The More Things Change

To write for posterity is not to worry whether they will read us tomorrow. It is to aspire to a certain quality of writing. Even if no one reads us. --Dávila 

I would like to someday publish another book. But what would be the point? It's all here -- and thensome -- and besides, who would be the potential audience? 

Some authors have to first create the audience for whom they write, and at this point in -- approaching 5,000 posts deep -- it would be a real challenge for me to write for any other audience. 

For one thing, I don't like to argue. Rather, I'm just trying to help. If the reader doesn't find it helpful, the last thing I want to do is to try to talk him into it. 

We're just articulating a vision, take it or leave it, and no hard feelings. Still, it would be nice to reach the anonymous Raccoon who doesn't know he is one. What a sad and lonely life! Surely they're out there, but

We need to write simultaneously as if no one whatsoever will read us and as if everyone will read us.

Indeed,

To write honestly for others, one must write fundamentally for oneself.

Turns out that I am the first member of the audience I have had to create in order to write. This may sound circular, but over the years I have indeed become increasingly influenced by my own writing, to the point that I actually assimilate my own vision as it sinks in post by post. 

Looking back on it, the vision was first articulated as long ago as 1988, in my doctoral dissertation. 

Every writer comments indefinitely on his brief original text.

I just pulled my dissertation from the shelf, and it begins with a quote by F.L. Kunz:

There is in the modern mind a growing wonder at the baffling depth and immensity of the perspectives being opened up by science, and a growing sense that they are somehow grasped together within a supremely intelligible context having more dimensions than space-time -- a context which man is perpetually engaged in reconstructing from the glimpses afforded him by the play between reality and understanding. 

The more things change. Flipping to the end, I see there's another quote by the same F.L. Kunz:

There is one universe, and modern understanding requires that all experience and knowledge be seen as a consistent part of the whole. Unity is possible because the reality is non-material and continuous and therefore universally present.

Good times. And here we are. 

My dissertation had an audience of four: me, my chairperson, and two advisors, but I have serious doubts about the last three. Rather, I suspect they gave it a glance and concluded that this guy seems pretty serious about what he's saying, so let's give him a pass. They were not members of the audience I hadn't yet created.

I mean, woo woo: how did I get away with this?

Just what exactly is a human? Where did we come from? What is consciousness?  

One must bear in mind that human beings are only in the initial stages -- the first 50,000 years or so -- of the process that a species goes through in evolving to a level of complexity which includes the capacity for self-reflection. 

If you say so, Bob. 

But ironically, the book I'm currently reading -- Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering -- actually reviews some of the same findings discussed in my dissertation. The author is a theologian, but there is a whole chapter devoted to the evolution of persons within the dynamic space of the mother-infant dyad:

Central to mental development is a psychological system that is greater and more powerful than the sum of its parts. The parts are caregiver and infant; the system is what happens when they act and feel in concert. 

The combined operation of infant-in-relation-to-caregiver is a motive force in development, and it achieves wonderful things. When it does not exist, and the motive force is lacking, the whole of mental development is terribly compromised (Hobson, in Stump).

That is precisely what I said in my dissertation. Even "a pre-linguistic infant can know her primary care-giver as a person" and "read the mind of her primary care-giver to some limited extent" (Stump).

To be emotionally connected with someone is to experience someone else as a person. Such connectedness is what enables a baby... to differentiate people from things.... It is through emotional connectedness that a baby discovers the kind of thing a person is. A person is the kind of thing with which one can communicate (Hobson). 

Stump continues:

it has become clear that a pre-linguistic infant's capacity for social cognition is foundational to the infant's ability to learn a language or to develop normal cognitive abilities in many other areas. 

She even correctly relates this to the right cerebral hemisphere, which is a pretty good guess for a theologian: "left-brain skills alone" will not

reveal to us all that is philosophically interesting about the world.... Breadth of focus is a right-brain skill. So are many abilities useful in interpersonal relations.... those who are impaired with respect to right-hemisphere functions have an "inability to give an overview or extract a moral from a story... or to assess properly social situations."

I'm still not sure where she's going with all this, but I guess we'll find out.