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31 December 1998
Being Other WiseClues to the dynamics of a meaningfully sustainable lifestyle- / -
Category domination: conceptual dungeonsIt is surprising the extent to which our thinking, at every level of society, is dominated by particular categories and sets of categories. These may include objects (table, chair), animal or plant species (dog, rose), proprietary products (Windows, Coca Cola), ethnic groups, countries, weather conditions, social roles (wife, father, daughter), values (peace, justice, sustainability, family), problems (hunger, poverty, injustice), and states of consciousness or meditation (depression, samadhi), etc.The identification of arrays of fundamental categories has always been a preoccupation of philosophers. Advances in philosophy might even be said to be associated with the identification of more fundamental or comprehensive sets of categories. Religions, through their theologians, are concerned that people should understand their place in the world through particular categories. Political movements, through their ideologues, have similar concerns. All might be said to engage in intense category competition in seeking to occupy the conceptual high grounds from which other experiences may be surveyed and ordered?. Sets of categories are imposed as desirable through education and programmes of indoctrination or propaganda. People may be severely sanctioned, excommunicated or executed, through failure to accept their organizing role. How the categories are to be understood as interrelated to form a larger whole is another matter. But aside from these processes, individuals are entrained by use of categories in their environment. Adults impose categories on children. Young people make use of fashionable categories, notably as they are articulated by slang and jargon through peer groups. Civilization is navigated through categories and the signs which reinforce them. Whether it all "makes sense" is again another matter. These tendencies, although increasingly widespread as a consequence of the universalist aspirations of western "cultural imperialism", are neither universal nor necessary. This has been well-argued by a number of authors (see Judge, 1993), but especially by Magoroh Maruyama (1980) who distinguishes five patterns. Maria Colavito (1995) has also identified 5 epistemologically invariant styles (maia, mythos, right brain mimesis, left brain mimesis, and logos) associated with 5 features of the brain (reptilian, limbic, right and left hemisphere, and the interpreter module) and explored their developmental history. But are these patterns also to be considered as categories? This paper raises the question as to whether the trap that societies face globally or locally is in some way intimately related to the way in which categories are defined, imposed or accepted. But of potentially greater interest is the question whether this may not also be true of the traps that many individuals experience in their lifestyle. Have people been effectively trapped in conceptual dungeons and slave pits -- for the duration of an experiential Kali Yuga? But "trap" is also a category. As Francisco Varela has argued: "In contrast to what is commonly assumed, a description, when carefully inspected, reveals the properties of the observer. We observers, distinguish ourselves precisely by distinguishing what we apparently are not, the world." How we have distinguished the problems we experience may say more about our ability to understand ourselves than we are comfortable in recognizing. Categorizing may effectively be a process of denial. Category politics: intellectual propertyThe names associated with particular categories or sets of categories are: the philosophers of every epoch (cf. Aristotle, Kant, Sartre, etc.), the initiators of religions (Buddha, etc.), plus every aspiring modern scholar. For the latter the matter is closely associated with issues of intellectual copyright. No categories, no kudos! The question is to what degree all those fixing categories in this way perform an inhibiting role as what amounts to "conceptual bureaucrats". Have they been engaged in frantic pigeonholing of the most uncreative kind or in a necessary exercise in draining conceptual swamps? In the case of philosophers, this effort at fixation and solidification is an ironic reframing of the classical quest for the Philosopher's Stone. How is the necessary complementarity with flow and other modes of experience to be established -- the aspiration of alchemists?Historically, who resisted such fixation in an effort to allow for flow? Who campaigned for non-fixity (cf. Whitehead, Korzybski, Csikszentmihalyi) and how were they resisted? The neatness of categories allows them to be projected onto the land, segmenting it unambiguously, permitting the parts so defined to become owned property -- as with objects. The obviousness of this is not so apparent in many indigenous cultures -- notably the Aborigines of Australia. Such categories may then be used to define and distinguish institutions and their programmes. Legislation is another means of defining and applying categories -- also eliminating the ambiguities of flow experience in the process. Is it any wonder that programmes defined by legislation are experienced as essentially arid and non-transformative -- even meaningless? The many efforts to formulate and sign universal declarations suffer from the limitations of this approach in articulating other modes of experience. Categories thus lend themselves readily to institutionalization -- as the non-whites found to their cost with the emergence of the apartheid regime in South Africa. Scientists, despite their claims to