This paper proposes a model and theory of leadership emergence whereby (1) small social groups are modeled as small world networks and a betweeness metric is shown to be a property of networks with strong leadership, and (2) a theory of group formation based on stigmergy explains how such networks evolve and form. Specifically, dominant actors are observed to emerge from simulations of artificial termites constructing a wood chip network in a random walk, suggesting a correlation between various preferential attachment rules and emergent network topologies. Three attachment rules are studied: maximizing node betweeness (intermediary power), maximizing node degree (node connectivity), and limiting radius (size of the network in terms of network distance). The simulation results suggest that a preference for maximizing betweeness produces networks with structure similar to the 62-node 9-11 terrorist network. Further simulations of emergent networks with small world properties (small radius) and high betweeness centrality (strong leader) are shown to match the topological structure of the 9-11 terrorist network, also. Interestingly, the same properties are not found in a small sampling of human made physical infrastructure networks such as power grids, transportation systems, water and pipeline networks, suggesting a difference between social network emergence and physical infrastructure emergence. Additionally, a contagion model is applied to random and structured networks to understand the dynamics of anti-leader sentiment (uprisings and counter-movements that challenge the status quo). For random networks, simulated pro-leader (pro-government) and anti-leader (pro-rebel) sentiments are propagated throughout a social network like opposing diseases to determine which sentiment eventually prevails. Simulations of the rise of rebel sentiment versus the ratio of rebel to government sentiment show that rebel sentiment rises on less than 100% rebel/government sentiment when government sentiment is high (strong leadership), but requires greater than 100% rebel/government sentiment when government sentiment is low (weak leadership). However, when applied to the structured 9-11 terrorist network, rebel sentiment is slow to rise against strong leadership, because of the high betweeness structure of the 9-11 network. These results suggest a theory of how and why human stigmergy evolves networks with strong leaders, and why successful social networks are resilient against anti-leader sentiment. The author concludes that a combination of small world and high betweeness structure explain how social networks emerge strong leadership structure and why the resulting networks are resilient against being overthrown by a dissenting majority.
Oakeshott on Law
The last essay in the collection.
To write about law in relationship to Michael Oakeshott’s ideas generally, or his thoughts on politics in particular, presents a complicated task, not because law is an obscure concept in Oakeshott and not because it is a topic about which he has written little. In fact, Oakeshott wrote about law and jurisprudence at the beginning of his life as a publishing scholar and was still writing essays on law more than half a century later. Rather, it is a challenge to write about Oakeshott and law because his ideas about law are so closely nested with related and interlocking concepts that it is very easy to start by thinking about law and find oneself considering authority or politics or his distinction between civil association and enterprise association. These concepts are woven together so tightly for Oakeshott that to pull one out and consider it on its own without attention to the others would badly misconstrue the idea. To express this idea in the terms that Oakeshott employs regarding Hegel and Hobbes, these ideas are related as in a system, and to attempt to understand any element of the system in isolation can generate only a limited and incomplete view, that is, a misunderstanding.
Yet this view of Oakeshott can itself lead to a misunderstanding, a mistaken belief that all he wrote about law over his life of analysis and commentary perfectly coheres. Instead, his thinking about law, as his thinking about politics, philosophy, and much else, changes over time, as we would expect from any complex and interesting thinker. His earliest published writing on law and jurisprudence comes before World War II, a period marked by the publication of Oakeshott’s first book, Experience and Its Modes, and like much of his writing of that time, “The Concept of a Philosophical Jurisprudence” bears the stamp of British idealism. In that work Oakeshott is less concerned with law itself than with what it would take to develop a philosophical explanation of law; he states there that he is not interested in the usage of “‘jurisprudence’ that refers to ‘case-law’ or ‘judge-made law,’ or the practice of a court” (CPJ, 154). Instead, he reviews various schools of the philosophical explanation of law and, much as he did regarding history or science in Experience and Its Modes, finds them wanting. These all fail to achieve a true philosophical jurisprudence, because they cannot attain what a philosophical explanation must. Oakeshott states, “a philosophical explanation is one which, in principle, is the relation of its subject to what I have called the totality of experience” (175).
