A PERSONAL CASE OF MULTIFACETED SPIRITUAL GRIEF
F Richard Singer III mailto:pndp@sbcglobal.net
January 2010, with some comments from later in 2010
Papers referenced in italics are available on my website: http://www.conceptualstudy.org/
Abstract: It is clear that I entered a protracted pathological grief state on 8/11/08. In giving an account of that state, I placed the concepts involved in the context of the pathology concept from Descriptive Psychology, but I also used some concepts not given in Descriptive Psychology. I begin with a brief presentation of the concept of a pathological state as a severely diminished state. I following this with a detailed account of the pathological state just mentioned, indicating why and how I consider it a case of multifaceted grief by sketching its relation to my life history. I also indicate that it coincided with what Recovery International calls fearful temper, i.e. fear that goes beyond the normal case of an emotion and is worked up into an exaggerated state of fearfulness. I suspect the reason they call this temper is because it tends to bring on temperamental language. A more extended account of relevant parts of my life history is presented in The Problem of Will. That paper is a modified selection of materials from my book A Personal Approach to Conceptual Philosophy (on the Conceptual Philosophy Section of my website. These selections relate to my collapses of will, and altho none of these collapses center on grief, they all seem like a prelude to my current state.
Diminished States: States tend to be temporary, i.e. a person P enters into a state and later stops being in that state. Duration can be few minutes or days. It can last much longer. When P is in a particular state, there is a difference in P’s powers or dispositions, and thus differences in what P can do. When P is in a diminished state, there is a restriction on P’s ability to engage in various types of behavior, and especially deliberate action and the practices of the communities to which P belongs. Equivalently there is a deficit in P’s valued behavior potential. The core conceptual condition for the Descriptive Psychology person concept that I will use is that a person is an individual with a noteworthy history of deliberate action in a dramaturgical pattern. For more about the person concept that I use see Person Concepts. Thus another way of thinking about a diminished state is to consider the impact this deficit in behavior potential has on the dramaturgical pattern of P’s life. This may be more a matter of significance than a matter of performance or first order achievement, since diminished significance has a major impact on P sense of identity and P’s place in the general scheme of things. For a discussion of this see the chapter on Personal Identity from (Ossorio 2006, especially page 378). Since P needs a world in order to have a life and a place, in a diminished state P’s world is damaged. See the commentary on Maxims A1-A4 (Ossorio 1998). One course for returning from such a state is for P to make explicit various features of the dramaturgical pattern of P’s life. In other words, P needs to consider who P is and what P would consider P’s place is in P’s world. Of course, this is only a start, as P is likely to also need to engage some amount of world reconstruction.
Pathological States: A pathological state is a diminished state that is extreme, with a severe restriction on P’s ability to engage in deliberate action or the practices of the communities to which P belongs, with all that this entails. This concept of a pathological state is taken from Ossorio 2006 (pages 403-404). Ossorio also adds the following perspective on the concept of a pathological state.
The definition of pathological state tells us what it is for a person to be in a pathological state. It does not preempt the question of how we explain or account for a person’s being in a pathological state, since that is a separate matter. Since we do in fact offer various sorts of explanation, the definition underlines the necessity for maintaining the distinction between the presence of pathology and any putative explanation of it.
Later (p416) he relates the concept of a pathological state to the concept of a need. However this is a conceptual relationship and is not intended as an explanation for being in a particular state.
A need is a condition or requirement the non-satisfaction of which is a pathological state or results in a pathological state. This conceptual relation provides a simple conceptual schema for giving explanations for a person’s being in a pathological state. The convenience of the schema conceals some widespread difficulties in providing convincing accounts of what the need is.
My Recent Recurrent Pathological States: On 8/11/08 I was in the backseat of our car silently crying as we drove to our cabin in Barbin Hollow. On arriving I walked down the first path that I had made to Barbin Branch. My silent tears turned to deep sobs. Charmayne found me there. We talked. The feelings subsided. I worked outside during the afternoon. I was able to relax and watch TV that evening after they left. The next two days were a struggle. My actions would not flow smoothly. Even when I was involved, there was a sense of something being off. Powers that normally flowed automatically as needed were not available without concerted effort. The main loss was in the powers of my value system. However the dispositions supporting my actions were also less operational. Later while talking with Paul, I felt whole again. The next morning was fraught with oppressive tension. It seemed as if my behavior potential had evaporated. I recall thinking that I had slipped into a pathological state. Charmayne was to come Friday, but I asked her come sooner. This is when the fearful temper emerged and debilitating tension became a major factor in my life. We returned to the city Thursday. Altho I felt some relief, after the first few days, I sensed that some type of internal siege had begun.
Altho I suspected a major part of my world had slipped away, I did not expect this pathological state to be long or severe. I believed that grief was the core component. I implicitly understood a large portion of my grievous losses and knew that they were more from within than from that which is beyond me. I also knew that I did not have my losses in systematic focus. Since I had conceptual tools from Descriptive Psychology to work with, I expected that I could bring them into focus. I thought I could reconstruct a world in which I had a place. I did not spot the nature of that fear at the time, but after some thought, I decided that it was a severe form on the fear of a permanent handicap. In essence, I had the dramaturgical pattern for the rest of my life worked out. This pattern had already been undermined and that week it collapsed. I had what Ossorio calls a face in the wall experience. It was time to revise and augment the dramaturgical pattern of my life. In fact, it had been time to do so 2 years earlier, altho I did not realize it at the time.
The Face in the Wall (Taken from page 392 of The Behavior Of Persons by Peter Ossorio)
Imagine that you and I are sitting in the office here having a conversation. I catch a hint of movement out of the corner of my eye, and I glance at the wall behind you.
An enormous
At that point, I have two major choices. I can say “You know, I had the most interesting hallucination just then…” Or I can walk out of the room knowing that the world is very different from what I always took it to be.
I can disown it or I can own up to it. If I own up to it, then, indeed, a world in which something like that could really happen is so different that my place in it and my possibilities in it couldn’t possibly be the same as they are now.
Moreover, under those conditions it would be astonishing if I had any clear sense of what my place was in this newly discovered world. Thus I, and my life, would lose the coherence that had been there, and I would, temporarily, at least (recall the “pruning” example), be deficient in my ability to carry on my affairs (what would “my affairs” be?).
This is, one might say, a portrayal of what psychological trauma is (as contrasted with a clever or careless account of a theoretical condition, “trauma,” which (somehow) causes psychological effects and which leans heavily on metaphors of broken machinery).
“A world in which they could do that to me;” [See Maxims in part A of Ossorio 1998]“A world in which I could do that” – there are many versions of “The Face in the Wall”. They are versions of the unthinkable come to life.
