred Gell (1998) elegantly clarified and expanded the applicability of philosopher C.S. Peirce’s ideas to understanding human interaction with and agency in the world. Yet, this is more than just a summary of Gell’s own ideas, as they also inspire a more profound biocultural synthesis. Thus, this post also covers the more general–and admittedly ambitious–third theme, which is also the focus of a manuscript that I’m preparing for submission to a special issue of the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology, dealing with “the future of embodied cognition.”
The main point of this post is that human linguistic communication is not only richer in embodied experience than we usually acknowledge, but it is also more thoroughly shaped and constrained by symbols and their indexical interconnections than scientific accounts of human social interaction usually assume.
What to make of our ancestors and distant relatives, separated from us in time and space? Do we emphasize our connections, symbolically tying us to something bigger–and even potentially boundariless, conceptually defying the impossibility of the close contact from which we build our daily relationships with loved ones and friends? Or do we see those only distantly related to us as an unambiguous–and unambiguously negative–counterpoint to our selves and our locations? … As in, “Thank heavens we’re us and not them, here and not there!” Or, “At least we’re not freaks like them.”
Logic, Reason, and Emotion in Biocultural Perspective
Frontispiece from the massive 18th Century Enlightenment compendium Encyclopedie, chiefly edited by Diderot. Astoundingly, this depiction--so richly suggestive of movement and sensual human contact--shows a crowned male figure representing "Reason" pulling a thin veil off the naked female figure representing "Truth." It is difficult to avoid considering this print as an ideological depiction, claiming to reveal what had been the hidden--but true--cosmological order, in which deliberative male Reason asserts the right to decide or rule, by pulling the veil off of sacred female Truth, sensual yet passive, satisfied to playfully toy with nature and the technical instruments for its inspection (science) and representation (art). Although this may have been intended as sly satire, one thing is for sure: reason and truth are ideas that evoke intense emotions, and thus, they are logically metonymically linked to desire. The Enlightenment was--and to an extent, still is--at least as much about (male) desire as it was about rationality.
Where do we derive our reasons, rationalizations, and explanations from? How do we discover, define, and decide to adopt new concepts? Logical reasoning is part and parcel of our actions and thoughts, in everyday practice, throughout our lives. The problem with human logic is that the very symbolic systems we use to represent our logical arguments inevitably allow us to represent absurd or contradictory arguments, too. Even from the beginning, in learning to use a logical system of representation, we have to get over the fact we’re also learning arbitrary choices of symbols that are set by convention, to refer to certain concepts. So we all too easily forget that when we were young, there was a time–as late as six or seven for many of us (and we still turned out ok)–that “2 + 2 = 4” was gobbledigook nonsense. Logic can lead us into confusion, even before our more complex thoughts really get going.
When we think about logic, we tend to focus on how one can rationally draw conclusions from premises. So we make deductive arguments. In our minds. Orally. Through various literate media: writing, print, electronic. We do so in order to explain our environment, justify courses of action, establish reassurances that the world has some predictable order in it. We tell ourselves and others that certain conditions have necessary implications that we need to expect and be prepared for.
We use inductive logic, too. Perhaps even more often. We have an experience, make an observation about how two phenomena relate … or perhaps how something has changed over time, and we generalize our understanding of why the change occurred. Why phenomenon A implied phenomenon B. We build the relationship between A and B into a general concept.
Hopefully, it’s needless to say that logical thought and communication can aid effective behavior. We have to navigate intricately interrelated social, material, and ecological environments. Some logic is usually better than none. Other things being equal, an animal that can use logic to organize information and guide its course of action will have greater chances for survival and reproductive success than another population member who is only capable of random, unpredictable irrationality.
From a biocultural perspective, then, logical arguments are not just interesting for philosophers, mathematicians, and computer programmers. The capacity to make logical arguments has long been evolving in nature–in the form of embodied cognitive representations. More to the point, the cognitive capacity for logical decision-making has been shaped by natural selection–in a wide range of animals, at least in many birds and mammals–as an adaptation for learning and effective behavioral decision-making in complex, unpredictable environments.
And natural selection has certainly continued to influence the human capacity for constructing and sharing logical arguments. The evolutionary emergence of socially shared logical representations has unfolded over the roughly seven million years since the hominin lineage evolved a reproductive barrier with the chimpanzee-bonobo lineage. Still, there is an important “but” here. Human beings have a greater capacity to focus attention on and construct logical arguments than any other animal species. But …
The Biocultural Evolution Blog 