Evolution, Enlightenment and American Philosophy a blog by Jeff Carreira

Entries tagged as ‘William James’

American Romanticism and Andrew Cohen

March 12, 2010 · 2 Comments

Now that I have outlined some thoughts about Romanticism I want to go back and explore what I do think that Andrew Cohen might have gotten from William James. I do believe that Andrew Cohen picked up something from his reading of William James, but I don’t believe that you can reasonably place his work in the tradition of the Pragmatists. I do believe that there is an American spiritual lineage and an argument can be made for Cohen’s inclusion in it. That is the lineage of American Romanticism.

Romanticism as I have previously discussed has German and English roots. Although it is a loosely defined literary, philosophical and spiritual tradition, I do believe that there are three primary elements of American Romanticism that connects Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Transcendentalists, to William James’ philosophy and then to Andrew Cohen’s Evolutionary Enlightenment. These elements are:

  1. A critique of scientific materialism and determinism
  2. The belief in natural creative forces beyond our ordinary awareness that can be embodied by a realized self
  3. The conviction that the development of the self is the highest human purpose

These fundamental principles can be seen strongly in the original American Romantics – the New England Transcendentalists. And although William James was a scientifically trained modernist, the ideas of Emerson, his godfather seemed in the end to have lodged themselves deep in the heart of James’ thinking as well. Andrew Cohen and his teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment are also characterized by these fundamental ideas.

My research into American philosophy began six years ago when I read some of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings and found that his spiritual teachings bore an uncanny resemblance to the teachings of Andrew Cohen. As I read more of Emerson and then William James I saw that there was a thread that ran through their thinking that connected them to Andrew Cohen. I now recognize it as the line of American Romanticism. All three critiqued scientific materialism and determinism. All three believed in a creative reality beyond our ordinary awareness. And perhaps most importantly all three believed that we actually choose who we become and that self-development is the ultimate purpose of human life.

The following quotation from William James’ first and arguably his greatest work “The Principles of Psychology” convey his belief in the human ability to self create.

“The ethical energy par excellence has to go farther and choose which interest out of several, equally coercive, shall become supreme. The issue here is of the utmost pregnancy, for it decides a man’s entire career. When he debates, Shall I commit this crime? choose that profession? accept that office, or marry this fortune? — his choice really lies between one of several equally possible future Characters. What he shall become is fixed by the conduct of this moment. Schopenhauer, who enforces his determinism by the argument that with a given fixed character only one reaction is possible under given circumstances, forgets that, in these critical ethical moments, what consciously seems to be in question is the complexion of the character itself. The problem with the man is less what act he shall now resolve to do than what being he shall now choose to become.”

This sentiment would have been well received by Emerson and it is also reflected in these words from Andrew Cohen.

“…in the end, you are always choosing to be the person that you are. You are making conscious and unconscious choices in every moment that determine what actions you will take and what impact you will have on the world around you.”

And so I feel confident that at least in a broad and loose sense I can place Andrew Cohen in an American tradition of Romantic thinkers.

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What Andrew Cohen may have gotten from William James

February 26, 2010 · 2 Comments

From my reading of William James I believe that his moral attitude, stemming from his insistence that ideas and actions are intimately connected, might be the most unique and significant thing that Andrew Cohen picked up from reading “The Varieties of Religious Experience” as a teenager in the midst of a spontaneous spiritual awakening. The entire attitude of James’ book reflects his belief that the value of a spiritual experience can only be determined by how it affects the way that we live. The experience and the affect it has on how we live are one in the same thing. This exact attitude, perhaps picked up from James years early, was to prove pivotal during a challenging turning point in Andrew Cohen’s career as a spiritual teacher.

Andrew Cohen’s life as a spiritual teacher began in 1986 with a re-awakening of the original spiritual experience that he had had years earlier. This event occurred during a brief conversation with Cohen’s own last spiritual teacher, the late H.W.L. Poonja.  During this interchange Poonja made the simple statement “You don’t have to make any effort to be free.” And upon hearing these words something happen to Cohen that he describes as follows:

“His words penetrated very deeply. I turned and looked into the courtyard outside his (Poonja’s) room and inside myself all I saw was a river – in that instant I realized that I had always been free. I saw clearly that I could never have been other than free and that any idea or concept of bondage had always ever been and could only ever be completely illusory.”

