The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
2nd Draft March 2005
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Epithet Since the organs of sight and hearing are distance
receptors, detachment from direct contact with the physical may be retained,
for the other senses call attention to the body, so destroying the isolation
of the contemplative mind. Thus the aristocratic attitude of classical
Greek culture has been preserved: the conviction of the superiority of the
essentially passive aloofness of the meditative spirit and contempt for the
practical and manipulative.
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1. Psychology’s ‘knowledge about knowledge’ like Science and Design comes in two complementary forms: its physical foundation and the psychic faculties for its acquisition. The first can be characterized as ‘hardware’; the second ‘software’. Alternatively, the brain, together with the entire nervous system, constitutes ‘wetware’ (Rucker 1988) [D], a neologism distinguishing biological or carbon-based artifacts (natural and genetically modified) from silicon-based computer systems or ‘dryware’. I will review findings from cognitive psychology about the relationship between wetware and cognition, i.e., knowing. I will then examine analytic psychology’s model of knowledge, but first more definitions.
2. ‘Faculty’ has several meanings including a branch or department of knowledge (OED, faculty, II, 6). For my purposes, however, two other definitions will be used. First, a faculty is “an inherent power or property of the body or of one of its organs” (OED, faculty, III, 3). In this sense, the human brain is the organ of knowing. Second, a faculty is “one of the several ‘powers’ of the mind” (OED, faculty, III, 4). The mind, as the seat of knowledge, hosts a number of distinct faculties. Etymologically, there are five inner senses, or inwits, including conscience, reason, intellect, understanding and wisdom (OED, inwit, 1 & 2a). With the exception of reason these terms have not previously been defined. Conscience is ‘inner knowledge or consciousness’ (OED, conscience, I); intellect is “the power of thought” (OED, intellect, n, 1); understanding means “capable of judging knowledge (OED, understanding, vbl. n, 1b); and, wisdom is “soundness of judgement in the choice of means and ends” (OED, wisdom, 1a).
3. These contrasting definitions of faculty - a power of the body and a power of the mind - correspond to the distinction between knowing by the senses (wetware) and knowing by the mind (software). For both there are significant dollar & cents implications e.g., with respect to knowing by the senses there is Prozac and MRIs (magnetic resonance imagers) and with respect to knowing by the mind, there is the educational and psychological testing industry.
1. It was only in the 20th century that wetware was meaningfully addressed by neurophysiology, i.e., the study of the brain and nervous system. In simple terms, the human brain has developed through a three-stage evolutionary process. First came the so-called Reptilian Brain whose nature was the subject of Carl Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden (1977). Sometimes called the ‘rectilinear or R-structure’ it includes the brain stem and its specialized extensions such as the medulla oblongata. It receives sensations from the nervous system – voluntary and involuntary - and regulates the involuntary system. Second, overlaying this primitive brain is the Mammalian Brain or cerebellum with its distinctive lobes – left/right, front/back. Finally, like wrapping paper enfolding the previous two, is the cerebral cortex, the grey ridged matter sometimes called ‘the human brain’ but which we, as a species, share with both the higher primates and cetaceans such as whales and dolphins.
2. Research over the last hundred years has revealed a lateralization of higher brain functions or faculties. In the simplest, and least controversial terms: the left lobe is responsible for speech; the right lobe for pattern recognition, the front or temporal lobes for reasoning; the back or occipital lobes for visualization. The latter involves not just physical sight but also imagination, i.e., “that faculty of the mind by which are formed images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses” (OED, imagination, 3).
3. In this regard, it has been recognized that imagination and creativity have an empirical basis in neurophysiology and are common to the Arts and Sciences (Meyer, 1974). In both, creativity occurs when an individual steps beyond traditional ways of seeing, doing and making. In fact, the process which brings about creative advances in science, e.g., scientific revolutions (Kuhn 1996, 89-90) appears analogous to that of artistic creation (Jantsch 1975, 18).
