So, in my dreaded (that's due to be handed in in a week's time), I wrote this:
Taken as a whole, the experience of the borderliner is one of ‘instability, ambiguity, and fragmentation’ (F. Lewis 2021). And this impacts cognition.
Many accounts suggest that what is presented to consciousness evolved in the unconscious, is influenced by unrecognised cues, a half or totally forgotten past, the neurochemistry of the brain, genes, environment and so on (T. D. Wilson 2002; Sapolsky 2017). For example, psychological experiments suggest that the smell of fresh bread increases the chances of a person helping a stranger (Badhwar 2014). If asked why they offered assistance, the subject is unlikely to acknowledge the role of the aroma but will instead respond with reasons such as ‘it’s the right thing to do’. Such reasons often feel accurate and complete (Mercier and Sperber 2017).
But whereas most people seem satisfied with their reasons, my phenomenological experience is different. My reasons feel weak: as though they can never exhaust the causes for my actions, decisions or emotions. I can develop a narrative that plays an explanatory role, but it feels like a confabulation. I now believe that I experience the contingency of cognition, and to accept that as a brute fact. I accept that others too will be influenced by factors outside their conscious awareness, leaving me as uncertain about their reasons as I am about my own.
This raises the question of whether the borderliner’s difficulties in mentalizing (having ‘an awareness of mental states in oneself and in other people, particularly in explaining their actions’ (Fonagy et al. 2019)) could be related to this meta-cognitive hyper-sensitivity, an experience that lacks a shared tool in our social understanding.
Subsequently, in Alasdair MacIntyre's Dependent Rational Animals, I came across a reference to irony as defined by Richard Rorty. So I went to Rorty's Contingency, irony and solidarity and found this:
All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives. I shall call these words a person's "final vocabulary."
It is "final" in the sense that if doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no noncircular argumentative recourse. Those words are as far as he can go with language; beyond them there is only helpless passivity or a resort to force. A small part of a final vocabulary is made up of thin, flexible, and ubiquitous terms such as "true," "good," "right," and "beautiful." The larger part contains thicker, more rigid, and more parochial terms, for example, "Christ," "England," "professional standards," "decency," "kindness," "the Revolution," "the Church," "progressive," "rigorous," "creative." The more parochial terms do most of the work.
I shall define an "ironist" as someone who fulfills three conditions: (i) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one's way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old.
Now, this is not the same thing... Rorty's considering a much vaster scale of contingency than I am. But there is a similar theme: that there is no bedrock. That one thing could well be another.
It seems to me that my thinking style makes me more receptive to the world-view of the ironist. I am disposed to resist a 'final vocabulary'.
Comentários