The Problem of Distraction
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The Problem of Distraction

Paul North

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eBook - ePub

The Problem of Distraction

Paul North

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About This Book

We live in an age of distraction. Contemporary analyses of culture, politics, techno-science, and psychology insist on this. They often suggest remedies for it, or ways to capitalize on it. Yet they almost never investigate the meaning and history of distraction itself. This book corrects this lack of attention. It inquires into the effects of distraction, defined not as the opposite of attention, but as truly discontinuous intellect. Human being has to be reconceived, according to this argument, not as quintessentially thought-bearing, but as subject to repeated, causeless blackouts of mind.

The Problem of Distraction presents the first genealogy of the concept from Aristotle to the largely forgotten, early twentieth-century efforts by Kafka, Heidegger, and Benjamin to revolutionize the humanities by means of distraction. Further, the book makes the case that our present troubles cannot be solved by recovering or enhancing attention. Not-always-thinking beings are beset by radical breaks in their experience, but in this way they are also receptive to what has not and cannot yet be called experience.

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Year
2011
ISBN
9780804778978

CHAPTER 1

Not-Always-Thinking / Aristotle

No one who wasn’t already convinced that asking what thinking means counted as thinking would ask such a question. At the same time, no one who didn’t also intend from the outset to suspend or abandon this conviction would bother to ask. Either the most profound question in thought is also the silliest, or else something essential about the constitution of thinking is revealed here, or both. Am I thinking when I think about thinking’s meaning, or do I put the act, receptivity, or spontaneity—however I may mean it or will mean it—into suspension, in order to inquire into its sense? If I suspend the sense of it, can I trust the outcome? Won’t the thought of thinking’s meaning for all intents and purposes be illegitimate, a result of faulty method, fickle? In short, the thought of thinking’s meaning is a tangle that produces something more like not-thinking. If thinking seems to stumble when it makes its act into a question, its approach to distraction should be even more precipitous.
How many understandings of this activity or passivity—thinking, penser, noein, denken—and its ambiguous seat or faculty—mens, mind, intellect, nous, Geist, esprit, and so forth—have been posited, and how various the attempts to cut through the tangle! The stubborn “problem of the moving principle of our thought,” so Franz Brentano summed it up in his brilliant 1867 study of Aristotle’s De anima. Brentano was struck by the large variety of responses to what he perceived as a single problem with a single solution. “How different the paths that different minds have traveled!” in order to arrive at thought thinking thought (The Psychology of Aristotle 157). How different indeed, and how strongly Brentano wanted to send the paths back to their origin, to minimize the confusion and show their primordial convergence, which could be found, he contended, in Aristotle’s account of nous. Not returning to Aristotle had been the kernel of the problem. “How many of those who indignantly shunned this thought were driven to the most extravagant assumptions by the difficulties of the problem. . . .” Aristotle too likes to list errant paths taken by his predecessors. Brentano and Aristotle agree on this methodological ideal: there is one original and unified description of thinking, representing the only solution to the problem of thought, and the different thoughts of different minds on the subject, when taken together, although they apparently point away from the origin, in pointing away simultaneously point back to the primordial path from which their minds strayed. They share the assumption that thinking is in essence whole, transparent, stable, essentially separate from the variety of ways in which one might try to gain access to it, a complex unity, to be sure, yet despite its complexity lacking nothing; thought is, in short, eminently thinkable. Diverging articulations of the meaning of thought prove the underlying unity. Brentano accepts the multiplicity; he has a plan for it: “is there not rather more unity where one begins with a multiplicity of assumptions, but where layer is securely placed upon layer, and the uniformity of style and coherence of all parts is skillfully preserved from top to bottom?” (159). The history of thought can be peeled away to reveal Aristotle, the skilled preserver who pioneered the layering of parts (in the soul) to engineer their coherence. After an afterlife of further layering, Brentano returns the parts to their proper strata.
Under the last layer, following this logic, lies the active intellect, the hen and haplos beneath the manageable complexity. No doubt it too is layered, encrusted with the false opinions of philologists and interpreters. The Aristotelian image of nous poiētikos is riddled with conceptual problems that Brentano sets out to simplify in a reading of De anima, perhaps better than Aristotle did or could possibly have done. Aristotle, after all, does not use the phrase “productive thought,” nous poiētikos, which nonetheless came to represent his thought of thought for millennia, up to and including in Brentano’s study.1
We will also start from a problem in Aristotle’s account of nous, although it doesn’t seem to have become diverted or layered over with opinion, and so it may not be a problem in Brentano’s sense. Like Brentano, we will return to a beginning in De anima, but instead of the lofty archē of a tradition that degenerates into extravagance after “this thought,” Aristotle’s pure thought of actual thinking, ours will stop short at a trouble that might have prevented him from beginning. In the beginning there is the beginning of something that would arrest him, but it is not carried through. Aristotle addresses the arresting trouble in his treatise on the psuche, when he calls for an investigation into a peculiar disturbance in noēsis. “Of not-always-thinking the cause must be investigated” (tou de mē aei noein to aition episkepteon) (De anima 430a5–6). An urgency sounds in this phrase, a fury to pinpoint a cause, and yet at the same time the strangeness and precariousness of the demand is also audible. With this sentence Aristotle enjoins us to find insight into the cause of an irregularity in the concept or experience of noēsis. In the general order of the argument in this section of the text, the demand seems to come out of nowhere. Unlike other problēmata or aporiai in the theory of nous, this one is not contextualized; it is not integrated into the network of psychic capacities—perception (aisthēsis), comprehension (dianoia), imagination (phantasia), and intellection (noēsis)—nor does it find a proper place in the ontological schema—potential/actual (dunamis/energeia)—that operates here. A sign of the peculiar difficulty inherent in making this demand is its sudden appearance and its even more precipitous disappearance from the argument. Once the productive aspect of nous has been determined to be actual, one, apart, and unchanging, Aristotle forgets or ignores the demand just as abruptly as he announced it.
The demand hangs suspended without a response, and in this suspension, and suspense, questions arise: why would a thinking whose time signature was not always, mē aei, present itself to Aristotle as requiring, let alone being susceptible to, causal investigation? Why would it seem necessary—as the suffix “-teon” implies—for an inquiry into the intellectual aspect of the psuchē, which was in turn necessary to the logos of anthrōpos? Moreover, how could the emphatically necessary investigation then come to be abandoned by this most rigorous of philosophers?

