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===6.1. The Phenomenology of Reflection===
===6.1. The Phenomenology of Reflection===
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This part of the discussion is fair to cast as the phenomenology of reflection. It aims to amass the kinds of observations that extremely simple reflective agents, as a matter of principal and with a minimal of preparation, can make on the ebb and flow of their own reflective acts. But this is not the kind of phenomenology that pretends it can bracket every assumption of a sophisticated or a theoretical nature off to one side of the observational picture, or thinks it can frame the description of reflection without the use of formal concepts, such as depend on the bracing and support of a technical language.
On the contrary, the brand of phenomenology being wielded here makes the explicit assumption that there are likely to be an untold number of implicit assumptions that contribute to and conspire in the framing of the picture to be observed, while it is precisely the job of reflective observation to detect the influence of these covertly acting assumptions. Further, this style of phenomenology is deliberately set free of prior constraints on the choice of descriptive devices, since it can appeal to any formal means or any technical language that serves to articulate the description of its subject.
Certain things need to be understood about the aims, the scope, and the self imposed limits of this phenomenology, especially when it comes to the question of what it hopes to explain. It is not the task of this phenomenology to explain consciousness but only to describe its course. This it does by making an inventory of the "contents" that appear in consciousness and by delineating the relationships that appear among these contents. Along the way, it must take into account, of course, that each moment of taking stock and each moment of charting relations needs to have its resulting list or map, respectively, realized as the content of a particular moment of consciousness.
Already, this lone requirement of the descriptive task raises a host of questions about what it means for something to be counted as a content of consciousness, and it leads, according to my present lights and aims, to a closer examination of a critical relationship, the logical relation "content of", taken abstractly and in general. Since it does not appear that very extensive lists or very detailed maps can be "wholly realized" as contents within a limited field of consciousness, it is necessary to recognize an extended sense of "realization", where a list or a map can be "partially" or "effectively" realized in a content of consciousness if and when an indication, pointer, or sign of it is present in awareness.
In particular, this tack suggests that some things, that otherwise loom too large to fit within the frame of immediate awareness, can be treated as contents of consciousness, in the extended sense, if only an effective indication of them is present in awareness. For instance, an effective indication of a larger text is a sign that can be followed to the next, and this to the next, and so on, in a way that incrementally leads to a traversal of the whole. By extension, a list of contents of consciousness or a map of relations among these contents is "effectively realized" in a single content of consciousness if that content effectively points to it, and if the object to which it points has the structure of an object that pointedly reveals itself in time. Given the evidence of the sign and the effective analysis of its object, a manifest of contents can be prized for the sake of the items it enumerates or the estates it maps, with each in due proportion to their values. Both parts of this condition are needed, though, since knowing the name alone of a thing, even if it lends itself to knowing the thing, does not itself amount to knowing the thing itself.
The concepts with which a theory operates are not all objectivized in the field which that theory thematizes.
In short, my philosophical working hypothesis is concrete reflection, i.e., the cogito as mediated by the whole universe of signs.
Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, [Ric, 166, 170]
This understanding of the task of phenomenology bears on three features of the approach to consciousness that I am charting here.
1. It is under the heading of "description", especially as qualified by the adjective "effective", that the rationale of using mathematical models and the strategy of seeking computational implementations of these models can be found to successively fall.
2. As a rule, I find it helps to avoid hypostatizing consciousness or self awareness as statically constituted entities, but to use the systematic notions of dynamic agency and developing organization. However, in order to make connections with other approaches to phenomenology I need occasionally to mention concepts and even to make use of language that I would otherwise prefer to avoid.
3. Finally, it is under the cumulative aims of effective description and systematic dynamics that the utility of sign relations is key. Sign relations are the minimal forms of models that are capable of compassing all that goes on in thinking along with whatever it is that thinking relates to in all the domains that it orients toward. The use of sign relations as models, as mathematical descriptions, and as computational simulations of what appears in reflecting on conduct is especially well suited to including in these models a description of what transpires in the conduct of reflection itself.