Soon after Andrew Cohen found himself surround by a small group of people wanting to be his student, and his career as a spiritual teacher had launched. For some time his life seemed like a “fairy tale.” He was teaching in the Indian style and having a deep impact on many people that came to see him. He was teaching a variation of Advaita Vedanta as he had been taught by his teacher. Advaita Vedanta is a Hindu enlightenment teaching that revolves around the immediate recognition that our fundamental nature is already free. In this tradition only the false notion that we are not free keeps us from realizing our own perfect liberation here and now. Someone like Andrew Cohen who had such unwavering confidence and conviction in this reality was able to bring other people to the same profound awakening in themselves.

After some time however Cohen began to find that he was having philosophical difficulties with what he was teaching and these difficulties were occurring on moral grounds. In the view of traditional Advaita Vedanta ultimate reality is seen as absolute Unity, total Oneness and the experience of this “non-duality” is enlightenment. From the moment of this enlightenment the aspirant is taught that the world of multiplicity is an illusion and as long as they never doubt the reality of oneness nothing that happens in the illusory world matters at all.

Andrew Cohen began to teach differently; in fact his teaching took a decidedly Pragmatic turn. Cohen didn’t accept that the experience of enlightenment could be divorced from the effects of our actions in the world. In fact, like James, he believed that the ultimate value of our spiritual experience could only be measured in its positive impact on the way that we actually lived. His teaching became something other than the Advaita Vedanta that he had been taught. By the time I met Andrew Cohen in 1992 he was already emphasizing action over experience. In fact I remember on one of the first nights that I saw him teach he exclaimed “What you do is who you are! That is the realization of Enlightenment.” Now that is as Jamesian a statement of truth as you are likely ever to find.

This abrupt turn in Andrew Cohen’s teaching work eventually led to a different direction and placed him on a new path that was to lead over time to the development of what he now calls Evolutionary Enlightenment: a spiritual teaching that recognizes the liberation of the human spirit as a potential platform for profound active participation in an evolutionary process that can bring about a new stage in human consciousness.

I think though that to better understand the origins of Andew Cohen’s work (and also James for that matter) we have to turn our attention to Romanticism.

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Truth, Knowing and Human Activity according to William James

February 21, 2010 · 36 Comments

William James tied the expereince of knowing directly to human activity. His version of Pragmatism was largely based on this “integral” (if I may use the term so loosely) connection between mind and matter. In some of James’ writing he draws out in detail exactly his view of knowing. Before I try to spell out James’ position I want to encourage you to think about how most of us generally, consciously or unconsciously, relate to the experience of knowing.

The way most of us relate to it, knowing revolves around some kind of mental “stuff” called thoughts and feelings that float in our heads. We say that we “know” something when one of the thoughts in our head appears to us to resemble some real object. I know, for instance, that the object I am holding in my hand is a pen because the object I see resembles an idea that I hold in my mind of a pen. This is an example of what is called the correspondence theory of truth. To take the example one step further, if I show you something and say, “This is a pen.” You will tell me that the statement is true because the object in my hand corresponds to an idea that you hold in your head that you think of as the idea “pen.”

This seems obvious and requiring little further thought, until you actually give it further thought and then you realize that it is not as simple as it appears. Think of a pen. What do you think of when you think of a pen? Probably the first thing you think of is an image of a pen. Maybe it is ballpoint pen, or a felt tip marker. Maybe it is a black pen, or a green pen. Let’s imagine that I hold an object in my hand and say “This is a pen.” If you look at it and see a blue pen, but in your mind you see a red pen would you say that my statement is false, probably not. That is because our idea of pen is more complicated than an image. We also “know” what the function of a pen is. What if I were holding a pencil – same function different name?

Think about all of the pens you can imagine. Wow, how many different kinds you can imagine, and you can recognize them all as pens. Even if you see a pen the likes of which you had never seen before you could probably recognize it as a pen.

In his writings James outlines his belief that the reason we can understand anything at all is only because the truth of that understanding is confirmed through mutual activity between people. Think about how you first teach a child what a pen is in the first place. Someone will pick up an object and show it to you, or hand it to you and say “pen.” This will happen over and over again until eventually the child picks up a pen and says to you “pen.” How does the child know he or she is correct in labeling the object a pen? The only way he or she knows is that you will say either yes or no. “Yes” will confirm the truth of the object being a pen and “no” will indicate that the child is wrong. Only in the interaction will the child be able to verify the reality of the pen.