4. The creative process appears to be rooted in the lateralization of brain function. The left hemisphere is primarily responsible for cognitive activities relying on verbal information, symbolic representation, sequential analysis, and on the ability to be conscious and report what is going on. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, functions without the individual being able to report verbally, and is concerned with pictorial, geometric, timeless and nonverbal information (Hansen, 1981, 23). In this regard, the noted economist Geoffrey Vickers writes:
I welcome the recent findings of brain science to
support the common experience that we have two ‘styles of cognition’, the one
sensitive to causal, the other to contextual
significance. I have no doubt that the
cultural phase - which is now closing - restricted our concept of human reason
by identifying it with the rational, and ignoring the intuitive function, and
thus failing to develop an epistemology which we badly need, and which is
within our reach - if we can overcome our cultural inhibitions. (Vickers, 1977)
5. More controversial are the findings of Wilder Penfield (1975) and Julian Jaynes (1978). Penfield after fifty years of neurosurgery concluded that the brain stem contains what he called the centrencephalic system, or programmer of the human computer. Thus, if parts of the brain are damaged, particularly prenatally, the programmer can reassign tasks altering the assignment of functions. It is only, Penfield deduced, when this centre is extinguished that ‘humanness’ vanishes. Nonetheless, “the mind, I must conclude, is something more than a mechanism. It is, in a certain sense, above and beyond the brain. Although it seems to depend upon brain action for its very existence, it is still free” (Penfield 1969, 81).
6. In the case of Jaynes, his career as neuropsychologist led him to conclude that a right lobe brain centre (current function unknown) corresponding to the left lobe’s Wernicke’s Area or speech centre was once active. Given the centrality of language to knowledge such a finding could have important implications. Dormant in contemporary humanity - except in artistic inspiration (the Muse), the voice of conscience and the voices of the schizophrenic, this right lobe centre was, according to Jaynes, once active and controlling. It constituted ‘the bicameral mind’. Auditory hallucinations – the voice of the king or god – guided behaviour, not ego consciousness. Jaynes concludes that the first writings were not read but rather heard as the voice of its author, e.g., with reference to the 18th century B.C.E. Code of Hammurabi (the first written legal code) “someone seeking redress… would come to the steward’s statue ‘to hear my words’ as the stele says” (Jaynes 1978, 198). He goes on to observe that in hindsight writing replaced the bicameral voice as the controlling social mechanism.
7. Up the social hierarchy the voice changed
from one’s master to one’s lord to one’s king to one’s god. Ancient humanity was in thrall to a social or
collective rather than ego consciousness.
This, Jaynes believes, is a partial
explanation for the engineering feats of the Beaker People (
8. The bicameral mind, however, broke
down with the near synchronistic collapse of all the ancient civilization in
the
9. Given the lateralization of brain function or faculties, the question still remains: how does the physical brain generate consciousness or mind? Put another way, how can a macroscopic state called mind result from the microscopic actions of brain cells or neurons? The answer proposed by Freeman is “circular causality”:
Circular causality expresses the
interrelations between levels in a hierarchy: a top-down macroscopic state
simultaneously influences microscopic particles that bottom-up create and
sustain the macroscopic state. (Freeman 1999)
10. Other examples can be cited. One comes from quantum physics involving the
quark field effect called hadrons, e.g.,
protons and neutrons. Quarks come in 6 flavours and three colours –
charmed, up, down, strange, top and bottom, red, green and blue. These distinguish one quark from another. It is, however, their grouping in sets that
cause the epiphenomenon known as a proton or neutron. In fact, quarks exist only in
combination. There are no ‘free’ quarks
floating around. (Nielson 2002).
It is like sticking one’s hand into a Jacuzzi
with streams of water merging in the middle producing what feels solid but is
an illusion, a secondary or epiphenomenon yet, nonetheless, ‘real’. Another example, used by Freeman, is the laser
(light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation). The excited atoms in a laser cause coherent
light emission, and this emission, in turn, imposes order on the atoms to
maintain that specific frequency (Freeman 2000).
11. The transcendent result of circular causality is ‘mind’ as distinct from brain in keeping with Penfield’s observation that mind is “in a certain sense, above and beyond the brain” (Penfield 1969, 81). Having proposed a possible physical mechanism for consciousness, however, does not answer the question of how does the mind – as a distinct, higher order epiphenomenon – know. Furthermore, as suggested by the controversial findings of Penfield and Jaynes, our understanding of brain function remains problematic at best. And, of course, such controversy attends altered states of consciousness produced by psychotropic substances as documented by Aldous Huxley among others (Huxley 1954). Nor does a physical explanation resolve the meta-methodological dilemma of ‘knowledge about knowledge’. I do not perceive the physical sub-structure or wetware of my consciousness. In my mind’s eye, the conscious ‘I’ is the operator, not some component part. This operator, this ‘wit’, occupies “the seat of consciousness or thought”; it is the “mind” (OED, wit, n, I, 1) made up by knowledge and learning (OED, wit, n, III, 11a). No matter if it is a divine spark or the result of circular causality, the mind is an objective phenomenon that must be treated in its own terms if it, and the nature of knowing and knowledge, is to be more fully understood.
