Photo by Christopher Anderson/Magnum

Rachel Gennis a neuroscientist, artist and writer who works between the Manchester Writing School and the School of Digital Arts, both at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has written two novels – The Cure (2011) and What You Could Have Won (2020) – and is now working on Hurtling, a hybrid collection of essays about the neuroscience, art and experience of artistic reverie, as well as Blessed which explores fighting and addiction to regret. She lives in Sheffield.

Edited by Marina Benjamin

13 JANUARY 2021 (psyche.co)

1. As well as to dream and to wander, an ancient root of the word ‘reverie’ is the Middle French desver – to lose meaning. By letting meaning loose, allowing it to graze, we can put play in the tether that commonsense usually keeps tight. In Move Closer (2000), the philosopher John Armstrong sees creative reverie as a state of letting something happen: when we find ourselves absorbed in a process or practice, we surrender to a flow of associations by quietening the self. In this state, we’re able to apprehend something novel that leaves us surprised. But what is the stuff of reverie? If we wish to cultivate it, we must ask what we lose by describing it in purely computational terms.

2. In The Soul of the White Ant (1925), Eugène Marais, the Afrikaner poet and naturalist, prostrates himself in devotion to the termite, scrutinising the potent ‘invisible influence [that] streams from the organism of the queen’ to her soldier and worker ants – this influence ‘is a power beyond our senses; it can penetrate all material barriers, even such as thin steel or iron plates.’ Marais’s empirical scrutiny never denies the sacred. As a result, his thinking is sublime. His is a book I wish I’d written. Perhaps reverie is related to revere.

3. As a species of strenuous relaxation, reverie allows our private selves to mesh with forces in the outside world. While the emergent ‘insight’ suggests answers found inside ourselves, ‘spread mind’ theory – a kind of modern-day pantheism elaborated by the Italian philosopher Riccardo Manzotti, which supposes consciousness to inhere within physical entities – points to origins of creativity in the dynamic interplay between our mind and the world. As Manzotti puts it: ‘[M]ind is the point of the universe where knowledge and being are the same.’ Or, as the Canadian poet Karen Solie has it: ‘Objects of my attention made more of me.’ In reverie, we are propped open while the world has a sniff around.

4. One route to creativity is quickly solving problems inside a given conceptual space (symbolic). Another involves peering beyond the problem space’s current limitations to new meanings (semantic), and expanding meaning into something potentially contrary to everything achieved so far. So while flow states are pleasurable, reverie and the insights it apprehends might not be.

Reverie, like dreams, provides a bridge between unconscious and conscious thinking, and doesn’t require an object

5. If we are to understand reverie, we need to differentiate it from flow. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes the flow state as the subjective experience of engaging in just-manageable challenges by tackling a series of clear proximal goals. But first comes a preparation period whereby we immerse ourselves into a group of problematic themes that stir up our interest and curiosity. Does the difference between talent and genius, certainty and uncertainty, embodiment and ecstasy reside in differences between flow and reverie? That reverie is simply intense flow is questionable, since reverie can be a sudden illumination and feel perilous. Indeed, the Norwegian psychoanalyst Eystein Våpenstad, quoting Steven Cooper, refers to ‘rougherie’.

6. Because reverie is indistinct, flow is better studied, and getting in among the material seems key to its initial stages. On hearing that ‘marble changes colour under different people’s hands’, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth realised that it was ‘not dominance which one had to attain over material, but an understanding, almost a kind of persuasion, and above all greater co-ordination between head and hand.’ Absorbed in playing or making, we process feedback on our progress, and adjust our actions accordingly. This holds whether playing Fortnite (ludic) or making pinch pots (aesthetic). Brain-imaging studies have begun to map the interconnected brain areas that contribute to flow states. But the well of suppressed experience and imagery, drawn upon in reverie in combination with the flickering fragility of the state itself, is not so amenable to study.

7. A conscious experience requires an intentional object. Whereas reverie, like dreams, provides a bridge or a dialogue between unconscious and conscious thinking, and doesn’t require an object, or trigger. Reverie states can be akin to the psychologist William James’s concept of the fringe – what Manzotti and his fellow philosopher Andrea Lavazza call ‘the intermediate zone between the mind and what is not yet mental’, while flow is a containment inside eager attentiveness. To transition from an embodied certainty to attending to ‘nothing’ takes guts. But this is a live nothing, not a vacuum. I scribble: Flow is to knowledge as Reverie is to wisdom? The g-force tests before we get into orbit?

8. After ‘immersion’, Csikszentmihalyi outlines an ‘incubation’ phase of the flow process in which ideas are tossed around beneath the threshold of consciousness – calling ‘to each other on their own without our leading them down a straight and narrow path’ and, here, unexpected combinations can come into being. An ‘incubation’ period doesn’t create novel insight, rather it’s a phase in which the cognitive system constructs the tools with which to see something. James’s fringe, in offering a working model of the shift from an unconscious to a conscious domain, would presumably allow for such a construction.

A lack of effort helps the reverie to form: not effortlessness, rather an active suppression of effort

9. The visual anthropologist Amanda Ravetz points out that reverie states are not produced on command, through an act of will; or, rather, they are a product of intention, but where no urgency is involved. The psychoanalyst Marion Milner, in On Not Being Able to Paint (1950), links reverie to ‘a certain kind of absent-mindedness which is not easy to achieve unless one is given a certain type of protection and permission from the environment’. Only then might we open up our receptors and move from what the artist Jenny Eden calls an inner to an outer space, where the self disappears along with self-conscious rumination. Evaluative feedback, if negative – such as anticipated regret – might degrade our relationship with reverie. By ruminating on what might go wrong, we scupper the momentum needed to reach the escape velocity that reverie can demand.

10. Diary entry: There is no writing but in the face of doubt, it is restraint that provokes a lift-off into orbit – held at speed, I’m objectively vulnerable but subjectively safe. The Italian psychoanalyst Roberto Speziale-Bagliacca points to metaphors used by patients that imply that a lack of effort helps the reverie to form: not effortlessness, rather an active suppression of effort. But how far can one bear the impotence required, refusing the possibility of discovery while seeking novelty? These are questions that inhere in the poet Rachael Boast’s lines in ‘The Script of Sleep’ (2016):

The right words formed in my mind
backlit by the hum of their origin

yet even as they brightened into line
I fell asleep inside them

too tired to begin. If accident
has design, then here it is …

11. I Tweet: Laying still is hard when you are trying to discover something, a crass reinterpretation of John Keats’s more succinct thesis that if we can suppress our obsessive seeking after incessant facts and endure long periods of strenuous not-knowing – his ‘negative capability’ – then we can replicate what the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion saw as his profession’s ideal receptive state of mind. Reverie of both types, then, although imaginative, is work not holiday. Only when the poet Alice Oswald lost her translation notebook and was forced to work without notes did she find that ‘not just the poem but the brightness beneath it was visible’.

12. Attention is involved then, but it doesn’t like the limelight. In a sense, Montaigne’s definition in 1580 of reverie as psychic activity not subject to attention presaged the discovery of the brain’s default mode network (DMN), which functional imaging reveals is activated during resting states. The DMN oversees tasks involving internally focused, self-referential cognition (or rumination) and also mind-wandering. It’s an important component of the neural basis of the ego and, when modulated (say, by LSD), it temporarily creates a more unified and interconnected brain where the self no longer feels ‘separate’ and ego is dissolved. In a 2002 paper for the journal Common Knowledge, the poet Anne Carson remarks how, in a similar bid to put her ‘self’ to one side, the heretic Marguerite Porete (burned at the stake in 1310) tested her ability ‘to clear her own heart and her own will off the path that leads to God’. At the moment of its annihilation, Carson says: ‘God practises upon the soul an amazing act of ravishing.’

