2014 Personality Lecture 12: Binswanger & Boss (Phenomenology)

we're going to talk some more about existentialism today and I'm going to talk to you about a couple of Swiss psychiatrists bin swanger and boss just as a starting point their psychological Viewpoint was influenced to a large degree by a philosopher named heiger and heiger considered himself a student of being and for piger the the main mystery of the world was why why it existed and the the best way to think about the Phenom he was a phenomenologist and the best way to think about phenomenology and existentialism is that phenomenology is the study of experience as it's lived and then existentialism puts a Twist on that because existentialists assume that being has a implicitly moral Dimension and the existentialists psychologists presume that pathology at least in part is a consequence of a disturbed relationship a disturbed moral relationship with the self and being it's very tricky thinking and it's not often handled in personality courses anymore but I I think that's a big mistake the phenomenological element in particular the thing I really like about it is that it's a really good counterpart to Modern materialistic Viewpoint because it puts Consciousness at the center of being instead of treating it as if it's something that's a secondary phenomena that emerges from something else and our modern presuppositions especially the scientific presuppositions are what pass for scientific presuppositions are generally extremely reductionist and they assume that Consciousness is in some manner that's not yet being determined like a secondary byproduct of fundamentally material processes and it's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis but I wouldn't say there's any real evidence for it I mean it's hard to over State how mysterious Consciousness is as phenomena for heiger Consciousness was a mystery that was in some sense equivalent to the mystery of being and the way that the reason for that was that he couldn't conceive of existence without a sub without a subject so you could imagine if the world was stripped of Consciousness it's very difficult to describe what would be left I mean if you take a very straightforward materialistic Viewpoint you could make the presumption that if everything that was conscious was eradicated then things would be just the way they are now but that I think that's a shallow Viewpoint because Consciousness is what gives everything a perspective gives it a size it gives it a duration and it gives it colors and and all the qualities that we associate with being and without that Consciousness all that's at least incomprehensible and and then there are deeper problems that are dealt with by people like John Wheeler who's a Quantum physicist who believes that Consciousness is necessarily is necessary for Quantum indeterminacy to resolve itself into something that's concrete and actual so wheeler and and many physicists like him put consciousness at the center of the process that turns potential into actuality now at the same time these Quantum ideas were being developed these philosophical ideas and psychological ideas that I'm describing were being developed and they provide such a different take on the structure of reality that that I think they're indispensable I also think they're they're they're interesting in Rel ship in particular to P's thought because the phenomenologists have a constructivist element to their thinking in that they believe that Consciousness plays a constructive role in the establishment of being so we're going to look at being so again the way to think about this is you got to flip your Viewpoint in a sense is you have to think about your experience as reality and that everything that's inside that experience so to speak as a subcomponent of that reality instead of thinking of material things as the reality and your experience somehow emerging out of those it's it's an inversion of what constitutes the fundamental reality and so you can think about it in sense as an intellectual exercise I mean most of the way that people think is predicated on some kind of implicit set of axioms and if you change the axioms you can ALS you can often shed light on reality in a new and interesting way and so we're going to walk through the phenomenological Viewpoint and we're going to see why and how that might be interesting the phenomenological and existential viewpoints and then I'm in the next lecture I'm going to put a Twist on that because what you think about the nature of reality appears to have some powerful relationship with how that reality unfolds holds itself and the existentialists the phenomenologists were very big Believers in the reality of subjective experience and the existentialists were very big Believers in the ethical responsibility of the individual and I'm going to talk to you about what happened in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959 which is a period of world history that isn't well covered in our culture I mean everybody knows about the Nazi Holocaust but very few people know that between 30 million and 60 million people were killed as a consequence of internal repression in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959 that's a figure that's five times as big as the commonly held figures for the Holocaust and the reason I'm going to introduce that to you is first you should know about it because it's the Stellar example of what happens when people abandon their individual responsibility and second and related to that it's an object lesson in why in what happened happens when the presuppositions that the phenomenologists and the existentialists held about the nature of reality were completely dismissed in in favor of a rationalist utopianism and rationalist Utopias ideologically rational Utopias killed millions and millions of people in the 20th century and it seems to me that you can make a fairly powerful case that if uh if if your view of reality when it's played out in the social World Turns genocidal time and time again there's probably something existentially wrong with it and then a second derivation of that might be if there's something that existentially wrong with a Viewpoint in in what way can you consider it tenable even if it makes sense and it's rational if the outcome is genocide and deceit and misery it's perfectly reasonable to presume that that's evidence that it's wrong now most of you and this is particularly true I think of universities are taught a kind of at least a kind of implicit moral relativism you know that it's that it's and that's fair that's reasonable from a scientific perspective at least to some point but there's a problem with that because there are forms of moral presupposition that seem to lead to horrendous ends and it's always struck me because I grew up like you and under the shadow of nuclear destruction so to speak it always has struck me that if certain viewpoints lead to