What Oakeshott himself has to offer as a philosophical jurisprudence at this time is less clear, as he is more involved with the critical review of the claims of others and theorizing what a true philosophical explanation must be like than with offering a theoretical explanation of law. He even suggests, “it is unnecessary for me to apply in detail my view of the nature of philosophy to the study of the nature of law; I have given the principle and the reader, if he cares, can easily apply it himself” (CPJ, 175). Oakeshott’s early attention to law then is less about law than the nature of philosophical explanation and, like his writing on history or politics, in the period after the war, he would leave behind much of the attention to philosophical explanation according to the strictures of idealism and focus more on the actual consideration of law, history, and politics, among other matters.
Of course, differing judgments about how much and how significantly Oakeshott does change his views on various topics are a source of ongoing debates among various scholars who have interpreted his work. Yet it is not my intention here to rehearse those debates; rather, it is to suggest that discussing Oakeshott on law means encountering a dilemma that reflects one feature of those debates. Put simply and directly, two emphases can be found in Oakeshott’s writing about government and politics, and seeing how these are reflected in his ideas about law reveals some conflicts between those emphases.
On the one hand, there is an Oakeshott, famous to many, who highlights the significance of practical knowledge over technical knowledge, who focuses attention on the traditional elements of a community, and who is suspicious of attempts to create de novo clear, simple ways of organizing community by means of universal principles, shorn of any local encumbrances; that is, this is the Oakeshott who cautions against what he calls rationalism, this we might call the traditionalist Oakeshott. On the other hand, there is an Oakeshott who reflects on human conduct, agency, and freedom in universal terms and who develops ideal understandings of human interaction and considers the terms of that engagement, most specifically law. The elements of that later view, which we might call the formalist Oakeshott, are exemplified in works such as On Human Conduct and “The Rule of Law”; I will suggest later that this formalist Oakeshott advocates a conception of law at odds with the views of the traditionalist Oakeshott, exhibited in works such as “Rationalism in Politics” and “Political Education.” These two conceptions of law, a traditionalist and a formalist view, set up a potential conflict in Oakeshott’s writings on law, a contradiction that he never acknowledges directly. Still, his manner of espousing these two approaches may offer a way to see them as complementary instead of contradictory and in doing so point to a way of thinking about law that escapes the confines of this common dilemma.
In the preceding pages I have highlighted a contrast. First, I reviewed an Oakeshott whose works advocate the importance of traditional practices and customs in politics; his approach there is wary of abstract approaches to politics, those disconnected from or dismissive of a community’s traditions and customs, approaches that see law as something that can be rationally developed on the engineer’s chalkboard or applied as if from an architect’s blueprint. From this view, recognizable to anyone familiar with some of Oakeshott’s most famous works, I suggested a related understanding of law that would reflect this traditional approach. This traditionalist view of law would be less concerned with rationally distinguishing the various functions or departments that inhere in the very idea of law and would rather be open to the sometimes ramshackle ways in which particular peoples and communities develop institutions and laws to provide some stability and regularity to their community’s life. These laws would possess authority only to the extent that they reflect customary beliefs and sentiments and only when those subject to the law experience it as reflecting those beliefs and sentiments. The constable, the judge, the magistrate, or the member of a county council or even Parliament or Congress, among many others, may each potentially play a role as custodian of law.
While some may have the formal duty of creating law, the action of each authoritative agent contributes to its ongoing re-creation. In a healthy polity, law could then be adjusted to new conditions and changing customs and beliefs based on knowledge of what has been achieved; in an unhealthy or unlucky polity, much law may fall into desuetude when it is not amended to reflect new conditions or when legislators reject custom and tradition and try to create law anew. While nothing here mandates a role for judges, it would be easy to see them as uniquely positioned on an almost daily basis to assess how well the law and its subjects relate, to gain knowledge of how a particular case reflects previous cases and how previous decisions did or did not reflect settled understandings of justice, and to be aware of how their ruling contributes to ongoing expectations of what the law is. This is a roundabout way to suggest that the Oakeshott of his famous essays of the 1950s seems especially amenable to an understanding of the law deeply sympathetic to the common law. And it should be clear how far away this vision is from his formal writings on law.
