(Version 021009-1025)

Supplemental critical documentation (relevant to sensing-based bodily interaction and virtual reality) to the seminar

http://www.informatik.umu.se/seminarier/2002/1016021700-1016028000.mit-huset.mc413, and
http://www.informatik.umu.se/seminarier/2001/1005740100-1005746400.mit-huset.mc413)

The editing and the emphasis with bold characters is Ivanov's

Tid: Onsdag 2002-03-13, 13:15-15:00

Plats: MIT-huset, MC 413

Kristo Ivanov: Contributions of systems thinking to the understanding and use of information technology: Infrastructure, change, and bricolage

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Book Excerpts:

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Johnson, M. (1987). The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press

Page 44

Because we experience force via interaction, there is always a structure or sequence of causality involved. The door closes because I, or the wind, or a spring mechanism, acted on it to cause it to shut. Forces are the means by which we achieve causal interactions. The agent of the causal sequence can be either an animate and purposive being, or it can be a mere inanimate object or event; but in either case the relevant forces are always actual or potential forces in an actual or potential sequence of causal interactions. [Cf. Aristotle's Metaphysics and R. Steiner's anthroposophy] In other words, although we can think of forces abstractly in isolation as bare force vectors, all actual forces are experienced by us in causal sequences. [Cf. Churchman 1971 chap. 6] .

What I have just described is a general gestalt structure for force. I am using the term "gestalt structure" to mean an organized, unified whole within out experience and understanding that manifests a repeatable pattern or structure. Some people use the term "gestalt" to mean a mere form or shape with no internal structure. In contrast to such a view, my entire project rests on showing that experiential gestalts have internal structure that connects up aspects of our experience and leads to inferences in our conceptual systems.

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Seven of the most common force structures that operate constantly in our experience are compulsion, blockage, counterforce, diversion, removal of restraint, enablement, attraction.

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The experiential (image-schematic) gestalts for force just described are actual repeatable prelinguistic structures or patterns of experience that emerge from our forceful interactions in our world, and are part of meaning and understanding or, rather, they are themselves meaning structures. In order to amplify this key point, I am going to discuss a body of recent empirical work on the semantics of modal verbs, such as can, may, must, could, might, pertaining to our experience of actuality, possibility, and necessity.

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In contrast to the logical analysis of modality there are other senses of these modal verbs or three categories of existence that are intimately related to our everyday experience and whose schemata are crucial to our understanding of our [cf. others'] experience. For instance, the modality of possibility is present in our experience of alternative actions open to us in a given situation. We feel the possibility of performing act A, act B, act C, etc., as options that are not necessitated. At other times we experience necessity [cf. violence, oppression] with all its compelling force [cf. H. Arendt on power, strength], as when shutting off the power causes the motor to stop, or the anesthetic makes us drowsy.

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Our ability to make correct predictions in not a proof that we have found the unique, God's-Eye account of reality; it only assures us that we are in touch with reality from one possible perspective.

This "being in with reality" is all the realism we need. Our realism consists in our sense that we are in touch reality in our bodily actions in the world, and in our having an understanding of reality sufficient to allow us to function more less successsfully in that world. 204 Our understanding is our way of being situated in the world, and it is our embodied understanding that manifests our realist commitments.

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What is required, which features, for an adequate account of knowledge which supports the sort of realist orientation I have been defending:

1. A view of human knowledge and not one of absolute, God's-Eye. Specifically human knowledge requires structures and categories of understanding that human beings can make sense of in terms of their own mediated experience and can use for their human purposes.

2. All knowledge is mediated by understanding in a manner which can be shared by others who join you to form a community of understanding.

3. Shared understanding is not merely a matter of shared concepts and propositions. It is also a matter of embodied structures of understanding, such as image schemata constituting a large part of the form itself in our experience. Such structures emerge in our bodily functioning. They are recurring patterns in our dynamic experience as we move about in our world. They include CONTAINERS, BALANCE, COMPULSION, BLOCKAGE, ATTRACTION, PATHS, LINKS, SCALES, CYCLES, CENTER-PERIPHERY, and a host of other patterns we did not explore.

