Self-Esteem: Reactive or Proactive?

[coberst]

Self-Esteem: Reactive or Proactive?

The human character has become a symbolic one as it becomes more and more a social creature. The survival of the [censored] sapiens species is no longer a result of natural selection but is a result of artificial selection; it is dependent upon the nature of the symbolic codes we SELECT to live by.

Seeking self-esteem is what we humans do; the question becomes ‘do we continue to be reactive as we are taught or do we become proactive as our self-constructed autodidactic comprehension guides us’.

If instinct is no longer the primary force driving the human species, i.e. this animal that is more than just animal, what is the motivating factor driving the life of wo/man?

The “clinical theories of Adler, as well as Sullivan, Rank, Fromm, Horney, and a growing number of young and undogmatic Freudians” identify “that the basic law of human life is the urge to self-esteem”.

As the infant matures s/he becomes the passive captor of a need to be accepted, first, by the mother, and then society. The maturing child has shaped herself into the very person who can take for granted that he meets or exceeds what is demanded; s/he gains self-esteem and a growing sense of belonging, with confidence in a developing sense of self-righteousness as a growing natural systematic continuation of the early ego efforts to handle anxiety.

Maturation becomes an extension of the infant’s ego struggle against anxiety. Self-esteem becomes the core of human adaptation; this human self-adaptation replaces the animal’s biological instinct as the means for adaptation to a changing world. The maturing child discovers that s/he cannot earn parental and social approval, i.e. self-esteem, by continuing to express himself with his body. S/he discovers that he must conduct himself in strict accordance to symbolic codes in order to find approval.

The maturing child’s growing sense of self-worth has become artificialized; self-worth is now dependent upon “linguistic contrivances”. “He has become the only animal in nature who vitally depends on a symbolic constitution of his worth.” The remainder of this creature’s life is animated by the “artificial symbolism of self-worth”.

Our character has become social as it becomes more and more a symbolic one. The survival of the [censored] sapiens species is no longer a result of natural selection but is a result of artificial selection; it is dependent upon the nature of the symbolic codes we select to live by.

How can we become proactive; rather than reactive as we have been schooled? I think we can do so when we have taught our self to recognize the difference. What do you think?

Ideas and quotes from “The Birth and Death of Meaning? by Ernest Becker

[madnak]

I think the problem with theory of this kind is that it places itself into a codified and symbolic form. This is problematic partly because we have to feed the theory back into itself, and partly because it becomes open to interpretation (some of those interpretations are certainly true, and some false - so the question becomes "how do we interpret it?"). I think before we can discuss these subjects reliably, we really need hard technical definitions that can be agreed to and adhered to.

Still, sounding profound is nice, so... I think human action can definitely be viewed from a perspective emphasizing self-esteem, but it can also be viewed from other perspectives (such as the "self-interest" perspective frequently brought up here, or the "response to pain" perspective we're moving toward on the other thread). I don't think we understand the mechanism of self-esteem, or predict the effects thereof, to a sufficient degree to draw any conclusions right now.

To answer the original question, I think reactive and proactive functions involve heavy feedback, and I don't think any action (that involves the cortex, as opposed to reflexes) can be described as just one or the other. Personally I think human choices are defined by ultimately reactive biological causes, but proponents of "free will" (in the incompatibilist sense) will loudly proclaim the opposite.

[coberst]

madnak

The great truth of human nature is that wo/man strives for meaning. S/he imposes on raw experience symbolic categories of thought, and does so with conceptual structures of thought. “All human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul.”—Otto Rank

In the nineteenth century, after two hundred years of opposition paradigms, science faced the dilemma: if we make wo/man to be totally an object of science, to be as this object merely a conglomeration of atoms and wheels then where is there a place for freedom? How can such a collection of mere atoms be happy, and fashion the Good Life?

The best thinkers of the Enlightenment followed by the best of the nineteenth century were caught in the dilemma of a materialistic psychology. Does not the inner wo/man disappear when humans are made into an object of science? On the other hand if we succumb to the mode of the middle Ages, when the Church kept man firmly under the wraps of medieval superstitions, do we not give up all hope for self-determined man?

