Stian Gudmundsen Høiland:
Let me re-state some of my questions here ... .
(a)
Does one need to adopt a certain world-view to understand Dewart's paradigm shifting discovery?
What is the nature of this discovery? Is it such that it make sense of something on a high level in an already quite developed "model of everything"? Is it a simple, down-to-earth discovery with immediate practical application?
...
Is Dewart's discovery
simple in this way, or does it require one to keep several threads of logic and
a conceptual house of cards to understand and/or make use of it?
(b)
It seems to me that you are either promoting several things as "the thing" that defines this discovery, or that these things are variations of the underlying essence of the discovery:
- to understand the difference between mere experience and self-present experience
- that consciousness is a skill and the implications of that
- that speech is prior to consciousness and the implications of that
(c)
Some of the things you write has an uncanny resemblance to what I have come to call apperception...
First of all, thanks for pointing out the review. I quoted it on my blog, as well as responding on the Amazon site; Nixon wrote back, and we have exchanged a few notes there. The initial reviewers within the obvious fields apparently relevant to the book (Religious Studies, Speech, etc.) when it first came out were a bit intimidated by the scope of the thing and put off by how it jarred with their preconceived ideas of how the world was supposed to work. Evidently, they could not grasp what it was saying, found it personally or professionally threatening at various levels, and failed to rise to the challenge that it offered.
The essence of Dewart's "discovery" is that the understanding of language, thought, mind, and reality passed down in our tradition from ancient times to the present,
that is the conceptual house of cards, as you put it; Dewart offers an alternative interpretation to the "semantic complex" which is actually vastly simpler and more powerful, but initially counter-intuitive. I don't think his insights can be reduced to any single, simple aphorisms, although some may occur to me as I write. No powerful theory or explanation ever appears simple, except to those who first appreciate the complexity for which the theory accounts. Dewart is very "simply" extending the celebrated work of Darwin, Einstein, and McLuhan to the realm of our everyday experience. Is that simple, or complex? Well, it's both, depending on your perspective.
Let me preface this by pointing out that even among educated people, it is hard to find many who could if "spot-checked" give a clear and technically accurate account of precisely what each of those three above-named luminaries actually said, without mixing it up somehow or glossing over key aspects of their insights. This is because the advances of science, philosophy, and indeed any field take a long time to percolate into "common-sense"
and some never do. In specialized fields such as biology, physics, or media studies, celebrated advances don't feel personally threatening because they are kind of "over there". When it comes to consciousness though, let me assure you from my own frustrating personal experience (in case you haven't noticed this on your own) that as soon as one starts to discuss the functioning of the human mind, suddenly, just because they can think at a functional everyday level, everybody becomes an expert and challenges every counter-intuitive nuance that might be relevant to an improved understanding of their own process. This is a very difficult space in which to maneuver. And yet, it is only by taking the observer into account that progress can be made here, and this is what Dewart does.
As Dewart extends them, the key insights of Darwin, Einstein, and McLuhan are as follows:
- The emergence of novelty can be accounted for in biological systems (such as species) not by applying deterministic causal rules, but by understanding the emergent properties of the system -- this is a causal, but non-deterministic and non-reductionistic explanation.
- The reality (and behaviour, etc.) of objects is not a property of those objects inherent to them with reference to an absolute space, but an emergent phenomenon proper to the relativity of objects to each other.
- Communication is not reducible to the contents of messages; the medium (or form) of a communication is relativistically interrelated to the experience of "transmitting" and "receiving" any message.
Now, if speech is considered a medium of communication, relativistic causality is accounted for, and the origin of human consciousness is queried in light of the known mechanism for the emergence of novelty in biological systems, all tempered with profound insight into the experience of being human... what you get is Dewart's thesis.
I have to say that this is a very-low resolution overview which doubtless misses a great deal of relevant material, but I hope is is helpful nevertheless. As I wrote on the Amazon review page:
Tarver:
I see the main value in Dewart's E&C not in the details of the pre-historical account it provides (which I read as essentially correct and subject to further fine-tuning, much like Darwin's original thesis), but in the overall picture it paints of how consciousness functions today, the critique of the semantic complex, the light it shines on absent-mindedness, and the vision it offers of responsibility borne of autonomy rather than obedience.
Is it necessary to understand the whole "world view" to start making use of it? Most people, as I have argued above, don't really actually understand, for example, Darwin, Einstein, and McLuhan and yet this has not prevented wide-spread non-specialist use of metaphorical extensions of and riffs upon their ideas. Dewart's thesis has not even been honored by widespread misunderstanding, yet, as even those who can benefit (relatively) directly have not yet grasped what is available. However, in the case of meditation practice, this is a specialized application which I think can benefit from fairly direct applications of the theory.
Case in point: "apperception". There is obviously something reflexive, and/or circular, and/or self-contained, and/or pointing back to itself, and/or somehow recursive about consciousness. Yes, this has been observed countless times. The difficulty in understanding consciousness this way is the endless recursion problem: if consciousness is perception of perception, then at what level of nesting does this "spring to life," as it were, as consciousness?
Dewart, E&C, p. 45:
I have said that it is by a single act and at the same time that we are aware of the object and of the act of experiencing it. I insist on this, because it is possible to glimpse the self-presence of consciousness but nevertheless misinterpret it by describing it as if two acts were involved. The result is that consciousness is defined as "experience of experience" or as "awareness of awareness".
