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ART & ORGANISM

DEVELOPMENT

INDIVIDUATION and SOCIALIZATION

“To Know and to be known”

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• “The Butterfly in the Brain”  You have likely heard of the “butterfly effect”— the dependence of the current state on a very small change in a previous state.  In other words, small changes can cascade and be amplified in subsequent states. 
  • In recent years, partly considering the interplay of  nature and nurture, after the relatively small contribution of genetics to subsequent behavior in humans (see about the science of individuality),  “Geneticists such as Robert Plomin at King’s College London argue that much of the remaining variation is the result of chance events as our brains develop in the uterus. As [neuroscientist David] Linden* puts it: “The wiring diagram of the human brain is so enormous and complicated that it cannot be specified exactly in the sequence of an individual’s DNA. Subtle random changes in the position or movement of cells within the developing nervous system can cascade through time to produce important differences in neural wiring and function.” (read about this idea in context in a book review of Unique in newscientist) [*(David Linden is author of Unique: The new science of human individuality; reviewed in New Scientist, 12 Dec 2020.)] (from A&O notes on DEVELOPMENT)

 

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Since deep antiquity seekers of wisdom have been urged to “KNOW THYSELF”

But also, in one’s behavior, to express NOTHING IN EXCESS .

Read

And then about the dynamic balance between individuation and socialization seen in light of the differences between LONELINESS and SOLITUDE:

read A&O notes on NEEDS for SOCIALITY and SOLITUDE

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Arguably, REASON itself evolved as a result of this tension and the necessity for socialization to develop and contribute to self actualization. [recall that in our integrative biological version of Maslow’s hierarchy of motivational NEEDS, socialization preceded emergence of “esteem”–how one stood out from the group and being recognized by potential partners for your useful uniqueness.  You might, for example, act in a way to evoke a critical thought in a potential reproductive partner: “I want those genes (and/or memes) in my babies.” 

Consider in terms of the idea that amongst our most urgent needs are

TO KNOW AND TO BE KNOWN

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Exceptionalism –the idea of uniqueness is two edged –obviously to students of Art & Organism now– we are speaking at two different levels of organization. 

What do you think of the quote: “Separation is an illusion that we have made real by agreement.  The fundamental nature of the universe is one of harmony and unity in relationship.  There is no separation. . . . We have no way of knowing that when we are born, our feeling of separation  flows from an illusion that is built upon our lack of experience in the reality in which we find ourselves.  We simply can’t see that our feeling of being separate is a result of our limited perception of the true nature of the universe. . . . Being born is like waking up inside a dream and not knowing it.”  – Stewart Emery (“Actualizations”))

MORE ABOUT OUR “SEPERATENESS:”

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security. (Einstein 1950)[i]  (Jon Kabat-Zinn tells a similar story: in “No Separation” in Coming to our Senses 2005 publ by Hyperion, NY. pp 338-339)

clinical: in the balance between the multiple elements of the sense of individual uniqueness and that of social integration, any combination of specific elements can get out of balance in ways that are dysfunctional if not at least troubling: for example, the profound sense of loneliness many people experience sometimes, and some people all the time:

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As Huxley pointed out (in Doors of Perception above) there are levels of organization in sociality– echoed by a Pashtun saying^[ii] (cited by Isabel Hilton New Yorker Dec 03 2001 p59): “Me against my brother, my brother and me against our cousins, we and our cousins against the enemy.”     

[Now see Lao-Tze on levels of sociality]

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• Does this resemble the sociality of songbirds: Songbirds help friends and family, but not strangers
  • (“Some songbirds are more likely to help other birds in their close social circles than casual acquaintances or strangers, according to a study published in Current Biology. Researchers examined how superb fairy wrens respond to distress calls, discovering that the birds will aid those in their same breeding group but ignore calls from those they don’t recognize — a multilevel society social arrangement also found in human hunter-gatherer societies.”) (Full Story: Forbes (tiered subscription model) (3/27/2023); or 
• The sociality of Barbary sheep: Christ Leste-Lasserre reported on animals-that-are-social-outliers-seem-to-be-better-at-solving-problems. 

