The Linguistic Turn

                One of the questions facing any attempt to develop a deep epistemology based on embodiment is how to frame the question of language.  In some form or another it has dominated 20^th century philosophy.  Rorty, barrowing the phrase from Bergmann, claimed philosophy had taken a ‘linguistic turn’ in the last century.  Now, a hundred years out from Saussure and his work on semiotics, the question is where does that turn lead, “Lincoln county road or Armageddon,” to quote Dylan.   The question of language illustrates just how flawed our cultural framework of working with language, mind and thought are.  Language, through a particular use of language, becomes an object in itself, something to be studied and dissected, with language, of course, as a linguistic phenomenon of importance.  I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to get a little dizzy.

                As I’ve written many times before, I prefer Maturana’s use of the term ‘languaging.’ Whenever I use that term, I find people have a hard time understanding it. Some have an intuitive feel for what he’s trying to say and some, perhaps most, just think my spellcheck is broken.  For Maturana, language isn’t a ‘thing,’ it is a biological function of being human.  Fish swim.  Humans language.  As such, it is incorrect to say we ‘use’ language and more accurate to think of us existing in language.  One of the things he often says is that we do not use language to describe a world that already exists but to bring forth a world with others that we then treat as real.  This is not mere nominalism.  In the way philosophers tended to deal with this issue, language was a spare part in the dynamic between thought and mind.  The world had been discarded a couple of centuries earlier.  For embodiment to occur, we have to reframe our relationship to language – we have to embrace languaging.

                Maturana would never settle for the notion that the world we create is merely language, because that would mean that the world and language were separable, and they’re not.  It makes more sense to me to think of language as a sense – just like the other senses – that both connect and restrict our experience of the world with others.  It is a malleable interface through which we manifest and imagine our interactions – or as Maturana puts it , “coordinatations of coordinations of behaviors.”  Cultures do this in different ways.  Some of Maturana’s earlier research is in how color is formulated differently in different cultures – we see what we are trained to see and expect to see.  As Saussure said, the signifier is not the signified, but Maturana makes a further point.  It is true that the signifier is open, but once it becomes a signifier, it now has consequence.  We can say anything, but when we are languaging, what we say has significance and is no longer simply arbitrary.  That is, it can never revert to nominalism.

                This dynamic is ongoing.  Bakhtin said that language was constantly being pushed and pulled by what he called centripetal and centrifugal forces.  We are both expanding and restricting language to find a balance between stable and unstable messaging.  We have to adapt the language to represent what is changing (what is alive), but we have to stay close enough to established form and meaning to make sense.  If we have a strong preference for elegance and closure we would become math majors.  If we were more concerned with imagery and the vatic potential of language we would be poets.  If harmony and rhythm were our focus we would be musicians.  If we lacked any discernable interest in any of this we would be social scientists.  The point is that languaging is part of the vibration and frequency of living and not an external abstraction.

                The final point that Maturana makes about this is that it is far from trivial.  In the nominalist turn in postmodern thought there is a strain that reduces everything to simply trying to be clever.  It’s fine to use language to be playful – being playful is one of the coolest things about being human.  But languaging, even in its playful moments is also profoundly important.  In many wisdom traditions the only thing prior to the word is the breath.  Once we breath, we speak and bring our world into being.  It makes a difference how that happens and what possibilities are available to us in that creation.  A deep epistemology always grounds us in that joy and that responsibility.

Examples

                After retiring, I wondered what it was I was supposed to be doing.  When I was teaching, it seemed like I was contributing something small but tangible to the struggle for a better world.  Absent that, it was unclear to me what I could contribute.  I like the freedom of reading and thinking what I want instead of having other people dictate what I have to respond to.  I like spending more time talking and hanging out with the people I choose to instead having to interact with people I really didn’t care much about.  I liked being retired, but I still wondered what I should be doing. 

                Working my way through the idea of deep epistemology has helped me reframe that question somewhat.  I no longer think of it as what I should do, but how I should be.  At this point, it seems to me that like older men in some Buddhist traditions, my true goal is to work on myself, not for any reward or external affirmation, but because the benefit of age is reflection.  In my working life, my mental reflexes were too amped up to be truly reflective.  Like most men growing up in this culture, I was set on solving problems and doing battle with those who opposed the way I saw the world.  There was never a shortage of either of those provocations.  I judged my contributions to the situation by winning and exerting control.  I suppose that is what youth demands – or at least my youth demanded it.  I tried not to be a complete jerk, and, in my telling of it, at least, my battles were mostly trying to speak truth to power and injustice.  Power and injustice always seemed to win.

