Critique of Pragmatic Dharma #2

In my last post, I wrote about the ways that I see Pragmatic Dharma (PD) as based upon an impoverished view of the mind. I argued that it specifically neglects the role of meaning in mental life. I suggested that this explains, in part, the plethora of spiritual bypassing and boundary violations in meditation communities. I also suggested that it undermines our capacity to recognize and work through psychological problems. I’d like to say a bit more about the philosophical ideas that support these points here.

In a recent podcast interview, Michael Taft asked Culadasa whether meditation might get in the way of seeing, much less of working through, certain psychological problems. I would argue that this is necessarily the case to the extent that meditation is understood as focusing on sensate experience as it arises moment to moment. Why? Because the nature of the mind is that it depends upon shared semiotic systems, chief among them language (Litowitz, 2014). By undercutting our capacity for symbolic engagement through language, we, in essence, cordon off huge portions of our minds [1].

Let me say a bit more about how I understand the term ‘mind.’

Under the umbrella term subjectivist, Cavell (1991) unpacks two assumptions about the nature of the mind that are deeply embedded in our common sense thinking. The first of these is that consciousness is a constitutive feature of the mental, which implies that first-person, subjective introspection is the only way to uncover mental contents. With the importance he places on a second-person interpreter in uncovering unconscious thought processes and the centrality of transference and countertransference in psychoanalytic practice, Freud clearly rejects this first subjectivist assumption about the nature of mind. More recently, cognitive science, among other disciplines, has clearly shown us that outside observers can learn things about our minds not available to us via introspection.

The second subjectivist assumption is internalism, that is, the idea that my thoughts must be in principle describable by things happening inside me alone. Contra Descartes’ notion that the mind and body are separate substances, Freud believed that the mind was a function of the body. Where there is a mind, there is a brain-in-a-body upon which that mind supervenes. For the internalist, that mind’s content is determined by things that are happening “from the skin inward” (Cavell, 1991, p. 142) and the content of a mental state, the meaning of it, is intrinsic to it. Related to this is an assumption about subjective priority, which holds that an inner, private world comes before knowledge of an external reality, both epistemologically and developmentally. We first know our subjective sense impressions, which then become the building blocks of thought and knowledge. This seems to be a fundamental assumption of modern vipassana: that it is from our sensate experience that our whole world of experience is built up. It also seems to be a fundamental assumption of much of the modern neuroscience research into meditation. I would argue that it is a mistaken assumption.

An externalist, anti-subjectivist view holds an individual’s mental states mean what they do only in relation to a vast network of other thoughts and to certain relations between that individual and the external world. Wittgenstein (1953), for example, suggests that the meaning of a word requires knowing how to use it in activities with others. Certainly the externalist, anti-subjectivist acknowledges that there is a sense in which the mental is subjective and private, for we have access to some of our thoughts in a way that is unique to us. Yet the externalist also argues that the mind is constituted by the relations between an individual and her environment, which includes other persons.

These relations take place as an individual interacts with her environment and with other persons in it. These interactions are inseparable from communication, which is the exchange of messages through a medium that both interactors share. In other words, the nature of the mental is that it depends upon shared semiotic systems, chief among them language (Litowitz, 2014). Language mediates our experiences even before we are born. Loewald (1980) writes of the patterns of sound and rhythm in the mother’s speech that permeate the infant’s early, even pre-natal, experience. Even then, the infant begins to lay down the structures for her developing linguistic capacity. Their minds are entangled from the beginning of the infant’s life through these shared language structures.

If we take an externalist, anti-subjectivist view seriously, then one of our best tools for understanding our minds is language, through higher-order symbolic functioning that allows us to re-present our minds to ourselves. From this point of view, our minds aren’t solely ‘inside’ our brains and bodies and, as such, won’t be cleansed of emotional poisons through a physiological / energetic process of purification (at least not entirely). In fact, we won’t encounter significant parts of our minds at all unless we make use of reflection through language. In important ways, it is not possible to encounter our unconscious – at least in the sense implied by this perspective – through moment-to-moment awareness of our sensate experience. Yes, in meditation we can have the experience of our thoughts bubbling just beneath the surface – what Shinzen Young calls the brain’s pre-processing – but this is not the unconscious that I’m referring to, it, or at least not all of it.

Let me give an example. Suppose that I have just learned that a close friend has died. I’m deeply saddened by this news. Moments later, I spill a cup of coffee on my new pants and become quite angry. Let’s further suppose that, throughout my life, I’ve had difficulty feeling sadness. For reasons related to my personal history, sadness frightens me. In my moment of anger, if I adopt the perspective of awareness of sensate experience, moment-by-moment, then I will have no access to the fact that I am sad. On the contrary, my sensate experience seems to reflect the fact that I am angry. But given what I know about myself, it’s quite reasonable to posit that my anger is a defense against the feeling of sadness, a feeling of which I am unconscious as I am caught up in my anger.

[1] I believe that sensate experience, or ‘nonconceptual experience’ as Ken McLeod discussed in a recent Imperfect Buddha podcast, is thoroughly infiltrated by language and ideology, but that is a separate discussion.

References

Cavell, M. (1991). The subject of mind. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 72, 141 – 154.

Loewald, H.W. (1980). Papers on Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Litowitz, B.E. (2014). Coming to terms with intersubjectivity: Keeping language in mind. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 62(2), 295 – 312.

Wittgenstein, L. & Anscombe, G.E.M. (1997). Philosophical investigations. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.