|
Noah -> RE: If is isn't about Acts, what is it about? (7/18/2005 11:07:49 AM)
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: ElektraUkM
I don't think that this refines the original idea that Acts in themselves are neither dominant nor submissive. All Acts are, in themselves, neutral ~ as I've already argued. It is the Intention or Motivation behind an act which allows us to attribute to that Act the meaning which we do.
Well we may have to agree to disagree here, but I’d like to flesh out my view for you to consider. The very point at issue is whether all acts are neutral in themselves. To state your conclusion--that they are indeed neutral--as a premise doesn't get anything done.
Under your view it is the intention or motivation which allows us to attribute meaning. This strictly speaking is an epistemic account, that is to say an account about what we can know and how we can know it, rather than an account dealing solely with the thing in itself: what we are talking about when we are talking about surrender. I think it is a pretty decent epistemic account by the way, but it leaves open the question of what sort of a thing it is to surrender.
Setting aside for minute the question of what allows us to draw conclusions, make attributions, etc., lets look back to the thing itself.
First of all, do you accept or reject the notion of, for lack of a better term, internal actions? I think that if you don't acknowledge the notion of internal actions you will end up having to give a tortured account of things like (much of) problem solving and also of decision making.
You're tripling the recipe. A single batch calls for a cup and a half plus one tablespoon of flour (assinine recipe, yeah.) Your intention to triple the batch is undeterred and you proceed. Some wheels turn in your head and now you have an awareness of the right amount of flour for a triple batch. That awareness was not present two seconds ago. I think you figured something out. I think you did something, that is you acted, mentally, invisibly. The rest of my account will be simpler if you see this the same way but let me give another example.
Parked at a fork in the road and unsure of how to proceed, you consider for a moment. A few seconds later you put the car back into in gear and take the north fork and not the west one. It seems to me that in between parking and moving you made a decision. The deciding is itself an act, is it not?
If you had been car-jacked right then you might have later told the cop: "I had just decided which way to turn when this maniac ran up with a gun …" If the cop had interrupted you at the point of "I has just decided which way to turn …" and the cop said at that point: "You did?" then we wouldn’t scratch our heads and say "Why did the cop use the word ‘did’? She hadn’t ‘done’ anything. She was sitting motionless." No the cop would have been acknowledging that you had done something, that you had acted internally, that you had decided something. The active nature of deciding is plain for all to see. To decide something is not to be in a given state. It is precisely the process of movement from one state to another, undecided to decided.
Your driving off one way or another is another act flowing from the first one and the driving off is visible but the deciding is in my view no less an act. A navigator may earn a living not by turning steering wheels and pulling tillers but instead by figuring things out and deciding them. Sure he voices his decision, but will you claim that just saying "turn left" is all he "does" beyond fiddle with maps or charts?
One more. A friend dies against whom you bear a reasonable and fairly serious grievance. The loss of your friend greatly troubles you of course and after her death the grievance troubles you in a different way than it had before. After an hour or a day or a year you "decide to" forgive the grievance, or forgive the person--however you want to call it. This decision is an act, like the decision to turn north. Now at this moment have you already forgiven your friend? Maybe or maybe not. It may take six months of thinking it over, examining your feelings and your feelings about your feelings, even some professional or friendly counseling. Then one day you can confidently evaluate your condition this way: "I have forgive my dear late friend." There was an internal act of decision, and in some case perhaps a separate and even quite protracted act of accomplishing forgiveness. The act of forgiveness has many parts but that does not mean it isn’t one act. To fetch the mail is intelligibly called an act even though it involves any number of separate motions.
"What did you do next?" "I fetched the mail, Your Honor"
The baker's internal of calculating are strictly mental, we might say. The soldier's may be strictly mental--a calculated move in the game of war--or it may be something more, something akin to your forgiving your late friend's misbehavior. The soldier may decide that he is indeed a beaten man who has no more fight in him. He may well and truly give up while his colleague beside him perform the same overt actions has not committed the internal act of giving up. We call this sort of thing a change of heart. Sometimes changes of heart are conscious and intentional, even the result of considerable external and internal effort. To "change one's heart" in this sort of way, well it is anything other than resting in a given state. The claim that to surrender is simply to be in a state simply doesn't square with the world.
