Mind Unmasked

A Political Phenomenology of Consciousness

Michael A. Weinstein, Timothy M. Yetman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351662901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The human mind has proven uniquely capable of unraveling untold mysteries, and yet, the mind is fundamentally challenged when it turns back on itself to ask what it itself is. How do we conceive of mind in this postmodern world; how can we use philosophical anthropology to understand mind and its functions? While philosophers and social scientists have made important contributions to our understanding of mind, existing theories are insufficient for penetrating the complexities of mind in the twenty-first century.

Mind Unmasked: A Political Phenomenology of Consciousness draws on twentieth-century philosophies of consciousness to explain the phenomenon of mind in the broadest sense of the word. Michael A. Weinstein and Timothy M. Yetman develop a thought provoking discourse that moves beyond the nature of the human experience of mind at both the individual and interpersonal levels and present a meditation on life in the contemporary world of global mass-mediated human culture.

1

Mind, Narrativity, and the Euro-romance

Timothy M. Yetman

The Narratological Essence of Mind; Shared Mind and Fabulation, or Transcendence and the Word

All known performances and edifices of mind are ultimately rooted in human beings’ fundamental sociality. Cultures, or traditions of sharing mind between individuals, have one seemingly universal characteristic: the production and consumption of stories. Far more than mere fleeting entertainment, these stories give meaning to the lives and worlds of their creators and consumers—they are lived through. There are solid reasons for both sides of this situation. Before addressing the story of the Euro-romance—our story, let’s assume the role of philosophical anthropologist and put the specific narrative tradition that the West has cultivated in context, considering the meaning and function of narrativity more broadly. The stories we humans broadcast and receive, we will here maintain, are utterly essential to the way in which mind as an extra-solipsistic (viz., social, or shared) phenomenon has come into being as we know it. In humankind’s prehistoric, pre-linguistic past, there were undoubtedly individual minds, but the individual minds that are manifested today cannot but be fundamentally different; they are the products of thousands of years of intersubjective interaction via language, and, although one can only speculatively conjecture, they no doubt have little likeness to their archaic predecessors in the pre-linguistic so-called “state of nature.”

By means of narratives, we have all been infecting each other with our cares, thoughts, concerns, fears, and hopes for eons. The notion of a mind decontextualized from larger human culture and society cannot have any real meaning to us. Although our immediate experience is one of particularity, to use a perfectly apt cliché, we are nevertheless ideationally woven into the “fabric” of the general, the universal, of the shared consciousness that constitutes society. I use “society” here in the widest sense, in the understanding that we are members of a species that places a higher stake in the realm of the unreal, of the imagination, of the story, than it does in the concrete, actual, material realm and, accordingly, remembers everything. Without memory, mind would lack one of its necessary conditions, and it is memory that adds to the relatively immediate connection between our own particularity and that of other minds, in the here and now of the present, the vast compendium of mind’s traces that constitute the abiding edifices of language, literature, and culture. It is a great irony that memory, whose faithlessness common sense has always understood as an enduring source of significant problems, has lately been “confirmed” by science. We tolerate our reliance on memory despite our broad acknowledgement of its consistent unreliability because it is like an abusive partner about whom we have mixed feelings, but cannot free ourselves from, because we are practically dependent upon it: memory is essential to the narratological functioning of mind. It is this “catch 22” that makes cynicism a key component in the standard operation of mind as we generally find it in its mature latter-day manifestation, wherein the search for truth is subsidiary to an initial predilection toward fabricating and consuming/being consumed by, lies.

Addressing the phenomenon of narratology is an indispensable part of the study of mind. One of its immediate concerns is to render phenomenologically as clear as possible the function of mind that is constituted by faith. Faith is another necessary condition for the functional operation of (shared) mind; that is one of the reasons it is at the core of Hobbes’ concerns, discussed below. For our present purposes, faith, or trust, like memory, is to be considered as an element of shared consciousness that precedes and trumps a concern for objective truth, and has to do more with primordial aspects of (human) mind’s response to its experience for which truth is initially of no concern at all. Truth, on this account, is a luxury we are rarely afforded.