The type of phenomenology that is being envisioned here depends on no assured power of introspection but only on a modest power to reflect on conduct and thereby to give it a description. These descriptions, all the better if they are inscribed in external media, can be examined with increasing degrees of detachment and have their consequences projected by deductive means. In time, the mass of descriptions that accumulates with continuing experience and persistent reflection on conduct begins to constitute a de facto "model of behavior" (MOB). In common regard this "prescribed code" or "catalog of procedure" (COP) can range from an empirical standard of comparison, through a provisional regulation, to a tentative ideal for future conduct. However, the status that a COP or a MOB has when it starts out is not as important as its ability to test its prescriptions, along with their deductive and pragmatic implications, against the corpus of continuing observation, reflection, and description.
Reflection and consciousness no longer coincide. ...
What emerges from this reflection is a wounded cogito, which posits but does not possess itself, which understands its originary truth only in and by the confession of the inadequation, the illusion, and the lie of existing consciousness.
Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, [Ric, 172, 173]
It is pertinent at this point to draw a distinction between the power of reflection, that is claimed as a capacity crucial to inquiry, and what is likely to be confused with it, the presumptive power of introspection. "Introspection", in the sole part of its technical meaning that leads to its being excluded from empirical inquiry, refers to an infallible, and thus incorrigible, power of observation that one is supposed to possess with respect to one's private experiences, matters over which there is imagined to be no higher court of appeal than one's own particular and immediate awareness. But the horizon of experience that is plotted with regard to this static standpoint fails to reckon with the dynamic nature of an ongoing circumstance, that subsequent experience continually rides a circuit around its antecedents and ever constitutes a higher court for every proceeding and every precedent that falls within its jurisdiction.
The distinction that marks reflection and sets it apart from introspection is its own acknowledged fallibility, which involves its ability to be seen as false in subsequent reflections. Naturally, this has an import for the status of reflection in empirical inquiry. Paradoxically, its admission of fallibility is actually a virtue from the standpoint of making reflection useful in science. If reflection on conduct leads to a description that cannot be falsified by any contingency of conduct, then that description is insufficient to specify any particular conduct at all. This means one of several things about the description, either (1) it remains a condition of conduct in general, or (2) it resides as a part of a necessary logic at the bounds of all experience, or (3) it rests in a realm of metaphysics that abides, if anywhere, beyond the bounds of purely human experience and thus abscounds altogether from the sphere of empirical inquiry.
In this way the psyche is itself a technique practiced on itself, a technique of disguise and misunderstanding. The soul of this technique is the pursuit of the lost archaic object which is constantly displaced and replaced by substitute, fantastic, illusory, delirious, and idealized objects.
Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, [Ric, 185]
One of the most difficult problems that arises for the phenonenology of reflection, and one that falls under the heading of "fallibility" in a markedly strong way, is the issue of systematic distortion. Aside from the false idols that are deliberately constructed, there is another host of false images whose generation is so thoroughly systematic that only their lack of consciousness prevents them from being called "deliberate". All the more naive projects of enlightenment, capitalized or not, are brought down by a failure to recognize this category of human frailty.
If the phenomenology of reflection that is developed and justified from this point on is not to be naive about this brand of fallibility, then it needs to constitute safeguards, a system of checks and balances, if you will, against it. If no method of remediation can permanently arrest the perpetrator of these schemes from generating distractions in perpetuity, then at least one can hope for ways to arraign the forms of fallibility under various recognizable themes, so that their dangers can be avoided in the future. In this vein, it is necessary to institute the study of those more opaque obstructions that limit the medium of investigation and to facilitate the analysis of those more refractory resistances to clear reflection, whose names are legion, but whose characters can be diversely noted under the themes of "obstruction", "resistance", the "shadow", the "unconscious", the "dark side of the enlightenment", or even better yet, the "underbrush of the clearing".
In the general scheme of things, the forms of distortion that remain peculiar to particular agents of reflection need garner to themselves nothing outside the incidental degrees of interest. The best check to counter this species of distortion, to which the isolated individual is likely to fall prey, is the balance of cultural wisdom that is commonly stored up and invested in the living praxis of a reflective community.
