Realism (John Anderson)

 

John Anderson's philosophy, known as Andersonian Realism, was a systematic approach in a century dominated by Anglo-Saxon philosophy. This approach was frowned upon by analytic philosophers, but continental philosophers were more at ease with systematic philosophy. Anderson described his systematic philosophy as a unified theory of the'sciences' of logic, ethics, and aesthetics, which he maintained until the 1930s. He believed that to assert that logic, ethics, or aesthetics were sciences was to assert that they were definite subjects that could be studied and that their method of study was as objective as any other science.

Realism, the most common term used to characterize Anderson's philosophy, was not merely an epistemological doctrine but a systematic enterprise that treated the subjects of logic, ethics, and aesthetics in a Realist manner. Anderson's understanding of the term 'logic' was not restricted to its contemporary usage of formal logic but was more of the traditional sense of metaphysics as including epistemology, ontology, and formal logic as distinct disciplines within that subject.

In his early article, "Realism and Some of its Critics," Anderson outlined the logic he believed his general metaphysical system followed. He argued that Realism appeared firstly as an epistemology based on the doctrine of external relations, secondly as an ontology (Empiricist), but more properly described as a theory of situations or spatio-temporal existence, and finally as a logic (Positivist), meaning that logic is a positive and not a relativistic subject.

Realism was based on the doctrine of external relations, which he believed was the basis for the direct knowledge of the object. In any relationship of knowledge, there are three distinct parts: a subject of knowledge or 'knower' (the -er), an object of knowledge or 'known' (the -ed), and the relation of knowing itself, the knowing (the -ing). On a Realist analysis, such a relationship had the logical form 'S/r/O', and each part of the relationship – the S, r, O, or -er, -ing, -ed – was distinct from the other and could not be reduced to any other part.

Anderson's Realist epistemology implied that an object, or its qualities, cannot be constituted by the relations it has. This conclusion had several interesting implications for Anderson's philosophy of mind, including the idea that 'consciousness', understood as both a quality of mind and a relation that mind has, cannot exist. Instead, the only possible quality of mind that could be aware or conscious of the things around it was emotion, feeling, or affect.

While Anderson's theory of'mind as feeling' appears suggestive as a Realist theory of mind, it is unfortunate that he never developed a detailed theory of which emotions constitute mind and how they operate.

Anderson's ontological theory of existence, Empiricism, is characterized by situations or occurrences in Space-Time and is characterized by various categories of existence. He argued that there are three important associated doctrines associated with Empiricism: pluralism, determinism, and objectivism.

Anderson's pluralism is the view that any thing is both a particular and a universal, which is the foundation of his theory of infinite complexity. This is the foundation of his theory of infinite complexity, where there is no indivisible 'atom' from which all things are made, and no unrelatable totality – no 'universe' – which has nothing outside of it. Anderson distinguished his position from the theories of monism and atomism understood as theories of logical totalities and logical simples.

Anderson's determinism is the view that every thing or occurrence is caused, and he opposed any theory of indeterminism and rejected the notion of a 'free will' as something outside the universe of spatiotemporal causality. Anderson's objectivism is the view that any subject must also be an object, rejecting the doctrine of subjectivism, which states that there are things that are 'irreducibly' subjective. In terms of mind, the alleged'subjectivity' of the mind is as objective as any other thing, that is, the mind as a subject, as a knower, is an existing thing with all the categorical features that other things possess.

In his logical position, Anderson described it as Positivism, which is not to be confused with Logical Positivism. He believed that experimentation was an inadequate test for the truth or falsity of propositions. Positivism was simply a theory of the positive truth and falsity of propositions and opposed to any theory which postulates that the context of a proposition or judgment determines its truth or falsity.

Anderson accepted the traditional Aristotelian analysis of the proposition, which is comprised of a subject, a predicate, a copula, and the quantifiers. The most general form of the proposition is 'S is P', where S is the subject function and P is the predicate function. The copula 'is' incorporates both the positive and negative formulations, 'is' and 'is not'. When the universal and particular quantifiers, 'All' and 'Some', are introduced, this yields the classical four forms of the proposition: All S are P (SaP), Some S are P (SiP), All S are not P (SeP), and Some S are not P (SoP).

Another term used to describe Anderson's Positivism was 'Propositional Realism', which is the view that any occurrence or situation is identical any proposition asserted about it. Anderson rejected the view that the 'proposition' could be a tertium quid, which committed him to the view that there must be some sense of an identity between propositions and situations.

In conclusion, Anderson's ontological theory of existence, Empiricism, and Positivism offers a unique perspective on the nature of reality and propositions.

In his Realist ethical theory, Anderson distinguished between ethics and morality, arguing that good and bad are naturally occurring qualities of social and psychological activities. He rejected the relativist view that relations determine the quality of good, and instead conceived ethics as a science of goodness and badness.

Anderson's classification of goods and bads was heavily influenced by Sorel's producer and consumer ethic theories. The producer ethic is creative, inquiring, and productive, while the consumer ethic is imitative, obscurantist, and consumptive. He later included love as the good and hate as the bad within the domestic sphere.

Socrates' view that goods support one another but oppose bads, while bads oppose both goods and other bads, was used to assist in his classification process. Goods are essentially supportive, while bads are competitive and uncommunicative. In this sense, goods are co-operative and communicative, while bads are competitive and uncommunicative.

Anderson's social and political theory during the 1930s was described as a proletarian theory, with a general Marxist and specifically Communist orientation. He rejected Marx's historical theory of dialectic and believed that the proletariat needed to work with artists and intellectuals to achieve social and political revolution. His analysis of this social conflict was more pluralistic than Marx's, as he believed that the proletariat needed to work with artists and intellectuals to achieve social and political revolution.