                From the perspective of retirement and deep epistemology, I see things differently.  I can be calmer now than I was before.  I still care as deeply about the outcomes, but they aren’t really my outcomes anymore.  Accepting my age means accepting a different role.  I think people who still want to direct things in their 70’s and 80’s are missing the point, not because they don’t “get it,” but because they are wasting their hard earned perspective on moment to moment chaos.  (Of course, it helps that nobody really cares what I think anymore).  Reflection is so lacking in this culture, where the pressure is to act and react instantly.  The way I see it now, our job – or at least my job – is to be an example of virtuous and mindful action.  I want to set aside being clever and aggressive for the opportunity to learn how to be an example of the things I always said I believed in.

                In cultures that have some sense of filial piety, they value age for the perspective, perhaps even the wisdom, it brings.  At the very least, we should be in a position to reflect on what we’ve seen and done instead of just reacting to the next stimulus in an endless stream of new stimuli.  One of the cultural consequences of deracinated and disembodied consciousness is that we lose our sense of mortality – not in some mawkish or fatalistic sense, but as the grounds of our being in the world.  Time is only meaningful to living things.  The gift that time bestows on us is to see what is important and what isn’t.  It is important that we reconnect to our bodies and the rest of the living universe. 

                I don’t plan on being a good example all the time, nor do I expect to overcome my rash and impulsive nature.  Cut in front of me in line and I’ll give you a demonstration.  But I can be an example of becoming to those who care or want to notice.  I can’t open a web site to market it or make money off it, but I can make this phase of my life richer.  Maybe I can help as part of a larger conversation about how we reimagine democracy and virtue.  I can at least listen and wait for a pause in the action for a chance to share what I know.  If that doesn’t happen, I can wait some more.  When I was a kid, I wanted to be a wizard.  That ain’t happening, but the disguise of wizards is often playing the role of an old fool. I’ve got that one down.

The Day Before the Revolution

I’m writing this before I know what the mid-term elections will bring.  I think it’s important to see this day as a day in a process and not as either a victory or a defeat.  Nothing is going to magically restore whatever fantasy we used to have about America.  We have seen the ugliness beneath – not very far beneath – the glossy surface of our democracy.  The hatred and stupidity that have been exposed have always been there.  If you are privileged enough not to have noticed until now, count yourself lucky.  The real issue, no matter what happens in today’s election, is realizing that tomorrow is not a destination, it is a small step in a long march toward sanity.

In Ursula LeGuin’s short story, “The Day Before the Revolution,” the main character, Odo, is revolutionary leader who has struggled her whole life just to make the smallest inroads into the corrupt power of her society.  In the day covered in the story, she laments her futility, her frustration and the unrelenting task of change.  She suffers a stroke and dies that day.  The revolution bearing her name started the next day.  We have to be prepared to see ourselves as Odo, as servants to a cause we may not fully witness or realize.  In MLK’s famous line, we may not get to the mountain top. 

Our job as we wait results is to prepare, no matter the outcome, to get up tomorrow and continue the struggle.  The forces that we oppose are never going surrender on their own – they will never relent.  We must be prepared to take either a defeat or a modest victory as just another step toward more organizing, more resistance and more hope.  This isn’t a game.  The way we tend to cover elections is more like a sporting contest than an act of civil engagement.  We must stop that.  We have been delivered a great gift, the chance to see what could go wrong, a chance to see just how soulless the future could be.  Despair is the most certain way to waste that gift.  Pessimism is not an option.

We have the challenge, but also the privilege to live in a moment where we can do something important, even remarkable.  We can take the soaring rhetoric and false narratives of our history and transform them into something better – not perfect – but better.  We have the government we have because it suits too many of the people in the country.  We are here because we don’t value families and education.  We are here because we don’t take of the environment, and we are here because we have commercialized the very idea of existence.  We have to “be the change we seek.”  We have to be better.

We need to help each other take the next step.