“Yet, we want man to be the embodiment of free, undetermined subjectivity, because this is the only thing that keeps him interesting in all of nature…It sums up the whole tragedy of the Enlightenment vision of science.” There are still those who would willingly surrender wo/man to Science because of their fear of an ever encroaching superstitious enemy.

Kant broke open this frustrating dilemma. By showing that sapiens could not know nature in its stark reality, that sapiens had no intellectual access to the thing-in-itself, that humans could never know a nature that transcended their epistemology, Kant “defeated materialistic psychology, even while keeping its gains. He centered nature on man, and so made psychology subjective; but he also showed the limitations of human perceptions in nature, and so he could be objective about them, and about man himself. In a word man was at once, limited creature, and bottomless mystery, object and subject…Thus it kept the best of materialism, and guaranteed more than materialism ever could: the protection of man’s freedom, and the preservation of his inner mystery.”

After Kant, Schilling illuminated the uniqueness of man’s ideas, and the limitations from any ideal within nature. Schilling gave us modern man. Materialism and idealism was conjoined. Wo/man functioned under the aegis of whole ideas, just as the idealists wanted, and thus man became an object of science while maintaining freedom of self-determination.

The great truth of the nineteenth century was that produced by William Dilthey, which was what wo/man constantly strived for. “It was “meaning” said Dilthey, meaning is the great truth about human nature. Everything that lives, lives by drawing together strands of experience as a basis for its action; to live is to act, to move forward into the world of experience…Meaning is the relationship between parts of experience.” Man does not do this drawing together on the basis of simple experience but on the basis of concepts. Man imposes symbolic categories of thought on raw experience. His conception of life determines the manner in which s/he values all of its parts.

Concludes Dilthey, meaning “is the comprehensive category through which life becomes comprehensible…Man is the meaning-creating animal.”

Does it make sense to you that “All human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul”??

Quotes and ideas from “Beyond Alienation” Becker

[madnak]

Sure. I assume "the soul" here is meant in an intuitive experiential sense, not a religious sense. I know when I read Victor Frankl he made an impact on me. But a lot of this depends on your definitions of "soul" and "meaning." If meaning is described broadly enough, then it's clearly relevant. Also, some people successfully kill themselves over what they experience as primarily apathy and boredom. A feeling of meaninglessness causes anxiety in anyone and everyone.

At the same time, it seems a bit romantic and unrealistic. Some problems, like starvation for example, aren't clearly matters of the soul. They can certainly be interpreted as such, and some people (including many intelligent people) believe those are the most insightful interpretations. Still, it's hard for me to distance myself from an empirical context and from the assumption that hunger causes suffering through primarily physiological means. Then again, the power of the individual over his own brain is significant enough that it may be possible to overcome even that "problem" - however, if the person were to feel no suffering when starving, they'd be rather likely to starve to death. And we come from a strong heritage of survivors. Reciprocal altruism and the selfish gene aside, "survival of the fittest" is still valid to some degree. It's perfectly reasonable to view human psychology in an empirical or an evolutionary context.

[coberst]

The ego is our command center; it is the “internal gyroscope” and creator of time for the human. It controls the individual; especially it controls individual’s response to the external environment. It keeps the individual independent from the environment by giving the individual time to think before acting. It is the device that other animal do not have and thus they instinctively respond immediately to the world.

The id is our animal self. It is the human without the ego control center. The id is reactive life and the ego changes that reactive life into delayed thoughtful life. The ego is also the timer that provides us with a sense of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. By doing so it makes us into philosophical beings conscious of our self as being separate from the ‘other’ and placed in a river of time with a terminal point—death. This time creation allows us to become creatures responding to symbolic reality that we alone create.

As a result of the id there is a “me” to which everything has a focus of being. The most important job the ego has is to control anxiety that paradoxically the ego has created. With a sense of time there comes a sense of termination and with this sense of death comes anxiety that the ego embraces and gives the “me” time to consider how not to have to encounter anxiety.