During his active political engagement, Anderson was actively involved in the Communist Party of Australia from 1927 to 1932. He believed Russian Communism was the pre-eminent model for Communist parties everywhere, although he supported the independent operation of local parties. However, he came to see that the Russian party was beset by bureaucracy, censorship, and ideology, which led him into conflict with local members who were more prone to following the Moscow line.

In 1933, he helped form the Trotskyist Workers Party of Australia and remained actively involved for the next four years. His break with Communism in 1933 was occasioned more by his recognition of the corrupt nature of Stalinism, rather than any belief that Communism was inconsistent with his philosophic doctrines. During this period, he retained the belief that Communist theory, untainted by Stalinist practice, was deterministic, pluralistic, and objective, and accepted that Trotskyism provided a viable theoretical and practical alternative to Stalinism.

In his Realist aesthetic theory, Anderson often criticized aesthetic theories on the basis of either their relativism or subjectivism. He argued that if beauty is simply a question of what the subject believes or prefers, then there is nothing that is beautiful in itself. Conversely, he argued that if beauty resides merely in the political context of the aesthetic judgment or the active willing of the aesthetic judgment, then there can be no objective aesthetic theory.

Apart from these formal features of his aesthetic theory, there is some indication that Anderson was also developing a more substantive theory of aesthetic damnation and redemption. He quoted Joyce's expression that "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," and suggested that release from this servitude is the affirmation of the human spirit through artistic creation and aesthetic criticism. However, he did not develop these views in detail.

 

Hellenistic Philosophy

Hellenistic philosophy, which spanned from Alexander's death in 323, to the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, was traditionally divided into three fields: physics, logic, and ethics. Epicurus and his school were often mistakenly considered purely hedonistic, but they were actually hedonists, focusing on pleasure without restricting it to bodily pleasures. Epicurus' school, the Garden, was primarily friendly and non-hierarchical.

Epicurus and his followers were thoroughgoing materialists, believing that everything except the void, even the human soul, is composed of material bodies. They believed that there is nothing but atoms and void, with atoms always in motion and varying in shape. Epicurus' view of atomic motion provides an important point of departure from Democritean atomism, as he believed that atoms sometimes swerve or venture away from their typical course due to chance, allowing room for free will. This allows Epicureans to apply this assumption to their physics, suggesting that there seems to be free will.

Ethics in Hellenistic thought is largely derived from Epicurus' Letter to Menoeceus, preserved in Diogenes Laertius' Lives. The goal of the good life is tranquility (ataraxia), and one achieves this by seeking pleasure (hedone). However, Epicurus also recommends a plain life, arguing that the most enjoyment of luxury comes to those who need luxury least. He explicitly denies that sensual pleasures constitute the best life and argues that the life of reason, which includes the removal of erroneous beliefs that cause us pain, will bring us peace and tranquility.

The two main beliefs that produce pain and anxiety for us are a mistaken conception of the gods and a misconception of death. Epicurus encourages us not to anthropomorphize the gods and think only what is fitting for the most blessed and eternal beings. He suggests that it is unreasonable to believe that gods, the best of beings, feel pain at all, and that it is not befitting of them to become angry or involved in our personal affairs.

In conclusion, Hellenistic philosophy is characterized by a focus on physics, logic, and ethics, with Epicurus and his followers being a significant figure in the philosophical landscape.

Epicurus argues that death is nothing to us, as good and evil only apply to sentient beings. The human body is nothing without the mind and soul, and when the body dies, so too does the mind and soul, and so too does sentience. This means that death is literally nothing to us. The terror we feel about death now will vanish once we die. Thus, it is better to be free from the fear of death now. When we rid ourselves of the fear of death and the hope of immortality that accompanies that fear, we can enjoy the preciousness of our mortality (DL X.124-125).

The Cynics were not properly a philosophical school, but they had no central doctrine or tenets. They were a disparate movement with varying interpretations on what constituted a Cynic. This interpretative freedom accords well with one of the characteristics that typified ancient Cynicism—a radical freedom from societal and cultural standards. The Cynics favored a life lived according to nature.

The term "Cynic" comes from the Greek word kunikos, meaning "dog-like." The first of the Dogs, Antisthenes (c.445-366 B.C.E.), was supposedly close with Socrates and was present at his death, according to Plato’s Phaedo. However, Diogenes of Sinope (c.404-323 B.C.E.), often called simply, "Diogenes the Cynic," was and is the most famous of the Dogs. Most information we have comes from Diogenes Laertius’ Lives, which is historically problematic. It provides an imaginative description of Diogenes the Cynic’s life, which was apparently unusual and outstanding.

The Cynics seem to have taken certain aspects of Socrates’ life and thought and pushed it to the extreme. One might wonder what drives the ascetic practice for any sort of luck. Is it that moving from one superficial pleasure to the next is ultimately unfulfilling? Or is the practice itself driven by a sort of fear, an emotion that the Cynic means to quell? That is, one might read the asceticism of the Cynic as a futile attempt to deny the truth of human fragility; for example, at any moment the things I enjoy can vanish, so I should avoid enjoying those things. On the other hand, perhaps the asceticism of the Cynic is an affirmation of this fragility. By living the ascetic life of poverty, the Cynic is constantly recognizing and affirming his/her finitude and fragility by choosing never to ignore it.

The Stoics, as described by Pierre Hadot, studied physics to better understand their own lives and live better ones. They believed that things depend on external causes and are linked in a necessary, rational manner. Like the Cynics, the Stoics strove to live in accordance with nature, and a rigorous study of nature allowed them to do so more effectively.

