I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
Today, some rambling reflections on consciousness and the context in which it operates.
Katsafanas on Nietzsche and consciousness
After writing about one version of Nietzsche on consciousness and free will, I reviewed Nietzsche’s theory of mind: Consciousness and conceptualization (Katsafanas, 2005). This says something slightly different than what I got before: that Nietzsche says what’s conscious is what has been conceptualized and if something remains unconceptualized — only existing as perceptions or imagery etc — it’s not conscious. Katsafanas suggests that Nietzsche’s version of consciousness, which is the same as conceptualization, is “superficial and falsifying.” Our consciousness gives a selective, partial rendering of the content of the unconscious states that give rise to them. And, our consciousness (conceptualizing capability) is oriented around utility and social needs, rather than accuracy in representing the world.
Further, conscious thought can influence unconscious states, implying that consciousness is not epiphenomenal (accidental, a side effect), on this formulation of Nietzsche’s approach. It can be efficacious instead, causing changes in the person. This does not mean, however, that there is free will, because the conscious states can still be caused by many influences. Let’s just set aside the question of free will for now.
I’m imagining three layers:
- Unconscious states – perceptions, imagery, feelings, drives
- Conscious states – in which unconscious states are turned into distilled, possibly incorrect representations of those unconscious states
- Cultural meaning – socially shared conceptualizations that themselves influence the conscious conceptions a person has
A person might find that her conscious thoughts are focused on what is culturally recommended and suggested. My thoughts seem too attendant to my social milieu, achievement society style.
Focal vs tacit awareness
In Meaningfulness and grief: you don’t know what you got till it’s gone (2023), Jennifer Matey distinguishes between focal and tacit awareness:
Consciousness has an intentional structure. Whenever a subject is conscious, they are conscious of something. What the subject is conscious of is referred to as the intentional object. Another way of describing the awareness one has of the intentional object is to say that the intentional object is something one is focally aware of. Whenever someone is focally aware of something, there are also numerous other things of which they have tacit awareness. Tacit awareness is awareness that one has of things that form the background or context for what one focally attends to. An example helps to bring this out. When focally aware of the garden, one might also be tacitly aware of contextual aspects of the physical scene such as the sky, the background setting, sounds, smells, etc. This tacit/focal distinction doesn’t just concern what we are aware of in perception. We are also tacitly aware of ourselves as the subject to whom things appear when we are perceiving (or to whom thoughts appear when thinking). One can also be focally aware of a goal directed action one is performing, and in being so they are at the same time tacitly aware of themselves as the agent of the action.
This distinction between focal awareness and tacit awareness seems to have something in common with Katsafanas’ formulation of Nietzsche’s approach to consciousness: the focal would be the conceptualized and the tacit the unconceptualized.
Matey continues:
An important difference between what occupies focal awareness and what occupies tacit awareness is that what one is focally aware of is manifest in the content of conscious experience in a way that makes it available for verbal report and disposes one to form beliefs about it.
Something that is “available for verbal report” and allows one to “form beliefs about it” has been conceptualized.
Matey suggests that you can have a tacit sense of meaningfulness about your life and actions, “including even the most routine and mundane elements of them.” The paper moves on to discuss how grief can make such tacit understanding focal instead, as what was unconscious becomes conscious through some change in one’s external circumstances.
So it’s not simply culture that affects one’s conceptualizations — one’s consciousness. It’s also the context one lives within, which includes relationships and roles, both of which may be lost in an event that causes grief (most obviously, with the death of a close loved one).
The truth of the matter
If someone loses a loved one, and then they lose some sense of meaningfulness they had before, as what was tacit meaningfulness becomes focal meaninglessness, what is the reality of the matter?
Nietzsche might say “there is none.” There is no God’s-eye view of reality. There is no absolute truth. There are only constructed viewpoints, conceptualized consciousness, selectively incomplete and always influenced by context, including the culture you live in.
And the constructed viewpoints you take on are the conscious ones, the conceptualized ones, the culturally- and context-dependent ones, the ones that are oriented around social communication and coordination.
I haven’t woven together these ideas fully yet, so I’m going to leave my reflection right here.