Extended Embodiment

                One of the features of a deep epistemology is that intelligence is ‘embodied,’ meaning that it involves all of our senses and emotions and is not just a product of the deracinated functions of we call our ‘mind.’  Deep epistemology always situates us within our experience of the world instead of isolating the act of knowing from the organism that experiences it.  Embodiment is a fairly well known concept and is frequently utilized to help overcome the mind/body split that dominates and restricts much of Western philosophy.  What I want to suggest is that we need to extend our ideas about embodiment beyond our individual bodies and even beyond our concepts of human consciousness.  What I’m proposing is an extended embodiment that recognizes that the body, the source of experience and intelligence, is never just and individual organism.  We are autonomous and somewhat unique, but we are not a singular entity.

                As Maturana makes clear, we are constructed by and connected to the world we bring forth with other people through the human act of ‘ languaging.’  Only in contact with others are we able to see meaning or value in they way we encounter and experience the material world.  That world does not impose its ‘beingness’ on us, we – and it is always a we – bring it into being and consciousness by interacting with others.  For Maturana, this is never mere nominalism.  He defines ‘languaging,’ as”the coordination of coordinations of behaviors.”  In other words, ‘languaging’ is never just naming, it is always the coordination of names and meanings with others in an attempt to share and shape our experience.  Thus, the body is always already a construction we share with others.  Even in Des Carte’s meditations, he is never really there alone.  He is always accompanied by the language of his culture and the thoughts of previous philosophers.  To have an embodied sense of intelligence is inherently to have a social sense – a multiple bodied sense – of intelligence.

                Our bodies are in the world in ways that are not explicitly human.  We construct a world through ‘languaging,’ but that world is not just a fantasy.  We are alive in a world that is also alive.  We are made of the same ‘stuff’ that it is made of, so if we have consciousness, why doesn’t it?  Embodiment can’t be fully understood in human terms.  It also has to account for the reality of the rest of the living universe we inhabit.  This is not the same as transcendentalism, where there is a ‘human’ power or consciousness in nature.  It is a more fundamental realization that consciousness is greater and more diverse than the more limited concept of human consciousness.  Our bodies connect us to that sense of consciousness.  We are connected in the awe we experience in nature.  We are connected in the love of puppies and the fear of sharks.  We are connected to the vastness of space.  Embodiment that ignores these connections to only concentrate on the technological or digital spaces we have created is cut off from a critical source of experience and moral action.

                Extended embodiment is a grounding.  It gives depth and integrity to our experience.  It is a recognition of both the limitations and finality of our existence and the limitless expressions of spirit that sustain us.  Moral action and deep intelligence can never originate in individual consciousness.  Every action, thought and word is connected to every other action, thought and word.  In Maturana’s way of putting it, nothing is trivial.  An extended embodiment makes those connections and their consequences manifest.  It is the source of our sense of rhythm, harmony and beauty.  It is greater than God.  Without it, all of our thoughts, creations and actions are in vain.  

Moral Action

                One of the things that a deep epistemology has to account for is moral action.  Just as knowing can’t be reduced to the abstract rational intellect, moral action does not grow out of abstract principles of morality.  Morality is not a principle or theory, it is a concrete and relational element of our daily experience.  Because of this, morality is less concerned with consistency and adherence to an ideal sense of the good than it is with variations of relationships and situations.  Moral action isn’t sustained by platitudes or pronouncements but by the concrete associations of people trying to act intelligently in specific situations.  Like fractal constructions, morality may have one organizing principle one day and another principle the next.

                The melding of Greek philosophy and early Christian theology around Plato’s ideal of the good has inverted both the direction and construction of a moral dimension.  That mashup creates a world where the ‘good’ already exists and every action is a poor attempt to realize it.  We live in a cultural context that tries to impose a definition of morality independent of our lived experience.  In a deep epistemology, morality is created in the opposite direction.  Rather than starting with an idea of what is good or moral, the goal is to build the good and moral out of the specific and contemplative actions we take every day.  It might be helpful to think of it as an ecology that is based on billions of small acts that sustain the evolving of higher and more complex forms of moral actions.  If the billion small ‘bacterial’ acts disappear, so do the larger structures that depend on them.

