On Knowing Where You Are

How do you answer the question, Where am I?  This post concerns this question in a broad sense, yet in a sense grounded in the concrete perceptual encounter with the world.  Our sense of where we are in space is a primary form of how our world is disclosed to us.  As Thomas Mann writes (and as I have cited him previously): 

Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached, state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabound of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.

Mann is admirable on this front in that he maintains important distinctions between space and time while showing their ultimate connection in a more general form, which we can call space-time for lack of a better term; lifeworld would probably do as well, but that term is typically invoked with historical and cultural meanings in mind.

Not surprisingly, my musings on this topic were set off by recent travels.  While visiting New York city, I found myself wondering where I was on several occasions.  And I don't mean I was pondering my place in the universe or some existential inquiry; no, I literally needed to know where I was, specifically whenever I got off the subway and emerged back on the surface streets.

One can figure out where he is in a few different ways.  Some of these ways are more "direct" in that one can instantly grasp his spatial orientation by perceiving landmarks, or, say, the position of the sun in the sky.  Simply by regarding one's visual horizon, one can immediately know which way is North, and thus which way all of the other cardinal directions point, and thus, most importantly, which way one must walk if the bar one his headed to is uptown. This was my consistent mode of spatial orientation while living in New Mexico.  When living in a town with uniformly low buildings and distinct mountain ranges in all directions, figuring out where you are and which direction to go is as easy as looking up.

Alternatively, one can figure out where he is in a more "indirect" fashion.  This requires reading signs and making inferences.  If I come out of the subway and need to walk East two avenues and then south for three blocks, then my typical strategy (amateur city-dweller that I am) is to read off the coordinates from the nearest corner, then pick a direction and walk until I see the next set of street signs, thus enabling me to infer what direction I just walked in, and determine how to further determine my course.  I felt alienated doing this.  I quickly learned that I could orient myself in the "direct" manner by identifying specific buildings on the horizon (e.g., the Freedom tower is downtown, so if I can see it, I know which way downtown is, and thus I know where I am).  But this doesn't always work in NYC, where you often can't see further than whatever random set of unremarkable buildings swallow up your horizon.

So, I like to know where I am by being able to simply look around.  But perhaps New Yorkers don't need my crude guess-and-check system to orient themselves when they emerge from the subway.  Perhaps after years of practice they have a little internalized map, like the GPS on your phone, with a red dot indicating where they are and the map adjusting accordingly.  I wouldn't be surprised if this ability were innate in all humans, and just a matter of whether it is cultivated by specific cultures.  It is now well known that Australian aboriginal speakers of Guugu Yimithirr do not rely on "ego centric" direction words at all (left, right, forward, backward, etc.), but rather always refer to the cardinal directions.  To quote a recent NYTimes article:  

Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, they’ll say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” Or they would warn you to “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was “coming northward.” 

The article proceeds to explain how the tribe's linguistic practices ingrain a sense of direction, to the point where speakers of this language simply "feel" directions, in the way someone with perfect pitch senses each note without having to calculate intervals.  This goes beyond the "direct" mode of spatial orientation I described above, however I would argue that it begins in the manner I describe above and becomes habituated to the point where the process is unconscious.

And this brings me back to Thomas Mann.  A change of setting is indeed one of the fastest ways to forget.  A new setting challenges you to orient yourself, to figure out where you are; whereas our home-spaces "feel like home" precisely because one knows where he is at all times.  In a new place we are set back to our "primitive, unattached state," which can be exhilarating, yet equally alienating. 

On Planning for the Future (part 2)

In my previous post I discussed the essential difference between retention and protention, with the intention to extend this analysis to the difference between recollection and thinking about the future (I have alternatively referred to thinking about the future as 'planning', which may be too narrow a term. From here, I will try to consistently use 'thinking about the future' or 'futural thinking'.)

Retention and protention are the bookends of what I call the micro-structure of time-consciousness. Recollection and planning are parts of the macro-structure of time-consciousness, which is more complex. The macro-structure of time-consciousness is accomplished through our "narrativizing faculty." That is, the narratives one constructs about her past and potential future constitute her autobiographical sense of self. Recollection and planning both participate in the phenomenological form of this narrativizing activity. Thus, when we think about the future, we are essentially "recalling memories" that we do not have (but wish to have; fear having; etc.)

