Longitude

We are no longer who we were!

Each self has passed the other by

And in so passing, passed themselves

you are not you

nor am I, I.

When you were

who you were before

And I was

who I was back when

We shared a space

And time called 'Ours'...

Now you've a now

I am not in.

Where you are I cannot say

Where I'll be I cannot tell

The who and we and where and when

Has left my compass-soul to spin

Wheeling, seeking

That place,

that time

where You were You when I was I.

The Offense of Overlooking

It is easy to suppose that the damage done to souls resembles that done to the body—that an attack on the former resembles an attack on the latter. But is this so obvious? Is it even true? A body ignored/overlooked by attackers is not attacked. But a soul ignored....is it also un-attacked? Or is the reverse the case—i.e. is it that, with regard to souls, to be ignored is to be attacked?

Our souls seem to know this difference between physical and spiritual damages, even if we do not. The soul, so acutely vulnerable to indifference, even detects a certain compliment built in to overt forms of attack/aggression, emotional, physical—or, at least, such aggressions come with one great solace one might whisper to oneself while weathering the blows: “Yes, there is this—but I have not been overlooked!” Those directly damaging us take account of us, consider us of some account, deal with us, face us. Malice pays attention. Personal attacks are attacks; but they are also personal. To be intentionally injured is precisely not to be ignored. We are taken seriously; we appear to the attacker as significant in some way, or seem to. “He hit me” the lyric tracing this consolation goes, “And it felt like a kiss...”

Compare this to the incomparable crushing power of a casual indifference, the common defenses of which (“Oh, I didn’t realize you...”, “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you...”, "I didn't think...") simply doubles the force of the original blow. Indifference all the more authentic for its being unintentional! an overlooking so complete we do not even appear as something missing; our absence to them an absence so thorough it does not register as a lack--seems natural--goes entirely unmarked. This, from the soul's point of view, compares unfavorably with the franker forms of abuse just mentioned. For what defense is there for our initial insignificance? Some solace! Not to be thrown aside only because one was never taken in hand? Not to be thought of evilly only because one was not thought of at all? Such a defense is no defense, but rather, a new and deeper obliviousness that needs defending. And this double-offense—this overlooking—is emotionally frustrating. For it generates a sense of loss and anger that is difficult to place; its source hides from us. This is because it is generated by nothing that happens (but should not), but rather, by things that do not happen (but should). I speak, he does not answer. I enter, she does not look up. I wave, he does not see. I am in town! She does not mention meeting today...nor tomorrow...and it descends on my mind with a slow, sad power that it has not and will not cross her mind to try.

In its most spiritually lethal form, this absence of engagement, acknowledgement, openness—this abscess which hollows me out, leaves me empty— is not aimed towards me by intentions—yet it is oriented towards me, strikes me unerringly, does not miss, devastates me. No one nods to me: this does not strike me as neutral. No one speaking to me says something to me. And non-acknowledgement, this easy overlooking, accumulates. To move through the day, the week, the month, in this void of acknowledgement is to walk through a gauntlet whereby one’s insignificance is shouted from every corner; one's irrelevance is unfailingly articulated by what people neither say nor do. No one says anything to me. What else am I to hear? No offense is meant towards me in particular, yes. But again, what solace is this? For this is consistent with the thought that NOTHING is meant towards me. And this is not nothing! Quite the contrary. It seems to unravel my meaning—seems the greatest possible offense. ************

There have been awful, even overtly violent, reactions to the quiet brutality of non-acknowledgement. Instead of responding to non-acknowledgement by resolving to give acknowledgement to others even in the absence of receiving it, as Jesus taught—instead of responding to being overlooked by making a private promise to oneself never to be an overlooker— a wounded vanity is nursed; the fact that others have deep concerns one cannot fathom is ignored; feelings fester; revenge is sought...