If I ask someone to pick up the book on the table and they pick up the object that I think I am referring to they will confirm for me that the object is a book. If I do the same and the person looks at me blankly I will either have to doubt that they know what a book is or wonder if I have named the object correctly. According to James it is only because ideas can be predictably tied to human activity, either our own or other peoples’, that we can know what they refer to. In fact James did not even think of ideas as existing in consciousness. He did not believe that anything called consciousness –meaning a space, substance or entity that contained thoughts, even existed.

T o James we “know” something not because some idea in our head appears to correspond to some object in the world. We “know” something because the appearance of a particular idea leads to certain predictable activities. I know my idea of pen refers to the object in my hand because I can reliable predict that if I ask someone “Is this a pen?” they will predictably answer yes. To James truth and knowing were always tided to human activity and human social interaction.

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Plato, Aristotle and William James

February 15, 2010 · 3 Comments

Before continuing to examine the ideas of William James lets look at the origins of metaphysical dualisms in Western thought by comparing the two big thinkers of ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle.

Plato was in some ways the original metaphysical dualist in Western thinking. His philosophy was based on the fundamentals conception of ideal form and as such he can be seen as one of the earliest thoughts in a conversation about the ideal reality that abides behind the reality of appearance known as Idealism Plato’s reasoning was simple. The only way we could know anything is if there already existed in the mind some notion of the ideal form of that thing. How do we know that a tree is a tree when we see it? We only recognize it as a tree because it matches our inner image of ideal “tree-ness.”

Plato was a student of Socrates and that is where this fundamental notion came from. Socrates believed that the mind already contained all knowledge and so his “Socratic” method of inquiry was designed to ask questions that would draw out the knowledge that was already in the mind. Truth, Beauty and Goodness were some of the big ideal forms that the mind contained, as was the idea of justice. How do we know what is true, what is beautiful, what is good or what is just? Some might say that we are taught these ideas from our society and certainly that is true and both Plato and Socrates recognized that. They also recognized that your society might teach you one thing and you might believe something else. Your society might tell you that going to war is just and you might believe it is unjust. How were you able to do that? In Plato’s thinking you can only do that because you have some innate ideal sense of justice already in your mind to appeal to that exists outside of what you have been taught.

Plato was a dualist in that he believed that the reality that we saw with our senses was an imperfect expression of a hidden world of ideal form. This hidden world of ideal form existed as the deep wisdom of the mind. This kind of dualism is reflected in the later ideas of Descartes, Kant, Hegel and other Idealist philosophers.

Aristotle challenged Plato’s dualism in some ways and his came with a different sense of what was ultimately real. Plato felt that what was ultimately real was the ideal form of things. Everything had an ideal form that existed behind the thing itself. Aristotle had a different sense of the ideal because he believed that the most fundamental aspect of reality had to do with the dynamics of change. Aristotle was captivated by the process of becoming. Things change and so the ideal of a thing, a thing’s nature, is not some hidden form behind it, but the force of change that can take it to its ultimate form in time. The nature of an apple seed rests in its potential to become an apple. What would a thing become if the natural process of change were allowed to progress to its ultimate end? That is the question that gives us a thing’s ideal form. The ideal form of a thing, its nature, is whatever it is destined to become through the process of natural change. In this sense then the ideal form of a thing is not something that exists in some separate realm, it is an innate part of the thing itself. In this sense Aristotle did away with Plato’s duality.

Aristotle’s thinking has a love/hate relationship with the modern conception of science that we have spent some time discussing already. On the one had Aristotle in his belief that change was most fundamental in reality was always motivated to observe how things changed, how they developed, grew and evolved. The question that naturally arises from this investigation is “what is the cause of change?” Why causes change? This was the question at the heart of Aristotle’s science and we still see the dominance of this question in science today. At the same time Aristotle attributed change to an innate nature of things. He believed in animism – the idea that all things are animated from within. This led him to believe for instance that objects fall because it makes them happier to be closer to the earth. So Aristotle’s thinking would tend to attribute animal qualities to Aquinasinanimate things. And it was in reaction against this idea that modern science would eventually be born.

Aristotle also became central to Christianity during the middle ages. The question of ultimate cause was picked up by the Christian thinker Thomas  Aquinas while he was attempting to rectify Aristotle’s thinking with Christian doctrine. This synthesis of thinking would become the dominant intellectual paradigm throughout the Western middle ages. And Aquinas would eventual come to define God in Aristotlilian terms as the “first cause” or the “uncaused cause.”