The Stoics were materialists, but not thoroughgoing materialists like the Epicureans. They saw matter as passive and logos (god) as active, with god running through all of the matter as its organizing principle. This divinity is most apparent in us via our ability to reason. The universe is a unity, and it is divine.

Epistemology is another aspect of Stoic ethics. Knowledge comes to us directly through our senses and impresses itself upon the blank slate of our minds. Our judgments of those objects can lead us into error, as our inner discourse enunciates and describes their content, and we either give or withhold our consent from this enunciation. However, there might be a problem lurking here regarding the standard of truth, which for the Stoics is simply the correspondence of one's idea of the object with the actual object. If it is not the bare sense impression that brings knowledge, there seems to be no standard by which we can ever be sure that our descriptions are correct.

Stoic ethics urges us to be rid of our desires and aversions, especially where these desires and aversions are not in accord with nature. For example, death is natural, and being averse to death will bring misery. Epictetus' Handbook summarizes this concept:

Some things are up to us and some are not up to us. Possessions come and go, reputations are determined by others, and it is reasonable to believe that even the best people will be hated by some, and even the worst people will be loved by some. Wealth, public office, and reputation are up to others to determine.

However, living as Epictetus recommends, one might still feel pain. Physical pain is not harm for a Stoic, as the only real harm is when one harms oneself by doing evil, just as the only real good is living excellently and in accordance with reason. Stoic ethics risks removing our humanity from us in favor of its own notion of divinity.

In conclusion, the Stoics' philosophy of physics, epistemology, and ethics emphasize the importance of understanding and avoiding desires and aversions that are not in accord with nature. By embracing Stoic ethics, individuals can live a more fulfilling and fulfilling life, recognizing the importance of balancing personal desires with the greater good.

Skepticism in the Hellenistic era was divided into two strands: Academic Skepticism and Pyrrhonian Skepticism. Each major Skeptic had their own take on Skepticism, but they all shared a common goal of tranquility and freedom from judgments, opinions, or absolute claims to knowledge. Skepticism, broadly speaking, challenged the possibility and nature of knowledge.

Academic Skepticism was initiated by Arcesilaus, who argued both for and against any given position, ultimately showing that neither side of the argument can be trusted. Arcesilaus' argument against stoic empiricism is not clear, but it suggests that we can never be sure that the way we perceive an object via the senses is true or false. He concludes that we should always suspend our judgment.

Carneades, the tenth scholarch of Plato’s Academy, responded to a typical objection raised against Skepticism by recognizing that even the claim “nothing can be known” should be called into doubt. Carneades relied upon the typical skeptic tactic of presenting arguments both for and against the same thing and claiming that we cannot therefore claim that either side is correct.

Pyrrhonian Skepticism, on the other hand, is characterized by the profound indifference that Pyrrhonian Skepticism is meant to generate. It refutes all dogmas and opinions and vehemently clings to indeterminacy, even the idea that “nothing can be known.” Aenesidemus, the Pyrrhonian Skeptic, advanced the “Ten Modes,” arguments that address typical difficulties in appearances and judgment. Each mode aimed toward the conclusion that we ought to suspend judgment if we are to be at peace.

The Skeptics used “philosophical discourse…to eliminate philosophical discourse.” They did not adhere to any philosophical position, but used the tools of philosophy to gain a sense of simplicity and tranquility in life, thereby ridding themselves of the need for philosophy. By using dialectic and opposing one argument to another, the Skeptic suspends judgment and is not committed to any particular position.

One example of a practical approach to life for the Skeptics is the example of antibiotics, which can help cure diseases born from certain bacteria. The Skeptic could reply in several ways, but the most effective reply might be that medicine does not bring us knowledge if knowledge is certainty. Medicine, and what it claims to know, has changed significantly, and the practice of medicine is just another way of describing the way certain bodies interact with other bodies in a given time and place.

The Skeptic would go further, arguing that the curing of a disease is neither good nor bad. If death is a matter of indifference, then the cure for illnesses must be, too. This raises questions about how one is ever spurred to action in this case.

 

Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution" (Summary)

Philosophers often discuss 'acts' in relation to performance and acting, with theories such as John Searle's' speech acts', action theory, and the phenomenological theory of 'acts'. These theories aim to explain the mundane way in which social agents constitute social reality through language, gesture, and symbolic social signs. However, phenomenology sometimes assumes a choosing and constituting agent prior to language, while the doctrine of constitution takes the social agent as an object rather than the subject of constitutive acts.

Gender is not a stable identity or locus of agency, but rather an identity tenuously constituted in time through stylized repetition of acts. Gender is instituted through the stylization of the body, and the appearance of substance is a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment that the mundane social audience, including actors themselves, come to believe and perform in the mode of belief.

Gender identity is a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo, with the possibility of contesting its reified status. Feminist and phenomenological views of sex and gender emphasize the existence and facticity of the material or natural dimensions of the body, as well as the process by which the body comes to bear cultural meanings.

In order to describe the gendered body, a phenomenological theory of constitution requires an expansion of the conventional view of acts to mean both that which constitutes meaning and that through which meaning is performed or enacted.

Merleau-Ponty argues that the body is not just a historical idea but a set of possibilities to be continually realized. This means that its appearance in the world is not predetermined by an interior essence and that its concrete expression must be understood as the taking up and rendering specific of historical possibilities. The body is not merely matter but a continual materializing of possibilities, and one does their body differently from one's contemporaries and embodied predecessors and successors.