Some seek to avenge non-acknowledgement with weaponry; and those who take this road deserve to be put down; the proper response to such random violence is precision violence—an ethical violence for which we need not apologize. But note that, given the nature of the offense, such outrages are also always failures in what they hope to effect. These physical revenges for this spiritual offense are inevitably inadequate; their end is never attained; they always strike too shallow. Non-acknowledgement cannot be avenged in this way. This is not opinion; it is analytic. For those who explode announce to the world the inestimable esteem in which they hold the acknowledgement of others. They say “You do not think enough of me even to form an opinion of me—and your non-opinion of me is all I think about!” This high opinion of the opinion of others is precisely what makes so unbearable to them their being overlooked. They then set out, absurdly, to attack indifference from others with intense interest in others (recall our second paragraph). And in this clash of anger and indifference, indifference inevitably wins, regardless of where the bullets go. For again, to arm oneself to say “You WILL acknowledge me” is to say how inestimably important the acknowledgement of others is—all while still being overlooked (what has their attention, you fools, is your gun, not your person). And this means such efforts are necessarily unable to compete with the original offense. All the bravado ends up an expression of impotence; waving weapons only ensures the weapons-wavers will themselves be overlooked in their last moments—will not be seen, will remain invisible to those they threaten in retribution for not seeing them. The gun in such circumstances is nothing less than a cloak of invisibility, erasing from their target's mind the significance of the gunman in favor of the significance of their own now-threatened selves. So the reasoning here is entirely broken. Such vengeances are contradictions incarnate. The offense the unacknowledged hoped to avenge was not an attack in the traditional sense, making traditional counter-attacks ridiculous. That original offense was, as we said, an effortless overlooking—something with which no effort, however violent, can compete. So the aggrieved come to collect the attention they feel they were owed—but their approach ensures they leave with none. Meanwhile, in the midst of their fallacious fantasies of revenge, they pay to the overlooking others, with their last breaths, the inestimable compliment of attention.

To raise points like these about the offense of overlooking is not, as some would have it, to diminish the culpability of the mind which can plan—much less relish—such a fearsome, if feckless, revenge. Often nothing more is involved than an adolescent grandiosity—an indignation that seeks to skip the hard work of first being dignified; it is also true that one may be complicit in one’s own overlooking. And as noted, there are alternatives to dealing with non-acknowledgement, some of which suggest that not to be acknowledged oneself is required to produce selves capable of the most beautiful form of acknowledgement: that form which takes no account of whether its infinite attentions to others are ever returned. *********************

So nothing said about the vengeful need be unsaid--particularly as regards culpability. We are not responsible for their outrages. But, in our eagerness to exculpate ourselves, we should not miss the broader point these outrages and their paradoxical structure bring to light. We should be aware that, though we “mean no offense”, it does not follow that we are not giving it. We should remember that the soul takes greatest offense, not at what we do, but what we do not, mean. We are thus, at this level of interpersonal interaction, responsible for more than what we mean to do. To lack the positive intention to acknowledge (or not acknowledge) another is never to leave them unrobbed or unscarred, because where two souls are present, one can never leave the other completely alone. Total neutrality of response is impossible. One welcomes or one rejects. One takes note of, or condemns as unnotable. There is thus a certain environment we may create, and towards which we daily contribute, by the simplest sins of omission--by an unconscious refusal to meet the eyes of others, by a hundred effortless turnings-away a day, by a comfortable numbness or easy indifference which it pleases us to think of as ‘autonomy’, ‘minding my own business’ or ‘keeping to myself’. And this lack of responsiveness—this overlooking— is something for which we are, irretrievably and at every minute, responsible.

It seems, however, that the ever-presence of this relentless responsibility should strike us as ethically encouraging. It is ever-present, yes: but that is to say we can fulfill it anywhere. It gives us no quarter: but this is to say it can be met at any time. More generally: to say we are responsible is to say we are able to respond. And we can respond to this. For if effortless overlooking is the greatest offense, we can resolve to look more carefully—can consistently and quietly refuse to be so steadfastly ‘neutral’ to each other, so discrete, so 'withdrawn' (which implies a prior natural proximity). Moreover, in the everyday of overt actions, the change required by the resolve to undo our effortless offense itself generally requires little effort. By resolving to acknowledge each other, we not only undo our offense of overlooking: by looking to acknowledge, we answer a positive requirement most often entirely discharged by nothing over and above a wink and a nod. The greatest attack on the soul is thus not merely undone but inverted by an instant’s wordless welcome. And how blessedly little this inversion typically costs! “My yoke is easy; my load is light”—too true if the ethical inversion of overlooking is effected by nothing over and above this un-defensive openness towards others—this acknowledgement—this availability/self-presenting--a simple, raised-eye ‘Here am I, and I see you there’", to each other--nothing more!

