Thinking more about the question I posed earlier with respect to Spinoza and Mandel’s gorgeous follow-up I find myself returning to themes I discussed a month or so ago: the evolution of freedom. In discussions of empiricism Deleuze repeatedly emphasizes that the central tenant of empiricism is that abstractions do not explain, but must be explained. Deleuze is a transcendental philosopher in the tradition of Kant, yet he differs from Kant insofar as he holds that things such as categories and forms of time and space must be given a genetic account. We cannot, Deleuze contends, treat these as transcendental givens, but must instead provide a genetic or developmental account of how these things come to be. This is the secret of the theme of aesthetics and learning that pervades Difference and Repetition.
When Deleuze refers to aesthetics, he is not referring to art or the appreciation of beauty per se (though that too), but rather aesthetics in the sense of Kant in the first Critique, where there are transcendental, a priori givens of sensibility. Time and space, for Kant, are a priori forms of sensibility in the dual sense that 1) all phenomena presuppose space and time, 2) time and space are not sensed through the five senses (they aren’t like tastes, smells, touches, sights, and sounds), and 3) they originate from mind, not world. For Kant, mind structures phenomena in terms of time and space, rather than time and space being properties of things-in-themselves. We thus here get a form of transcendental intuition. Where empirical sensations such as sounds or sights must be received from the world, space and time, according to Kant, originate from mind and structure the sensations of experience. In this way Kant hopes to account for why sciences like geometry and arithmetic are possible a priori or independent of experience. Insofar as mind structures world in this way we don’t have to await sensations of time and space in the way we must await the taste of a cherry doughnut to know what it will taste like.
read on!
Deleuze accepts all this. The major difference is that Deleuze requires a genesis of the a priori form of sensibility that accounts for how these structures of experience come into being. This is the origin of the theme of learning in Deleuze. Sensibility is a structure that develops and evolves, generating new a priori possibility, not a static and fixed form that is already there as in the case of Kant. Here Deleuze straddles both developmental psychology and Darwin. From the standpoint of developmental psychology our minds develop at the level of sensibility in such a way that new a priori forms of inference become possible that have, as it were, their own “mathematical” a priori structure. This is what Deleuze is exploring when he explores the work of great artists such as Bacon, Cezanne, Proust, or Kafka. What Deleuze is exploring is the new aesthetic a prioris these artists have invented or introduced to the world. He is doing a transcendental aesthetic in the sense that Kant proposes a transcendental aesthetics in the Critique of Pure Reason, but at the level of artistic creativity. Such a move was already suggested by Kant’s Critique of Judgment where Kant describes aesthetic judgment as intuition in search of a concept (i.e., art creates a new spatio-temporal schematization of experience).
On the other hand, Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism is thoroughly post-Darwinian in the sense that the evolution of a species is not merely the evolution of a new form of life, but also the evolution of a new form of sensibility. The bat, for example, evolves a transcendental form of intuition structured around sonar that has its own logic and organization. Acoustic signatures such as those found in sonar are not a feature of the in-itself, but rather are a way in which the bat minimizes the complexity of its environment such that it selectively relates to that environment. This selective relation to the environment, so brilliantly explored by von Uexkull, has its own transcendental spatio-temporality, its own organizational logic of transcendental signs, that marks the particular way in which bats are open to their Umwelt. In this regard, there is no contradiction between the transcendental empiricism proposed by Joe Hughes and the transcendental empiricism that I propose in Difference and Givenness. Joe adopts the Husserlian-Kantian orientation in his reading of Deleuze, emphasizing epistemology, how an entity grasps or relates to its environments, and questions of synthesis and genesis. Hughes dispenses with categories altogether– the abstract doesn’t explain but is to be explained –instead exploring the manner in which genesis and synthesis produce forms of experience. In this way he is able to equally explain the world of a plant, a bat, a singular human being, etc., in terms of how they reduce the complexity of their environment and bring an Umwelt into being. My difference from Joe lies merely in the fact that I emphasize that the entities that result from these genetic processes are just that, entities. The bee does not merely grasp its Umwelt genetically in a particular way, but also is a particular entity or system. Here, I believe, we’re both on the same page.