Again, there is no inherent positive-negative asymmetry here. For example, when I undergo a religious conversion I have discovered a world of hope and redemption of which I would earlier have said “That’s crazy talk.”
Changes such as religious conversions are generally not traumatic because they occur in the context of a social structure that serves as a psychological exoskeleton while I make the transition. But if, instead, it were a matter of solitary revelation, then, indeed, I might emerge from the wilderness in a state of confusion and find my way strewn with pitfalls.
Over a year has elapsed, and success still eludes me. With some exceptions, I awake in the morning either in a pathological state or in a significantly diminished state, usually marked with tension. This is what Recovery call pre-symptomatic processing, as it occurs prior to any recognition of the symptom, and thus makes the exact nature of the symptom hard to spot. In fact it is only recently the I was able to achieve what seems like a fairly plausible account of the details of the fearful temper involved. Until recently, on only a few occasions I have remained in a pathological state for most of the day. On some other days, I remain in a fairly diminished state until late afternoon and on rare occasions until late in the evening. However on most days, I engage in activity that enables me to transition into a state that is diminished but not fully pathological, and by afternoon I often find that my powers and dispositions seem to be operational. During the winter of 2009 there had even been periods of several days in which no diminished state has seemed to occur. On a day by day basis, successful action is a basis for at least recurrent periods in which I have had a sense of wellbeing, altho I suspect that much of this was do to the relaxation effect of lorazepam. However, this sense always seems temporary and what I have yet to achieve is the kind of security in my powers and faith in the reliability of my dispositions that I had prior to slipping into this recurrent state of pathology. Grief was still close, and I have yet to overcome the recurrent feeling of a lack of integration that plagues me, and thus the unreliability of my some of my powers and traits. It is especially my value system that has been negatively effected. In the summer of 2009 the pathological has worsened. Without strong deliberate effort the only value that seems highly operational is to reduce pain, but adding more lorazepam has not helped relieve the daytime tension.
Note from May 2010:
About two weeks after my son killed himself on 5/7/10 my pathological state
became much worse. On a few days I even took extra Wal-dryl and tried to sleep
all day. However, this aggravated my pathological state.
My losses are multifaceted and cumulative. Related to this is the amorphous nature of my loss appraisals. Since I had partially succeeded in making most of the component losses seem less than grievous, the motivational significance of these appraisals had been problem solving. If I identify my diminished state as a state of grief, then I must extend the concept of grief beyond the paradigm case described in Appendix 1, a case that I refer to as simple grief. Simple grief relates primarily to a single grievous loss, altho it may also relate to other losses that have not been ameliorated. Multifaceted grief relates to a variety of losses that leave a person’s world so diminished that the dramaturgical pattern of that person’s life is significantly undermined. In some cases these losses may be linked to a core grievous loss that has never been sufficiently ameliorated. In my case, it seems highly plausible that there is such a core loss, namely a diminished plausibility attitude about whether any persons survive biological death. In fact my belief that I cannot survive biological death has become a highly operational attitude. My contradictory belief that biological death would just take me into a state of worse torture has also become a highly operational attitude, or using the language of Descriptive Psychology these have both become real to me. This has happened in spite of the fact these plausibility attitudes are inconsistent and that that my warranted plausibility attitude towards both beliefs is that they are both at most somewhat plausible. See Plausibility Attitudes.
Soon after I decided that my state was a pathological state of grief, one component was easy to identify. I had lost my relationship with my home in Barbin Hollow, altho even this loss was cumulative. This alone would have been a grievous loss, but one that would have been unlikely to trigger more than a brief pathological state, for I would have found a way to rebuild this relationship. However other losses had been accumulating and these losses were linked to losses occurring for over half a century. Before examining these losses, and in order to understand my pathological state and to see how it is largely based on multifaceted grief, I need to make explicit various features of the dramaturgical pattern of my life and how it needs to evolve. In other words I need to consider who I am and my chosen place in the world. I then need to reconstruct a world in which I not only have diverse behavior potential, but in which I also have more valued behavior potential.
Who I am: To be an origin is to proactively shape one’s world. Most of my life I have been an origin and an explorer. I begin as a child in the world of small towns and nearby woods, and I still explore and shape realms close to nature. I have always operated effectively in the worlds of children and in helping children enjoy and expand their worlds. I am a person who forms extremely close personal relationships with both children and adults, but who also lives in a world with aspects they do not understand. I am a student who casually explores remote paranatural worlds (see below) beyond the immediate world of everyday activities, such as economics, history, psychology, etc. I am an amateur mathematician who creates manifest examples for understanding and communicating about mathematics, but who has little interest in doing the kind of research that is done in the community of academic mathematicians. I am a conceptual philosopher who does not belong to the community of academic philosophers. I am an explorer and shaper of conceptual nets. I am an explorer of the utility of concepts. I am one who tries to understand my world and the worlds of others, and how these worlds relate to the real world. I am a personal resource in the worlds of other persons. I am a person with strong roots in various communities, but whose world has significant aspects that differ radically from their worlds. I am an educator who wants a world in which student directed education could flourish. I am a potentially radical origin who wants a world that enhances originship, and thus more of a self-status assignor than one who takes the status assignment of others seriously, altho I have slipped somewhat in this regard . I am a creator who both appreciates and challenges the practices and choice principles of my culture and the other communities to which I partially belong. At least all of this is what I used to be. Now all that I know about who I am is that I am an explorer of spiritual needs, who has long had persistent unfulfilled spiritual needs and who has no spiritual community and no spiritual security. This crucial aspect of who I am has been with me since adolescence.
Note From June 4: Altho implicit in what I just said and what I will say later, I did not explicitly say something which may be the most central factor in my grief. That I can see its significance is due largely to my first therapy session with Ray Bergner.
Since 1975 I hoped to play a role in the initial stages of one of them most noteworthy potential comprehensive paradigm shifts in human history (see Comprehensive Paradigms Shifts and Comprehensive Paradigms. This shift started in mathematics in the 19th century, then independently became a central component of Descriptive Psychology near the middle of the 20th century. I saw my role as attempting to plant some primitive seeds for a similar shift in philosophy, and when I later discovered Descriptive Psychology I incorporated much of it into my work in conceptual philosophy. I also hoped that some of my work could be incorporated into Descriptive Psychology. It was the fading of such hopes that may be the one of the two most central losses in giving rise to my pathological state.
Note From June 5: Altho I think of comprehensive paradigms a playing an important role in human affairs, they are only one of many aspects of our world that do so. What fascinates me about them is that I find it at least fairly plausible that they are created by persons in an attempt to understand how we fit in the broadest possible scheme of thing. This is one reason I hope that the next comprehensive paradigm shift will be to treat then in terms of plausibility attitudes rather than regarding them as true or false.
