Technique and Sensitivity

Technique is for orderly progression toward a pre-determined goal.
Sensitivity assesses the situation of the moment and makes a decision based on ultimate purposes.

Technique is a disregarder of persons.
Sensitivity allows for individual differences.

Technique demands submission of one's personhood.
Sensitivity is a response to personhood.

Technique is a means of living temporally.
Sensitivity is the means by which one lives in eternity--the a-temporal moment.

Technique is law.
Sensitivity is life.

Technique says, "My will be done."
Sensitivity moves in response to the will of God.

Technique is a scheme.
Sensitivity is a response.

Technique relegates responsibility to the scheme: It fails or succeeds.
Sensitivity is responsibility--response-ability. The only "failure" is my failure to respond.

Technique has a timetable.
Sensitivity has all the time in the world, for sensitivity is only possible in the now.

Technique orders the chaos into a meaningful system.
Sensitivity finds the meaning in the chaos.

Sometimes, sensitivity is knowing when to use which technique.

(Composed in 1974)

Motivation

I want to blog today--it's the first day of the new year, after all--but I find that I can't get motivated!

I make the best attempt I can to approach this topic philosophically, but end up disgusted. I'm reminded of the assignment in my sophomore composition class when I wanted to do my research paper on "Writer's Block." My teacher, mercifully, wouldn't allow it. I did it on "Copyright in the Church", instead. But that's another story.

Today, I turn off the computer and sweep the kitchen floor and vacuum the carpet. I think about motivation while I work. What motivates me to sweep and vacuum? It needs doing. There is enough material, tracked in from outside or dropped from snacks, that I can see it everywhere. I like to see clean floors. I can feel it crunch underfoot. I don't like crunchies underfoot. That's the motivation.

Why am I motivated to blog today, then?

I haven't blogged for three weeks.

I hear a little voice way inside say, "So what?"

So that's not it.

I go practice the violin for a while. I like the feel of the strings, and I want to learn the assigned piece for an upcoming lesson. I'm learning to like the piece itself. I find it running through my head, and I enjoy making the sounds in my mind appear in the outer world of sensation. I'm beyond motivation once I get started--it is more like eating potato chips. Can't eat just one.

But here I am. I've checked my email. Nothing new, but I can answer a day-old one. And so I do. I may get a response to my response and that motivates me.

And now it is is 3:30 pm on a gorgeous day, and I need to get outside and enjoy the new snow before it gets dark. It will soon be sunset, and I will lose the day. Scarcity is motivating.

The snow is delightful and very, very cold. I take a sled down past the silo to where my husband has cut up fallen trees. I load the wood on and haul it up to the barn to the drying stack. I do want to be helpful, but my real motivation is to get exercise.

My fingers are freezing so I come inside and from the upstairs window, take a picture of my sister-in-law's farm just before the day finally fades.

And now I've written my blog.

Going Deeper

I find myself working over the same material from year to year. I've been reading psychological theory for years, investing time pursuing theological and philosophical interests, and learning about recent neuro-science particularly as it applies to consciousness. Just when I think I've got something figured out, something new turns up to be added to the mix and integrated.

Although it may not be so much that something really new turns up as that I finally have absorbed enough and integrated it enough that I'm able to recognize the meaning of something I've already been exposed to. And it is possible that the rest of the intellectual community is integrating and writing about the very thing that I've been struggling to pull together.

Back a few years ago, we were reading "Don't Think of an Elephant," by Geo. Lakoff. I was interested, but at the same time a little put off by the idea of framing--at least what I understood of it at that time. It seemed like "spin", like putting one's own agenda into appealing words ("re-spin"), to appeal to an audience that didn't know its own mind. Are people really that stupid? Don't "facts" matter more than "images"?

Well, I've been reading Gerald Edelman's "Bright Air, Brilliant Fire" and getting a picture of how deeply hard-wired our metaphors are, how fundamental these metaphors are to the way we experience the world. They arise from the interaction of our general human neurological/brain structure with what we do, what happens to us, and how we respond (affect and action) to what happens.

I've never had much interest in Jungian psychology and the idea of archetypes, but now with a sense of how metaphor is the underlying structure of the mind, it is much more interesting to me. Certain narratives, certain characters in those narratives, show up in most people's lives. They are of "mythic" proportion.

Revisiting Lakoff recently ("Thinking Points" and "The Politcal Mind"), I see that he has addressed my concern about "spin" and "re-spin" and is defining frames--deep framing--as that level of neurological structure in the brain that is formed by early experiences, held in place by the emotional charge associated with those experiences. "Fact" is something for the logical mind to relate to, but to matter to the individual it has to be wrapped in metaphoric imagery that is associated with the emotional charge you want to tap. "Fact" without metaphor makes no sense. Literally. We "make sense" of facts, events, objects, etc., in terms of their metaphoric similarity with previous experiece, which is associated with some feeling. Without feeling, there is no "sense" of things. So to "frame" or "re-frame" at the level of discourse (explicit) is to access the deeper, "hard-wired" metaphors of experience and feeling (implicit) that direct our political (and religious) feeling/thinking.

Lakoff talks about the various metaphoric narratives that one lives by. We have more than one narrative, and some narratives are incompatible and mutually exclusive. He gets behind the narratives in a way that helps me make sense of the apparent inconsistencies in the "moral" issues held by [people I disagree with politically].


I'm going to have to work on this some more, but for now, I'll post it. I'll try to give examples next time.