Returning, then, to the issue of freedom, I contend that freedom as well must be given a genetic account. Freedom must not be conceived as something we have but as something we acquire, evolve, or develop. Contrary to Rousseau’s thesis where we are born free and everywhere we are in chains, this thesis would argue that we are born in chains and perhaps become free. The issue can be set up in terms of the opposition between heteronomy and autonomy. An autonomous being is a being that is self-directing such that it chooses its own action and is the ground of its own action. A heteronomous being is a being whose action is determined by something external to itself. My car, for example, is heteronomous in the sense that it requires me to steer it, to turn it on, to keep it running, etc. The car is not the origin of its own action. It does not determine itself.
The idea that I’m toying with is that autonomy is not something we’re born with, nor something that we have, but something that we develop in much the same way that the artist cultivates a particular system of percepts. So how would this work? Minimally, in order for a system to become autonomous, that system must have 1) memory, 2) be capable of formulating reasons or grounds for its action, and 3) be self-referential such that the reasons it provides for its actions can become causal grounds for subsequent causal actions. These are conditions for autonomy but do not guarantee autonomy. Rather, freedom or autonomy is something that must be acquired, produced, or created. What is the process by which this takes place?
Let’s agree with the thesis put forward by many cognitive scientists and neurologist where it is argued that we do not act based on reasons, that we have little to no accurate knowledge of why we act as we do, but rather that the reasons we give for our actions are produced retroactively and have nothing to do with the real processes that led us to this or that action. As the neurologists show– through the pathbreaking work of cyberneticists such as Ashby –all thoughts have a certain electric potential signature such that we can detect when a thought is taking place in the brain. The remarkable thing about these measurements of electric potential is that the neurologists are able to detect a rise in electric potential nanoseconds prior to the person becoming aware of the thought they are having. Phenomenologically we experience ourselves as the origin and author of these thoughts but this time lag– not unlike an echo in a cave –suggests that thoughts always occur behind our backs such that we are not the authors of our thought, but are instead authored by our thought.
This would seem to spell the ruin of autonomy insofar as it would entail that we are thought rather than thinkers. Put differently, it would entail that we are heteronomously determined by pre-personal neurological processes, rather than being autonomously self-determining and self-directing agents. Any reasons we give for our action would be illusory rationalizations of why we acted as we did. The real reason that we acted as we did would simply be mechanisms– highly non-linear to be sure –of our brain.
However, things are not as bleak as all that. The solution to the riddle, I suggest, already lies in the “echo-phenomena” of retroactively providing reasons for why we did what we did. The reasons I provide for what I did do not provide reasons for what I did, but can provide reasons for what I will later do. The mistake lies in believing that these reasons were grounds of my previous action (these reasons are, after all, retroactive). What is to be accounted for is why these retroactive reasons reasons are produced. Are these reasons “spandrels” of developmental processes that serve no neuro-cognitive function, or do they have a functional and adaptive purpose in neuro-cognitive development? That is the question. Why do systems such as ourselves, many animals, social systems, and some computers retroactively produce reasons for their actions if these reasons have nothing to do with why those actions were undertaken? That’s the question.
Here’s an example. Suppose I get angry at my friend Joe and strike him while we drinking at a conference together. The neurology tells me that in this moment of striking my dear friend Joe I was a pure mechanism. The reasons I provide for striking him are retroactive rationalizations of a sequence of events that were the result of an actualization of a set of electro-chemical potentiations that were evoked when I was perturbed in a particular way. Because the neurological events of my brain belong to the environment of my thoughts, I know nothing about this sequence of events. As a consequence, later, as I pace back and forth in my hotel room I am filled with remorse– after all, Joe is one of the kindest and friendliest people I’ve ever met and has been a great ally and source of encouragement for my work for years –and I begin to cast about for reasons as to why I struck Joe in this way. Having been trained in psychoanalysis I begin to free associate and conclude that Joe resembles a figure from my childhood that tortured me endlessly in elementary school, tripping me in the hallway, posting “kick me” signs to my back, taunting me mercilessly “Levi is Evil, Levi is Vile!”, etc., etc., etc. This childhood figure was even named “Joe”. I now conclude that somehow my unconscious thought process conflated Joe-1 (the elementary school figure) with Joe-2 (good’ole Joe Hughes), that Joe had said something that had released all these repressed representations and that I hit him accordingly.