Yes sometimes we merely acknowledge a change in our heart which has happened imperceptibly: "Heathcliff, the thrill is gone." But sometimes, as the forgiveness example shows, there is a strong intentional aspect. You decide to, you mean to, and you follow through to success or failure in the effort.
So I hope we can agree that not all acts are external or observable. They might result in observable behavior or they might—if you step back onto a land mine just then, for instance--not.
Now if you will accept that some acts can be internal and not observable in the way that flag waving is then please re-consider surrender.
If a submissive posted here a lament that she "had tried long and earnestly to surrender but in the end, with that partner and at that stage of her life could not" would you call that confused talk about a state of being or would you allow that there was something she had tried to do and failed to do. An act she had wanted and attempted to commit but in the end didn’t manage to?
As in the "long process of forgiveness" example above, surrender is accompanied or preceded by a decision, in many case at least. It is an interesting question, what is there in surrender beyond the decision to surrender? There must be something, otherwise the expression "decide to surrender" would sound odd and obviously redundant like Rio Grande River or Mt. McKinley Mountain.
You say that surrender is a state of mind or being, but how could this possibly be? Surrender in the sense mistoferin was using the word is a transition. It is motion, not stasis. The one thing it most surely is not is a state. It is a process of getting from one state to another. Sure, you can say that after waving the white flag and so forth the soldier was in a state of surrender. You might say that after accepting her collar a certain submissive was in a state of surrender. But no reasonable reading of mistoferin's point could leave you thinking that this aftereffect was all she was talking about, a state left over after the person surrenders, soldier or submissive.
If I've misread her I apologize but the point is a valid one whether she was making it or not. There is an event which fits in the timeline between a state in which a person has not yet surrrendered and a later state in which that person has surrendered. It is that event that I am calling the act of surrender. I think that for me to call it that is utterly conventional; that is what the word means in such cases despite your strident claims to the contrary. It is--in the kinds of cases I'm talking about--intentional and conscious behavior on the part of the surrenderer.
The soldier in fact might wave the white flag while not having surrendered in his heart, as we might say. It may be a ploy. What would the question turn on? Well in practice in a real case we could watch to see observable behaviors that indicated this or that but if we have to look into that one moment don't we have to look into the mind and heart of the soldier? If the soldier stepped onto a mine and was killed just then and we wanted to attribute meaning to his flag waving a moment before (the epistemic question) then wouldn't our analysis be complicated if we found a letter in his pocket detailing a plan to fake surrender and attack craftily under a white flag that very day? Nothing would be proven perhaps, but it might be fair to guess that maybe the late soldier had not been busy surrendering at all, despite the flag. There was the facsimile of an external act corresponding to surrender but the internal act of surrender was absent.
"So don’t you dare call my brother a coward or a quitter!" she cried, "The letter shows that he was both bold and stalwart to the end!"
Well whether you are convinced by her evidence or not is one thing. No matter; such testimony is perfectly intelligible. The late soldier’s sister is making perfect sense in talking about the omission rather than commission of an internal act of surrender.
quote:
The 'Act of Surrender' is a misnomer, since what is actually being described is the 'Intention or Motivation' to surrender by any other (misleading) name.
I disagree again; but that you will have guessed.
The intention and motivation to clean the house are not "cleaning the house." Anyway I seem to recall from my youth that my parents held this tenet quite dear.
To describe the intention is not to describe the activity. It is a very familiar thing, a person who has an intention or a motivation to act, but who is not acting. No, the intention and motivation must be present, like soil and water must be present for a growing, healthy tree. But soil and water are not a tree.
quote:
There is no particular Act which is surrender. Surrender is a state of mind or being. Any acts associated with surrender, or corresponding to it in our minds (raising the hands, waving a white flag) are merely indicators or admissions that that state has been entered into or agreed upon.
Here again you seem to state your conclusion as if it were in support of your argument, that is to say, as if it were in support of your conclusion. It is whether or not surrender can be and iscommonly is seen an act that we are discussing here in the first place.
If not by an act of surrender, per se, how does a person proceed from the state of not having surrendered to the state of surrender? If surrender itself is only a state, as you claim, then the word "surrender" should be only a noun. But the verb form precedes the noun form in dictionaries. This reflects research showing that the word is more commonly used in its active sense than to name a state. Surrender is primarily somthing you do. Etymologically the word surrender a cousin, through old French, of "render," to surrender is to render all, as it were. No. I don’t see how the claim can be defended that surrender is just a state of mind or being and not an act in itself, independent of flag waving.
