Is it “Tender” or is it “Open”?

One of my habits is to re-read an old textbook of mine, Thomism and Modern Thought by Harry R. Klocker, S.J. This tends to be good-weather, outdoor reading. Last summer I left the book outdoors, forgot that it was there, and a downpour damaged it. All of my copious marginal notes, made (foolishly) in ink were obliterated in the process. But then I found another copy on the Internet… Anyway, trying to tease Spring into action, I took the new copy out the other day and came across this interesting classification:

The Tender-Minded	The Tough-Minded
Rationalistic (going by principles)	Empiricist (going by facts)
Intellectualistic	Sensationalistic
Idealistic	Materialistic
Optimistic	Pessimistic
Religious	Irreligious
Free-Willist	Fatalistic
Monistic	Pluralistic
Dogmatical	Skeptical

Those familiar with William James, particularly his The Varieties of Religious Experience, will have heard the phrases used in the title. But this side-by-side characterization of these two psychological types, as viewed by James, appeared in Pragmatism (New York, Longmans, Green & Co., Inc., 1908) in a chapter titled “The Dilemma in Philosophy.”

The scheme is reproduced in Klocker’s segment on Pragmatism on page 127 of his book. Pragmatism, of course, falls decided under the tough-minded category. This time around, I got to thinking about the words James had used to classify these two opposing tendencies. Why “tender”? What really underlies these two classifications? Other words he might have chosen are “sensitive/insensitive,”  “inner-oriented/outer-oriented,” and from that last, echoing Jung, why not “introvert/extrovert”?

Now pragmatism, logical positivism, and other related philosophical positions are absolutely anchored in the assertion that all knowledge reaches us by the senses (hence the tough-minded are sensationalistic). And, furthermore, there is absolutely no way that sensory experience can give us proof of the metaphysical. But there are those tender-minded people who, perversely, assert the opposite. Should the pairing therefore include “stupid/bright” and “deluded/realistic”?

My simple solution here is to borrow from pragmatism its emphasis on “experience”—experience as the crucial and sole source of knowledge—but modifying that by asserting, based on experience itself, that some people do obtain additional knowledge that comes from a source beyond the senses. Call in inspiration. But if that is so (and I certainly think it is), then the tender-minded have greater access to reality than the tough. They are more “open” to ranges of reality than the tough-minded. The tough-minded feel it too—but at so marginal a level that they do not notice these ranges.

The “tender” classification used by James signals awareness of the tougher job the tender-minded have of dealing with reality. There is much more there. The tender are over-stimulated. They turn inward. And the tough, to be sure, have an easier time of coping with the world. Why then are they “pessimistic”? Could it be that, having nothing beyond the sensorium on which to build their world-view, they tend, ultimately, to despair? While the long-suffering tender-minded are “optimistic”?

The classification also shows that we are really mixtures of these two. It is very “tough” to choose but one.  My guess is that most people would rather pick and choose. But a forced choice will produce the actual leaning of the individual; it will mean, however, letting go of quite useful or inspiring products on the shelf of philosophy.

Transvaluation of All Values

Old Friedrich had it right, of course, but he gave it the wrong slant. The Friedrich I have in mind is Nietzsche. He coined this concept as die Umwertung aller Werte. He referred to religion in the broad sense and to Christianity specifically. He thought that Christianity was hostile to life, elevated the weak when, instead, we should admire the strong, worshipped the weak when we ought to worship, instead, the vital and energetic instead, etc. But Nietzsche was certainly a deep and profound thinker all the same, and if his conceptualization is distilled down from the big messy blog in which he managed to perceive it, it points at a great truth. In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience William James echoed this conceptualization somewhat, although much more mildly, when he contrasted sick-minded and healthy-minded individuals. They were contemporaries, needless to say, James born in 1842, Nietzsche in 1884, and such ideas were, alas, “in the air.” But it is possible to turn this insight upside-down in turn and then derive the genuine truth within it. Our times have happily (or unhappily) evolved a great deal since. We’ve come to know what the healthy-minded are capable of. Both died well before such plagues as communism, Nazism, and commercialism took hold, James in 1910, Nietzsche in 1900.

Curious this. It was “in the air,” the future. Nietzsche interpreted that strange emanation, either from the future or rising like a nasty vapor from his present, in a negative way and embraced primitivism. James felt the same thing but ended by up-holding the inherent value of those who were “soul-sick” and moved by a deep religious impulse. Freud and Jung, who followed them in 1856 and 1875 respectively, also went in different directions sensing the same air. Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion, meaning religion. Jung’s work anchored a broad movement back to religion by the West’s intellectual fellahin.