THREAD 1: The Trouble With Souls POST 3: How a Soul is Like a Hammer We are not at all dissuaded from pursuing our original question “What is a soul?” (see post 2 of this thread); but Ryle has given us fair warning: to ask questions about what something IS turns out to be a tricky business; for as Ryle shows, the main word in our question, 'is', is ambiguous. Ryle noted one such ambiguity of ‘is’: to say a word 'is' or 'exists' is not the same thing as saying that a physical object is/exists. Our confusion between the existence of 'souls' and the existence of souls (argued Ryle) is what led us to look for 'soul' as though it were an object. But the ambiguities of ‘is’ do not stop with that noted by Ryle. Consider the assertions ‘Bob is blonde’, “Bob is a builder” and “Bob is” (i.e. “Bob exists”). It is not at all obvious that we mean the same thing by ‘is’ in any of these cases. Is being blonde (a physical feature) anything like being a builder (having an occupation)? Are either of these anything like being Bob? So if we ask, “What is a soul?” or “What is it to be a soul?” we had better be more careful with our copula. When we ask, as we are now doing, a question of the form “What is a ___?” we need to say more about what sort of IS we have in mind... ************** ************************ ******************************* ************* The idea of different sorts of ‘is’—and so different ways which souls might exist—might be—may seem strange. Yet it is not strange—or at least, we suppose these different ‘is’s’ and use them every day. The easiest way to show that this is so is to forget about souls for a moment, and instead consider the humble hammer. Let us ask, “What is a hammer? What it is to be a hammer? What is it for a hammer to exist/be?” We immediately notice that what it is to be a hammer has two very interesting features—features which are intimately connected. First: as we saw earlier with souls, a hammer has a strangely tenuous relation with the physical world. That is, there is no obvious answer to “What is it to be a hammer?” in terms of what a hammer must be physically made of. For a hammer is able to be made of many different materials and take very different physical forms, but still remain what it is. We could (and do) make hammers out of all sorts of materials in all sorts of ways (a ball peen hammer, a giant jack-hammer, a plastic toy hammer, a steel hammer, a ceramic hammer, etc.). What it is to be a hammer is remarkably tough, even impossible, to physically specify. This does not, of course, make us suspect hammers of enjoying an essence which is immaterial or ‘ghostly’. But it does make their ‘being’ hard for the physicalist to nail down. Second: the usual scientific stories we tell about the origin of a ‘natural’ object in the world (say, a cat, rock, or tree) do not apply very well to things like hammers. After all, a hammer is not something we find in nature, awaiting us to use it to hammer (‘Aha! There’s one! I can use it because it really is a hammer!’). That would be a very bad history of hammers, or of any artifact. Such a history, taken to explain what sort of thing hammers really are and/or what it is to really be one overlooks the fact that we did not discover or observe a hammer being a hammer by itself, “in the wild”. Rather, it was purpose which brought hammers into being. There was and is no ‘natural’ hammer. A hammer is, originally and essentially, any physical thing we use for hammering. So the history of hammers runs purpose-first. The first ‘hammer’ was a handy rock, perhaps; then a rock selected for its propitious shape; then a stick tied to a rock and swung overhead, etc. We eventually engineer them, of course—tailor them for specific tasks, and now buy them off the shelf. But to treat a hammer as something which we discovered is really for hammering, as we might discover a cat which, do what we like, really is a cat is, at best, an eccentric doctrine. For with things like hammers, intent is original. What it is for gets there before the first hammer, because for hammers, for-ness comes first. This is why one cannot give an account of what it is to be a hammer by listing what parts it has. For in the case of things like hammers, its purpose precedes its parts. Unlike natural objects, which seem to have what parts they do regardless of anyone’s purposes, things like hammers have the parts they do solely because of their purpose. Indeed, this is what it is to engineer them. What counts as a part of the hammer—the reason a hammer