The body is not a self-identical or factic materiality; it is a materiality that bears meaning, and the manner of this bearing is fundamentally dramatic. Embodiment manifests a set of strategies or "styles of being" that are conditioned and circumscribed by historical conventions. For example, gender is a corporeal style, an intentional and performative act that is both dramatic and non-referential.

Beauvoir emphasizes the distinction between sex and gender as cultural interpretations of biological facticity. Gender is a construction that regularly conceals its genesis, and those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished. The historical possibilities materialized through various corporeal styles are nothing other than punitively regulated cultural fictions that are alternately embodied and disguised under duress.

Feminist theory shares a commitment to grounding theory in lived experience and revealing the way in which the world is produced through the constituting acts of subjective experience. Feminist theory has sought to understand how systemic or pervasive political and cultural structures are enacted and reproduced through individual acts and practices, and how the analysis of ostensibly personal situations is clarified through situating the issues in a broader and shared cultural context.

Feminist theory posits that the personal is an expansive category that accommodates political structures usually viewed as public. The body becomes its gender through a series of acts that are renewed, revised, and consolidated over time. From a feminist point of view, the gendered body is the legacy of sedimented acts rather than a predetermined or foreclosed structure, essence, or fact.

Feminist discourse has often relied upon the category of woman as a universal presupposition of cultural experience, providing a false ontological promise of eventual political solidarity. However, this effort to combat the invisibility of women as a category may render visible a category that may or may not be representative of the concrete lives of women.

The reproduction of the category of gender is enacted on a large political scale, such as when women first enter a profession or gain certain rights. However, the more mundane reproduction of gendered identity takes place through the various ways in which bodies are acted in relationship to the deeply entrenched or sedimented expectations of gendered existence.

Binary genders and the heterosexual contract are two concepts that have been used to guarantee the reproduction of a given culture. Feminist theory suggests that the association of a natural sex with a discrete gender and an ostensibly natural attraction to the opposing sex/gender is an unnatural combination of cultural constructs in the service of reproductive interests.

Cultural anthropology and kinship studies have shown that cultures are governed by conventions that regulate the production, exchange, and consumption of material goods, as well as reproduce the bonds of kinship itself. The incest taboo works to guarantee the channeling of sexuality into various modes of heterosexual marriage, producing discrete gendered identities and sexualities. Contemporary gender identities are many marks or "traces" of residual kinship.

Phenomenology can assist a feminist reconstruction of the sedimented character of sex, gender, and sexuality at the level of the body. The focus on the various acts by which cultural identity is constituted and assumed provides a starting point for the feminist effort to understand the mundane manner in which bodies get crafted into genders. However, it is difficult to conceptualize the scale and systemic character of women's oppression from a theoretical position which takes constituting acts as its point of departure.

The relation between acts and conditions is neither unilateral nor unmediated, as there are social contexts and conventions within which certain acts become possible and conceivable as acts at all. The transformation of social relations becomes a matter of transforming hegemonic social conditions rather than individual acts that are spawned by those conditions.

Gender is an act that has been rehearsed, much like a script survives the particular actors who make use of it, but which requires individual actors in order to be actualized and reproduced as reality once again. As a public action and performative act, gender is not a radical choice or project that reflects a merely individual choice, but neither is it imposed or inscribed upon the individual. Actors are always already on the stage, within the terms of the performance, and enacting interpretations within the confines of already existing directives.

The relationship between theatrical and social roles is complex, with distinctions between the two being difficult to draw. In theatre, one can de-realize an act as a play, making it distinct from reality. This allows for a sense of reality in the face of challenging ontological assumptions about gender arrangements. On the street or in the bus, the act becomes dangerous because there are no conventions to delimit the purely imaginary character of the act.

The transvestite can challenge the distinction between appearance and reality that structures popular thinking about gender identity. If the'reality' of gender is constituted by the performance itself, then there is no recourse to an essential and unrealized'sex' or 'gender' which gender performances ostensibly express. Gender reality is performative, meaning it is real only to the extent that it is performed. Certain acts are usually interpreted as expressive of a gender core or identity, either conforming to an expected gender identity or contesting that expectation in some way.

Gender attributes and acts are performative, meaning there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured. This means that the notions of an essential sex, a true or abiding masculinity or femininity, are also constituted as part of the strategy by which the performative aspect of gender is concealed. Gender cannot be understood as a role that either expresses or disguises an interior'self,' whether that'self' is conceived as sexed or not.

Gender is made to comply with a model of truth and falsity, which contradicts its own performative fluidity and serves a social policy of gender regulation and control. Performing one's gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, while performing it well provides reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity.

Feminist theory does not provide a comprehensive view of gender or its construction, nor does it prescribe an explicit feminist political program. It is primarily political interests that create the social phenomena of gender itself, and without a radical critique of gender constitution, feminist theory fails to take stock of the way in which oppression structures the ontological categories through which gender is conceived.

Feminists may worry about the political implications of claiming that women do not exist, especially in light of persuasive arguments advanced by Mary Anne Warren in her book, Gendercide. However, it is important to articulate a normative vision for feminist theory that celebrates or emancipates an essence, a nature, or a shared cultural reality which cannot be found. The presupposition of the category of woman itself requires a critical genealogy of the complex institutional and discursive means by which it is constituted.

The critical genealogy of gender should rely on a phenomenological set of presuppositions, most important among them the expanded conception of an "act" which is both socially shared and historically constituted, and which is performative. This prescription is not utopian but consists in an imperative to acknowledge the existing complexity of gender and bring that complexity into a dramatic cultural interplay without punitive consequences.