This rather Jamesian/Piercean understanding of the search for truth finds the latter to be subordinate to the more pressing quest for reprieve from grief broadly conceived. This grief is precisely the quality of conscious experience articulated by existentialism in the notions of the dread, anguish, and care, as something that makes mind want to escape from itself in proportion to the fullness with which it is manifested, to run away from itself at every turn. Here, incidentally, is a solution to the complication that Freud’s concept of the “death drive” posed for his preceding, simpler understanding of human psychology as, among other things, book-ended by the pleasure and reality principles. Mind, on the present view, simultaneously and in equal measure, indulges the pleasure principle and the will to nothingness (the so-called “death drive”) when it seeks comfort in distraction and occupation. Few things have managed more adequately and universally to serve the purpose of imaginative reprieve from both the immediate and enduring experience of suffering in everyday life than the pastime of telling and listening to stories.

Faith plays an essential role in the mechanics of narrativity because, even though in the West it has always been tied to ideas of objective truth (via notions like “fidelity”), it can be argued that its Kierkegaardian passional function as a vehicle for the mitigation of/escape from (Heideggerian) care is more “primordial.” We can move beyond this and claim in postmodernist fashion that the truth was never anything of real concern at all to mind. Instead, due to something inexplicable and incomprehensible about the latter, it seems to find itself feeling naked and consequently compelled in the name of modesty to pay cynical lip service to the idea of truth. This reduces the latter to a mere alibi, a conceit on which mind for some unknown reason seems to need to rely in order to function. The escape from itself that consciousness undertakes via the instrument of faith can come just as well from the relatively benign consumption of fairy tales as from the potentially disastrous blind following of orders issued by another—a mentor or a demagogue for example—onto whom we have displaced the dreadful burden of decision and care. Faith, then, is what lies behind the fascination that compels us into the realm of narrativity.

Broadcasting

What is specifically behind the telling of stories? First, and common-sensibly, we tell stories because, notwithstanding the fundamentally social nature of humans we noted above, it seems that we cannot help but be first and foremost the center of our own universes. This is a practical explanation of, if not a justification for, anthropo-narcissism. Putting aside questions of truth and fidelity, the functional explanation of stories as mere inert conveyances of information assumed in standard communications theory overlooks the fact that we tell them first and foremost as self-aggrandizing bids for attention, acceptance, and approval. They are projections, broadcasts, or testimonials devoted to satisfying the successor to what would figure in the Hobbesian “state of nature” as the instinct for survival. This instinct or inclination is transformed when the initial material struggle for survival has been superseded by the ideational struggle for significance, or meaning, in the artificial world of shared mind, shared meaning, or culture. The present writing is no exception to this. Even though I share E.M. Cioran’s (1987) ruthless acceptance that every human undertaking is baseless, I am nevertheless writing (as did Cioran) with the anticipation that my words will be read by someone in the future, because I have valorized the advancement of a public Socratic critical agenda, even though the deeper thrust of that agenda spurs me to aver that this, like all public communications, does not escape qualification by its own vanity.

We have not yet adapted to the sea-change we have instituted with civilization. The still-active instinct for survival insistently and incessantly throws us back into a comportment that gives primacy to self-interest or at least self-orientation. Despite having largely done away with the ever-present literal, material, mortal threats of pre-civilized life, our civilized consciousness remains inevitably cagey, guarding against threats to its (own) meaning. We have sublimated the instinctual energy previously devoted to self-preservation, transforming it into a new tradition of performative, self-promoting fabulation. It is by way of this narratological performative activity that all of us, in the mediate or immediate, real or imagined, company of others, engage in civilized life. In the imaginative space of civilization, we now fend off the principally figurative threat we face of being deprived of access to, and participation in, the shared system of meanings in virtually everything we say and do.

This is a hypothetical-historical explanation of what appears to be the universal human tendency to construct and energetically maintain narratives as a function of staking a claim to significance in the secondary (virtual) life-world of shared meaning that is culture. A kind of constitutional (not necessarily a psychological or ethical) self-concern lies at the heart of our most basic orientation as human beings, and the Euro-romantic attitude of anthropo-narcissism is merely the hypertrophied, generalized form of this fundamental self-concern.

