In this last episode of the link between philosophy and psychology I’d like to connect the fifth branch of philosophy Esthetics with what I regard the fifth branch of psychology man’s sense-of-life. As per Oxford English Dictionary, to our modern time ears Esthetics is concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty, but fundamentally and etymologically we should thank the Greeks for giving it to us. From Greek “aisthetickos”, from “aistheta” perceptible things, from “aisthethai” perceive.
This focus on perceptible things on our ability to perceive the world and other people as the final branch of philosophy underlies the importance and significance of perception for man. We are inspired by nature as much as we are inspired by the appearance of others, imagine for example the Sierra Nevada mountains or the statue of David by Michelangelo. Similarly, we can be disgusted by a foul smell in nature or unpleasant odor of a passerby. We can spend hours listening to melodic harmony presented flawlessly at a concert or spend hours listening to birds singing to each other. But it is terrifying listening to the awesome power of a hurricane pounding on your walls of shelter or the deafening sounds of loud speakers emitting random and disintegrated noise.
Our perceptive experiences of the world and others directly reflect on our sense-of-life. Ayn Rand states: “A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence.” Psychologically, man’s sense of life is the most fundamental in him. It is his compass that gives direction to his path in life. The generosity of a benevolent soul can alter the sense of life of man of miserable existence as it was shown by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables. The power of perception can ignite a war or flame a heart in love; It can draw the Mona Lisa, or splash red paint on a canvas; It can sent three hundred men agains a million in a bloody hand to hand combat; it can peer into the eyes of a stranger and fall in love forever.
The One in the Many, the process of integration is the dynamo of our sense of life. Through perception we are perpetually and indispensably engaged in the metaphysics of our self, we are consciously articulating the focus of our epistemologically established custom of existence and constantly refine our emotional intelligence to produce more efficiently and relate more meaningfully to others. It is the perception of the one in the many in others that makes us and them important and valuable.
Perception is an automatic function of man’s nature. To live is to perceive. Identifying what man perceives requires mental effort in the form of conscious focus in reality. To man perception comes in the form of vision, touch, hearing, smell and taste. Some may argue that balance is a form of perception, too. The integration of man’s perceptive experiences in individual coherent wholes distinguishes him from the rest of the animal kingdom.
The conceptualization of man’s identifications by virtue of rationality on the basis of his perceptive mechanism is not automatic -- it is volitional. Through the conceptual mechanism man is capable of misidentifying facts in reality. If he misidentified the pain in his stomach, he faces the danger of dying hungry and in pain. If he misidentified the pain in his child, the child may die hungry and in pain. The survival of man depends on the veridical relationship between perception and conceptualization.
Unlike perception, deception is a volitional phenomenon. To deceive the individual must differentiate between what is true and false, and choose the latter. To the extend that there is no anatomical abnormality in the perceptive mechanism of the child, his mind will guide his identification in accordance with the cause and effect principle. Perception is the norm, deception is the abnormal.
The ability of the child to perceive the world around him is limited by the amount of data he can process on the perceptual level. G. A. Miller (1956) has demonstrated that humans are capable of holding in the field of their awareness up to seven distinct entities as a unit of perception. Ayn Rand has coined the term “crow-epistemology” to denote the limitations of the perceptual level.
When the child arrives at the conceptual level of learning, when he performs a “mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristic(s), with their particular measurements omitted” (Ayn Rand, 1966), and when this method of learning becomes his modus operandi, the potential for his life becomes unlimited.
The child’s body is limited by laws of nature; the child’s mind is unlimited by the law of identity and his degree of curiosity and imagination about the world. His identification of what inspires and motivates his sense-of-life will define the magnitude of the horizon in his future.
If he concerned himself only with the perceptively available to him, he will be limited by the myopia of his context. If he chose to adhere to the abstraction from the perceptively available, to the conceptually possible, he will see far beyond the limits of his perceptual boundaries. His sense-of-life will be unlimited.
All that work he did as an infant, and toddler, as adolescent and young adult to become a self-sufficient human being integrated in reality pays off in the, now earned, proud sense-of-life he has achieved. Pride is dependent on achievement of a value. Pride is not an automatic sense-of-life experience, the child must earn it.
Ayn Rand states in Atlas Shrugged, “Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man’s values, it has to be earned -- that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character...” (Ayn Rand, 1957)
For the child to grow into a happy adult, he must create a character capable of enjoying happiness. The pursuit of happiness is the final destination on the cyclical progression of his development and interaction with reality. Happiness is the effect he desires to sustain for a pain-free existence on earth. It is selfish and non-negotiable quality of anyone’s life.
The extend of one’s celebration is proportionate to the extend of one’s sense- of-life. The prouder the man has achieved to be, the happier and greater his celebration of life. Like an infant, an adult is constantly evaluating his body functions, his relation to others, his relation to existence. His integration of body and mind, thought and action, percepts and concepts, are dependent on his volition to pursue happiness, i.e., pursue values that give rise to a meaningful life.
His reaction to a threat of his meaningful life is swift and determined. If he misidentified a threat as a complement to his happiness, he will be reminded of the pain he experienced in his tummy as an infant.
Living meaningfully is a taxing endeavor where one is perennially on alert. But, the reward is disproportionately great.
To celebrate life man is required by nature to respond timely to the pain- pleasure principle, to see the world rationally, to adhere to particulars and universals with honesty, to get inspired by his identifications, to blend reason and emotion in integrated harmony, to rely on the implicit as he relies on the explicit knowledge, which will guide his volition to select the values that in turn will test his positive and negative emotions, to be selfish and just, as in reality, so in society, to be motivated in his pursuit of happiness, to produce goods and values as a free member of a free society, to act in order to achieve the goals he sets for himself, to create proud and unlimited sense-of-life made possible by his relentless perception of reality.
On one side of the tree of life you have the five branches of philosophy, on the other side you have the five branches of psychology and you, the one in the many, are the stem firmly rooted in existence and proudly raising your crown to the sky.