The World Beyond Your Head

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Author: Matthew B. Crawford
Full Title: The World Beyond Your Head
Category: #books

Highlights

In a previous book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, I wrote about the de-skilling of everyday life. The core theme was individual agency: the experience of seeing a direct effect of your actions in the world, and knowing that these actions are genuinely your own. I suggested that genuine agency arises not in the context of mere choices freely made (as in shopping) but rather, somewhat paradoxically, in the context of submission to things that have their own intractable ways, whether the thing be a musical instrument, a garden, or the building of a bridge.
In the chapters that follow we will consider the ways our environment constitutes the self, rather than compromises it. Attention is at the core of this constitutive or formative process. When we become competent in some particular field of practice, our perception is disciplined by that practice; we become attuned to pertinent features of a situation that would be invisible to a bystander. Through the exercise of a skill, the self that acts in the world takes on a definite shape. It comes to be in a relation of fit to a world it has grasped.
For several hundred years now, the ideal self of the West has been striving to secure its freedom by rendering the external world fully pliable to its will. For the originators of modern thought, this was to be accomplished by treating objects as projections of the mind; we make contact with them only through our representations of them. Early in the twenty-first century, our daily lives are saturated with representations; we have come to resemble the human person as posited in Enlightenment thought. Such is the power and ubiquity of these representations that we find ourselves living a highly mediated existence. The thing is, in this style of existence we ourselves have been rendered pliable—to whoever has the power to craft the most bewitching representations or to control the portals of public space through which we must pass to conduct the business of life.
The philosophical project of this book is to reclaim the real, as against representations. That is why the central term of approbation in these pages is not “freedom” but “agency.” For it is when we are engaged in a skilled practice that the world shows up for us as having a reality of its own, independent of the self. Reciprocally, the self comes into view as being in a situation that is not of its own making.
The point of an assembly line is to replace skilled work with routinized work that can be done by unskilled labor. Early in the twentieth century this gave rise to the saying “Cheap men need expensive jigs; expensive men need only the tools in their toolbox.”
contrast, administrative nudges are a thin attempt to get us to act as if we were virtuous, without any reference to character traits like self-control.
One way to parse this is to think about habit and formation. The word “character” comes from a Greek word that means “stamp.” Character, in the original view, is something that is stamped upon you by experience, and your history of responding to various kinds of experience, not the welling up of an innate quality. Character is a kind of jig that is built up through habit, becoming a reliable pattern of responses to a variety of situations. There are limits, of course. Character is “tested,” and may fail. In some circumstances, a person’s behavior may be “out of character.” But still, there is something we call character. Habit seems to work from the outside in; from behavior to personality. One question, then, is whether an administrative nudge, which works on behavior, could have an effect similar to a cultural jig such as Protestantism. Both help to regulate life. But there is a big difference in how this regulation operates. If I fail to opt out of a 401(k), have I really acted? Have I done something, such as facing down temptation, that helps to wear the groove of habit into my character? Probably
The brain does not have to construct a representation of the world. The world is known to us because we live and act in it, and accumulate experience.
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Friedrich Nietzsche said that joy is the feeling of one’s power increasing. This needn’t be understood as the motto of an insatiable tyrant. It captures something important about the role that skill plays in a good life. When we become competent in some skilled action, the very elements of the world that were initially sources of frustration become elements of a self that has expanded, by analogy with the way a toddler expands into his own body and comes to inhabit it comfortably. And this feels good.
Getting things right requires triangulating with other people. Psychologists therefore would do well to ask whether “metacognition” (thinking critically about your own thinking) is at bottom a social phenomenon. It typically happens in conversation—not idle chitchat, but the kind that aims to get to the bottom of things. I call this an “art” because it requires both tact and doggedness. And I call it a moral accomplishment because to be good at this kind of conversation you have to love the truth more than you love your own current state of understanding. This is, of course, an unusual priority to have, which may help to account for the rarity of real mastery in any pursuit.