In reverie we are rendered vulnerable, sub-contracted into having the best brought out in us

13. Despite the unpredictability and low probability of naturally occurring mystical-type experiences in writing, I am always attracted to the idea of surrendering my responsibility for what goes on the page. Like the painter Celia Paul, who writes in her memoir Self-Portrait (2019): ‘You need to give yourself completely, while at the same time seeing things from a distance.’

14. Functioning as what Porete calls ‘le Loingprés’ or ‘the FarNear’, God opens ‘an aperture, like a spark, which quickly closes, in which one cannot long remain … ’ It might be that increased brain interconnectivity provides what might be called a ‘window of opportunity’ before the brain goes back to a more fixed state again. Such transition (a word that also describes the late phase of childbirth where, to the mother, death feels imminent) might show reverie as an intense interplay between the abstract and the perceptual, wherein annihilation and ecstasy are equally possible. Every important creative act, says Paul, ‘has this duality: of giving everything and then of letting go, so that the created work can have a life of its own.’ Oswald seems to capture precisely this straddling in her poem ‘Swan’ (2016):

A rotted swan
is hurrying away from the plane-crash mess of her wings
      one here
          one there
getting panicky up out of her clothes and mid-splash
    looking down again at what a horrible plastic
mould of herself split-second
climbing out of her own cockpit …

15. The phase of interplay between perceptual and abstract inputs contributes to the creative semantic space such that the mind is a web. ‘The unity into which the Thought – as I shall for a time proceed to call … the present mental state – binds the individual past facts with each other and with itself, does not exist until the Thought is there,’ wrote James in 1890. Reverie affords this unity, and the thought is caught; art is found not made. The laws of physics do not change to make aeroplanes fly.

16. The rawness of exiting reverie helps us understand its nature. Someone has spoiled our game. Being yanked from reverie causes a definite rupture, provoking petulance, and requiring mending if one is to reinstate it. In reverie we are rendered vulnerable, sub-contracted into having the best brought out in us. In our new porous (pious?) state, our essence is drawn forth by forces beyond the centrifuge – and maybe even by the dynamic power of the FarNear – so that we can unify and connect with something more; receiving and transmitting at once.

17. Sightless, and willing to be guided without question, we are permitted to seek. Marais saw termites at ceaseless work as ‘mere automata, governed by the psychological power of the queen. For the same reason, they lost their sight, and other senses which are the accompaniment of an individual psyche.’ Does taking leave of our senses render us more or less receptive than these ‘guided’ termite automata? Only by testing the boundaries of flow and reverie might we discover whether reverie deepens our connectedness by removing our individual targets or by making us blind to them, or both.

With its revolutionary heat and rational cool, French thought once dazzled the world. Where did it all go wrong?

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir having lunch at the “La Coupole” Brasserie, December 1973. Photo by Guy Le Querrec/Magnum

Sudhir Hazareesingh is professor in politics and a tutorial fellow in politics at Balliol College at the University of Oxford. He won the Prix d’histoire for The Legend of Napoleon (2006), and his latest book is How the French Think (2015).

22 September 2015 (aeon.co)

Edited by Brigid Hains

Aeon for Friends

There are many things we have come to regard as quintessentially French: Coco Chanel’s little black dress, the love of fine wines and gastronomy, the paintings of Auguste Renoir, the smell of burnt rubber in the Paris Métro. Equally distinctive is the French mode and style of thinking, which the Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke described in 1790 as ‘the conquering empire of light and reason’. He meant this as a criticism of the French Revolution, but this expression would undoubtedly have been worn as a badge of honour by most French thinkers from the Enlightenment onwards.

Indeed, the notion that rationality is the defining quality of humankind was first celebrated by the 17th-century thinker René Descartes, the father of modern French philosophy. His skeptical method of reasoning led him to conclude that the only certainty was the existence of his own mind: hence his ‘cogito ergo sum’ (‘I think, therefore I am’). This French rationalism was also expressed in a fondness for abstract notions and a preference for deductive reasoning, which starts with a general claim or thesis and eventually works its way towards a specific conclusion – thus the consistent French penchant for grand theories. As the essayist Emile Montégut put it in 1858: ‘There is no people among whom abstract ideas have played such a great role, and whose history is rife with such formidable philosophical tendencies.’

The French way of thinking is a matter of substance, but also style. This is most notably reflected in the emphasis on rhetorical elegance and analytical lucidity, often claimed to stem from the very properties of the French language: ‘What is not clear,’ affirmed the writer Antoine de Rivarol in 1784, somewhat ambitiously, ‘is not French.’ Typically French, too, is a questioning and adversarial tendency, also arising from Descartes’ skeptical method. The historian Jules Michelet summed up this French trait in the following way: ‘We gossip, we quarrel, we expend our energy in words; we use strong language, and fly into great rages over the smallest of subjects.’ A British Army manual issued before the Normandy landings in 1944 sounded this warning about the cultural habits of the natives: ‘By and large, Frenchmen enjoy intellectual argument more than we do. You will often think that two Frenchmen are having a violent quarrel when they are simply arguing about some abstract point.’

Yet even this disputatiousness comes in a very tidy form: the habit of dividing issues into two. It is not fortuitous that the division of political space between Left and Right is a French invention, nor that the distinction between presence and absence lies at the heart of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. French public debate has been framed around enduring oppositions such as good and evil, opening and closure, unity and diversity, civilisation and barbarity, progress and decadence, and secularism and religion.

Underlying this passion for ideas is a belief in the singularity of France’s mission. This is a feature of all exceptionalist nations, but it is rendered here in a particular trope: that France has a duty to think not just for herself, but for the whole world. In the lofty words of the author Jean d’Ormesson, writing in the magazine Le Point in 2011: ‘There is at the heart of Frenchness something which transcends it. France is not only a matter of contradiction and diversity. She also constantly looks over her shoulder, towards others, and towards the world which surrounds her. More than any nation, France is haunted by a yearning towards universality.’

This specification of a distinct French way of thinking is not rooted in a claim about Gallic ‘national character’. These ideas are not a genetic inheritance, but rather the product of specific social and political factors. The Enlightenment, for example, was a cultural phenomenon which spread rationalist ideas across Europe and the Americas. But in France, from the mid-18th century, this intellectual movement produced a particular type of philosophical radicalism, which was articulated by a remarkable group of thinkers, the philosophes. Thanks to the influence of the likes of Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau, the French version of rationalism took on a particularly anti-clerical, egalitarian and transformative quality. These subversive precepts also circulated through another French cultural innovation, the salon: this private cultural gathering flourished in high society, contributing to the dissemination of philosophical and artistic ideas among French elites, and the empowerment of women.

This intellectual effervescence challenged the established order of the ancien régime during the second half of the 18th century. It also gave a particularly radical edge to the French Revolution, compared, notably, with its American counterpart. Thus, 1789 was not only a landmark in French thought, but the culmination of the Enlightenment’s philosophical radicalism: it gave rise to a new republican political culture, and enduringly associated the very idea of Frenchness with novelty and resistance to oppression. It also crystallised an entirely original way of thinking about the public sphere, centred around general principles such as the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’, the civic conception of the nation (resting on shared values as opposed to blood ties), the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, and the notions of the general interest and popular sovereignty.

One might object that, despite this common and lasting revolutionary heritage, the French have remained too diverse and individualistic to be characterised in terms of a general mind-set. Yet there are two decisive reasons why it is possible – and indeed necessary – to speak of a collective French way of thinking. Firstly, since the Enlightenment, France has granted a privileged role to thinkers, recognising them as moral and spiritual guides to society – a phenomenon reflected in the very notion of the ‘intellectual’, which is a late-19th-century (French) invention. Public intellectuals exist elsewhere, of course, but in France they enjoy an unparalleled degree of visibility and social legitimacy.