It is only when the incidence of singular distortions is not damped out by the collective incitement of countermeasures, when the aggregation of local distortions is overlooked by the powers of a general reflection, when the flaws in the individual lights and mirrors of the scientific organon are not taken into account and duly compensated in the shape of the social "panopticon", or when the grinding accumulation and the precipitous mounting up of infinitesimal but significant deviations from accurate reflection are not met with an adequate power of oversight, one that can maintain solely the interests of community integrity at heart, that a truly false ideal begins to hold sway over the very perceptions of every specialized agent of reflection.
When these aberrations and astigmatisms develop unchecked, and when the strain to see things clearly reaches the point of breaking all the instruments thereof, then the most circumscribed faults, the distorted reflections of individual hypocrisy, the strange lack of insight and the missing sense of mutual reciprocity that manifest themselves in the most parochial forms of self interest, then all of these defects, and ills, and shocks begin to "pass through" to the collective strata, to be inherited and propagated by the highest levels of social oraganization, and then a systematic and widespread falsification of the whole conduct of society begins to pervade its view of itself.
On macroscopic scales of organization, with medium sized bodies and bodies of media that extend over considerable distances, with masses of activity that successfully propagate their own forms through vastening expanses of time, the general condition of thoughtfulness cancels out and compensates for all but the most singular of disturbances, namely, those that are peculiar to the microscopic realm of observation. If the matter is regarded on this grander scale, then it is not hard to find a sufficient reason for the stubborn persistence of the cosmic order, and thus the desirable necessity of doing just this is never far from mind. In the case of whole societies, a like reason is often enough to explain their inertia, their resistance, and their overall slowness to change.
If there is felt a need to devise an object explanation, a presumptive sources of troubles that is already compact, concrete, and thus confined enough to accuse, apprehend, and hopefully imprison on account of the mass's retarded potential, then resorting to a hypostasis posed in the form of an "archaic object" is a prototypical way of controlling anxiety, and it frequently, if not infallibly, can serve just as well as any other device on which to pin the common blame. This highlights the question: What sort of archaic object would account for the general malaise in a community whose dedication to inquiry has become root bound?
I wish to apply a determinate philosophical method to a determinate problem, that of the constitution of the symbol, which I described as an expression with a double meaning. I had already applied this method to the symbols of art and the ethics of religion. But the reason behind it is neither in the domains considered nor in the objects which are proper to them. It resides in the overdetermination of the symbol, which cannot be understood outside the dialecticity of the reflection which I propose.
Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, [Ric, 175]
The archaic object of this global aimlessness, that informs the course of the general drift, that the total condition and the specific culture of inquiry revolve about in their orbits, as if they aim to be constantly accelerated toward it, but never quite manage to resolve their situation toward it, as if they fear to dissolve into it, is very likely nothing more than the whole community of interpretation itself, effectively realized as an object of its own devising.
The community of interpretation, whose currency funds the community of inquiry as a going enterprise within its fold, has sufficient reason to preserve itself in its present form as a valuable object, commodity, or resource. But the dialectical nature of the process that is currently conducted between them, due in part to the dialectrical charges of the "-ionized" terms that pass for information between them. A term of this charge splits the action from the end and shares it between the parties to an ambiguity, the active and passive objects that together comprise its full denomination. This division of denotation forces interpretation to vacillate between the two extremes of meaning in a vain and eternal effort to rejoin their senses of value to the realm of the rendered and misspent coin, in hopes of regaining the meaning what was mint in their original condition. The stowing away of one portion or the other drives the potential that drives both themselves and all the actions that they are meant to convey toward their designate and their destinate ends, but the unstable equilibrium that is their due, especially when it is permitted to be waged by uncontrolled forms of oppositional attraction, does not permit the dialogue to rest. It continues to remain in doubt and does not fail to renew its ambivalence regarding the maintenance of any fixed form it happens to take, always wondering whether its present form is literally necessary, precisely sufficient, or whether it is but transiently and contingently convenient. Accordingly and otherwise the whirl of dialogue, for all its own reasons, is always in imminent danger of wasting away into the echo of its own narcissism.