As I said in my previous post, an essential difference between retention and protention can be cashed out in terms of their differing levels of determinateness of the content and context. Whereas retention has a determinate content and context, protention has a more or less determinate context but a necessarily unfulfilled content. However, this "essential difference" does not exhaust the difference between retention and protention. Protention, with its unfulfilled character, is affective. That is, the content of protentions is made determinate through the unfolding of time in a uni-directional manner. The phenomenal character of this "filling-in" is thus affective in the sense that we experience it as happening to us. Thus, protentional contents have a certain valence, or power to affect us, to varying degrees.

The reason we must be cautious with our thinking of the future is precisely because the emotional/valence aspect of protention is narratively affective on the level of maco-temporal consciousness. We view, and thus (e)value(ate) ourselves in light of our pasts and in anticipation of some future. The past is determinate but the possibility of the future is delimited by the context provided it by our past. Thus, it makes sense to say that we think of our future--through planning, hoping, fearing, desiring--in a formally similar way as we think of our past.

We are greatly affected by what we perceive to be our potential futures. The power of this affect only makes one more prone to self-fulfill the 'motivated' and thus delimited possible path through life. The more one becomes attuned to the infinity of logical possibility, one is able to become infinitely more hopeful; but also potentially infinitely more wrought with despair.

There is a danger here, however. While it makes psychological sense to assert that our fantasized futures are constrained by, even dependent upon, our past experiences; this runs the risk of forgetting or covering over the logical truth by virtue of which our futures are generally much more open and indeterminate than we typically imagine them to be. Our everyday understanding of what "could" happen is really just a misunderstanding of what will "probably" happen.

Notice that this forgetting is not necessarily good or bad for any particular group. Some individuals probably conceive of their futures in much too positive a light, while others are generally much too negative. Those unfailing optimists should recognize that a vast horizon of misfortune potentially awaits them, while those miserable misanthropes need to learn to see the light a bit more.

Our consciousness of the future generally conforms to how the future unfolds. This is more true for protention than it is for macro-level anticipation/planning. The further off into the futural horizon one abstracts, the broader the transverse horizon of meaningful possibility expands. As a subject approaches a fixed point in the future, the phenomenological horizon of possibility contracts, while the logical horizon does not. While it would be absurd to always pay heed to the logical horizon of possibility, it is wise to pay more attention to it more often than not. It is a humbling viewpoint which makes one cautious with words, thoughts, and deeds.

On Planning for the Future (part 1)

While watching a fascinating TED talk last night on the difference between the "experiencing self" and the "remembering self", I was struck by the connection I could draw to some recent reading I've been doing on time-consciousness. I'm almost done Evan Thompson's Mind in Life, which is an ambitious work on phenomenology, cognitive science, and the philosophy of biology. Thompson covers everything from cellular biology to Husserlian analyses of empathy, enculturation, visual perception, and, as I will discuss here today, time-consciousness. The line from the TED talk (btw, check out the compendious collection of TED talks, they are great!) that really struck me was along the lines of: "When we think about our future, we think about memories we anticipate having." This means that one's form of thinking about the future shares in (some, if not all of) the essential features of recollection. As someone who has thought time-consciousness and the phenomenal character of recollection before, this really got me thinking. I will proceed with two posts: this one will cover some of the "nuts and bolts" of Husserl's analysis of time-consciousness; the next one will be more speculative and probably conclude with some sentences using the word "ought".

The analysis of time-consciousness occupies one of the most important places in phenomenology. The syntheses that constitute both the objects of experience, and the experiences themselves, are temporal syntheses. Husserl shed a great deal of ink analyzing both types of constitution; the former are constituted in "objective time" while the latter are constituted in "immanent time." Both levels of temporality are constituted by an underlying, bedrock "absolute flow," which is essentially forward moving, unfolding in a three-part structure. "Primal impressions" are the absolute now-point of consciousness--the "knife-edge" of the specious present. Primal impressions make no reference to what-has-just-passed or what-is-about-to-come. But we don't experience the present as a series of "knife-edge" moments. We experience the present as a "duration block" (William James). That is, while time flows along, our experience of it is "chunky." The present chunk of temporal experience is constituted by the primal impression and its relation to what has just passed but remains in consciousness--retentions. When one hears a melody, her experience of the presently sounding note is affected by the note that has just sounded. Similarly, one's experience of the present note is conditioned by her anticipation of what is imminently to follow--protention. Thus, the threefold structure retention-primal impression-protention is a formal invariant structure of our experience of time.

