(Roughly) Daily

Further in a fashion to yesterday’s post, and via the always illuminating Delanceyplace.com, an explication of one of the most fundamental of all human needs: an excerpt from Rebecca Goldstein‘s The Mattering Instinct, in which she draws on one of the fathers of both pragmatism and psychology, William James…

We speak both of what matters and of who matters. In fact, we speak a great deal about both.

Consider what matters. In recent decades, the phrase why X matters has become a template for dozens of book titles, including Why Beauty Matters, Why Emotions Matter, Why Family Matters, Why Genealogy Matters, Why Good Sex Matters, Why Jesus Matters, Why Knowledge Matters, Why Liberalism Matters, Why Money Matters, and Why Stories Matter. The profusion of titles, many of them mutually exclusive–after all, if Jesus matters, then how, too, can money?–testifies to our preoccupation with what matters.

And it’s not only the question of what matters but also of who matters that’s urgent. Consider: In 2013, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, a Black American, was visiting, together with his father, his father’s fiance at her townhouse in a gated community in Florida. While the grownups were out, Trayvon went to a nearby convenience store to get himself some snacks and, on his way back, was shot by a Neighborhood Watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, himself a member of a minority as a Hispanic American. Zimmerman found Trayvon suspicious looking–the boy’s hoodie was prominently mentioned in news stories–and called the police, while he continued to trail the teenager, a course of action ultimately ending in the boy’s death. Trayvon hadn’t been armed. All that was found on him was a bag of Skittles and an iced tea.

After the acquittal of the shooter, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter exploded onto social media. The three-word slogan soon went beyond mere hashtags and placards, following the deaths of two more unarmed Black Americans, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, to become a political movement. Those who opposed Black Lives Matter sometimes offered as rejoinders their own three-word slogans: ‘All Lives Matter,’ or ‘Blue Lives Matter,’ this last referring to police officers. Of course, ‘Black Lives Matter’ isn’t inconsistent with either ‘All Lives Matter’ or ‘Blue Lives Matter,’ since ‘Black Lives Matter’ isn’t synonymous with ‘Only Black Lives Matter.’ The power and the poignancy of the original slogan lay in its minimalism. But what the battle of the slogans made clear is the potency of the verb to matter, in this instance applied not to the question of what matters but rather who matters.

So what exactly does the verb to matter mean? Here is a quick working definition: To matter is to be deserving of attention. It’s the same whether we are speaking of what matters or who matters. The thing or the person that matters makes a claim on us; at the very least, a claim is made on our attention.

The claim of being deserving of attention may be based on consequences that would ensue from paying attention or not paying attention–as when we ask, say, does voting really matter? We’re asking whether voting makes a difference; and so whether it’s worth our while to pay the attention called for in voting. It’s still the question of being deserving of attention, but what decides the issue is the consequences. In other circumstances, claims of mattering–of being deserving of attention–are independent of considerations of consequences, as when we assert that Black lives matter or that all lives matter. Here it’s intrinsic mattering, having nothing to do with consequences. And what intrinsic mattering comes down to is being deserving of attention. To claim that Black lives matter, as all lives matter, is to make claims regarding the deservingness of attention.

This leaves us with two more terms to explicate: attention and deservingness.

Attention is a mental phenomenon studied by contemporary psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists–in other words, it is a subject for the empirical sciences.

The best definition I know of the phenomenon was given by the philosopher and psychologist William James. Attention, he wrote, is ‘the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what may seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thoughts.’ Focalization, concentration of consciousness, are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.

James implies that attention is something we do. ‘It is the taking possession by the mind.’ The world’s languages agree. In English we pay attention, while in other languages we give, lend, gift, dedicate, sacrifice, prepare, turn, attach, apply, infuse, and arouse our attention. The linguistic formations all imply that there is activity and agency in attention. His definition also makes clear how attention, as an activity, is to be distinguished from the broader notion of consciousness. After all, that confused, dazed, scatterbrained state is a state of consciousness, though the ‘real opposite’ of paying attention.