Feminist theory that presupposes sexual difference as the necessary and invariant theoretical point of departure improves upon humanist discourses that conflate the universal with the masculine and appropriate all of culture as masculine property. It is necessary to reread texts of western philosophy from various points of view to offer alternative descriptions and prescriptions, establish philosophy as a cultural practice, and criticize its tenets from marginalized cultural locations.

while there is a lot of diverse experiences of women, there is no waiting room for femaleness to be expressed. Gender is an innovative aspect of cultural play, not passively scripted by nature, language, or patriarchy. It is constantly under constraint, but if mistaken for a natural or linguistic given, power is relinquished, allowing for subversive performances to expand the cultural field.

 

Raymond Williams, 2. Language (Marxism and Literature)

H J Markowitsch, "Cultural Memory and the Neurosciences" (Summary)

To comprehend cultural memory, it's crucial to first grasp memory in its general context. Up until the 1970s, scientists predominantly viewed memory as a unified function present across most animal species, albeit with variations in learning acquisition such as gradient, capacity, differentiation, and behavioral-cognitive flexibility. Gagné proposed a hierarchical sequence or taxonomy of learning, which included:

 

Signal learning or classical conditioning: Illustrated by Pavlov's famous experiment, where a dog learns to associate a ringing bell with food and salivates at the sound alone.

Stimulus-response learning or instrumental conditioning: Dependent on the subject's behavior, where the association between a stimulus and a response is learned.

Chaining (including verbal association): Involves consecutive responses where each determines the next, leading to a reward.

Multiple discrimination: Learning to differentiate between stimuli sharing one or more attributes.

Concept learning: Learning to respond similarly to various objects or attributes sharing common characteristics.

Principle learning: Acquiring knowledge on solving a set of problems with common attributes.

Problem solving: Applying learned principles to draw inferences and solve problems.

Memory, by definition, is based on learning and involves the learning-dependent storage of acquired information, integrated selectively into neuronal structures. Memory can be retrieved for situation-appropriate behavior. The evolution of memory study shifted dramatically with Tulving's work on episodic and semantic memory, and further investigations of amnesic patients revealed that memory deficits are not universal. This led to a paradigm shift in understanding memory, where it was divided into processes and systems.

 

Previously, memory was classified into short-term and long-term memory. However, the new approach distinguishes between implicit and explicit memories, encoded with or without conscious reflection. Moreover, long-term memory is now divided into five basic systems, representing a significant advancement in understanding memory processes.

 

Procedural Memory: Psychology and neuroscience posit that children initially learn through motor movements, understanding that their actions influence their environment, like making a mobile move. This learning expands to various motor-related functions, such as skiing, biking, driving, or playing musical instruments. These processes operate automatically and unconsciously, freeing individuals from reflective thinking in routine situations. For example, when asked about shifting gears while driving, many would instinctively respond with "press the clutch," showcasing the automatic nature of procedural memory.

 

Priming: Similarly, priming, another memory system, operates unconsciously and aids in daily situations. It's estimated that around 95% of the information we process occurs unconsciously. An example of priming is when hearing a melody on the radio automatically brings to mind the song's lyrics. This phenomenon is often utilized in advertising, where repeated exposure to stimuli within a short time frame influences consumer behavior.

 

Perceptual Memory: In contrast to procedural memory and priming, perceptual memory operates consciously and allows for identifying familiar objects or patterns based on familiarity judgments. It enables recognizing objects like apples regardless of color or condition, distinguishing them from other fruits like pears or peaches.

 

Semantic Memory: Semantic memory involves conscious knowledge of general facts, distinguishing true from false statements, like knowing Oslo is the capital of Norway.

 

Episodic-Autobiographical Memory: This memory system, considered the highest, involves mental time travel backward and forward, evaluating events in relation to oneself and the social context, often laden with emotions.

 

Cultural Memory: Cultural memory doesn't neatly fit into this hierarchy. While it may seem to belong to higher memory systems, it's diverse and interconnected with semantic, procedural, and priming memory systems. Cultural memories are transmitted across generations and can include habits and practices that are not genetically determined but learned from society. Neuroscientific research emphasizes the interplay between brain activity and social environment, suggesting a shift towards understanding "collective remembering" rather than just individual memory.

 

The term "ecphory," originally introduced by Semon and later refined by Tulving, describes the process by which retrieval cues interact with stored information to bring forth a representation of that information. Similar to encoding, where various cues, conditions, and emotional states interact with new information, ecphory involves an interaction with present environmental and social factors. This interaction with the present environment and cultural context shapes the retrieval and recollection of old information, including traditions and myths. Cultural memory, therefore, involves a continuous adaptation influenced by the current environment and social partners.

 

The phenomenon of the "reminiscence bump," commonly observed in autobiographical memory research, illustrates this interaction. Memories often recalled are from the period around age 25, a time when significant life changes occur, and individuals gain substantial knowledge about themselves and their society. This period facilitates the consolidation of memories and the development of self-awareness within a socio-cultural context, contributing to autonoetic consciousness.

 

However, there are contrasting tendencies in different cultural contexts. While individuality is highly valued in Western societies, leading to earlier development of self-awareness, other cultures emphasize collective identity, delaying individual self-awareness. Moreover, contemporary culture, heavily influenced by media and professional activities, shapes individuals' sense of self more profoundly than in the past.

 

The concept of being "in relation" extends beyond interpersonal connections to interactions with tools and technology, as demonstrated in Hutchins' study on cockpit instruments. Similarly, individual brilliance or societal memory relies on comparisons within a social context. Neuroscience explores the relationship between behavior and brain function, emphasizing the interplay between individual cognition and social context.