genocidal outcomes and if they do that consistently then it's extremely dangerous for us not to act as if that's wrong and of course if something's wrong then that also implies that something is right right because the opposite of wrong is right and so even if you can't necessarily figure out what's right you might be able to ground yourself to some degree by figuring out what's wrong and so we'll walk through the philosophy and the psychology first and then we'll walk through the sociological consequences of its abandonment in a sense and well then you can see for yourself if you think that this perspective is worthy of some consideration it's very complicated well we'll look at this first phenomenology in part is based on this idea of dazzine and dazzine means being there and again this way of simplifying that is to think about it as your experience and then this is a map I've made of people's experience which I think is at least roughly equivalent to the phenomenologists dine and it has the advantage that I can explain it well so I'm going to use it and so the phenomenologists believe that the past and the present and the future are all tangled up together in your current experience in that say everything that you're doing is related to the Future which it of course is because you're sitting in this class and that has some consequences for whether or not you graduate and that has some conse consquences for your status and your career moving forward and you're perfectly aware of that so that you experience the meaning of the the lecture say in the context of your conceptions of the future and of course the same thing is true of your experience now because of your past and so the past and the future in some sense are here now it's partly because when you're experiencing things things you consider your current situation and you consider where it is that you're headed and so design also has this element of becoming in it there's you're not just a static thing and you don't ever experience anything that's in your environment as something that's merely static you always experiencing you're always experiencing it in relationship to your plans for transformation and that might be short term like maybe you're bored of the class because you need to go get a cup of coffee and then that colors your current experience or maybe it's longterm or it's medium-term it doesn't matter the point is is that your Viewpoint of the future conditions your experience in the present so in some sense the future is already here it's also the case that what you do now is going to have effects and consequences into the future here's a here's a more complicated consequence so you're somewhere now and you're going somewhere in the future and one of the consequences of that is that your nervous system it's one way of looking at it parses up the world in relationship to the relationship between those two polls so for example when you walk into a class and your plan is to sit down then you're immediately going to perceive an array of chairs imagine you were coming in here to clean up the room instead of sitting down for a lecture well then the things that would manifest themselves to you would be qualitatively different so maybe you'd only be looking for the things that were out of place or maybe you're coming in here because you're spectacularly Lonesome and you think that you know there's somebody here who might be a potential partner then the world's going to array itself in front of you in a different Manner and the degree to which what you're pursuing in relationship to where you are determines even how the objects of the world manifest themselves to you is indeterminate it happens to a tremendous degree and it's not only that things manifest themselves to you as objects in relationship to your conception of your current situation and your goals but your emotions are also hang on that platform so for example if you're writing an exam and you expect to see you're hoping for a c and you get a B then you're going to be extremely happy about it but if you are hoping for an A and you get a B then you're going to be extremely unhappy about it and what's interesting about that is that in some sense the stimulus as the behaviors would have it is the same but the emotional consequence is actually reversed it seems to me to be sort of related to the idea of Maya which is a Buddhist idea which is that people live inside a framework that's conditioned by desire and as a consequence it's not actually real and the the unreality the unreality of it is that you can change what manifests itself to you and the importance of what manifests itself to you by changing your conception of your of your goal your future or also by changing your conception of who and where you are right now and so in that sense being your experience is malleable and it's it's it's malleable at least in part as a consequences of the choices that you make and so what that implies from a phenomenological perspective is that free will and the manner in which the world manifests itself are integrally related and from an existential point of view it implies that you actually Bear a fair bit of responsibility for the ongoing quality of your experience and the existentialists would presume that that responsibility is built into the nature of being there's no way out of it it's like a precondition for being the the word phenomenon is from a Greek word and the Greek word is FIS thigh and what FIS thigh means is to shine forth now one of the presuppositions of the phenomenological Viewpoint is that reality in in some sense is composed of what shines forth now this is a very difficult thing to explain but I I can do it partly this way way so when you're moving from point A to point B you can parse the world up into tools and obstacles I showed you that in the last slide tools are things that get you to where you're going and so what the tools are depends on where you're going and obstacles are the things that get in your way and so if you perceive tools then that makes you happy because happiness at least in part is experienced in relationship to movement towards a goal and if you experience nothing but obstacles that's going to produce negative emotion so this is a variant of that and the variant is when you're moving from point A to point B you can experience things that you predict or desire and those make you hopeful and happy or you can experience things that are unpredictable and those make you those are threats and they make you anxious but it's broader than that they disinhibit negative emotion in a more General sense but sometimes you can experience something that's so unpredicted and so shocking that it blows the framework that you're using it it it what would you say the phenomenologists called that loss of world the framework the thing that you encounter is so unexpected that its appearance blows the structure of being a part and that happens for example