Secondly, to an extent that is also unique in modern Western culture, France’s major cultural bodies – from the State to the great institutions of secondary and higher education, the major academies, the principal publishing houses, and the leading press organs – are all concentrated in Paris. This cultural centralisation extends to the school curriculum (all high-school students have to study philosophy up to the baccalauréat), and this explains how and why French ways of thought have exhibited such a striking degree of stylistic consistency.

The French way of thinking has been remarkably fertile. One of the striking measures of this success is the extent to which French ideas have shaped the values and ideals of other nations and peoples. Versailles in the age of the Sun King was the unrivalled political and aesthetic exemplar for European courts, in the same way as the French Revolution, by virtue of its equation of monarchy with tyranny, and its celebration of civic equality, became an inspiration for progressives all over the world during the 19th century and beyond. The Russian Bolsheviks were notably obsessed by the analogies between their revolution and its French predecessor.

At the same time, thanks to its colonial empire (the second largest in the world after Britain’s), France basked in its great-power status and projected its ‘civilising mission’ across its Asian and African dominions. The Statue of Liberty, which has become such an emblem of Americanness, was designed by the French sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi in 1879; to this day Poland’s national anthem celebrates Napoleon Bonaparte; and Brazil’s flag bears the motto of Auguste Comte’s positivist philosophy: order and progress.

Modern French literature, from Flaubert, Balzac and Hugo to Camus, has become an integral part of the Western cultural heritage. In the second half of the 20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre became a global symbol of the intellectual who dared speak truth to power in all its forms, while Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) revolutionised our understanding of the feminine condition. A few decades later, ‘French theory’ reshaped the contours of US academia, and Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu remain to this day among the most cited thinkers in the social sciences.

One of the main reasons for this global appeal was the dynamism of French thinking. The sheer inventiveness of Gallic thinkers reflects the key role devolved to imagination, alongside reason, in modern French thought; and a corresponding contempt for empirical knowledge: Rousseau begins his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754) by ‘laying aside all facts’. Hence the tendency for French thinkers to push their ideas to their extreme conclusions, and the primacy given to intellectual creation and cultural innovation. Key concepts such as ideology and engagement are French inventions, and the idea of rupture is central to French intellectual discourse. Derrida was thus one of the most recent of a long tradition of French thinkers when he asserted in 2001: ‘There is no ethical responsibility, no decision which is worthy of its name which is not, in its essence, revolutionary, which is not in rupture with the system of dominant norms, or even with the very idea of normativity itself.’

This inventiveness also appears in the establishment of such powerful overarching frameworks as republicanism, positivism, socialism, existentialism and structuralism, and in the Gallic fondness for combining apparently contradictory concepts. ‘Never were we more free than under the German occupation,’ said Sartre at the end of the Second World War, and this French love of paradox has also given us mystical rationalists, conservative revolutionaries, secular missionaries, republican monarchs, and (most wondrous of all) the concept of the glorious defeat.

French thought proved compelling, too, because of its remarkable boldness. This quality was expressed in the richness of the French utopian tradition, which began with Rousseau, reached its apogee in the 19th century in the irenic works of socialists and Saint-Simonians, and later culminated in the communist tradition. This boldness was also reflected in the extraordinary intellectual ambition to provide ‘total’ explanations of human phenomena – a common trait of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s 18th-century Encyclopédie, Comte’s 19th-century positivism, and the 20th-century Annales historians’ methodology, whose self-proclaimed objective was to produce a ‘total history’.

French rationalism is charged with creating a nation of individualists, with a fetish for skepticism and challenging authority

This French style of thinking has had its critics, both from within France and outside. The liberal thinker Alexis de Tocqueville noted in 1856 the ‘extraordinary and terrible’ influence of literary figures in France, lamenting their disposition to ‘indulge unreservedly in ethereal and general theories’ in order to ‘rebuild society on some wholly new plan’. Making the same point in philosophical terms in 1901, the essayist Hippolyte Taine criticised Descartes and Rousseau, France’s tutelary thinkers, for shying away from experience, and creating a formal mode of reasoning that relied only on the deductive method and on essentialist abstractions such as ‘human nature’.

Likewise, Foucault criticised the French philosophical obsession with Reason for its sweeping character, and for effectively clearing the way for new, and more perverse, forms of social and political oppression. Indeed, Foucault believed that the imperatives of control and domination lay at the heart of the Enlightenment’s conception of rationalism: it was thus less concerned with liberating the mind than with imposing a bourgeois order of ‘pure morality and ethical uniformity’. It was a similar intuition that led Frantz Fanon to urge his comrades struggling for freedom from colonial rule during the post-Second World War-era to reject the false universalism of ‘the European model’, which was nothing but ‘the negation of humanity’.

In less apocalyptic terms, French philosophical rationalism has also been charged with creating a nation of individualists, with a crippling fetish for skepticism, and for challenging authority in all its forms. This trait has been deemed to have negative consequences of both a practical and theoretical nature. In the latter case, it has fostered a tradition of theoretical extremism (most vividly reflected in the vibrant radical movements in France both on the right and the left). It has hindered the emergence of a gradualist epistemological tradition of acquiring knowledge through a process of accumulation. And in practical matters, this French individualism has encouraged a cult of singularity and a resistance to state power: President Charles de Gaulle (himself one of France’s great individualists) gave voice to this concern when he once wondered whether it was possible to govern a country that produced 246 varieties of cheese.

Since the late 20th century, the rich tradition of French thought has come under increasing strain. The symptoms of this crisis are numerous, beginning with a widespread belief in the decline of French artistic and intellectual creativity. In 2007, Time magazine’s cover article even announced ‘The Death of French Culture’, cruelly concluding: ‘All of these mighty oaks being felled in France’s cultural forest make barely a sound in the wider world.’ Even philosophical ideas about resisting tyranny and promoting revolutionary change, which were the hallmark of French thought since the Enlightenment, lost their universal resonance. It is instructive that neither the fall of Soviet-style communism in eastern Europe or the Arab spring took any direct intellectual inspiration from French thinking. The European project, the brainchild of French thinkers such as Jean Monnet, has likewise stalled, as European peoples have grown increasingly skeptical of an institution that appears too distant and technocratic, and insufficiently mindful of the continent’s democratic and patriotic heritages.

Mirroring this retrenchment is a pervasive mood of pessimism that has spread across the French nation. In opinion polls since the early 21st century, the French have appeared consistently gloomy about their future prospects as a nation. French thinking has become increasingly inward-looking – a crisis that manifests itself in the rise of the xenophobic Front National, which has become one of the most dynamic political forces in contemporary France, and in the sense of despondency among the nation’s intellectual elites. It is no accident that two of the bestselling pamphlets of the recent past have been Alain Finkielkraut’s L’Identité malheureuse (2013) and Eric Zemmour’s Le suicide français (2014), and that Michel Houellebecq’s latest dystopian novel about the election of an Islamist candidate to the French presidency bears the resigned title of Soumission (‘submission’) (2015).

A telling example of this crisis of French thought is the discussion of the integration of post-colonial minorities from the Maghreb – one of the burning issues in contemporary French politics. The roots of this question lie in the universality of the French model of citizenship, and the deeply held assumption of the beneficial quality of French civilisation for humankind. Because of their belief in the emancipatory quality of their culture, French progressives consistently advocated a policy of assimilation in the colonies, and largely ignored the racism and social inequalities produced by their own empire. This uncritical belief in the supremacy of the French mission civilisatrice was illustrated during the Algerian war of national liberation in the 1950s and early ’60s by the socialist Guy Mollet, who rejected all manifestations of Algerian nationalism as ‘reactionary’ and ‘obscurantist’.