Let’s link Aristotle more directly to William James. Aristotle’s investigation into the nature of causes led him to realize that there was a hierarchy of being. The lowest level of the chain was inanimate things and in examining the causes of change in these types of objects it is clear that they only change when acted upon. So a rock for instance if thrown into the air would stop and come back down, but it would never throw itself into the air. The next level of the chain was plants because these would act when acted upon like non-living things, but they would also grow all on their own. You plant a seed and it contained the cause for it to grow into a flower. Animals were next in the chain because not only could they be acted upon like rocks, and grow like plants, but they could also choose to do things, walk, run, sleep, eat, etc.

Human beings were highest on the chain because human beings are not only acted upon, grow and act, they also choose what they should become. Human beings have the unique ability to be concerned about themselves and to make choices about how they should live and what they will become. The nature of being human rested in our ability to cause ourselves to be a particular kind of person. The fulfillment of human nature to Aristotle rested in become the person you are most supposed to be This ability to choose who you will be is absolutely central to James’ thinking, as it was to the Romantic American Transcendentalists whose shadow he was traveling in..

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The Self-consciousness flow of William James

February 11, 2010 · 2 Comments

To understand the thinking of William James I have tried to see the world as I believe he saw it – as one continuous unfolding flow. In my own contemplation of James I have followed a line of thought that mirrors in some ways hiw own development from a psychologist to a philosopher. James’ philosophic pet peeve was any notion of duality, which means any belief in the existance of any realm of being outside of, or separate from, the rest of reality. James believed that the universe had to be one continious unbroken event  and he was at war with metaphysical or transcendental dualisms that allowed for two seprate parts of reality to exist simultaniously. He shared this battle with the other founding Pragmatists, but he took it in a unique and fascinating direction starting with his psychological understanding of conscoiusness, developing through his conception of Pragmatsim and ending up in his own “theory of everything” that he called Radical Empiricism.

I have described previously James’ conception of “the stream of consciousness.” To James our experience of consciousness emerges as a continuous single stream and within that stream everything that we experience is included. This may sound simple and obvious, but it is more profound than it may apprear at first and has deep implicatons for the nature of reality.

To describe what I have come to understand from James I will start by examining how he thought about the experience of self-consciousness. Let’s assume that we are aware of an object. When we are aware of that object we are also aware of being aware of the object – we would say that we are self-consciously aware of the object. The same thing happens for actions. We are acting and we are simultaneously aware that we are acting. The way most of us relate to this without thinking is that we assume that there is the original awareness of the object, or the original action, AND at the same time there is a simultaneous awareness of being aware of the object or of the action. Essentially that creates a split in the sense of identity. There is a “me” that is aware of the object or a “me” who is acting, AND another “me” that is aware of the “me-being-aware-of-the-object” or the “actor.” So where does that second “me” exist. If you think about it you will probably realize that you don’t usually think about it, but you probably imagine that that awareness of yourself being aware is somehow hovering over the self that it is aware of – two “me’s” It is a transcendent self that exists outside of the process of the original awareness or the original action that watches these.

James wouldn’t accept this. There is only one reality he insisted, not two, and he had ethical reasons for insisting as much. He feared that the sense of a second “I” that was aware of the original one created a philosophical identity crisis. Who am I really? Is the question that arises. Am I the one who was aware of the object, or the one who was acting, OR was I the one who was aware of being aware of the object, or aware of acting? This split identity James saw as a moral slippery slope. Was I the one acting in the world or the one watching myself in the world? And if I was the one watching myself in the world was I the one acting? If I commit a crime, but I am identified with the self-awareness that was aware of the crime do I think of myself as innocent? Am I innocent?

This split left open the possibility that the “observing self” might be able to claim immunity from the results of the actions of the “acting” self. James considered himself to be a moral philosopher and he wanted to remove the wiggle room that would allow anyone to excuse their negative behavior in the world by appealing to the part of themselves that existed in a more transcendental realm.

James saw consciousness as a continuous stream. The experience of self awareness wasn’t a separate awareness that existed outside of the original stream; it was part of that awareness. If I see an object, part of my experience of the object is the sense of being aware of it. Self awareness in this way becomes not a separate vantage point from which to view myself viewing-the-object, but rather my self-awareness is part of my experience of the object. There is only one continuous stream of consciousness. At one moment I am aware only of the object, and then in the next moment I am aware of myself, and then in the next moment I am aware of myself being aware of the object, and in the next moment I am aware of the object again, etc, etc…

James’ philosophy of Radical Empiricism took this idea one step further and stated that the world itself is created only from successive moments of personal experience. Personal experience is the “stuff” that reality is made of. And reality, like consciousness, appears drop by drop in one continuous stream.  He didn’t believe that ideas existed outside of the world. The physical world and the mental world of thoughts and feelings were both made up of what he called “pure experience.”