1. For most of human history the
operator was called ‘the soul’ or “the principle of thought and action in man,
commonly regarded as an entity distinct from the body; the spiritual part of
man in contrast to the purely physical” (OED, soul, n, 2a). For the
ancient Egyptians there were multiple souls but for the ancient Greeks and
Church Fathers, each human being had a single soul constituting a monad, an
indivisible unity. While external
entities like demons and angels might influence the soul, it was nonetheless
the atomistic soul that faced the world and was responsible for the
consequences of its thoughts, words and deeds.
2. Until the height of the European
Enlightenment in the 18th century, the faculties of knowing (of whatever nature
or constitution) were thus viewed as revolving around and at the service of an
individual undivided conscious self. Arguably,
it was Franz Mesmer (1734-1815) who first
demonstrated that there was more than a monad at play. About 1772 he identified the phenomenon of ‘animal
magnetism’ that led to ‘mesmerism’, the precursor of hypnotism in modern
psychotherapy. In
3. While Charcot
(1825-93), Janet (1859-1947) and Krafft-Ebing
(1840-1902) all explored beneath the surface of consciousness it is with
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) that the fissioning of the psychic atom is
associated. Instead of a single ‘I’, the
ego of the conscious individual was shown to be but one planet revolving around
a larger primary along with the unconscious, superego and id. The executive decisions of the ego could,
therefore, be countermanded or frustrated by other players in a psychic drama
leading from normality to neurosis to, at the extreme, psychosis. For Freud, however, the unconscious
essentially contained only the suppressed content of personal consciousness, i.e., knowledge too painful to
consciously bear. In this sense, ego was
still in control.
7.2.3.1 Archetypes & Complexes
1. It was Freud’s protégé, colleague
and eventual rival, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), who moved beyond the self-
and socially-imposed constraints under which his one-time patron worked. Jung literally constellated the human mind
with a myriad of unconscious forms and structures that are the common
inheritance of all humanity – the collective unconscious. These are archetypes or “primordial,
structural elements of the human psyche” (Sharp 1991) that affect
consciousness in the course of daily life as well as in dreams, myths and fairy
tales. Crystallized out of common
elements shared by peoples across time and cultures, these are also called ‘mythogems’.
2. More importantly from a dollars
& cents perspective, they can also be crystallized out into highly
marketable products like ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’, i.e., forms of commercial pattern
recognition. The ‘wise old man’, ‘the
hero’, ‘the witch’, ‘the lost treasure’, et
al are archetypical roles, forms and images that exist in all human
cultures and all human minds. On the
stage of daily life these ‘complexes’ can, consciously or unconsciously, be
donned like a costume by an individual playing with others (role playing). On screen, in literature, in painting and
computer games, the audience individually identifies with or ‘knows’ these mythogemic elements and can, as Coleridge said of poetry, ‘temporarily
suspend disbelief’ and play along.
3. Arguably, the star role today is
played by ‘the ego’. This is certainly
the conclusion of Erich Neumann, a student and colleague of Jung, in his
exhaustive study: The Origins and History of
Consciousness (1954). For Neumann, the ancient myths and
religions show progressive development of the ‘hero’ as the carrier of
individuality, i.e., of ego
consciousness. Ego consciousness has thus
been an evolutionary struggle of one mythogemic
complex among others for dominance. [F]
4. Alternatively called analytic,
complex, depth or Jungian psychology, analytic psychology draws heavily on Kant
(1724-1804) including concepts such as faculties of knowing and a transcendent
function. In simplified form, there are four
morphological features to the Jungian model:
a)
Conscious/Unconscious: inhabited by distinct complexes or archetypes including
the ego, all of which revolve around a transcendent called the Self;
b) Introvert/Extrovert/Centrovert: direction of psychic attention;
c) Thinking,
Intuition, Feeling & Sensation: ways of knowing in varying
dominant/subordinate configurations; and,
d) Individuation:
the teleological end of life as the realization one’s true unique Self.
5. Each morphological structure competes
for a limited supply of ‘libido’, i.e.,
psychic energy. Freud viewed libido as
sexual in nature; Jung saw it as the life force which ebbs and flows into many ports
of call – sexual, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, et al. Accordingly, ego is
in control only to the degree it can competitively appropriate sufficient libido.
If not, then another complex may occupy the seat of consciousness as occurs in participation mystique, a “term derived
from anthropology and the study of primitive psychology, denoting a mystical
connection, or identity, between subject and object” (Sharp 1991).
6. Beyond its descriptive power,
analytic psychology has spawned arguably the most widely used psychological
testing instruments in the English-speaking world: The Myers-Briggs Type
Indicator ®. Used extensively in North American business and
education it attempts to identify and measure the faculties of knowing
possessed by an individual. The mix or ‘type’
reveals how each individual learns best, i.e.,
accumulates knowledge and best makes decisions.
