In my 2013 essay AFFECTIVITY, MEET EFFICACY, I focused upon Ernst Cassirer
distinction between “causality” and “efficacy.” Causality, the philosopher
said, represented humanity’s ability to think about cause and effect in a
rational, discursive manner, and from this we get the first stirrings of early
philosophy, and later, the developments of science. Efficacy, however, belonged
to the language of myth: it depends on a blurring of the distinctions between
the objective and subjective worlds.
…the world of mythical ideas… appears closely bound up with the world of efficacy. Here lies the core of the magical worldview… which is indeed nothing more than a translation and transposition of the world of subjective emotions and drives into a sensuous, objective existence.
One mythical idea to which Cassirer
refers occasionally is myth’s view of the origins of the world. Some mythical
tales hold the world comes into being only because some giant being—Ymir in
Norse stories, Purusha in Hindu stories—is torn apart, so that the different
parts of the giant’s body become the earth, the seas, the moon, etc. Within the
scope of these narratives, there is no attempt to provide a rationale as to why
the world had to made from the flesh and bones of a giant. It is true purely
because it confers the aura of human associations upon the whole of creation,
even those aspects of creation that may seem entirely alien to human
experience. This is what I’ve called “affective freedom,” humankind’s ability
to imagine almost anything, whether it accords with experience or not.
Rational conceptions of causal
relations, of course, could not care less about the aura of subjective emotions
and drives: the desire is to extrapolate a closed system of relations that
depend entirely on physical force: CAUSE A exerts FORCE B upon OBJECT C,
resulting in RESULT Z. This tendency to rely exclusively upon material
experience is one that I’m now terming “cognitive restraint.” Just as in
psychology “the affective” and “the cognitive” describe complementary aspects
of human mentality, “cognitive restraint” exists in a complementary
relationship with “affective freedom.” In other words, human beings are
entirely defined by neither: we need both the ability to imagine what seems
impossible and to discourse about what we believe to be immediately possible.
I’ve written a lot on my blog about
the concept of freedom, and it’s a major reason as to why I’ve devoted so much
blog-space to such obscure concepts as “the combative mode” and the various
forms of phenomenality, sublimity, and so on. But freedom without a
complementary form of internal restraint is, as Janis Joplin sang, “just
another word for nothing left to lose.”
Even in fiction, where the boundaries of affective freedom *may * sometimes exceed those of religious
mythology, cognitive restraint is necessary to make the essentially mythic
ideas relevant to living human beings.
Human beings, we may fairly deduce,
relate to the world in different ways than other animals. We cannot know what
goes on in the head of a lion when it stalks a bird, and then fails to catch
the bird because the latter flaps its wings and flies away, We can fairly guess
that the lion is frustrated, and possibly with its limited mentality it might entertain the wish to continue chasing the bird into the air. But that would seem
to be as far as a lion’s imagination could go.
We also cannot really know what
thoughts may have passed through the mind of a Neanderthal hunter in the same
situation. Maybe our caveman stalker had no thoughts at all when his prey
escaped. Yet we can at least reasonably suspect that the primitive fellow may
have entertained the idea of what it would like to be a bird: to sprout wings and chase the bird into its own territory. And once he had this thought—say,
for argument’s sake, that no one had entertained the thought before him—he
might not be limited to thinking only about filling his belly with bird-flesh.
He nay have started to think about what it would feel like to fly, to be a
bird; to soar above the limits of other cavemen. At this point he probably
doesn’t think about imitating the bird
by designing his own pair of wings, but he may decide to translate this vagrant
imaginings into a mythic form. The caves at Lascaux attest to some sort of
mental alchemy that combined man and bird, even if today we can only look at
drawings of bird-man hybrids and label them “portraits of shamans.” They may have been just that, but their
original context may matter less than their role in determining humankind’s
affective freedom.
In one conversation I mentioned that
humankind’s advancements in powered flight would have been impossible without
this sort of internal, subjective appreciation for the possible thrill of
flying. My opponent simply said something along the lines, “Yeah, but powered
flight wouldn’t have been possible without science and logical thinking.” Quite true; as far as achieving an effect in
the physical world, wishing never makes it so. But my opponent in my opinion
missed the point: the wish makes everything else thinkable. To the earthbound
human who can only run and jump and swim, the idea of flying cannot be imagined
as having some practical applications—not even just that of catching
birds—until *after * it has been re-imagined as something that the earthbound
human can imagine bringing into his own “sensuous, objective experience.”
One of the greatest “myths”
propounded by empiricist-types has been that of the “caveman-engineer:” the
primitive who instantly sees some practical advantage in making a new type of
spear or a rooftop, because he’s so much more attuned to the scientific
principles in the physical world, even if he doesn’t have a scientific system
as such. This very selective conception of the early scientist was of course an
anachronism: an imagining of some 18th-century scientist born before
his time; one who would be in no way influenced by the myths and religion of
his time. This was one of many verbal strategies used by empiricists to tout
the supreme importance of cognitive restraint, of valuing only practical cause
and effect, and to consign myth to the dust-bin of “failed science.”
The mistake of utilitarianism—that
the only things that matter are those which have a defined use—is one that
depends upon the formulations of cognitive restraint. A utilitarian might allow
some niggling truth to my “flying caveman” example, but he would view the
caveman’s “fancy of flight” to be relevant to the human condition only
because it did lead to a useful development. In contrast, the utilitarian would
not be impressed by, say, Tolkien’s example of “arresting strangeness:” of
imaging a world with a green sun. Even in the world of fiction, the world of
the green sun would have no relevance unless it illustrated the restraints on
physical life expressed through scientific fact. Thus, if autrhor Hal Clement
devoted a book to explaining the makeup of a fictional world that happened to
have a green sun for some scientific reason, then that, and that alone, would
have relevance to utilitarianism.
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