James’ version of the philosophy of Pragmatism contained the same sense of a continuous flow that was reflected in his view of consciousness and of experience, but now it included action as well. He saw an idea and the action that resulted from belief in that idea, not as two different things, but as two ways of looking at the same thing. Maybe we could think of it as if the idea was the inside-out view and the action was the outside-in view of the same exact event. From this way of thinking our experience of reality is a continuous flow in which our mental experience is connected directly to our actions in the outside world. In a very Zen-like way James saw reality unfolding as thoughts led to actions, that led to consequences, that led to more thoughts, that lead to more actions, that lead to more consequences, and so on. To James believing in an idea meant acting on that idea, and acting on any particular idea would inevitably result in particular consequences in the world. Our ideas and the manifestations of those ideas in the world are not two separate things. You cannot believe in an idea without your actions demonstrating that belief in consequences in the world, and if there no consequences of an idea expressed in your actions then you don’t really believe in that idea. For James we all had “the will to believe,” we all had the freedom to choose which ideas we would believe in. And because whatever ideas we believed in would ultimately lead to actions and consequence, the one thing that we had to take absolute responsibility for was the ideas we choose to believe in.

James’ personal feelings about this were influenced by his misgivings about the human cost of the civil war. The war was ostensibly fought defending noble ideas, but for James the fact that noble ideas could be used to justify so much bloodshed was a deep philosophical failing in our understanding of reality. In fact if those noble ideas led to such bloodshed, you would have to question their nobility.

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Cosmic Consciousness, William James and Andrew Cohen

February 6, 2010 · 11 Comments

Andrew Cohen’s spiritual life began at the age of 16 when he experienced a spiritual experience spontaneously during a conversation with his mother. He later described that during this experience he was “completely overwhelmed and intoxicated by Love and struck by a sense of awe and wonder that was impossible to describe.”  From that revelation he “suddenly knew without any doubt that there was no such thing as death and that life itself had no beginning and no end… life was intimately connected and inseparable. It became clear that there was no such thing as individuality separate from that one Self that was all of life. The glory and majesty in the cosmic unity that was revealing itself  to me was completely overwhelming”

After this experience the young Andrew Cohen asked everyone he could about the experience that had occurred to him and no one he found seemed to be able to help him. In his autobiography Cohen states that at the time of his spontaneous spiritual awakening as a teenager he was reading his first spiritual book, William James’ classic of comparative religious study “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” and it was only this book that gave him “some understanding” of his experience.

As I stated in my last post I don’t believe that James was the most directly influential force on the development of Andrew Cohen’s evolutionary philosophy, although I do think James might have had some influence on Cohen’s evolutionary perspective.  Evolutionary philosophy is the explicit and implicit context of James’ work and the American character has certainly been predisposed to the idea of evolution for many reasons that we have explored here. Still, James’ Varieties of Religious Experience has minimal direct reference to evolution, so how might that book have influenced Andrew Cohen?

My desire to understand how the ideas of William James might have had shaped the development of Andrew Cohen’s Evolutionary Enlightenment has been partially fueling my own interest in American Philosophy for the past few years.  I have come to believe that there are several critical influences that Cohen could have received directly from James at a vulnerable moment in his spiritual life. One of these was certainly an exposure to the idea that spiritual awakening is part of a cosmic process of evolution. In particular Andrew Cohen may have been exposed to the idea of “cosmic consciousness” through James’ book.

Cosmic Consciousness is a term that was coined by the Canadian Doctor Richard Maurice Bucke in his 1901 book entitled Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind. In that book Bucke proposes that experiences of this type represent the next stage in human consciousness. He contends that the occurrence of them is increasing with time showing that this new possibility is becoming closer at hand.

In his book, Bucke describes this state of consciousness as follows.

“The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is… a consciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe…Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment or illumination… To this is added a state of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense… With these come, what may be called a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but the consciousness that he has it already.”