The implications for consumer and producer theory are self-evident.
Decades of testing provides a potentially massive database for further
quantitative analysis (assuming ethical guidelines can be met and corporate owners
are willing to share their results).
1. For my immediate purposes only ways
or faculties of knowing will concern us.
I will reconcile Jung’s four faculties – thinking, intuition, feeling
and sensation – with an economic epistemology that would be familiar to Adam Smith:
Reason, Revelation, Sentiment and Sensation.
These terms are intentionally value-laden. They are meant to elicit or
induce affect defined as “emotional reactions marked by physical symptoms and
disturbances in thinking” (Sharp 1991). A connection between Adam Smith and Carl Jung
can be drawn through the work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant was a contemporary of Smith (1723-1790) with
whom he shared the concept of faculties of knowing and, as seen above, Jung
drew on Kant’s concepts of faculties and a transcendent function. For each I offer an analytic psychology
definition and contrast it with economic usage.
1. Reason must be reconciled with the psychological concept of thinking. Thinking is defined as the mental process of interpreting what is perceived. It is one of four functions used for psychological orientation or ‘knowing’ – thinking, intuition, feeling and sensation. Of these either thinking or feeling is usually dominant in an individual. Both are decision making faculties. In this sense, both are rational. Intuition and sensation tend to be subordinate to a dominant function while the remaining dominant tends to be suppressed becoming ‘the lost treasure’ in mythogemic terms. If thinking is primary, then feeling is automatically the inferior function. Higher order thinking rigorously excludes feeling and vice versa (Sharp 1991).
2. The guiding premise of economic epistemology is the rule of reason. In English, the word ‘reason’ entered the language in the 13th century and derives from the Latin ratio meaning computation and deriving, in turn, from reri meaning to calculate (MWO 2003). Hence mathematics, by definition, is the highest form of reason and reason as mathematical calculation dominates contemporary economics in the guise of calculatory rationalism. Nonetheless, non-mathematical linguistic-based logic also qualifies as Reason.
3. While Reason, as defined above, is narrower than thinking the archetypal symbol for thinking is the sword or knife, i.e., something that cuts or splits into parts. Cutting through a problem is a metaphor for decisive thinking dating back to at least Alexander the Great’s solution of the Gordian knot in 333 B.C.E. - a sword. And, as previously noted, the word ‘science’ derives for the Latin meaning ‘to split’.
4. If there is, at the individual
level, a human want, need or desire for ‘reasoned’, ‘calculated’ or ‘reductive’
knowledge, and, assuming circular causality is operative, then
one would expect an industrial sector specializing in its satisfaction. This I will call the Science Industry
inclusive of the natural and engineering as well as the social sciences to the extent
that they apply calculatory rationalism.
1. Revelation must be reconciled with
the psychological concept of intuition.
In analytic psychology, intuition is the function that perceives
possibilities inherent in the present compared to sensation that perceives
immediate reality. It is arational, i.e.,
it does not explain or judge. It tends
to be subordinate to a dominant function, usually thinking or feeling. Intuition gives outlook and insight into a
garden of magical possibilities as if they were real (Sharp 1991).
2. In religion, Revelation refers to the disclosure of divine or sacred reality, purpose or truth. It may come through mystical insight, historical event, or spiritual experience that transforms the lives of individuals, groups and whole civilizations. The revelations of a Moses, Buddha, Jesus or Mohammed have incalculable social and economic effects ranging from changing patterns of consumption and international trade to geo-political conflict. More generally, and at the individual level, intuition refers to the power or faculty of attaining direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference. In technological forecasting & assessment, this is called ‘no-knowledge’ (Jantsch 1967, 51).
3. It is important to note that in Smith’s time, the Church still claimed, but no longer effectively enforced, its monopoly on Revelation. The erosion of Church authority began in the 15th century when artist/engineer/humanist/scientist began to claim godlike powers of creation, i.e., creating something out of nothing - ex nihilo (Nahm 1947, 1950). Their importance, however, extends beyond their works. They mark the eruption of the individual out of feudal subordination – a problem, as will be demonstrated, of acute concern to Smith. Most of these Renaissance giants claimed humble birth yet achieved noble ends – new knowledge, new creations. The ‘Cult of the Genius’ was born (Woodmansee 1984, 446, 47ff [Zilsel 1918]).
4. This, in turn, set the ground for the 16th century Protestant Reformation’s assertion of direct contact between the individual human soul and the godhead without intermediation by popes, bishops, clergy or philosophers. Freeing the individual from subordination to birth (the Renaissance) and from a clerical monopoly of revelation (the Reformation), the next step was political: the Republican Revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries with their declaration that “all men are created equal”.
