Examining Life

     Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. This is a theme that runs through all of Western philosophy, and in fact can be seen as the point of philosophy to a certain extent. The philosopher that has probably been most influential on my thinking is Martin Heidegger. In the following, I want to explain one of his examinations of life, and how it can help us make more of life and the world.
     In his book “Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity” Heidegger talks about how care is a fundamental aspect of our experience of the world, of our being human.

“To-be-‘in’-the-world does not mean occurring among other things, but rather: all the while being concerned about it and attending to it, tarrying awhile ‘at home in’ the round-about of the world being encountered. The authentic mode of “being” in the world is caring in the sense of producing, putting in place.”

     First, this shows Heidegger’s rejection of strict objectivity. Our interactions with the world are never strictly objective because we always arrange the things we encounter. This is not always a physical arrangement. In fact it is primarily something that takes place though our arranging ideas and words in our minds, and those words and ideas are connected with physical things in the world. They shape how we experience physical things.
     (This of course does not mean that we can arrange things in any way we wish. Our arrangement has to allow us to interact successfully with the physical world as it is in terms of basic qualities that the physical things have. But Heidegger would argue that those basic physical qualities are far more limited and bare than what we often assume them to be. Most of what we encounter when we encounter everyday objects is a result of the way that we arrange them –mostly via the way that we arrange the ideas and words that we attach to them—and not because of the basic physical qualities of the objects themselves. What we think of things is far more influential in how we deal with them then their basic physical characteristics: size, weight, shape, etc. Purpose, usefulness and meaning are limited by those physical characteristics, but they are determined far more by what we think and how we act.)
     But if care is such a foundational part of how we experience the world, why are we not always aware of it. Why would it take a philosopher or careful examination to realize that care is so important? This is because care is often hidden.

“Care disappears in the habits, customs and publicness of everydayness—and this does not mean it comes to an end, but rather that it does not show itself any longer, it is covered up…. The world being encountered appears as simply there in a straightforward manner.” 

     We act out of habit most of the time. This means that we act not paying attention to the physical things around us in any more detail than is needed to use them for whatever limited purpose we have for them at that specific moment. Even more so, we act without paying attention to the arrangement we have made: the words, ideas and thoughts that determine how we understand, see and use things.
     I would add that we often pick up habits from other or society without knowing what arrangement they rely on. We pick up habits while being unaware of the care that is behind them. We act in the world as if it is always and essentially the way we see it. When we act out of habit; we take for granted the care, the arrangement, that has made the world the comprehensible, and sometimes meaningful, place it is. In other words, in habit we stop noticing the significant part that the human mind has played in making the world in which we live. This is what allows us to think and talk of objectivity, as if the things are there to be encountered in and of themselves without contamination from the subject.
     Though he doesn’t talk about authenticity much in this book, he does in Being and Time. I think authenticity fits in here in a very important way. When we are aware and conscious of the arrangements and the care that shape our world, we are aware of the inherent subjectivity. Then we are also able to play a role in shaping the world we live in. This can’t happen when we unthinkingly take up habits from others (which we always do, especially when we are young—that is how we become social creatures) and never stop to inquire about the arrangements and care that they are base on. If we do not pay attention to these things we are being inauthentic, and we are living under the control of those arrangements and cares. Those things shape the world that we live in, and we take them as being part of the world, not part of what we bring to the world. In not being aware of them, they exert a huge amount of influence on us that we are bind to. When we do that we are slaves of others cares and arrangements and we are inauthentic.
     Because we so often act out of habit—not seeing the importance of the arrangement and the way that the things themselves are different from what we make of them—we can sometimes be surprised when the physical world does not conform to our arrangements.

“On account of this, the possibility ever remains that distress will suddenly break forth in the world. The world can be encountered as something distressing only insofar as it is a world which is of significance to us.”
     It is always possible that the world of physical objects will act in a way that defies our habits. Or on a deeper level that defies our ideas and words, our arrangement. This is upsetting, or should be if we care to notice it. We won’t notice it if these things—and the arrangement we have made and become used to, our habitual state—are not important to us. Even if they are important to us, we will feel ourselves powerless to do anything about it if we are not aware of the fact that care and arrangement have shaped that world. It is when this happens that we should take a special interest in examining the world, life, and becoming aware of the care and arrangements that have shaped them. If we are already aware of the care and arrangement that have shaped the world we are already one step ahead.
     It is this being aware of how care shapes the world we live in, and how habits are both an expression of that care and a way of hiding it, that makes examining life in a philosophical way fruitful.

First Thoughts and Hopes Regarding Cognitive Dissonance

Having been asked about Orwell’s doublethink in 1984 recently, I started thinking about contradicting thoughts and beliefs.  To me it seems that the most troubling (and maybe the only really troubling) part of doublethink is that the person that has two contradictory thoughts or beliefs in their head does not see a problem with that.  I am not at all against contradiction and think that it is essential to entertain and hold contradictory thoughts in your head in order to not become simple minded and dogmatic.  After all, what in the world is actually black and white, simple and clear, cut and dry?  Things are complex and contradictory, so entertaining contradicting thoughts helps us keep that reality in mind—keep it real for us—, and keeps us actively reviewing and evolving our ideas, opinions and beliefs. 