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Some philosophers have tried to salvage Objectivism by granting that knowledge and truth are relative to standards dependent upon our purposes, while yet insisting that there is, in fact, one supreme purpose served by all structures of knowledge, namely, the "accurate description of reality". But this misses the point. But this misses the point. "Accurately describing reality" is not a single homogeneous purpose a par with a purpose like making one's bed. "Describing accurately how things are" is a short-hand for "finding descriptions of reality that work more or less well given our purposes in framing descriptions of reality". You cannot eliminate the valuative element from our notion of truth. Truth is always relative truth relative to a basic description [representation?!] and relative to standards of adequacy determined by our human purposes and the nature of our interactions with our environment. Truth is always relative to this embodied understanding.

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Objectivity can be accounted for in terms of both coherence and fit. Objectivity if not merely a matter of coherence of our beliefs with those of others. It is also a matter of fit with our experiential beliefs.

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Objectivity consists, then, in taking an appropriate publicly shared understanding or point of view. This involves rising above our personal prejudices, idiosyncratic views, and subjective representations. It requires taking up appropriately shared human perspectives that are tied to reality through our embodied imaginative understanding. [THE END]

Johnson, M. (1993). Moral imagination: Implications of cognitive science for ethics. Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press

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The rigid separation of the aesthetic from the moral is rooted in the Enlightenment view of cognition that we have inherited

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As long as aesthetic and moral judgments are viewed as radically different, the idea that imagination is central to moral judgment will be seen as utterly wrongheaded. I want to single out for criticism two views in particular: that aesthetic judgment pertains only to objects of beauty and works of art (and so is no part of morality), and that morality covers only that dimension of our lives where we guide our actions by rationally derived moral laws.

In sharp contrast, it has been an underlying assumption of this entire study that the "aesthetic" permeates every aspect of our lives. I construe the "aesthetic" as including the imaginative structures, activities, orientations, and transformations by means of which we are able to have coherent experience that we can make some sense of. (Dewey). The aesthetic is present and intermingles in what we think of as the "scientific", the "theoretical", and the "moral" (relatively unified, coherent, and consummated experiences;

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meaningful order, coherence, and consummation). In large measure, this is a matter of imaginative structuring. Seen in this light, morality is not the search for moral laws to guide our lives, but rather the ongoing imaginative exploration of possibilities for dealing with our problems, enhancing the quality of our communal relations, and forming significant personal attachments that grow.

Thus, it is neither scandalous nor threatening to regard morality as fundamentally a matter of moral imagination and as involving aesthetic development. The aesthetic dimensions of experience -- including imagination, emotions, and concepts -- are what make meaning and the enhancement of quality possible. And this holds true for whether we are experiencing and judging artworks [cf. design] or engagin in pressing moral deliberations that determine the course of our lives.

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Discernment. Deciding how to act in a particular set of circumstances will depend on how we frame the situation. This is a matter of subtle discernment and discrimination [cf. "attention"] of what is important in the situation. It is very much a matter of reading situations, character, and intentions. (Martha Nussbaum). The capacity for subtle discriminations that is absolutely essential if we are to be morally sensitive is one of the things we prize most in artists, to notice what we do not see, to imagine possibilities we have not imagined, and to feel in ways we might, but are not now, feeling. Also to respons to situations and experiences in ways that we tend to overlook, thereby opening up to us new dimensions of our world.

There are constraints on our imaginative vision of things. If we think of the perception as a created work of art, we must at the same time remember that artists are not free simply to create anything they like. Their obligation is to render reality, precisely and faithfully. In this task they are assisted by general principles and by the habits and attachments that are their internalization. To respond "at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right aim, and in the right way, is what is appropriate and best, and this is characteristic of excellence" (Aristotle, Nich. Ethics 1106b21-23).