5. Even in the heartland of Reason, the natural & engineering sciences, Revelation or intuition, plays a critical role described by Thomas Kuhn as “scales falling from the eyes”, “lightning flash” and “illumination” (Kuhn 1996, 123). Of scientific revolutions he writes:
a new paradigm, or a sufficient hint to permit later articulation, emerges all at once, sometimes in the middle of the night, in the mind of a man deeply immersed in crisis. What the nature of that final stage is - how an individual invents (or finds he has invented) a new way of giving order to data now all assembled - must here remain inscrutable and may be permanently so. (Kuhn 1996, 89-90)
6. While Revelation may appear narrower
than intuition it shares many of the same symbols, e.g., ‘lightening flash’ and ‘illumination’. Religious metaphors in the West include ‘the
burning bush’, the medieval English ‘Cloud of Unknowing’ (Progoff
1957) and Thomas Merton’s 20th century ‘Palace of Nowhere’ (Finley 1978). Furthermore, the contemporary role of religion
in geo-political competition – economic, political and military – should not be
underestimated. The economic
consequences of such knowledge cannot be ignored either. For example, in
A new
7. To put it another way, from an economic perspective God is real and means business, big business. If there is, at the individual level, a human want, need or desire for no-knowledge, psychic, spiritual or higher enlightenment, and, assuming circular causality is operative, then one would expect an industrial sector specializing in its satisfaction. This I will call the Spiritual Industry inclusive of religion and a myriad of psychic movements and communities as well as the ‘self-help’ movement.
1. The psychological term feeling also must be reconciled with economic usage. It is the psychological function that evaluates or judges what something or someone is worth compared with thinking that interprets what ‘is’. Both are rational functions. One or the other tends to be dominant in any individual – thinking type or feeling type. A feeling is as indisputable a reality as the existence of an idea (Sharp 1991). Feeling also leads to cooperation or opposition between individuals and groups.
2. Before the Marginalist
Revolution of the 19th century, feeling or rather its economic cognate - Sentiment
- played a complimentary role to Reason.
It too, however, was displaced by Bentham’s
hedonic calculus. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith stresses
the role of Sentiment in the dialogue of the marketplace, e.g., what today is called ‘market trust’ (The Economist
3. Sentiment means “an opinion or view as to what is right or agreeable” (OED, sentiment, 6a). In order to highlight the economic importance of Sentiment as a way of knowing I will briefly review Smith’s attitude towards subordination of the individual and his ‘sentimental’ concern about the division and specialization of labour. I will then amplify these findings with a review of the work of cultural anthropologist Grant McCraken and economist Ekhart Schlicht.
1. Adam Smith (1723-1790) can justly be called ‘the great mariner’. It was he who first navigated the limits of economics using what was, in his day, a branch of moral philosophy destined to become the first ‘social’ science - political economy. Economics, as a discipline of thought or “a recognized field of tooled knowledge” (Schumpeter 1954, 143) is generally dated from the 1776 publication of his The Wealth of Nations. The foundation for Smith’s concept of knowledge, however, was laid down in his other great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published previously in 1759.
2. With time, some of Smith’s findings became axiomatic in economics; others, slipped into its murky depths waiting to be recovered by adventurous intellectual archaeologists. What fell, or was thrown into the water partially reflects the reactionary forces dominating political life after Smith’s death until the fall of empires in 1918. During his own life, he was considered, by many, a dissident, a friend of French économistes, a Jacobin, a revolutionary.
3. Consider the pre-revolutionary
reception of The Wealth of Nations in
… some weeks before it was
first published in
4. Smith published just as the
republican revolution in
5. Smith also lived to see the second
republican revolution in
6. Nonetheless, the view of the individual as the foundation of political life was shared by Smith and was consonant with his view of the individual as the foundation of economic life. In his day, there was in fact only one life. Politics and economics were, according to Smith, incestuously entangled - political power converted to economic profit and profit to political power. The regime of privilege in the form of feudal corporations including the Church, mastership guilds, towns and trading corporations was a fundamental impediment to the wealth of nations because it inhibited the individual in pursuing self-interest rather than that of his or her lord, lady or other superior above stairs.
7. Following the defeat of the French
Revolution, the Congress of Vienna in 1815 created the ‘Holy Alliance’ of
European monarchies to reinstate political and social subordination and repress
republican sentiment among the population. In
8. One economic axiom derived from Smith is ‘the division and specialization of labour is limited by the extent of the market’. Both imply knowledge. In the first instance, ‘know-how’ is required in the division of the production process and, in the second, specialized skills are required to efficiently realize an ever increasingly complex production process. Division and specialization of labour is the cornerstone of the Wealth of Nations.