has the features it has—is not a purposeless story. No, what parts a hammer includes is explained by whatever we have included in it in order to further its purpose. To be a hammer, then, is to be for something—some purpose— not to merely to be, or to be made of, something, in a physical or ‘scientific’ sense. The ‘being’ of hammers thus seems a different sort of being than that enjoyed by natural objects. Now note: this purpose definitive of the being of hammers—what it IS FOR— cannot be found by looking at the hammer alone. The for-ness of a hammer cannot be found within it, cannot be grasped by analyzing it, staring at it. Rather, this purpose comes from outside the hammer itself, and pre-dates the existence of hammers. As to not being found within it: the purpose comes from outside hammers—in this case, from us/our intentions (‘Now—I need something solid, shaped like so...’). Thus all the physical variances we experience with wildly different forms of hammers are unified NOT by any physical properties in hammers at all; instead they are united only by the aims for which all hammers are formed, the common end to which they were all assigned. As to pre-dating the existence/being of hammers: this purpose necessarily pre-dates the ‘being’ or existence of hammers because the hammer’s very being rests on its commission/assignment. Without the aim of hammering, no physical item can be commissioned to hammer; thus this assignment/commission was already in place before a single hammer could be. A hammer’s being is in this way premised on a purpose it did not assign itself, was always prior to itself, but without which it could not be what it is. Of course, the hammer is not unique in being best understood not by having its parts observed, but by having its purpose identified. Other examples of this kind of ‘being’ come easy, arising in everyday life: drinks, love-tokens, weapons, gifts—none of these things have strong ties to some specific physically discoverable composition which defines them; for what defines them is not their composition at all. What makes them what they are is simply what they are for— drinking, courting, fighting, and giving, respectively. To go on to talk about what such ‘things’ really are (‘Is that sunflower really a gift?’) is a mistake which, if pursued, would lead straight-away to some embarrassing ‘observations’ (‘It is really a gift? In that case, look at that field of gifts growing there!’). ************************************************************************************ All the heavy lifting now done, we need only transpose from hammers to souls. We said at the top that if we wish to ask “What is a soul?” or “What is a person?” we must get the different IS questions straight. By way of accomplishing this we identified the ‘IS’ question appropriate to things like hammers. We can now see why to ask a ‘regular’ IS question about hammers is to have already made an error—is to ask what a hammer IS, when, if we want to get down to the essentials of hammers, we meant to ask what a hammer IS FOR. This BEING/BEING-FOR distinction firmly in hand, we can now more intelligently ask this: When we ask what a soul IS, what kind of ‘IS’ question are we really asking? Are we asking the sort of IS question which seems appropriate to finding the essence of things like cats, rocks, and waterfalls: namely, “What are its parts/processes?” Or are we asking the sort of IS question most appropriate to things like hammers—i.e. “What is its purpose?” “What is it for?” Later posts will justify our moving in this more ‘purpose-full’ direction as regards souls/selves…but for now, and in sum, our idea is this: We have sufficient reason and resources to entertain and explore the possibility that to ask “What is a soul/self/person?” may be taken in the sense of ‘What is a hammer?’ or ‘What is a gift?’—i.e. in the sense of things which are not properly characterized by their parts, but by their purpose. To look past the purpose and to focus on the parts is not, as the science-minded may imagine, to look ‘further’, ‘deeper’, or to understand more. Rather, it is to abbreviate—even amputate— the correct question to ask about our souls/selves (“What is a person for?”) with a shorter, misleading, and much easier one (“What is a person?”). In looking to understand what it is to be a person—to be a self or soul—we must therefore endeavor to avoid the prejudice built in to this abbreviated IS question, and instead ask it in its alternative, longer, and more soul-appropriate form...