When Oakeshott takes up the discussion of law in an essay such as “The Rule of Law” or in On Human Conduct, he explicitly rejects most of what I suggested was implicit in the earlier works. What gives law its authority? Neither its age nor its reflection of custom or common belief grants it authority, only that it is created in a formal legislative procedure. What makes such a formal procedure authentic? It takes place exclusively in an office of legislation explicitly authorized to make law—and nothing else. A law might be seen as just if it coheres with sentiments and beliefs about what the law should be, but this does not increase its authority; nor would a negative assessment of a law’s justice undermine its claim to be authentic law. If the earlier, admittedly implicit, view of law reflects a common law view, then this explicit and formal view pronounced by Oakeshott may best be understood in the framework of positive law theory.
Might these two conflicting views be reconciled? Oakeshott seldom associates his views on any matter with a school of thought or intellectual forebears, although he is often willing to distance himself from such. Yet he does offer a clue to just such an association. In discussing the idea of a state organized according to his understanding of the rule of law, he suggests that such a “vision . . . was pioneered by Bodin and by Hobbes. In spite of some unnecessary nods in other directions, its character and presuppositions were fully explored by Hegel” (OH, 161).
While Oakeshott writes comparably little of Bodin, both Hobbes and Hegel share twin billing as the philosophers with the largest presence in his thought, and in some ways they represent the two sides of the contrast. Hobbes especially reflects the formal character of law emphasized in the discussions from On Human Conduct and “The Rule of Law.”
The Curse of the Confederacy of Dunces
This programme features Toole’s biographer, the very excellent Cory MacLauchlin.
The Rolfe-Symons Entanglement
A nice and recent piece on the Rolfe-Symons entanglement, a follow up to the last post.
Symons Said; On the trail of a strange, elusive life in literature.
Michael Dirda, The Weekly Standard, Vol. 18 No. 14
My quest for Symons A.J.A. Symons, that is began when, many years ago, I first read that strange novel Hadrian the Seventh (1904). Written by the so-called Baron Corvo, and admired by D.H. Lawrence, among others, the book opens with a magnificent description of a hack writer suffering from writer’s block:
After two hours, the writer his name is George Arthur Rose looks askance at his manuscript: He had written no more than fourteen lines; and these were deformed by erasures of words and sentences, by substitutions and additions. He struck an upward line from left to right across the sheet: laid down his pen. He could not work.
Anyone who writes, or tries to write, will recognize Rose’s anxiety, disgust, and weary resignation. But mirabile dictu, this Grub Street washout is about to undergo an utterly astonishing, almost miraculous transformation: By the middle of chapter three, George Arthur Rose will find himself ordained a Roman Catholic priest and then, in short order, elected Pope. He takes the name Hadrian the Seventh.
What happens during his papacy is fantastic, occasionally comic, sometimes touching. Corvo’s prose, reflecting Rose’s new life, quickly grows theologically baroque, even fustian at times, but never releases the reader until the book’s shocking finale. In truth, Hadrian the Seventh is a novel like no other, with a George Gissing-like power rather than, as one might imagine, a Ronald Firbankian campiness.
But who was this Baron Corvo? According to my thrift-shop paperback, he was actually Frederick Rolfe (1860-1913), a minor literary figure of the fin de siècle, which didn’t tell me much. An even fuller answer, I was informed, could be found in the tantalizingly titled The Quest for Corvo by someone named A.J.A. Symons. On a trip to New York, I scoured half-a-dozen used bookstores before I found a copy of the first American edition, published in 1934. It cost only $2, mainly because of bad covers, as a penciled note inside succinctly summed up the worn spine and loose binding. I took a break from my slow-going dissertation and settled down for a bit of rest and recreation.