Paranatural Activity: Natural activity is any activity that would have been found in a world without persons. Such activity is physical or biological in the sense that it seems to be describable using either physical or biological concepts, whether ordinary or scientific. The motion of the planets is an example of natural activity. So is the action of genetic material. Paranatural activity is activity that does not lend itself to such a description and for which it makes sense to inquire about the significance that what is being done has for the actor. Even in an activity such as eating, that seems like natural activity, humans engage in a wide variety of social practices that have very little to do with the mere need for nourishment. The activity of creating an amendment to the constitution is even more remotely paranatural. In fact, the vast majority of human activity is paranatural. Classifying an activity as paranatural does not entail any extraordinary ontological commitments, such as thinking of it as unnatural nor as transcending causality, altho the existence of paranatural activity does suggest that a great deal of human activity might transcends causality. Paranatural activity may very well be related to natural activity. It may be determined by the circumstances and characteristics of the actor. My paranatural activity of teaching earned money that relates to my natural activity as a biological organism, and for part of this activity, I did not even consider options. Paranatural activity can have significance for the actor that seems ultimate in the sense that it connects the actor to what the actor sees as the actor’s place in the general scheme of thing. I call such activity spiritual. Again ‘spiritual’ is a functional concept, which is independent of any ontological commitment. More on these concepts, along with the related concept of supernatural activity, is presented in Natural-Paranatural-Supernatural. Also see Spiritual Life.
Barbin Hollow: We acquired our cabin in Barbin Hollow in 1995. Barbin expanded and enhanced my world, supporting major components of my wellbeing in the world I had reconstructed for myself after recovering from my third collapse of will. At Barbin I could explore my paranatural worlds, as I often did in the mornings. I would then step outside into a natural world that felt open and alive with possibilities even beyond those I experienced in and around the small towns of my childhood. I could play in the creek, build rafts for my grandchildren, build rock paths, split logs, explores the woods, cultivate a garden, and in general shape and interact paranaturally with my physical environment. I would often alternate a week at Barbin with a week in the city. Moreover, altho I was alone much of the time, Barbin was highly appreciated and used by my family, and for many years I had sufficient company with others that I loved. So why suddenly did my relationship with Barbin crash? The answer is simple. I had already been slowly loosing it in stages, as others spent less time with me and as spending days alone began to seem isolating. I was losing an aspect f my world, namely my sense of community. This slowly undermined the joy I experienced for so many years. I felt pulled apart. In the city I had friends and family, but I did not like the physical environment. At Barbin, I would awake in the morning feeling alone, and altho I would normally become involved and enjoy the day, the evenings were becoming extremely lonely.
Note: I only fully realized this loss of family community around Christmas 2009. when I temporarily regained it, altho I should have realized it earlier. Part of my current state is the I cannot regain it, altho most of my family still loves Barbin Hollow.
The grievous nature of the loss of Barbin relates to my
childhood. A major part of the dramaturgical pattern of my life as a child was
being part of the world of nature, as a person at home in the woods with all
that that entailed. This was supplemented by freedom to roam and engage in
various creative activities with friends. My first sense of belonging was that
the small town of
Living in the City:
The pull towards living in the city was strong for various reasons, and the
longer I stayed the more reasons there were to stay. In 1951 I entered
What pulled me most strongly to the city was that teaching
mathematics at the college level enabled me to be a student of the remote
paranatural worlds that I found so fascinating. Altho I knew that my major area
of mathematical interest was logic and its epistemic implications, I also knew
from my research at the
Multifaceted Losses: With Barbin I had regained a world partially lost when I moved to the city. Moreover Barbin had been a major factor in mitigating a variety of others losses and in being a refuge from all losses. The loss of my relationship with Barbin was also a grievous loss because Barbin was no longer a refuge. Why would I need a refuge? To more fully understand how my current state relates to these other interrelated losses and how I only partially ameliorated them prior to having Barbin, I will examine these losses. The major loss of my life was the loss of my assurance that humans had the potential to survive biological death. Intertwined with this major loss are losses in connection with so many of my hopes and dreams. The most significant lost hope was the hope that I could cultivate and sustain a positive attitude towards uncertainty about all comprehensive paradigms and the cosmic versions that these entailed. The other major losses related to my dreams of finding spiritual allies and communities of such allies. I will now turn to an examination of this loss, beginning with my most significant loss.
Biological Death: When I was in high school, I stopped fully belonging to the religious community of my childhood. While reading Paradise Lost, I identified with Satan’s quest for freedom against the tyranny of Heaven. I wondered about the fate of my soul. I was trying to reconcile my religious heritage with my heritage of political freedom. I easily rejected Calvinism, replacing it by a form of Christianity in which God was just and reason was the source of religious knowledge. However I did not totally eradicate my Calvinistic conditioning. What seemed reasonable became inconsistent with felt beliefs. I knew those beliefs were irrational, but I could not totally escape the feeling that I might have chosen a path that would damn me, that God may be as Calvin had described, and thus an enemy. Later I applauded John Stuart Mill in his refusal to worship an unjust God, but deep inside I could not find the courage to face eternal damnation. I would have preferred to believe in a more rational religion, but the more I reasoned, the more I diverged from the religious beliefs I had been conditioned to hold. Until I was about 17 I took it for granted that humans had immortal souls, altho by that time I had rejected many of my other religious beliefs. Over a period of several years my sense of supernatural support for my spiritual wellbeing eroded. Below is a modified excerpt from my paper The Problem of Will that is indicative of what was happening during that time.
For about four years, I seemed to surge with confidence as I was shaping a rational freedom oriented deistic religion. While rejecting Christian dogma, I still retained what I thought was the most important element of Christianity, namely its ethical ideals. I was rooting both my religious and social ideas in philosophy, while thinking that philosophy could be rooted in epistemology and that the basic premises of epistemology were self-evident truths of a rational universe. I seemed to be comfortable within a mainstream of western thought, with my philosophical roots firmly implanted in a type of Cartesian rationalism. I was challenged by epistemological views coming from logical positivism, but this helped me develop my ideas. I did not realize how much this undermined their broader basis. I was comfortable with my deistic religion and did not feel threatened by the current physicalism around me or by the earlier Calvinism of my childhood. I felt I had the key insights into the meaning of human existence. I merely needed to think thru the details. Once this was done, I would have a secure grounding for my own purposes.
My surface confidence screened me from my deeper feelings, from my need for support from others. Rationalism and deism had lost their intellectual respectability. Perhaps I would not have questioned so searchingly if I had found a comfortable niche in some respectable contemporary way of thinking, for then I could have drawn my intellectual support from the living.