His definition also entails that attention is limited and selective: withdrawal from some things. Every act of attention is an act of exclusion. In paying attention to something, we are forced to ignore a multitude of other things. And he ties this limitedness and selectivity with attention’s usefulness: in order to deal effectively. Contemporary psychology agrees. Attention’s limitedness and selectivity is crucial to its usefulness and linked to the reason why organisms evolved attention in the first place: to pay attention to changeable things in the organism’s immediate environment that can help or hinder it, nourish or annihilate it. That unpleasant smell, for example, may very well signal toxicity. Note the presence of the word changeable. The function of attention is tied to what is variable, not just to what is relevant to fitness. Oxygen, our heartbeat, gravity, and many other things are vital to our survival, and our unconscious mental processes must take them into account. But they tend to be constant, so there is no need to allocate our limited window of attention to them, unless circumstances alarmingly change.

The agency entailed in the act of paying attention means that we have some control over what we do and don’t pay attention to. You may be unable to remain oblivious to the bad music blasting in your gym or the rank smell seeping into your kitchen–stimuli that are intense or that pop out of your surroundings. But you can decide to pay no attention to, say, gossip or popular culture, social media or your weight. You can decide that they simply don’t matter, which is to say that they’re not deserving of your attention. And this brings us to the second component of the English verb to matter–namely deservingness.

Deservingness introduces an entirely different level of consideration into our preoccupations with mattering. It’s a level that goes beyond the psychological, beyond the empirical altogether. Deservingness draws us into the nonempirical sphere of values and justifications, of oughts and ought-nots. This is the sphere that philosophers call normative, because it invokes norms of justification. The mattering instinct means that we are normative creatures down to our core. We think and act and shape our lives within the sphere of justifications. Instead of calling ourselves Homo sapiens, we might better have christened ourselves Homo justificans.

It’s the presence of deservingness in the concept of mattering that raises us up into an entirely different order of both complexity and perplexedness. The mattering instinct has us straining beyond the empirical for the normative knowledge that eludes us. We are carried over into the sphere of values and justifications without being equipped to see our way through. Here is the epistemic elusiveness that injects the unsubdued doubt–and hence unease–into the heart of what it is to pursue a human life.

We speak both of what matters and of who matters. And behind our preoccupations with both is the most urgent of all our mattering questions, which is voiced in the first person: Do I matter? This is the mother of our mattering questions. Ultimately, we want to know what matters because we desperately want our own lives to be driven by what matters. We want to know who matters because we desperately want to be numbered among the ones who matter.

Self-mattering–feeling ourselves overwhelmingly deserving of our own attention–is baked into our identity. The usefulness of attention, to which William James alluded, is its usefulness to ourselves. So it’s no wonder that the greater part of our attention is given over to ourselves, whether overtly or tacitly. Throughout the enormous complexity of how the mind works, our self-mattering is presumed. And yet, astonishing creatures that we are, we are able, by way of the capacity for self-reflection with which our brains come equipped, to step outside of our self-mattering, which is to step outside ourselves, to pose the mother of all mattering questions…

It’s the deservingness component that separates the mattering for which we long from such empirical psychological states as having confidence or self-esteem. You can go online right now, or schedule a visit to a psychologist, and take a test that measures your confidence or self-esteem. There will be a series of statements to which you respond with the degree of your agreement, such as: I feel that I am a person of worth, at least on an equal plane with others. I feel that I have a number of good qualities. All in all, I am inclined to feel that I’m a failure. The test may even provide a numerical score, similar to an IQ test. The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, for example, which is one of the most widely used measures of self-esteem and from which I’ve taken the above statements, provides a numerical value from 1 to 30, with any score under 15 indicating low self-esteem. It was none other than William James who first formulated the concept of self-esteem, offering an equation as its definition.

But these assessments of how good you feel about yourself, often in relation to others, aren’t tests of whether you truly, objectively, existentially matter. To figure out that question, the mother of all mattering questions, you can’t take an empirical test. Your self-esteem score, whether high or low, may be grounded in self-delusion, and the mother question is a demand for the answer that lies on the other side of self-delusion. Do I truly and objectively matter? I know that I can’t help feeling that I do, but do I really?

When it comes to our own mattering, we are staunch realists. We don’t want feelings. We want the facts.”…

“Mattering“

See also “Why We Need to Feel Like We Matter” (source of the image above)

* John Green

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As we wonder about worth, we might spare a thought for a man who unquestionably mattered, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; he died on this date in 1832. A poet, playwright, artist, biologist, theoretical physicist, and philosopher, he is probably best remembered these days for Faust. But by virtue of the breadth and depth of his work, he is considered “the master spirit of the German people,” and, after Napoleon, the leading figure of his age.