(Every time I hear of meditators describing the so-called "attention bounce," I wonder if they are falling for this one.) Dewart spends the next several pages of the text distinguishing consciousness from "reflexion", the bending-back of experience onto itself. The "self-presence" of experience, in contrast, is the simultaneous presence of the object and the act in a conscious experience. If, however, experience in the first place is (mis-)understood as a reflection or repetition of reality in the mind of the experiencer, then this simple explanation breaks down as the number of "objects" quickly multiplies out of control.
I have not sat down to catalog them all, but my impression is that there are numerous points where the bleeding edge of dharma practice is both an illustration of, and a fabulously fertile field in which to seek applications of Dewart's theory. Examples:
I would bet that a close reading of Dewart would throw new light on "luminosity" as a roundabout way of describing assertiveness; not at the extreme end of esoteric practice, but right at the tips of our noses, so to speak, in our every conscious experience, where the most advanced mystics have insisted all along that it is to be found, surprise, surprise.
(Also, speaking of luminosity, if anyone is looking for a great PhD topic: what is the relationship of depositional-speaking Tibet to the peculiarities of the dharma that emerged there? The vibrancy and richness of Tibetan Buddhism has
got to have something to do with the interplay of the ontic presuppositions of Indian Buddhism and the native phenomenal culture of the Tibetans. Dewart analyzes the better known case of Sumerian and Indo-European ontic influence on the depositional speakers of Hebrew and Arabic. Any prior scholarship on the topic that relies on linguistic evidence is now suspect because of the high probability of inadvertent ethnocentrism, failing to take into account the peculiarities of phenomenal
speech, not Tibetan
language. The same may be true, but a bit less dramatically, for all of Zen.)
The difficult doctrine of
anatta is the most utterly simple of complete no-brainers from Dewart's point of view: the self is generated in the wake of the self-defining level of consciousness, in the "pocket" as it were, of the otherness which is other than objects of experience and other than acts of experience. (See E&C p. 61) That this should be so difficult for many to grasp today is an index of our absent-mindedness.
"Emptiness" is no mystery: reality is neither meaningful nor absurd, just apt to be interpreted -- of course it is all "empty". And yet the ontic preoccupation with objectivity, with what reality "really is," makes this very hard for normal people in our culture to grok on the basis of their own experience, relying either on the word of advanced meditation practitioners or the insights of science at the expense of their own experience. How odd is that?
Why is noting practice orders of magnitude more effective than other insight practices in maddeningly hard to qualify but subjectively easy to experience ways? Well, if speech is a consciousness-generating assertive form of communicative behaviour, and noting turns out to be a systematic way of training the experiential faculties with a rhythmic pattern of acts of speech, it should be no more surprising that noting transforms the quality of consciousness than that lifting weights builds muscle. Knowing the mechanism should lead either to improvements in the best practices of noting, or increased motivation to actually do it, or both.
And how about the religious tendencies of every group that cottons onto an interesting and effective way of growing spiritually? Once again, no anomaly: religions are plainly and simply institutions of self-definition, and even the (somewhat problematic)
stated identity of "We Who Have Ditched Our Self-Identification" will still tend to function religiously if it functions well enough to actually start to affect people's self-definition.
If you don't like that tone, knowing the mechanism (again) will help you tinker with it; either to start a religion of your own, or to manipulate your self-definition around your problematic membership in any (religious?) group whose practices you like, for example, but whose wider identity you don't like.
That brings me to the psychological mechanisms of projection and denial. From Dewart's point of view, these are not peripheral anomalies to the human condition -- these are routine structural manifestations of consciousness's capacity for self-deception, which are integral to our capacity for generating meaning in the first place. Of course, suggesting to any given individual who is not ready to hear it that they may be in denial around Important Issue X accomplishes nothing except pissing them off. Still, reading or hearing about how
other people have shadows can be entertaining. (Joke, get it?) Seriously, anyone interested in the psycho-spiritual transformation and maturation process conventionally known as awakening is going to hit a few of their own shadows on the way. This is never inherently pleasant, but understanding that this is absolutely normal, routine, expected, and even a sign of progress can leverage the experience away from a potential content trap and into a powerful insight experience.
Understanding meaning as the most fundamental human need (eclipsing even organic survival) accounts for the facts of the extremes of human motivation, from selfishness to altruism, much better than any genetic, reductionistic, or purely behavioral account ever dreamed of; and understanding consciousness as a learned skill accounts for how (yes, with difficulty and effort, but still) it can be
re-learned in all kinds of interesting and useful ways.
So this was a very incomplete and preliminary sketch of some of the practical uses of Dewart's theory to insight practice, as I see them.
As it stands, Dewart's theory is not yet popularized or applied -- it is the philosophical equivalent of a research result from pure science waiting to be exploited on the open market. Until someone works it out and says "practice like this -- it works better, faster, etc." it remains theoretical. Once applications are developed, it may not even be obvious that they can be traced back to Dewart's theory. I may be utterly deluded (hey, it happens) but I really do think that some in this community will find this material richly rewarding once their attention is called to it and they take the time to work through it.