One can see in the advent of human mind a later—or the final—stage of a biological continuum where the movement toward complexity accompanies the emergence of ontological, and ultimately mental independence, centeredness, and uniqueness—at the level of the individual. Fleshing out this notion, one can see consciousness as reducible to the occurrence of an entity’s reckoning with the world. Wherever there is such a reckoning, there is consciousness. At the most simple end of the continuum, even a virus can be considered a rudimentarily conscious entity by virtue of the fact that it actively reckons with its environment, but in a most direct fashion, when it infects its host and replicates itself, only mutating over generations according to the demands of its encountered circumstances. Such mutations are the result of a mediation between an organism and its world in its least obstructionist, most relatively direct, form. At the other end of this continuum is human consciousness, whose reckoning with the world manifests a dimensionality that is the product of the relatively tremendous detour that is mind’s interposition between the material human organism and immediacy. The farther mind takes itself from immediacy with its narrative mediation, the more robust and dimensional mental life becomes.

Immediacy is something we cannot escape while alive; its hold on us is merely obscured by the illusion of distance created by the imaginative work carried out by our exceedingly powerful and ambitious human mental apparatuses. The baseline for consciousness remains the encounter between a singular entity and the world. The fact remains that we can’t actually walk a single step in another’s shoes. The closest we can come is to attempt the imaginative leap of sympathy. Sympathy is only a modified, or hypothetical, modality of the more primordial condition of self-centeredness (in the existential-phenomenological, not moral, sense of the expression). Even the extreme sympathetic pathos of saintliness is in the end rooted in an endeavor to make one’s own life and action meaningful, and this meaning, in the context of human society, rests on the mediation provided by socially inculcated sensibilities we inherit from convention. This context is the native home of narratology. The gap between minds is bridged via stories.

The sociable habits of human beings, as we stated above, make possible narrativism and the illusion it lends to us of overcoming the actually insuperable distance between radically separated individual minds. Once a story is born and nurtured, it takes on a life of its own, one whose robustness and durability is proportional to how compelling it is seen to be. Perhaps it must be also noted that a crucial factor in the durability of the life of any particular narrative is the continuity and breadth of its spreading. The re-telling of stories is essential to the longevity of the human narratological tradition.

The phenomenon or “problem” of plagiarism can be explained in light of this analysis: one enhances one’s perceived gravitas (in the eyes of both oneself and of others) when one participates in the life of a story in any capacity. In the modern Western world, we put a premium on the latter’s genesis, praising the genius of authorial yarn-weavers because these so-called luminaries participate in the divine aura that attends the mythical revealed Word. Plagiarists are just as driven to take undue credit for others’ work by their reverence for those whose work they seek to pass off as their own as by practical expediency. What they are doing is in a sense nothing more than participating in the re-telling, or the dissemination, of what we generally consider to be among the best of our imaginative works. How utterly different is the use of someone’s words without citation than with? Given the relatively narrow imaginative breadth of what is considered to be the legitimate purview of most of our disciplinary traditions, how truly earth-shatteringly unique and original are the “exemplary” works published in today’s hyper-specialized discourses to begin with? The temptation to illegitimately associate oneself with “greatness” via the mimetic reproduction of another’s words is more than likely the same behavior that kept alive many of the pre-graphic oral narrative traditions that gave us the works of the likes of Homer.

One can consider the “problem” from yet another angle. If so-called “victims” of plagiarism are unable to get some level of serio-comic distance from their lives, their work, and the culture in which they operate, they might consider availing themselves of Nietzsche’s advice (“what are my parasites to me?”). If nothing else, such a consideration might at least appeal to their vanity, at whose behest they could perhaps accept the notion that having “their” ideas “stolen” from them is a gesture of respect and only serves to reinforce their already agreed upon status as “genius.” This claim is analogous to Barack Obama’s famous statement to industrial leaders that “you didn’t build that” as a reminder that everything produced in society partakes of and relies on an already existing, shared, public, infrastructure. This applies irrespective of whether that infrastructure is composed of roads or ideas.

For my own part, I maintain no illusion that the ideas I have presented here are in any way “mine.” I did not create the language in which they are written, the culture that made them possible, nor the philosophical tradition that refined their elements and made them formally available to me for processing. It would be nothing short of delusional for me to believe that anything I have said here has not already been said in one form or another, and most likely more eloquently, by some other thinker. No man is an island; a sense of intellectual propriety has no place in the practice of radical phenomenology of mind.

Receiving

Especially when we take into account that all of the stories that we generate are as much (indeed, initially only) for our own consumption as they are for others, it may not seem too difficult to accept the above explanation of our narratological impulse, but it does not account for a second, equally crucial co-condition for the coming into being of the tradition of human fabulation: an enthusiastic audience who delights in the experience of imaginative re-presentation. At bottom, it seems this receptivity may be rooted in our desire for something stable we can rely on in a world fraught with insecurity and uncertainty, and this is where faith plays its crucial role.