Evidence indicates that there is an “intrinsic symbolic process” is some primates. Such animals may be able to create in memory other events that are not presently going on. “But intrinsic symbolization is not enough. In order to become a social act, the symbol must be joined to some extrinsic mode; there must exist an external graphic mode to convey what the individual has to express…but it also shows how separate are the worlds we live in, unless we join our inner apprehensions to those of others by means of socially agreed symbols.”

“What they needed for a true ego was a symbolic rallying point, a personal and social symbol—an “I”, in order to thoroughly unjumble himself from his world the animal must have a precise designation of himself. The “I”, in a word, has to take shape linguistically…the self (or ego) is largely a verbal edifice…The ego thus builds up a world in which it can act with equanimity, largely by naming names.” The primate may have a brain large enough for “me” but it must go a step further that requires linguistic ability that permits an “I” that can develop controlled symbols with “which to put some distance between him and immediate internal and external experience.”

I conclude from this that many primates have the brain that is large enough to be human but in the process of evolution the biological apparatus that makes speech possible was the catalyst that led to the modern human species. The ability to emit more sophisticated sounds was the stepping stone to the evolution of wo/man. This ability to control the vocal sounds promoted the development of the human brain.

Ideas and quotes from “Birth and Death of Meaning”—Ernest Becker

[DougShrapnel]

[ QUOTE ]
it is dependent upon the nature of the symbolic codes we SELECT to live by.

[/ QUOTE ] This is a brave assuption, that answers your question of being proactive. That we are the ones that SELECT. As opposed to REALITY that selects the codes. The codes survive becuase they are selected, and this selection is not artificial.

[ QUOTE ]
If instinct is no longer the primary force driving the human species

[/ QUOTE ] Another assumption.

[ QUOTE ]
S/he discovers that he must conduct himself in strict accordance to symbolic codes in order to find approval.

[/ QUOTE ] The other side is that we conduct ourselves in accordnace with codes, because that helps us to survive.

[ QUOTE ]
He has become the only animal in nature who vitally depends on a symbolic constitution of his worth.

[/ QUOTE ] When I hear "the only animal in nature who...", I can't help but chuckle a bit. It's a requirement for any student of human nuture to finish that sentence, as much as it is a requirement to be wrong about what you think is what sets us apart from other animals.

[ QUOTE ]
How can we become proactive; rather than reactive as we have been schooled? I think we can do so when we have taught our self to recognize the difference.

[/ QUOTE ] Know theself.

[coberst]

Doug

The following is a post I made some time ago that relates to your questions.

You last response "Know theself" is right on the mark. To know theself is not quick and easy and I try to post ideas that will focus upon how to "know theself".


iPod is a pseudo pod

‘Object is container’ is, I think, a useful metaphor. The object has an inside and an outside with a boundary separating the two. It is possibly the reason we think of the existence of souls and spirits. Humans think about them self as an object. We see an example of this interior and exterior when we communicate on the Internet. In our face-to-face communication in the real world the exterior of a person becomes very important in our concept of that person. On the Internet such is not the case and this fact causes situations between the two modes of communication.

When most people contact one another there is only a combining of exteriors. Few occasions develop when two people make a significant contact of interiors. James Baldwin put it succinctly when he said “mirrors can only lie”. The mirror exposes only the exterior and says nothing about the interior; I find that, as I grow older, I have less and less exterior about which to communicate and communication about the interior seems much easier with total strangers on the Internet than with those close to me.

Marshall McLuhan “The High Priest of Pop-Culture” in the mid twentieth century was the first to announce the existence of the ‘global village’ and to express that “we become what we behold”. McLuhan sought to understand and express the effects of technology on modern culture.

McLuhan was particularly interested in “Technology as Extension of the Human Body”. “An extension occurs when an individual or society makes or uses something in a way that extends the range of the human body and mind in a fashion that is new. The shovel we use for digging holes is a kind of extension of the hands and feet. The spade is similar to the cupped hand, only it is stronger, less likely to break, and capable of removing more dirt per scoop than the hand. A microscope or telescope is a way of seeing that is an extension of the eye.”

Going further in this vein the auto is an extension of the foot. However there are negative results from all such extensions. “Amputations” represent the unintended and un-reflected counterparts of such extensions.