9. To Smith, however, gains had to be counted against costs including what Marx would later call ‘alienation’. For Smith, division and specialization of labour led to a dangerous narrowing of the individual: “People are not born ‘stupid and ignorant’ but are made so by their ‘ordinary employments’; by the simple, uniform nature of the work they can get” (Smith quoted in Rothschild 2001, 97). Smith’s answer was public education. The dialogue of the marketplace and the political arena required citizen workers who could read, write and count.
10. Moving from division and specialization of labour to that of knowledge, the market has now extended to global proportions. And, as Smith implied, there has been a narrowing of breadth and an increasing of depth with the individual becoming increasingly atomized, alienated or disinterested in all but a narrow but deep vertical slice of knowledge. This is evident in the natural & engineering sciences where ‘normal science’ involves puzzle-solving attention to smaller and smaller fields of vision (Kuhn 1996). As demonstrated, this leads to incommensurability compounded by ‘just keeping up’. It is also evident in the Arts where the Art-for-Art’s-Sake Movement (Henderson 1984) generates an ever moving, shifting and changing avant garde (Bell 1976) spinning out ever increasing esoteric aesthetic messages intended for ever smaller audiences – the cognoscente from the Italian meaning ‘the knowing man’ (OED, cognoscente).
1. The interaction of Reason and
Sentiment in economic behaviour is revealed in Grant McCracken’s 1988 study Culture and Consumption. McCraken begins by
describing the birth of consumer culture.
He argues that it was in 16th century
2. McCraken
goes on to explore the subsequent English consumer revolution of the 18th
century with particular emphasis on the role of Josiah Wedgewood
in shifting the source of fashion (pattern construction) from the nobility to
the bourgeois marketeer, or what McCraken
calls “market ethnographers” who watched for patterns and regularities and
adjusted products and marketing strategies to take advantage of emerging
opportunities. By the 19th century such observers of English society attained
unprecedented social mobility. Thus McCraken notes: “In
the person of Beau Brummel we see nothing less than
the abrogation of powers of influence that had previously been possessed only
by the monarch”. Today, of course,
1. In his 1998 book, On Custom in the Economy, German economist Ekkehart Schlicht demonstrates that - despite Bentham’s conviction that it is not rational – custom is critical to the efficient operation of the economy – both on the supply- and demand-side. Using aesthetics and pattern recognition, Schlicht lays out the nature, persistence and economic implications of custom. By way of introduction he observes:
…custom affects motivation, conviction, and behaviour
in such a perfectly ‘natural’ way that the customary undergirdings
of social and economic processes appear hardly discernible, and sometimes even
invisible. In spite of this imperspicuity, custom exerts, in Alfred Marshall’s words, a
‘deep and controlling influence over the history of the world.’ (Schlicht 1998, 1)
And, custom
is not a child of Reason but of Sentiment.
2. If there is, at the individual level, a human want, need or desire for Sentiment and assuming circular causality is operative, then one would expect an industrial sector specializing in its satisfaction. This I will call the Arts Industry inclusive of the amateur, applied, entertainment, fine and heritage arts in all media of expression, i.e., the literary, media, performing and visual arts (Chartrand April 2000). As will subsequently be argued, Art provides the technology of the heart; it manages and manipulates Sentiments.
1. Sensation is the psychological function that perceives immediate reality through the physical senses compared to intuition that perceives possibilities. Both tend to be subordinate to a dominant faculty and are arational, i.e., they do not involve interpretation or judgement (Sharp 1991). There are, however, individuals whose dominant faculty is sensation – the athlete, dancer, gourmet and arguably the mechanic as well as the drug addict, the debauchee, i.e., “one who is addicted to vicious indulgence in sensual pleasures” (OED, debauchee) and, arguably, all ‘thrill seekers’.