This colonialist legacy still casts a long shadow over the ways in which France treats and perceives its ethnic minority citizens, especially those from the Maghreb. Because of their rejection of ‘communitarian’ group identities in the British or American mould, the French have no generic way of even designating these minority groups (the only available word is the slang term beur), except to refer to their country of origin. Even worse, these minorities are regularly demonised in the French conservative press and by the extreme right. This vilification has been made easier by the typically abstract and binary ways that French thinkers have framed the debate about minority integration. Thus the principle of laïcité (secularism) has been deployed not to protect the religious freedom of the Maghrebi minorities, but to question their Frenchness.

The Gallic malaise highlights the erosion of the classical strengths of French thinking (universalism, dynamism and inventiveness)

The Muslim veil (hijab) has been banned in French schools, and those who have opposed this measure have been spuriously accused of ‘communitarianism’ and ‘Islamism’ – terms all the more terrifying in that they are never precisely defined. Since the January 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo, there have been widespread calls for French citizens of Maghrebi origin to ‘prove’ their attachment to the nation. Presenting the issue of civic integration in such schematic terms has proved socially divisive, not least because it has detracted from the real problems confronting these populations: unemployment, racial discrimination, and educational underachievement.

The French fondness for abstraction appears in its most paradoxical (and perverse) form in the absence of precise statistical information about their Maghrebi minorities, as it is illegal to collect data about ethnicity and religion in France (an article on the front page of Le Monde this August stated that France has ‘between 2 and 5 million Muslims’). And so, in the absence of specific social facts and trends, the debate about minority integration has become mired in crude ideological oversimplifications: the equation of secularism with Frenchness (even though the 1905 law separating church and state has never been implemented in some parts of France, such as Alsace-Moselle); the suggestion that the white secular French are the bearers of ‘reason’, while those who practise the Islamic faith are ‘reactionary’ (the very same argument deployed earlier against any natives who dared to question French colonial rule); and the essentialist assumption of an immutable, and yet paradoxically-fragile, French ‘national identity’.

The present Gallic intellectual crisis is in part an anguished collective reaction against France’s shrinking place in a world increasingly dominated by Anglo-American culture. Indeed, this penetration has now advanced deep into the French heartlands: Disneyland Paris is one of the most visited theme parks in Europe; translations of US and UK novels routinely feature on French bestseller lists; and to the dismay of many of the nation’s intellectual elites, the French government recently voted a law allowing French universities to teach certain courses in English. The global retreat of French cultural institutions is also apparent in the low ranking of the nation’s elite universities in the Shanghai league table, and the generally recognised impotence of official organisations such as Francophonia, the association of French-speaking countries, which does little except hold lavish annual summits of its heads of state.

In intellectual terms, the Gallic malaise also highlights the erosion of the classical strengths of French thinking (universalism, dynamism and inventiveness), and the preponderance of its less salubrious features: an over-reliance on abstraction, and a fetish for semantics (one of the most perverse legacies of the post-structuralist flourish of the late-20th century, typified by the works of Foucault, Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard); a tendency to look inwards in space, and backwards in time, and to retreat within the comfortable boundaries of disciplinary specialisations. As the leading historian Pierre Nora said in an interview with Le Figaro this May, French thought is increasingly suffering from ‘national provincialisation’.

The humanism of the republican tradition is still alive, and pushing back against the pessimism of the declinists

All of these negative elements are fused in the current mainstream discussion of French identity, which stems from the refusal of the nation’s elites to adapt their rhetoric to the reality of a multicultural and postcolonial French society. This resolute and often dogmatic attachment to a unitary sense of the French collective self is also one of the powerful legacies of Descartes’ conception of philosophical reason. This ideal (echoed in the classic concept of the ‘one and indivisible republic’) remains widespread among French intellectual elites today. As the editor of the daily newspaper Libération Laurent Joffrin put it in an article this April: ‘Only an abstract conception of Man can confer unity upon France.’

Yet there are silver linings to this bleak vision. The humanism and intellectual creativity of the republican tradition is still alive, and indeed is increasingly pushing back against the pessimism of the declinists. Such voices can be heard in the progressive press, notably in the powerful pamphlet by the journalist Edwy Plenel Pour les musulmans (2015), an eloquent demonstration that multiculturalism is in fact an integral (albeit unrecognised) part of France’s cultural heritage; in the sociological theories of Bruno Latour, whose research effectively combines grand theory with epistemological pluralism; and in Thomas Piketty’s acclaimed study of the inherently inegalitarian nature of modern capitalism, which was hailed by the Nobel Prize-winning US economist Paul Krugman as ‘a book that will change both the way we think about society and the way we do economics’.

Indeed, there are wider grounds for optimism. The French are still exceptionally devoted to their culture, to an extent that is unique in the Western world. France remains the land of major cultural festivals (more than 3,000 are held every year, mostly during the summer); the Journées du Patrimoine draw more than 12 million annual visitors to the country’s historical sites; the Ministry of Culture provides subsidies to a wide range of cultural activities, from artistic endeavours and research institutes to regional bookshops. Most importantly, the French still idolise their major writers, and remain a nation of avid readers, across all age groups and occupations. The Rentrée Littéraire is a cherished literary ritual every September, and for the 2015 season no fewer than 589 new novels are expected.

Among the runaway early successes is Laurent Binet’s La septième fonction du langage, an entertaining murder-mystery yarn framed around the death of the philosopher Roland Barthes in 1980. Its subtle lampooning of the vanities of late-20th-century Parisian high culture should be read as a satire of the structuralists’ interpretative delirium, but also as a belief in the possibility of a return to the universalising rationalism of the French intellectual tradition. Regeneration, after all, is one of the most potent ideals of modern French culture.

Sudhir Hazareesingh’s book How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People is published in the US on 22 September 2015.

CosmopolitanismHistory of ideasPolitics and government

By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” the great French philosopher Simone Weil wrote shortly before her untimely death. An epoch after her, Mary Oliver eulogized the love of her life with the observation that “attention without feeling… is only a report.” Looking back on centuries of love poems by people of genius who dared to love beyond the cultural narrows of their time, the poet J.D. McClatchy observed that “love is the quality of attention we pay to things.”

Because our attention shapes our entire experience of the world — this, after all, is the foundation of all Eastern traditions of mindfulness, which train the attention in order to anneal our quality of presence — the objects of our attention end up, in a subtle but profound way, shaping who we are.

Because there is hardly a condition of consciousness that focuses the attention more sharply and totally upon its object than love, what and whom we love is the ultimate revelation of what and who we are.

That is what the great Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (May 9, 1883–October 18, 1955) explores in a series of essays originally written for the Madrid newspaper El Sol and posthumously published in English as On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme (public library) — a singular culmination of Ortega’s philosophic investigation of Western culture’s blind spots, biases, and touching self-delusions about love, that is, about who and what we are.

Illustration from the vintage Danish handbook An ABZ of Love

Defining love as “that sense of spiritual perception with which one seems to touch someone else’s soul, to feel its contours, the harshness or gentleness of its character,” Ortega notes that love reveals “the most intimate and mysterious preferences which form our individual character.” He writes:

There are situations, moments in life, in which, unawares, the human being confesses great portions of his ultimate personality, of his true nature. One of these situations is love. In their choice* of lovers [human beings] reveal their essential nature. The type of human being which we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss. A skilled naturalist, by filing these materials, can reconstruct the oceanic depths from which they have been uprooted.

Defining attention as “the function charged with giving the mind its structure and cohesion,” Ortega places it at the center of the experience of love:

“Falling in love” is a phenomenon of attention.