objectivity, have a possessive "Kilroy was here" approach to the phenomena they explore. An advance in fundamental physics becomes Blogg's Theory, a new galaxy is named Dupont, a new flower species is called after Smith. Is the intellectual goal of aspiring Nobel Prize winners to have the Theory of Everything bear their name -- a form of conceptual skywriting? The night sky is transformed into a memorial to dead astronomers and the biosphere into a memorial to dead biologists -- an environment to be experienced as plastered with labels (Economist, 12 Dec 1998, pp 135-7). Such names may be misleading and offensive as with much renaming of topography by Europeans in former colonies. What a contrast to the bricks of a cathedral which were never signed. It is characteristic of any school of thought that schisms eventually develop. Heretics who fail to toe the line develop alternative, unauthorized categories or interpretations. Typically they are condemned, demonized, and even violently "sanctioned". It is worth reflecting on the possibility that any fixed category must eventually evoke complementary categories to hold insights otherwise poorly held. The pattern of emergent, or potential, schisms may even be similar whatever the field, whether religion, gardening, physics, sex, or cooking -- as implicit in the arguments of Feyerabend (1993). There are necessary "incommensurable" differences, whether amongst concepts, species, individuals or their preferences. There is a necessity to the range of incompatible mindscapes distinguished by Maruyama (1992, 1994). The learnings which Varela et al. (1991) rightly argue are to be found from Buddhism should not obscure the need to learn from the existence of 18 classical schools of Buddhist thought, the reason for their emergence as schisms, and the challenge to integration they represent. The coherence of the pattern may only be comprehensible beyond the fixity of individual categories -- in the experience of some form of flow. Perhaps René Thom's work (1989, 1990) on catastrophe theory and bifurcation could provide insights into the types and dynamics of such schism formation. The collision and decay relationships between fundamental particles offer another model. Category politics: societal issuesMuch physical violence in society is about the interpretation or domination of fixed categories -- starting with peace. Religion has been at the origin of many such conflicts. Johan Galtung makes a vital distinction between physical violence and structural violence. Physical violence is for the amateur, using weapons in order to dominate. For Galtung, structural violence is the tool of the professional employing exploitation and social injustice to achieve domination. But beyond the latter, acting behind the scenes (and adjusting the scenery) is surely the conceptual violence of the super-professional, using disinformation and psychological operations (military psy-ops) -- and the associated processes of brainwashing. It is in this light that the entrapment of people in networks of fixed categories could be usefully explored, as undertaken by Noam Chomsky (1992, 1994). Examples of conceptual violence include use of category euphemism to inhibit or numb recognition of other dimensions of an experience. This is typical of business and military jargon (bodycount, collateral damage, etc.) but even of reference to body processes (washroom, etc.) -- reinforcing an insidious form of experiential denial.A number of modern debates within the international community provide good illustrations of subtle games with categories. This might be termed definitional game-playing. Examples include: peace, development (economic, social, cultural, human, sustainable, that is basic to UN programs, cf more), civil society, sect, etc. Categories tend to be defined by those who derive political or ideological advantage from the ways that they are subsequently used -- as exemplified by cynical definition of "environment" in a "ministry of the environment" (cf Judge, 1982). Classification, and the definition of categories, has long been a political act as demonstrated by the UN's exercises in defining "aggression" and "racism". The case of sects indicates how a wide range of non-conventional initiatives can be conveniently grouped together and demonized -- whilst carefully avoiding attention to those that have establishment support (e.g. Freemasons, Opus Dei, etc.). This effectively inhibits any social experiment (Judge, 1997). One consequence is that categories such as "citizen" and "state" effectively imprison what should otherwise be characterized by a dynamic, flowing condition (Judge, 1998). It is much easier to manipulate definitions when they have this static, simplistic quality. Unfortunately it is questionable whether any real transformation, as proclaimed in the manifestos of many political bodies, can be achieved by this means -- perhaps to the satisfaction of some. Any body that considers that current use of categories (in whatever mechanical combination) is adequate for dealing with such issues as:
