Prepare for a load of old cog.
I came across a few terms I liked the other day. Well, two. One was this cognitively laden concept. This is when beliefs and expectations effect the way we interpret - or 'see' - a perception.
So, say in football match there's a beautiful, acrobatic, balletic move which leads to the scoring of a goal. Let's call that A. Imagine the same physical movements that do NOT lead to a goal. This is B. Or, C, the same series of movements that are demonstrated as a group of people run through a minefield while escaping chasing militia with machine guns. Finally, D, the movements are performed as a ballet.
A one can appreciate A as both a purposive (this is the other term) and aesthetic moment. D is purely aesthetic. B might be appreciated by purists, but, as the result is missing in a game in which the whole purpose is victory, probably it would not be seen as either. C is purely purposive, because the stakes are so high.
Purposive suggests that the perception is shaped by how we seek to utilise it. This is similar the a Heideggerian concept of something, a tool, being 'ready-to-hand'. Things are not just things they are part of what we can do. A chair is not, unlike a sculpture, a purely aesthetic thing. The purpose of an aesthetic thing is not its usefulness, but its beauty. Yet within the terms of a particular practice, like the game of football, the aesthetic gets bound up in the purposive. Where the matter is life and death, aesthetics loses significance.
I like all this. The ability to create these, albeit complex, distinctions.
What's more, such ideas also shed light on other things. What if we look at people - or animals - as purposive or aesthetic? It may be that we can appreciate their aesthetic value in a moment - regard a particular gesture or athletic movement or the totality of the creature in a particular light. We can, likewise, regard them intermittently as purposive - 'Here, hand me that hammer?'. But what if that's how we always see them? The man with the trophy wife. The woman with the wealthy husband. The rider with the dressage horse. In all cases, the people will deny that they value the person or animal purely for the purposive or aesthetic factor, but sans that purposive or aesthetic factor, they would not value that other being. Can this ever be morally acceptable? Not for Kant, who could boil down his ethics to the proposition that one must always treat others as ends in themselves, not means to an end.
It seems to me that I can think of people for whom many of their relationships are founded on value that fails to fully respect the other's personhood. Sometimes people select only friends and partners who will consistently entertain, encourage or empathise; or who are regarded highly by others, thus conferring some social benefit, a vicarious prestige; or who may be professionally useful and so on. There will, of course, be a mixture of motivations but I think you can tell the 'disinterestedness' of a person's choice of friends by how clearly they see them. What I mean is that those who choose friends as means rather than ends will see those people through distorting lenses. For example, you might hear them describe a pretty young woman as 'very clever and really amusing' when actually the young woman stands out far more for her looks than her sparkling wit. The claim that the woman is more entertaining than she is is there to justify the fact that she has been selected as an object of aesthetic value, rather than as a complete person.
Some people see no value in others at all - either as persons (ends in themselves), means to ends or aesthetic objects. This is also interesting. Interactions with such people tend to involve only conversation around their interests, needs, desires and frustrations. For they have no curiosity about the otherness of others. Nor even in what the other might think of them. This latter quality must be liberating. I have wondered if in these cases, while some may be merely sociopathic, perhaps the majority are very afraid. Connections with others always pose a risk for one cannot control the other. Narcissists will be concerned about what the others think of them, but will seek to manage it, manipulate it. Psychopaths won't care, but will be interested in people as means to ends, and for that reason will monitor the reactions of others.
All this takes me back to Iris Murdoch for whom the aim of the moral education is to learn 'how real things can be looked at and loved without being seized and used, without being appropriated into the greedy organism of the self.' She describes this as detachment - and, for the first time, I realised the real meaning of the Buddhist advice to let go of attachments. It's about this. Seeing becomes just and compassionate; attention is unselfish. She goes on to say that '[t]he more the separate-ness and different-ness of other people is realised, and the fact seen that another man has needs and wishes as demanding as one's own, the harder it becomes to treat the person as a thing.' (Both lines taken from The Sovereignty of the Good.)
I have friends who are like this as friends. But I think it gets a lot harder for us when we move outside personal relationships. Those we don't know we can still regard in the cognitively laden way. I am thinking especially here of prejudice. It is very, shockingly, apparent to the observer, though not to the subject, how differently people will judge those from a group they do not like. Hence the animosity between Brexiteers and Remainers, Trans activists and feminists, Black Lives Matter demonstrators and traditionalist nationalists, Labour and Tory, Republican and Democrat, working class and aristocrat.
An infraction that would be excused and justified if perpetrated by 'us' is condemned and vilified if done by 'them'. Because 'they' are, well, choose your adjective - self-seeking, blinkered, cruel, corrupt, old-fashioned, unreasonable, patronising, irresponsible. It's the fundamental attribution error writ large. No one is interested in the reasons and motives of the other side, only the reasons and motives that they think the other side has - if they even believe that they have reasons beyond self-interest.
Strangely, there might be common ground - all might, genuinely, be seeking a better world for all. But until we can talk through the reasons and motives, the arguments and aims in a detached fashion, we'll keep on heading to a world that's worse for all.
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