[…]

Our spiritual and mental life is merely that which takes place in the zone of maximum illumination. The rest — the zone of conscious inattention and, beyond that, the subconscious — is only potential life, a preparation, an arsenal or reserve. The attentive consciousness can be regarded as the very space of our personalities. We can just as well say that that thing dislodges a certain space in our personalities.

Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print.)

Half a century after William James — one of Ortega’s greatest influences and philosophical progenitors — laid the groundwork of modern psychology with his statement “My experience is what I agree to attend to,” Ortega adds:

Nothing characterizes us as much as our field of attention… This formula might be accepted: tell me where your attention lies and I will tell you who you are.

[…]

“Falling in love,” initially, is no more than this: attention abnormally fastened upon another person. If the latter knows how to utilize his privileged situation and ingeniously nourishes that attention, the rest follows with irremissible mechanism.

Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Available as a print.

Paradoxically, the cultural narrative handed down to us by the Romantics postulates that love broadens and consecrates our awareness of life: Suddenly, everything is illuminated; suddenly, everything sings. Anyone who has ridden the intoxicating elation of early love has felt this, and yet Ortega intimates that this is an illusion of consciousness, masking the actual phenomenon at work, which is rather the opposite — everything is tinted with aspects of the beloved, blurring and tuning out the details that give the world its actuality. Ortega writes:

The person in love has the impression that the life of his consciousness is very rich. His reduced world is more concentrated. All of his psychic forces converge to act upon one single point, and this gives a false aspect of superlative intensity to his existence.

At the same time, that exclusiveness of attention endows the favored object with portentous qualities… By overwhelming an object with attention and concentrating on it, the consciousness endows it with an incomparable force of reality. It exists for us at every moment; it is ever present, there alongside us, more real than anything else. The remainder of the world must be sought out, by laboriously deflecting our attention from the beloved… The world does not exist for the lover. His beloved has dislodged and replaced it… Without a paralysis of consciousness and a reduction of our habitual world, we could never fall in love.

Art from the 19th-century French physics textbook Les phénomènes de la physique. (Available as a print.)

Long before cognitive scientists came to study what “an intentional, unapologetic discriminator” attention is as it frames our experience of reality by deliberate exclusion, Ortega writes:

Attention is the supreme instrument of personality; it is the apparatus which regulates our mental lives. When paralyzed, it does not leave us any freedom of movement. In order to save ourselves, we would have to reopen the field of our consciousness, and to achieve that it would be necessary to introduce other objects into its focus to rupture the beloved’s exclusiveness. If in the paroxysm of falling in love we could suddenly see the beloved in the normal perspective of our attention, her magic power would be destroyed. In order, however, to gain this perspective we would have to focus our attention upon other things, that is, we would have to emerge from our own consciousness, which is totally absorbed by the object that we love.

Nothing illustrates this contracting of the lens more clearly than the discomposing experience of emerging from the somnambulant state of in-loveness — an experience familiar to anyone who has ever surfaced from an infatuation or has deepened an infatuation into a clam and steady love. Ortega writes:

When we emerge from a period of falling in love we feel an impression similar to awakening and emerging form a narrow passage crammed with dreams. Then we realize that normal perspective is broader and airier, and we become aware of all the hermeticism and rarefaction from which our impassioned minds suffered. For a time we experience the moments of vacillation, weakness, and melancholy of convalescence.

One of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s original watercolors for The Little Prince.

But despite its potential pitfalls, love remains at once the most interior and the most influential experience of our personhood. In a sentiment evocative of that exquisite line from The Little Prince — “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” — Ortega considers how love, so invisible yet so essential a feature of our humanity, polishes the lens of our entire worldview:

The things which are important lie behind the things that are apparent.

[…]

Probably, there is only one other theme more inward than love: that which may be called “metaphysical sentiment,” or the essential, ultimate, and basic impression which we have of the universe. This acts as a foundation and support for our other activities, whatever they may be. No one lives without it, although its degree of clarity varies from person to person. It encompasses our primary, decisive attitude toward all of reality, the pleasure which the world and life hold for us. Our other feelings, thoughts, and desires are activated by this primary attitude and are sustained and colored by it. Of necessity, the complexion of our love affairs is one of the most telling symptoms of this primogenital sensation. By observing our neighbor in love we are able to deduce his vision or goal in life. And this is the most interesting thing to ascertain: not anecdotes about his existence, but the card upon which he stakes his life.

Art by Jean-Pierre Weill from The Well of Being

And yet our culture has a peculiar willful blindness to how love shapes life and the particular expression of aliveness that is our creative work — a peculiar denial of the elemental fact that because we love with everything we are, our loves imprint everything we make. (I wrote Figuring in large part as an antidote to this dangerous delusion, exploring how the loves at the center of great lives shaped the way in which those persons of genius in turn shaped our understanding of the world with their scientific and artistic work.) Ortega shares in this distaste for the cultural diminishment of love as a driving force of creative work. Observing that many persons extraordinary creative power have tended to take their loves “more seriously than their work” — the very work for which they are celebrated as geniuses, and a choice for which they have suffered derision by their contemporaries and by posterity — he admonishes against this common cultural judgment:

It is curious that only those incapable of producing great work believe that the contrary is the proper conduct: to take science, art, or politics seriously and disdain love affairs as mere frivolities.

Crochet mural by street artist NaomiRAG, Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Photograph by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)

A century and a half after astronomer Maria Mitchell — a key figure in Figuring — observed that “whatever our degree of friends may be, we come more under their influence than we are aware,” Ortega laments:

We do not take into sufficient consideration the enormous influence which our loves exercise upon our lives.

But while love reveals who we are, it also shapes who we are, sculpting our character and tinting our personality. The century of psychology developed since Ortega’s epoch has illuminated just how much “who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.” Ortega intuits this transformative power of love and, in consonance with Kurt Vonnegut’s theory that you can be in love up to three times in life, he writes:

A personality experiences in the course of its life two or three great transformations, which are like different stages of the same moral trajectory… Our innermost being seems, in each of these two or three phases, to rotate a few degrees upon its axis, to shift toward another quadrant of the universe and to orient itself toward new constellations.

Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print.)

Complement these fragments from Ortega’s intensely insightful On Love with Adrienne Rich on how relationships refine our truths, James Baldwin on love and the illusion of choice, and Esther Perel on our greatest misconception about love, then revisit what remains my favorite meditation on the subject from centuries of literature and philosophy: Hannah Arendt on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss.

Kundalini Yoga Training with Sat Dharam Kaur “Who Do You THINK You Are?” public talk in Vancouver Jan 29, 2016, with Dr. Gabor Maté, Diederik Wolsak and Sat Dharam Kaur ND. This talk was a fundraising event for Beyond Addiction: The Yogic Path to Recovery, in Vancouver. See http://beyondaddiction.ca For more lectures with Dr. Gabor Maté, see http://drgabormate.com For workshops with Diederik Wolsak, see http://choose-again.com

“Your conflicts, all the difficult things, the problematic situations in your life are not chance or haphazard. They are actually yours. They are specifically yours, designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else. The part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself. You are not going in the right direction unless there is something pricking you in the side, telling you, “Look here! This way!” That part of you loves you so much that it doesn’t want you to lose the chance. It will go to extreme measures to wake you up, it will make you suffer greatly if you don’t listen. What else can it do? That is its purpose.”