Subtitled An Experiment in Biography, The Quest for Corvo opens with a much quieter hook than Hadrian the Seventh, but it seizes the reader’s attention nonetheless:
The next 293 pages recount Symons’s adventures. Rather than simply present a biography of Frederick Rolfe from cradle to grave, Symons chronicles his own efforts to discover all he could about the author of Hadrian the Seventh. At times, the book risks becoming a dossier of press cuttings, letters, and archival material; that it never does so is due to a soothing prose style and a subtle attention to framing and rhythm, as well as a contrast of humor and pathos, light and shadow. Chapters introduce us to bookish clergymen, eminent publishers and novelists, quiet eccentrics, and even a mysterious millionaire spymaster, nearly all of them victims of the ruthlessly demanding Rolfe, who made friendship a minor experiment in demonology.
At the start, fellow biographer and bibliographer Millard lends Symons some scandalous Rolfe letters, packed with accounts of pederasty in Venice and written (says Symons) in the most beautiful handwriting I had ever seen, in red, blue, green, purple, and black inks. Millard then points him to a biographical article by Shane Leslie in the London Mercury, which provides several leads to further information. Before long, Symons discovers a magazine article by Rolfe, sensationally titled How I Was Buried Alive, but also a vituperative attack on both its veracity and the character of the author from the Aberdeen Free Press.
Having written letters in all directions, Symons is soon in correspondence with Rolfe’s lawyer-brother Herbert, the novelist Frank Swinnerton, man of letters Vincent O’Sullivan, several clerics, and the publisher Grant Richards. He learns that Fr. Robert Hugh Benson, now remembered chiefly for his occult religious thrillers such as Come Rack, Come Rope, had once been a friend and admirer of Rolfe. (R.H. Benson was the brother of essayist A.C. Benson and novelist E.F. Benson, the latter revered today for his comic Lucia novels and a handful of surprisingly gruesome ghost stories.
As the quest for Corvo continues, the reader I might honestly say the enthralled reader gradually acquires a fuller understanding of Rolfe, this failed priest and paranoid author. In person, writes Canon Carmont, Rolfe was about 5 ft. 7 in. in height perhaps slightly less. He was pale, rather demure and ascetic in expression, wore eye-glasses, smoked rather heavily. According to one Roman Catholic clergyman, Rolfe knew more about astrology than anyone then alive, while his appetite for gossip and scandal was insatiable. Vain to the point of megalomania, he once painted a wall portrait of St. William of Norwich in which all 149 mourners, and the saint himself, were given his own features. Another time, he hinted that Kaiser Wilhelm II was his godfather.
Throughout his life, Rolfe suffered from persecution mania, constantly turning against friends and well-wishers, often unleashing torrents of abuse. A master of invective, he opened one letter Quite cretinous creature, and ended many with Your faithful enemy. As he once said, he considered all men to be too vile for words to tell. Given such a hypersensitive and quarrelsome character, it’s not surprising that Rolfe was usually broke, and sometimes on the verge of starvation. He once asked to be certified insane so that he might have free quarters in the local asylum. In Venice, he applied for a job as a gondolier.
But that was near the end of his life. In his youth, he yearned for ordination but was found unsuitable. For a while, he painted religious tableaux; then he tried to establish himself as a photographer. Surviving pictures betray his idolization of youthful adolescents, as does his first book, Stories Toto Told Me (1898), in which an Italian peasant lad charmingly conflates pagan myths with saints’ lives. The legend of Perseus, for example, is reworked into a Christian allegory starring Saint George. Symons notes that the early Toto stories appeared in the notorious Yellow Book and compares them to Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales
But Rolfe didn’t just write semi-autobiographical novels and fiction of a rather fantastic cast. His monumental Chronicles of the House of Borgia (1901), once respected enough to be included in the Modern Library series, is in part an apologia for the notorious Renaissance family but also a grab bag of bizarre lore. (One chapter examines the legend of the Borgia venom.) This book, and some of his others such as the novels Don Tarquinio (1905), Don Renato (1909), and the homoerotic Venetian romance The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (written during 1910-13, published in 1934) vividly display Rolfe’s linguistic preciosity and his liking for such recondite words and neologisms as subturpiculous, insulsity, macilent, effrenate, and torose.