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By taking seriously the MORALITY AS ART metaphor I am not, thereby, collapsing morality into art (narrowly construed as the making of art objects) [cf. design]. Rather, I have been arguing that the kind of imaginative judgment widely recognized as appropriate to the making, experiencing, and evaluating of artworks can serve as a model of moral judgment, insofar as it is pervasively imaginative in many of the same respects. I am thus not sanctioning the "aestheticization" of life and morality that has cropped up repeatedly during the last century as a cynical or despairing response to the disintegration of what was once regarded as the Western moral framework. The aesthete is both a flight from moral responsibility and a destruction of the possibility of meaningful human existence and action. (Kierkegaard, Either-Or, and Fear and Trembling.)

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Contrary to extreme relativistic charges, moralities are not radically incommensurable forms of life. The fact of our embodiment guarantees this much. We all have bodies that have at least a core set of universal needs and desires. Beyond that small core there may be broad variation across cultures. Still, we all need love, shelter, food, and protection from harm. We all feel pain, joy, fear, and anger. [And mainly pleasure?]

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MacIntyre's mistake, according to Nussbaum, is belief in the necessity of political authority or shared commitment to authority, because of a "radical defectiveness in the natural human order". Taking the "fact" of original sin as a given, he claims that natural human reason is intrinsically defective and can be redeemed only by a superior (divine) authority.

Nussbaum defends Aristotle's view of shared human characteristics as making possible rational enquiries that could be both intelligible and compelling to nearly everyone.

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Human beings share a basic biological makeup, the same general congnitive mechanisms, certain general physical, interpersonal, and cultural needs that are the basis for universally shared purposes, interests, and projects. Given the nature of our bodies, our brains, and our physical and social interactions, we would expect that certain basic-level experiences (e.g. of harm, of help, of well-being) woud be common across cultures. Shared purposes and experiences of this sort are the basis for Aristotle's experiences of recognition and affiliation that link human beings.

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We are in a position to make some general claims about the nature of a reasonable and realistic human objectivity, as opposed to an impossible

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God's-eye-view objectivity. Human objectivity is what characterizes a reflective process by means of which we are able to take up multiple perspectives as a way both of criticizing and transforming our own views and those of others. Objectivity becomes a question of transperspectivity, or the ability of a physically, historically, socially, and culturally situated self to reflect critically on its own construction of a world, and to imagine other possible worlds that might be constructed. "Impartiality", in turn, is no longer a matter of an aperspectival position, but rather an exercise of the empathetic ability to imagine what a question looks like from more than one side. (Steve Winter, Bull Durham and the Uses of Theory, 685-686).

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In sum, the scope of morality is far broader that the "institution of morality" allows. It confronts us with the task of always trying to see as broadly as possible the implications of our attitudes, judgments, and the way of life. [Cf. the systems approach]. It simply tries to make us more finely attuned to our interconnectedness with other people, animals, and organic processes as a whole.

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Just because there are a few moral laws, all moral reasoning is not be discovering and applying such laws. On the contrary, much of what matters is hidden by Moral Law theories. We need a different model of moral reasoning that encompasses the imaginative dimensions of conceptualization and thought.

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But if you strip away all absolutistic metaphysical and epistemological supports, then what is left of moral criticism? Transperspectiviy. We can be critical through an ongoing dialectical process in which we bring different perspectives to bear on our present moral understanding to see what it entails for our lives. Criticism becomes a social practice in which individuals and entire groups subject their values, principles, and fundamental frames to continual scrutiny.