“Every extension of mankind, especially technological extensions, has the effect of amputating or modifying some other extension… The extension of a technology like the automobile "amputates" the need for a highly developed walking culture, which in turn causes cities and countries to develop in different ways. The telephone extends the voice, but also amputates the art of penmanship gained through regular correspondence. These are a few examples, and almost everything we can think of is subject to similar observations…We have become people who regularly praise all extensions, and minimize all amputations. McLuhan believed that we do so at our own peril.”

McLuhan was concerned about man's willful blindness to the downside of technology. In his later years McLuhan developed a scientific basis for his thought around what he termed the tetrad. The tetrad is four laws, framed as questions, which give us a useful instrument for studying our culture.
"What does it (the medium or technology) extend?"
"What does it make obsolete?"
"What is retrieved?"
"What does the technology reverse into if it is over-extended?"

McLuhan’s gravestone carries the inscription “The Truth Shall Make You Free." We do not have to like or even agree with everything that McLuhan said. However, we would be wise to remember that his was a life of great insight and it was dedicated to showing wo/man the truth about the world we live in, and especially the hidden consequences of the technologies we develop.

In the book “The Birth and Death of Meaning” Earnest Becker provides us with a synthesis of the knowledge about the extensions of the human body that McLuhan spoke of and science certified through research.

Becker informs us that the “self” is in the body but is not part of the body; it is symbolic and is not physical. “The body is an object in the field of the self: it is one of the things we inhabit…A person literally projects or throws himself out of the body, and anywhere at all…A man’s “Me” is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his mind, but his clothes and house, his wife and children, [etc].” The human can be symbolically located wherever s/he thinks part of her really exists or belongs.

It is said that the more insecure we are the more important these symbolic extensions of the self become. When we invest undue value onto such matters as desecrating a piece of cloth that symbolizes our nation is an indication that our self-valuation has declined and this overvaluation of a symbol can help compensate that loss. We get a good feeling about own value by obtaining value in the pseudopod as the flag.

In conceiving our self as a container that overflows with various and important extensions that our technology provides us we might appear like a giant amoeba spread out over the land with a center in the self. These pseudopods are not just patriotic symbols and important things but include silly things such as a car or a neck tie. We can experience nervous breakdowns when others do not respect our particular objects of reverence.

[DougShrapnel]

Really interesting stuff, and it's taken me some time to digest. There are other ways to view technology. Kevin Kelly believe technology to be the seventh kingdon of life, with it's main advatage is that technologies never die. Once obsolete technologies can "mate" with new technologies. He uses the evolution of the trombone to prove his point. I personally am contemplating if technology is the 4th type of evolution.

1. The evoution of matter. From what is was before only being hydrogen to being hydrogen, and then to what we see today, in it's myriad forms and combinations.
2. The evolution of life. A particular combination of matter. That has replication tendecies, a unique method for experimenting with new forms and stucture of matter, and a single common ancestry.
3. The evolution of memes. Including the peacocks "burden proves fitness", to the bealtes "When you where young you used to say.."
4. The evolution of technology. I'll speculate about the specific question you asked.

What does it (the medium or technology) extend? Technology ultimate purpose is to extend the ability of parentage to "obsolete" technologies, and dead life.

"What does it make obsolete?" No technology is ever obsolete.

"What is retrieved?" "Dead" technologies and dead life.
"What does the technology reverse into if it is over-extended?"
I don't know what the last one means

It's a bit of a sidetrack but would be interested in hearing peoples thoughts. Perhaps it's not the right thread.

-Doug

[coberst]

Doug

I think McLuhan has a great deal of useful insight about such matters.

The following is a newspaper article I copied.