Of course, the events that transpired that evening had nothing to do with this narrative. As a marionette, a series of gears and pulleys simply twisted and turned in me and I punched Joe (this scenario is purely fictional, by the way). So why, cognitively, do I produce all these reasons if they were never the actual ground of the event that took place? My suggestion is that this activity of producing reasons functions not to account for past actions that took place, but to develop schema for future action. In producing a set of reasons for why I did what I did, I do not account for why I did what I did– these reasons share no relation to the event that took place or its causal factors –but I do produce a set of cognitive causal factors that can become parameters of my future action. In other words, after developing this purely mythological account of the grounds of my action, the next time I encounter a stimuli from Joe that would set of this sequence of unfortunate events the myth that I’ve concocted sets in, preventing me from doing this again. I tell myself that it is not Joe-2 that I’m angry with but Joe-1 and that Joe-2 is not Joe-1. It matters little whether or not my action indeed had anything to do with Joe-1 and repressed memories. No, all that matters is that these reasons that I retroactively produced take on a causal power within my cognitive system. In this way I gradually become self-determining and free (note how nicely this gels with our intuitions about childhood development and our claims that children are not, in fact autonomous or self-directing). Gradually, through the retroactive production of reasons I create reasons that become grounds or causal factors in subsequent encounters such that I am no longer heteronomously determined but such that these reasons I’ve produced come to guide and determine me (such would also be the case for social systems that become over time self-directing through the formulation of missions, goals, aims, etc).
Let’s return to Spinoza and Mandel’s brilliant analysis. Pace Spinoza I am determined but this does not entail that I cannot form or generate ends over time. As I acquire knowledge of true causes, my beliefs about these causes can come to direct my action. I might, for example, suffer from profound depression. I believe this depression originates form how terrible my life is. I amuse myself my exploring all the ways my life is terrible. Meanwhile my buddy Joe looks askance at me, pointing out a number of ways my life is very nice. While causally reading an article I discover that the absence of omega-3 fatty acids in a diet can generate depression due to the way it affects brain chemistry. I notice that all I eat is barbeque (not really) and that I eat almost nothing in the way of fish. I therefore resolve to begin eating more fish only to witness my depression and its alleged reasons dissipate like a morning fog. Now what’s the point of this example? The point is not that eating fish re-adjusted my brain chemistry such that I was no longer tormented by phantasisms apparently coming from the external world telling me that life is terrible. No. The point is that knowledge or belief that omega-3 fatty acids in my diet could become a causal factor changing my behavior in a variety of ways. The reason is produced retroactively but once it is there it opens the possibility of a self-directing future. If we are self-referential systems with memory and that subsequently produce reasons for our action we can become self-directing. In other words, we can have our mechanical determinism and eat it too.
April 12, 2011 at 9:54 pm
A few days ago I was planning to publish a cartoon in which you go to a karate class, referring to something you wrote about wanting to do Eastern sports. This Chinese teacher performs an elaborate set of ”katas” (fighting movements), very ceremonious, with the intent of hitting you – like in Leslie Nielsen comedies. But in the middle of his ballet, you simply punch him in the face, the good ole Texan way, and he is floored. Later you
And then when I read this:
The reasons I provide for striking him are retroactive rationalizations of a sequence of events that were the result of an actualization of a set of electro-chemical potentiations that were evoked when I was perturbed in a particular way. Because the neurological events of my brain belong to the environment of my thoughts, I know nothing about this sequence of events. As a consequence, later, as I pace back and forth in my hotel room I am filled with remorse– after all, Joe is one of the kindest and friendliest people I’ve ever met and has been a great ally and source of encouragement for my work for years –and I begin to cast about for reasons as to why I struck Joe in this way.
Too bad I didn’t publish the cartoon on time, to demonstrate directly that it was literally an introduction to your text.
The interesting question now is how – if it’s not some kind of telepathy – did I get this thought at around the same time you were thinking it?
April 12, 2011 at 10:03 pm
a part of the comment fell out:
”Later you retroactively rationalize your anger to your wife, who is about to call Dr. Miller for another emergency session”
April 12, 2011 at 10:26 pm
Levy: ’twas good to meet you today. Loving the idea of having another philosopher in the neighborhood. Can’t imagine how we haven’t met before.
Pax.
