InsightClass10_Nov11p2

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PL 772: Insight & Beyond, IFall 2009

Patrick H. ByrnePhilosophy Department

Boston College

Class # 10, January 7, 2010

Chapter 6§2: “Patterns of Experience

& Dramatic Bias”





Common Sense as I ntel lectual

• What is “common” in common sense?

• The self-correcting process of learning

• But “such learning is not without teaching that … It

throws out the clues [images], the pointed hints, that

lead to insights” (198)

• “the only interpreter of commonsense utterances is

common sense.” (200)

•

It is self-correcting (197)





Common Sense as I ntel lectual

• What is “common” in common sense?

• “common sense at once reverts to its normal

state of incompleteness.” (199)





Patterning of Experience

• “There is, then, a subtle ambiguity in the apparently

evident statement that common sense relates things to

us.

• “For who are we?

• “Do we not change? Is not the acquisition of common

sense itself a change in us?” (204)




• Since insights are into phantasms, how we

understand and behave is conditioned in a most

fundamental way by what phantasms come to us.

• Phantasms come to us through the ways and modes

in which we pattern our experiences.

• So in an important way, “Who are we?” is answered

by first answering,

“How do we pattern our experiencing?”




• “The notion of the pattern of experience may best

be approached by remarking how abstract it is to

speak of a sensation.” (204)

• “nor is it difficult for us to say just what we mean

by such a pattern. As conceived, it is the

formulation of an insight; but all insight arisesfrom sensitive or imaginative presentations, and in

the present case the relevant presentations are

simply the various elements in the experience that

is organized by the pattern.” (205)





Patterns Of Experience &

Neural Demand Functions

“For the stream of sensitive experience is a chameleon;and as its pattern can be biological or artistic, so too

it can become the automatic instrument, or rather

the vitally adaptive collaborator, of the spirit of

inquiry.” (209)

“Consciousness selects; it floats upon the series of

demands for attention. ” (Topics in Education , 84)




“There are, then, different dynamic patterns of

experience.”

• Biological

• Aesthetic

• Artistic

• Intellectual

• Dramatic [Interpersonal]

(205-214)

• Practical

•

Mystical (410)








• All patterning of experience is selective, from the

vast reservoir of neuro-physiological functioning

that underpins actually conscious contents.







The Animal Biological Pattern &

Its Concerns

“the pattern is a set of intelligible relations that link together sequences of sensations, memories, images,

conations, emotions, and bodily movements; and to

name the pattern biological is simply to affirm that

the sequences converge upon terminal activities of intussusception or reproduction, or, when negative in

scope, self-preservation.” (206)



The Animal Biological Pattern &

Its Concerns

“Thus extroversion is a

basic characteristic of

the biological pattern of experience... concerned,

not with the immanent

aspects of living, but

with its externalconditions and

opportunities.” (207)

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Biological Experiences

vs. Biological Patterning

• In one sense, all experiencing is biological

– of the body.

• But not all patterning of experience is biological.







Intellectual Pattern &


“In reflection, there arises a passionless calm. Memory

ferrets out instances that would run counter to the

prospective judgment.

“Imagination anticipates the shape of possibilities that

would prove the judgment wrong.

“So deep is the penetration, so firm the dominance, so

strange the transformation of sensitive spontaneity,

that memories and anticipations rise above the

threshold of consciousness only if they possess at least

a plausible relevance to the decision to be made.” (209)





I t lli d th



Intelligence and the

Dramatic Constitution of Subjectivity


Insights

ActionsInquiries

Insights

ImaginationInquiries

Persona: Cycle of Performance

Ego: Cycle

of Rehearsal



Dramatic Pattern &


“So deep is the penetration, so firm the dominance,

so strange the transformation of sensitive

spontaneity, that memories and anticipations rise

above the threshold of consciousness only if they

possess at least a plausible relevance to the

decision to be made.” (209)









Erik Erikson &Dramatic Patterning of Experience



Erickson: His Project

“It is human to have a long childhood: it is civilized to

have an ever longer childhood. Long childhood

makes a technical and mental virtuoso out of

[humanity], but it also leaves a lifelong residue of

emotional immaturity.”

(Childhood and Society, 1985 edition, p. 17)

Modern historical transitions “threaten the identities

which humans have inherited.” (413)





Erickson: His Project

“We concluded that only a gradually accruing sense

of identity, based on the experience [insights] of

social health and cultural solidarity, at the end of each major childhood crisis, promises that

periodical balance in human life which … makes

for a sense of humanity.” (412)

“This then is one of our jobs: to perfect methods

which, in given situations, facilitate the

elucidation of such prejudices, apprehensions, and

lapses of judgment as emanate from infantile

anxiety.” (413)



Critical Stages of Ego Formation

“Roles … grow out of the third principle of

organization, thesocial

. The human being, at alltimes, from the first kick in utero to the last breath,

is organized into groupings of geographic and

historical coherence: family, class, community,

nation. A human being, thus, is at all times an

organism, an ego, and a member of a society.” (36)

Case studies of crises in integrating needs of bodily

developments with socio-cultural roles (e.g., 25-35)



Critical Stages of Ego Formation

Sucking and Nursing:

“What, then, is „good for the child‟ depends on what [he orshe] is supposed to become, and where.” (73)

American Cultural Roles:

“Thus the functioning American, as the heir of a history of

extreme contrasts and abrupt changes, bases [his or her] final

ego identity on some tentative combination of dynamic

polarities such as migratory and sedentary, individualistic and

standardized, competitive and co-operative, pious and

freethinking, responsible and cynical, etc.” (286; 293)







Dramatic Bias & Non-intelligibility

“In contrast, the aberration of censorship is primarily

repressive … its positive activity is the admission to

consciousness of any materials in any otherarrangement or perspective” [other than images that

would give rise to the unwanted insight.] (214)

“For a situation is „random‟ if it is „any whateverprovided specified conditions of intelligibility are not

fulfilled.‟ But nonsystematic process results from any

basic situation provided it lacks intelligible unity from

a definitive viewpoint.” (74)





§2.7.7: “A Note on Method”

“Freud represents the outlook of his time and tendsto regard observable psychic events as appearance

and unobservable entities as reality …”

“Again, Freud was professedly determinist.” (229)



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InsightClass10_Nov11p2