While I enjoyed The Quest for Corvo immensely, by its final pages I found myself hungering to know more about the tall, thin, bespectacled A.J.A. Symons. Who was he?
Today’s readers are liable to confuse Symons with several other almost-contemporary writers. There is the Renaissance historian and translator of Cellini’s Memoirs, John Addington Symonds (1840-1893). There is Arthur Symons (1865-1945), the poet and literary critic whose Symbolist Movement in Literature greatly influenced the young T.S. Eliot. And, not least, there is the distinguished crime novelist Julian Symons (1912-1994) who, as it happens, was the 11-years-younger brother of our Symons. In 1950, he brought out a superb short biography of his brother AJ. Only when I traveled to Oxford did I finally find a copy of A.J.A. Symons: His Life and Speculations in a used bookshop and I had to pay £6 for it. (There has since been a paperback reissue.) The book opens as dramatically as both Hadrian the Seventh and The Quest for Corvo:
Though he was the son of an auctioneer and left school at 14, A.J.A. Symons transformed himself into one of the great aesthetes, connoisseurs, and dandies of his time. His announced aim was to build and shape his life as an architect plans a house. While living always beyond his means, Symons somehow managed to collect Victoriana, rare books, and music boxes. With determination, he perfected an exquisite penmanship, only sported handmade shirts and bespoke suits, and eventually owned a house in the country with an enviable wine cellar and garden. According to his brother, it was his conviction that personal property could be both beautiful and useful, whereas money consisted merely of paper and metal pieces which were not, in general, of an appearance aesthetically pleasing. At the same time, Symons loved games and gambling and dreamed of moving in the highest social circles.
Literary societies, combined with a seemingly irresistible personal charm, were the engines of his success. He started The First Editions Club, was elected a member of the exclusive Sette of Odd Volumes, helped edit The Book Collector’s Quarterly, and cofounded, with André Simon, The Wine and Food Society. In his biography, Julian Symons describes one of that society’s most egregiously lavish banquets: There were 42 courses, with 16 wines and liqueurs. Sadly, this great diner-out and bon viveur took ill just as World War II broke out and died at the age of 41, from a stroke caused by an undiagnosed haemangioma of the brainstem.
A.J.A. Symons: His Life and Speculations is one of the most entrancing biographies you will ever read, especially if you share its subject’s passion for collecting books, wine, or interesting friends. It is not, however, reverential: Julian Symons concludes, after describing his brother’s increasingly sybaritic lifestyle, that we often think that we are conquering society, when in fact we are adapting ourselves to its remorseless vulgarity, its fathomless destruction of our own idealism
While A.J.A. Symons viewed himself primarily as a writer, much of his work can be characterized as occasional comments in The Book-Collector’s Quarterly, an introduction to a volume of 1890s verse, a retrospective essay on the first 15 years of the Nonesuch Press. Apart from The Quest for Corvo, his very best writing can be found in the posthumous Essays and Biographies (1969), which includes the fragments of several unfinished books, including a life of Oscar Wilde. This last might have been Symons’s magnum opus, if only because he was a close friend to both Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland and Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas.
Somewhat surprisingly, Symons did write a short biography of H.M. Stanley and planned another on the African explorers Sir Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke: He always admired risktakers and those who lived extravagantly. Other biographical essays provide brief accounts of Edgar Allan Poe, Regency wit and practical joker Theodore Hooker, and the preacher Edward Irving (the greatest orator of the Romantic age, according to Hazlitt, De Quincey, and others). Symons himself always insisted that a biographer should choose his subject as a dandy chooses his suit, remembering cut and tone as much as texture; and his subjects should fit his talent as the suit fits the dandy’s body: exquisitely.