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By getting rid of Enlightenment absolutism, morality is opened up to certain virtues and moral ideals that were previously hidden, but which now come to seem central to moral understanding and moral wisdom. I have in mind such virtues and feelings as tenderness, mercy, forgiveness, love, and humility. I have in mind the recognition that absurdity, inescapable tragedy, and luck play a central parti in all human existence. It would be a morality based on our ability to take up the part of others through imagination and feeling. We better learn to live not only with multiple moral systems, but also with an irreducible and sometimes conflicting multiplicity of values and goods that we experience in our own lives. We negotiate our way through this tangled maze of moral deliberation, one step at a time, never sure where we will end, guided only by our ideals of what we, and others, anbd our shared world might become. In this journey we must rely on what illumination we can get from our flickering moral imagination [cf. conscience]. [THE END]

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books

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Philosophical sophistication is necessary if we are to keep science honest. Science cannot maintain a self-critical stance without a serious familiarity with philosophy and alternative philosophies. Scientists need to be aware of how hidden a priori philosophical assumptions can determine their scientific results. On the other hand, philosophy, if it is be responsible, cannot simply spin out theories of mind, language, and other aspects of human life without seriously encountering and understanding the massive body of relevant ongoing scientific research. Otherwise, philosophy is just storytelling, a fabrication of narratives ungrounded in the realities of human embodiment and cognition. Philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of the mind.

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What the traditional Western concept of the person is and what we think it should be replaced with: (1) Embodied reason, (2) Metaphoric reason, (3) Limited freedom, (4) 4a. No "Higher" Morality: Our concepts of what is moral, like all our other concepts, originate from the specific nature of human embodied experience. Our conceptions of morality cannot be objective or derive from a "higher source". 4b. Metaphoric Morality: Moral concepts are mostly metaphorical, based ultimately on our experience of well-being and family. 4c. The Pluralism of Human Moral Systems: Because each person's conceptutal system contains a multiplicity of moral metaphors, some of which are mutually inconsistent, we each have within us a moral pluralism. (5) Human Nature Beyond Essentialism or Human Nature Without Essence: The characterizations of human nature by cognitive science, neuroscience, and biology do not rely on the classical theory of essences. Human nature is conceptualized in terms of variation, change, and evolution, not in terms of a fixed list of central features. It is part our nature to vary and change.

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There is no disembodied mind or Subject independent of the body. This matters vitally in the realm of spiritual and religious life. The universal embodied experiences that give rise to the metaphor of Subject and Self produce in our cognitive unconscious a concept [why not "experience"] of the Subject as an independent entity in no way dependent for its existence on the body. Requiring the mind and Soul to be embodied is no small matter. It contradicts those parts of religious around the world based on reincarnation and the transmigration of souls. It is also at odds with one of the two traditions in Christianity, the disembodied, otherworldly conception of spirituality and transcendence that downplays one's relation to the world, the natural environment. What we need is an alternative conception of embodied spirituality that at least begins to do justice to what people experience. What embodied sense can be made of transcendence? How are we to understand our sense of being part of a larger all-encompassing whole, of ecstatic participation -- with awe and respect -- whithin that whole, and of the moral engagement within such experience? Where is the mystery to be found in a

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spiritual experience that is embodied? And what is revelation there? Finally, what does the concept God become in an embodied spirituality?

The embodied mind is thus very much of this world. Our flesh is inseparable from what Merleau-Ponty called the "flesh of the world". The mind is not merely corporeal but also passionate, desiring, and social. It has a culture, a history, and an unconscious aspect. A major function of it is empathic, a capacity to imitate others, to vividly imagine being another person.

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An embodied spirituality requires an aesthetic attitude to the world that is central to self-nurturance, to the nurturance of others, and to the nurturance of the world itself. It requires pleasure, joy in the bodily connection with earth and air, sea and sky, plants and animals -- and the recognition that they are all more than human, more than human beings could ever achieve. Embodied spirituality is more than spiritual experience. It is an ethical relationship to the physical world.

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An embodied spirituality is based in empathy with all things. But empathic connection to the world is only one dimension of spirituality that body makes possible. It is the body that makes spiritual experience passionate, that brings to it intense desire, pleasure, pain, delight, and remorse. Without all these things, spirituality is bland. In the world's spiritual traditions, sex and art and music and dance and the taste of food have been for millennia forms of spiritual experience just as much as ritual practice, meditation, and prayer.