when people are betrayed by someone that they love or maybe they're very seriously hurt or they develop a very serious illness or or a dream that they've been pursuing for a long period of time is rendered Impossible by some failure or or some unexpected natural occurrence now part of the question is what do you experience when your World falls apart your world emerges from something and then when it falls apart it falls back into that something that chaotic state and the the phenomenologists say that what you experience most basically is meaning so from from a phenomenological perspective when when you're looking at the world you perceive meaning and then you derive objects from that and you derive the objects in relationship to your representation of your current state and your future state so from a phenomenological perspective the base of the world is meaning now I I can give you some hints about how that plays itself out so so so one interesting phenomena is how interest guides your ability to concentrate okay so let's say that you've got an array of difficult papers on your desk and you have to read them now some of those papers independently of their difficulty some of those papers will will presume that you're actually interested in and some of them you're not interested in and so some the papers that you're interested in come with this quality that the phenomenologists described as shining forth there's something about them that grips your attention that enables you to concentrate that enables you to learn and that enables you to remember and in a relatively effort effortless way whereas the other papers that you're not interested in assuming they're of equivalent difficulty it's very difficult to focus your attention on and they lie there in sort of an inert manner so the F fenes thigh phenomena is partially apprehendable by considering what the difference is to you between something that you're interested in and something that you're not now someone like Yung would think of that interest as a consequence of an internal process a psychological process that's guiding your attention but the phenomenologists at least in It's tricky because they go both ways on this would consider the fact that some things are illuminated so that they're easy to concentrate on is actually a function of being itself it isn't something that you apply to the world it's a characteristic of being some things shine forth as meaning ful and some things don't now the existentialist would say at least in part that you have a duty to follow the things that shine forth that's where the moral element of this comes in now bin swanger said for example what we perceive are first and foremost not impressions of taste tone smell or touch not even things or objects but meanings and then bin swanger and boss split on the reason for why some things manifest themselves as compelling and some things don't bin swanger would say that you come equipped with an it's like it's a Canan idea with an a prior ontological structure and that's imagine you're reading a book so then you might say and the book obviously has meaning you're reading it and you're you're into it you might ask yourself where is the book and you could say well the book is the physical object that I have in my hand I mean that's that's what people act like in some sense or at least that's what they say they act like the book is the physical object but then person a might read the book and say I thought that was a terrible book and person B might read that book and say I thought that was a great book and person A and B might might differ on how they responded to the characters and they're going to differ in terms of how they imagine the situation and like there's a tremendous amount of flexibility in exactly what constitutes the book and so you'd say well the book is an artifact and the artifact is produced by the the author but of course it's not just produced by the author because it's produced inside a cultural context that shaped the author and that shaped you and then you bring something to bear on the book which is the sum total of your individual knowledge and your enculturated knowledge and so what that means is that it's almost as if there's a pattern that constitutes you and there's a pattern that constitutes the book and when you put the two of them together you get a juxtoposition of the two patterns and it's the juxtoposition that's the book and it's it's the realization of it this in some part that's led to The Oddities of postmodernism and and to the claim that there's no canonical meaning to Any Given text because it's a matter of interpretation it's like yeah well just because it's a matter of interpretation and even maybe just because the interpretations are very wide in potential scope that doesn't mean that the text doesn't have any meaning but you can understand how that idea might have come about now for bin swanger the reason the book would be meaningful at least in part is because you're imposing something on it and so that would be your individuality boss would say the opposite he would say well no the book itself is manifesting it its meaning to you in some sense of its own accord and that's because boss doesn't necessarily make a distinction between the thing the book and the entire context within which it's embedded and he would consider the meaning emerging as a consequence of that entire context you can't separate the book out from the situation in which it's embedded here's a map that I made a while back that helped me understand this at least to some degree the phenomenologists talk about three elements of of being of desine one is the umw the other another is the mitw and the third is the igen wel and there are various way to conceptualize these and I can give you a couple now the umwelt is the natural world so when we say nature that's what we mean we say well human beings live in nature we have a natural environment so the idea that there's a natural environment is like a canonical idea and and you know we we even think of the natural environment sometimes as the unspoiled natural environment as if there are natural environments that exist in the complete absence of human Endeavor and then we also have a social world and the social world is the world of culture so there's nature and culture and that's umwelt and mwth and then finally other than that there's the world of the self which is the part of being your being that's only accessible to you so it's you in in the middle of culture in the middle of Nature and so those are the elements of daid and for bin swanger it's the mittelt that contains most of the meaning or at least that structures the meaning so if you're reading a great novel the degree to which you can extract meaning from it is a consequence of your previous education and your own inculturation but that isn't necessarily the only way to look at things like if you walk into a bookstore say and a book