Bucke was an adventurous soul in more ways than one. As a young man he left the backwoods of Canada and spent 5 years living in and traveling through the wilderness of the American northwest. It became a death defying ordeal on several occasions and in the end resulted in the amputation of one of his feet completely and the other one partially due to frostbite.  

Later after having finished his education to become a doctor Bucke claimed to have been brought to an experience of Cosmic Consciousness himself after reading poetry by the English Romantics and the American poet Walt Whitman. After that Bucke became what you could call a spiritual devotee of Whitman (although Whitman was reluctant about the role of spiritual teacher). He eventually met Whitman in person, spent a summer with the great poet and wrote Whitman’s biography.  

Cohen’s description of his own experience certainly matches the description that Bucke provides and Cohen’s exposure to Bucke would have come through the reading of James at the time of his awakening. I wonder if reading James’ powerful book, full of rich and detailed descriptions of experiences of deep spiritual awakening, catalyzed Cohen’s experience as well as helped him to interpret it afterward.

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Cosmos, Consciousness and Culture

January 27, 2010 · 3 Comments

It was almost exactly one year ago today that I started this blog so I guess this is my first anniversary post. I started the blog because I wanted to explore the relationship between classical American Philosophy and the teaching of Evolutionary Enlightenment which I have been involved with for 18 years. What I found was that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalism had many resemblances to Evolutionary Enlightenment and that the American Pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey had developed between them a profound evolutionary philosophy.

I have been both stunned and humbled to learn that so many ideas that I have devoted myself to and had thought were new actually had a long and rich history in American Philosophy. I also have had the benefit of outstanding comments from so many of my readers and have refined developed and even (gasp) altered my thinking all along the way. The path over the year was not exactly what I expected. We took a few long detours into very critical and important philosophical questions. One of these was the question of freewill vs. determinism. With the help of our friend Carl we were able to take a long look at this perennial philosophical question and to get help by drawing on Carl’s college professor B. F. Skinner a truly original and brilliant American thinker. I also took us on a related excursion into the possible limits of science and certain rigidities that can arise in scientific thinking. We also had many changes to explore the sweeping movements of history that have so much impact on how thought develops through time.

For me the big revelation over this past year was seeing how Peirce, James and Dewey had constructed the beginnings of a comprehensive philosophy that attempted to explain the evolution of cosmos, consciousness and culture. Although the ideas of each of these thinkers includes some of each of these three elements, it is also true that they can fairly neatly be categorized based on the emphasis in their work as follows. Peirce emphasized an exploration of the cosmos. James emphasized the evolution of human consciousness. And Dewey emphasized the evolution of culture.

Peirce was convinced that a fully encompassing theory of evolution would have to explain not only the evolution of life, but the evolution of the universe as a whole including the development of time and space, life and consciousness, and all of the natural and physical laws that currently exist. Peirce explained how the right combination of spontaneity, continuity and the tendency to form habits was enough to explain the evolution of everything else. 

James taught that the human experience of consciousness flows forward in ever emerging “drops” of awareness. He described “The Will to Believe” as the mechanism that controls the unfolding of our destiny. We each are free to chose what we believe in and what we believe in will determine the choices that we make and the future that we create.  

Dewey  recognized that objects that are named always have as part of their meaning a sign that points toward some possible future. Objects such as these, that can be either physical or mental objects, make up culture, and the energy and activity of people that live in any particular culture will tend to flow in whatever direction the objects of that culture are pointing. Changing the objects in a culture becomes the mechanism through which culture can be changed.  

Together these three thinkers outlined the broad contours of an American Evolutionary Philosophy. Over the course of this year it seemed more and more obvious that the contemporary ideas contained in Integral Theory and Evolutionary Enlightenment have deep roots in the intellectual development of American Philosophy. So where do we go from here? With a year’s worth of foundation set I want to turn now to a more detailed look at just what Integral Theory and Evolutionary Enlightenment have inherited, directly and indirectly, from the great tradition of American Philosophy.

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John Dewey and Cultural Evolution

January 24, 2010 · 3 Comments

What I see in John Dewey’s Instrumentalism is a compelling theory of how the evolution of culture can be consciously guided. Dewey’s ideas about directing the further development of culture rest squarely on his understanding of objects as things with meaning and his understanding of meaning as always pointing to some future utility. For Dewey a thing, be it physical or mental, was meaningful when it was understood that it could be used to achieve some future outcome. A baseball, for example, is for playing the game of baseball. The object, in this case a baseball, can be seen as an instrument that could be used to bring about a specific end, in this case a game of baseball. Another way to understand this is that an object is a sign that points toward a possible future, a base ball points toward the possibility of a baseball game.

