integral calculus: elevationism

For the introduction to this series of posts, here.  For the personal side of my desires in what I’m trying in these writing-thought experiments, here and here.

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First up, Emily Yoffe writing in Slate on research into emotional states of “elevation.” Just to reiterate, I’m not endorsing or not endorsing her views (or the views/theories of the people she summarizes in the piece).  This is working prior to all of that.  Simply how did we get here?

Warning: Serious thought-density beyond the jump.

Before even the first sentence, there is a first person (1p), namely Yoffe who has her first person awareness of herself.  Herself is of course relative to my point of view–i.e. she is a third person relative to me (a first person from my own point of view).  From Yoffe’s point of view, she is her own first person.  But this is not discussed.

Sometimes in this article Yoffe’s employs more interpretation with the work she is describing (entering into first and second person points of view on the matter, trying either to come at the topic from the inside of it, putting herself in the mind of the author’s she is trying to study, engaging with them) and at other times takes a more observational (3rd person perspective) to the work.  The interpretive side is the 1st/2nd.  The analytical side the 3rd person view.

Very technically we can say that she is taking up a 4th person perspective: Yoffe is holding in her mind the work of other people (who are 1st, 2nd, or 3rd persons relative to her or to anyone), those “researchers” themselves are taking up 1st, 2nd, and/or 3rd person perspectives relative to other 1st, 2nd, or 3rd persons (i.e. the test subjects of the experiment).  The subjects of the experiments (which is already arising in the space of beings-in-perspectives) themselves are 1st, 2nd, or 3rd persons themselves.

In order to understand what Yoffe is discussing before even an ability to read English, know some of the relevant background discussions, and so forth, it is cognitively necessary to be able to hold in one’s mind another person’s view of another person’s research/interpretation/theory of other people’s self-description in an experiment.  And now you have to hold (to understand what I’m doing), your understanding of my take on Yoffe’s commentary on the scientific research on subjects relating to Obama’s speech re: emotional states.

But this is never anywhere acknowledged by the author.  As you can see this can get complicated very quickly.  But it is brilliantly beautiful as a way of jnana yoga–a way of gnosis–a way of using the mind to begin to break cracks in the mind into which transcendetal spiritual reality may flood.  If this is not your path, that’s ok, you can skip this one.

Yoffe attempts to describe truthfully (1st person) her understanding of the research she has studied (3rd person) as a kind of truth that by engaging in the blosophere (community, plural 1st and 2nd persons) she believes will be normative (rightness/justness/goodness) for all people. Again this is happening without any expressed acknowledgment.  It is unconsciously presumed and assumed.

So now finally to the beginning of the article itself, Yoffe:

For researchers of emotions, creating them in the lab can be a problem. Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California-Berkeley, studies the emotions of uplift, and he has tried everything from showing subjects vistas of the Grand Canyon to reading them poetry—with little success. But just this week one of his postdocs came in with a great idea: Hook up the subjects, play Barack Obama’s victory speech, and record as their autonomic nervous systems go into a swoon.

–Researchers of Emotions

Researchers. Researchers are third-person plurals relative to Youffe (i.e. them).

Emotions. Emotions are already arising in perspectives.  By emotions is meant the inner feelings (1st person dimension) of an individual.

–Creating Them (Emotions) in the Lab can be a Problem.

Creating emotions in the lab can be a problem because emotions are 1st person dimensions of experience and labs are dominated by third person scientific modes of being and dimensions.  They generally feel somehow “unreal”.  There is a desire in third person modes to “create” or at points “generate” or even manipulate emotions.  Creating emotions in a lab as such is not a problem because a being, as a first person, simply has emotions moment to moment and anyone could take up a 2nd person perspective relative to that first person and simply ask them what they are feeling.  If you want to control emotions or create a certain set of emotions than yes, doing that in the lab can be a “problem”.

–Hook up the subjects, play Barack Obama’s victory speech, and record as their autonomic nervous systems go into a swoon

Subjects. Subjects is already an abstraction from the fact that they are 1,2,3 persons.  A subject is usually in this more like an object, i.e. the object of the scientific inquiry.

Play Obama’s victory speech. The “subjects” are now in dialogue (2nd person mode of being) with Obama, though he is not in the room personally.  Obama himself is a first person with his own first person view but plays a public role as presidential candidate that generally occludes any number of expressions of his inner world.  The being the subjects are relating to is himself partly a product of the social-political-media world.  (Four Quadrants all the way up and down).

record as their autonomic nervous systems…

i.e. Take up a third person perspective (an it pov) relative to the individuals in the study.  Pay no real attention to the interaction between the dialogical arising moment between the subjects and Obama’s speech but simply treat them as an it–a biological construct–and record/observe.  This view embeds a hidden assumption that the meaning of an emotion (which as a word points to first person realities) is located in the exterior of the body.  Exterior here does not mean inside as in they are checking inside the person’s body.  But exterior (or “without”) as opposed to interior (or within–i.e. consciousness as within, matter as without).

Yoffe:

In his forthcoming book, Born To Be Good (which is not a biography of Obama), Keltner writes that he believes when we experience transcendence, it stimulates our vagus nerve, causing “a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat.”