catches your eye you might say that that book caught my eye well you think what exactly does that mean well it means that out of all the innumerable entities in the bookstore that could have your eye only that one did and then you might ask why well in boss would say well the world is disclosing a particular meaning to you why well that has something to do with the way that you're playing out your individual destiny going to show you this first so this is both a constructivist and a phenomenological perspective and so here's the idea that the thing that's at the center of reality is the domain that's not yet mapped so you're in a relationship the relationship is betrayed before you're betrayed you're in one place and after you're betrayed you're in another place before you're betrayed your world is all structured and you know where you are and what you're doing and who you're with and what everything is the second after you're betrayed none of that's true and so the second after you're betrayed nothing is structured it's like everything reverts to to a chaotic place and so in some sense the only time that you encounter a peer view of what the world itself is made out of what the ground of being is is when you encounter an error that's so overwhelming that your current framework of meaning is no longer applicable so the framework blows apart but it isn't as if nothing happens when the framework blows apart like if you're in a committed relationship and you find Security in that and you believe that the security is genuine and that's blows apart then everything that you presumed is wrong that's your midw but when that disappears there's something underneath it and what's underneath it that's the that's the ground of reality and the ground of reality is what you explore to put yourself back together and to put the world back together so you're betrayed and you fall fall into a depression and you're anxious but you know there's always the possibility of a new relationship that beckons and perhaps your previous relationship wasn't perfect so the chaos that you fall into is depressing and anxiety-provoking so it generates a lot of negative emotion but sort of lurking behind that are the sort of dim remnants of Hope and then as you proceed forward with your grief and your misery and you're attempting to reconstruct a stable mode of being you take out of that thing that's anomalous you and the world so another way of thinking about this is that for the phenomenologists and this is where they're similar to the constructivists the ground of reality isn't so much matter as it is information and when you're when you're living in in your constructed world and things are going the way that you want them to go then you've constrained that information in a particular way constrained and narrowed it in a particular way that serves your particular narrow end and that that makes things much more comfortable because then you don't have to deal with the the information that constitutes the entire world you can remove most of it and say well all that's relevant to me all that necessarily makes up my world of being are these Circ IRS cribe is this circumscribed set of phenomena and that works well when it's working but when it doesn't work and it blows apart that puts you somewhere else and that that being put somewhere else can be well revelatory sometimes I mean sometimes people make new discoveries that blow their previous frames of reference and it's like awe inspiring and overwhelming to them in a positive way sometimes you can come across something new that helps you reconfigure the the way that you're living almost instantly in a more comprehensive and Fuller way but more common is the traumatic response which is when the presuppositions of your world are shifted dramatically and you fall into the surrounding chaos then it's so hard on you that you know it actually does you psychophysiological damage now you remember that drawing I showed you with the little ovals at the bottom and the bigger ovals at the top the hierarchy you remember that does everybody remember that I decomposed say good person which is a very high order abstraction down to put a fork on the table which is a motor movement that's part of making dinner which is part of being a good parent which is part of being a good citizen which is part of being a good person so the idea was that the higher order abstractions can be concretized down to the motor behaviors in a hierarchy okay now if someone goes after you at the good person level of analysis and they just demolish you you know in the course of say a three-year relationship hacking away at the idea that you have any moral worth whatsoever this is what happen s when you're abused then that's going to knock you into pieces at a very complex and high level of abstraction so that can undermine your entire world view if the person instead helps you retool the little behaviors and the little micr structures that make you up and if you're willing to participate in that and if you're open to corrective feedback from the world then you can continually adjust yourself at a small level and then that makes the things in the hierarchy a little higher a little healthier and then that makes the aggregation of those things a little higher in the hierarchy a little healthier and a little more complete then you can do this bit by bit retooling without ever having to suffer the demolition of huge chunks of your personality so let's go back to the relationship where there's a betrayal it's like virtually every time someone gets flipped upside down because of a betrayal in a relationship after the Betrayal happens they say to themselves there were all these signs I didn't pay attention to so and maybe the first sign is who knows your partner starts to flirt a bit more when you go out on a social occasion it's and not a lot more just a bit more and you decide because maybe you're timid that that that's okay you're not going to do anything about it but it but it's it's interesting that it happens it grabs your attention and it means something but what you decide is it's not worth paying attention to and so maybe the next eight times that you go out the same thing happens but it happens at a somewhat accelerated rate and then maybe the person starts to go out without you and so on there's this progression towards the end state of betrayal and every time you get a little hint the world tells you that something's going on you put it aside and you fail to take it into account well you're forgoing your opportunity to adjust the relationship at micro stages because maybe what you should have done the first time that happened is you should have gone home with your partner and said um what the hell's going on like this is what was happening why are you doing that um here here is how you should have behaved and of course that's going to be a fight there's absolutely no doubt about it but it might be a micro fight