In a chapter titled "Primordial Dynamism" in his Mind in Life, Evan Thompson considers protention's essential difference from retention:
"In thinking about time-consciousness, it is easy to assume that protention is simply the reverse or inverse of retention and thus that the threefold structure of temporality is symmetrical. But this can be the case for several reasons" (360).
The principle difference between retention and protention can be articulated in terms of the determinateness of the content of these respective time-phases. The retentional character of temporal experience takes the form of "what's-having-just-been." If one were to cash out a retention in propositional form, both the context (conditions necessary for determining the meaning of a proposition) and content (immanent meaningful object of experience) would be determinate. That is, what's-having-just-been is not subject to change. It is contingent in the sense that things could have gone otherwise, but it is necessary in that the past is fixed. The protentional aspect of experience, on the other hand, takes the form of "what-has-yet-to-come." If one were to spell out a protention in propositional form, the context would be more or less determinate, but the content remains necessarily unfulfilled. Here, I say the context is more or less determinate in that when we are experiencing the specious present, background conditions such as physical location, surrounding objects, natural laws, etc, are operant such that any change in them would result in massive shock to one's temporal consciousness. The content of the what-has-yet-to-come remains necessarily unfulfilled in that there is an openness to a horizon of possibility underlying the forward flow of time. Thus, while we may have a very good sense of what is about to happen, we can never be sure.

Here's an example to clarify some things:
As I sit here at my desk typing away, the background conditions defining the context of my experience are "sedimented" as they define my experience with great regularity. I do not find myself instantly teleported to another location. The furniture in the room does not start floating. Nothing dissipates into thin air, etc. Were anything like this to happen, it would cause massive shock to my temporal consciousness. I.e. "what the hell!!!" Whereas, let's say all of a sudden I see a spider crawling up the wall next to me. I was not expecting this, but it does not come as a shock, only a mild surprise at best. The difference between the two scenarios (the first being "shocking" and the second being "unexpected") is that the first involves an alteration to the context of the proposition that would be used to articulate the meaning of a protention, whereas the latter involves a uniform context inherited from my retentions while the content is filled in with something I didn't expect (the spider).

In my next post, I will consider whether the necessity of unfulfilled content characterizing protention fully exhausts the phenomenological difference between protention and retention. I will argue (following Thompson) that protention is a necessarily affective experience, thus involving emotion and valence. I will go on to consider the implications of this analysis for the difference between recollection and fantasizing about the future, and if this tells us anything about how we ought to think about our futures.

Back to Ze German Authors

If you know me at all, you know that Hermann Hesse is my favorite author. His last and greatest work Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game) [Das Glasperlenspiel] is my favorite book. I like his stories, I identify with his characters, I like his style.
In keeping with my love of Hesse, I have always meant to read Thomas Mann's work since he was a great friend and literary interlocutor to Hesse. In fact, in Magister Ludi Hesse names one of his characters "Thomas van der Trave," which is a veiled allusion to Mann, who grew up in a town on the Trave river in Germany. Van der Trave is one of the most enlightened and noble characters in Hesse's masterpiece.
Finally, I have made time for Thomas Mann. It was almost as if he made time for me, as I saw a wonderful hard back edition of his master work, The Magic Mountain, at a used book sale on campus. I have only read the first few chapters, but already I'm struck by wonderful passages such as this:

Two days travel separated the youth--he was still too young to have thrust his roots down firmly into life--from his own world, from all that he thought of as his own duties, interests, cares and prospects; far more than he had dreamed it would when he sat in the carriage on the way to the station. Space, rolling and revolving between him and his native heath, possessed and wielded powers we generally ascribe to time. From hour to hour it worked changes in him, like to those wrought by time, yet in a way even more striking. Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached, state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabound of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.
-Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter 1939, p. 4.

Contemplating the last few sentences has yielded extreme aesthetic pleasure for me. Mann's prose is enchanting. He evokes the image of the "primitive, unattached state" in order to make palpable the grandiosity of Space and Time. Whatever it is that Hesse and Mann have in common, it is most striking in passages like this one.