April 12, 2011 at 10:27 pm
Totally wild Scott! What are the chances of two process philosopjphers two houses apart in Frisco!
April 12, 2011 at 11:13 pm
This aggression will not stand, man.
April 12, 2011 at 11:14 pm
That’s it Joe, outside! Right now!
April 12, 2011 at 11:23 pm
This is a beautiful post indeed.
Maybe following on your Deleuze-Spinoza connection here it might be good to add the importance of affection. In his spinoza interpretation deleuze is insistent on the primacy of affection in generating active thought (meaning he demands genesis from spinoza as well). In this way we can account for reactive, depressive and illusive thought as well (like when we think ourselves to be absolutely free – a kingdom within a kingdom Spinoza says – only to scorn ourselves and others upon failures). But mainly, Spinoza’s special attention to affection is related to his claim that we are situated individuals that are affected by their environment. To be affected is not merely to be determined, but rather it defines the state we are in, and this state is not thought but felt. The primacy of affection in this regard is clearly related to Deleuze’s brand of transcendental aesthetics. Aesthetically, this primacy is relates to the heterogeneity of thought and affection, the necessity of a sensuous encounter, and the heterogenesis of thought. But Ethically it has to do with the claim that only positive affection can increase our power to act freely, meaning that even while regulated by reasons we might still be captured and enslaved.
April 12, 2011 at 11:33 pm
I enjoyed this post. Very interesting read. I like the way you clearly summarise at least three complex movements or developments in Deleuze’s philosophy (relation to Kant, location of sensibility, function of artists).
April 12, 2011 at 11:50 pm
Thanks Glen.
April 12, 2011 at 11:52 pm
Adam,
That’s very much what I’m working towards with all the von Uexkull, second-order cybernetics, and systems theory stuff. In my article in The Speculative Turn I define objects in terms of their affects and capacity to be affected. I need to work this out, however, far more explicitly as you point out. Affect, I think, is going to be the motor that presides over the evolution of these types of machines.
April 13, 2011 at 3:14 am
I’m glad you found my comment useful, if only because it lead to this fascinating follow-up post for all of us to enjoy.
My way of interpreting Spinoza shows the influence of my adviser Joseph Almog and the rest of our quirky little group of Spinoza enthusiasts at UCLA, where I did my grad work.
But I’ve also been very much impressed by Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza. It’s been my ‘foot in the door’ to understanding Deleuze, and a rich source of insight into Spinoza for me. So, it seemed as if you almost read my mind when you followed up on your Spinoza post with one on Deleuze!
April 13, 2011 at 3:35 am
Returning, then, to the issue of freedom, I contend that freedom as well must be given a genetic account. Freedom must not be conceived as something we have but as something we acquire, evolve, or develop.
Freedom, it seems to me, is an inherently relational concept, it always requires both a preposition and an object. One is free to X or free from Y. Linked with this is the question of autonomy (and my own personal work on “authenticity” going on at the moment). Without the object of the freedom, it is just this bare abstraction which doesn’t do any work.
If we take my point here and couple it with your point, then we can offer genealogies of freedoms which avoid both banal abstractions and bald reductions. There is not one single genealogy nor one simple freedom, but rather a rich network of freedoms each with a unique history in each given subject. My freedom to sit in silence for long periods of time comes from the discipline of meditation–a child hopped up on caffeine is not free to do this. Contrariwise, I am not free to bounce around like a child anymore, my middle-aged body just can’t take it. I’m not free from the aches and pains of my body as I was when I was younger. But, I’m more free to engage in speculative thought than I was 15 years ago due to education and so on…
How does Deleuze think through what the objects and prepositions of freedom are? What are we free from/for/to?
April 13, 2011 at 3:59 pm
Scot,
I think Deleuze would be pretty sympathetic to the prepositional conception of freedom you present here. For Deleuze what is crucial is the formation of new affects. Affects shouldn’t here be conceived as mere feelings or emotions, but rather as capacities to act and be acted-upon. This is what Deleuze is exploring in his analyses of various artists. For Deleuze artists don’t represent and shouldn’t be understood in terms of theme or meaning, but rather invent new forms of affect: new ways of acting, feeling, experiencing, etc (here he’s heavily indebted to Bergson’s understanding of emotions in texts like Time and Free Will). At any rate, this concept of affect would be something like what you call “freedom to” and “freedom for”. I develop this concept of affect a bit in my article “The Ontic Principle” in this collection here which can be accessed in .pdf form if you’re interested.
