A&E/Intro

top

Introduction:
   Three Selves—Subjective, Objective, and Reflective

Hi, Robbie, here, the person who's writing this memoir. I should speak up before we really get started to prevent misinterpretation and make explicit something important about "my story:" It is not a Sargent Friday, just-the-facts-ma'am story. This memoir presents its central character, Robbie, in three distinct modes, a subjective Robbie, an objective one, and a reflective. I'll introduce each quickly and then discuss a little further the subjective, intentional Robbie, for the education in the title of this memoir takes place in the inward experience of the subjective Robbie.

It's Robbie, as he lives subjectively that generates the story. He proposes and initiates the action. However central and significant, the intentional Robbie will often seem elusive, not because he's trying to hide, but because he is the subjective, inward person, Robbie continually anticipating his circumstances, as best he can. The encompassing world becomes defined by his unique relations to all that it contains, the results of which thereby constitute his circumstances, the world as it bears upon his capabilities and intentions. The intentional Robbie lives an inner life, much of which doesn't appear outwardly because it consists in his efforts to understand circumstantial possibilities and to judge on that basis what to try to do, how, when, where, with whom, and why. Intentionality pushes the vast array of possibilities that have not yet occurred through the filter of present time, consigning most to the limbo of nothingness, passing those remaining on into the realm of actuality, often warped but sometimes unperturbed.

Enter Robbie, as he objectively speaks and acts at the moving juncture linking past and future, converting possibility into actuality. Here among the actualities bubbling forth, the second Robbie keeps showing up, like Zelig, doing things at the center of the action. He's the objective correlate of the intentional Robbie. The objective Robbie is Friday's guy, just words and deeds; what he does and says declares the facts of the story, whereas the wanting and the meaning that moves the intentional Robbie are always undeclared, motivations that conditionally activate Robbie in his circumstances. As we proceed, we'll learn much about what he said and did, signals and signs bereft of intrinsic meaning. By themselves, these make up a middling academic vita. It's up to others to extract their meaning and significance.

There's my cue, the reflective Robbie. I'm writing this text late in life, 86+, from a privileged vantage, partially knowing what the two other Robbie's have inwardly thought and felt and outwardly said and done. I won't say that I work with the whole picture, far from it, for I'm not always well informed and my memory stinks, but my imperfect knowledge enables me to be a reflective Robbie who will, at opportunities like this, burst in to raise questions, frame contexts, and suggest interpretations. I want to make the significance of the story as clear as possible so that when my two counterparts and me coalesce in the minds of readers, they will find us useful in their thinking, wherever and whenever it may take place.

Let's return to the subjective Robbie to expand our thoughts about the importance of circumstances in our inner lives. We might think that circumstances, what stands around us, are more a features of objective lives. An encompassing world stands around each of us, and I, as everyone else, has a vast number of specific relationships to the myriad contents of that encompassing world, other persons, other living creatures, and all manner of material matter and energetic forces, which we sum up as "our circumstances." We form our many different intentions, taking these circumstances into account as best we can, but it's a complicated, daunting process. Let's with the help of AI, sketch out a simplified representation of the phrase, "I am I and My Circumstances" should call to mind.

Here's a prompt. Please draw for me a line diagram in which a circle, 8 inches in diameter, enclosing numerous objects symbolized by small circles, squares, and triangles, about 100 of them all together, with the objects roughly similar in size and number, neither contiguous nor equidistant from each other. In addition, please add 3 arced arrows from one small circle pointing to another small circle, to a square, and to a triangle. To the right side of the large circle print the following explanation. "The larger circle represents the encompassing world, filled with persons (the small circles), other forms of life (the small squares) and manifold material objects and energetic forces (the small triangles). The arced lines connecting the circle forming their source of the arcs to another circle, to a square, and to a triangle, represent various intentions that the subjective person forms relative with other objects within its encompassing world."

