Recently, while illegally streaming the first episode of
True Detective, I watched one of the lead characters, Rust Chole, played by Matthew McConaughey, argue that the development of consciousness, like all evolutionary adaptations over generations, occured accidentally and, more importantly, tragically. His reasons for this post-lapsarian ontology are, relevantly, non-christian and, more generically, non-religious. After this particularly dark diatribe, his partner, Martin "Marty" Hart, played by Woody Harrelson, urges his new friend to, basically, "shut the fuck up." At the nominal level, Hart seems to be scoffing at his partner's beliefs; however, in the context of the scene, he's actually attempting to protect his friend from himself. By espousing such controversial ideas, Chole positions himself in tension with pretty much all of Louisiana. Chole takes the hint but this newly appropriated taciturn-ity only allows for the unaddressed observation to linger in the air. Given all of the cognitive loops consciousness goes through to make some sense of the world, we--as an audience--may share Chole's concern and apprehension, even if we haven't, like him, lost a daughter to the universes' chaos. After watching consciousness--or
Geist--fail over and over again to find itself comfortable within the world, Hegel seems to indirectly address the absurdity of Chole's inquiry. In an attempt to find solid epistemological grounds, consciousness begins with the simplest of things: the Here, the Now, the This, and the I. Within a given space-time slice, what could be more direct and more accurate than these designations? Yes, of course, they are devoid of content; even so, communication seems to be happening, at least. As Hegel shows us, however, Here, Now, This, and I are, in fact, the most abstract universals. Upon her utterance, she invokes all Heres, all Nows, all Is, and all Thises. In an attempt to access the world unmediated, the subject ends up accessing nothing. Frustrated by her attempts to speak unequivocally, she migrates to another alternative: perception. While the first option, sense-certainty, with all its uncertainty, surly doesn't appeal to us in the most resounding fashion, we more or less rely on perception to at least avoid catastrophe within our every day movements. As I walk down the street, I have templates for how objects appear. Given these templates, the dumpsters, sidewalks, and rushing cars do not disorient me; in fact, at times, I hardly even realize they are there--they almost disappear, like the 'black' in between blinks. Where does that place us as far as knowing, though. This disposition seems to be a simple solution to a difficult problem, an almost stop-gap measure. The workability of this situation, though, makes it more desirable than the alternative: perpetual inundation of unfamiliar sensory data.
I agree with what you are saying, our minds categorize all the time to make things easier, this is why we stereotype people. If most Southerners drink sweet tea and say y'all then it is easy for our brains to just assume when we meet a Southerner that they fit the mold. On a macro and micro level our minds attempt to make sense of the huge amounts of data we ask it to process, which may lead to mistakes many times. However, as you suggest, the alternative would be constant inundation
ReplyDeleteThe idea of "templates" makes me think about social constructionism, and sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. In "The Social Construction of Reality," they discuss some of the topics we have touched on in class. If we approached the world without concepts, templates, or categories of understanding we would be terrified, overwhelmed, and hopelessly lost and confused. If we interacted with the world using only sense-certainty or perception we would spend every moment of our lives constantly inventing and reinventing our reality, and we would have no time or means to progress beyond the most basic interactions with the world. Berger and Luckmann argue that this need for an ordered world is why even beyond the primary level of naming objects and accepting agreed-upon categories and templates for reality, we create institutions.
ReplyDeleteIn other posts for this week people have been talking about how things progress from consciousness to consciousness and from age to age, and at least for Berger and Luckmann the answer is Institutions. Institutions such as the church, the family, education, government, etc. act as storehouses for the contributions of many many consciousnesses over time and act almost as meta-conciousnesses, which, like consciousness, grow and change overtime. Also like consciousness, institutions, in the fullest sense, include the process, all of the steps, and the vestiges of all previous incarnations of themselves. Think of our government, we are still arguing about a document written hundreds of years ago and it still undergirds much of the modern incarnation of government institution. However, there have clearly been massive changes in the structure and function of the government over time. That document, and all of those changes represent the development of an institution based on the input of many many conciousnesses.
Tim,
ReplyDeleteFun post. This is a bit of an unrelated thought, but I just realized the following while reading your post. I think when you say,"After watching consciousness--or Geist--fail over and over again [...]," that this is both correct and incorrect. I think Hegel tries to appeal to us in a way that we can understand, and that is why he may use the idea of "failure" intially to describe consciousness's struggles. However, I think that for Hegel this is bit contradictory because these "failures" are actually successes in that consciousness moves and progresses in them. This just goes to show how subtly we may prevent ourselves from speculative thinking from Hegel's point of view.
Your thoughts on "templates" are intriguing. Perception does appear useful or workable in some sense, but we did recognize its downfalls in class. One of those being that it is not able to capture everything about the object in question. Due to this templates, your daily experiences have been dulled, and we all experience this. Imagine just how much one misses out on--all of the interesting things that could be going on around you--when your main form of cognition is more akin to perception. However, If we were to consciously note that universals leave things out and try to improve upon cognition, we would be moving in a direction from which we have already come: sense-certainty.