April 13, 2011 at 6:09 pm
Sorry for intervening here, but for me freedom is rather an act by which determinism is established, necessity is constituted. You have a perfectly contingent happening (traumatic or blissful) and you inscribe this episode into a meaningful frame. This is, for me, the pure form of freedom: the hermeneutic move from contingency to necessity.
April 14, 2011 at 10:47 pm
April 15, 2011 at 6:24 pm
The idea of retroactive self-justification servinga as a basis for self-directed future action strikes me as a brilliant way of turning what may seem like a pretty depressing notion on its head, rendering it a ground for freedom (and perhaps hope).
A question occurs to me, though: do the retroactive explanations necessarily have to be “purely mythological” in nature? In the example you concocted regarding the punching of Joe, for instance, the retroactive ruminations on the tortures of elementary school do seem to comprise a somewhat plausible set of factors that may “really” inform the (fictional) assault. Might it be the case that though all of our retroactive explanations are something of a crap-shoot and should therefore be approached with a certain amount of agnosticism, some of them do seem closer to the target than others?
I also wonder whether the latter question may have some bearing on the issue of neurological mechanism vis-a-vis more complex psychological explanations for human behavior. To take a couple of extreme examples from the domain of criminality:
–some explanations for spontaneous (i.e. non-premeditated) homicide tend to reduce it to some sort of neuro-cognitive problem with the control of rage, whereas other, more psychoanalytic approaches stress the specific contextual factors that may have contributed to the crime, such as the physical and/or behavioral resemblance of the victim to an abusive father figure.
–similarly, some neruo-cognitive approaches to rape treat is as primarily a problem of mental and sexual wiring–i.e. the raw primordial lust of the rapist overwhelms legal and moral prohibitions. Psycho-therapeutic approaches, on the other hand, would again stress specific biographical factors such as the possible childhood sexual abuse of the perpetrator or early exposure to extreme sexual imagery (here I will add: God help generation z). And in the case of both impulse killers and rapists, much data tends to support the salience of such contextual factors.
If, then, a criminal in some prison therapy program were to adopt a purely neuro-determinist explanation for his/her prior behavior, it would come off seeming wrong–possibly even like an excuse, justification, or avoidance of painful subconscious material. And this would seem to indicate that the basis for the future a priori that the reformed criminal is trying to construct needs to have some sort of adequately plausible relationship to past factors, meaning that they are not purely mythological in character.
I don’t think what I’ve said necessarily contradicts the main thrust of your argument. Rather, I’m simply arguing for the inclusion of significant biographical and psychological factors in the preconscious operations of cognitiion, and for the usefulness of a sort of index of plausibility regarding our retroactive theories about them.
April 16, 2011 at 1:21 am
Aaron, I think the point Levi was getting at is that some of our behavior is NOT motivated by any rational or conscious justification and that we often retroactively attempt to explain it. For instance, researcher Jonathan Haidt came up with the concept of ‘moral dumbfounding’ in which he would present moral problem scenarios to subjects and then ask whether the action in the scenario was morally right or wrong. When the subject stated the action was morally wrong, Haidt would ask for an explaination. To his surprise, not a single person was able to give a coherent response. For instance, a woman is going through some boxes and finds an old American flag. She begins to clean here toilet with it. A brother and sister agree to have protected sex and don’t tell anyone about it. A neighbor’s dog is run over by a truck so a family decides to eat it. In all of these situations the subjects gave a variety of answers but soon found that there was no rational explaination as to why they were wrong aside from ‘well…it’s just wrong”. The point that Haidt gets at with these thought experiments is that much of our behavior is clearly dictated by biochemical impulses (and in an OOO-framework, sticky networks of objects) that work contrary to our reasoning, and so we have to often go on the defensive and assure ourselves that what we did or thought had some meaning or purpose. So while it is entirely possible that somewhat might shoot up a postal office because they were beaten as a child, it is more likely that they concocted this notion in their head after the fact to somehow reduce their own perception of guilt.