More strongly: membership in a community is a prerequisite to creativity. What it means to learn Russian is to become part of the community of Russian speakers, without whom there would be no such thing as “Russian.” Likewise with bluegrass. These communities and aesthetic traditions provide a kind of cultural jig, within which our energies get ordered.
For Hegel, one knows oneself by one’s deeds. And deeds are inherently social—their meaning depends very much on how others receive them. The problem of self-knowledge is in large part the problem of how we can make ourselves intelligible to others through our actions, and from them receive back a reflected view of ourselves. For Hegel, there is no self to be known that exists prior to, or at a “deeper level” than, the self that is in the world. This implies that individuality, too, is something that we achieve only in and through our dealings with others.
Pippin puts Hegel’s point sharply when he writes, “You have not executed an intention successfully unless others attribute to you the deed and intention you attribute to yourself.
Wallace states the central problem of life as one of critical self-awareness, as opposed to self-absorption. “[A] huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.” In particular, “everything in my immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe…” The task, then, is one of “somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of the self.” His point, he makes clear, is not a moral one about being altruistic. The point is not to be deluded, “lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me…”
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For the subjectivist, value judgments don’t apprehend anything. There is no feature of the world that would make them true or false, since they merely express private feeling. It follows that your moral and aesthetic outlook can’t become more discerning. It can’t deepen or mature, it can only change.2 But surely your understanding of friendship, for example, at age forty isn’t the same as it was at age thirteen. Nor is it merely different, if all goes well, but deeper. And this deepening, tied to a particular biography, is what we mean when we talk about individuality; we are referring to something that has been earned. Yet for the subjectivist, everyone is already an individual by default; everyone has his or her own idiosyncratic bundle of value sentiments. Subjectivism can’t make sense of the experience of achieving greater clarity in one’s evaluative outlook, and it can’t accommodate the closely related idea of an earned individuality of judgment, as opposed to mere
But of course we run into a problem: we are not competent to judge everything for ourselves. We know this; we feel it. We cannot look to custom or established authority, so we look around to see what everyone else thinks. The demand to be an individual makes us feel anxious, and the remedy for this, ironically enough, is conformity. We become more deferential to public opinion.
It seems we need to supplement Kierkegaard’s psychology. He taught us that reverence is a prerequisite to rebellion. The organ reform movement sheds light on the other side of this coin: a readiness to rebel—against the self-satisfaction of the age—seems to be prerequisite to discovering something you judge worthy of reverence. To affirm something in this way, freely and with discernment, is surely one element of what it means to be an individual.
Some critics will say that these craftspeople have “retreated from the modern world.” I think nearly the opposite. We have come to accept a condition of retreat from the world as normal. The point of the organ shop example is to help us see what it would look like to inhabit an ecology of attention that puts one squarely in the world.
Finally, our investigation of “the erotics of attention” yielded some insight into how one might go about escaping the lonely hell described by David Foster Wallace, in which other people are simply impediments to my will. Contrary to Wallace’s own take on the matter, I suggested that it is not by freely “constructing meaning” according to my psychic need and projecting generous imaginings onto others that I escape my self-enclosure. It is by acquiring new objects of attention, which is to say, real objects of love that provide a source of energy. As against the need to transform the world into something ideal, the erotic nature of attention suggests we can orient ourselves by a selective affection for the world as it is, and join ourselves to it.
At such moments, the possibilities for beautiful human action in the world as it is—the undiscovered possibilities of fit—seem inexhaustible. This can inspire wonder and gratitude: the most creditable of religious intuitions is available within a this-worldly ethics of attention. For there does seem to be something benevolent in the disposition of things, relative to us. Such are the rules of gravity and buoyancy that surfing is possible. That’s the kind of universe we inhabit. Being alert to such possibilities, and giving their occurrence in the world their due in wonder: to encounter things in this way is basically erotic, in the sense that we are drawn out of ourselves toward beauty.
the following quote from Doug Stowe, a woodshop teacher and first-class thinker about education: “In schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention. Without the opportunity to learn through their hands, the world remains abstract, and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.