Pushing Buttons . . .

For instance, I might submit a paper on the difference between civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism, insisting that the two be distinguished as grand narrative and gland narrative, respectively.

I could argue first about psychology, insist that Jungian psychology manifests the former, the grand narrative, with its all-encompassing mythic stories of who we can be, and insist that Freudian psychology manifests the latter, the gland narrative, with its reductionist, sex-derived formulation of who we cannot but be.

I'd then turn to some other field and make the same sort of division, then another field and do the same, then another and another . . .

Sounds Like Psych

Freud or Freud?

Someone took Freud's Es, Ueberich, and Ich and rendered these words in 'English' as the more scientificky-sounding terms Id, Superego, and Ego, but how much better wouldn't It, Overi, and I have sounded . . .

Analysis without Freud

Freudnichts

Freud didn't posit the Id, the Superego, and the Ego. He posited the Es, the Ueberich, and the Ich. English should have rendered these as the It, the Overi, and the I.

I may have said this before. Or maybe Overi said it. It didn't say it.

Visible Gorilla?

Visible Gorilla

An article I was reading in a newspaper over the weekend spoke of the "famous 'Invisible Gorilla' experiment" as a great example of how we ignore things outside our basic interest.

I've never heard of this famous experiment, and the article never mentions it again. I could look it up, but I suspect it's a kind of trick to show I'm a fool for taking this seriously and wasting my time on it since there's no way to locate an invisible gorilla, so it's entirely outside my basic interest.

Chip off the old block on your shoulder?

Follow Sequence:

Find Chips Off An Old Block.

Select One, Place on Shoulder.

Await Consequences.

John Milton's Reason says: "Eat it, just eat it."

Weird Al Yankovic
You Tube

I posted yesterday on John Milton's faculty psychology, and I do so again today, but in more humility, quoting from my comments on the Milton List:

I've had second thoughts about how Milton's faculty psychology works.

Yesterday, my point was that even though reason is addressed as though it works on its own, it can be tricked, and thus Adam and Eve have to remain firm and not allow reason to mislead.

But remain firm how?

One might think they would do so through their will, which is free, but the text says the will is free when it follows reason. Milton instead implicates memory as the faculty that reminds one of what God has expressly forbidden. Adam is to remind Eve, and Eve to remind Adam.

Moral reasoning seems to require a community that remembers moral laws - though, presumably, one could also remind oneself.

But only one thing in the garden is expressly forbidden by God - the fruit of the tree of knowledge - and what could reason dictate to the will about that negative command? Aside from the command, reason would find nothing wrong in Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. By reason alone, the tree and its fruit are good. "Eat it, just eat it," says reason (echoing Weird Al Yankovic). Memory countermands that advice.

So, how does Milton's faculty psychology work? From Five Senses to Fancy to Reason to Will, but from Memory back to Will?

Professor Todd Wayne Butler corrected my speculation:

In response to Jeffery's query on how Milton's psychology works, I'd hesitate to offer memory direct access to the will (or vice-versa). Rather, it's through the imagination that the information stored in the memory is recollected to reason. Once the past is thus again immediately present, reason can (much as it does with sensory data) assess this information and, if it chooses, direct action.

I then asked:

So "Fansie" - to borrow Milton's term - is the faculty through which both sense impressions and memories pass to reach "Reason"? . . . Does Milton somewhere make the point that memories pass through Fansie, or is this inferred to Milton's views from what is otherwise known about faculty psychology?

Professor Butler responded:

I'm not aware of any other places where Milton is explicit (at least in detail) about the cognitive mechanics of remembering, though the inference is supported by more specific explications of faculty psychology found elsewhere.

I therefore need to learn more about faculty psychology . . .

Faculty Psychology in Paradise Lost

Phrenology
But Not Miltonic
Early Faculty Psychology

The Milton List scholars have been discussing what "laws" Adam and Eve might have recognized in their prelapsarian state as depicted by Milton in Paradise Lost. In my confidence that in addition to the one exceptional command not to eat from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, there were an unbound number of moral laws discoverable by reason, I quoted PL 5.100-119 for a closer look at the faculty psychology that Adam elucidates:

But know that in the Soule
Are many lesser Faculties that serve
Reason as chief; among these Fansie next
Her office holds; of all external things,
Which the five watchful Senses represent,
She forms Imaginations, Aerie shapes,
Which Reason joyning or disjoyning, frames
All what we affirm or what deny, and call
Our knowledge or opinion; then retires
Into her private Cell when Nature rests.
Oft in her absence mimic Fansie wakes
To imitate her; but misjoyning shapes,
Wilde work produces oft, and most in dreams,
Ill matching words and deeds long past or late.
Som such resemblances methinks I find
Of our last Evenings talk, in this thy dream,
But with addition strange; yet be not sad.
Evil into the mind of God or Man
May come and go, so unapprov'd, and leave
No spot or blame behind:

I added that while we might take this as Adam's description of an automatic system in which reason makes the right decision without need for deliberation, one should consider this other passage, PL 9.351-363, in which Adam elucidates faculty psychology further:

But God left free the Will, for what obeyes
Reason, is free, and Reason he made right
But bid her well beware, and still erect,
Least by some faire appeering good surpris'd
She dictate false, and misinforme the Will
To do what God expresly hath forbid,
Not then mistrust, but tender love enjoynes,
That I should mind thee oft, and mind thou me.
Firm we subsist, yet possible to swerve,
Since Reason not impossibly may meet
Some specious object by the Foe subornd,
And fall into deception unaware,
Not keeping strictest watch, as she was warnd.

Here, Adam warns Eve about the danger of temptation, and the language used prepares the reader for Eve's encounter with the serpent's temptation with the tree as provoking object, but neither Adam nor Eve suspects the tree's role yet (though they likely should, given Eve's dream).

But my point is that even though reason is addressed as though it works on its own, it can be tricked, and thus Adam and Eve have to remain firm and not allow reason to mislead. One might think they would do so through their will, which is free, but the text says the will is free when it follows reason. Milton instead implicates memory as the faculty that reminds one of what God has expressly forbidden. Adam is to remind Eve, and Eve to remind Adam. Presumably, one could also remind oneself. But only one thing in the garden is expressly forbidden - the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

I am thus less sure I understand Milton now than I was before I looked closely at these passages . . .