The mechanism by which spirituality becomes passionate is metaphor. An ineffable God becomes vital through metaphor.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1983). The structure of behavior. Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, reprint of orig. Beacon Press, 1963. (Trans. from French La structure du comportement, PUF, 1942.)

Page xi (foreword by John Wild, chairman of dept. of philosophy, Northwestern University

Human behavior is neither a series of blind reactions to external "stimuli", not the projection of acts that are motivated by pure ideas of disembodied, worldless mind. It is neither exclusively subjective nor exclusively objective, but a dialectical interchange between man and the world, which cannot be adequately expressed in traditional causal terms. It is a circular dialectic in which the independent beings

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of the life-field, already selected by the structure of the human body, exert a further selective operation on the body's acts. It is out of this dialectical interchange that human meanings emerge. The reader will be reminded, at many points, of the social behaviorism of the American philosopher George H. Mead.

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Merleau-Ponty is not satisfied with this thorough criticism and rejection of Cartesian dualism. He is also concerned with working out a new way of understanding the lived body which will avoid the extremes of an objective behaviorism, and of a vitalistic psychism. He emphatically denies that was called the soul is a separate, vital force exerting a peculiar, non-physical power of its own. This is merely an over correction of physicalism. The Aristotelian view that I am related to my body as the pilot to the ship is unacceptable. If I thought of my body in this way, I would not call it mine [??]. Furthermore, I do not use the body as an instrument. It is better to say that I am my body. My meanings are found in the structures of its behavior, and it is the center of the world in which I exist.

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But problems of "order" can be rejected as anthropomorphic [cf. Kant3]. It is useless to posit a "shunting power" "hidden behind" the cerebral mechanism by which ordered behavior is realized; and the problem of order has no meaning if we make it a second problem of causality.

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The object of the preceding chapters was not only to establish that behavior is irreducible to its alleged parts...It is not a thing, but neither is it an idea. It is not the envelope of a pure consciousness and, as a the witness of behavior, I am not a pure consciousness. It is precisely this which we wanted to say in stating that behavior is a form.

Thus, with the notion of "form", we have found the means of avoiding the classical antitheses in the analysis of the "central sector" of behavior as well as in that of its visible manifestations. More generally, this notion saves us from the alternative of a philosophy which juxtaposes externally associated terms and of another philosophy which discovers relations which are intrinsic to thought in all phenomena. But precisely for this reason the notion of form is ambiguous. Up until now it has been introduced by physical examples and defined by characteristics which made it appropriate for resolving problems of psychology and physiology. Now this notion must be understood in itself, without which the philosophical significance of what precedes would remain equivocal.

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The ambivalence of time and space at the level of perceptual consciousness reminds one of the mixed notions by means of which modern physics goes beyond the abstract simplicity of classical time and space. It should not be concluded from this that forms already exist in a physical universe and serve an ontological foundation for perceptual structures. The truth [?] is that science, on the basis of certain privileged perceptual structures, has sought to construct the image of an absolute

physical world, of a physical reality, of which

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these structures would no longer be anything but the manifestations. In accordance with the spirit of positivism, the perceptual given should be only the point of departure, a provisional intermediary between us and the ensemble of laws; and these laws -- explaining by their combined interplay the appearance of such and such a state of the world, the presence in me of such and such sensations, the development of knowledge and even the formation of science -- should thus close the circle and stand independently. On the contrary, as we have seen, the reference to a sensible or historical given is not a provisional imperfection; it is essential to physical knowledge. In fact and by right, a law is an instrument of knowledge and structure is an object of consciousness. Laws have meaning only as a means of conceptualizing the perceived world. The reintroduction of the most unexpected perceptual structures into modern science, far from revealing forms of life or even of mind as already in a physical world-in-itself, only testifies to the fact that the universe of naturalism has not been able to become self-enclosed, and that perception is not an event of nature.