instead of a the relationship is over fight and in order to keep a relationship healthy it needs to be retooled at micro levels constantly and the same is the case with your own character when you encounter something that's unexpected especially if it's small enough to handle you need to extract the information from it rebuild the world and rebuild yourself and then maybe if you continue doing that every time you get evidence of an anomaly or an error or every time the world manifests some meaning to you then you won't have to fall apart because the structure that constitutes you is going to remain viable and healthy from the bottom up and if you don't do that then those errors are going to accumulate and when they finally do manifest themselves as unavoidable like when your partner says I don't want to be with you anymore or I've been with someone else for the last year there's no ignoring that then the whole thing comes crashing down you're no longer in a relationship you're no longer in a good relationship and then all the other things become questionable so meaning manifests itself so that you can retool being itself on a continual basis while simultaneously minimizing the risk of total collapse and morality then becomes the act of paying sufficient attention and reacting sufficiently so that that corrective process occurs now so you're inside one of these you're going from point A to point B and as you do that things you want to have happen happen and things you don't want to have happen and things you don't understand happen and let's say that you investigate the things that you don't want to have happen and you investigate the things that you didn't expect and you do that as soon as they come up so then what happens well partly what happens is you're going to change your perceptions a bit and you're going to change your actions a bit and what that'll culminate in over time is that this whole structure will change so instead of going from point A to point B maybe you start shifting so that you're going from point A to point C because as you're gathering information as a consequence of the inadequacies of the way you're looking at the world not only are you improving your ability to perceive and to act but you're also gathering information that helps shift your perspective to a better point B because you might say well where are you going and why and the answer to that is well you have a plan you're going to get your degree I don't know what your long-term plan is but there's no reason to assume that your long-term plan is correct even though there's no reason to assume that you can do without one so you're in this weird situation where you have to live within a bounded space and the bounded space is going to produce errors and it's also going to be wrong but at the same time if you use the bounded space then you can transform it continually across time even what it's aimed at and you can minimize the probability of precipitous collapse now I want to show you how this is being represented it's very complicated and difficult so on the right you see that the Harry Potter snitch thing right and then on the left here you see this incredibly peculiar alchemical image and the image is something like this this is what this image means it means at the base of the world is this weird combination of matter and spirit so this is matter and this is Spirit the winged element represents spirit and then out of that comes something that's like primordial and reptilian and then out of that comes something that's associated with Consciousness so it's it's like a it's a map of the way that Consciousness emerges from the base of reality now you'll see that this thing and that thing the snitch and that this thing is called the round chaos this thing the snitch and the round chaos are the same thing now in in Harry Potter when he plays quidditch remember PJ had such an emphasis on games right psj believed that games were the subelements of human culture and quiddit is this weird two-level game where on one level it's sort of like soccer or basketball and then on another level you have two players that are Seekers and what they seek is this snitch and the snitch is this thing that captures your attention that's why it's gold and winged and it moves around very fast it's like Mercury the spirit Mercury cuz Mercury the God had winged feet and he was the messenger of the Gods that's that's how Mercury was conceived of and I'll tell you something else that's weird about Mercury so Mercury is a metal as well and if you mix Mercury with sand and the sand has gold in it then the Mercury will pick up the sand and then or the gold and then you can heat up the Mercury and all that's left is gold so Mercury will will lead you to where the gold is and the spirit mercurious the Mercurial Spirit was the messenger of the Gods and if you paid attention to Mercury the God then you'd gather the gold but it wasn't the gold of fools it was the gold that made your life valuable and that's the same thing that's played out in this weird Quidditch game the two best players the fastest the ones that are most awake aren't playing the normal game they're playing a superordinate game and the superordinate game is pay attention pay attention and if you pay attention then you'll get the thing that's most valuable you win the game but there's more than that because in the Harry Potter series for example there was a piece of soul in that and that's related to the idea that if you pay attention to what interests you what manifest itself is Meaningful not only do you build the world out of that because you're differentiating something that's undifferentiated into something that's comprehensible and usable but at the same time you're doing the same thing to yourself CU and that's the constructivist idea right is that well where do you where do you come from well you come from exploration and the generation of information and exploration what should you explore well the things that shine forth to you that's the phenomenological idea and the existential idea idea is if you refuse to explore the things that shine forth for you that capture your interest and your attention then that will lessen you as a being it'll make you weaker and progressively weaker because not only do you remain unformed but the ratio of chaos to World in your domain of being becomes too intolerable too much chaos not enough order not enough of you then the whole thing is unstable then you've only got two options one is that you lose belief in being itself and that's like a nihilistic reaction and the other is you turn to some sort of totalitarian or ideological solution that fills in for where you're not and that's an abdication of your individual responsibility and the consequence of turning to totalitarian ideologies like that is that they stagnate and become brittle because there's no transformation in them anymore because all of the people inside of them