April 17, 2011 at 7:32 am
btw talking of affect: Massumi makes a brief appearance in public:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/15/half-life-of-disaster
April 17, 2011 at 4:23 pm
Point taken, Drew. But my response did not in any way contest the notion “that some of our behavior is NOT motivated by any rational or conscious justification,” as you put it.
Rather, I argued something quite to the contrary: that Levi’s fictional account of the subconscious (i.e. not conscious or necessarily rational) biographical motivations he concocted for his fictional act of rage did seem to emit a glimmer of plausibility. Along with my examples from criminality, this claim was tied to my larger argument that major biographical factors such as a history of childhood trauma or abuse can subconsciously inform adult behavior. My point is not to therey render these factors “conscious and rational,” but simply to argue that they exist in the subconscious, and that some of our retroactive theories about them are more adequate and plausible than others.
Thus in the cases of the incestual siblings and the dog eating family, the point would not be to investigate the lack or falsity of a rational explanation for their behavior, but to investigate deep seated or structural aspects of the family dynamics that may have subconsciously informed the events-in-question. And in the case of the postal rampage, one would also want to look at things like workplace dynamics, shift lengths, and low pay as possible motivators. (And does that really seem all that unreasonable an undertaking? Postal workers have themselves appealed to such factors in providing explanations for workplace violence.)
My worry is that if we refuse to credit theories that allow space for the influence of complex biographical factors in the unconscious, we reduce all of the “real” explanations for our behavior to neural puppet dancing, and all of our attempts to understand ourselves to retroactive fictions. On one level, you would have a neural puppet mechanism or automated zombie, and the other, a fictional psyche invented to retroactively explain its behavor–which itself raises a tricky question as to how one would account for the difference between them. Did human personality evolve solely as a means of providing explanations for automatic neural actions? If so, why would there even be a need for it in the first place? Neural puppets do not demand an explanation.
April 17, 2011 at 4:30 pm
Btw, something akin to the last problem I mentioned has also been cited as a serious question re: Spinoza’s “Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect.”
April 17, 2011 at 5:28 pm
One final example, drawing a distinction between rational explanation and rational reasons:
Rational explanation: “The postal worker went beserk and shot up his workplace due to pent up feelings of stress and workplace resentment. An underlying psychological disorder tied to childhood also had something to do with it. Prior to this act, he was not fully conscious of the extent of his rage.”
Not a rational reason: “I went beserk and shot up the post office where I work because I’m overworked and exploited and hate my boss. They all had it coming.”
April 18, 2011 at 9:37 pm
That was a better explaination Aaron, I think I read too much into what you had said earlier.
“Thus in the cases of the incestual siblings and the dog eating family, the point would not be to investigate the lack or falsity of a rational explanation for their behavior, but to investigate deep seated or structural aspects of the family dynamics”
The point I was trying to illustrate with these examples was not to explain the behaviors of the actors in the scenario at all but raise the question of why others would consider it morally wrong. Clearly there is no rational explaination as to why it is wrong for two consenting siblings to have protected sex that no one else knows about. Instead, the moral disgust most feel about the act is more likely to be derived from an internal hardwiring of the brain that appeals to feelings of purity/impurity. Thus incest seems morally abominable precisely because it seems impure, not because it is entails any type of specific harm to anyone or violates other supposed ethical considerations. Anyway, I’m totally off topic.
“Did human personality evolve solely as a means of providing explanations for automatic neural actions? If so, why would there even be a need for it in the first place? Neural puppets do not demand an explanation.
That is a great question and one that has been brought up on occassion within the speculative realist camp. Ray Brassier touches a lot on the issue in his Alien Theory paper, especially the sections on Paul Churchland. There is a big degree to which the ‘manifest image’ of man, as a personality existing in a phenomenal world is clearly mistaken about the internal workings of their own consciousness. He says something along the lines that evolution doesn’t care if our thoughts map to the world or not.
April 19, 2011 at 2:43 am
Thanks for your feedback, Ross. I’m in agreement with all of your points and clarifications, except perhaps the one regarding the moral probity of secret consentual protected adult sibling sex. Not sure how I feel about that one, other than to say that it’s definitely something I’m never going to try.
I should also add that there is no snark nor innuendo intended here. I’m just acknowledging that it’s a complicated issue, about which one might best say, “to each their own.”
April 19, 2011 at 10:32 pm
“I should also add that there is no snark nor innuendo intended here. I’m just acknowledging that it’s a complicated issue, about which one might best say, “to each their own.””