When a group of people share the same understanding of the meaning of an object, which means they share the same understanding of the future the object is pointing toward, then the presence of that object among those people will tend to make the future the object is pointing toward more likely to come into being. (Try reading that 10 times fast.) Using our example of a baseball one more time, imagine a playground full of children. If there is a baseball on the ground in that playground the possibility of a baseball game being played will be greater.

Culture is the collection of understood objects, or signs, that are shared by a group of people. The existence of these objects will tend to direct the flow of human energy and activity toward the possible futures that the objects point toward. This means that the people within a given culture will tend to act in ways that follow in the general direction that the objects (signs) of that culture are pointing.

Cultures are exceedingly complex and contain many physical and mental signs that all point toward different possible  ends. Baseballs toward ball games. Chairs toward sitting. Democracy towards forms of governance. Capitalism towards ways of regulating commerce. etc. Some objects are physical and some are mental, some are small with minimal influence in the overall direction of a culture, some are huge with massive influence over the general direction that a culture will develop in.

To guide culture in this model you need to be able to do two things. You need to educate people to be able to correctly interpret the meaning of objects, and you need to strategically place objects, physical and mental, in the culture so that they will guide the development of culture in the direction you want culture to go. Dewey spent his professional career as a philosopher studying education theory and the big ideas, institutions and social structures that have the largest impact in directing the flow of human energy and activity in society.

There is of course one huge hole in this theory of conscious cultural evolution: how do you decide what direction cultural should follow. Think of Adolf Hitler. He was masterful at educating a population toward a shared understanding of the meaning of objects, and at filling his culture with the objects that  would direct the flow of energy and activity of people  in the direction that he wanted to manifest. Unfortunately the results of his efforts were monstrous.  The lack of a clear moral foundation for Pragmatic thinking was a problem that occupied all of the three founders of Pragmatism.

Charles Sanders Peirce came to believe that morality was an inherent part of the universe in the form of a force he called Agapism or “Evolutionary Love.” This force was a pull and preference for that which was most evolutionary and it dictated the direction of highest moral good. Of the three founding Pragmatists William James was perhaps most preoccupied with the question of morality and he developed an updated version of John Stuart Mills Utilitarianism stating that moral goodness was always in the direction that brought the most good to the most people. John Dewey, as I have written about in previous posts, realized that the process of evolution only rewards the potential for still greater evolution. Progress in any other direction would ultimatly become an evolutionary dead end and so Dewey believed that the moral good was in whatever direction led to the greatest possibility for further growth and evolution.

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Rational Mechanics and the Mind

January 16, 2010 · 3 Comments

I want to post one more time before getting back to a few last words on John Dewey and conscious evolution. I have been doing a little research into the development of modern physics because I think there is a useful analogy to be found there and applied to the discussion we have been having about whether anything called a mind actually exists or not.

Isaac Newton is perhaps most famous for the discovery of gravity and his laws of motion. His ground breaking work gave rise to two competing schools of thought both initiated by mathematical astronomers. One is most closely associated with the Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736 –1813) and the other with Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749 – 1827).

Laplace’s physics emphasized trying to understand the nature of the forces that work on objects and the nature of the objects that they work on. Laplace advocated examining situations and trying to determine the characteristics of the elements and forces involved. He tried to imagine why things were happening. This leaning toward speculation led him to speculate that there might be tiny invisible particles that could account for the motion that we see in the world, or unseen forces responsible for moving matter around.

Lagrange took a completely different approach in his mechanics which is generally called Rational Mechanics. He advocated giving up speculation about the nature of things. Why invent invisible particles or unseen forces to describe what we see he would say. Instead he felt that we should simply fit accurate mathematical descriptions to what we see and use those mathematical descriptions to predict and control future events.

Laplace wanted to understand the nature of things and then be able to predict and explain why they behaved the way they did. LaGrange wanted to simply study and model the behavior of things and not worry about their nature.  Laplace dove into our ignorance, LaGrange avoided it. I can see this distinction in my own history. Initially I studied Engineering as an undergraduate, but I switched to physics because I felt that I was more interested in why things work than how they work. Physics, at least in its most theoretical sense follows Laplace. Engineering, in its most applied sense, follows LaGrange. Both of these streams of thought have persisted in science for the past few centuries and what is fascinating is that neither has proven superior to the other.  Both approaches work better in some circumstances than the other does.