                From the perspective of a deep epistemology, it makes no sense to talk about laws or principles as the source of a moral life.  Morality is lived and not articulated.  Its presence is only obvious by outcomes it creates, not by the labels it claims.  We build the potential for a moral life in the relationships we engage in.  Most of these relationships are with other people, but we also have relationships with non-human fields of reference, such as the environment.  If actions at the ‘bacterial’ level lack just and moral outcomes, no constitution or system of justice will evolve.  All morality happens at the level of individual responsibility and resonates within the relational constructs we share with other people.  It is not enough for the individual to claim a moral purpose, it can only emerge in the context of relationships with others that we are always already a part of.

                To me – and I claim no academic validity for this comparison – it seems that this is the root insight into the Buddhist idea of the Bodhisattva, the one who is enlightened but stays to work with the rest of humanity and the world.  We may see the way and know what to do, but only in action with others can we bring forth a world that is attuned to what we see.  Knowing and moral action live at the connecting point of our divided nature, linking autonomy to connectedness.  We are always operating in this paradox.  We can never be just one or the other.  Without autonomy there is no insight and reflection.  Without connection there is no avenue of expression or realization for insight and reflection.  We can experience this paradox as a dissonance or as a harmony, but we can’t escape the paradox.

                Maturana is fond of saying that no act of ‘languaging’ is trivial.  With every word and action we are building and/or destroying a world.  There is no free lunch.  We are always challenged, no matter what we think we know or what we have already done, to know and do more.  The context of our relationships and the actors we share them with change.  Sometimes our roles are well defined and sometimes they are vague at best, but our responsibility is the same.  ‘Know thyself,’ sounds to us like a call to individual awareness.  It is not.  In the context of its utterance, it is a call to a deeper knowing that connects us with not just our self but the conditions and relationships that bring that self into being.  Deep knowing is moral action.  Moral action is deep knowing.

Dominos

               

                Now that Brett Kavanaugh is a Supreme Court justice, it may be fair to say that the United States is no longer a functional democracy.  His confirmation by an undemocratic president and an undemocratic senate insured that the tyranny of the minority that has been in place since the Electoral College invalidated the will of people and made Trump president will continue.  It is now total.  The sacred idea of checks and balances and the independence of the three branches of government is now just a cruel joke.  There is no independence and there are no checks and balances.  Our institutions are now controlled by people who do not believe in them and who have no intention of preserving them.  The last domino has fallen.

                The grand illusion of American democracy was that there was something inherently noble in the founding of this nation.  That myth overlooks the fact that the ‘founders’ weren’t very democratically inclined people, except as it referred to them personally.  The Electoral College, the initial restrictions of voting and the election of Senators all point to a system that protected an elite oligarchy and not a broad democratic populous.  Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric may have made it sound like all of us were included, but he certainly never envisioned women or people of color being included.  Hamilton may make a great subject for a musical, but his politics were openly hostile to the common man.  What claim America had to being a beacon of democracy has always come from the people initially excluded in the compact forcing their way in and demanding a voice and a right to participate.  Good luck making that argument in front of the Roberts’ Court.

                The Trump, McConnell, Ryan, Roberts view of government is Calvinist in its orientation and intent.  A small group of chosen elites dictate terms and conditions to the rest of us, all the while stealing everything that isn’t nailed down.  The constitutional ‘purists’ among them will find more and more ways to limit access to justice and participation to those of us of suspect origin and philosophy.  One of their heroes, Scalia, made a career out of claiming to be a strict constructionist while crafting opinions in cases such as Heller and Citizens United that are completely at odds with the historical context of the constitution.  Expect that to continue.  Corporations will have unlimited power while vast swaths of people will be denied the right to even vote.

                The optimistic view is that this can be corrected at the ballot box. Maybe.  Seats on the Supreme Court don’t open up every day.  Maybe people will organize and turn out in numbers sufficient to take control of the House, the Senate and eventually the White House.  Maybe federal prosecutors are going to nail Trump and his family.  Maybe.  Even if that happens, the specter of women cheering Trump as he ridiculed a woman who survived an attempted rape by a privileged punk means that this isn’t going to be pretty.  No mere election will convince people to be inclusive or compassionate.  We don’t just disagree, we hate each other. 