In spite of my divergence from the doctrines of the church that we were attending, I continued being active in that church. We even sponsored the youth group. I still retained the ethical components of my religious heritage, along with an attitude of moderately plausible towards some form of theism, and I thought that these provided reason enough to remain in this community. Moreover we had formed many friendships, and we were involved in a number of related activities that we enjoyed. The only thing I found overtly onerous was the church service, which I attended for family reasons. However my divergence from the beliefs of that community did result in a significant loss of my sense of belonging. Finally all beliefs about the supernatural eroded. Nor were they replaced with any type of physicalism. I was left without a preeminent cosmic version. Before I questioned my religious beliefs I had a sense of spiritual security as an immortal child of God. During those years I held fast in my attempts to believe in human immortality. There is too much to do, if my time is finite. Immortality was deeply important to me. Even as early as age seven, when I was in a catechism class, and I knew the question and its official answer. I also knew why this answer seemed incorrect. What is the purpose of man? The purpose of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. I felt appalled. This could not be. It was not enough. In the erosion of my cosmic version, my greatest loss was a loss of certainty, in that I neither believed nor disbelieved in human immortality. From there on, I have searched intermittently for an alternative spiritual community or a way to find a sense of belonging in my Charmayne’s spiritual community.
My First Collapse
of Will: My loss of spiritual assurance was linked to another loss, namely
the loss of sufficient reasons for grounding my choices. Before this loss, I
could act. Afterwards, I lapsed into a pathological state. I had always considered
action and knowledge as inseparable. Now there was a gap between them. This
culminated in my first collapse of will, which is described in detail in The Problem of Will. I came out of this
collapse with a world reconstruction that was at least partially adequate,
altho I was still plagued by my loss of immortality support. I focused on a
direct confrontation of how to ground my choices as the immediate concern.
Until about 1974, I decided to act on the assumption that there was a
sufficient reason for grounding my choices and that I would eventually find it.
I found that I could again act with power. I acted extensively on implementing
and expanding various ideals. For instance I put considerable voluntary work on
integrated housing, and even received recognition for having a significant
impact in
Lack of a Spiritual Community: During all of my life I have had considerable success with almost all of my personal relationship ideals, especially those related to family and friends. Yet I have experienced a significant sense of loss in regards to these ideals. Much of my life I had hoped to find a spiritual community to which I could belong. In 1994, I acknowledged that this dream was dead. Altho I had often tried to find a home in the traditional theistic community of my family, the doctrines of original sin and of eternal damnation made this impossible. However another major barrier to finding a spiritual community was that everyone I knew seemed to at least implicitly have a preeminent cosmic version. Moreover they were not interested in probing deeply into the comprehensive paradigms supporting their cosmic versions (see Cosmic Versions and Comprehensive Paradigms). In contrast, after my first collapse of will, I have only had varying plausibility attitudes with respect to any cosmic version. This made it impossible for me to even belong to a two-person spiritual community, altho some seemed promising for a while. During the years between 1962 and 1974, I even had some two-person relationships that seemed like a spiritual community. However what was mostly shared was primarily dissatisfaction with our religious heritages. On the other hand, I was hoping to use philosophy to find a foundation for deep and persistent spiritual needs. In fact in all of my relationships with those who have been dissatisfied with their religious heritage, I have been more plagued by unsatisfied spiritual needs and more interested in exploring these needs than any of my friends. This has taken me alone thru many twists and turns. Thus even in my closest personal relationships, an important spiritual element has always been missing.
An Alien in My
Educational Communities: In a similar manner, I had always hoped to find an
educational community to which I could fully belong, a community that shared my
ideal of student directed education. In 1994, I also acknowledged that this
dream was dead, altho I retained my educational ideals and continued to work on
them by creating educational materials and educational concepts for my website.
The ideal of student directed education can be summarized as follows. It
envisions a society in which persons who want to direct there own education can
find considerable inexpensive support for this endeavor. Moreover to the extent
that accreditation of educational achievement is relevant, such persons will
not be disadvantaged in relation to those obtaining such accreditation in a
more traditional manner. During my teaching career, these were largely attempts
to shape student directed educational islands within
My Second Collapse of Will: During the years between my recovery form my first collapse of will and my second one, I was still plagued about my lack of a comprehensive paradigm, and I finally decided that the kind I wanted was impossible for me to obtain. Before this, I had been faced with situations that challenged me to choose and specific choices were sometimes a problem. After this realization, choice itself was a problem, aggravating and magnifying every specific problem of choice. In 1974 I plunged into a second collapse of will more severe than my first. In spite of its severity, it was brief. I soon decided that our philosophic tradition was not useful to me for answering questions, but it was useful because of the concepts that had emerged in the process of trying to answer them. However, I found many of the concepts involved too vague to be useful. It was then that I began examining my network of crucial concepts as I wrote the major part of my book, which I later entitled A Personal Approach to Conceptual Philosophy.
As I indicate in its opening remark, this book is personal rather than scholarly. Moreover everything I later seriously worked on is personal. Even more than my radical ideals about education, or my unwillingness to devote myself to traditional mathematical research, it was my interest in conceptual philosophy that removed me from a sense of belonging in the academic community. Because of my radical commitment to not having a comprehensive paradigm, along with what this entails for me, it also made me an alien in all of the communities to which I partially belonged, at least in the sense indicated in Appendix 1. Actually being an alien in my communities is a self-assigned status, which differs considerably from the status others would assign me. I was an alien primarily because there are major components of the worlds of all communities that I find alien. Perhaps more significant is that these worlds also omit core aspects of my world, namely a major concern with conceptual philosophy and what I suspect may be the need for a paradigm shift away from comprehensive paradigms.
In shaping my crucial concepts into a conceptual philosophy, one of the major concepts I refined and modified was the concept of freewill. I replaced this with a concept I called transcendent action or origin activity, depending on whether the intent was to focus on the act or the actor. This gave me the somewhat unsatisfactory solution to grounding my choices, as indicated in the excerpt below.
I know now that I was trying to convince myself that I had no alternative other than to face the call of will. I did not want to risk any form of decision. I wanted to feel that I had been forced into freedom and thus was not responsible for the resulting agony and chaos. That worked as a temporary expedient, but then I began to see that my commitments had always been at least partially grounded in my will and that my will was beyond rational analysis. I had achieved a new insight into the kind of crucial net I needed, but it felt irrational.
I can never have sufficient reasons
for any transcendent act.