Only in the imaginative “safe place” carved out by the narrative, is entertainment—that hypertrophied narratological bugbear that has come to dominate contemporary cultural life—possible. The escapist sense of safety nurtured by narratology provides an outlet for our human desire to indulge in trust. The fact that we are capable of taking something, anything, on faith, flies in the face of what common sense would comfortably describe as our primordial, instinctive tendency to be mistrustful and wary, a tendency rooted in (at least the memory of) actual adversity. This tendency can be said most likely to have arisen in response to what Dewey describes as the “precarious and perilous” nature of human existence: we are rightly vigilant in our anticipation of adversity, and this, as we suggested above, holds true on both sides of the dividing line that is the advent of civilized life.

All of this would seem to weigh against the receptivity that is required for the second, consumptive term in the tradition of narratological relations between human minds. Is it possible that the narratological contrivance of the life of the mind is sufficiently compelling to deliver us from actual material suffering? The power of mind to deliver us from material suffering is evidenced clearly in two fundamentally divergent approaches to life: Buddhism and contemporary Western culture. Both suggest, in vastly different ways, that mind can deliver us from suffering, setting aside the otherwise important question of the fundamentally different approach taken by each as to specifically how this is achieved (self-overcoming vs. self-indulgence).

The primary form of adversity we faced in pre-civilized life was unchecked nature. After civilization, we face a principally human, unnatural adversity hinted at above: the deprivation of unalloyed faith in, or full access to, the common life of meaning. The most basic form this threat of privation takes is that of deception. In a world of shared meaning, fidelity is at a premium. The ever-present threat of deception and manipulation forces us to spend tremendous intellectual and emotional energy evaluating others’ intentions, their loyalties, their usefulness, and, for our own parts, being calculating, conniving, ingratiating, and manipulative, all of which are inescapable in human social life.

The Hobbes-inspired skepticism with regard to others’ general trustworthiness would seem to weigh against the practicability of faith that is at the core of the second, receptive term in the narratological relationship we are discussing. So how does one explain it? With reference to the fact that we are exhausted. Navigating the artificial world of civilization can be so difficult that at times we are compelled to wonder whether it has really achieved its hypothetical end of deliverance from, or at least significant respite from, adversity. Ivan Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor may have had a point in reproaching God for his bungled work, but we ourselves certainly haven’t made much headway in the task of “correcting” it. In light of this re-engineering job’s failure, we are forced to take refuge in trust. Trust arises as the imaginative safe-haven of resignation born of weariness and wishful thinking and finds its archetype in the romantic concept of love. The valorization of trust is the ethical corollary to what Nietzsche called western metaphysics’ “will to truth:” an ideal founded on an inversion or perversion of what common sense would seem to call for because, even though having faith in others is irrational, we are willing to take that risk anyway.¹

Like capricious Nature, others will betray our trust continuously (and it matters little that the vast majority of those betrayals are carried out neither maliciously nor deliberately). Like thirsty desert-wanderers, we are ever looking for an illusory oasis that would provide relief from the memory and anticipation of betrayal.

Historically, everywhere mind comes face to face with itself, when it finds itself alone with itself (the primordial state of consciousness, or “radical separation”), it is overwhelmed and turns away aghast. This is the deep truth about human life depicted in morality plays like Everyman, but delved into more deeply by Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, and later expounded on by Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus. What these thinkers showed us is that the separation of minds does not admit of degrees, but is absolute. Theoretically, however, an acknowledgment of the reality of any distance between minds shatters the delicate illusion, woven by our narratives, that we can share anything outside the terms of the shared narrative itself, viz., actually. Via fabulation, history, tradition, etc., we can all share what appears to be the same world, but in actuality, the radical particularity of our experience denies us that connection, and the many can never become the one.

When one dives deeply into the experience of radical particularity, or dwells alone contemplating the irremediable separation of individual minds, the result is usually what most would consider madness. Madness and evil are of a piece in this sense. This is what drove Hobbes’ ardent defe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Mind, Narrativity, and the Euro-romance
• 2. Integral Consciousness
• 3. Embeddedness, Serio-comedy, and the Third Ape
• 4. Welcome to the Fragmentorium! It’s Ridiculous!
• Bibliography
• Index