It’s clear that in all these figures, and in Frederick Rolfe too, he recognized aspects of himself.
Writing came slowly to A.J.A. Symons, in part because he aimed for a witty, easygoing prose. Invitations, he declares with a Wilde-like flourish, are the sincerest form of flattery. A relentless social climber taxed his constitution like a wartime Chancellor. The women in Poe’s fiction, he notes, are the grimmest heroines in literature. Though he never left England, Symons can evoke the travails and horrors of early African exploration:
Throughout his writing, Symons repeatedly stresses that a biography should aspire to be a shaped work of art, a book that can be reread for the pleasure of its form alone. Like Lytton Strachey before him, he helped do away with those enormous memorial sculptures favored by the Victorians, all those dully respectful multivolume Lives and Letters:Constructed on the simple formula of chronological sequence, they begin, for the most part, with their subject’s birth, and describe his curly-headed innocence, his sailor suit. Chapters two and three, which show no diminution of the one or discarding of the other, are headed Schooldays and Alma Mater, and precede Early Manhood in which a passing reference to wild oats shows that the author also has experienced much; and then chapter five, Marriage, sets us on the trail for home. Life in London, Early Work, and Later Work lead naturally to Last Days and a deathbed scene, several moral reflections, a list of the books or acts of the victim, and one more biography is on the shelf, probably to stay there.
Such is not the case with The Quest for Corvo, though, as a repository of facts about Frederick Rolfe, the book has long been superseded by the work of more recent biographers chiefly Donald Weeks and Miriam J. Benkowitz. But one can reread anything by Symons and A.J.A. Symons: His Life and Speculations, too, for that matter just for the stylish prose and the chance to spend some time in the author’s delightful company. Along with that unique autobiographical fantasy, Hadrian the Seventh, all these interconnected books just might become, as they have for me, personal favorites in your own reading life.
A Confederacy of Dunces – quotes and extracts – 2
Check out the Catalan cover to “Dunces” (H/T to Cory MacLauchlin)
The outfit was acceptable by any theological and geometrical standards, however abstruse, and suggested a rich inner life (p. 2).
Human stigmergy
Even though this special issue has been available for a while, since it is the March issue, it’s an opportune time to give it another plug. I’ll run some extracts from each paper over the coming weeks.
The Emergence of the Mind: Hayek’s Account of Mental Phenomena as a Product of Spontaneous Physical and Social Orders
Extracts from Gloria’s chapter:
Friedrich Hayek’s social theory is well known for his articulation of the paradigm of spontaneous orders that challenges the traditional distinction between what is natural and what is artificial. The problem that Hayek saw is that language and other social objects do not fall under either heading completely. Language is, for example, seen as natural since it was not designed by man. At the same time, man has imposed rules of grammar on natural languages as these became formalized and documented. From this perspective, language falls under the category of artificial too. This distinction thus fails in its application not only to language but also to any other object that is, as Hayek puts it, the result of human action, but not of human design. The paradigm of spontaneous orders, which applies to all social objects, has thus become the hallmark of Hayek’s social theory.
However, what is lesser known is that Hayek also presents a similar paradigm of spontaneous orders in his theory of the mind. In The Sensory Order (TSO), Hayek defines the mind as a particular order arising from the cumulative sets of events taking place in the brain in response to stimuli. Although stimuli are also constituted by sets of events, Hayek observes that the relation between these two sets of events is at best one of imperfect correspondence, since stimuli do not always result in sense experiences.