2. Sensation is the most primitive faculty. It is also the most epistemologically problematic. Everything one knows about the external world (and about the state of one’s own body) is through the senses of taste, touch, smell, sight and sound. Excepting emergencies, in normal life what they tell us, however, – be it pleasure or pain - is subject to perception and reflection including context, e.g., knowing one was hit by accident and restraining one’s response. This is the difference between the raw data of sensation and its meaning mediated by ‘higher’ faculties, i.e., perception. Overcoming the pleasures of the physical senses has also been seen as critical for the good judgement of rulers. Thus over 2,000 years before Bill Clinton succumbed to the pleasures of Monica Lewinsky “because I could” [G], the Indian ‘Machiavelli’, Kautilya, wrote of the king:
he shall restrain the organs of sense; acquire wisdom
by keeping company with the aged; see through his spies; establish safety and
security by being ever active; maintain his subjects in the observance of their
respective duties by exercising authority; keep up his personal discipline by
receiving lessons in the sciences; and endear himself to the people by bringing
them in contact with wealth and doing good to them. Thus, with his organs of sense under control,
he shall keep away from hurting the women and property of others; avoid not
only lustfulness, even in dream, but also falsehood, haughtiness, and evil
proclivities; and keep away from unrighteous and uneconomical transactions. (Kautilya c. 250 BCE)
Book I, Chapter 7, The Life
of a Holy King,
The Arthashastra, c. 250 BCE
3. As a subordinate faculty, Sensation
is subject to excitation by a dominant one – usually thinking or feeling. This process is captured in Timothy Findley’s
1999 novel Pilgrim, a
fictionalized biography of Carl Jung. Very late at night, Jung tries to tell his
wife a new intellectual insight when he realizes he is suffering from “intellectual
priapism”: “It’s that simple. Get an idea - get an erection” (Findley 1999, 258).
4. With respect to religious art, Kenneth Clark in Civilization demonstrates the subordination of Sensation to Sentiment by reference to Bellini’s statue of:
… the Ecstasy of
St Theresa … one of the most deeply moving works of European art… used to
convey the rarest and most precious of all emotional states, that of religious
ecstasy… in the supreme moment of her life: how an angel with a flaming golden
arrow pierced her heart repeatedly: ‘The pain was so great that I screamed
aloud, but simultaneously felt such infinite sweetness that I wished the pain
to last eternally. It was the sweetest caressing
of the soul by God.’ (Clark 1969, 191)
5. The primal or instinctoid drives of the Id had, in the Freudian view, been yoked and sublimated by the individual (super ego) and society (custom and law) to produce human civilization. In this regard, logic and reason are rooted in Western rejection of passion, i.e., of the mind “being acted upon” by an external agency (OED, passion, n, II). Revelation, of course, embraces passion, specifically in the West that of Christ (OED, passion, n, I, 1a). It rejects, however, passions of the flesh including the Seven Deadly Sins – pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth. I will now briefly consider the implications of Sensation in aesthetics, science and economics.
1. Different individuals often interpret the same objective sensory data differently. Is it hot or cold? Is it pleasure or pain? Is it God or the devil? The Scientific Revolution, however, achieved something new. Robert Boyle during the 1650s placed the laws of the physical universe in stasis above and beyond the meddling of human and God (Jacob 1978). The act of Creation had, once and forever, established the Laws of Nature. Having set the machine in motion God withdrew and Nature became the legitimate object of the disinterested machines of experimental philosophy.
2. What the Scientific Revolution did was to introduce instruments that generate consistent, objective, quantitative measurements of physical sensation through time. They extend the human senses beyond the subjectivity of the individual observer. Once calibrated and set in motion a clock ticks at a constant rate per unit time until its energy source is exhausted. Such measurement is achieved without mediation by a human subject. In a manner of speaking the Scientific Revolution allowed the study of sensation at a distance – the distance and legitimacy afforded by scientific instrumentation. In the process, however, it can be argued that ‘instrumental’ perception in the natural sciences has been reduced almost exclusively to sight and to an ever narrowing ‘vision’ thereof (Idhe 1991, 41). [H]
1. Similarly, aesthetics traditionally
restricts itself to the ‘distant senses’ of sight and sound. The contact senses of touch, taste and smell lead
to obscenity, gluttony and scatology, or more generally, as noted by Berleant in the epithet to this chapter “destroying the
isolation of the contemplative mind” (Berleant Winter 1964, 187).
1. This distancing from the intimate subjectivity of the physical senses is thus shared by: (i) philosophy (a humanity) which isolates itself from the passions; (ii) aesthetics which traditionally restricts consideration to the distant senses; and, (iii) science that segregates the observer from the observed through instrumentation.
2. Economics, however, is another question. In economics, Bentham’s utile – the unit measure of pleasure/pain - is the foundation of knowledge with pleasure and pain acting as “the two sovereign masters of humanity” (Clough 1964: 825). One suffers the disutility (pain) of work to earn income to buy goods and services into which firms fix utility that is to be extracted by customers in final consumption (pleasure). Economics, so defined, is strictly hedonic and materialistic. Any and all sensations demanding satisfaction become a legitimate object of economic epistemology – no holds barred. In this sense, economics is an amoral science
3. In the Benthamite tradition, however, maximizing pleasure was
restrained by the tenets of Ethical Hedonism, a very Protestant Ethic. This ethic, beyond concern with the moral
value of work, also involved social inhibitions against conspicuous consumption
(Veblen 1899).