Butterfly collections and Bicycle ridingBiologists and taxonomists have long focussed their attentions on collecting species from around the world. Necessarily it is both difficult and inconvenient to acquire, transport, store and study such species if they are alive. The collection of "butterflies" in a museum is therefore an impressive grid pattern of dead specimens pinned into drawers in appropriate cupboards. Each "butterfly" is thus accessible for the anatomical study basic to taxonomy. More controbversially, a similar procedure has been adopted for the bones of indigenous peoples. In the case of larger animals, use may be made of photographs and videos. It is however difficult to maintain video collections of all the different butterflies. A species of butterfly is therefore reduced to its static form and its dynamics go almost completely unrepresented. When has a butterfly specimen been displayed in relation to the species which feed on it -- and on which it feeds (at some time in its lifecycle)? What learning is lost by this failure? What is the process of reductionism through which the magnificent experience of a unique old tree is reduced to the category "tree" -- thereby facilitating its removal? This procedure reinforces the assumption that the species is somehow well-represented in such a collection by its remains -- despite the fact that the behavioural dynamics through which it expressed itself are lost, even if they were at any time known. The assumption is also evident in efforts to photograph an animal -- a camel is not what can be photographed. An elephant is poorly represented by a still photograph that fails to indicate its lifestyle, migratory and other behavior. Even films that capture only dramatic moments must necessarily fail to capture the larger rhythm of the life of the elephant. How can the shifting pattern of biological and behavioural experiences of an elephant best be understood? It is useful to ask whether such survey methods adequately represent human beings, notably in a democratic society. Understanding of the environment is thus largely in the hands of conceptual bureaucrats. The fundamental nature of this point could be made in an interesting way to students through a "bicycle experiment". Make eight separate groups of students, one for each of the following functions:
Categories of the present and past may be perceived by the future like butterfly collections or the contents of a bicycle riding manual. They "work" when they can be combined mechancially as from a recipe book. They usually fail when the secret lies in the dynamics of how they are combined -- as in the kinetic intelligence required in bicycle riding and the martial arts. Distinguishing notes as categories does not mean that a tune can be played. Can categories be "played" as notes are played on a musical instrument? The challenge of governance is then clearly not the particular category but the way in which these are combined as chords that flow after one another in a larger melodic pattern of meaning. Should a meaningful government development programme be experienced like a piece of music -- whose "articles" people can sing?
This is the "secret" of quality of life, sustainable community and taoist understanding. Social and community life -- how things work together -- eludes social engineers, just as biological life eludes biochemists. Use of fixity is like working a sculpture that serves as a mnemonic whose symbolism one can seek to comprehend. But only "magic" can make it "live" -- as Pinocchio explores. Hence the danger in basing social transformation strategies on the rigid categories of political economists. What sort of cognitive environment is being created through the vast accumulation of facts and the containers for them? How is this to be meaningfully integrated, whether as information, knowledge or wisdom? Is this weight of unintegrated knowledge to be dumped onto the psyche of each new child in the spirit of education -- and as a gift of civilization? What is anyone to make of each new "advance of knowledge" that effectively renders more ignorant those who do not have the attention time to be aware of it? These concerns are explored elsewhere (see http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/musings/infqual.php) Opening the metaphorical boxIt is interesting that a category, as normally used by the international community, can be thought of as a kind of sealed box or container. Ideally everything labeled by the category can be considered inside the box, and everything else is outside. Thinking, and much of the activity of scholars and policy-makers, can then be seen as the artful shuffling of boxes into particular configurations and arrays -- possibly not seen before -- better to capture and contain reality. Of course some of it may have to do with making new boxes, possibly inside other boxes, or to contain other boxes. In this sense use of categories is governed by what Lakoff and Johnson (1980) analyzed as the "container" metaphor.As a container, the box is then to be understood as containing "meaning". The label for that meaning is the box. For some it is the box that is meaning and asking what the box contains is meaningless. But suppose we imagine the box to be open at the top. This implies that new meaning could get into the box -- if there was space. Also that some meaning might spill out if the box was roughly handled -- or there was a change in gravitational pull. Or the meaning might evaporate from the open surface. Suppose the box had a hole in the bottom and meaning leaked out -- as seems to happens to some old categories that are essentially left as empty boxes. Nobody finds meaning in them anymore -- except those explorers intrigued by old conceptual castles and the ghosts that continue to haunt them! Now if one open box was appropriately positioned under another, the meaning from one might flow to the other. A series of boxes might then constitute a cascade of meaning through a series of categories -- possibly capturing educational (or historical) developments of insight, or psychic energy cascading down the chakras of the East. Of course this raises questions about where the meaning is coming from or going to -- unless the containers at each end are immense. But the lifecycle of a "caterpillar" might be experienced as a circular cascade, through a sequence of forms, by the entity