The problem arises of how to bring these systematic distortions under systematic control. It helps to stand back a bit from the problem and to cast a somewhat wider net. Accordingly, let the whole category of phenomena that are gathered around this issue be thematized under the family name of an "obstruction to inquiry" (OTI). This includes as a subordinate genus the panoply of systematic distortions, generated by disingenuous reflections, that can be hypothesized to have their source in protecting the favored assumptions and defending the implicit claims of a particular status quo, no matter whether the implicated propositions are held to be the prerogatives of a privileged POV or whether they are delivered up to indictment as the prejudices of a more widely sanctioned world view. The archetype of this behavior is appropriately addressed under the mythological or the psychological category of "narcissism".
It is important to note that the family OTI and the genus "narcissus" differ in the levels of hypothesis that are involved in their concepts, both in their speculative formation and in their provisional attribution. The presence of an OTI is fairly easy to surmise from its distinguishing traits: the dissipative conduct and the rambling course that affect the inquiry in question. To the degree that the suspicion of its effect and the verification of its force can be assembled from superficial traces, this makes its maintenance supportable on circumstantial evidence alone. In a phrase, one says that the wider hypothesis lies "nearer to nature" than the narrower construction, or that it makes its appearance closer to the purely phenomenal sphere. In contrast, unraveling the precise nature of the obstruction requires a deeper investigation. There is an additional hypothesis involved in guessing the source of the resistance, no matter how prevalent a particular genus of distortion is found and no matter how likely an individual species of explanation is in fact.
Within this wider setting it may be possible to focus more clearly on the species of threats to accurate reflection that need to be clarified here. Already, besides the stigma of stubborn error that hangs over the whole refractory horde, there is a germ of paradox that hides within the very folds of this classification. Namely, it is that the first obstacle one finds to reflection, and hence to every form of reflective inquiry, is a kind of narcissism or self love. It begins naturally enough, ensconced in the not unnatural desire of every form of life to preserve itself in its present form. But the simple desire to remain as is can be diverted into a blinded esteem of the self, one that admires its present condition only as reflected in the array of disingenuous reflections and contrived presentations that make up a fixed, idealized, and very selective image. Finally and strangely enough, this unreflective form of narcissism even comes to prefer the simplistic and beautiful lies to the realistic forms that a veritable mirror would show.
The danger of narcissism, with respect to the prospects of a reflective inquiry, is not in the dynamic attractions and the realistic affections that a person or a society bears toward its truer self, and that in turn inform their respective bearings toward the selves they are meant to be, but in the static character of its attachment to a fixed, idealized, and partial image of that self.
Once again, the quality that distinguishes reflection from introspection, its fallibility, is a trait that sufficiently reflective agents can find reflected in their own conduct of reflection, and needless to say, their conduct in general. This quality of fallibility, thus cognized and thus converted, that is, once its application to oneself is acknowledged and its consequences for one's experience are recognized, becomes a type of self recognizant character, an internalized trait that leads reflective agents to become more corrigible, more docile, and thus more educatable. This makes it possible for reflective agents to build up their images of reality from scratch materials, to proceed through steps that are always revisable and edifiable, and to leave the finishing of their forms to the work of future editions. In the final analysis, while this mannerism of aesthetic distance and tempered discretion prevents any affection or any impression from becoming too "immediate", in the strictest sense of that word, it is just this mode of detachment that assures the sensible image of its eventual remediation.
The nature and use of reflection in inquiry, as it currently appears, can be described as follows. Reflection on conduct leads to a description of that conduct, posed in terms of a reflective image. Over an interval of time or an extended period of investigation, these descriptive images are accumulated into exhaustive theories and compiled into compact models of the conduct in question. To be useful in science, or empirical inquiry, these theories and models must be capable of being false with respect to their intentions, amenable to being tested in further experience, and subject to being amended on subsequent reflection.
In sum, the very feature of reflection that seems to be its chief defect, the fact that it can generate false images, casting reflections that are false to the actions they intend to represent and even leading to wholly distorted perspectives on the objectified scene of activity, is the very characteristic that saves its appearance in experience and the very trait that permits it to show its face at the court of inquiry, which all along admits that distortions acknowledged to be imperfect images can still be disclosed to subsequent experience and remedied in future reflections.
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===6.2. A Candid Point of View===
===6.2. A Candid Point of View===