Aristotle’s Insatiable Demand

An understanding of non-attentional distraction could have been articulated in Ancient Greece; conditions were ripe. A strong theory of intellectual activity had developed in which nous, with theoria as its main mode and genre, had taken a stand against poetry and history, as well as, in another vein, against less centralizing modes of community. As its meaning changed and became fixed in texts by thinkers from Heraclitus to Aristotle, nous came to replace other principles for organizing cultural goods, while at the same time excluding and substituting for disorder and the lack of principles.2 Needless to say, only in retrospect do pre-noetic modes appear as lacking principle and as negations of order. Not-thinking is an accusation made within the agora of thought. After the demise of Mycenaean palace culture, at roughly the same time as scattered rural communities on the Greek peninsula began collecting into poleis, nous began its rise to prominence. Nous and polis have been seen as historically parallel centralizing, stabilizing, and ordering processes. In their own ways responding and contributing to the turning point between the so-called eighth-century renaissance when the Homeric poems were most likely recorded and the “golden age” when the dalliance called philosophy came into its own, the two concepts provided guidelines for a novel commonality and predictability in anthropic things.
Alternative structures had been articulated, among other places, in the Homeric poems, although the consolidation of political community around something like a soul had already begun there. The wild caprices of the Olympian gods in the Iliad, for instance, are ultimately quashed by “The Will of Zeus,” which transcends all other negotiations.3 When, a few centuries after the Homeric poems became codified, Heraclitus wrote that the unified intellectual principle (hen to sophon mounon) was “both willing and unwilling to be known by the name Zeus,” he was commenting on a process, well underway, by which transcendence was falling out of fashion and was gradually being replaced with an immanent force or will, though the necessity for a divine will would never wane (Kirk and Raven #228). An internal will can be found at work in almost every scene of the Iliad, a plan sprung from the father’s head that renders mortal challenges moot. Achilles’ resistance—to Agamemnon, to war in general, to the gods, as well as to his own finitude and fate—is but a reaction to the Zeus principle, the psychic principle of principles. In the codified texts left from the Homeric tradition the hero’s resistance becomes the medium through which the gods’ will exerts itself, crushing other forms of order and pointing the way toward a collectivity based on a central intellect that keeps the destiny of the group firmly in mind, despite the vicissitudes of experience.
An anecdote highlights the importance for Aristotle of nous’s independence from all that might change. His student Clearchus reports that Aristotle attended a public experiment in which nous was shown to be separable not only from the body but also from the rest of the psuchē. In the anecdote, someone strikes a reclining boy with a rod made for attracting souls (psuchoulkos rabdos). Upon being hit, the boy’s soul slips out of his body and comes to hover in a corner of the observation room. To the amazement of the onlookers who have gathered to witness the event, including Aristotle, when the soul is slipped back into him, the boy can report all that happened as though he had experienced it without interruption (Clearchus 11).4
Although the story is apocryphal and surely originates in a confusion about Aristotle’s desires in his study of the psuchē and its separable aspect, productive nous, on the part of a well-meaning but too empirically minded student, or perhaps on the part of Proclus, who records Clearchus’s anecdote, it is nevertheless striking. Through the veil of distortion produced by a student on one hand and a scholar on the other, the story lets a secret be communicated: the philosopher’s desire for direct experience of the highest aspect of thought. Throughout his natural-scientific investigations and even in his metaphysics, a direct view of the separability of nous eluded Aristotle. Unlike later generations of psychologists, the scientist did not think to