This statement symbolizes, but does not describe, my insight. It is primarily symbolic, pointing towards the radical implication of originship. Nothing I have ever said or written comes close to articulating what this means to me, for it indicates the deepest shift I have ever made in my nets. However this focus muted my need for supernatural support, and I thought I had eliminated it. Given an ideal of originship, it seemed appropriate to be agnostic about the supernatural character of humans. Any other attitude might have distorted my origin ideals. Many people would claim that all humans are immortal. Others claim that no humans are immortal. My reaction to these claims only involved plausibility attitudes, none of which I regarded as highly warranted. This enabled me to consider my plausibility attitude towards other alternatives, reinforcing my sense of being an alien in the communities to which I belonged. However I never developed the powers I needed to be a viable radical origin. Moreover fifteen years later I discovered that I was wrong about eliminating my need for supernatural support, as this need reemerged in a new form during my third collapse of will, and the supposed solution from the second collapse proved insufficient. It should have been sufficient then and it should be now. It is not, and I do not currently have the power to make it sufficient.
My Third Collapse of Will: On 3/10/89 I slipped from my roof and crushed a vertebra in my back. The next morning I experienced a sense of personal spiritual isolation so deep that it seemed it would not only persist thruout my life, but thruout eternity. When I was almost recovered physically from the accident, I slipped into a third collapse of will, as this feeling of eternal isolation manifested itself as extreme pathological anxiety and despair. In one of my dreams, I had died biologically. I was alone in a room with a door. That door opened into another just like it, which entered into another just like it, etc. I was also terrified by thoughts of repeated reincarnations. Again the essence seemed to center on unmet spiritual needs. However my immediate focus soon became on being currently in a state of pathological floating anxiety. It was not until early in 1993, when I was able to convert a major part of the anxiety into a fear, that I was able to lift myself from this pathological state and regain some stable power of will. Before this, I could observe that at any time my pathological state would place me in situations where I felt personally helpless. I decided to rely extensively on professional help, both for medication and therapy. I was hospitalized several times. None of this had the effect I needed. During this ordeal I had considerable floating anxiety, which I later realized centered on a feeling that my ability to function effectively would never return. Early in 1993 most of my anxiety was replaced by fear (See Fearfulness Concepts), allowing me to see that each time I collapsed my will reemerged and my helplessness begin to fade. Following this I had a new sense of power, but I had not learned to live joyfully. Moreover I had not improved on my previous solution to my spiritual problems, altho that solution seemed sufficient again.
About a year after my recovery from my third collapse of
will, a major turning point in what I saw as the dramaturgical pattern of my
life came into focus. As Charmayne and I were walking near
In late 2003, a more complex positive attitude began to emerge. Bob Brill, the president elect of SDP (Society for Descriptive Psychology), discovered my website. I had integrated concepts from Descriptive Psychology into my work on conceptual philosophy, and I felt like both areas of study were part of a potential shift away from comprehensive paradigms. Bob said that members of the society were interested in it. He asked me to make a presentation at the 2004 SDP fall conference. I soon established a relationship with Paul Zeiger, another member of the society. I wanted my presentation to be in the form of a discussion, and Paul agreed to assist me in this format. We have been communicating and collaborating since then. At the conference, I felt like I had finally found a community in which I was not an alien, one in which others might become interested in some of my work in conceptual philosophy. That fall I also became more involved in implementing my educational ideal. I had been talking with my close friend Brenda Fyfe who was on the board of ACT (Association for Constructivist Teaching). She suggested that I present a workshop at their fall conference. Another ACT board member, Jim Pelech, attended this workshop and was extremely complementary. Since then, he and I have been working together occasionally on ideas for learning mathematics. Two of my relinquished dreams had reemerged, altho my most basic spiritual problems remained muted rather than solved. Moreover a number of attempts to find other allies had failed.
This reemergence of my dreams lasted until the summer of
2007, altho late in 2006 they were beginning to fade. I had mixed feeling of
both belonging and being an alien at the 2006 SDP conference, altho Paul and I
did make a presentation. At the previous conferences, I had interesting
discussions, and I felt a potential to work with several other members. At the
2006 conference, I felt that while I shared an interest in Descriptive
Psychology, there was little or no interest in my work in conceptual
philosophy. Later when I was asked if I wanted to submit an article for
Advances 9, the editor said that one of my papers looked appropriate. However
it was a paper that had very little to do with conceptual philosophy, so when
he later sent out a call for articles, I did not remind him of it. Paul and I
did coauthor a different paper, which will be included. We also helped review
another paper. Moreover we prepared a
presentation for the 2008 fall conference. I had to cancel my part because I
fell into the pathological state before the conference began. In spite of this,
I worked last fall on an index for Ossorio’s book The Behavior of Persons. While I still have a sense of belonging to
SDP, I no longer see it as a community that will appreciate conceptual
philosophy. I no longer see it as potentially my spiritual community.
At the 2006 ACT conference, I was also beginning to feel like an alien. I had arranged for one of the sessions to focus on Descriptive Psychology, but the connection between Descriptive Psychology and constructivist teaching was not appreciated. In my later attempt to discuss constructivist teaching with Brenda, I felt like I was at a dead end. Several other attempts to act with others in connection with my educational ideals proved unfruitful.
By late 2007, I had again largely dropped any dreams of
acting within any community on either my educational ideals or my work in
conceptual philosophy. The thought of returning to the life I had been living
from 1994 to 2003 was not appealing. Too much had changed. Muting my reemerged
dreams was more painful than muting them had been in 1994. Altho I had not yet
lost my relationship with Barbin, it had been diminished because of the
loneliness. Also after having lost hope for major allies, the thought of
working without them seemed like a dreary prospect, and this sapped some of the
joy from working on my website. Still I tried to return to the life of muted dreams,
and this seemed to work for a while. In August, I had an unexpected prelude to
the pathological state that I am in now. The first morning on our vacation to
My Multifaceted
Spiritual Grief: Altho everything written above seems relevant, I do not
know if I have reached the core of my pathological state. However I expect it
is more a fear of what if anything comes after this life, altho what to do with
this life is also involved. This fear of an afterlife relates to several cosmic
versions, and one non-traditional nightmare cosmic versions has become more
real to me than the others, altho it does not seem more plausible than its
alternatives. These versions are briefly sketched in A Personal Approach to Conceptual Philosophy, but need to be
expanded in a paper I plan to write on cosmic versions. A major problem is that
I do not want to have a preeminent cosmic version, but I am having trouble
remaining agnostic with respect to the ones that seem most onerous.