Posted at 06:36 AM ET, 06/29/2006
Dictatorship of the Pickup
I'm in Asheville, most likely. Just off a freeway, across from a Waffle House, staying in a place with a name like Country Homewood Residence Suites by Marriott. Had dinner last night at a local joint, not a chain, a steak place where somehow they make everything very soft, very jiggly, including the Caesar salad. Even the ice in the water glass wasn't hard. It was one of those restaurants where the waitress, eyeing the way the diner is picking at the food, will say, "Sir, is your salad too crisp?"
Yesterday I visited some back-to-the-land people in the mountains. They raise their own food. My family tried that, back in the 1970s, when I was a teenager, and I'm pretty sure it was because my step-father, Jim, bought a pickup truck, an old Ford with a steel bed. We had been normal city folks until we got the truck.
Suddenly we were growing corn and potatoes, as though we were farmers. We sold stuff at the farmer's market every Saturday, the truck serving as the symbol of our authenticity. Then we started selling firewood that we hauled around in the back of the pickup, and we'd sell sawdust that we dug out of giant sawdust piles in the woods. The truck kept inventing things for us to do. We hauled furniture, 25 bucks a load. We grew ornamental plants that looked fine until we loaded them in the pickup and blasted them with 60 mile-per-hour winds as we delivered them around town. That truck didn't just change our lives, it took dictatorial control of them.
People think that a car reflects the personality of the owner, but it's the other way around. Volvos are well known to make people more cautious. Convertibles cause normally sane middle-aged men to start wearing leather vests and too-tight jeans. Trucks inspire their owners to wear silly caps and talk funny. If I bought a pickup and a bass boat, and towed the boat behind the pickup as I tooled up and down the streets of Northwest DC, I'd be unable to stop myself from speaking in a drawl. I guarandangtee it.

[Aver-aging]

You know, I've said it once to you, and I'll say it again. You are on the wrong track to understanding things in a comprehensive way that is accessible to regular people, and most fields of study. Get off your philosophical track, because it's leading nowhere.

Stop trying to sound so romantic, you are wasting your time. Madnak has already said it, there are better approaches to understanding these questions, their more empirical, more standardized, and more accessible. You can understand these things through physiology and evolutionary study much better than you can from the approach (whatever its called) that you're taking. Do yourself a favor, learn about the structure of the brain and body (and I mean structural details! not generalities), find how structure affects behavior both normally and potentially, understand how behavior evolved from an evolutionary perspective, and then meld all those things together and you'll actually have an approach that people can understand, discuss and further studies on. I am telling you now, that with your method, you will not discover anything useful or anything that a scientific community will recognize as valid.

Don't listen to Freudians, and don't listen to philosophers. You can use their ideas as inspiration, but don't accept them as 100% valid, because it can be a huge waste of time. Listen to the neurology guys, listen to the evolutionary study guys, and most importantly, think up your own ideas!

[coberst]

Aver-aging

Speaking of empirical sciences I have become very interested in cognitive science.

It appears to me that CS has two paradigms, symbol manipulation (AI), and conceptual metaphor. When I speak of CS here I am speaking of the conceptual metaphor paradigm.

Cognitive science has radically attacked the traditional Western philosophical position that there is a dichotomy between perception and conception. This traditional view that perception is strictly a faculty of body and conception (the formation and use of concepts) is purely mental and wholly separate from and independent of our ability to perceive and move.

Cognitive science has introduced revolutionary theories that, if true, will change dramatically the views of Western philosophy. Advocates of the traditional view will, of course, “say that conceptual structure must have a neural realization in the brain, which just happens to reside in a body. But they deny that anything about the body is essential for characterizing what concepts are.”

The cognitive science claim is that “the very properties of concepts are created as a result of the way the brain and body are structured and the way they function in interpersonal relations and in the physical world.”

The embodied-mind hypothesis therefore radically undercuts the perception/conception distinction. In an embodied mind, it is conceivable that the same neural system engaged in perception (or in bodily movements) plays a central role in conception. Indeed, in recent neural modeling research, models of perceptual mechanisms and motor schemas can actually do conception work in language learning and in reasoning.

A standard technique for checking out new ideas is to create computer models of the idea and subject that model to simulated conditions to determine if the model behaves as does the reality. Such modeling techniques are used constantly in projecting behavior of meteorological parameters.

Neural computer models have shown that the types of operations required to perceive and move in space require the very same type of capability associated with reasoning. That is, neural models capable of doing all of the things that a body must be able to do when perceiving and moving can also perform the same kinds of actions associated with reasoning, i.e. inferring, categorizing, and conceiving.