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With physical systems action that is exercised outside the system has always the effect of reducing a state of tension, of advancing the system toward rest. We speak of vital structures, on the contrary, when equilibrium is obtained, not with respect to real and present conditions, but with respect to conditions which are only virtual [cf. potential] and which the system itself brings into existence [cf. teleology]; when the structure, instead of producing a release from the forces with which it is penetrated through the pressure of external ones, executes

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a work beyond its proper limits and constitutes s proper milieu for itself. Such perceptual behavior also has preferred determinations. [Senso-motor example given in the text]. Any behavior which is not preferred will be judged by the subject as difficult or imperfect behavior. But what is it that confers their [??] preference on preferred modes of behavior? How does it happen that they are treated as "the simplest" and "the most natural", that they give a feeling of balance and facility? Can it be said that the preferred modes of behavior of an organism are those which in its conditions, objectively offer the greatest simplicity, the greates unity? ]Cf. "design"]. But most of the time they do not have any privilege of simplicity or unity in themselves.

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The reactions evoked by a stimulus depend upon the significance which it has for the organism, not as a group of forces which tend toward rest by the shortest paths, but as a being capable of certain types of action. [Cf. teleology].

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For the physical or organic individual and its milieu, their relations are not mechanical, but dialectical. A mechanical action is one in which the cause and the effect are decomposable into real elements which have a one-to-one correspondence. The dependence is uni-directional; the cause is the necessary and sufficient condition of the effect considered in its existence and its nature. On the contrary, physical stimuli act upon the organism only by eliciting a global response which will vary qualitatively when the stimuli vary quantitatively; with respect to the organism they play the role of occasions rather than of cause [cf. improvisation]; the reaction depends on their vital significance [cf. teleology] rather than on the material properties of the stimuli. The mutual exteriority of the organism and the milieu is surmounted along with the mutual exteriority of the stimuli. Thus, two correlatives must be substituted for these two terms defined in isolation: the "milieu" and the "aptitude", which are like two poles of behavior and participate in the same structure. It is this intrinsic connection which Bergson expresses when he finds in instinct a relation of "sympathy" with its object.

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While a physical system equilibrates itself itself in respect to the given forces of the milieu and the animal organism constructs a stable milieu for itself corresponding to the monotonous a prioris of need and instinct, human work inaugurates a third dialectic. For, between man and the physico-chemical stimuli, it projects "use-objects"-- clothing, tables, gardens -- and "cultural objects" -- books, musical instruments, language -- which constitute the proper milieu of man and bring about the emergence of new cycles of behavior.

It is by design that, instead of speaking of action as do most contemporary psychologists, we choose the Hegelian term "work", which designates the ensemble of activities by which man transforms physical and living nature.

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Although all actions permit an adaptation to life, the word "life" does not have the same meaning in animality and humanity; and the conditions of life are defined by the proper essence of the species. Doubtless, clothing and houses serve to protect us from the cold; language helps in collective work and in the analysis of the "unorganized mass". But the act of dressing becomes the act of adornment or also of modesty and thus reveals a new attitude toward oneself and others. Only men see that they are nude. In the house that he builds for himself, man projects and realizes his preferred values. Finally the act of speaking expresses the fact that man ceases to adhere immediately to the milieu, that he elevates it to the status of spectacle and takes possession of it mentally by means of knowledge properly so called. [Cf. aesthetics and ethics]

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What defines man is not the capacity to create a second nature -- economic, social or cultural -- beyond biological nature; it is rather the capacity of going beyond created structures in order to create others...

The power of choosing and varying points of view permits man to create instruments, not under the pressure of a de facto situation, but for a virtual use and especially in order to fabricate others. The meaning of human work therefore is the recognition, beyond the present milieu, of a world of things visible for each "I" under a plurality of aspects, the taking possession of an indefinite time and space.