 

Communicative memory encompasses both collective memory in society and memories stored within individual brains. Collective memory failures, such as societal amnesia regarding historical atrocities, can impact individuals' psychological well-being across generations. Conversely, communicative memories transmitted across generations, as seen in the descendants of Holocaust survivors, can influence brain development and vulnerability to trauma.

    

John C Ryan, "Planting the Eco-Humanities? Climate Change, PoeticNarrati...

Planting the Ecohumanities explores the role of critical plant studies in elucidating, deepening, or challenging aspects of climate change discourse. Plants are our most cherished and precious foods, medicines, fibers, decorations, and totems, accounting for nearly 99.9% of the planet's biomass. However, we often forget that plants have their own lives to lead, including their desires, comforts, and goals. Due to their sessile lifestyles, silences, ubiquities, and uncanny abilities to regenerate and proliferate, plants can be too often dismissed or relegated to the categories of disposable things, mute materials, unsensing automatons, or aesthetic objects.

The emerging interdisciplinary field of critical plant studies asserts the pressing need to devise frameworks for governing the ethics of human interactions with the botanical world. These ethical frameworks counterpoise anthropocentric tendencies to treat, conceive of, and categorize plant life either as speechless material for consumption or as beautiful objects for sensory appreciation. New understandings of plants—as percipient, intelligent beings with the ability to remember, learn, adapt, and behave—problematize the utilitarian paradigm that conceptualizes the lives of plants as having value only in terms of the "ecosystem services" they confer to other, more sentient living beings.

While bringing the intrinsic rights of plants to the fore, the ethical principles forwarded by CPS research can also trigger the restructuring of discourse, leading to new possibilities for the stories we tell about plants and climate change. Hence, rather than focusing on ethics, this discussion postulates how discourse, in the form of poetic narratives, might shift to reflect—and come to be shaped by—the botanical world.

Considering plants both as primeval sources of carbon and as modern carbon sinks, and as beings inextricably linked to human survival in the Anthropocene, why do they seem to languish in the background of the stories we tell about climate change? And do they in fact languish? Has there been a failure to narrativetivize plants and, if so, what are the reasons for these narrative blind spots that privilege the experiences of animals and humans?

The scope of the discussion will be limited to narratives and, more specifically, to climate change poetry through a topical example entitled the "Keep It In the Ground" campaign. Curated by British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy in 2015, this online anthology of climate change poetry was published over twenty consecutive days in the British newspaper The Guardian. Well-known actors, including James Franco and Jeremy Irons, recited some of the poems, lending greater public impact to what was essentially a narratively- and poetically-based campaign.

Climate change has had significant impacts on plants worldwide, but recent scientific analysis indicates that plants exhibit surprising resilience in response to climatic disturbances. A study at the University of Minnesota found that plants can acclimate to rising temperatures while releasing only one-fifth as much additional carbon dioxide than previously believed. This suggests that with enhanced leaf thermal acclimation, plants are more adaptive and contribute less to climate warming than earlier models indicated.

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen also showed that plant gases, or biogenic volatiles, can slow the increase of atmospheric temperatures in the Arctic. When biogenic compounds react in the Arctic atmosphere, they extend the lifespan of the potent greenhouse gas methane while prompting the formation and growth of air particles that cool down the atmosphere. This phenomenon is especially important for global sustainability, as the rate of melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet is deeply implicated in the climate change patterns of the biosphere.

The pervasive effects of anthropogenic climate change on all aspects of global plant biology are due to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, hotter climate conditions, and altered precipitation patterns. Plant life tends to defy conventional models and statistical predictions concerning the biological impacts of increased carbon dioxide and temperatures, and diminished rainfall. The misalignment between theoretical prediction and ecological adaptation is partly due to the unforeseen complexity of interactions between plants, herbivores, symbionts, competitors, and the abiotic environment.

These studies indicate that the resilience and adaptive abilities of individual plants and whole botanical communities ensure that the implications of climate change are often not those anticipated by climate scientists. Multi-faceted knowledge of plants might also facilitate human adaptation to an increasingly bleak climate future. Biologist Stefano Mancuso uses the term bio-inspiration to denote the application of vegetal intelligence and plant-like networks to the design of technologies and social structures, resulting in sustainable systems that are "networked, decentralized, modular, reiterated, redundant, and green." However, the lives of plants also require recognition, respect, and human engagement beyond their utilitarian value as "a goldmine of solutions" to climate change issues.

Critical Plant Studies is a rapidly growing field of scholarship that aims to explore the lives of plants, their intrinsic value, and the possibilities for dialogical relations between humans and plants in an era of climate change and mass global extinction of floristic species. The field critiques long-standing conceptions of plant life in aesthetics, critical theory, ethics, literary studies, metaphysics and ontology, performance and politics, and other areas of culture, society, and philosophy.

Interdisciplinary critical plant studies research focuses on plant signaling and behavior, including "plant neurobiology" and "plant bioacoustics." This body of science demonstrates the long-term memory and behavior of plants in the context of their learning processes. Experimental results acknowledge plants as highly sensitive organisms that perceive, assess, interact, and even facilitate each other's life by actively acquiring information from their environment.

Plant bioacoustics describes the perception and production of sound, indicating that plants emit sonic data and adapt their behaviors in response to received auditory information. Recent bioacoustic research empirically affirms that vocalization in plants is an active process facilitating signaling in a manner perhaps more efficient than the chemical model of plant communication has allowed.

Despite lacking brains and neural tissues, plants possess complex internal signaling networks, including those involving sound. The intentional production of sound serves an ecological function by enhancing the fitness of the plant in terms of its evolutionary makeup. This constitutes what Anthony Trewavas calls "mindless mastery," a networked and distributed form of intelligence specific to plant life.

