Is there any point thinking about what to do? It is often said that our judgements and behaviour are really caused by immediate intuitions and gut feelings, with reasoning happening only afterwards. But that claim misses an important point. Experiments also indicate that reasoning shapes the cognitive system that produces future responses. The more we reason that something is good or bad, right or wrong, attractive or unattractive, the more influential that attitude becomes over our intuitions and gut feelings.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty coined the term ‘sedimentation’ in his book Phenomenology of Perception (1945). He uses it to describe the process of taking on information about our bodies and environment in a form that enables us to act intelligently without much attention, effort or thought. Just as a river accumulates particles and deposits them as sedimented structures that direct the river’s flow, argued Merleau-Ponty, so we accumulate information as we go about our lives, which gradually and unconsciously builds into a contoured bedrock of understanding that guides our behaviour.
De Beauvoir argued that this repeated endorsement of the same goals and values embeds them into our cognitive systems through sedimentation. Because girls and boys are subject to different expectations, we develop gendered sets of goals and values. De Beauvoir argued that the same process also embeds gender stereotypes into our outlooks.
The interesting question, I guess (well one of many) is how much thinking about logic and analysis and skepticism really engenders those qualities. I can easily accept that moral ideologies are shaped in a very large part by environment - in fact I find it difficult to see how it could be otherwise. But sincere self-skepticism and unbiased curiosity, those I'm not so sure about. It's not at all obvious to me what makes some people into intelligent but uncritical and only able to rationalise their beliefs, while others really value the truth regardless of what they'd prefer (of course, we all do both - it's a matter of degree).
https://aeon.co/ideas/sedimentation-the-existentialist-challenge-to-stereotypes
My theory says, somewhere along the line, we accept that we're not rational beings - but we kinda ought to be. Somewhat further along the line, we grudgingly acknowledge our failure to even want to be rational beings, that the world doesn't work along rational lines, that the best we can do is not to accept any lies or prejudices into our personal frameworks.
ReplyDeleteAnd then, after some long while, we angrily assert, along with the Buddha and Jesus Christ and every other kindly and enlightened person, that - not only is to exist is to suffer, our mandate is to reach out to each other and help each other along - that rationality will not save us from ourselves and will not dance at our weddings nor grieve at our funerals.
Rationality is overrated.
Merlot-Ponty posed a famous problem: what does the man with phantom limb pain "feel" ? The amputee can look at the stump of his leg and rationally assert "This sensation is not real, it is all in my mind." And that's where all this Aristotle argy-bargy about Real and Ideal falls off the wagon. The solution is simple don't read Aristotle. Accept that the amputee is in pain.
The existentialism of de Beauvoir and Fanon is only half-right. Though we are not the puppets of inherited ideologies, we must endure the madness inherent in the arguments we cannot change: consider racism and sexism and nationalism and all the other abominable -isms , persecution of LGBTQ and the like - which lead humans to treat each other with such ugliness. Though society is wired up to put black men in prison, I don't have to accept that as justice.
Sure, we can reason about the attitudes that matter most to us, but I question how much we can reform our social environments. We can only change ourselves. Beyond that, well - I spent too long in refugee work and there three times as many refugees in the world as they day I last drove out of a refugee camp....
"use it or lose it" but the more you go over the map, the more it adheres to your mind
ReplyDeleteshared on Seers and Seekers
ReplyDelete"De Beauvoir argued that this repeated endorsement of the same goals and values embeds them into our cognitive systems through sedimentation"
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that the same is true for "wrong thinking" ... e.g., Scientology, Christianty, Flat Earth etc.
Jack Martinelli Ecch... though you're entirely right about how Wrong Thinking benefits from repetition, sedimentation is the process of establishing certain axioms without considered thought. With the aforementioned stuff, Scientology and suchlike, those are conscious choices.
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