2014 Personality Lecture 12: Binswanger & Boss (Phenomenology)

We're going to talk some more about existentialism today, and I'm going to talk to you about a couple of Swiss psychiatrists, Bin Swanger and Boss. Just as a starting point, their psychological viewpoint was influenced to a large degree by a philosopher named Heiger. Heiger considered himself a student of being, and for Heiger, the main mystery of the world was why it existed. The best way to think about the phenomenon — he was a phenomenologist — and the best way to think about phenomenology and existentialism is that phenomenology is the study of experience as it's lived, and then existentialism puts a twist on that.

Existentialists assume that being has an implicitly moral dimension, and the existentialist psychologists presume that pathology, at least in part, is a consequence of a disturbed relationship — a disturbed moral relationship — with the self and being. It's very tricky thinking, and it's not often handled in personality courses anymore, but I think that's a big mistake. The phenomenological element in particular — the thing I really like about it — is that it's a really good counterpart to the modern materialistic viewpoint because it puts consciousness at the center of being instead of treating it as if it's something that's a secondary phenomenon that emerges from something else.

Our modern presuppositions, especially the scientific presuppositions, are what pass for scientific presuppositions — are generally extremely reductionist, and they assume that consciousness is, in some manner that’s not yet being determined, like a secondary byproduct of fundamentally material processes. It's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, but I wouldn't say there's any real evidence for it. I mean, it's hard to overstate how mysterious consciousness is as a phenomenon. For Heiger, consciousness was a mystery that was, in some sense, equivalent to the mystery of being. The reason for that was that he couldn't conceive of existence without a subject.

You could imagine if the world was stripped of consciousness. It's very difficult to describe what would be left. I mean, if you take a very straightforward materialistic viewpoint, you could make the presumption that if everything that was conscious was eradicated, then things would be just the way they are now. But I think that's a shallow viewpoint because consciousness is what gives everything a perspective, gives it size, gives it duration, and gives it colors — all the qualities that we associate with being. Without that consciousness, all that's at least incomprehensible.

Then there are deeper problems that are dealt with by people like John Wheeler, who's a quantum physicist who believes that consciousness is necessary for quantum indeterminacy to resolve itself into something concrete and actual. Wheeler and many physicists like him put consciousness at the center of the process that turns potential into actuality. Now, at the same time these quantum ideas were being developed, these philosophical ideas and psychological ideas that I'm describing were being developed, and they provide such a different take on the structure of reality that I think they're indispensable.

I also think they're interesting in relationship to P's thought because the phenomenologists have a constructivist element to their thinking in that they believe that consciousness plays a constructive role in the establishment of being. So we're going to look at being. Again, the way to think about this is you've got to flip your viewpoint. In a sense, you have to think about your experience as reality and that everything that's inside that experience, so to speak, is a subcomponent of that reality instead of thinking of material things as the reality and your experience somehow emerging out of those.

It's an inversion of what constitutes the fundamental reality. You can think about it in a sense as an intellectual exercise. Most of the way that people think is predicated on some kind of implicit set of axioms, and if you change the axioms, you can often shed light on reality in a new and interesting way. So we're going to walk through the phenomenological viewpoint, and we're going to see why and how that might be interesting — the phenomenological and existential viewpoints.

In the next lecture, I'm going to put a twist on that because what you think about the nature of reality appears to have some powerful relationship with how that reality unfolds itself. The existentialists, the phenomenologists, were very big believers in the reality of subjective experience, and the existentialists were very big believers in the ethical responsibility of the individual. I'm going to talk to you about what happened in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959, which is a period of world history that isn't well covered in our culture.

I mean, everybody knows about the Nazi Holocaust, but very few people know that between 30 million and 60 million people were killed as a consequence of internal repression in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959. That's a figure that's five times as big as the commonly held figures for the Holocaust. The reason I'm going to introduce that to you is, first, you should know about it because it's the stellar example of what happens when people abandon their individual responsibility. Second, and related to that, it's an object lesson in what happens when the presuppositions that the phenomenologists and the existentialists held about the nature of reality were completely dismissed in favor of a rationalist utopianism.

Ideologically rational utopias killed millions and millions of people in the 20th century. It seems to me that you can make a fairly powerful case that if your view of reality, when it's played out in the social world, turns genocidal time and time again, there's probably something existentially wrong with it. Then a second derivation of that might be: if there's something existentially wrong with a viewpoint, in what way can you consider it tenable even if it makes sense and it's rational? If the outcome is genocide and deceit and misery, it's perfectly reasonable to presume that that's evidence that it's wrong.

Now, most of you — and this is particularly true, I think, of universities — are taught at least a kind of implicit moral relativism. You know, that's fair. That's reasonable from a scientific perspective, at least to some point. But there's a problem with that because there are forms of moral presupposition that seem to lead to horrendous ends. It's always struck me because I grew up like you under the shadow of nuclear destruction, so to speak. It always has struck me that if certain viewpoints lead to genocidal outcomes, and if they do that consistently, then it's extremely dangerous for us not to act as if that's wrong.