–A. H. Almaas (born 1944) is the pen name of A. Hameed Ali, a Kuwaiti American author and spiritual teacher who writes about and teaches an approach to spiritual development informed by modern psychology and therapy which he calls the Diamond Approach. “Almaas” is the Arabic word for “diamond”. Almaas is originally from Kuwait. Wikipedia

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=233015355033648

By John Blake, CNN

Updated 4:07 AM ET, Sun June 20, 2021 (cnn.com)

(CNN)They never ran out of things to talk about. It was obvious from the start.He was a brawny former Maine lobsterman with a booming baritone. She was a redhead with freckles from Wisconsin who worked in corporate recruiting. They talked about everything from sci-fi movies and her love for the rock group Bon Jovi to whether the Lord of the Rings film trilogy did justice to J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. He asked for permission to kiss her on their first date. She said yes.When Ian and Michelle Horne got married, he wore a purple tie on their wedding day because it was her favorite color. As the years rolled by, they got matching tattoos and gave each other nicknames from the movie, “The Princess Bride.” He called her Princess Buttercup and she called him “Farm Boy Wesley.” They made plans to visit Ireland this year to celebrate her Irish roots.Then came the pandemic. Last fall, after a long battle, Michelle Horne died from complications caused by Covid-19. Ian Horne’s “superpower,” as he called her, was gone. They had been married almost 10 years.But not long after his wife’s death, the morning radio deejay in Wichita, Kansas, wondered if Michelle was still speaking to him. He was driving to his job in the predawn darkness when he spotted something odd. About two dozen streetlights flanking the highway had turned purple. They looked like a lavender string of pearls glowing in the night sky.Michelle and Ian Horne. The couple were married almost 10 years.Horne took it as a sign.Enter your email to subscribe to the Results Are In Newsletter with Dr. Sanjay Gupta.“close dialog”

Reported encounters with departed loved ones are not uncommon

The coronavirus pandemic has now killed more than 600,000 Americans. Many of us never had a chance to hug or say farewell to loved ones who died alone and isolated in hospital wards due to fears of spreading the virus.But there is another group of pandemic survivors who say they have been granted a second chance to say goodbye. They are people like Horne who believe they’ve been contacted by a loved one who died from coronavirus.These experiences can be subtle: relatives appearing in hyper-real dreams, a sudden whiff of fragrance worn by a departed loved one, or unusual behavior by animals. Other encounters are more dramatic: feeling a touch on your shoulder at night, hearing a sudden warning from a loved one, or seeing the full-bodied form of a recently departed relative appear at the foot of your bed.These stories may sound implausible, but they are in fact part of a historical pattern. There is something in us — or in our lost loved ones — that won’t accept not being able to say goodbye.And whenever there is a massive tragedy such as a pandemic, a war or a natural disaster, there is a corresponding surge in reports of people seeing the dead or trying to contact them.After mass tragedies such as wars many Americans have turned to Ouija boards in an attempt to contact departed loved ones.The 1918 influenza epidemic sparked a “spiritualism craze” as Americans turned to seances and Ouija boards to contact departed loved ones. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks came a wave of people reporting sightings of and even conversations with those who had been snatched from their lives.When a tsunami struck Japan in 2011, killing at least 20,000 people, so many inhabitants of Ishinomaki reported seeing their loved ones appear that a book and a documentary were made about this city of wandering ghosts.”These kind of reports are normal in my world,” says Scott Janssen, an author who has worked in the hospice field for years and studies these experiences. “It would make sense that in a pandemic or other event that leads to mass deaths that there will be a numerical increase in reports and experiences, given the shared grief and trauma.”

These experiences are so common in the psychological field that there is a name for them: ADCs, or “after death communications.” Research suggests at least 60 million Americans have these experiences, and that they occur across cultures, religious beliefs, ethnicities and income levels. Many of these encounters occur in the twilight state between sleeping and waking, but others have been reported by people who were alert.Bill Guggenheim, co-author of “Hello from Heaven,” a book that explores ADCs, believes there is a spiritual purpose behind the visits.”They want you to know they’re still alive, and that you’ll be reunited with them when it’s your turn to leave your lifetime on Earth,” he writes. “They want to assure you they’ll be there to meet you and greet you — and perhaps even to assist you — as you make your own transition.”

A dining room encounter with a beloved aunt

ADCs may serve another function in the world created by Covid — to reassure people who couldn’t be at the side of their loved ones when they died.Consider the story of Jamie Jackson, an office manager who lives near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and her beloved “Aunt Pat.” Jackson’s aunt died of a heart attack last summer after complications from Covid. Jackson said her aunt was like a mother to her — someone she spent summers with and accompanied to the hospital for routine medical visits.But when her aunt was afflicted with Covid, Jackson couldn’t visit the hospital to reassure her.”That was the hardest thing,” Jackson says. “You can’t say goodbye and you can’t be there as an advocate for your loved one, which is difficult because you have somebody who’s in the hospital, who’s scared and not used to being alone.”Gloves worn by pallbearers are draped on the casket of retired officer Charles Jackson Jr., who died from Covid-19 in April 2020 in Los Angeles. Covid restrictions prevented many people from saying goodbye to dying loved ones in person.Seven months later, though, Jackson says she heard from her aunt again.It was December, and Jackson was putting up Christmas decorations in the house while Bing Crosby sang holiday carols. Christmas was one of her aunt’s favorite holidays, and she loved decorating. Jackson’s bin was filled with the same decorations that once belonged to her aunt.Jackson says she left the bin in her hallway to get something and when she returned, she saw a translucent figure peering into it. It was the figure of a petite woman, with the same haircut, color of hair and white blouse and blue slacks that her aunt used to wear.Jackson froze. Her hearted started pounding. She fled to her dining room and started crying. When she returned, the figure was gone. She says it was her aunt.”It was overwhelming,” Jackson says. “It’s hard to put into words. I felt touched by that. It’s obvious that she’s around and she’s visiting me.”

A cold hand on a shoulder and a whiff of perfume

Some post-Covid paranormal encounters are even more dramatic. One woman says she was literally touched by a loved one who died from complications from Covid.Marie Pina teaches English as a second language in Manitoba, Canada. She says her 79-year-old mother, Inez, was about to be released from the hospital last November when there was a Covid outbreak in her ward. She tested positive and was put in isolation. She returned home the next month, but had lost her strength.About four months after her diagnosis, her mother died.On the morning of her mother’s death, Pina says she was reaching for her slippers in her bedroom when she felt a cold hand on her shoulder. She turned and saw her mother sitting beside her, staring straight ahead with no expression. She looked 20 years younger.”Her touch was cold, like she had just come from outside,” Pina says.Family members gather to mourn a lost relative at the Continental Funeral Home on December 20, 2020 in East Los Angeles.One day not long after that morning, Pina reported another classic characteristic of an ADC. She was making spinach soup, one of her mom’s favorites, when she suddenly smelled the fragrance associated with her mother — a combination of White Diamond perfume and her mom’s Chi hairspray.”The scent was overpowering,” Pina says. “My husband and I stood in the kitchen awestruck as I stirred the soup. We both could smell it. It lasted for approximately five minutes before evaporating.”Talk to people who have these experiences, and many will acknowledge that maybe their minds created the episode. Others insist the visitations were too real to deny.Jackson, who lost her aunt, says it’s almost irrelevant if they’re real or not. Their impact is real, she says. They made her feel better.”If I needed to see it and it made me feel better and that’s all it was, I’m okay with that,” she says. “I tell people if they don’t want to believe me, that’s fine. I don’t need to explain to other people.”