Climate change narratives, such as climate change fiction or cli-fi, consider the internal, psychological impacts of climate change and the external effects of social and ecological collapse. Cli-fi thematizes the political consequences of climate disturbance and the challenges to human survival instigated by anthropogenic climate change through recognizable literary forms, including parody, satire, and elegy. Additionally, the emergence of climate change theater dramatizes disastrous climate-related events and their aftermaths.

A broad-ranging and encompassing interdisciplinary perspective on vegetal life is especially important, considering the impacts of anthropogenic climate change on both plant and human wellbeing. By integrating the humanities and sciences, plants can be understood more persuasively as agents acting upon and transforming art, culture, literature, politics, and all activities in which human beings engage.

Ecopoetry, an environmental poetry genre, offers a medium for poets to narrate climate change. Alfred Siewers outlines four features of ecopoetry: (1) traidic overlay, (2) metonymic imagery, (3) time-plexity, and (4) environmental ethos. The "Keep It In the Ground" campaign published online in 2015 aims to augment climate change narratives in the public imagination by focusing on the big picture.

Curator Carol Ann Duffy asserts that climate change journalism and the science on which it is based can alienate the public by rendering the issue devoid of emotional or aesthetic content. In response, the 20-day "anthology of poetry on climate change" features lyrical descriptions by twenty different poets promoting an environmental ethos while poetically expressing personal experiences of mourning, loss, and displacement. However, the project bears a distinctly zoocentric imprint, largely neglecting plants.

Duffy's poem "Parliament" is characteristic of the unconscious privileging of the zoological over the botanical in climate change narratives. The poem opens with the lines: "Then in the writers' wood / every bird with a name in the world / crowded the leafless trees." An array of bird voices and affects follow: owls grieve, magpies mock, rooks curse, cormorants speak, woodpeckers heckle, hawks swear, and nightingales intone. The poem concludes with "the golden plover, / and the albatross / telling of Arctic ice / as the cold, hard moon calved from the earth" (Duffy, 2015b, pp. 49–52).

The analysis is not intended as an indictment of Duffy's poem, the campaign, nor the genre of ecopoetry with its vaulted principles of environmental ethics and vision of ecological justice for all beings—floral, fungal, faunal. Rather, the author wishes to call attention to a predisposition in poetic works and the majority of other narrative forms to relegate vegetal life to the background of the stories we tell about climate change—as the somewhat living, somewhat dead setting for animalistic dramas in the tragic context of climate change.

The characterization of plants as secret or cryptic comes with the risk of marginalizing their lives as well as our responsibility for their futures as sentient non-human beings impacted by climate disturbance yet also adapting in ways specific to their vegetality. These narrative patterns persist in poet Alice Oswald's hydrologically attuned "Vertigo," a perceptive, delicate, and imaginative elucidation of the "two minute life of rain."

From a critical plant studies perspective, what is missing from Oswald's poem is a sense for the ecological memories between rain, animals, plants, and other beings where all contribute their percipience to the construction of the narrative. As the science of plant signaling and behavior indicates, it is not a flight of fancy or transgression against Western epistemology for plants to speak, remember, learn, experience excitation, or express pain.

Climate change narratives often neglect the perspective of plants, which is a crucial aspect of understanding the impacts on animals and humans. Poetic narratives and other genres can engage with the climatically altered lives of plants in relation to emerging scientific research into their floristic abilities. However, no single storied instance, such as a poem or novel, should or can do everything, resulting in a communion of subjects. In an era of exponentially intensifying climate change, species loss, and ecocultural disintegration, it is urgent that our narratives begin to intergrade with the agencies of plants and for our environmental consciousness to turn more concertedly toward the vegetal world.

Critical plant studies can shift the peripheral emphasis on the vegetal world in climate change narratives by bringing plants to the foreground as agents with their own modes of adaptation to and subjective experiences of environmental disturbance in the Anthropocene. This can be seen in John Wyndham's post-apocalyptic novel The Day of the Triffids (1986), where bioengineered triffid plants exhibit aggressive forms of movement and communication, or Louise Glück's Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, The Wild Iris (1992), presented almost entirely from the perspectives of garden plants who speak in the first person about their lives.

CPS can ground climate change narratives in the substance of the botanical world, transforming the abstracted rhetoric of statistical predictions and scientific models into evocative material realities that affect us on a personal, emotive level. The mediation of the embodiment of plants in narratives can mirror back to us our utter physical, psychological, and spiritual interdependence with vegetal life during the ecologically unstable era we find ourselves in.

Conducted attention to vegetality in narratives can interject sensuous specificity, counterbalancing and bringing down to earth the immense scale and abstract nature of climate change as it is theorized in many forms of discourse. The powers of plant scents, tastes, sensations, sounds, and sights concretize the phenomenological effects of climate change as a hyperobject while evoking our affective states in dialogic relation to other organisms.

Plants compel us to consider the dialectics of climate change and prompt us toward our own forms of social and personal adaptation. As both ancient sources and modern sinks of carbon, the vegetal mode of being can accommodate the messiness of human-plant-earth-animal-biosphere-time entanglements. Such a dialectics can enable us to conceive of climate change in terms that resist monologic practices, rigid categorizations, and unfounded expectations.

In conclusion, critical plant studies can enhance the stories circulating in the public imagination about climate change and provoke debate, action, and reflection through the invigorated understandings of the botanical world offered by CPS. This includes the increased representation of plant life, plant ethics, and vegetal intelligence in climate change narratives, but also involves the intrinsic reshaping of narratives into distinctly vegetal forms.