have decided that transformation is unnecessary and so they become increasingly outdated and corrupt and then that's the first step on the way to having everything fall apart in the most horrible possible way and that plays out at the state level just like it plays out at the individual level I'll tell you a dream I had about this since we're just out of the psychoanalytic domain I can show you using this how dreams often solve problems I'll just read it to you because I wrote it when I just after I had it I'll just tell it to you so the first thing I saw was it was like a view from a space shuttle so it was a global view and I could see the Atlantic Ocean and on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean there were four hurricanes and they were in a quadrant like this so there was a circle here and a circle here and a circle here and a circle here and they were very large hurricanes I mean one Hurricane's quite good but four that's a lot of hurricanes so it was impressive and so then the next thing I saw was a bank of scientists in kind of a dark room watching TV screens focused on this hurricane storm event and wondering what was going on and then the next thing I saw was this little ball about this big hovering over the surface of the ocean so now I was in the eye so the four hurricanes had an eye in the middle of them you know a calm place and so this little ball which was about 10 ft above the surface of the water was in that calm place and the storms were its accompaniment so and it was zooming along at a very rapid rate and it was bringing the storms with them and and so all of the scientists with their satellites were trying to figure out what this little ball that was 10 ft off the ocean surface and then needed like four hurricanes to accompany that accompany it they're trying to figure out what this thing was okay so the next scene was I was a third person Observer and I was in this room it was a small room about 8 by8 say and in the middle of the room there was this display case like a Museum you know like a Victorian Museum so it was made out of wood the top it had this glass and inside the case was this ball and it was just floating and inside the room was Steven Hawking you know the physicist in the wheelchair and a faceless president of the United States didn't matter who he was it just mattered that he was President of the United States and then the room itself I remember from the dream was made out of titanium dioxide and I woke up and I after this dream and I thought what the hell is titanium dioxide and the walls were 7 feet thick so the the idea was that little ball which had caused those four storms was going to be they caught it and they put it in that room and it was going to stay there titanium dioxide turned out to be the metal that the hull of the Starship Enterprise is built out of so it's it it represented like an impermeable substance and so inside the so there was this box made out of this Hightech metal and then inside the the room the American president was there so he's sort of representative of the mitwelt you know the social environment he's sort of King of the social environment and then step Hawking well Steven Hawking is disembodied rationality right obviously so so the room was a classific ation system in a sense and this ball whatever it was was stuck in there and so it was going to be a thing that you could look at in a museum and it wasn't going anywhere so it had been fixed and so I was watching this thing and then when I was watching it it did two weird things in the museum case the first thing it did was turned into a chrysalis and you know what a chrysalis is it's the like a cocoon that a butterfly comes out of and you may not know this but the word the Greek word for butterfly is psyche and the reason the psyche is a butterfly is because the psyche is something that transforms and it transforms towards something that's like an aerial spirit so this ball was transforming it transformed into a chrysalis and then it did a really strange thing it transformed into a pipe like a smoking pipe it was a Miram pipe which is a a carved pipe I think it's Irish sort of looks like a little saxophone thing but it was definitely a pipe and so that was the whole dream and I woke up and I thought I got the chrysis idea this whatever this ball was was the thing that's capable of transforming but then I thought what the hell what does that pipe mean what could that Poss pipe possibly mean one other thing transformed into chrysis and then back to a bowl and then it transformed into a pipe and then back into a bowl and then it went and shot out of the case and shot right through the S feet walls and it was gone and it just left a hole like there was it was moving so fast there was just a hole in the case and there was a hole in the wall and that was the end of that so it it was a ball it did its Crysis thing did its pipe thing and then it was gone that box was not going to hold it so after I had that dream quite a while later two years later I read this little poem from Dante it's from The Inferno The Inferno is an interesting book because it's Dante's attempt it's a it's a book about hell and it's Dante's attempt in a sense to turn the old idea of Hell into something that was psychological so Dante has this of hell as this place that has multiple depths with something that's the absolute worst right at the center so in some sense it's his attempt to come up with a a category structure of of evil he actually puts betrayers right in the center he figured that was the worst form of of moral error anyways here's part of the poem Virgil and Dante are going into The Inferno Virgil's the guide suddenly there broke on the dirty swell of the dark Marsh a Squall of terrible sound that sent a Tremor through both shores of Hell a sound as if two continents of Air One frigid and one scorching clashed head on in a war of winds that stripped the forest bare ripped off whole boughs and blew them Helter Skelter along the range of dust it raised before it making the beasts and shepherds run from shelter run for shelter that's a messenger from God comes down and that's how he makes himself manifest and I thought wow that's very much like this dream I had two continents of air and there was the this similar idea that there was something at the center that was that couldn't be encapsulated in a what a conceptual structure at least not for any length of time and you know being is like that you can't encapsulate it in a conceptual structure for any length of time no matter what you think you're wrong and even if you're right enough for the time being being is transforming and you have to keep up with it because otherwise the structure that you were inhabiting becomes dead and decays and then you fall apart and so you need a conceptual structure because it orients you but it can't be static and that's the problem with totalitarian ideology is that totalitarian ideology