Now let us begin in imagination to revise our simplified schema towards a picture of actuality. We will watch the encompassing circle vastly expand and morph from 2-dimensional into a 3-dimensional sphere, growing outward to the immediate horizon, beyond to the whole world, the universe, the entire cosmos. And as we see all that unfold, we recognize that the 3-dimensional cosmos and all in it moves on a 4th dimension, which we call time and experience as a steady churning in the state of actuality, altering the relations of everything to everything in ways that challenge our perceptions of stability with random and indeterminate upheavals. We could continue transforming the small circles, determined by the simple rotation of a trivial radius, seeing them blossom into a myriad of complex person, tall and short, differentiated in endless ways, each living a distinctive life, maintaining themselves in their lifeworlds through the play of innumerable intentions, each far more complex that the 3 simplistic arcs of our diagram. The same complexification goes for the squares, the lifeforms with which humans cohabit the cosmos, as they too sprout hairs of intentionality, aiming like ours to suit the imperative of self-maintenance. Finally, let's close tis exercise of imagination observing the transformation of the triangles, not vital subjects, but indifferent phenomena, lacking intentional vectors, surrounded by a cloud of impassive predictability.

• Ignorance imposed by limits and dynamism
• Boggled, befuddled, and bewildered.

Let us now compare the situation of our distinct selves in this expanded vision of our place in the cosmos, considering first the situation of the newborn infant and then that of the fully developed adults that we have become. Let's grant that the infant leaves the womb with simple tropisms that incline it to accept a few important matters—suckle nourishment, inhale air, fall asleep, receive visual, tactile, and auditory stimuli that it knows not what to do. All these are extremely inchoate and the infant immediately start a process of self-managed expanding, forming, and refining its rudimentary capacities to for intentions and to act on them in its ever-changing, far-too complex circumstances. We could go on at much greater length about the self-mastery that the infant in its natal state must achieve before to be able to receive support and instruction in learning to participate in the sociocultural dimensions of adult life.

We come now to the point of our simplistic diagram of intentional life and our expanding it into a picture of the full complexity experienced in living in our actual world. Is the situation of the full grown, well-educated adult significantly different from that of the newborn infant?? That is the question at the heart of this memoir.

let's face it, two difficulties seriously limit our ability to do so. One we'll call the problem of limitation and the other that of dynamism.

As we write, I-Robbie-me has become old and the world in which I'm accustomed to think and speak has heaved up much more confusion than what seemed to have been the norm. I've always striven in a somewhat contrarian mode to the main currents of the lifeworld in which I've worked. Many educators and public intellectuals have been addressing the problem of agency in contemporary experience. Educators have primarily addressed the question of agency with respect to the motivation of students within the educational process, seeking ways to improve the intellectual and social outcomes of educational experience. Social criticism broadly considered looks at agency as a capacity to control the actualization of intentions, personal or public, with positive results in order to understand how it may be weakening or improving and to decide on the basis of that understanding what can and should be done. The story in what follows will interact with these concerns significantly at many points, for it concerns how a sense of agency emerges for living persons as they repeatedly find themselves having to act immersed in the midst of actual circumstances fundamentally uncertain about what to do, how to do it, why, with whom, when and where. We experience this uncertainty within our subjective lives and the emergence of agency, the actuality of action, in its unique set of circumstances takes place inwardly. It's a subjective phenomenon [Fill out. . . . do this reflecting on my own case, seeking to understand how my own sense of agency, the ongoing emergence of what I can and should seek to do while immersed in the actual circumstances of my life, has come about. I do this cognizant that the lifeworld which became actual with me on August 17th, 1939, was unique to me and remains so as I in interaction with it have continued to develop. My reflections on this process give rise to no transmissible or reproduceable model. But the reflective effort may stimulate similar efforts by others, leading to more refined purposes, greater skills, and deeper insights. And as numerous reflections on how a sense of agency emerges in unique and different lives accumulates, insight into common resources and pitfalls may build, leading not to normative models, but to more helpful support and counsel to persons seeking to foster the ongoing effort by distinctive persons forming their abilities to act purposefully within their unique set of circumstances.