Our understanding of biology indicates that the body has a marvelous ability to do as any handyman does, i.e. make do with what is at hand. The body would, it seems logical to assume, take these abilities that exist in all creatures that move and survive in space and with such fundamental capabilities reshape it through evolution to become what we now know as our ability to reason. The first budding of the reasoning ability exists in all creatures that function as perceiving, moving, surviving, creatures.

Cognitive science has, it seems to me, connected our ability to reason with our bodies in such away as to make sense out of connecting reason with our biological evolution in ways that Western philosophy has not done, as far as I know.

It seems to me that Western philosophical tradition as always tried to separate mind from body and in so doing has never been able to show how mind, as was conceived by this tradition, could be part of Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Cognitive science now provides us with a comprehensible model for grounding all that we are both bodily and mentally into a unified whole that makes sense without all of the attempts to make mind as some kind of transcendent, mystical, reality unassociated with biology.

Quotes from “Philosophy in the Flesh”

[Aver-aging]

Yes.. I am aware of all those things. If you're interested in what one of the models looks like, read the book "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins. He sets out the basic structural details of the neocortex (the modern part of the brain). Then he goes through explaining how it controls motor movement, moral behavior, reasoning faculties, creativity and even consciousness because of its unique and incredibly complex hierarchical structure that uses feedback to build models of understanding and behavior.

Also don't work under the assumption that physical movement was the motivating factor behind complex neo-cortical development. The main driving force of this mechanism was social behavior, and figuring complex behavioral patterns that other people exhibited (being able to predict what your peers will or won't do is a huge advantage in a social environment). Naturally, I don't want to underplay the role that physical movement had (like the ability to manipulate tools easily), it's just that that wasn't the most important thing for survival.

That's good that you've had exposure to more modern ideas of neurology, physiology and psychology, but you need to ditch that philosophical approach. That's all I am saying. Also be very wary of cognitive sciences, because they have a tendency to rely too heavily on neurological 'models' instead of dissecting and understanding the real model - the brain.

Also, if you want to understand evolutionary ideas, read books like "The Evolution of Co-operation" by Robert Axelrod, "Emotional Intelligence" and "Social Intelligence" by Daniel Goleman (People like to undermine his work because he's a fairly popular writer for a layman, but his perspective is rock solid) and "The Female Brain" by Louann Brizendine. Those are all good starters if you want to understand the relationship between behavior, evolution and physiology.

[tame_deuces]

This is fairly typical for the sciences to run into. Previous views conflict with new theories, but the previous truths creates a bias which is hard to overcome. If it sinks in deep enough you'll need some serious out of the box thinking to get rid of it.

This is a common problem to study in for instance sociology, how a 'truth' can become part of a culture. I'm not too much into sociology as a whole, but these are interesting parts.

Viewing the mind as separate entity from the body is one the big 'classic' errors that cloud the way we think about things. For instance that people suffering from sort of eating disorders suffers from 'weak minds'. etc.

Interestingly Freud as you mentioned earlier, together with Jung, is also responsible for what I would call some of the 'great lies' that has blocked progress into studying how humans actually function.

An interesting example of such destructive ideals is phlogiston. For those haven't heard the tale 17th century physics taught us that all combustible materials contained phlogiston; 'flame stuff' which disappeared after it was used up. And that it was this stuff that caused fire. When some materials were found to gain weight after burning, branches within physics proposed that phlogiston had 'negative' mass.

Here we see how an idea first is accepted, then as the idea is used it creates an unbalanced bias which later on develops into a massive error which can unbalance an entire field and create ideas which are potentially very destructive for future knowledge.

And this isn't an old wife's tale, stuff like this happens still and it will continue to happen in the future within all scientific branches and even common sense ideals, to think otherwise is foolish.

Small old tidbits of one surefire scientific knowledge that we now know to be 'dead wrong' still floats about ruining the spread of proper knowledge. Just like in your mind and body example.

[coberst]

We all stand on the shoulders of giants. These giants provide us with fundamental knowledge because they formulated answers to fundamental questions. We would be mistaken to take on a sophomoric attitude that, since we have advanced somewhat beyond those broad shoulders, we do not not owe a great debt to these giants.