LOL, I certainly won’t be engaging in such things either. :)
April 20, 2011 at 6:42 am
A genetic view of freedom, I agree, is of utmost importance. Psychoanalytic thought would indicate that autonomy (which isn’t isomorphic to the concept of freedom, btw) evolves through identification. The child identifies with parental figures: gestures, intonations, behavioral repetitions, emotional episodes, etc. Good parents will teach their children things about the world that are true, and an autonomous agent later in life is not rendered heteronomous due to the fact that he utilizes information conditioned through early object relations in forming intentions and relating to the world. However, an autonomous agent would utilize the information that was instilled by parents only in virtue of its grounding in truth, NOT in virtue of its having been imparted by a parent. Thus, a genetic account of freedom can indeed incorporate deterministic views of conditioned response without surrendering the force of autonomous decision making.
Bernard Berofsky at Columbia is worth consulting on issues of autonomy and heteronomy. The aforementioned comment is heavily influenced by Berofsky’s Liberation From Self: A Theory of Personal Autonomy (1995), one of the great texts on the subject, as far as I can tell.
Today, April 19th, is the 52nd anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s formally being granted exile in India. I mention this because the Lama (…Gunga la Gunga…) has said he will reject any Buddhist teaching that turns out to contradict the findings of science. This is an example of a criterion for autonomous action in a developmental framework. Early object relations have an impact on the developing psyche such that authority figures loom large in decision making processes and the formation of long-term and short-term projects. A genetic account of the freedom expressed in Picasso’s invention of new ways to think and see, for example, might involve a survey of the authority figures in the history of art with whom he identified and struggled at various times in his education and creative research.
There is also an issue in the discussion of freedom — and this gets into von Uexkull — about the development of reliable perceptual powers and situational information processing, specifically in regard to their relationship to subjective principles and the physiology of objectivity.
Objectivity is an important aspect of discussions of autonomy and freedom. Other species like bats have developed reliable perceptions streamlining physiology toward the minimally goal-oriented behaviors we see in the forest. What Levi describes as the neuro-cognitive production of reasons for actions could perhaps be framed in terms of the development of subjective processing pathways whose minimally goal-oriented function is to triangulate a self-referential objectivity. The autonomous agent’s rational review of past action informs the situational intelligence of tomorrow, even at the level of sub-cognitive perceptions or pre-symbolic awareness.
April 20, 2011 at 6:54 am
Oh, Levi, it is important to point out that, in the situation where you review your reasons for punching Joe, your subsequent autonomy in future situations crucially depends upon the reliability of your review. If you produce reasons that are self-deceptive, you may be subsequently heteronomous even though your reasons contribute to the formation of future intentions. Producing reasons for actions certainly functions to modify the self-organization of intentional behavior and motivational inputs. However, there is nothing inherent in the evolution of this system that produces anything like “progress”.
April 20, 2011 at 7:02 am
Antonio Damasio’s work fits nicely with what Levi is saying here also.
The production of reasons for actions may have a neuro-cognitive role to play in calibrating Damasio’s Core Self, Self and Autobiographical Self. The formation of a robust autobiographical self for Damasio can streamline the neurophysiology of erupting emotions and enhance the autonomy of the agent.
April 23, 2011 at 2:32 am
happy easter Levi. we can’t just hang around waiting for more dazzling blog posts – come on
when is DoO coming out….????????????????
April 25, 2011 at 12:11 am
Eggs, baskets, paint, rabbits, churches, chocolate, peeps, …Easter Objects.
April 26, 2011 at 4:05 am
Forgive the possible comedic interjection, but surely you’re not drunk when you punch your friend Joe at the bar, correct? Because if that’s the case, then, indeed, your subsequent evaluation of your motivations is unreliable.
March 8, 2012 at 2:03 pm
I don’t know if you’re still reading comments from this thread, but I’ll leave one anyway. You make an interesting argument.
The problem is that if you’re striking Joe is ultimately caused by a marionette-like neurological action, what makes you think the retroactive reasoning process you use to justify the strike, and which will inform future action, is not also determined by a very similar marionette-like neurological process?
And if the retroactive reasons as well as the strike are purely “pre-personal neurological processes”… it’s heteronomy all the way down.