                There’s been a lot of people who have written that this period in our history has made them understand what happened in Germany before WWII.  I get it, but those aren’t the historical comparisons that resonate with me.  I always wondered how America could become so disfunctional that we would descend into a Civil War.  I think I’m starting to understand.  This divide separates not just predictable enemies but friends and family.  Where is the forum that we can use to debate and argue constructively?  What do we agree on that would allow us to heal our differences?  I’m not sure what the possibility of compromise even looks like.

                The other event that the current situation makes me think about is the Reign of Terror, when at the beginning of the French Revolution the rebels carried out mass executions of aristocrats and their sympathizers.  It seemed so brutal and senseless.  Now, I’m not sure that a thousand guillotines at the base of the Washington Monument isn’t inevitable.  

Deep Epistemology

                We tend to think of epistemology as the production of verifiably true statements about the world.  I want to suggest that we shift our focus to what it means for a person to actually ‘know’ something and the value that such knowing brings to our lives.  It is not enough to say that we know something because we possess information or data about a particular subject.  Knowing implies that we have changed as a function of learning, that my situated place in the world is impacted by what I’ve learned.  Dewey tried to capture this by foregrounding ‘experience’ as the primary focal point of philosophy and learning.  Experiential learning always involves other people, so that knowing something is always a social and linguistic operation.  I think the concept of ‘deep epistemology,’ along the lines of deep ecology that places us in the ecology and not as an arbiter outside it, is a way to develop a more complicated and complex understanding and modeling of what it means to ‘know.’

                To begin with, knowing is never about knowing the world ‘as it is’ because we are always already involved in the process of making that world.  Language, or as Maturana puts it ‘languaging,’ is the act of interacting with others to bring forth a world.  This is an active, which is to say experiential, process and not a passive one or one that can be reduced to abstract representations.  A friend of mine tells a story about his seventh- grade daughter winning a contest by remembering the capitols of all 50 states.  Later that week when they were driving by the capitol located in their city, she had no comprehension of what a capitol was.  Because she could say that Lansing was the capitol of Michigan, she got credit on a test, but what did she really know about capitols?  This example is trivial on one level but profound on another.  She manipulated a short-termed stimulus to her advantage, but she had no connection to the activity or process that makes a capitol meaningful.

                In Cognition in the Wild, Edwin Hutchins explains how cultures construct intelligences to make it possible for them to understand and function in the world.  In that context, ‘knowing’ something is always connected to a cultural action.  Maturana likes to say that at some point all knowledge is verifiable by behavior.  In other words, I can talk about playing violin all day, but at some point I have to actually play the violin to be credible.  Turning epistemology into an analytical and linguistic game blinds us to the deeper implications of knowing.  If knowing is social, then everything I know and learn has an inherent ethical dimension to it.  This is particularly true about what I presume to know about other people.  In the last century, a one- dimensional social science assumed we could reduce people to statistics and data.  When I was teaching, I would have administrators occasionally produce aggregated data about my students.  In the end, the report would always talk about the ‘average’ student.  My point was always that I never met that average student.  She didn’t exist, except in some parallel statistical universe.  The data and trends could be helpful.  They could give me different frames and concepts to work with, but they were not ‘true.’  Reducing any particular student to those averages was to replace knowing and working with them with an authoritative abstraction that gave me power over their experience.

                In some basic sense, all learning is a function of narrative inquiry.  That is not to say that it is necessarily solipsistic, because language is always connecting, to one degree or another, what we know with the larger cultural frameworks we operate within.  But our knowing is deeply our knowing.  We use it to connect with others.  We use it impact the social and material conditions we live in, but part of it is always uniquely our own.  Part of it is about our own quest to understand ourselves as simultaneously connected and isolated.  We have to function in both of those realms at the same time.   How we act in our world, the ethics, intelligence and humanity we express is a function of what we know deeply.

                In the same sense, intelligence can never be ‘artificial.’  Machine intelligence can augment, organize and challenge what we know, but it is not the same as human intelligence.  It is not connected to the social and biological reality of our being, no matter how much it might appear to replicate it.  Knowing is more than intellect.  It is the connections we make in the social, ecological and emotional universe we construct.  It is as much a function of the way we connect to music or read a poem as it is an abstract intellectual property.  Both can make us more ‘experienced,’ both can make us better actors and co-creators of the world we share and shape.  Deep epistemology realizes and honors all of that.