In our discussion of mind I would say that B. F. Skinner is applying the approach of LaGrange to human behavior. As has been true in the physical sciences this approach will probably work better in some circumstances than alternatives. I don’t believe that this means we should advocate that everyone stop speculating about what the nature of mind might be. Imagine if we had stopped all scientists in the 18th century from searching for unseen particles and forces.

This also brings me back to a few things that we have discussed in the past having to do with individual preference and temperament. William James believed that some people were temperamentally more “tough-minded” and others more “tender-minded.” The tough-minded tend to believe in things based on proof and evidence. They are driven by results and tend to trust in calculation and direct deduction. The tender-minded are more inclined to believe based on intuitions, feelings and hunches. They are more likely to be religious believers and spiritually inclined. This difference in temperament James believed was why some of us become empiricists and others idealists, why some would follow Laplace and others LaGrange. Why some would be Religious and others not.

Back again for a moment to the 18th century to end on a note of interest, the English Romantics whom we have talked about before very much picked up on the language of forces from Laplace. You can see illusions to the unseen forces of nature in writers like Coleridge and Wordsworth, and as we have previously discussed you will not find a more tender-minded bunch.

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Does anything like a mind exist?

January 12, 2010 · 11 Comments

I still have a few more posts on Dewey that I want to put up that lead to an exciting model of cultural evolution, but Carl’s comment to my last post inspired me to write something more about the mind. Carl pointed out how metaphorical my description was, presumably he is making the point that the reason such heavily metaphorical language is needed to describe the mind is because there is no such thing.

The concept of mind is a fascinating one. What is it? Where is it? In the commonest terms we often simply equate mind with brain, or at least speak as if the mind is some function of the brain. In fact, no one knows what the mind is. The word itself is really a metaphor for the collection of experiences of thought, memory, feeling, will, choice etc. that we experience as our “inner world.” Carl’s teacher B. F. Skinner didn’t believe there was such a thing as a mind. With his conception of Radical Behaviorism he believed that he could describe human behavior in relationship to the environment without needing to resort to something called a mind.

I won’t go back into Behaviorism now, because we have covered that in some detail in earlier posts, but I did want to say a few words about the relationship between Behaviorism and the psychology of William James James was not a Behaviorist but he did help set the stage for Behaviorism. Philosophically James also questioned the nature of consciousness. In an important paper of his called, Does Consciousness Exist? James wrote the following:

During the past year, I have read a number of articles whose authors seemed just on the point of abandoning the notion of consciousness… But they were not quite radical enough, not quite daring enough in their negations. For twenty years past I have mistrusted ‘consciousness’ as an entity; for seven or eight years past I have suggested its non-existence to my students, and tried to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded.

James’ pragmatic equivalent was to recognize that everything in the end is “pure experience.” I suppose he was thinking that by doing away with the problem of trying to figure out “what consciousness is” we could put our energy to finding out how human beings actually work. This is certainly aligned with Sinner’s view and it inspired one of James’ students, Edward Lee Thorndike, to do behavior studies on chicks in James’ own basement.

In these experiments Thorndike observed the behavior of insects and baby chicks as he put them through different trials. What he observed led him to believe that animal behavior developed through trial and error and the tendency to form habits by repeating behaviors that had been tried and successful in the past. Thorndike concluded that nothing about animal behavior led him to believe that any kind of mental activity or thought processing was going on behind the scenes. This negation of “mentalism” would be developed by later American Behaviorists including B.F. Skinner, who would develop an alternative to the original Russian conception.

So, is there such a thing as a mind? And if there is a mind, what is it?

People who tend toward empiricism, behaviorism and materialism in general will believe that if you can explain human behavior without needing to resort to some assumption about a thinking entity called mind then you should not make that assumption. To that extend I can go along, but I find that many people with inclinations in this direction will go one step further and say that in fact you should assume there is no such thing. I think it is accurate to say we just don’t know and therefore we need to have an open inquiry as to the existence of mind.

We can’t see a mind, or measure a mind, or even conceive of what it is. So maybe there just isn’t one, but then again maybe there is and we just haven’t conceived of it accurately yet. To use another metaphor, think of leaves blowing in the wind. We can’t see the wind, so it might be helpful to study the motion of leaves without assuming the existence of wind, but that doesn’t mean that the wind isn’t there and it might be a good idea to assume of some wind-like entity until we figure out what is really going on.

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