is predicated on the idea it's utopian that you can finally model things once and for all and so once you do that it's perfect and then it never has to change and that's that's wrong technically it's not wrong arbitrarily it's not a kind of relative wrong it's just wrong and it's because whatever being is is not static and so whatever it is that you inhabit to allow being to work in your favor also can't be static even though it has to be a structure then I figured out why it was a pipe and that took about 3 years for me to figure that out this is a famous painting by mcgree right and so it says this is not a pipe so what does that mean what does he mean the first question is is it a pipe what do we think kind of idea that's an image of pipe it's certainly It's actually an image of an image of a pipe right because we're projecting it but yes you're exactly right it's not a pipe and so what what's mcgree trying to communicate what's the idea the idea is the conception is not the object or another way of putting it is the map is not the territory and you live in the map in some sense but the territory is always underneath it and the reason that little ball turned into a pipe was to make that case it's like it was in this box and it was being transformed into a an entity that was defined and static and it it it said two things it said everything transforms that's the Chrysalis and everything transforms into Psych because the butterfly is psyche and then it said don't mistake the map for the territory and then it left and the being that manifests itself the being that shines forth in the phenomenologists sense is the thing that cannot be encapsulated inside any conceptual structure it's always outside of it it's always out side of it and you have to keep up with it well that's why in the Harry Potter book for example the best players don't play the game they chase the snitch and what that means is that they follow what manifests itself to them as most meaningful at any given time now Yung would have thought of that as the manifestation of the self cuz he he would say and it's like I can never remember who I can never differentiate these two thinkers yung's like B swanger he assumes that the meaning is a consequence of the action of some internal structure more less that he characterized as the self boss's perspective is more in some sense it's more like a classical Rel religious perspective although he dispenses almost entirely with any religious language and makes the claim that meaning is the fund fundamental element of being and that if you lose touch with meaning then the quality of your being is going to collapse and not only yours but also the meaning of the society that you're part of because not when you're updating when you're paying attention to what's meaningful not only are you updating yourself are not not only are you improving the quality of your own being but because you're embedded in this midw and you're like a node in a network your Transformations affect the transformations of the people around you and so you can't only transform yourself or fail to if you transform yourself you also transform society and if you fa fail to transform yourself then you also fail to transform society and if you fail to transform Society then it stays static and if it stays static then it dies and so that's the relationship between the phenomenological Viewpoint and the existential Viewpoint the to me what the phenomenologists force you to Grapple with is the phenomena of meaning because it seems to me and and this is basically haider's point he said well what's self-evident well one answer is objects the other as answer is is is predicated on a different perspective meaning is self-evident in that you can't escape from it you can you can escape from the positive elements of it by being locks but you cannot escape from the negative elements of it you can't argue your yourself out of it and and and you act as if there's nothing more real so if you if you think about it this way if someone's terrified they're going to act it out and and you cannot calm them down using rational means if someone's in pain it's the same thing both anxiety or Terror and pain are forms of meaning and they're not they're underneath rationality in a sense in that rationality is powerless Against Terror and pain and if you're terrified then you'll act that way and if you're in pain then you'll act that way and you might do everything you can to say there's no such thing as meaning but if you're be if your state of being is one of Terror no matter what you say you're going to act like that's real and then you have to ask yourself another question is what's more reflective of real what you say or how you act and it it matters because what constitutes real changes with whether like what what defines real changes on depending on how you answer that question and the existentialist would say well how you act is what's real how you act reflects what's real mcgree played with this a lot so there's another painting by mcgree and he often uses men in suits like a suit is representative of a certain kind of a certain mode of being and it's a mode of being that's focused on that's focused rather narrowly on whatever a business suit represents dominance hierarchy success um materialistic possessions that's the at least the cliched and satirical version of business it certainly represents Conformity and M mcree's Painting is a representation of blindness induced by conformity these people can see but they're only seeing what's right in front of their eyes and what's right in front of their eyes that they see blocks them from seeing everything else yes in the in the first quarter of the 20th century could be something more like kind of a person sure it's that it's it's it's Conformity essentially yeah and and it's not only that it's it's like it's moral Conformity you know I'm not saying that it's right it's it's that it it's in the guise of moral Conformity if you wear a suit you're you're representing what the culture perceives to be associated with citizenship and responsibility a lot of what mcgree did was to try to dissociate the structure from the underlying reality and he does that for example in the painting on the right where he takes an image and then juxtaposes it with the wrong signifier I suppose those in some sense those are almost like that that painting is almost like a poem in that the Ju the position of the label and the entity forces you to imagine more than either of them would force you to do alone because you might say well in what Manner is a horse like a door and what in what Manner is the clock like the wind or a pitcher like a bird well and he returns to normal in the last one time flies like the wind I mean a horse is something that takes you places it's like a door a bird it isn't exactly clear to me how a vase is like a bird this is another dream that's attempting to lay out the same idea so you are