There's been a recent spate of books giving FDR and his depression-era economic policies a pretty hard time (see, for instance, Powell's "FDR's Folly", and Amity Shlaes' "The Forgotten Man"). My own objection to FDR on this fine Halloween Holiday is far less scholarly and far more specific.

FDR: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

REBUTTAL: "Hellooo, Danny. Come play with us...forever...and ever...."

Thread 1: The Trouble with Souls Post 2: How ‘having a soul’ is like ‘having breakfast’ Though there are troubles going the physicalist route, there are likewise troubles if we take a more traditionalist road with regard to the soul. For, as noted in the previous post, the soul has a tendency to merely hover over and/or haunt the solid and well-behaved bodies we are sure we have. Traditional thought says this is because the ‘stuff’ of souls is special, made of spiritual material which ambles about, unencumbered by physics, while nonetheless successfully interacting with the physical. That is: I—or my soul— act, USING my body as its instrument. My body is a tool of my soul. For example, I use my brain to think, as though my brain were a machine I might operate, gripping its physical levers with ghostly hands. But this proves to involve considerable problems—in particular, how does the soul’s ‘ghostly hands’ get a grip on physical things/levers? How might a non-physical thing cause a physical event/act? A problem, no doubt! Yet, some say, there is an easier explanation: the reason the soul can ‘go anywhere’ and enjoys such an indigent and ethereal lifestyle with respect to the physical world and its laws, is that it travels at the pleasure of the imagination. Souls are as elusive and anarchic as they are because they are imaginary. It is our imagination which stuffs the human body with soul. Of course, more has to be said here. Part of correcting a mammoth and nearly universal ‘mistake of imagination’ is to explain why it has been so persistently made. What could have possibly led almost all of humankind to imagine there is something over and above the body— some crucial additional essence, private place, special spirit amidst the merely physical--a ‘ghost in the machine’? What are we to make of the fact that the bulk of the world believes the same ghost story—has seen, still sees, and deeply cares about, the same ghost? Gilbert Ryle offers the following on behalf of the claim that the soul is a ghost of grammar.... Suppose I sit down before a hearty platter of bacon, pancakes, and eggs. I happily dig in to all three—yet say, between mouthfuls: “I sure enjoy this bacon, these eggs, and these pancakes—but what I’d really like is this ‘breakfast’ everyone raves about.” Should I say such a thing, you would no doubt point out to me that I have made a basic linguistic error. For to ‘have’ breakfast is not to have something over and above this morning’s eggs, bacon, and pancakes. ‘Breakfast’ (the single quotes matter greatly here!) is a NAME for what I am already having, not itself another physical thing to have, which could make its own appearance on my plate, be swabbed with syrup, and/or be stabbed with a fork. That is, where morning meals are concerned, and multiple realizability issues (i.e. that I could have had oatmeal instead) are bracketed, it is correct to say this:

Eggs+Bacon+Pancakes= ‘My Breakfast’

Look at these terms and their relation: ‘breakfast’ is not a FOURTH THING; rather, it is a NAME for the other three together. Vis-à-vis what is on my plate in the a.m., ‘having’ eggs, bacon, and pancakes JUST IS to ‘have’ breakfast, full stop. Now, Ryle suggests, let us move from considering the having of breakfasts to the having of souls—or rather, move from considering the grammatical function of terms like ‘breakfast’ to the grammatical function of terms like ‘soul’. Suppose you say to me: “I see very well that I have a physical body and experiences in and of the physical world —but where is this mysterious, otherworldly, intimately personal ‘I’ I seem to have in addition to my body and my experiences? Where is my SELF? In our looser language: where is my soul? By Ryle’s lights, this is as bad as the breakfast question—and it is based on the same poor grammatical math. For, roughly speaking,

Body+Experiences=‘Self/Soul’

without remainder, just as bacon, eggs, and pancakes involved no ‘breakfast’ left to eat. If I have had my bacon, eggs, and pancakes, I can be said to ‘have breakfast’; but I will find no ‘breakfast’, if/insofar as I suppose ‘breakfast’ to be an additional ingestible. Likewise, I can (trivially) be said to ‘have a soul’—but only insofar as I do not expect to find the soul to be something additional to my physical being/body. This, Ryle argues, is the sense in which your ‘having a soul’ is a grammatical mistake, where the soul is treated as some distinct thing one might have over and above one’s physical properties—the sense in which (the traditional, unique, and private) 'you' and/or 'me' is a function of a grammatical error, to which all peoples with a language are prone. His argument, to which we have here been faithful in structure, claims to explain not only where the notion of soul-having comes from; but also why (being merely a term, mistakenly sought as a thing) the soul has proved so elusive, immaterial, ghostly. For wouldn't our 'breakfast' appear likewise, should we seek it out while eating our pancakes, eggs, and bacon?*************** There are problems with Ryle’s view we will not consider here--problems over and above the absurd difference in significance with respect to the reduction of souls to 'souls' and the same grammatical reduction run on 'breakfast'. Suffice to say here that Ryle’s overall view led him to some rather public and painful intellectual struggles with very simple notions we take for granted every day--for example, the notion of ‘talking to ones self’. After all, the post-reduction idea of talking to one's 'self' (note the quotes) fares poorly; it turns out to be hard to characterize talking to my 'self'--perhaps because it is hard to plausibly characterize a dialogue between a grammar user and his own grammatical mistake. But, problems aside, what Ryle does succeed in showing is how careful one must be when using copulas and soul-talk together. What he does successfully show us is that there is something remarkably peculiar about the 'being' involved in ‘being a soul’ or 'being a person'—a peculiarity we will look at in a string of future posts...