experiment on himself; the subject here is a prostrate boy.5 In contrast to later schools of thought—Cartesianism or phenomenology, say—Greek “philosophy of mind” is acted out within a resolutely social milieu. Here, in contrast to Plato’s communal philosophizing, which proceeds by dialogue, the experimenter philosophizes with an instrument, the soul-attracting rod, which attracts psuchai not through erōs, as the figure of the prostrate boy might otherwise suggest, but by a blow (plēxas, “having struck him”) (Clearchus 11). The philosophical quality of the soul-attracting rod seems to be the brusqueness with which it jars loose what only appears to be integrated into soul and body. The experimenter’s skill at moving psuchai around is also to be noted. It is Aristotle’s teaching, after all, that the intellectual part of the psuchē is actualized by the highest being, a god (Metaphysics 1072b19–30). He doesn’t say in the Metaphysics, however, that violence is needed. In this anecdote, Clearchus confuses the empirical with the intelligible, confounding the inductive method of second philosophy with the deductive method of first philosophy. Or perhaps he is poking fun at the frustrated desire at the center of his teacher’s teaching: to be able to demonstrate with the certainty of the senses that nous is separable and immortal. The joke is on the student then, since it is not in the realm of phenomena that the difference of nous can be demonstrated. As soon as it became a phenomenon it would no longer be separable. Passed on in the anecdote, then, is the problem in Aristotle’s animating wish: he desires mastery over the special motion of nous, but he cannot demonstrate to himself that he has gained it.
Clearchus’s anecdote also reveals a peculiar quality, necessary in order for nous to be separable from the senses, from the other higher parts of the soul (such as imagination and the locomotive principle), and from phusis in general. If the psuchē is not mixed with physical life in any way it must have an unnatural motility of its own, different in kind from the locomotion it produces in bodies. Given Aristotle’s rejection of a “self-moving mover,” this motion would seem difficult to imagine. But the anecdote gives a clue. The peculiar movement of the psuchē is a movement without place, if place is thought of as physical location. In effect nous would have to be placeless, where being placeless meant nous could at any time slip away from these psychic locales, the senses, the imagination, the body, the world. To become master over this exceptional noetic motion is what it means, according to the anecdote, to be a philosopher. And indeed, the stunned boy recalls the process by which one comes to philosophy in the Aristotelian muthos. According to Metaphysics Λ, a philosopher is the one susceptible to a blow of wonder—thaumazein (982b12–13), but also the one who can make use of this stunning blow to produce motion. Philosophizing moves the philosopher from potential to actual philosophizing, from trivial aporias to momentous ones (982b11–983a11). This anecdote, in contrast, goes further: the psuchē is struck out of place and is made to reveal its special movement.6 In this student’s misreading or joke, a philosopher’s psuchē-moving rod, in one and the same blow, stuns a student, proves the separability, unity, and power of nous, and inadvertently gestures toward its innate slipperiness.
And yet the boy’s psuchē continues to process perceptions while he is out of his senses. Slipping away, in this tale, does not alter the ability of nous to function as the productive principle of thought. This is the exoteric teaching that survives in the anecdote. In his epilogue, Proclus remarks that the experiment convinced onlookers about the psuchē’s independence from the body (Clearchus 11).7 And so, the philosopher has succeeded in demonstrating that, even when separated from the organs of experience, nous never stops noetizing. It operates continually, unchangingly, and forever, independent of circumstances.8 Whatever ephemeral forces appear to affect it belong to the body or the lower parts of the soul, and they only appear to affect it. Thus, on the surface, to be a philosopher means to demonstrate the total and continual disaffection of nous. No merely empirical violence can compel nous ...

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