aw you know I believe it's da Vinci V Da Vinci's vitrous man it's this figure presume you've all seen it it's very very famous image so it's the man is in a square and then the square is in a circle yeah um in this dream this dream had that image except the square wasn't a Square it was a cube so the figure inside the there was a figure inside the cube which was a a man sort of a generic man or an idealized man and the cube was about 9 ft maybe or 8et by 8T by 8 ft and the man was suspended in the middle of the cube so he was about a foot and a half off the floor floating and then from his hands to the wall was about a foot and a half and he could reach close to the wall that was in front of him and then the inside of the cube no matter where the man looked was covered with these squares with a circle in them and inside the circle there was a little dragon's tail and if the man walked forward then the cube went with him and if the man walked backwards the cube went with him and so it was a representation of what surrounds you in reality and then the man could reach out to any of these squares with the circle with the tail and he could pull on one of the taals and that would pull something into being and there were all these choices in front of them that represented different Paths of being so so what that dream represented was this you know you might say well what is it that's right in front of you and then you could say well chairs and the floor and students and light and and that's true but there's another way of thinking about it which is that what's right in front of you is a landscape of possibility to which your conceptions of objects blind you so no matter where you're going in your life the things that present themselves to you offer an array of almost unlimited possibility and so when I look ahead and I see a student or students then that makes all of you one bit of information in a sense right because I've generalized across all of you and there's some utility in that in that part of what you're doing here can be conceptualized as being a student but the loss in that perception might be far greater than the gain because it reduces all of your complexity to a single utterance and makes you flat and so then you think as you wander around the world are you seeing this or are you seeing a wall in front of you that from which you can pull anything you want the the standard Viewpoint would be that this is real but it seems to me that you can make a reasonable case that what you interact with is not so much reality as it is possible possibility and so the possibility is what lurks behind your conception of what's there and that possibility is also the thing out of which everything emerges so if I if you come to my office and I sit and talk to you and I try to approach you without any preconceptions which would be say a rogerian approach then all sorts of things can emerge into reality that wouldn't emerge at all if I stayed rigidly in a prescribed role now there's some utility in the prescribed role don't get me wrong because it gives people structure and it and it it helps them manage their expectations and it protects them from being exposed to Too Much possibility at any one time because that can be overwhelming but the danger is at least in part that you'll blind yourself to all the things things that are there by only allowing yourself to see what you can immediately see the Buddhists talk about desire as something to push aside and I think that's their attempt to warn people about the danger of substituting their own preconceptions about what should be or what is for for attention to what's behind that so imagine that you're depressed and you're bored and all the positive meaning has gone out of your life well perhaps it's because you've substituted your a priority perceptions for possibility and you're in this C AG that that's in part a mirror and all it does is reflect back to you your sterile preconceptions well behind that is the possibility and it's conceivable in that possibility which is maybe infinite possibility that what it is that you lack now that's making you so rigid and bored could be pulled out of that possibility boss said man's option to respond to this claim or to choose not to not to do so seems to be the very core of human freedom all right so I'm going to return to a theme that I developed partway through this lecture if being doesn't manifest itself to you as structured then it's as if you're falling endlessly you need structure structures like a set of tools that that you have at your disposal now the problem with structure is that it can blind you to possibility and the possibility might be more important than the structure and that means that partly what you have to do is balance the possibility and the structure one possibility is that the things that manifest themselves to you as meaningful are constitute a Gateway between structure and possibility so that if you follow that which shines forth then you stay sufficiently within the structure but at the same time you're pulling in enough new possibility so that the structure stays Dynamic and alive instead of static and dead if if you're n nous system huh if you pay attention to the cues that being is offering you showing you where to look and you actually look then maybe you can stay flexible enough so that as things shift around you you don't grow a huge gap between yourself and the world and fall maybe you just into interact in a like in a dance that's that's of acceptable emotional significance it's it's anxiety-provoking enough to keep you awake and it's compelling enough to keep you interested and so those two things in some sense constitute like the core of meaning in order to interact with the world in that way you have to flip your preconceptions upside down and make the presupposition that the material elements that people modern people regard as most real are actually secondary and limited derivations of something that's more fundamental and the thing that's more fundamental is possibility and possibility shines through structure with meaning that's the phenomenological perspective and the existential perspective is follow that meaning or suffer the consequences that's that we'll see you [Applause] Thursday

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 95,150

Keywords: Atrocity, Crime and Punishment, mythology, Hope, Carl Rogers, Buddhism, Dragon, Mircea Eliade, Developmental Psychology, Christ, Creativity, Jordan B Peterson, Fear, Anger, Jordan, Jeffrey Gray, Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, Conscientiousness, Carl Jung, change blindness, Maps of Meaning, Great Father, education, Great Mother, Personality, existentialism, Alfred Adler, motivation, Archetypes, Behaviorism, Clinical Psychology, Freud, Hero, Existentialism, Peterson, emotion, psychology

Id: UzdpzuEkL74

Length: 73min 19sec (4399 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 27 2014