Thread 1: The Trouble with Souls All Soul’s Day approaching—let’s talk souls! Thread here will, like the others, proceed at the will and choosing of the lovely, talented, and sleep-deprived Broadcast Depth crew (pictured above, in its entirety). Said crew has also devised an ingenious means for indicating a continuing thread--namely, '...' at the end of the post (Yep--crew is that good.) On to souls and their troubles! *********** Post 1: The Trouble with Souls One of persistent troubles with purporting to have a soul is that one is never quite sure where to put it. It seems accurate, so far as such talk can be, to say that our soul is ‘in’ our body; but justifying our choice of preposition is not so easy, given the soul’s itinerant nature. The soul's casual relation to body and place has a historical pedigree, as peoples, ancient and modern, tend to stash their souls in very different places. Ancient Hebrews favored the kidneys. Western poets prefer the heart, which they subsequently tend to either lose to various (generally ‘raven-haired’) persons, leave in various locations (e.g. Paris, San Francisco), or both. Philosophers who take soul-talk seriously tend to make the head (i.e. mind, rationality) the seat of the soul, and deride all other locations as unworthy of so ethereal a guest. Others, however, tire of the search and profess themselves quite satisfied with the body, no soul required. The less humble of these go on to profess to be on the verge of discovering just which bodily parts and functions have colluded to generate such an elusive essence; they promise to produce a public account of the most inner person. Though at odds over details, all such persons are agreed that talk of souls, hearts, etc., is well and good, provided it is all seen for what it is: a bit of folk-psychological fable-ry. Yet such ‘reductionists’ tend to lapse into physicalist fables of their own, as Ambrose Bierce happily points out in his incomparable dictionary under his entry for 'heart'.

HEART: An automatic, muscular blood-pump. Figuratively, this useful organ is said to be the seat of emotions and sentiments—a very pretty fancy ...[for] it is now known that the sentiments and emotions reside in the stomach, being evolved from food by chemical action of the gastric fluid. The exact process by which a beefsteak becomes a feeling—tender or not, according to the age of the animal from which it was cut; the successive stages of elaboration through which a caviar sandwich is transmuted to a quaint fancy and reappears as a pungent epigram; the marvelous functional methods of converting a hard-boiled egg into religious contrition, or a cream-puff into a sigh of sensibility—these things have been patiently ascertained by M. Pasteur, and by him expounded with convincing lucidity. (See, also, my monograph, The Essential Identity of the Spiritual Affections and Certain Intestinal Gases Freed in Digestion—4to, 687 pp.) In a scientific work entitled, I believe, Delectatio Demonorum (John Camden Hotton, London, 1873) this view of the sentiments receives a striking illustration; and for further light consult Professor Dam's famous treatise on Love as a Product of Alimentary Maceration.

As usual, Bierce’s citations here are entirely fictional; and his account of the viewpoint he is skewering rather uncharitable. But the view he impugns does engage in a certain 'just-so-story'-style physicalist fiction; it must, for its discoveries of self, consciousness, and soul are all, as they say in publishing, 'forthcoming'. And, while some excellent work proceeds humbly, and piecemeal, Bierce's characterization of a certain form of physicalist-philosophical ambition is not so far off--is, in point of fact, a perfectly serious reductio of soul-to-body reductions. For the very idea of a clear physical/causal explanatory path from 'a hard boiled egg to...religious contrition'--the very notion that one might chart the conversion of 'a cream puff into a sigh of sensibility' is, to say the least, an extraordinary sort of assumption--yet it is an assumption which, in some form or other, those who seek a public and physical explanation of the soul, our selves, and our inner life, do make...