If we take values to represent the high—whatever meaning we want to give it—it is certainly true that the more stimulus we feel and the more intense it is, the lower we are in the scheme of nature. Pleasure is an intermediate here. The real stimulus is actually pain. And as in the physical, so also in other realms. I once read the comment in one of Idries Shah’s book, he was a Sufi teacher, that the most visible are of the lowest rank. That startled me at first back then, but I’ve come to see its truth. The most visible have power—and we worship power. Another tale that sticks in mind, in this context, I encountered in C.G. Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Here it is, very brief:

There is a fine old story about a student who came to a rabbi and said, “In the olden days there were men who saw the face of God. Why don’t they any more?” The rabbi replied, “Because nowadays no one can stoop so low.” [C.G. Jung]

A variant of “visibility” is that celebrity, when nothing else is present, is almost pure vacuity. Noise is low, silence is high. Motion distracts; indeed when it intensifies, it confuses the mind; therefore advertisers treasure nano-second flickers on the screen to cloud the judgment. The with-it are without it. Solitude is beatitude—except in an age of social networking.

Much has changed since Nietzsche wished to transvalue values and thus get rid of the last traces of Christian culture that still lingered in the late nineteenth century. Well, be careful what you wish for. The paradox is that to wish for nothing might get you everything. But it will be boring in the meantime, and there is no put-down in this day and age as potent as to call something B‑O‑R‑I‑N‑G…

It Becomes You to Be

The mention of Whitehead in the last post brought to mind the complementarity of being and becoming. Becoming is fashionable in our times, and being therefore sits below the salt, but the paradox is that to behold this fashionable Becoming one must be enduring. To hold these two concepts simultaneously in the mind is the easiest thing in the world. It is the experience of consciousness. But it seems to irk the intellect. Hence in the Ages of Becoming, the enduring self is also pictured as but an instance of the universal flux, and as this age peaked, William James discovered the “stream of consciousness.” That strikes a retrograde like me as a contradiction. In the Ages of Being a similar reduction of one to the other hides in the idea that Ultimate Being is pure act. We can’t have one without the other.

The Roots of Dualism

In consciousness the presentation of content must be viewed as separate from the perception of content. William James does that, in effect, by discussing the role of attention. The materialistic mode of thought, however, by speaking of attention rather than of the soul or the self, obscures what in effect can be seen as a radical duality. James himself (in Talks to Teachers) rejects the possibility that consciousness can be the consequence of mechanical processes. In this context he means the composite of presentation and perception. The nature of whatever it is that bestows attention to the flow of consciousness is altogether inaccessible to observation, as James himself notes. That this whatever picks and chooses what to notice and what to neglect is the basis for the faculty we call the will. James holds for a free will but thinks that its freedom cannot be proved. To lean in one direction or the other is itself a choice.

The traditional approaches to the mind are based on a narrative of reality in which responsibility is central. In effect you cannot have a meaningful narrative without real characters, thus agents. Agents without freedom of will cannot claim to be agents. Whatever cosmic narrative we choose, the characters within it must have freedom of choice. They need very little else. Angelic communities may rebel, for instance, and this alongside a presumption that they are immaterial. You might say that from the traditional perspective the fact that humans have bodies is almost incidental to their core being. In that agency must have free choice and free choice cannot be conceptualized without understanding of the choices before the agent, the very notion of agency includes consciousness and will in a single complex; you cannot remove one without negating the other.

The content of consciousness must be separate from the act of perception if language is to correspond to reality in any meaningful way. When I say "I am aware of XYZ," I'm positing two distinct phenomenal realities. One is awareness and the other is XYZ. Aquinas argued that the self cannot become aware of itself except by its acts. We can examine this assertion by pondering Franklin Merrell-Wolff's notion of consciousness-without-an-object, M-W's idea of the absolute. That phrase is without meaning. Consciousness-without-an-object is akin to the paradoxical concept of Aristotle's potential, a capacity out there in some ontological limbo without actuality.

In this relationship I discern a fundamental dualism beneath reality. If consciousness is, something else must be there too. The object seen cannot at the same time be the object that sees. Once we accept this, we have a reasonable basis for looking at reality. We have minimal orientation. Neither a materialistic nor a pure idealistic position is tenable. The materialistic view denies the reality of an agency. The idealistic denies the reality of anything over against the agency; it treats everything as a mirage produced by the mind.