Of course, if something's wrong, then that also implies that something is right, right? Because the opposite of wrong is right. So even if you can't necessarily figure out what's right, you might be able to ground yourself to some degree by figuring out what's wrong. We'll walk through the philosophy and the psychology first, and then we'll walk through the sociological consequences of its abandonment. In a sense, you'll see for yourself if you think that this perspective is worthy of some consideration. It's very complicated.

We'll look at this first. Phenomenology, in part, is based on this idea of Dasein, and Dasein means being there. Again, this way of simplifying that is to think about it as your experience. This is a map I've made of people's experience, which I think is at least roughly equivalent to the phenomenologist's Dasein, and it has the advantage that I can explain it well. So I'm going to use it.

The phenomenologists believe that the past, the present, and the future are all tangled up together in your current experience in that, say, everything that you're doing is related to the future, which it, of course, is, because you're sitting in this class, and that has some consequences for whether or not you graduate. That has some consequences for your status and your career moving forward, and you're perfectly aware of that. So you experience the meaning of the lecture, say, in the context of your conceptions of the future. Of course, the same thing is true of your experience now because of your past.

So the past and the future, in some sense, are here now. It's partly because when you're experiencing things, you consider your current situation and you consider where it is that you're headed. Dasein also has this element of becoming in it. You're not just a static thing, and you don't ever experience anything that's in your environment as something that's merely static. You're always experiencing it in relationship to your plans for transformation. That might be short term, like maybe you're bored of the class because you need to go get a cup of coffee, and then that colors your current experience.

Or maybe it's long-term or it's medium-term; it doesn't matter. The point is that your viewpoint of the future conditions your experience in the present. So in some sense, the future is already here. It's also the case that what you do now is going to have effects and consequences into the future. Here's a more complicated consequence: You're somewhere now, and you're going somewhere in the future, and one of the consequences of that is that your nervous system — it's one way of looking at it — parses up the world in relationship to the relationship between those two poles.

For example, when you walk into a class and your plan is to sit down, then you're immediately going to perceive an array of chairs. Imagine you were coming in here to clean up the room instead of sitting down for a lecture. Well, then the things that would manifest themselves to you would be qualitatively different. Maybe you'd only be looking for the things that were out of place, or maybe you're coming in here because you're spectacularly lonesome and you think that, you know, there's somebody here who might be a potential partner. Then, the world's going to array itself in front of you in a different manner. The degree to which what you're pursuing in relationship to where you are determines even how the objects of the world manifest themselves to you is indeterminate.

It happens to a tremendous degree. It's not only that things manifest themselves to you as objects in relationship to your conception of your current situation and your goals, but your emotions also hang on that platform. For example, if you're writing an exam and you expect to see — you're hoping for a C — and you get a B, then you're going to be extremely happy about it. But if you are hoping for an A and you get a B, then you're going to be extremely unhappy about it. What's interesting about that is that in some sense, the stimuli, as the behaviors would have it, are the same, but the emotional consequence is actually reversed.

It seems to me to be sort of related to the idea of Maya, which is a Buddhist idea, which is that people live inside a framework that's conditioned by desire. As a consequence, it's not actually real. The unreality of it is that you can change what manifests itself to you and the importance of what manifests itself to you by changing your conception of your goal, your future, or also by changing your conception of who and where you are right now.

In that sense, being your experience is malleable, and it's malleable at least in part as a consequence of the choices that you make. What that implies from a phenomenological perspective is that free will and the manner in which the world manifests itself are integrally related. From an existential point of view, it implies that you actually bear a fair bit of responsibility for the ongoing quality of your experience. The existentialists would presume that that responsibility is built into the nature of being. There's no way out of it; it's like a precondition for being.

The word "phenomenon" is from a Greek word, and the Greek word is "phainesthai," and what "phainesthai" means is "to shine forth." Now, one of the presuppositions of the phenomenological viewpoint is that reality, in some sense, is composed of what shines forth. This is a very difficult thing to explain, but I can do it partly this way. So when you're moving from point A to point B, you can parse the world up into tools and obstacles. I showed you that in the last slide.

Tools are things that get you to where you're going, and what the tools are depends on where you're going. Obstacles are the things that get in your way. If you perceive tools, then that makes you happy because happiness, at least in part, is experienced in relationship to movement toward a goal. If you experience nothing but obstacles, that's going to produce negative emotion. This is a variant of that, and the variant is, when you're moving from point A to point B, you can experience things that you predict or desire, and those make you hopeful and happy; or you can experience things that are unpredictable, and those make you — those are threats, and they make you anxious.

But it's broader than that; they disinhibit negative emotion in a more general sense. Sometimes you can experience something that's so unpredicted and so shocking that it blows the framework that you're using apart. What would you say the phenomenologists call that? Loss of world. The framework, the thing that you encounter, is so unexpected that its appearance blows the structure of being apart.

That happens, for example, when people are betrayed by someone that they love, or maybe they're very seriously hurt, or they develop a very serious illness, or a dream that they've been pursuing for a long period of time is rendered impossible by some failure or some unexpected natural occurrence. Now, part of the question is, what do you experience when your world falls apart? Your world emerges from something, and then when it falls apart, it falls back into that something — that chaotic state. The phenomenologists say that what you experience most basically is meaning.

So from a phenomenological perspective, when you're looking at the world, you perceive meaning, and then you derive objects from that, and you derive the objects in relationship to your representation of your current state and your future state. So from a phenomenological perspective, the base of the world is meaning. I can give you some hints about how that plays itself out. One interesting phenomenon is how interest guides your ability to concentrate. Okay, so let's say that you've got an array of difficult papers on your desk, and you have to read them. Now, some of those papers, independently of their difficulty, some of those papers will presume that you're actually interested in, and some of them you're not interested in.

So some of the papers that you're interested in come with this quality that the phenomenologists described as shining forth. There's something about them that grips your attention, enables you to concentrate, enables you to learn, and enables you to remember in a relatively effortless way. Whereas the other papers that you're not interested in, assuming they're of equivalent difficulty, it's very difficult to focus your attention on, and they lie there in sort of an inert manner. So the "phainesthai" phenomenon is partially apprehendable by considering what the difference is to you between something that you're interested in and something that you're not.

Now, someone like Jung would think of that interest as a consequence of an internal process, a psychological process that's guiding your attention. But the phenomenologists, at least in...it's tricky because they go both ways on this — would consider the fact that some things are illuminated so that they're easy to concentrate on is actually a function of being itself. It isn't something that you apply to the world; it's a characteristic of being. Some things shine forth as meaningful, and some things don't.

Now, the existentialists would say, at least in part, that you have a duty to follow the things that shine forth; that's where the moral element of this comes in. Now, Bin Swanger said, for example, what we perceive are, first and foremost, not impressions of taste, tone, smell, or touch; not even things or objects, but meanings. And then Bin Swanger and Boss split on the reason for why some things manifest themselves as compelling and some things don't. Bin Swanger would say that you come equipped with a — it's like it's a Kantian idea — with an a priori ontological structure.

Imagine you're reading a book. So then you might say, and the book obviously has meaning. You're reading it, and you're into it. You might ask yourself, where is the book? You could say, "Well, the book is the physical object that I have in my hand." I mean, that's what people act like, in some sense, or at least that's what they say; they act like the book is the physical object. But then person A might read the book and say, "I thought that was a terrible book," and person B might read that book and say, "I thought that was a great book."

Person A and B might differ on how they responded to the characters, and they're going to differ in terms of how they imagine the situation. There's a tremendous amount of flexibility in exactly what constitutes the book. So you'd say, "Well, the book is an artifact." And the artifact is produced by the author, but of course, it's not just produced by the author because it's produced inside a cultural context that shaped the author and that shaped you. You bring something to bear on the book, which is the sum total of your individual knowledge and your enculturated knowledge.

What that means is that it's almost as if there's a pattern that constitutes you, and there's a pattern that constitutes the book. When you put the two of them together, you get a juxtaposition of the two patterns, and it's the juxtaposition that's the book. It's the realization of this, in some part, that's led to the oddities of postmodernism and to the claim that there's no canonical meaning to any given text because it's a matter of interpretation. It's like, yeah, well, just because it's a matter of interpretation, and even maybe just because the interpretations are very wide in potential scope, that doesn't mean that the text doesn't have any meaning.

But you can understand how that idea might have come about. Now, for Bin Swanger, the reason the book would be meaningful, at least in part, is because you're imposing something on it, and so that would be your individuality. Boss would say the opposite. He would say, well, no, the book itself is manifesting its meaning to you in some sense of its own accord. That's because Boss doesn't necessarily make a distinction between the thing, the book, and the entire context within which it's embedded, and he would consider the meaning emerging as a consequence of that entire context. You can't separate the book out from the situation in which it's embedded.

Here's a map that I made a while back that helped me understand this, at least to some degree. The phenomenologists talk about three elements of Dasein: one is the Umwelt, another is the Mitwelt, and the third is the Eigenwelt. There are various ways to conceptualize these, and I can give you a couple now. The Umwelt is the natural world. So when we say "nature," that's what we mean. We say, well, human beings live in nature; we have a natural environment. So the idea that there's a natural environment is like a canonical idea.

We even think of the natural environment sometimes as the unspoiled natural environment, as if there are natural environments that exist in the complete absence of human endeavor. Then we also have a social world, and the social world is the world of culture. So there's nature and culture, and that's Umwelt and Mitwelt. Finally, other than that, there's the world of the self, which is the part of being, your being, that's only accessible to you. It's you, in the middle of culture, in the middle of nature.

Those are the elements of Dasein, and for Bin Swanger, it's the Mitwelt that contains most of the meaning, or at least that structures the meaning. So if you're reading a great novel, the degree to which you can extract meaning from it is a consequence of your previous education and your own inculturation. But that isn't necessarily the only way to look at things. If you walk into a bookstore, say, and a book catches your eye, you might say that that book caught my eye.

You think, what exactly does that mean? Well, it means that out of all the innumerable entities in the bookstore that could have caught your eye, only that one did. You might ask why. Well, Boss would say, well, the world is disclosing a particular meaning to you. Why? Well, that has something to do with the way that you're playing out your individual destiny.

This is both a constructivist and a phenomenological perspective. Here's the idea: that the thing that's at the center of reality is the domain that's not yet mapped. So you're in a relationship. The relationship is betrayed. Before you're betrayed, you're in one place, and after you're betrayed, you're in another place. Before you're betrayed, your world is all structured, and you know where you are and what you're doing and who you're with and what everything is. The second after you're betrayed, none of that's true.

It's like everything reverts to a chaotic place. In some sense, the only time that you encounter a pure view of what the world itself is made out of — what the ground of being is — is when you encounter an error that's so overwhelming that your current framework of meaning is no longer applicable. The framework blows apart, but it isn't as if nothing happens when the framework blows apart. If you're in a committed relationship and you find security in that and you believe that the security is genuine, and that blows apart, then everything that you presumed is wrong — that's your Mitwelt.

When that disappears, there's something underneath it. What's underneath it? That's the ground of reality, and the ground of reality is what you explore to put yourself back together and to put the world back together. So you're betrayed, and you fall into a depression, and you're anxious. But you know there's always the possibility of a new relationship that beckons. Perhaps your previous relationship wasn't perfect.

So the chaos that you fall into is depressing and anxiety-provoking; it generates a lot of negative emotion. But sort of lurking behind that are the sort of dim remnants of hope. As you proceed forward with your grief and your misery and you're attempting to reconstruct a stable mode of being, you take out of that thing that's anomalous, you and the world. Another way of thinking about this is that for the phenomenologists — and this is where they're similar to the constructivists — the ground of reality isn't so much matter as it is information.

When you're living in your constructed world and things are going the way that you want them to go, then you've constrained that information in a particular way, narrowed it in a particular way that serves your particular, narrow end. That makes things much more comfortable because then you don't have to deal with the information that constitutes the entire world. You can remove most of it and say, well, all that's relevant to me, all that necessarily makes up my world of being, are these circumscribed set of phenomena. And that works well when it's working.

But when it doesn't work and it blows apart, that puts you somewhere else and that being put somewhere else can be revelatory sometimes. I mean, sometimes people make new discoveries that blow their previous frames of reference, and it's awe-inspiring and overwhelming to them in a positive way. Sometimes you can come across something new that helps you reconfigure the way that you're living almost instantly in a more comprehensive and fuller way.

But more common is the traumatic response, which is when the presuppositions of your world are shifted dramatically, and you fall into the surrounding chaos. Then, it's so hard on you that it actually does you psychophysiological damage. Now, you remember that drawing I showed you with the little ovals at the bottom and the bigger ovals at the top — the hierarchy. You remember that? Does everybody remember that?

I decomposed, say, "good person," which is a very high-order abstraction, down to "put a fork on the table," which is a motor movement that's part of making dinner, which is part of being a good parent, which is part of being a good citizen, which is part of being a good person. So the idea was that the higher-order abstractions can be concretized down to the motor behaviors in a hierarchy. Now, if someone goes after you at the good person level of analysis and they just demolish you, you know, in the course of, say, a three-year relationship hacking away at the idea that you have any moral worth whatsoever — this is what happens when you're abused.

That's going to knock you into pieces at a very complex and high level of abstraction. So that can undermine your entire worldview. If the person instead helps you retool the little behaviors and the little microstructures that make you up, and if you're willing to participate in that, and if you're open to corrective feedback from the world, then you can continually adjust yourself at a small level. That makes the things in the hierarchy a little higher, a little healthier, and then that makes the aggregation of those things a little higher in the hierarchy, a little healthier and a little more complete.

Then you can do this bit-by-bit retooling without ever having to suffer the demolition of huge chunks of your personality. So let's go back to the relationship where there's a betrayal. It's like virtually every time someone gets flipped upside down because of a betrayal in a relationship, after the betrayal happens, they say to themselves, "There were all these signs I didn't pay attention to." So, maybe the first sign is, who knows, your partner starts to flirt a bit more when you go out on a social occasion. It's not a lot more, just a bit more.

You decide that's okay; you're not going to do anything about it. But it's interesting that it grabs your attention, and it means something. What you decide is, "It's not worth paying attention to." Maybe the next eight times you go out the same thing happens, but it happens at somewhat accelerated rates. Then maybe the person starts to go out without you and so on. There's this progression toward the end state of betrayal. Every time you get a little hint, the world tells you that something's going on; you put it aside.

You forgo your opportunity to adjust the relationship at micro stages. What you should have done the first time that happened is you should have gone home with your partner and said, "Um, what the hell's going on? Like, this is what was happening; why are you doing that?" Here is how you should have behaved, and of course that's going to be a fight; there's absolutely no doubt about it. But it might be a micro fight instead of a "the relationship is over" fight.

In order to keep a relationship healthy, it needs to be retooled at micro levels constantly. The same is the case with your own character. When you encounter something that's unexpected, especially if it's small enough to handle, you need to extract the information from it, rebuild the world, and rebuild yourself. Then maybe if you continue doing that, every time you get evidence of an anomaly or an error, or every time the world manifests some meaning to you, then you won't have to fall apart because the structure that constitutes you is going to remain viable and healthy from the bottom up.

If you don't do that, then those errors are going to accumulate, and when they finally do manifest themselves as unavoidable — like when your partner says, "I don't want to be with you anymore," or "I've been with someone else for the last year" — there's no ignoring that. The whole thing comes crashing down. You're no longer in a relationship; you're no longer in a good relationship, and then all the other things become questionable. So meaning manifests itself so that you can retool being itself on a continual basis while simultaneously minimizing the risk of total collapse.

Morality then becomes the act of paying sufficient attention and reacting sufficiently so that that corrective process occurs. So you're inside one of these, you're going from point A to point B, and as you do that, things you want to have happen happen, and things you don't want to have happen and things you don't understand happen. Let's say that you investigate the things that you don't want to have happen, and you investigate the things that you didn't expect, and you do that as soon as they come up.

What happens? Partly what happens is you're going to change your perceptions a bit, and you're going to change your actions a bit. What that'll culminate in over time is that this whole structure will change. Instead of going from point A to point B, maybe you start shifting so that you're going from point A to point C, because as you're gathering information, as a consequence of the inadequacies of the way you're looking at the world, not only are you improving your ability to perceive and to act, but you're also gathering information that helps shift your perspective to a better point B.

You might say, well, where are you going and why? The answer to that is, well, you have a plan; you're going to get your degree. I don't know what your long-term plan is, but there's no reason to assume that your long-term plan is correct, even though there's no reason to assume that you can do without one. You're in this weird situation where you have to live within a bounded space, and the bounded space is going to produce errors, and it's also going to be wrong. But at the same time, if you use the bounded space, then you can transform it continually across time, even what it's aimed at, and you can minimize the probability of precipitous collapse.

Now, I want to show you how this is being represented. It's very complicated and difficult. On the right, you see that the Harry Potter snitch thing, right? On the left here you see this incredibly peculiar alchemical image, and the image is something like this: This is what this image means. It means at the base of the world is this weird combination of matter and spirit. This is matter, and this is spirit.

The winged element represents spirit, and then out of that comes something that's like primordial and reptilian, and then out of that comes something that's associated with consciousness. It's like a — it's a map of the way that consciousness emerges from the base of reality. Now, you'll see that this thing and that thing — the snitch and this thing — are the same thing. In Harry Potter, when he plays Quidditch, remember, PJ had such an emphasis on games.

PJ believed that games were the subelements of human culture. Quidditch is this weird two-level game where, on one level, it's sort of like soccer or basketball, and then on another level, you have two players that are Seekers, and what they seek is this snitch. The snitch is this thing that captures your attention. That's why it's gold and winged, and it moves around very fast. It's like Mercury, the spirit.

Mercury, because Mercury the God had winged feet and he was the messenger of the Gods — that's how Mercury was conceived of. I’ll tell you something else that's weird about Mercury: Mercury is a metal as well, and if you mix Mercury with sand and the sand has gold in it, then the Mercury will pick up the sand, or the gold, and then you can heat up the Mercury and all that's left is gold. So Mercury will lead you to where the gold is, and the spirit — Mercurial spirit was the messenger of the Gods, and if you paid attention to Mercury the God, then you'd gather the gold.

But it wasn't the gold of fools; it was the gold that made your life valuable, and that's the same thing that's played out in this weird Quidditch game. The two best players, the fastest, the ones that are most awake, aren't playing the normal game; they're playing a superordinate game. The superordinate game is, pay attention, pay attention. If you pay attention, then you'll get the thing that's most valuable. You win the game.

But there's more than that because, in the Harry Potter series, for example, there was a piece of soul in that, and that's related to the idea that if you pay attention to what interests you — what manifests itself as meaningful — not only do you build the world out of that, because you're differentiating something that's undifferentiated into something that's comprehensible and usable, but at the same time, you're doing the same thing to yourself. That's the constructivist idea, right? Where do you come from? You come from exploration and the generation of information. Exploration — what should you explore?

Well, the things that shine forth to you. That's the phenomenological idea, and the existential idea is, if you refuse to explore the things that shine forth for you — that capture your interest and your attention — then that will lessen you as a being. It'll make you weaker and progressively weaker because not only do you remain unformed, but the ratio of chaos to world in your domain of being becomes too intolerable — too much chaos, not enough order, not enough of you. Then the whole thing is unstable.

Then you've only got two options. One is that you lose belief in being itself, and that's like a nihilistic reaction. The other is you turn to some sort of totalitarian or ideological solution that fills in for where you're not, and that's an abdication of your individual responsibility. The consequence of turning to totalitarian ideologies like that is that they stagnate and become brittle because there's no transformation in them anymore, because all of the people inside of them have decided that transformation is unnecessary.

So they become increasingly outdated and corrupt, and then that's the first step on the way to having everything fall apart in the most horrible possible way, and that plays out at the state level just like it plays out at the individual level. I'll tell you a dream I had about this since we're just out of the psychoanalytic domain. I can show you, using this, how dreams often solve problems.

I'll just read it to you because I wrote it just after I had it. I'll just tell it to you. So the first thing I saw was, it was like a view from a space shuttle. It was a global view, and I could see the Atlantic Ocean, and on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, there were four hurricanes, and they were in a quadrant like this. So there was a circle here and a circle here and a circle here and a circle here, and they were very large hurricanes. I mean, one hurricane is quite good, but four — that's a lot of hurricanes.

So it was impressive. Then the next thing I saw was a bank of scientists in kind of a dark room watching TV screens focused on this hurricane storm event and wondering what was going on. Then the next thing I saw was this little ball, about this big, hovering over the surface of the ocean. So now I was in the eye, so the four hurricanes had an eye in the middle of them, you know? A calm place.

This little ball, which was about ten feet above the surface of the water, was in that calm place, and the storms were its accompaniment. It was zooming along at a very rapid rate, and it was bringing the storms with it. All of the scientists with their satellites were trying to figure out what this little ball that was ten feet off the ocean surface needed, like four hurricanes to accompany it. They were trying to figure out what this thing was.

The next scene was I was a third-person observer, and I was in this room. It was a small room, about 8 by 8, say, and in the middle of the room, there was this display case like a museum, you know, like a Victorian museum. It was made out of wood; the top had this glass, and inside the case was this ball. It was just floating, and inside the room was Stephen Hawking, you know, the physicist in the wheelchair, and a faceless president of the United States. It didn't matter who he was. It just mattered that he was the President of the United States.

The room itself, I remember from the dream, was made out of titanium dioxide. I woke up after this dream and I thought, what the hell is titanium dioxide? The walls were seven feet thick. So the idea was that little ball, which had caused those four storms, was going to be — they caught it, and they put it in that room; it was going to stay there. Titanium dioxide turned out to be the metal that the hull of the Starship Enterprise is built out of, so it represented like an impermeable substance.

Inside the room, the American president was there, so he's sort of representative of the Mitwelt, which is the social environment. He's sort of the king of the social environment. Then Stephen Hawking, well, Stephen Hawking is disembodied rationality, right? Obviously. The room was a classification system, in a sense, and this ball, whatever it was, was stuck in there. It was going to be a thing that you could look at in a museum and it wasn't going anywhere, so it had been fixed.

When I was watching this thing, it did two weird things in the museum case. The first thing it did was turn into a chrysalis, and you know what a chrysalis is; it’s like a cocoon that a butterfly comes out of. You may not know this, but the Greek word for butterfly is "psyche," and the reason the psyche is a butterfly is because the psyche is something that transforms, and it transforms towards something that's like an aerial spirit.

So this ball was transforming. It transformed into a chrysalis, and then it did a really strange thing: it transformed into a pipe, like a smoking pipe. It was a Meerschaum pipe, which is a carved pipe; I think it's Irish — sort of looks like a little saxophone thing — but it was definitely a pipe. So that was the whole dream, and I woke up and I thought, I got the chrysalis idea. Whatever this ball was, was the thing that's capable of transforming. But then I thought, what the hell? What does that pipe mean? What could that pipe possibly mean?

One other thing transformed into chrysalis, and then back to a bowl, and then it transformed into a pipe, and then back into a bowl, and then it shot out of the case and shot right through those seven-foot walls, and it was gone. It just left a hole like there was — it was moving so fast there was just a hole in the case and there was a hole in the wall, and that was the end of that. It was a ball; it did its chrysalis thing, did its pipe thing, and then it was gone. That box was not going to hold it.

So after I had that dream, quite a while later — two years later — I read this little poem from Dante. It's from The Inferno. The Inferno is an interesting book because it's Dante's attempt to — it's a book about hell, and it's Dante's attempt, in a sense, to turn the old idea of Hell into something that was psychological. Dante has this of hell as this place that has multiple depths, with something that's the absolute worst right at the center. In some sense, it's his attempt to come up with a category structure of evil; he actually puts betrayers right in the center; he figured that was the worst form of moral error.

Anyways, here's part of the poem: Virgil and Dante are going into The Inferno. Virgil's the guide: "Suddenly there broke on the dirty swell of the dark marsh a squall of terrible sound that sent a tremor through both shores of hell, a sound as if two continents of air, one frigid and one scorching, clashed head on in a war of winds that stripped the forest bare, ripped off whole boughs, and blew them helter-skelter along the range of dust it raised before it, making the beasts and shepherds run for shelter."

That's a messenger from God comes down, and that's how he makes himself manifest. I thought, wow, that's very much like this dream I had. Two continents of air, and there was this similar idea that there was something at the center that couldn't be encapsulated in a conceptual structure — at least not for any length of time. You know, being is like that; you can't encapsulate it in a conceptual structure for any length of time. No matter what you think, you're wrong, and even if you're right enough for the time being, being is transforming, and you have to keep up with it because otherwise, the structure that you were inhabiting becomes dead and decays, and then you fall apart.

You need a conceptual structure because it orients you, but it can't be static. That's the problem with totalitarian ideology: that totalitarian ideology is predicated on the idea — it's utopian — that you can finally model things once and for all. Once you do that, it's perfect, and then it never has to change. And that's wrong. Technically, it's not wrong arbitrarily; it's not a kind of relative wrong; it's just wrong. It's because whatever being is, is not static, and so whatever it is that you inhabit to allow being to work in your favor also can't be static, even though it has to be a structure.

Then I figured out why it was a pipe, and that took about three years for me to figure that out. This is a famous painting by Magritte, and it says, "This is not a pipe." What does that mean? What does he mean? The first question is, is it a pipe? What do we think? It's kind of — that's an image of a pipe. It's actually an image of an image of a pipe, right? Because we're projecting it. But yes, you're exactly right; it's not a pipe.

So what is Magritte trying to communicate? What's the idea? The idea is that the conception is not the object, or another way of putting it is the map is not the territory. You live in the map in some sense, but the territory is always underneath it. The reason that little ball turned into a pipe was to make that case: it's like it was in this box, and it was being transformed into an entity that was defined and static. It said two things: it said everything transforms; that's the chrysalis. And everything transforms into psyche because the butterfly is psyche.

Then it said, don't mistake the map for the territory. Then it left, and the being that manifests itself — the being that shines forth in the phenomenologist's sense — is the thing that cannot be encapsulated inside any conceptual structure. It's always outside of it; it's always outside of it, and you have to keep up with it. That's why, in the Harry Potter book, for example, the best players don't play the game; they chase the snitch.

What that means is that they follow what manifests itself to them as most meaningful at any given time. Now, Jung would have thought of that as the manifestation of the self because he would say — and it's like, I can never remember — I can never differentiate these two thinkers. Jung's like Bin Swanger; he assumes that the meaning is a consequence of the action of some internal structure more or less that he characterized as the self. Boss's perspective is, in some sense, it's more like a classical religious perspective, although he dispenses almost entirely with any religious language and makes the claim that meaning is the fundamental element of being and that if you lose touch with meaning, then the quality of your being is going to collapse — not only yours, but also the meaning of the society that you're part of.

Because when you're updating, when you're paying attention to what's meaningful, not only are you updating yourself — not only are you improving the quality of your own being — but because you're embedded in this Mitwelt and you're like a node in a network, your transformations affect the transformations of the people around you. You can't only transform yourself or fail to; if you transform yourself, you also transform society. If you fail to transform yourself, then you also fail to transform society. If you fail to transform society, then it stays static, and if it stays static, then it dies.

That's the relationship between the phenomenological viewpoint and the existential viewpoint. To me, what the phenomenologists force you to grapple with is the phenomena of meaning because it seems to me—and this is basically Heider's point. He said, well, what's self-evident? Well, one answer is objects; the other answer, predicated on a different perspective, is meaning is self-evident in that you can't escape from it. You can escape from the positive elements of it by being locked, but you cannot escape from the negative elements of it.

You can't argue yourself out of it, and you act as if there's nothing more real. If you think about it this way, if someone's terrified, they're going to act it out. You cannot calm them down using rational means. If someone's in pain, it's the same thing. Both anxiety or terror and pain are forms of meaning, and they're underneath rationality in a sense, in that rationality is powerless against terror and pain. If you're terrified, then you'll act that way, and if you're in pain, then you'll act that way. You might do everything you can to say there’s no such thing as meaning, but if your state of being is one of terror, no matter what you say, you’re going to act like that's real.

Then you have to ask yourself another question: what's more reflective of real—what you say or how you act? It matters because what constitutes real changes depending on how you answer that question, and the existentialists would say, well, how you act is what's real. How you act reflects what's real. Magritte played with this a lot. There's another painting by Magritte, and he often uses men in suits. A suit is representative of a certain kind of — a certain mode of being, and it's a mode of being that's focused on — that's focused rather narrowly on whatever a business suit represents: dominance, hierarchy, success, materialistic possessions—that's at least the cliched and satirical version of business.

It certainly represents conformity. Magritte's painting is a representation of blindness induced by conformity. These people can see, but they're only seeing what's right in front of their eyes. What's right in front of their eyes that they see blocks them from seeing everything else. Yes, in the first quarter of the 20th century, it could be something more like kind of a person. Sure, it's that. It's conformity, essentially.

And it's not only that; it's like it's moral conformity. I'm not saying that it's right. It's in the guise of moral conformity. If you wear a suit, you're representing what the culture perceives to be associated with citizenship and responsibility. A lot of what Magritte did was to try to dissociate the structure from the underlying reality, and he does that, for example, in the painting on the right where he takes an image and then juxtaposes it with the wrong signifier. In some sense, those paintings might be—almost like that painting is a poem in that the juxtaposition of the label and the entity forces you to imagine more than either of them would force you to do alone.

You might say, well, in what manner is a horse like a door? What, in what manner is a clock like the wind? Or a pitcher like a bird? Well, and he returns to normal in the last one, time flies like the wind. I mean, a horse is something that takes you places; it's like a door. A bird? It isn't exactly clear to me how a vase is like a bird.

This is another dream that's attempting to lay out the same idea, so you are aw...you know, I believe it's da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. It's this figure; you've presumed you've all seen it. It's a very famous image. The man is in a square, and then the square is in a circle. In this dream, this dream had that image, except the square wasn't a square; it was a cube. So the figure inside the — there was a figure inside the cube, which was a man, sort of a generic man or an idealized man. The cube was about nine feet, maybe, or eight feet by eight feet by eight feet, and the man was suspended in the middle of the cube.

So he was about a foot and a half off the floor, floating. Then from his hands to the wall was about a foot and a half, and he could reach close to the wall that was in front of him. The inside of the cube, no matter where the man looked, was covered with these squares with a circle in them, and inside the circle, there was a little dragon's tail. If the man walked forward, then the cube went with him, and if the man walked backward, the cube went with him.

It was a representation of what surrounds you in reality. The man could reach out to any of these squares with the circle with the tail, and he could pull on one of the tails, and that would pull something into being. There were all these choices in front of him that represented different paths of being. So what that dream represented was this — you might say, well, what is it that's right in front of you? Then you could say, well, chairs and the floor and students and light, and that's true.

But there's another way of thinking about it, which is that what's right in front of you is a landscape of possibility to which your conceptions of objects blind you. No matter where you're going in your life, the things that present themselves to you offer an array of almost unlimited possibility. So when I look ahead and I see a student or students, then that makes all of you one bit of information in a sense, right? Because I’ve generalized across all of you, and there’s some utility in that in that part of what you're doing here can be conceptualized as being a student.

But the loss in that perception might be far greater than the gain because it reduces all of your complexity to a single utterance and makes you flat. So then you think, as you wander around the world, are you seeing this or are you seeing a wall in front of you that from which you can pull anything you want? The standard viewpoint would be that this is real, but it seems to me that you can make a reasonable case that what you interact with is not so much reality as it is possibility.

The possibility is what lurks behind your conception of what's there, and that possibility is also the thing out of which everything emerges. If you come to my office and I sit and talk to you, and I try to approach you without any preconceptions, which would be, say, a Rogerian approach, then all sorts of things can emerge into reality that wouldn't emerge at all if I stayed rigidly in a prescribed role. Now, there's some utility in the prescribed role; don't get me wrong because it gives people structure, it helps them manage their expectations, and it protects them from being exposed to too much possibility at any one time because that can be overwhelming.

But the danger is at least in part that you'll blind yourself to all the things that are there by only allowing yourself to see what you can immediately see. The Buddhists talk about desire as something to push aside, and I think that's their attempt to warn people about the danger of substituting their own preconceptions about what should be or what is for attention to what's behind that. So imagine that you're depressed and you're bored and all the positive meaning has gone out of your life.

Well, perhaps it's because you've substituted your a priori perceptions for possibility, and you're in this cave that's in part a mirror, and all it does is reflect back to you your sterile preconceptions. Behind that is the possibility — and it’s conceivable in that possibility, which is maybe infinite possibility, that what it is that you lack now that's making you so rigid and bored could be pulled out of that possibility.

Boss said man's option to respond to this claim or to choose not to do so seems to be the very core of human freedom. All right, so I'm going to return to a theme that I developed partway through this lecture: if being doesn't manifest itself to you as structured, then it's as if you're falling endlessly. You need structure; structure is like a set of tools that you have at your disposal. Now, the problem with structure is that it can blind you to possibility, and the possibility might be more important than the structure.

That means that partly what you have to do is balance the possibility and the structure. One possibility is that the things that manifest themselves to you as meaningful constitute a gateway between structure and possibility so that if you follow that which shines forth, then you stay sufficiently within the structure. But at the same time, you're pulling in enough new possibility so that the structure stays dynamic and alive instead of static and dead. If you're attentive and you pay attention to the cues that being is offering you, showing you where to look, and you actually look, then maybe you can stay flexible enough so that as things shift around you, you don't grow a huge gap between yourself and the world and fall.

Maybe you just into interact in a dance that's of acceptable emotional significance. It's anxiety-provoking enough to keep you awake, and it's compelling enough to keep you interested. Those two things in some sense constitute the core of meaning. In order to interact with the world in that way, you have to flip your preconceptions upside down and make the presupposition that the material elements that people — modern people — regard as most real are actually secondary and limited derivations of something that's more fundamental.

The thing that's more fundamental is possibility, and possibility shines through structure with meaning. That's the phenomenological perspective, and the existential perspective is: follow that meaning or suffer the consequences. That's that. We'll see you.