The lack of debilitating tension would be a sign that I am in a manifest state of wellbeing. The presence of debilitating tension is a sign that something is still wrong. I have mentioned the some of the fear that I knew that I was processing, but there always seemed to be something about my pathological state that was missing. I know that I still fear that I would not be able to reestablish a new dramaturgical pattern of my life. I connected this to the significance of many things in the past. The fear is still there, but it has taken a form that I can act on, altho how effectively is still unclear. Then an even deeper link arose fear emerged and for the first time in my life I became seriously depressed. I realized that the danger I had feared for 50 years had already occurred. Above I said that a major problem is that I do not want to have a preeminent cosmic version, but I am having trouble remaining agnostic with respect to them. There was a gap between my evidential and warranted plausibility attitudes towards cosmic versions (See Plausibility Concepts) and what I call my operational beliefs about cosmic versions. That biological death ends a humans existence had become an operationally belief for me altho my evidential and warranted plausibility attitude towards this claims was not higher that the negation of this claim.
Operational Beliefs and What is Real For a Person: The concept of an operational belief was suggested by the way that Ossorio (2006. page 387) uses the concept of what is real for a person., namely, What is real for a person is what he’s prepared to act on. He the add the maxim that reality takes precedence over truth. For many of my purposes I would restate this maxim as follows.
Maxim: Operational beliefs take precedence over evidential and warranted plausibility attitudes.
Side Remark: My preference the locution ‘a person’s operational beliefs’ over ‘what is real for a person’ is partially a matter of individual taste. However it also seems more descriptively related to ordinary language (especially when what is real to a person) is stated as a claim about some aspect of the world. A similar remark applies to the locutions ‘truth’ and ‘evidential and warranted plausibility attitudes’. However, another part of my preference relates to my tendency to regard much of what a person takes to be true as something towards which (on reflection) I only have plausibility attitudes. This is especially the case with complex claim in realms remote from ordinary experience. For claims that primarily involve basic reliable knowledge, I am comfortable with the locutions true’ or truth’.
Reconstructing My World: The most diminished aspect of my world is the analog I (as used by Julian Jaynes). Spotting fearful temper and working it down may help me reconstructed a world in which I belong. But I still feel more is needed, perhaps a courage beyond anything I have yet acquired. I also need a world that is less dependent on which cosmic version (if any) is correct.
APPENDIX 1: MY MAIN COSMIC IMAGE (circa 1974 and not having as much relevance as then)
Altho I have no preeminent cosmic version, this should not be a serious problem. Other than providing an illusion of closure, what would be its utility? Cosmic images may not provide such an illusion, but I use a cosmic image that has a significant impact on my thoughts and actions. This one suggests nothing about the origin of the universe. It is a partial image. It merely orients me to the present and immediate future. I picture rather than describe this image.
I imagine the universe not as
The extreme outer boundary of the cell is will. There is creative chaos in this region. The boundary is fuzzy, not clearly defined. I also see individual spots of will that seem be out in the wilderness, outside of the cell. This may be an illusion. Perhaps the small tendrils connecting them to the cell indicates that even they are part of it. Some of these spots are bright, others almost dark. Some of these light spots of will almost touch. Some are almost completely isolated. Most appear to grow and fade.
When I sense the fading of such a spot I feel sadness, relief, determination. At this stage in the development of the universe I feel it must be a terrible thing to feel the pull to become an individual will, for I do not think many individuals obtain the power to become highly effective origins. It appears to me that most belong to an intermediate stage in the potential evolution of creative power. I often wonder if this is a dead-end process. How can a will ever become highly effective? How can it, having so recently emerged from a state of helplessness, reach for ever-expanding understanding and courage? How can it go from a state in which all its purposes were given into a state in which it deliberately creates purpose? How can it go from a state of blind secure childish belonging to a state of acting as an origin, and then to a state where the whole cell is an extension of itself?
What is a personal will? I imagine a pawn in a game where the cell is blindly reaching for purpose and creative power. However these are strange pawns for some of them sense that perhaps there is no master mover and by default they tend to become the movers of the game. These pawns are also origins.
If the cell only had awareness it might look upon individuality and feel a smug sense of satisfaction. What ideal pawns they make for the game of create and at the same time play it safe. They may destroy themselves individually, but then as individuals they are expendable, for they reproduce rapidly enough. Even if they destroy themselves they cannot affect the totality of the cell. They are partially programmed yet somewhat flexible. They are programmed with strong individual desires, but have little power as individuals to obtain these desires. These desires, while individual, are similar to the desires of others. This provides incentive for both cooperation and competition. In serving their own purposes, they must serve a broader function. Because they are strongly programmed to preserve their individual existence they are both conservative and creative. Even the most conservative must react to the creative efforts of those who live in the wilderness. Those far out in the wilderness are also ideal pawns. They act as pawns even as they aspire to be masters of the game.
I live in a very good spot within the cell, for I am loved, respected admired, etc. Wait, this is not me. Only my persona lives so much within the cell. As a will I am split, partially directed from within and partially directed from without. Part of my will is in a spot at the end of a long tendril that reaches far out into the wilderness. I cannot tell if this spot is bright or dim. In some directions there are a few nearby spots, but in most directions I see nothing but wilderness. I am out here by a choice so fundamental that it cannot be explained. I can feel very cold and empty. It looks warmer and more comfortable inside. Inside there is structure and purpose, rules and principles. These reach out to my spot, but I do not feel bound by them. Yet they affect me. The wilderness nearby affects me more. I have chosen to explore the wilderness and I create something which is neither wilderness nor part of the cell, but which might influence the cell’s future. This may produce evil and I may be cut off. I feel that I am expendable. Regardless of what I, do the cell can probably disregard my creative efforts. I endorse this inertial capacity of the cell, altho I often feel frustrated by it.
I am judged by those within, mostly in ways they find positive. Being well loved, I also tend to judge my purposes and actions by their principles. Their principles of judgment are objective for they are rooted in the current nature of what is good. Yet I will not be bound by such judgment. Being admired tends to draw me into a world too conservative for my tastes. I search for ways to minimize its impact. To live where I live is to grope beyond good and evil. To act I must balance the judgment of good and evil against other factors. There are no fixed criteria to which I can appeal. I can appeal only to my created ideals, and these are grounded ultimately in me. My acts of will, while perhaps having little impact, are as objective as the principles of the universe.
Currently I have one basic ideal, my origin ideal. My basic purpose is to enhance and expand the power of persons as origins. This involves a personal struggle for freedom. It involves going beyond this whenever I encounter anyone else who I sense wants to act as an origin. This ideal functions almost as an absolute, for I am committed to it altho it may lead me again into chaos and agony. Yet it is not absolute, for I may be crushed by the chaos and agony of an impossible struggle, and I may renounce my quest.
I experience a vast emptiness when I ask the questions about what directions and for what purposes shall I expand my power of will. I have no answer to these questions.