 

Semiotic Animal (Roland Barthes)

Roland Barthes' semiotic animal explores the nexus between humans and animals, highlighting the role of animals in shaping cultural metaphors, myths, and identity. The cat, as a biotope, assimilates with various drives that reinforce the isotope of experiences. The cat's tendency for comfort is a radical perception of fantasy that delivers essential schemas of transcendence. By stressing on the desire for comfort in the cat, Barthes gives expression to his own desire for comfort, which he seeks in his mother.

Barthes presents the cat as an animal animated phantasmatic object that stands for the homey idea of "corner" that normally occurs between mother and child. The cat's relation with the space in the verb "to sleep" is an expression of "the pronominal I" that mirrors the self as sleeping. An interesting parallelism may also be drawn in the movement of animal and non-human animal, as Barthes walks towards a platform that is cat-like during a lecture at the College de France.

The structural difference with fixed nouns supplies the discursive prosopopeia (the figure of personification which is absent) where cat as a fictional character shows the ethological concerns analogous to cognitive and behavioral understanding. The function of the existential fantasy of self with the other (cat) as stereotyping becomes the foreclosure of truth. The difference of self and cat posits the uncanny hypothesis where cat acts as a pre-established machine for the repressive mechanism in self.

The Barthesian cat is anti-Cartesian in the sense that it covers a dual space both of the self and the other. This dual space generates a semantic ambiguity between "the correspondence" and "relation," i.e., cat/self. The cat looking for "stereotyping of the localization" suggests that it is an illusion of the sovereign good that can be idealized for that space. The indispensable schema for narrating the self through the expression of the cat, which is Heimlich (domestic, intimate, secret), becomes the subject that remains at the side of the mirror.

Cat represents Barthes's inner psychic space, playing between the real and the unreal. To Barthes, cat is the "objective co-relative" that correlates the self with the anonymous cat. The active semiology becomes the medium of conscious fantasies and serves as the hyper-individual level where Barthes speaks about the basic fantasy that is part of the personal history, aimed at the discursive line of flight. The transference of the self via the detour of writing becomes a mediating point for the symbolic reading of the text.

Lacan (1999) states that for objectification in psychological matters it is subject, at its very core, to a law of misrecognition that governs the subject not only as observed but also as observer.

Roland Barthes's metaphor of the dog as an extension of the self is a reflection on the wounds of Narcissism. The animal subject and wounds of Narcissism are seen as an extra-textual space that allows for a phantasmic reading of the self as the text. Barthes posits a binary between plant and animal to relate the space between utopia and heterotopia. The image of animal as narcissistic expression pierces the shafts of cognition and dissolution of the visualized disconnection from the real object. The subjective expression of the veiled self-identity is attained through active self-consciousness, where the difference of "self" is held by unraveling the truth that other animals bring to oneself.

Plant as a contingency of experience displays all focus of attention on its detail, while its meaninglessness strives for zero degree meaning. Barthes observes plant as a text that is also compared with animals, as they are conspicuous spectacles of pure effect. This comparison fills the lack of obtaining the desired object, as Barthes seeks to fill the empty space within himself with arbitrary linguistic sign.

Dog becomes a relevant trope to express the self, as it becomes the wound that flags the self via the functions of analogy of dog as "satori" of meaning. The magical presence of dog as a referent expresses the inexpressible being-there of the referent, which can only truly appear as "reality effect." The linguistic expression of dog is a central supplement to the "fundamental absence," as Barthes begins to remember the features of "dog" when it is absent.

Barthes's selection of the particular trope suggests that it is a continuation of a specific fantasy, which is also a reversal to the fantasy of the cat. Dogs are fascinating because they are like men without reason (and without madness). The discussion of dog with the "being saturated with man" suggests the annachronistic link with the self through the rhetorical trope.

Roland Barthes's work explores the concept of the animal as an object of affect for humans, arguing that it is the place one occupies rather than their psyche that is the subject of affect. The paradoxical fitting of the dog by Barthes is an expression of re-presenting the real, the fetish, and a lack where the perversion of self denies tearing the referent by reading one's own body. By representing the dog as a host of "real presence," Barthes attempts to extrapolate the provocation of other and memory that leads to the transformation of self.

The linguistic autonomy of accounting the dog as "our animal" represents the symbolic order of the real. Barthes's personal "biographemes" articulate the problem of existence between three registers introduced by Jacques Lacan: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. The expression of dog and cat becomes both the condensation and displacement, acting as a "psychotic experience" of reality. Thus, the imaginary relationship between the dog and the self is established through psychotic experience that builds up mediation between the self and the idea.

Barthes's digression toward distinction of "the animal from the beast" associates him with the metonymic signifier, where the beast-like signifier is a metaphor to men. This constitution of the personal code causes symptomatic storehouses of mutilated images. Barthes considers animals to be "having a soul" that posits affect on humans, and every symptom and every oniric symbol is a compromise.

Barthes offers the supplementary crack for reading the obssessional production of "diffuse affective" that is hysteric in nature. The hysteric self-identity isrendered with the "shimmering," which is a specific and rare affective mode. Dog as a site of desire is condemned as a denomination of the realized animal in the self, confirming the singularity of the being.

The recurrent trope of "Dog" in Barthes is a metonymic signifier of self suggesting the two-fold of a Dasein. By drawing parallelism between "haiku" and "dog," Barthes attempts to sense the co-relation between the self and the environment. Through the 'dog' metaphor, Barthes believes that aesthetic judgment has a liberatory critical power that complements the more deterministic type of thought found in cognition and morality.