It is true as you suggest that other behaviors may signal that a person has surrendered—in my terms has committed the internal act of surrender. In fact the example of the tricky soldier may become complex here because in a case like that we want to allow that the soldier still has all the same motivations: live and fight and win, as before. He has only changed tactics. The soldier might just decide that giving himself up is the best course left toward those goals. In the case of the surrender of a submissive to a dominant I suppose it might work along those lines but we might call that ungenuine surrender or "acting like" surrendering. I was thinking of a much richer sense of surrender than a disingenuous tactical ploy with a white flag or a collar and I think mistoferin was too.
If deciding to turn north is an internal act; if figuring out the tripling or a recipe (or a proof of Fermat's Theorem) is an internal act or series of acts, then won't you consider that the movement from the state of not having surrendered to the state of having surrendered involves an act as well? In some cases at least? An act of will, to use a very familiar expression.
After all, we can say that a baker or mathematician is in a "state" of figuring something out, but isn’t this is just verbal sloppiness? He or she is better said to be "busy" figuring something out. Active. Silent, invisible action.
People don't usually get paid for being in a state (we both know exceptions.) Instead they usually get paid for doing something. Performing actions. And some get paid to make decisions, or figure things out. Sure they report their results but honestly when the analyst spends the entire afternoon from lunch to quitting time motionless with furrowed brow and then the next day produces a brilliant printed analysis, will we say that the prior day he "did" nothing? On the prior day he did not act on his assignment? Will you pay him for his typing on Tuesday and dock him for malingering on Monday while the state of knowing the answer approached him mysteriously and unaccountably?
quote:
quote:
Anyway, so how about weather? Tectonic forces? Gravity? Death? Ain’t there nothing you are subject to?
Surrender doesn’t mean curl up and die, or even be passive. We can stand up to gravity, and build ladders and airplanes and spaceships but seems to me that all of those things are still ultimately subject to gravity.
It seems to me that here you are compounding the notion of 'surrender' with that of being subject to something. One can be subject to something, and still not surrender to it. The idea of surrender is antithetical to 'standing up' to it.
I can see why it seems so. The reason is that I said it so badly. Here you have restated my point, I think. I'm sorry I didn’t make it more clear. I had said that everyone must surrender to certain things in certain ways and degrees. I had observed that some people choose to see themselves as never surrendering to anything. I offered my opinion that these people are not facing the facts.
In my view, standing up in the presence of gravity is not a failure to be subject to it. I think you agree. Stand at a forty-five degree angle on level ground and we’ll talk.
"When my father became senile I was certainly subject to this fact, subjugated by it, but I railed against it and refused to accept it. My own life as a result was turmoil. Then I surrendered to the fact that Dad was indeed senile. Life was sad but the turmoil settled." … at that point our narrator may go on to announce his father’s demise in dementia. The narrator might instead explain his (the son's) research into senile dementia and the medical cure he found and administered to his father. The first would be an account of an act of surrender that led to a passive state in the narrator. The second an account of an act of surrender that led to activity, to "standing up to it" in a way that was effective—whereas standing up to it via denial was in vain. The son surrendered to the present fact of his father’s dementia and this allowed him to take action against the malady itself and the resolution was the defeat of the disease, in his father's case anyway.
There is a subtle turn here. At one point the "it" in my parable is the disease as such. At another point the "it" is the fact of the father’s having the disease. But it was a subtle dialectical turn on mistoferin’s part that kick-started this conversation. We shouldn’t be surprised to find more subtleties lurking within.
So you are right. The son could not effectively stand up to the fact of his father being ill. His efforts to do so were doomed. That would have indeed been antithetical to the requisite surrender. The son had to surender himself to that fact and acknowledge that his will had no power over that fact in that moment. We notice along the way however that to surrender is not, as I said before, to lay down and die, even figuratively. I find it all complex but gorgeously complex.
Surrender in the sense I am interested in is the act of acknowledging deeply one’s subjugation to any person, thing or power. It is specifically an act, an act of will.
It is an act of adjustment, or re-alignment if you please. Adjust your garters. Adjust your will. You have acted twice.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it for now, but I’m listening to you, too.
Can we agree?
Thanks for your post, by the way.
Noah
PS: this post due out in a lovely hardcover edition a week from Tuesday.
|
|
|
|