  • Sheep, camels, goats, gazelles and other hoofed animals are better at figuring out solutions to puzzles when they are less integrated into social groups. … Such marginalisation might force individuals to find food, shelter and other needs on their own without group help, thereby fuelling innovation, says Federica Amici at the University of Leipzig in Germany” (Caicoya et al 2023): She and her colleagues found that “Innovation across 13 ungulate species: problem solvers are less integrated in the social group and less neophobic”  (see notes on “innovation in other species” in A&O notes on creativity)

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CONSIDER the word “SONDER.”    It was invented by John Koenig and posted to his project, “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.” I think it helps crystalize something about mutual connectivity to which check-ins at the beginning of seminar helps us aspire.  In our A&O webnotes, now look at “intersubjectivity” (below).     BTW: for all the inadequacies of language, you still must appreciate the power of WORDS: Koenig has a beautiful promotion for the book that eventually emerged from his project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkoML0_FiV4)

In a new book, “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber take a stab at answering this question [about the evolution of reason]. Mercier, who works at a French research institute in Lyon, and Sperber, now based at the Central European University, in Budapest, point out that reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context.

“Stripped of a lot of what might be called cognitive-science-ese, Mercier and Sperber’s argument runs, more or less, as follows: Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain. For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action. Reason developed not to enable us to solve abstract, logical problems or even to help us draw conclusions from unfamiliar data; rather, it developed to resolve the problems posed by living in collaborative groups.”

“Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves,” Mercier and Sperber write. Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an “intellectualist” point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social “interactionist” perspective.   (excerpt from Elizabeth Kolbert’s essay review of  The Enigma of Reason, by the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber:  “That’s What You Think”  By Elizabeth Kolbert The New Yorker Books  February 27, 2017 Issue  pp 66-71   https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds

ARISTOTLE on the necessity to be social to be fully human: 

“… if each individual when separate is not self-sufficient, he must be related to the whole state as other parts are to their whole, while a man who is incapable of entering into partnership, or who is so self-sufficing that he has no need to do so, is no part of a state, so that he must be either a lower animal or a god.”  (from Perseus, an open educational resource for Greek and Latin)

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INTERSUBJECTIVITY

• DEEP ethological aspects of INTERSUBJECTIVITY, a major theme in PHENOMENOLOGY and an aspect of INDIVIDUATION X SOCIALIZATION):   so, we know a bit about mirror neurons; theory of mind; empathy– NOW, maybe you really can feel someone else’s pain:  “Researchers have found that the rat brain activates the same cells when they observe the pain of others as when they experience pain themselves. In addition, without activity of these ‘mirror neurons,’ the animals no longer share the pain of others. Finding the neural basis for sharing the emotions of others is an exciting step towards understanding empathy.”  (popular link) (technical link)
  • COMMUNICATING – what are other we/other people thinking or feeling? Crossing BOUNDARIES between us, between us and the world 
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• INTERSUBJECTIVITY is a key element in Winnecott’s psychoanalytic theories and can be fruitfully viewed from the perspectives of Empathy, Psychoanalysis, and Phenomenology.  At the core of these perspectives there is a resonance that stretches towards the ideal of “being one with everything”  (see ART and EMOTION notes and the [see Psyche essay for Winnecott). (as when subject and object enter into each other? Co-create / co-constitute a unique entity?)   READ “The Invention of Empathy”  and then Delacroix on Painting as Communication.
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• “Starbucks on Forty-second and Sixth, even has a sign that reads, “Friends are like snowflakes: beautiful and different.” … “The sign in Starbucks should read, “Friends are like snowflakes: more different and more beautiful each time you cross their paths in our common descent.” For the final truth about snowflakes is that they become more individual as they fall—that, buffeted by wind and time, they are translated, as if by magic, into ever more strange and complex patterns, until, at last, like us, they touch earth. Then, like us, they melt.’ ♦  (Adam Gopnik “All Alike” comment in “The Talk of the  Town” – The New Yorker,  Jan 3, 2011 pp19-20)[i]

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SOCIAL and HISTORICAL FORCES

• “Before modern times, very few human beings lived alone. Slowly, beginning not much more than a century ago, that changed. In the United States, more than one in four people now lives alone; in some parts of the country, especially big cities, that percentage is much higher. You can live alone without being lonely, and you can be lonely without living alone, but the two are closely tied together, which makes lockdowns, sheltering in place, that much harder to bear. Loneliness, it seems unnecessary to say, is terrible for your health.” Read excerpts from “The History of Lonliness.”