–when we experience transcendence, it stimulates our vagus nerve, causing “a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat.”

experience transcendence

Experience is a very unhelpful word as anything that arises in whatever perspective (mode) and quadrant (dimension) is an experience.  Transcendence is only slightly less unhelpful.  Transcendence is not specified.  What kind of transcendence?  A flow state?  A state of openness?  An actual trained meditational state of transcendence (if so, which one?).

[The Experience] stimulates our vagus nerve causing a feeling of spreading liquid warmth in the chest.

A feeling is the interior element of any arising moment while the bodily elements are the corresponding and co-dependently arising components of any occasion.  i.e. The experience of transcendence does not cause a feeling of spreading liquid warmth.  The liquid warmth is using first person descriptors to try and describe a 3rd person (bodily) movement which is the exterior correlate of the feeling.  The feeling-bodily element arise simultaneous and they are not caused by the experience of transcendence but are the interior and exterior correlates of the occasion or experience we label transcendence.

The vagus nerve is already a 3rd person who is itself in 1st and 2nd person modes of relationship.  [By person here I do not mean a self-reflective person, like a human person....you can substitute being for person if you prefer].  The interior correlate of the vagus nerve is deeply connected to the experience of transcendece which is missed because the materialistic (exterioristic as it were) prejudice–or at least sloppiness–of the quotation is coming through.  Though there is also a moment of idealism–that consciousness creates materiality prejudicing the interior dimension of existence–by saying the experience of transcendence “causes” via stimulation of the nerve the bodily reaction.

Yoffe:

University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who coined the term elevation, writes, “Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental ‘reset button,’ wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration.”

–powerful moments of elevation seem to push a mental reset button wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope…Haidt quotes first-century Greek philosopher Longinus on great oratory: “The effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport.”…Haidt’s research shows that elevation is good at provoking a desire to make a difference but not so good at motivating real action.

Moments of elevation push mental reset button.

These are more technically understood as phenomenal states.  By phenomenal here I mean phenomena nor phenomenal as in fantastically awesome or something. Although in this case, I guess we could say elevationism is a phenomenal phenomenal state.  [I suppose that was a lame attempt at a perspectival pun ].

Phenomenal states come and go.  They generally (like most states) show no develompent (”not so good at motivating real action”).  Which is why they temporarily erase the other phenomenal states of cynicism and so forth.

Not persuasion but transport

i.e. Altered state of consciousness.  Again generally comes and goes.  There will be (when looked at from a third person pov) a bodily-material correlate to “transport”.  Transport here is a third person signifier normatively used by a community of linguistic participants (2nd/1st persons plural) to describe an inner individual state of consciousness (1st person sigular).

Yoffe:

It was while looking through the letters of Thomas Jefferson that Haidt first found a description of elevation. Jefferson wrote of the physical sensation that comes from witnessing goodness in others: It is to “dilate [the] breast and elevate [the] sentiments … and privately covenant to copy the fair example.”

–Jefferson wrote of the physical sensation that comes from witnessing goodness in others.

Jefferson is a third person relative to Haidt (who is a third person…mostly) relative to Yoffe.  Jefferson, when alive, had his own first person sense of himself, and again like all politicians, particularly one so (in)famous in the public eye had a public personae, itself a kind of habitual taking up of a position to himself while taking up positions (perspectives) relative to other beings themselves taking up positions relative to him. That Jefferson wrote of this experience is a later interpretive moment, itself a practice (sitting down to write), through social technology (quill & paper), which helped an experience come that he apprehended (the memory of the elevation experience), passed on to social discourse (through the medium of the written word).  [See Integral Cycle of Knowledge].

Physical sensation that comes from witnessing goodness in others

Witnessing is 3rd person observational point of view.  But interesting that Jefferson describes it as witnessing goodness, since goodness is a normative, 1st person plural (or 2nd person) point of view.  It is to take up a 3rd person viewpoint from within a 1st person plural world.  Since goodness is (contra Jefferson) not “naturally” given–i.e. by observing nature alone–by through social discourse, communicative capacities, legal and cultural norms, worldviews and the like.

–[The physical sensation] It is to “dilate [the] breast and elevate [the] sentiments … and privately covenant to copy the fair example.”

Jefferson quite nicely expands on physical sensation to include both the bodily arising of the moment (dilate the breast) and the consciousness element of the moment (elevate the sentiments).

Privately covenant to copy the fair example:

To copy the example suggests public-communal forms of action, behavior, and discourse.  Since the “copy” (the now 3rd person relative to Jefferson’s 1st person) was itself originally a public act-communication (3rd person communication to 2nd persons) of a individual with his/her own self-consciousness (a 1st person).

Privately covenant. Also very intriguing language.  Covenant is again 2nd person, or 1st person plural language.  Normative language.  It is also religious in original meaning.  To privately covenant is to take up a first person point of view to one’s own first person (a phenomenology) and then to make an inner promise to self–which creates the sense of two selves, the committing one and the one to hold oneself responsible.  That is Jefferson here opens up something like a self and a conscience as well as an Awareness (”Witness of the Covenant”) to the deal with himself.

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I could go through the last half of the article like this, but I think this suffices as a first go round.  What might seem odd–and it still is partially odd to me to me which is part of the attraction on my end–is actually a deeper desire to see how deep are the layers of miscommunication, karmic patterning hidden in our language, about how we are with each other in this world.