employing them. If the volume of the cascade was significantly greater than the containers through which it moved a different situation would become apparent. The individual boxes are then only a temporary constraint on the meaning, a kind of fleeting label for a flow of meaning that eludes particular labels -- as in some rapid moving, creative dialogue. This is best seen in the case of a river flowing through a rocky bed. The rocks may of course constrain the water into pools, some of which may appear still. The water could in such cases be said to be contained -- at least for certain purposes. The pool may even have a name and people may come back to it year after year as a predictable experience. Some might experience a familiar party evening in that way -- especially after imbibing a suitable amount of liquid! Suppose now that the container walls are flexible and invisible. This might be said to be the case with swirls of water in the river. The swirl may be quite stable as a pattern, or may periodically recur in the same place, apparently unrelated to any neighbouring rocks. The same may be said of cloud formations. Forming and reforming as they do, are they to be judged as permanent or impermanent and to whom? To what extent do we endeavour conceptually to grasp at swirls that only briefly hold pattern and meaning? Froth on a wave? As with the river for Heraclitus, meaning is then constantly on the move! This relates to David Bohm's (**) notion of the holomovement -- the outfolding and infolding of explicate and implicate order. Those who seek to label a swirl in the river are condemned to be identified with it and to be imprisoned by their attachment to it -- a frozen moment in the dance with reality. Exploring the metaphorical trapThe argument above has set the design for a metaphorical trap that will be explored in various ways in what follows. A distinction has been made above between the solidity of a container for meaning which has then been associated with fluidity. Like it or not, in the material world we have to live with states of matter -- even if they are only metaphors. This poses a challenge of self-reflexiveness to be explored below.If this is the case then it is useful to consider the other states of matter in the light of the metaphor that we cannot for the moment escape. Corresponding to the solidity of the container and the fluid nature of the meaning it contains, we might experience "airy" and "fiery" conditions. Their roles will be explored in various ways below. At this stage the four can be allowed to suggest different ways in which meaning is experienced:
, although with a tendency to cohere (surface tension -- fashion, peer group) There is a certain irony in the attitude that has been cultivated to the apparently simplistic manner in which classical philosophers categorized natural phenomena in terms of earth, air, fire and water. However, this categorization takes on a different and more disturbing flavour if it is assumed that "earth" was effectively a metaphorical representation of the categorization process itself -- and that all four "categories" were more meaningfully understood as necessarily complementary ways of experiencing (experience). The equivalent classical Chinese preference for 5 categories, including wood and metal, is traditionally understood as metaphorical -- although equally quaint to western eyes. From the perspective of this paper, the contemporary understanding of the classical perspective is then to be understood as being itself trapped in the conceptual rigidity of solidity as denoted by "earth". The classical metaphor then amounts to an experiential, or existential, secret -- which leaves the unaware free to laugh at the literal interpretation. The larger significance is then an open secret elegantly hidden immediately behind the objectivists own mockery -- where else?! It is almost certainly to this secret that Antonio de Nicolas (1978) alludes in his identification of the four "languages" of the Rg Veda. These are distinguished by their degree of intentionality: images and sacrifice, existence, embodied vision, and non-existence. The unique feature of that approach is that it is grounded in sound and the shifting relationships between tone -- rather than in terms of vision, as is implicit in most categorization (cf summary of argument in Judge, 1981). It is through the pattern of musical tones that the significance of the Rg Veda is to be found: "Therefore, from a linguistic and cultural perspective, we have to be aware that we are dealing with a language where tonal and arithmetical relations establish the epistemological invariances... Language grounded in music is grounded thereby on context dependency; any tone can have any possible relation to other tones, and the shift from one tone to another, which alone makes melody possible, is a shift in perspective which the singer himself embodies. Any perspective (tone) must be "sacrificed" for a new one to come into being; the song is a radical activity which requires innovation while maintaining continuity, and the "world" is the creation of the singer, who shares its dimensions with the song." (p. 57)How can conceptual "stones" be experienced as "singing"? What insights for the present are offered by the songlines along which Australian Aborigines "sing the land" to ensure its continuous recreation (Judge, 1996, 1997)? Working with meaningful experience: fixity and fluidityThe concern of this paper is to highlight the role of meaningful experience outside rigidly accepted categories. This means exploring the non-solid modes of experience that may be basic to transformation processes. But this in no way suggests that there is not a place for conceptual solidity -- and solid arguments! The argument is rather that excessive solidity (and lack of poesis) establishes or reinforces a world that is then necessarily arid -- where growth and transformation, dependent on fluidity, are very difficult. Edward de Bono has explored this distinction in a book subtitled From Rock Logic to Water Logic (1992). But this does not mean that a "water world" should be created, free from all solidity. Rather it means that the need for both, and the interface between them, should be more thoroughly explored -- together with the other two phases, such that all are experienced as both complementary and necessary. The Jungian psychology of types has explored the relationship between four functions (sensation, feeling, thinking, intuition) which the traditional categories are considered to symbolize (cf ***). The approach here makes extensive use of metaphor. In Kenneth Boulding's words: "Our consciousness of the unity of the self in the middle of a vast complexity of images or material structures is at least a suitable metaphor for the unity of a group, organization, department, discipline, or science. If personification is only a metaphor, let us not despise metaphors - we might be one ourselves." (1978, p.345). Or, as the poet John Keats puts it: "A man's life is a continual allegory - and very few eyes can see the mystery of his life - a life like the scriptures, figurative." The charm of it, as Gregory Bateson stated in concluding a conference on the effects of conscious purpose on human adaptation, is that: "We are our own metaphor." (1972, p.304). Unfortunately we have over-identified with the metaphor -- reifying it into a category -- and have consequently been unable to experience ourselves in intrinsically richer, and more dynamic, ways. The lack of such self-reflexiveness could well prove to be an important contributory factor to the current uncontrolled attitude to procreation which is at the root of so many current problems. In a thought experiment, theologian Sallie McFague (1982) has explored the relationship between the theological language of models and concepts and the religious language of images and metaphors. She develops insights from science and philosophy showing how models are derived from metaphors. But: "Models can never be taken literally, since they are not descriptions but indirect attempts to express the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar (McFague, p. 193). As such, "many models are necessary, since all are partial" (p. 193). Of God, she concludes: " there is nothing which resembles what we can conceive when we say that word". Her colleague David Tracy (1981) has explored the role of analogical imagination. It is indeed useful to contain a certain experience as "dog" and it is convenient to develop predictable patterns of response to that experience. But when is a dog not a dog? Perhaps when it is a dingo, a poodle, rabid, a cartoon character, or mounted in a display case -- depending on one's prejudices. The fixity of categories can be used to provide tokens in one kind of exchange. Fixed definitions are basic to one kind of conversation. This would tend to be of an essentially bureaucratic, "non-transformative" nature. It is difficult to transform one kind of solid into another kind -- lead into gold? Defining something, defines one's relationship to it -- freezing it. Water flowing against a rock does not have a definition of the rock. It is in action and has to respond to inaction. Conventional category-oriented thinking leads to:
Working with meaningful experience: a four-dimensional spaceWhen are fluidity and flow appropriate? Much intellectual endeavour has effectively been a heroic process of draining "swamps" and "bogs". But recent years have discovered that these have a vital role as "wetlands". When is "drying out" appropriate and when does it contribute directly to the reduction of diversity of thinking and being? Has the advance of categorization been equivalent to "clearing the land", even covering it with concrete -- destroying experiential and cultural rainforests and hedgerows in the process? Is this why some resist "being concrete"?When is fixity just plain boring -- especially for the young? When is flow too chaotic? Nature has myriad ways of combining fixity and flow. Changing seasons allow for growing, evolving and decaying. People emulate this freedom in gardening, cultivation and the fashions of culture. How do people intervene in this four-fold world of experience?
There is however an immediacy to cultivation in these world that indicates the limitations of category fixity:
Invasion between worlds: experiencing intrusionEach of the above is a kind of "world" or way of being. Much of life functions at the interface between these worlds:
World-making at any moment produces ranges of viable life forms relating differently to the four worlds When one is centered within a particular world, its integrity and coherence may be experienced as invaded by other "logics" -- infuriating inconsistencies and adherences to other parameters, rules and paradigms -- "alien thinking". Like the hand-game of rock / scissors / paper -- each endeavours to subsume the others. In effect these intrusions are boundary disputes in the phase diagram (with each world a phase and the intrusions being from neighbouring parts of the diagram): In the container world, typical intrusions experienced include:It is intriguing that experience may only be possible at interfaces between worlds -- as the contrast between alternative modes of experience. In this sense all experience is of "invasion" -- whether as perpetrator or victim. The invasions above can then be understood as a basic set of 12 modes -- resonant wit |