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Connecting to

• DEVELOPMENT
• EMPATHY notes and EMPATHY reading (Rilke & Rodin)
• Painting as Communication.
• INDIVIDUATION and SOCIALIZATION;
• CONNECTIONS BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS and LISTENING ANGELS
• KNOW THYSELF:  
• SELF in the CLASSROOM
• BIOLOGICAL NEEDS
• NATURE/NURTURE
• COGNITION and the THEORY of MIND – is loneliness at the heart of existential angst?
• A&O post on Loneliness
• AO-needs-sociality-and-physiology-loneliness/
• READING – about loneliness as a social construct  

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• [i] “Wilson (Snowflake) Bentley, the great snowflake-ologist …In 1885, at the age of nineteen, he photographed his first snowflake, against a background made as dark as black velvet by long hours spent scraping the emulsion surrounding the snowflake images from the glass-plate negatives. … over his lifetime, took portraits of five thousand three hundred and eighty-one snow crystals (to give them their proper scientific name; flakes are crystals clumped together) and inserted into the world’s imagination the image of the stellar flower as the typical, “iconic” snowflake, along with the idea of a snowflake’s quiddity, its uniqueness. …  It turns out, however (a few more slips, a bit more Googling), that Bentley censored as much as he unveiled. … Most snow crystals—as he knew, and kept quiet about—are nothing like our stellar flower: they’re irregular, bluntly geometric. They are as plain and as misshapen as, well, people.  … In 1988, a cloud scientist named Nancy Knight (at the National Center for Atmospheric Research—let’s not defund it) took a plane up into the clouds over Wisconsin and found two simple but identical snow crystals, hexagonal prisms, each as like the other as one twin to another, as Cole Sprouse is like Dylan Sprouse. Snowflakes, it seems, are not only alike; they usually start out more or less the same.

  Yet if this notion threatens to be depressing—with the suggestion that only the happy eye of nineteenth-century optimism saw special individuality here—one last burst of searching and learning puts a brighter seasonal spin on things. “As a snowflake falls, it tumbles through many different environments,” an Australian science writer named Karl Kruszelnicki explains. “So the snowflake that you see on the ground is deeply affected by the different temperatures, humidities, velocities, turbulences, etc, that it has experienced on the way.” Snowflakes start off all alike; their different shapes are owed to their different lives.”

   

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  [i]   [“All intelligent thoughts have already been thought, what is necessary is only to try to think them again” (Guterman trans of “Proverbs in Prose” (Spruche in Prosa … also there: “Doubt grows with knowledge”)  …   “New inventions can and will be made; however, nothing new can be thought of that concerns moral man. Everything has already been thought and said which at best we can express in different forms and give new expressions to.”  Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832), German poet, dramatist. Conversation with Joseph Sebastian Grüner (August 24, 1823).  http://www.poemhunter.com/johann-wolfgang-von-goethe/quotations/page-4/  SIMILAR:  “The most original authors of today are original not because they create something new but because they are capable of saying such things as if they had never been said before.”  –Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832), German poet, dramatist. Wilhelm Meister’s Travels, Reflections in the Spirit of the Travellers (1829).

  [ii]. Man lernt nichts kennen als was man Liebt‑‑ Goethe. [complete:  “Man lernt nichts kennen, als was man liebt, und je tiefer und vollständiger die Kenntnis werden soll, desto kräftiger und lebendiger muß die Liebe, ja Leidenschaft sein.”  (Goethe in einem Brief an Jacobi, 1812)] 

  One learns to know nothing but what one loves, and the deeper and more complete the knowledge is to become, the stronger, stronger and more alive must be love, even passion.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe  (1749 – 1832), source: Goethe, letters. To Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, May 10, 1812

  [iii].  From Langdon Hammer’s review of  ‘God’s Silence: Poems,’ by Franz Wright:=   “In Pursuit of Revelation” (orig title in paper was “To Live is to Do Evil”) (NYT Sunday May 14, 2006, p38.

  “What kind of apocalypse does Wright imagine in his new poems? He is not waiting for the Rapture, but he is a Roman Catholic devotional poet of mystical hope. He is impatient with the real and visible (“concrete things stand for / invisible things=), and he pushes past them toward “real reality,” a higher unseeable / life, inconceivable / light / of which light is mere shadow.” This impatience extends to people C “a human face” is “the mask / of some being no one can see” as well as to language. Wright describes a moment of past vision in which “The mask was gone,” “There was no / I,” and there was no text, only what the words stood for; and then what all things stand for. 

  Wright’s poems pursue this state of revelation, as if there were a word just out of reach, beyond the words on the page. He calls that goal “some radiantly obvious thing I need to say, though quite what that might be escapes me at the moment, as it always has, and always will.”

   

   

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