What this means is that the mind does not emerge as a process of mapping of events external to the mind or, shall we say, reality; rather, the mind emerges, in part, from the interconnections that ensue between the electrical and chemical responses to stimuli. Central to this understanding of the mind is the role of memory in facilitating the conversion of these responses into sensations. According to Hayek, we do not first have sensations which are then preserved by memory, but it is as a result physiological memory that the physiological impulses are converted into sensations. The connexions between the physiological elements are thus the primary phenomenon which creates the mental phenomena. (TSO 2:50)
Memory, then, serves as an a priori mechanism that makes the emergence of the mind possible in the sense that it translates physical events of the brain into sense experiences that are unified. In a note for this passage, Hayek explains that this understanding of memory is already present in the Preface to his Beitrage zur Theorie der Entwicklung des Bewusstseins (the Beitrage). What this means is that this apriorism was present in Hayek’s theory of the mind by 1920 and that after he returned to this work in 1952, after more than three decades spent developing his social theory, Hayek did not change his mind in this regard. In TSO, Hayek develops more details to be added to the earlier view. Memory is not localized or passive, as it is understood in modular paradigms of memory, that is, stored in one discrete region until specifically recalled. Instead, it is distributed and dynamic, giving rise to neuronal activity that searches, with each new stimulus, for related networks of connections. This seems consistent with a description of spontaneous orders. A single neuron, for example, can participate in any number of networks, not just the one it is already in or one that engages only in its existing immediate surroundings. These interconnections between physiological events representing stimuli are what Hayek calls linkages. The view that memory is cortically distributed had already been set forth by the time TSO appeared, but it is not clear that Hayek was specifically aware of these findings. Hayek observes that, ‘‘It is difficult to see what other meaning ‘memory’ can have but the retention of connexions or relations.’’ However, an important consideration is that the interconnections between events can be as transient as the events themselves. The question thus arises, how does memory endure? One way to answer this within Hayek’s framework is that not only the structural basis but also the relational code that emerges from it is a continuant. Accordingly, memories endure even if any element of its structural basis is somewhat altered by entering into new interconnections. ‘‘In fact,’’ Hayek adds, ‘‘far from being diminished, the a priori element will tend to increase as in the course of this process the various objects are increasingly defined by explicit relations existing between them’’ (TSO 8.17). In other words, as memory increases, so does the mind. In this way, the mind emerges and continues to develop as a result of the role of memory in converting physical responses of the brain to external stimuli into an enduring and increasingly more sophisticated order of linkages supporting sensations that give us a finer grained picture of any new experiences.
The expression ‘‘we-mode intentions’’ is part of the growing scholarship on collective intentionality. The term ‘‘collective intentionality’’ has been made famous by John Searle and it first appeared in his 1995 book The Construction of Social Reality. But the investigations of this phenomenon are of much older lineage.18 Collective intentionality refers to the social phenomenon in which a number of individuals target the same intentional object in a coordinated way that is not necessarily deliberate. A bunch of people in a city theater watching a film, for example, all have the same intentional object, but they do not exemplify collective intentionality because they do not have a shared context in directing their attention to the film. For some, the film is a means for entertainment, for others an excuse to be near a particular person, and for yet others, it may just be an airconditioned escape from a hot summer’s day. However, a bunch of students in a classroom watching a film may exemplify collective intentionality since they have a shared context for their action. The students do not have to have a deliberate plan to arrive at a shared goal as perhaps the members of a string quartet would have in aiming at a flawless performance as their intentional target. Such collective intentions that we find in both the classroom and the string quartet examples Searle calls we-mode intentions.
According to one study, the discovery of mirror neurons may now provide evidence of a neurological basis for such we-mode intentions. Neurons identified as mirror neurons not only fire when an individual acts but also when an individual observes another individual performing the same action. Although mirror neurons were discovered in monkeys, scientists report that neuropsychological studies have shown that they exist also in the human brain. It must be clear that we-intentions can be understood at best as one aspect of the phenomenon of intersubjectivity but not as identical to it since the latter is not merely the experience of sharing intentional targets. Rather, it is the sharing an experience stream, which involves having a first-person experience of what another is experiencing, and this is not achieved by aiming at the same intentional target as the other person but, instead, by aiming at the experience of the other person. So, the we-mode intention interpretation of mirror neurons does not provide the missing explanation.