I had heard the term cognitive dissonance before but actually spent more than just couple minutes looking it up this time.  Cognitive dissonance is “the existence of nonfitting relations among… knowledge, opinion[s], or belief[s] about the environment, about oneself, or about one’s behavior.”  It is a nonfitting that causes psychological discomfort. This definition comes from the first chapter of Leon Festinger’s book “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.”  It is the first book on the subject (or at least the first to use the term cognitive dissonance), and I finally received it in the mail yesterday and started reading it today.  It will take me a while I bet, but it should be worth it.  It not only lays out the idea of what cognitive dissonance is; it also explores the ways in which people try to overcome it.  The latter is what I am really most interested in at this point.

The difference between doublethink and cognitive dissonance, to put it simply, is that there is anxiety or psychological discomfort about the conflict, the nonfitting, in the latter but not the former.  It is the anxiety and discomfort that is key.  I think that as a person tries to resolve that conflict they have a chance to expand their thinking and understanding.  It is in a way—thought I tend to dislike the dialectic because it is binary and as a result too simple—a sort of synthesis that can lead to new and better understandings.  A person experiencing cognitive dissonance is faced with a violation of the logical law of non-contradiction and they need to reconcile it.  Doing so is an opportunity to re-evaluate the ideas that are in conflict coming to a fresher perspective and possibly deeper understanding.  Or that is my hope.

In the first chapter, Festinger mentions some articles published prior to the book that talk about similar ideas thought using different terms.  In one article, according to Festinger, after experiencing a conflict between an opinion and a source of information “there is a marked tendency to change either the evaluation of the opinion involved or the evaluation of the source in a direction which would reduce the dissonance.”  To me this seems fairly obvious and it is something that I have observed in myself and in others often. 

Here I want to depart from the book (though I hope that as I go this issue or idea is addressed in it) and talk about the authority of opinions and sources, especially in contemporary culture.  It used to be that when things were printed they were fairly well vetted and checked, especially full length books.  It was not cheap to print a book, so there was a financial risk if the material was later shown to be clearly inaccurate, or at least more of a risk than when you simply post something on the internet.  There was also a greater emphasis on reputation: the reputation of a publishing house, newspaper or magazine.  If you read something in print from a reputable printer, you could be fairly certain that it was well vetted.  At least, more so than today when you simply click on a link from a Google search and take in what could have been composed and posted just as easily and simply as you found it and opened it.  This is an issue that is serious, but I want only to mention it here on my way to another topic in the subject of authority. 

Today mere opinions (thought the internet is flooded with these partially informed and half-thought opinions) are not supposed to be taken seriously by serious people.  In fact, opinion as a whole is given a very bad wrap.  The same is true of personal experience and even tradition.  These things hold little authority because what is supposed to hold authority are facts, data and the scientific discoveries based on facts and data. 

In common culture these days, when data, facts and science appear and there is a conflict, all else is supposed to be re-evaluated to accommodate the facts, the data, the scientific discovery.  To keep things simple, the ‘all else’ is often just discredited and discarded.  This seems very dangerous for at least a couple of reasons. 

The first is that this is not really a synthesis or sublation (to use terms from the dialect, though I cringe as I do so); it is a simple turning of the tables.  Tradition, personal experience, etc. were authoritative in the past and science was nothing.  In this new simple solution to dissonance, science rules (along with data and facts), and the ‘all else’ is nothing to be taken seriously.  It is a case of the slave becoming the master and the master becoming the slave.  This is not a real change in thinking or understanding, it is only a change in positons.  This reason is based on a concern over the structure of thinking or the methodology being used in common culture.  People want progress and improvement.  This method does not result in progress or improvement in the long run, it simply moves the problems around.

The second is that facts, data and scientific discoveries are never complete or irrefutable.  Any good scientist or statistician will acknowledge that there is never really an end to the process of collecting and analyzing data or conducting scientific experiments and formulating theories, laws, and explanations.  The problem with the simple ‘throw out all else’ approach here is that it is often done (and here I am speaking about in common culture among everyday people) based on the newest data, facts or scientific discovery, though it may be just one study among many conflicting or contrary ones.  Facts, data and science are about collecting and analyzing large amounts of input over a long period.  To take the most recent and use it to trump everything else is not wise and not really in the spirit of science itself.  When there is nothing there—no opinion, personal experience or tradition—to counter the newest authoritative information, there is no progress there is only a tyranny of the new.  

Festinger’s book is supposed to explore ways that people tend to resolve dissonance.  It is psychology, a science, so it will provide descriptive theories on how people in general deal with dissonance.  I hope those theories will give me an understanding and provide me with some bearings.  From there I hope to be able to better think out and explain my idea of how cognitive dissonance can be used as an opportunity to refine our understanding and deepen our opinions.  In other words, I hope to be able to write about a prescriptive philosophy that uses cognitive dissonance as a starting point for developing more refined and well informed opinions and more accurate and complex understandings.