We still threaten ourselves with our own destruction, whether with our armaments or through the world’s remarkable economic productivity coupled with a still-reckless disregard for the natural environment.
A two-hundred and fifty year-old industrial civilization is also entering its terminal phase. It is mostly failing to come to grips with the problems occasioned by its success, and it exhibits all of the major contradictions that have driven past civilizations toward decline and fall—ecological stress, overpopulation, resource exhaustion, excessive complexity, loosened morals, burgeoning indebtedness, social strife, blatant corruption, and political dysfunction.
Basins of attraction are places of local stability or equilibrium where the system in question is more likely to settle and remain, because less energy is needed to keep the system there. In the state-space model, the basins are locations in the state space where large numbers of people don’t have to invest a lot of cognitive energy— they don’t have to think much— to maintain their political ideologies, because (among other reasons) the ideologies at those locations align with their temperaments and moral intuitions. Psychologists can measure people’s investment of cognitive energy by using methods such as the implicit association test, which captures the degree of subconscious association between mental representations in a person’s mind. Generally, the more conscious an association, the more cognitive energy is invested in making the association.
The aesthetic experience, as we look back at it from a point of view where we distinguish theoretical from practical activity, thus presents characteristics of both kinds. It is a knowing of oneself and of one’s world, these two knowns and knowings being not yet distinguished, so that the self is expressed in the world, the world consisting of language whose meaning is that emotional experience which constitutes the self, and the self consisting of emotions which are known only as expressed in the language which is the world.
It has taken me a long time to accept this move entirely seriously. You really have to dig pretty deep, if you are a conceptual rationalist, to get below, or beyond, all those defensive concepts – the constructs of the mind that structure and filter experience and make it safe for human consumption. It is not that concepts must be banished. Only they must not be taken literally ‒ the “things” they posit are not substances.