Some paranormal visitations aren’t so welcome

Other ADCs are more chilling. Some paranormal experiences happen to people who are not reassured by them.”Some people are creeped out by these things and are certainly not looking for them,” says Janssen, the hospice worker. “For some it clashes with worldviews or religious beliefs. Some people have visits like this years after the fact when they are not grieving, or have visits from people with whom they have struggled and from whom they might not actually wish to have a visit.”Many victims of coronavirus died alone in hospitals, depriving family members of closure.Haunting ADCs also are common during wartime. War memoirs are filled with stories of combat veterans reporting creepy, after-death visitations from fallen comrades or even enemy soldiers they’ve killed. In the classic memoir, “What It Is like to Go to War,” Karl Marlantes, a Vietnam veteran, wrote about how the ghost of a North Vietnamese soldier he killed stalked him years after he returned home.In one striking passage, Marlantes relates how he exorcised his enemy’s ghost. He arranged a private mass with a priest at 2 in the morning at an old church where he says he saw the spirits of the enemies he killed and the comrades who died under his command file into the pews. Even his late grandparents appeared, smiling as if they approved.Counselors working with veterans often hear such stories, Janssen says.”I’ve been doing this a long time and I consider it a near universal [phenomenon] that after a particularly heavy engagement, a lot of people in your unit are lost, it is inevitable that some of those troops are going to receive visits from their buddies,” he says.

An unusual bird sighting and a cry in the night

Horne, the radio DJ, reports having other after-death encounters with his late wife.Not long after she died, he was sitting on the deck in his backyard when a cardinal landed on a branch in front of him. Cardinals, according to folklore, often appear when loved ones are near. Horne was struck by the bird because he says cardinals don’t normally show up in Kansas in autumn.Horne says he’s had moments when he’s clearly heard Michelle call to him in the night: “Ian, wake up!””It’s as if she’s in the room with me,” he says. “It’s enough to snap me awake, and I’m a deep, hard sleeper. Call it an auditory hallucination or what you want, but I definitely hear it.”Perceived messages from deceased loved ones can be comforting but also unsettling.Both signs are comforting to him in part because Horne remembers how Michelle fought so hard to live. He says her immune system was weakened after she received a kidney transplant several years ago. When the pandemic hit, they both dreaded what would happen if she got the virus.After their worst fears proved true, Horne says it seemed at first as if Michelle would survive. She endured a lengthy hospital stay, which included being put on a ventilator, but was released last October. She worked hard to get better, but there were times when Michelle’s natural optimism wavered.Horne says she once told him, “I’m such a burden to you. You don’t deserve this. You should just leave.”He kept encouraging her in physical therapy.”I was in it for the long haul, for better or for worse,” he says.Michelle’s body, though, didn’t have the strength for the long haul. She died from a heart attack last October, her body weakened by Covid, Horne says. She was 50.Horne’s radio audience has rallied around him. He’s shared his story on the air and it’s been featured in local newspapers. He finds it cathartic to talk about Michelle.”I feel that a person dies twice — once when they have their physical death and the second time, when we stop saying their name,” he says. “Any opportunity I have to talk about Michelle, I will take it.”Purple streetlights in Wichita, Kansas, which Ian Horne thinks are a signal from his late wife.Yet in an odd way, Michelle may be still talking to Horne, even after he first saw those purple streetlights.When they were married, Horne developed a ritual with Michelle. She worried about his safety driving to work in the dark each morning. After he arrived, he would reassure Michelle by texting: “I’m here. I love you.”The purple lights in Wichita are still shining. Horne keeps seeing them on his morning commute. It’s as if Michelle is responding with a similar message.He’s not sure how long the purple lights will remain. He called the city of Wichita and they attributed the faulty lights to a defective batch. They told him they were going to replace the lights. He’s in no rush for that to happen.”I’m kind of honestly hoping that they don’t,” Horne says. “I will always believe that Michelle turned them purple. Whether she actually did or not, that’s up to a reader or viewer to decide. They can explain it away … I believe it was a way for Michelle to be with me on my ride to work.

(Suggested by Sarah Flynn)

Photo by Nicolas Balcazar/EyeEm/Getty

Henry Tayloris a Birmingham Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham in the UK.

21 Jume 2021 (psyche.co)

Edited by Nigel Warburton

I see. When I open my eyes, I see a long stretch of grass, terminating in an unoccupied café, with chairs and tables stacked neatly by the door. In the distance, I see a large hospital blurring into the horizon. My visual consciousness represents a rich collection of objects, shapes, and colours. This all happens with ease: I just open my eyes and there it all is, apparently instantaneously.

This is all so effortless, that it’s easy to think of seeing as a straightforward process. Of course, that’s not true. In reality, the conscious view I have of the world is the end result of an immense level of computation. My eyes register information about light, and that information is processed in several different systems located throughout my brain, before showing up in my visual consciousness. The impression I get of the outside world (the grass, the café, the hospital) is a very distant descendent of the information that first entered my eyes. Of course, we’re not privy to all of this processing. Almost all of the work goes on entirely unconsciously, inaccessible to our own conscious minds.

One challenge for psychologists, philosophers and neuroscientists is to find ways of unpicking how this unconscious processing works. Illusions represent a valuable way to do this. Visual illusions are cases where the visual system has made a mistake, and as a result we see the world not as it really is. These mistakes provide us with tantalising glimpses into the secret workings of the visual system. They force us to think: what must the brain be like, in order to get that particular thing wrong? What processing is going on, which results in that error, rather than any other?

My favourite visual illusion is the Tse illusion below, named after the American neuroscientist Peter Ulric Tse.

Focus your eyes on the white dot in the middle of this image. Keeping your eyes focused there, allow your attention to roam over the large circles that surround that dot. This might take a bit of practice (we’re not generally used to paying attention to something that we’re not focusing our eyes on), but you’ll find that the circle you pay attention to gets darker than the others. I vividly remember first seeing this illusion at a conference about attention. I was shocked. It was as though my attention was reaching out into the world and changing the brightness of objects out there. Of course, that isn’t what’s happening. The circles aren’t changing. My attention is merely making it look as though they are.

Why does this happen? It seems to be connected to the fact that the circles partially overlap one another, against a light background (if the circles are placed on a black background, the illusion doesn’t happen). This causes the visual system to interpret the circles as a series of semi-transparent disks. The visual system then tries to work out which disk is lying ‘on top’ of the others. Attention seems to be one factor influencing this interpretation, but unfortunately it’s still not clear why this would cause a change in the brightness of one circle.

The Tse illusion might initially appear to be just an interesting novelty. But, really, it challenges some of our most deeply held assumptions about the role of attention in our mental lives. We usually think that paying attention to something is a good way of getting knowledge about it. If you want to know more about something, you should pay attention to it and, when your attention slips, you’ll make mistakes. On this common-sense idea, attention is a path to knowledge.

But the idea that attention is a path to knowledge isn’t just part of common sense. It also has a long history in epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge). The 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes is renowned for his search for knowledge beyond all doubt, and attention plays an important role in this search. He argued that ‘So long as we attend to a truth which we perceive very clearly, we cannot doubt it.’ Descartes’s thought is a pretty strong version of the same idea that’s part of common sense – that paying attention to something is a good means of gaining knowledge about it.

Paying attention to an object can make it appear more vivid than objects that we don’t pay attention to

Of course, no one would deny that paying attention to something often helps us to gain knowledge. You’re more likely to solve a maths problem correctly if you pay a lot of attention to what you’re doing. However, the Tse illusion demonstrates that attention doesn’t always help us gain more knowledge, but that sometimes it can distort our perception of the world. It’s making one of the disks look like it’s getting darker, when really it’s not. It’s actively misleading us. This is a problem for our common-sense assumptions about attention, and for the theories of philosophers such as Descartes. In this case, far from acting as a straightforward path to knowledge, attention is making us see things less clearly.

The Tse illusion is just one example of how attention has the potential to mislead us about the world. There is excellent evidence that paying attention to a gap between two lines will make the gap look bigger. Paying attention to an object can make it appear more vivid than objects that we don’t pay attention to. Amazingly, attention also affects our perception of time. Paying attention to a particular event can make it seem to take longer than it really does. This last feature of attention might even be why people often report traffic collisions as happening ‘in slow motion’. If you’re involved in a crash, your attention will be grabbed suddenly and, as a result, you might experience it as taking longer than it actually does.