However, according to another interpretation of mirror neurons, they may constitute the neural substratum of a mechanism that enables us to resonate with others of our own kind, which would undoubtedly favor survival. This is more in line with the phenomenon of intersubjectivity as it offers an explanation for the realm of shared experiences so common in human experience. Moreover, empirical data shows that mirror neurons match representations not only of actions but also of pains and emotions. In one experiment, the mirror phenomenon occurred in a pain-related neuron that responded to the patient’s pinprick in the same way as an observed pinprick on the examiner’s hand. In another experiment, mirror neurons responded to facial expression and sounds of disgust in the same way as if the experience of disgust had been a first-person experience.
What these studies show is that ‘‘mirror phenomena are not to be seen as limited to a particular group of motor neurons in the ventral cortex, but as a modality of functioning which is widespread in the brain’’ (Becchio & Bertone, 2004, p. 131). Or, as Hayek explains in TSO, ‘‘mental functions need not be localized in any particular part of the cortex’’ (TSO?). The applications AU :12 of these discoveries of modern neuroscience with regard to these linkages (to use Hayek’s term) not only offer evidence of the phenomenon of intersubjectivity and its mechanics in brain functions but are also potentially fruitful for studies that concern the phenomenon of empathy. Moreover, our understanding of mirror neurons can help to fuel interdisciplinary research on values, which is perhaps the next frontier in human social phenomena.
Frederick Rolfe a.k.a. Baron Corvo
Given a papal change is underway, Rolf’s Hadrian the Seventh is as timely as ever, and in my view happens to be one of the top five novels of the 20th Century. Here is David Bradshaw’s reliable Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry. Part and parcel of the Corvo legend is Symons’ classic biography of Corvo, Corvo brought to Symons’ attention by another “character” Christopher Millard, sensitively acknowledged in Symons’ “Quest” (Millard lived around the corner from me in NW8 at 8 Abercorn Place). In the preface to “Quest” (the ’66 edition) Julian Symons (A.J.A.’s brother) in turn characterizes AJA as a character “continually being seduced . . . by wine and food” (my kinda man!). Anyway, read “Hadrian” and you’ll want to read Symons and those of you who share my enthusiasm for The Confederacy of Dunces will probably find Hadrian very much to your taste.
Philosophy: confusion and wishful thinking
I’m with Ludwig on this.
Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking.
Life as Literature
I’ve been thinking a lot about my instinctive predilection for writers whose life and work bleed into each other, an attraction I felt long before I was fully aware of their biographical details. The first was Kafka; the second Rolfe; the third Musil; the fourth Mishima and the fifth, Toole. I’ve come to the conclusion that these philosophical novelists speak to me more deeply than the greatest pure philosophers. What’s the theme binds their work? The “spiritual impoverishment” of their age, a phrase I’m loathe to use since its meaning would be vulgarized both by so-called “new atheists” and by their enemies, doctrinal fundamentalist followers.
Here are some Mishima quotes culled for the Paul Schrader’s film (here is the finale), beautifully rendered with Philip Glass’ brilliant score:
In its essence, any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away – of their corrosive function… Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words will be corroded too.
… (There were always) two contradictory tendencies within myself. One was the determination to press ahead loyally with the corrosive function of words, and to make that my life’s work. The other was the desire to encounter reality in some field where words should play no part at all.
So if you do not acknowledge in your heart the values that surpass yourself, you are in a psychological state where your sole existence is meaningless
A sea of clouds spread out below, devoid of any conspicuous irregularities, like a garden of pure white moss… The silver fuselage floated in the naked light, the plane maintaining a splendid equilibrium. Once more it became a closed, motionless room. The plane was moving at all. It had become an oddly shaped metal cabin floating quite still in the upper atmosphere…
There was no suffocating sensation. My mind was at ease. My thought process lively. If this stillness was the ultimate end of action – of movement – then the sky about me, the clouds far below, the sea gleaming between the clouds. Even the setting sun, might well be events, things, within myself. At this distance from the earth, intellectual adventure and physical adventure could join hands without the slightest difficulty. This was the point I had always been striving towards.