When I reflect on what I have just written I am mildly disturbed. I have tried to focus on the fact that I am outside the cell without judging myself as special, either in the sense of being inferior or superior. Conceptually, I cannot even make sense of such judgments. The fact that I am sensitive about this indicates that such judgments are still emotionally relevant. It has been said that my struggle to be an origin is wrong in some absolute sense, being either pathological or sinful. It may be, but even so, I wish I could merely acknowledge this, and then pursue it anyway. That I am still reluctant indicates the strength of my conditioning. I still desire criteria beyond me. I still tend to feel that to ground behavior ultimately in me is somehow insane. But when I examine other nets, all I find is a kind of conceptual chaos that seems to be grounded in a cluster of subceptual certainties. I live with the awareness that I have rejected this type of certainty, that I have actually, not just intellectually, chosen to live on the edge of chaos, using my nets, and that all too often I will journey into chaos.
Why? Why not?
APPENDIX 2:
CONCEPTS OF SADNESS AND GRIEF
Note This appendix is a radically personalized modification of (Ossorio 2006 pp 341-345). Instead of treating grief as an emotion in its own right, I conceptualize sadness as an emotion (see Appendix 3 for emotion concepts) and treat grief as a form of sadness. Ossorio does not even mention sadness.
Losses: Jim is
reading on the porch. A small screw holding the right arm of his eyeglasses to
the vision part comes out. It seems to falls on the floor. He curses and begins
searching. Having no luck he sighs and concludes it must have fallen off the
porch and into the grass. He puts the glasses in a drawer and decides to see
what can be done sometime later to repair them. Jim obtains another pair of
glasses and continues reading. Later that day
Poignant Loss and
Sadness: The concept of a poignant loss involves losing something that a
person intrinsically values. This involves some significant aspect of what a
person takes to be an aspect of that person’s world, altho the significance may
be minor and transient. Jo’s favorite book from childhood has been lost.
Occasionally something reminds her of it, and she feels some sadness and
laments the loss, but this passes quickly. Altho this loss briefly diminishes
her world, it does not threaten her well-being. Poignant losses abound, but few
have a major impact on a person’s world (at least when taken individually). Yet
any appraisal of poignant loss is followed by sadness and a tendency to rue the
loss without deliberation. Thus reacting to some poignant loss with simple
sadness meets the criteria of being a type of emotional behavior (see Appendix
3). With a wide variety of minor poignant losses, briefly ruing the loss is
often very successful emotional behavior. It helps the person treat it as a
minor loss in comparison to the rest of P’s world, and thus to move beyond it.
Socially appropriate expressions of sadness also bring support from others that
may ameliorate the loss. In cases of a somewhat more poignant loss, something
more may need to be involved in moving beyond the loss or in obtaining support
from other. Some reframing may be needed. A rabid fan may reframe his football
world by agreeing with some friends that at least
Unless a loss is appraised as poignant, it motivational significance is more likely to be irritation rather than sadness. And some losses may not engender any emotional behavior, such as my loss of a lid to our bottle of vitamin. I regret that the decline in the stock market has diminished my retirement income by a notable amount, and altho I often feel mild distress each time I hear that it has declined again, I deal with this in a businesslike manner, rather than treating it as a poignant loss.
Grievous Loss and Grief: Some losses can involve a core component of P’s world and have a major impact on P’s wellbeing. For P, such a loss is a grievous loss. The emotional response to such a loss is grief. This is independent of the publicly reckoned value of what P loses or how P might later evaluate it. The core conceptual condition for the Descriptive Psychology person concept is that a person P is an individual with a noteworthy history of deliberate action in a dramaturgical pattern. The appraisal in the case of grief is that there appears to be a major blow to the dramaturgical pattern of a P’s life. Roughly speaking P’s world is significantly diminished, at least for a while. In terms of behavior, this means that P’s valued behavior potential has been (at least temporarily) lessened to the extent that P’s actions may seem of minor significance in comparison to the loss. By not completing a ROTC summer camp in 1954, I lost my plans for my future. For me this was a grievous loss, altho it actually kept me out of a situation I would have hated. More commonly, if a spouse or a family member dies, a person will normally grieve.
In order to relate grief to the paradigm case of the Descriptive Psychology concept of emotional behavior we need to indicate how and why people are motivated to act as they do in relation to a grievous loss. Clearly a grievous loss is of a type that by its nature involves a motivational significance for the person. However, unlike the obvious motivational significance of fear or of simple sadness, why people are motivated to behave as they do in an appraisal of grievous loss seems less clear. With fear, successful behavior is some type of action to escape the suspected danger. With simple sadness, mild lamentation of some type is often successful for the reasons indicated above. With grief, there is an appraisal of grievous loss and so it might seem that this would logically motivate some type of action to restore or mitigate the loss. The reactions bear a resemblance to sadness, but since the loss is so much greater the responses usually last longer and are more intense. People mourn, cry; create memorials, walk about openly in pain or unhappy. In general, they actively endure the loss. However restoring a grievous loss may seem less apparent and even impossible. What would restore the loss of a loved one or even significantly mitigate this loss? Grief is certainly a negative emotion, i.e. it involves finding oneself in a bad position and the motivated behavior was designed to get out of that bad position. Since grieving won’t undo the loss, why grieve? Below is a tentative account, which differs in some ways from the account that is given by Ossorio.
As with any poignant loss, lamenting a grievous loss bring social support and can help P move beyond the loss. Unlike most poignant losses, there is an additional problem. P must move beyond a loss that makes P’ world seem unlivable. Thus unlike simple sadness, part of the reaction to a grievous loss may involve some form of denial. Altho P knows of the loss, but the loss isn’t real for P, i.e. P can’t effectively act on the fact of the loss. Thus, the problem is to make real what P believes to be true. Since what a person P takes to be real is what P is prepared to act on, what it takes to make it real for P is to act on it. Grieving consists of such actions. If P is overcome by a loss, P acts overcome and that helps to make the loss real, for P is enacting the fact of the loss. If P laments intensely, that is behavior in which P take the status of a person with diminished behavior potential. The more P memorialize the loss the more it is the past tense that becomes operative and the more real it is for P that it’s gone. The net effect of grieving is that it is now real for P that P’s world is now diminished in all those ways that are consequent on the loss. At this point, P may be able to stop grieving and move forward. Otherwise, P may move from grieving to a state of pathological grief.
What it takes to move forward, is to repeatedly engage in behavior that enhances P’s behavior potential that in any way has notable significance for P. This includes any type self-affirming behavior – behavior that affirms that P has the characteristics supportive of P’s ability to act. It also includes behavior that affirms the value of P’s world. Altho a major component of P’s world is lost, P’s world must become one in which P acts and find significance.