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Perception, which has appeared to be the assimilation of consciousness into a cradle of institutions and a narrow circle of human "milieus", can become, especially by means or art, perception of a "universe". The knowledge of a truth is substituted for the experience of an immediate reality. The knowledge of a universe will already be prefigured in lived perception, just as the negation of all the milieus is prefigured in the work which creates them.

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Perspective does not appear to me to be a subjective deformation of things but, on the contrary, to be one of their properties, perhaps their essential property. It is precisely because of it that the perceived possesses in itself a hidden and inexhaustible richness, that it is a "thing".

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To say that I have a body is simply another way of saying that my knowledge is an individual dialectic in which intersubjective objects appear, that these objects, when they are given to knowledge in the mode of actual existence, present themselves to it by successive aspects which cannot coexist; finally it is a way of saying that one of them offers itself obstinately "from the same side" without my being able to go around it.

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All the sciences situate themselves in a "complete" and real world without realizing that perceptual experience is constituting with respect to this world. Thus we find ourselves in the presence of a field of lived perception which is prior to number, measure, space and causality and which is nonetheless given only as a perspectival view of objects gifted with stable properties, a perspectival view of an objective worl and an objective space. The problem of perception then consists in trying to discover how the intersubjective world, the determinations of which science is gradually making precise, is grasped through this field. The antinomy of which we spoke above is based upon this ambiguous structure of perceptual experience. The thesis and the antithesis express the two aspects of it: it is true to say that my perception is always a flux of individual events and that what is radically contingent in the lived perspectivism of perception accounts for the realistic appearance. But it is also true to say that my perception accedes to things themselves, for these perspectives are articulated in a way that makes access to inter-individual significations possible; the "present" a world.

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Until now we have considered only the perspectivism of true [??] perception. Instances in which lived experience appears clothed with a signification which breaks apart, so to speak, in the course of subsequent experience and is not verified by concordant syntheses [cf. Johnson's "multiperspectivism"] would still have to be analyzed. We have not accepted the causal explanation which naturalism provides in order to account for this subjectivity in the second degree. What is called bodily, psychological or social determinism in hallucination and error has appeared to us to be reducible to the emergence of imperfect dialectics, of partial structures. But why does such a dialectic at the organic-vegetative level [cf. evil] break up a more integrated dialectic, as happens in hallucination? Consciousness is not only and not always consciousness of truth [??]; how are we to understand the inertia and the resistance of the inferior dialectics which stand in the way of the pure relations of impersonal subject and true object and which affect my knowledge with a coefficient of subjectivity [cf. error]? How are we to understand the adherence of a fallacious signification to the lived, which is constitutive of illusion?...

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It may happen that we ourselves do not grasp the true meaning of our life, not because of an unconscious personality is deep within us and governs our actions, but because we understand our lived states on through an idea which is not adequate for them.

But even unknown to us, the efficacious law or our life is constituted by its true signification. Everything happens as if this signification directed the flux of mental events. Thus it will be necessary to distinguish their ideal signification, which can be true or false, and their immanent signification, that we will call actual structure. Correlatively, it will be necessary to distinguish in development an ideal liberation which does not transform us in our being and changes only the consciousness which we have of ourselves, and a real liberation which is the Umgestaltung of this we spoke. We are not reducible to the ideal consciousness which we have of ourselves any more that the existent thing is reducible to the signification by which we express it.

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A philosophy in the critical tradition founds moral theory on a reflection which discovers the thinking subject in its liberty [cf. moral law or conscience?] behind all objects. If, however, one acknowledges -- be it in the status of phenomenon -- an existence of consciousness and of its resistant structures, our knowledge depends upon what we are; moral theory begins with a psychological and sociological critique of oneself; man is not assured ahead of time of possessing a source of morality; consciousness of self is acquired by elucidation of his concrete being and is verified only by the active integration of isolated dialectics -- body and soul -- between which it is initially broken up. And finally, death is not deprived by meaning, since the contingency of the lived is a perpetual menace for the eternal significations in which it is believed to be completely expressed.