COGNITIVE CHAINS

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.-- Rousseau.

I don't have any interest in visiting Rousseau's antiquated explanation of the disparity between freedom and its lack, but his aphorism does throw a little light on the acquaintance/discursive duality I've been investigating lately.

I re-read the relevant sections of Langer's PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, and her division of "presentational symbolism" and "discursive symbolism" are definitely structured in a similar fashion to the dualities propounded by James and Russell. The main difference between Langer's formula and earlier "a/d" formulations is that Langer has been heavily influenced by Cassirer's distinction between "mythical thinking" and "theoretical/discursive thinking." Thus, rather than conceiving of "acquaintance" in a generalized sense, Langer substitutes presentational symbolism as a way of conceiving how human beings separate the data of the senses into discrete, meaningful symbols that do not "describe" anything, but simply "present" themselves to the subject in terms of their emotional values.

I favor Langer's alteration, but as I noted in FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 3, the two forms of symbolism interpenetrate one another, possibly more than Langer credited:

Thus, it would seem that even when humans are seeking to plumb the depths of presentational symbolism in order to employ tropes that transmit deep emotional states of mind, the same humans cannot help but reproduce aspects of discursive symbolism characteristic of the theoretical mind...

Earlier I expressed these two tendencies in a more opposed fashion in AFFECTIVE FREEDOM, COGNITIVE RESTRAINT:

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.

This is where Rousseau becomes relevant. For me, man is "free" only in the sense that he can imagine any number of situations that may (or may not) contribute to his real freedom. The same man is "in chains" because he will always be faced with circumstances arising from simply being a corporeal entity subject to all sorts of realistic limitations.

More later.