Appendix 3: Emotion CONCEPTS FROM PNDP
Example: Fay and Ron walk down the lane from their cabin to the road. He starts to turn right. She stops. Turning right would have taken her past a house with dogs that run loose. Fay is afraid of these dogs, and considers them dangerous. Avoiding them is a much stronger reason for acting than her desire to go the way Ron turned. This example illustrates three main features of the paradigm case of the concept of emotional behavior as used in Descriptive Psychology, the emotion in this case being fear. This paradigm case applies to competent socialized adult humans. This concept is developed by (Bergner 1983 p209), altho I have modified his language, hopefully in order to make it easier to understand by anyone who is not familiar with Descriptive Psychology.
(1) An emotion is an appraisal by a person P of a relationship that something bears to P.
(2) This appraisal is of a type that by its nature involves a motivational significance for P.
(3) P has a learned tendency to act on this appraisal without deliberation.
The concept of something should be taken broadly to include any aspect of a person’s world. An appraisal may or may not be explicitly in focus. In Fay’s case, the appraisal was largely implicit. She merely came to the road, was aware that turning right seemed dangerous, and gave in to her impulse to stop. However when Ron asked her about it she easily identified the possibility of dogs attacking her as a threat. Ron said that there would be less traffic the way he wanted to go and assured her that the dogs only bark and that they always back away when confronted. This did nothing to mute the motivational significance of her appraisal. Part of what it means to classify a behavior as emotional is that it carries motivational significance, altho the motivation need not be preemptive as it was with Fay. Finally, not only was Fay motivated to stop without deliberation, this was something she had learned to do in response to this type of situation. In general, Fay avoids going anywhere near strange dogs that are running loose.
The term impulse is used in the ordinary sense, i.e. as an immediate inclination towards some unpremeditated action that a person is aware of at least to the extent that there is enough time between the inclination and the action to counter the inclination. As with any impulse, Fay might have decided to go the way Ron was turning, but the very fact that this would have taken a major effort shows that her appraisal carried strong motivational significance.
Saying that Fay is afraid of dogs and that her response in this case involved this fear does not mean that she is having some specific type of feeling. Moreover she did not have a noteworthy feeling about the dogs as she stopped, but this does not mean that her stopping was not emotional behavior. On other occasions, a similar emotional response of avoiding dogs has been accompanied by strong feelings. It is the three conditions above, rather than the presence or absence or extent of feeling, which characterize the concept of emotional behavior.
The last condition explicitly distinguishes emotional behavior as a form of action that is not deliberate action. However there are types of non-deliberate action that are not emotional. In order to contrast emotional behavior, such behaviors having only some of these features. Consider another example involving Ron. The description about to be given is primarily a performance description, with the other behavior description parameters implicit or ignored. Hopefully you can imagine enough about these other parameters to understand his actions and the interpretation given for them. Ron is moving rocks in the creek. A crawdad shoots out and he tries to catch it. He is distracted as a horsefly lands on his head. He automatically tries to brush it away. This fly is persistent. Ron lies on his back in the creek prominently exposing a bare knee. The fly lands. Ron knows that if he swats too soon the fly will escape. He patiently waits until it begins to bite and then he swats. He casually removes the smashed fly.
His appraisal about the crawdad was that it had the minor relation to him as something for him to catch, and his tendency to catch a crawdad in such a situation was learned and in this particular case was implemented without deliberation. What primarily distinguishes this from an emotional act is that his appraisal alone did not carry motivational significance. He often sees crawdads and does not consider catching them. Removing the smashed fly also involved an appraisal of his relationship to it and a tendency to act automatically. Altho this act did not involve considering alternative, it was casual. In Ron’s initial reaction to the horsefly, I doubt that an appraisal was even made, but if so the appraisal was only implicit. The tendency to act was both strong and automatic. However unlike an emotional response, there was no time to counter the inclination, so this tendency to act was reflexive rather than impulsive. Nor was this reaction learned. Ron’s methodical slaying of the fly involves an appraisal of it as an irritant. The motivational significance, while strong can be distinguished from an emotional response because his acting in this fashion was extremely deliberate. Motivational significance is obviously not restricted to emotional behavior.
Trying to catch crawdads when they appear is a habitual response for Ron. Like any other habitual response, altho involving learned tendencies to act, it differs from emotional ones by lacking logical motivational significance. For instance, Fay comes to a corner and turns because this is how she normally drives to work. Altho automatic, there is no impulse and a slight reminder that she was going to the library would have nullified this motivation.
Removing the dead horsefly was an intentional act, but one done without deliberation. It is like the multitude of non-deliberate intentional acts that follow in a course of action initiated by deliberation. After Ron and Fay deliberately turn right their continued walk was intentional, altho very little of it is deliberate and none of it involved strong motivational significance or any impulses. Even when they reached the goat farm and automatically turned around to head back, this was the case. This is just what they would do because they had initially decided to walk 2½ miles. If one of them had suggested walking further then the motivational significance of the appraisal that this is the place to turn around would have been considerably muted.
If the concept of an appraisal is not limited to being cognitive, one could say that a reflex action satisfies most of the conditions given for an emotional one. They both certainly carry a strong tendency to act automatically. However, even if we allow for a broad concept of an appraisal, a reflex action still differs from emotional behavior in two important respects. The tendency to act is mostly unlearned. Nor does it involve an impulse because an impulse is usually an inclination to act that a person can counter.
Emotional concepts also include emotional states. States are usually temporary, altho they can last for an extended period. Unlike behavior, states are caused, rather than chosen. Emotional states differ from other states by having a distinctive kind of cause and behavioral manifestation. What brings on an emotional state is a pair of conditions. First, there is the kind of appraisal for the corresponding emotional behavior. Second, the emotional behavior of the kind was motivated by the appraisal has not been successful. For example, to be in a state of grief a person P must have made the appraisal of a grievous loss and also continue to act as if his or her world as having been permanently diminished.
When P is in an emotional state P has an increased tendency to engage in the corresponding emotional behaviors. Thus, in a state of grief P will have an increased tendency to magnify losses and to lament them. P will also have a tendency to dwell on the losses that first triggered the grief. Emotional behaviors differ in the length of the typical delay between motivation and success. With fear, the motivated behavior often succeeds in removing the eminent danger, and normally a major state of fearfulness does not emerge. On the other hand, with grief there is typically a significant delay during which suffering is intense and success may seem impossible. So with grief there is typically an emotional state that follows the initial emotional behavior. Likewise with fear that is not immediate, an emotional state seem more likely to occur than with fear in which the danger is eminent
Bergner, Raymond (1983) Emotions. In K. Davis & R. Bergner (Eds), Advances in
Descriptive Psychology (Vol 3, pp
7-32).
Ossorio, Peter (1998) Place.
Volume III, The Collected Works of Peter G. Ossorio.
Ossorio, Peter (2006) The
Behavior of Persons. Volume V, The Collected Works of Peter G. Ossorio.