Taken as a whole, these results suggest that, sometimes, attention can mislead us about the world. This is not to say that attention always distorts our knowledge of the world, but it does suggest that it might not be the unproblematic guide to knowledge that we originally thought. In order to unravel the complex link between attention and knowledge, we might need to change the way we think about both of these faculties.

Taking a step back, perhaps it’s not so surprising that attention can occasionally distort our knowledge of things. We’re all familiar with the experience of overthinking something. If you’ve ever been engaged in a long and complicated project, you’ll know what it’s like to spend all of your attention on one thing, and be left with a vague feeling that you now understand it much less than when you started. Anyone who has written a PhD will certainly know what I’m talking about.

Think about the job that attention has in the visual system. Psychologists and neuroscientists generally argue that attention is there to deal with a problem of finite resources. Our brains can only do so much, and there is far more information available to our sense organs than our brains can fully process. But, of course, not all of this information is equally relevant. In order to prevent ourselves from becoming overloaded by a torrent of information, we need to select which bits to concentrate on. This is the main job for attention: it’s in charge of picking the most important things to concentrate on, and to filter out surrounding noise. On this way of looking at attention, its job is not to get everything perfectly correct, but to select what’s deserving of our limited cognitive resources. What’s most important is that we’re concentrating on the most important things at that particular time. Once we start thinking about attention this way, it’s unsurprising that it doesn’t always get everything 100 per cent right.

As well as tweaking the way we think about attention, we might also need to rethink our view about knowledge itself. Turning away from Descartes, we find other views about the link between attention and knowledge, which perhaps fit better with the Tse illusion, and the other results outlined above. Some philosophers (known as contextualists) have long argued that too much attention can be a dangerous thing for knowledge. According to the contextualists, we have all sorts of knowledge as we go about our everyday lives, but when we pay too much attention to the sources of our knowledge, we find that our faith in that knowledge often vanishes. As an example, return to the visual experience with which we started: of the grass, the café, and the hospital. I normally think that this visual experience gives me good knowledge about the world around me: it tells me that there’s a café there, that the hospital is behind it, and so on.

However, if I think too much about it, I can start to doubt myself. What if I’m having some kind of hallucination? What if there’s no café there, but it’s really some kind of mirage? What if actually, I’m not looking out the window at all, but am really just in a dream? The more I reflect on these increasingly extravagant scenarios, the less knowledge I really seem to have. According to the contextualists, the problem here is simple: I’m overthinking things. If you devote too much attention to all the ways that I could in theory be wrong, then even the most mundane knowledge that we thought we had will soon disappear. The proposed solution is just not to pay too much attention to these kinds of worries.

All of these issues raise some very delicate questions. The contextualists are certainly right that we don’t want to go too far, and end up spending all our time worrying about whether we’re in a dream or not. But then, it’s often really important to reflect on why we hold certain beliefs. This can lead us to revising our opinions, in a beneficial and productive way. What we really need is a way of deciding the point at which attention stops being beneficial for knowledge, and strays over into distorting things. I’m pretty sure that working all this out is going to prove very difficult. But then, maybe I’m just overthinking it.

This Idea was made possible through the support of a grant to Aeon+Psyche from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. Funders to Aeon+Psyche are not involved in editorial decision-making.

PBS Voices “Senior Prom” takes on a whole new meaning at Triangle Square, a haven for LGBTQ+ retirees in Hollywood, CA. For so many high-schoolers, prom is a rite of passage in all of its love-filled, well-coiffed, abundantly photographed glory. But for generations of LGBTQ+ youth, prom has been emblematic of exclusion from a world they could not experience as their authentic selves. Over a night of dancing, kissing, and crowning of prom queens at Triangle Square, these trailblazing seniors reflect back on how far they’ve come and their dreams for the next generation. “Senior Prom” celebrates our eldest LGBTQ+ generation who spent a lifetime fighting for the right to love openly and, via rich personal archives, retraces lives and legacies of resistance that helped change the course of civil rights. Subscribe to PBS Voices so you never miss a new video: https://to.pbs.org/2XewHgX​ Happy Pride, everyone! Let us know how you’re celebrating (safely) this year in the comments below. #Pride#Prom#LGBTQ FOLLOW INDEPENDENT LENS: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/independentlens Twitter: https://twitter.com/IndependentLens Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/independent… Executive Producers Sally Jo Fifer Lois Vossen Director & Producer Luisa Conlon Producer Jessica Chermayeff Co-Producers Ana Veselic Anne Alexander Director of Photography Luisa Conlon Editors Orian Barki Alex Bohs Ora DeKornfeld Additional Cinematography Maya Craig Seth Hahn Associate Producers Cloe Young Zoe Kase Music Composer William Ryan Fritch Music Supervisor Juliette Carter Graphic Designer Abigail Leuchter Colorist Elias Nousiopoulos Sound Designer & Mixer Calvin Pia Vice President of Production Royd Chung Senior Manager, Short-Form Content Pamela Torno Supervising Producer Clare Chambers Associate Producer Susan Cohen Archival Materials by Personal Archives provided by: Robert Clement, Andrea Segal, and Nancy Valverde Photographer Ron Frehm / AP Photo by Ron Frehm Footage supplied by CBS News Prelinger Archives NBC Archives via Getty Images Imagery supplied by Fred W. McDarrah/Premium Archive via Getty Images First New York Parade (Stonewall Year), Crawford Wayne Barton Papers, 1993-11 Courtesy of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society. Footage Courtesy of; JOANI: Queen of the Paradiddle! “Gay & Proud” by Lilli Vincenz, permission by Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., Archival film and/or video materials from the collections of the Library of Congress David of California, Courtesy of ONE Archives at the USC Libraries Stock media provided by DogPhonics/ Pond5 Footage made available from MKS Video, Inc., and Michael Stimler Music “Dancing Queen” Written by Stig Erik Leopoldo Anderson, Benny Goran Bror Andersson, Bjoern K. Ulvaeus Performed by Franck Pourcel Courtesy of Parlophone Music France, a Warner Music Group Company By arrangement with Warner Music Group Film & TV Licensing Published by Universal Songs of Polygram International Inc., Universal/Union Songs Musikforlag AB, and EMI Grove Park Music Inc. “Ain’t Nobody Straight In L.A.” Written by William Griffin & Warren Moore Performed by The Miracles Courtesy of Motown Records under license from Universal Music Enterprises Used by Permission of Grimora Publishing “Boogie Wonderland” Written by Jonathan Lind and Allee Willis Performed by Earth, Wind & Fire with The Emotions Courtesy of Columbia Records By arrangement with Sony Music Entertainment Published by EMI Blackwood Music Inc., Irving Music, EMI April Music Inc., and Big Mystique Music/Kobalt Songs Music Publishing Special Thanks Los Angeles LGBT Center Ash Peters Jazmin Romero Independent Lens Short-Form for Voices Original Series Funding Provided By: Corporation for Public Broadcasting Acton Family Giving Ford Foundation John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Wyncote Foundation National Endowment for the Arts SENIOR PROM is a co-production of JESSICA CHERMAYEFF, LUISA CONLON, and ITVS, with funding provided by the CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING (CPB), in association with COUSINS. This program was produced by JPC FILMS LLC and LC Productions LLC, which is solely responsible for its content. © 2021 JPC FILMS LLC and LC Productions LLC. All Rights Reserved.

The word nostalgia is learned formation of a Greek compound, consisting of νόστος (nóstos), meaning “homecoming”, a Homeric word, and ἄλγος (álgos), meaning “pain” or “ache”, and was coined by a 17th-century medical student to describe the anxieties displayed by Swiss mercenaries fighting away from home.

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia