Latest / Gabriel Ellis, PhD | The Curious Mind Podcast / Social Recognition and its Philosophical Roots

Transcript

Social Recognition and its Philosophical Roots · Gabriel Ellis, PhD | The Curious Mind Podcast

• 0:01
  Welcome to another episode of the Curious Mind podcast.
• 0:04
  My name is Gabriel Ellis, I'm a psychologist, psychotherapist
• 0:08
  and philosopher. And today indeed, I want to dig
• 0:11
  deeper into the philosophy of connectedness and of loneliness,
• 0:16
  a topic that I have introduced in the previous episodes
• 0:20
  already, and focus there on the more social roots of the
• 0:26
  problem, the psychological aspects of the problem.
• 0:29
  And today I want to focus on why social life connectedness is an
• 0:36
  issue at all and why it seems to be so difficult to emancipate
• 0:42
  ourselves from this issue. Today I want to show that is
• 0:45
  indeed impossible to emancipate ourselves from this issue, to
• 0:49
  finally solve it in a satisfying way.
• 0:54
  The basis for loneliness and connectedness lies in obviously
• 0:59
  in the success of failure, of recognizing others and of being
• 1:04
  accurately and adequately recognized by them.
• 1:11
  There are three prerequisites for social connection and
• 1:13
  loneliness. 1 is a separation from the other, so it's it's
• 1:20
  just obvious the other has to be something else than me so that
• 1:25
  there is a connection possible at all.
• 1:27
  The second is the second prerequisite is that I have a
• 1:32
  need to establish a connection with this other.
• 1:36
  So in most situations, the stone on the street is something
• 1:42
  different than me, but I don't have a need to connect with it.
• 1:45
  So in order to have a topic of connectedness, social topic of
• 1:50
  recognition, there needs to be another, typically a human being
• 1:55
  and my need to connect to them. And 3rd, the prerequisite is the
• 2:02
  ability to identify myself with things that are not me, meaning
• 2:09
  that I perceive the other person as part of me or myself as a
• 2:15
  part of them. And this sounds a bit cryptic
• 2:20
  maybe, but if you think about close human relations, intimate
• 2:25
  relations, close family relations, especially as
• 2:29
  children with our parents or siblings, then it becomes
• 2:32
  clearer, especially on second sight and when you analyze the
• 2:37
  feelings that you have for each other, that there is a certain
• 2:40
  aspect of possessiveness or identification more generally
• 2:46
  taking place. Where I behave and feel and
• 2:51
  communicate is if I belong to them or they somehow belong to
• 2:57
  me. And part of therapeutic
• 3:00
  processes, for example, is often enough to reduce this automatic
• 3:06
  sense of possessiveness so that the most unhealthy aspects of
• 3:10
  relationship, which is to control, get reduced so that the
• 3:17
  other has the possibility to discover the freedom for me to
• 3:21
  discover my freedom in relationships.
• 3:23
  And usually this has a healthy impact, especially on
• 3:28
  relationship circumstances that are difficult or unhealthy.
• 3:33
  Anyway, this sense of identification, this potential
• 3:37
  of identification with others is fundamental for the human mind.
• 3:41
  And I want to give you examples or the complexity of this all.
• 3:47
  The relationship with the other, so to speak, does not begin with
• 3:51
  birth, with language, or with the presence of other people,
• 3:55
  but it starts already in the boom.
• 3:58
  The embryonic consciousness first perceives its own body and
• 4:04
  sensation, right? So this is something that we
• 4:07
  know embryos in the womb, womb do experience.
• 4:10
  They experience a sense of the body and they have sensations
• 4:14
  and to a certain degree they have very elementary feelings
• 4:19
  like pain. And here already we see a blurry
• 4:23
  line between me and others. This is a common theme and this
• 4:30
  topic. The lines are blurred.
• 4:32
  The lines between me and the others are blurry from the
• 4:36
  beginning to the end, and the beginning is in the womb.
• 4:41
  So when I experience pain, for example, there is an aspect in
• 4:45
  this pain that is other and there is an aspect that is me.
• 4:50
  The aspect that is other is that the the existence of this pain,
• 4:57
  The coming up of the pain is partly due to circumstances, for
• 5:02
  example, something happening within the womb or there is a
• 5:05
  growing pain or there can be chemical imbalance, but either
• 5:11
  way this is an outside circumstance that is one of the
• 5:15
  roots of the pain. On the other hand, the pain is
• 5:19
  not completely other. It is imposed on my
• 5:22
  consciousness by circumstances, but the fact that is that it is
• 5:27
  in my consciousness immediately makes me relate to it.
• 5:32
  So it happens within the vessel of my experience, which is me,
• 5:39
  and yet it is caused by outside forces, which is the other.
• 5:47
  Philosophically, if you're interested to get into the
• 5:50
  depths of it, it is Hegel, of course, again, Hegel, which I've
• 5:56
  mentioned so often as being such a rich and fertile source for
• 6:02
  psychological speculations within philosophy.
• 6:06
  Speculations in the best sense. Hegel describes in detail the
• 6:11
  complex process of the mental development as a dialectic, as a
• 6:18
  movement between the other and me.
• 6:22
  Within me, or to put it less and less cryptical terms, self
• 6:29
  growth includes understanding more and more how the experience
• 6:38
  within me belongs or is based on other elements that are not me,
• 6:46
  to emancipate myself from it. But not in the modern sense of
• 6:50
  becoming more and more independent, but by more and
• 6:53
  more understanding how the spirit functions and thus both,
• 7:00
  so to speak, understanding and incorporating the other within
• 7:06
  me. And through this process to
• 7:07
  become more independent and more encompassing as a subject.
• 7:13
  It is a difficult process. Also, when you read Hegel, you
• 7:17
  will see that this is difficult to understand, but basically it
• 7:22
  always involves new levels and new understandings of what the
• 7:26
  other inside of me is and what I am within me.
• 7:30
  And again, to bring the example of pain or any kind of
• 7:34
  experience, both are there, the other and me at the same time,
• 7:41
  and there is no way to draw a an artificial distinction there,
• 7:48
  meaning that it is not possible for me to establish who I am in
• 7:53
  the exchange, in the relatedness to others.
• 7:55
  I will never be able to reduce it to this is me, this is you,
• 8:01
  and it is a pure interaction between individuals that we're
• 8:05
  engaged in. There is always a sense, there's
• 8:08
  always a process of identification that takes place
• 8:11
  where I am identified with parts of you and especially when it
• 8:16
  comes to humans, with how I perceive that you see me.
• 8:22
  In other words, I might fall in love with a person who finds me
• 8:27
  attractive because I'm interested in people who have a
• 8:32
  certain perspective of me. So there you see the blurry
• 8:35
  lines. There you see an example of
• 8:37
  complex identification. OK, go back.
• 8:42
  And the development of humans. So I described already that the
• 8:46
  relation, the blurry relationship to the other, not
• 8:50
  in the sense of humans yet, begins in the boop.
• 8:53
  Now children typically until the age of seven, they continue to
• 9:00
  have very complex and very blurred relationships with
• 9:04
  others and not only to humans. Young children have quasi social
• 9:14
  relationships after birth. They tend to attribute to
• 9:19
  project mental qualities not just to humans, but also to
• 9:22
  objects that play with dolls, that play with toys, they play
• 9:26
  with objects, they talk to them, and they even imagine that those
• 9:32
  objects talk back to them, that those objects have relationships
• 9:36
  with them. It shows how ready the human
• 9:38
  mind is to project a relatedness, a connection even
• 9:42
  to lifeless objects, in order to enact a social principle, a
• 9:50
  quasi social relationship. The first one to deeply describe
• 9:57
  these processes in children was the Swiss cognitivist or
• 10:02
  cognitive psychologist John Piaget.
• 10:04
  He called this principle early childhood animism.
• 10:11
  To animism, anima as a as a word for the soul, so that children
• 10:16
  assume that objects have a soul. So children therefore not only
• 10:24
  utilize social interactions with people, with the parents, with
• 10:28
  siblings, with other children, with kindergarteners, but also
• 10:31
  project these quasi social processes onto objects with
• 10:36
  which they have partly been identified.
• 10:40
  This is most common with toys that they love very much.
• 10:45
  There's clearly a sense of identification going on where
• 10:49
  they feel that this toy belongs to them.
• 10:53
  It gets incorporated into the mental sphere of animism within
• 10:58
  them. But in the way there is also the
• 11:02
  opposite process going on that children perceive that they are
• 11:06
  the position of these objects going on.
• 11:12
  To put a perspective on childhood in general, I want to
• 11:17
  mention a fundamental aspect that really cements these normal
• 11:22
  importance of other people in our lives.
• 11:25
  And this is the extremely long phase of the dependence of
• 11:29
  children. It was Freud, and then very much
• 11:33
  la con after him, who emphasized that human children are helpless
• 11:38
  and dependent on others for significantly longer time than
• 11:43
  other animals. You can watch any animal
• 11:47
  documentary if you see how horses give birth and the young
• 11:52
  link will be able to walk around only hours after birth.
• 11:57
  How long does it take for human children to be just bodily, so
• 12:02
  independent that they can move around and seek the mother or go
• 12:06
  to play? It takes many, many months for
• 12:09
  children to just gain the control over the body in a
• 12:14
  sufficient way that they can just move.
• 12:17
  And this is extremely unusual in the human realm.
• 12:20
  In the animal realm, there are other animals who whose children
• 12:27
  are also dependent for a very long time on the parents, and
• 12:32
  usually these are also animals that have social have complex
• 12:38
  social interactions. This long standing dependency of
• 12:44
  children to their parents makes them extremely receptive to
• 12:50
  recognition, to love, to support, and even more
• 12:55
  importantly, children grow up identifying themselves with the
• 12:59
  main people around them, and not only that, but also with the
• 13:03
  image that these people have of them.
• 13:07
  This is what I can observe regularly in my clinical
• 13:10
  practice. Children have been grown up in
• 13:14
  an environment where the parents believe that they are maybe
• 13:18
  lazy, maybe not attractive. They were criticized often
• 13:22
  enough and children cannot help but to take over this image that
• 13:26
  they have been presented to them by the parents and to
• 13:30
  incorporate it into their own identity.
• 13:33
  So there you see a complex hall of mirrors, so to speak, that
• 13:38
  children seeing the parents as a very significant, important
• 13:45
  other in their life, coming with the ability and the necessity to
• 13:53
  identify themselves. And then they get presented an
• 13:57
  image of themselves so that the parents have an image of the
• 14:01
  children and their characteristic and their
• 14:03
  personality, and the children start to identify with that
• 14:06
  image. It's a complex relationship of
• 14:10
  otherness, identification and identity that encapsulates the
• 14:18
  social problem in the sense that the child is never fully
• 14:22
  independent. In fact, it grows up
• 14:25
  independence and it continues to have dependent relationship in
• 14:31
  its adulthood, even though for the sake of mental health there
• 14:38
  is a certain degree of independence possible.
• 14:42
  How alive this process of identification is, is you can
• 14:49
  observe that with still how many people have the romantic ideal
• 14:53
  of symbiosis in a relationship, that two people belong together
• 14:58
  until the rest of their life. They Many couples even have the
• 15:03
  expectation that they can read each other's mind.
• 15:06
  For example, in the attitude of if you knew me, if you truly
• 15:10
  loved me, you would see how I'm suffering, how I'm struggling,
• 15:14
  and you would have come to me to ask me what is wrong.
• 15:17
  This is a very widespread attitude among couples.
• 15:22
  And there you see how pervasive and still among adults, how
• 15:27
  widespread this even this ideal of symbiosis and identification
• 15:33
  and possessing each other is. Now let's I hope I could
• 15:39
  describe how necessarily blurry the recognition of others and
• 15:46
  being recognized by others is. Again, if you want to take a
• 15:50
  deeper look at that, then take a look at the Hegel and the
• 15:55
  Subjective Mind chapters on the subjective, objective mind and
• 16:00
  self consciousness in Hegel's later philosophy.
• 16:03
  If we zoom out and go to intellectual and spiritual realm
• 16:11
  where some of those components that are just described are seen
• 16:16
  in a very critical light, then of course we end up with
• 16:20
  Buddhism. Original Buddhism addresses some
• 16:25
  of those core elements. And in fact, if you go into some
• 16:30
  of the most fundamental concepts and ancient Buddhism, then
• 16:34
  identification, this automatic process in the mind of
• 16:38
  identifying itself with other people or with objects is seen
• 16:43
  as one of the main reasons for suffering in human realm.
• 16:49
  And on a more cosmic level, on one of the main components that
• 16:54
  keep subjects in Sangzara in the wheel of almost infinite rebirth
• 17:00
  unless we completely princend it and achieve Nirvana.
• 17:07
  There is even a meditation practice that addresses this
• 17:10
  directly. This meditation practice is the
• 17:13
  practice of perception of not self or non self.
• 17:20
  And this is called an Atta sanya in Pali.
• 17:24
  And in this practice what we do again and again is to dis
• 17:29
  identify not even from outside objects on possessing them.
• 17:35
  This at this stage the practitioners have long mastered
• 17:39
  that already. But in this meditation we
• 17:43
  practice to observe mental phenomena inside our minds, such
• 17:50
  as thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and to disidentify
• 17:55
  from them. So we are countering this
• 17:59
  fundamental aspect of the human mind which is to constantly or
• 18:04
  at least partially identify with what is going on within us.
• 18:08
  We take that as the object and we try to take away the
• 18:15
  identification aspect of that. And kind of, if you want to
• 18:20
  repeating attitude in this practice is to say this is not
• 18:24
  mine, this is not me, this is not myself, this is not a part
• 18:29
  of me. So this memory is not me, it's
• 18:33
  not part of me. This feeling is not me, is not
• 18:36
  part of me. And with this practice of going
• 18:41
  against identification, Buddhism obviously goes not only against
• 18:47
  something that we kind of would wish to have less off in the
• 18:52
  life, you know, that identification would be
• 18:56
  something that obstructs a healthy way of living and we
• 19:00
  would like to reduce it. No, it goes against
• 19:03
  identification in the mind in general, which is such a radical
• 19:09
  perspective on the mind. And it makes clear that when we
• 19:15
  have basically solved this Riddle, when we overcame this
• 19:20
  obstacle of identification, we have not just improved the
• 19:24
  quality of our life because we have stopped this messiness of
• 19:28
  the blurry lines between me and the other.
• 19:31
  This is in fact one of the key key practices or key elements of
• 19:38
  achieving Nirvana, which just shows how fundamental
• 19:42
  identification is in the mind. It's not just, you know, a minor
• 19:47
  component, something that possessive people do or people
• 19:51
  who are superficial and then identify with success or money.
• 19:55
  No, identification is at the root of the mind.
• 19:58
  That is something that makes us very much alive and human, and
• 20:03
  something that, from the perspective of Buddhism, needs
• 20:06
  to be completely transcended in order.
• 20:10
  To free oneself completely from the shackles of reincarnation,
• 20:15
  which is again Buddhist perspective.
• 20:17
  It's not a fact, but this is from the perspective of
• 20:20
  Buddhism. OK, As long as we don't undergo
• 20:24
  such radical transformations, and I would assume that the vast
• 20:29
  majority of humanity doesn't, both identifications and the
• 20:33
  consequences will remain inevitable components of our
• 20:38
  minds. And this means that it will
• 20:41
  remain ever unclear and blurry who I am as an individual
• 20:46
  subject and who others are independent from me.
• 20:52
  So clear dividing lines between myself and others simply don't
• 20:58
  exist, and therefore other people necessarily necessarily
• 21:06
  retain an influence on my inner life.
• 21:10
  Most importantly, my intimate partners, my close friends, my
• 21:16
  family members, but to a certain degree also strangers and
• 21:22
  certainly society in general, because society dictates so much
• 21:27
  about the symbolic codes that we are embedded in, the sense of
• 21:33
  security that we are embedded in, in the culture that we have.
• 21:37
  Can we trust the mechanisms of security, the mechanisms of
• 21:42
  success, the access to joy and lust in the society?
• 21:48
  This is so much not only on an individual or group of family
• 21:53
  family level, but this is tribal, this is societal and in
• 21:59
  as far as these are important aspects to us through our mental
• 22:04
  life, it this automatically means that also to this I will
• 22:10
  have a blurry line where I cannot fully distinguish who I
• 22:14
  am and what society is and also that society is not independent
• 22:20
  from the individuals obviously that it consists of.
• 22:24
  OK, this was it for today. It was rather concise, extremely
• 22:29
  difficult topic. I do not assume that you fully
• 22:33
  can accept what I said based on this.
• 22:36
  But if you go into the philosophy of social recognition
• 22:40
  and for example in the philosophy of Hegel or into
• 22:43
  sociological studies, I think that you will see that what I
• 22:47
  outlined here as a sketch remains valid.
• 22:51
  And especially keep in mind, if you want to on a day-to-day
• 22:56
  basis, understand the difficulty of the blurry lines between you
• 23:01
  and others, then for sure you can observe children.
• 23:06
  You can observe yourself and ask yourself if you have completely
• 23:09
  transcended those mechanisms that keep children entrapped
• 23:13
  into those blurry lines. And if you want to make sure,
• 23:16
  then observe the struggle that you have in the intimate
• 23:20
  connections, that in the intimate relationships that you
• 23:22
  have in the family that you're embedded in.
• 23:25
  And I think that's this will sufficiently show you that it is
• 23:29
  nigh impossible for us to have a truly separate sense of identity
• 23:35
  without taking into account the recognition and the images that
• 23:40
  people have of us. OK, this was it for today.
• 23:44
  Next time I will focus on the practical aspects, on what we
• 23:49
  can do and over in order to overcome the sense of
• 23:53
  loneliness, the sense of separation.
• 23:55
  And with this, then I will conclude this small cycle on the
• 23:59
  new loneliness, the new separatedness, as I've coined it
• 24:03
  in the beginning. Thank you for your attention and
• 24:06
  I hope to see you next time.