As noted by Daniel Bell (1976, 20-22), however, with the collapse of the
Protestant Ethic after the Industrial Revolution, only hedonism remains - in
all its unrestrained, irrational incarnations.
Without a generally accepted moral code, the law became the accepted
social mechanism to moderate individual pleasure-seeking. In fact, the Benthamite
tradition in crime and punishment continues to guide both legal and economic
research, e.g. Bentham’s
famous and seemingly plausible dictum “the more deficient in certainty a
punishment is, the severer it should be” (Becker 1968).
4. If there is, at the individual level, a human want, need or desire to know sensation, and, assuming circular causality is operative, then one would expect an industrial sector specializing in its satisfaction. This I will call the Pleasure Industry inclusive of ‘sex, drugs and rock’n roll’ as well as the leisure, sports and food industries.
1. In each individual, all four faculties of knowing – Reason, Revelation, Sentiment and Sensation – function. Like quarks, they do not exist alone. There are no free faculties. Rather they exist only together uniquely embodied in the ‘self-awareness’, ‘consciousness’, ‘knowing’, ‘mind’ or ‘wit’ of an individual human being. The itch for knowledge may be satisfied in many ways, e.g., Reason, Revelation and/or Sentiment can, in some cases, satisfy or sublimate the urge to know in a carnal sense, i.e., defer gratification, and vice-versa. These alternative ways of knowing are immeasurable and incommensurable and, when expressed in any human language including mathematics, they are subject to inherent limitation and bias.
2. This uniqueness colours our individual use of faculties and defines how best we learn. In the words of James Hillman: “each person [is] the embodiment of an individual destiny” (Hillman 1980, 4). The entanglement of the four psychological faculties of knowing constitutes our second knowledge Qubit - the PSI which is some function of Reason, Revelation, Sentiment, Sensation.
3. This uniqueness, however, creates another meta-methodological dilemma. If knowledge exists only in a unique individual, then knowledge is unique and ‘knowledge about knowledge’ becomes comparatively impossible to obtain. The individual is, however, not just unique but also social. Bronowski captures the dualism of the human being as ‘a social solitaire’ (Bronowski 1973). Each individual shares faculties with other individuals. Uniqueness is an aesthetic, gestalt or image emerging from the blending, mixing and intensity of these faculties constituting the PSI, i.e., Reason, Revelation, Sentiment and Sensation. It also reflects a hieros gamos or sacred wedding (Jung [1954] 1966, 5) of mind and body (knowing by the mind and knowing by the senses) that makes us a living human being. Whether animated by a divine spark or circular causality, to be human is to be married mind and body, or traditionally, body and soul. Divorce leads to death beyond which component parts fly apart whose final destination remains a matter of metaphysical dispute.
3. One of the great fears of analytic psychologists like Jung and Hillman, however, is that development of a typology of psychic faculties, functions and directions (introversion/centroversion/ extroversion) required to recognize the uniqueness of an individual patient could be transformed into a tool of social control and conditioning, even in the hands of the psychologist:
If even psychology sees man as exemplifying typical
functions, then there are no essential differences among human kind. We are functions, or functionaries, of
groupings, an inventory of consumer tastes, actuarial probabilities, marketable
skills, opinion. (Hillman 1980, 57)
1. From cognitive psychology, we know that Reason resides somewhere in the frontal lobes; Sentiment in the amygdaloid nucleus; and, Sensation in the thalamus near the top of the brain stem. Further we know that the thalamus mediates the inflow and outflow (to our limbs) of our physical senses which are routed to and from higher order structures including the amygdaloid nucleus and the frontal lobes (Freeman 2000). In this regard, the decision-making or executive function located in the frontal lobes appears to be always matched by an emotional response emanating from the interaction of the cerebellum and brainstem (Freeman 1999). This appears consonant with analytic psychology’s findings about the judgmental role of thinking and feeling, i.e., broadly defined, both are rational. To date, the structural location of Revelation or intuition has not been found but arguably it is associated with the visual cortex in the occipital or rear lobe of the brain.
2. To economics, however, the wetware configuration is of relatively little importance. What is important is that the different faculties generate distinct human wants, needs and desires to know that producers can strive to satisfy. Thus unlike aesthetics, epistemology and science, no moral or methodological limitations are admitted to the PSI. All the senses – near and far, obscene and revelatory – are admitted even when they clash with calculatory rationalism. What matters is that human beings have a need to know and this takes many polymorphous forms.
The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy