In light of the present debate about volition raised by my two questions, I thought it would be both useful and interesting to post some of my notes on the topic from Barbara Branden’s NBI course Principles of Efficient Thinking, Tape Two (“Focusing and Problem Solving”). Despite my present view of Barbara Branden, I do recommend listening to the course, as it includes much material not discussed elsewhere in the Objectivist corpus. In particular, I think the five levels of focus nicely differentiate focus from concentration. (Warning: As these are only lecture notes, I cannot guarantee perfect accuracy.)

There are not merely two primary states of consciousness, being in focus or being out of focus. Rather, there are a variety of mental states between these two extremes. Also, a person can be in a mixture of levels of focus or rapidly alternating between levels. There are five major levels of focus:

1. Passive daze: A person is seeing and hearing what is going on, but not identifying those events in any conceptual terms. Recounting those events later would be difficult, not because the mind was elsewhere, but because the mind was nowhere. This is probably the lowest level of consciousness possible.

2. Passive identification: A person is conceptually identifying what is going on, but not integrating, judging, or identifying the meaning of those events. The knowledge necessary to make judgments is available, but unused. Because judgments are not made, the resulting gap is filled in with emotions and/or the opinions of others. This is the level of awareness of the social metaphysician; by not forming judgments, there is no possibility of their judgments clashing with the judgments of others.

3. Arbitrary focus: A person is identifying and judging what is going on, but not integrating. The mind is conceptually active and purposeful, but arbitrarily selective concerning the objects of focus. Awareness is fractured and splintered, as the person is constantly going in and out of focus. The resulting incomplete awareness warps a person’s judgments, such as when a person judges someone to be of good moral character due to one good deed or character trait. The primary cause of this state of awareness is that the person allows emotions (or chance) to determine what is focused upon. One secondary cause is evasion; a person might not want to think about something unpleasant, and so goes out of focus rather than think about it. Another secondary cause is unidentified emotions or fear. This level of awareness is not the same as purposeful selective focus. In this state of arbitrary focus, a person focuses only on selected objects and is in a daze about everything else. In order for a selective focus to be rational, there must be a reason for the selectivity, awareness of the selectivity, no need to act upon the facts not focused on, and no need to pass a judgment upon the facts no focused on. The crucial issue here is that a person must always be in focus and that the person’s values determine the object of their focus. A person must be aware of all the relevant aspects of a situation and never blur out important details, as the arbitrary focus level of consciousness does.

4. Unsharpened awareness: A person is conceptually identifying, judging, and integrating, but only in broad outline. No new knowledge, connections, or integrations are being integrated. If events are more subtle or complicated than past thinking, then those peculiarities will not be grasped. This level of consciousness is not active, independent, or creative. The person is not aware of the limits of their knowledge or that there is more to be known. An extreme example is seen in some people who cannot seem to grasp an idea simply because it is new.

5. Full mental clarity: A person is conceptually identifying, judging, integrating, and connecting the full conceptual meaning of every aspect of reality with which one is dealing.

The level of awareness is the degree of active cognitive integration in which the mind is engaged.

The lecture also touches upon the question of why people choose not to focus. Branden offers six reasons for that choice:

1. It requires effort, which on the very short term, is not worth exerting.
2. Some people enjoy being unfocused.
3. The effort of focusing might not be regarded as worthwhile even in the long term.
4. Acting on impulse and whim is sometimes regarded as more exciting, interesting, and romantic than acting on reason.
5. Sectioning off an area of reality as unknowable means that thinking is regarded as useless.
6. Believing oneself to not be smart enough to understand something means that thinking is useless.

All very interesting!

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Over the past few months, I’ve been occasionally contemplating the following two questions in the context of the Objectivist theory of volition. So I thought I’d throw them out for general consideration.

Ten years ago today, Paul and I met for the very first time for dinner in St. Louis. I was a sophmore at WashU, not yet even a philosophy major, not yet even 20 years old. Paul had just returned to the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology as an attending physician after his year of MRI fellowship in Los Angeles. While still in Los Angeles, Paul noticed that I was in St. Louis from my posts on alt.philosophy.objectivism. The rest is history.

If, on that evening ten years ago, someone had told me that I would be insanely happy married to that geeky Asian doctor with the unpronouncable name whom I watched walk up to my apartment building with a spring in his step from my second-story window, I would have died of shock. Yet here I am, Mrs. Paul Hsieh. Go figure.

It’s been a good ten years, Mr. Woo.

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I received an e-mail this morning from an old acquaintance who was disturbed by my recent blog post about the Brandens. I thought it worth quoting, along with my reply. He wrote:

I’ve just brought myself up to speed on the “trouble” you’ve been having with the Brandens and NoodleFood. I had no idea that you had developed such a bitterly negative perspective on the two of them. I don’t know that it will matter much to you, but I find the anger-filled and adversarial nature of your comments to be quite bewildering, a little disturbing, and not at all like the Diana Brickell that helped to introduce me to the universe of “Objectivism” back in the early 90s.

I really don’t understand, and I don’t know what else to say.

I replied:

I can understand that you find my strongly negative moral judgment of the Brandens strange and bewildering. In that blog post, I couldn’t do more than hint at the reasons for that judgment, which was unfortunate. Such was certainly not my plan, which was to say nothing publicly on the matter until I could fully detail my reasons. (That’s taking some time to write up, but I am currently working on it.) The purpose of that plan was precisely to help prevent bafflement.

Unfortunately, NB’s juvenile and deceptive games made that impossible. In my e-mail to him this spring, I told him that he was no longer welcome to post on my blog and that I would not engage him in debate. Yet he posted anyway, engaging me in debate under false pretenses. That put me in a horribly awkward position. In order to expose the deception and explain why I was deleting that debate from the comments, I had to explain why he was banned from my comments in the first place. And that required indicating my basic moral judgment of him, despite my desire to wait until I could offer my full reasons.

And yes, I was furious. He deceived and manipulated me, not to mention wasted my time and violated my property rights, all while feigning friendliness and benevolence. In my book, that’s reason enough for anger. The emotion was in response to the facts — and it is those facts which ought to be the focus of your attention.

As with another recent e-mail, I do appreciate the fact that this person had the courage to inquire with me directly. Unfortunately, his attention seems focused on the strength of my emotional reaction, rather than upon the facts relevant to the underlying moral judgment. That’s a fairly common response, I suspect. I’ve noticed a similar concern for inessentials from people focused upon the sheer number of my moral condemnations of past associates — now up to the unacceptably largely number of two, apparently — rather than upon my reasons for them. That’s quite a handy rationalization for dismissing whatever evidence I present to support those moral judgments.

In reality, understanding my present emotional response to David Kelley and Nathaniel Branden requires a person to be focused upon the relevant facts and moral principles. Of course, I haven’t yet had a chance to present my full case. But I’ve written enough for someone to grasp my basic reasons for my moral judgments, e.g. in my public statement disassociating myself from TOC, my comparison of the abysmal op-eds of TOC in comparison to those of ARI, my comments on my regrets about my years at TOC, my discussion of how my approach to error influenced my departure from TOC, my comments on the closed system view of Objectivism, my discussion of my approach to ARI and the role of emotion in moral judgment, my view of apparent reforms at TOC, my post on Kelley’s pragmatist approach to moral principles, my post on TOC’s willingness to regard subjectivists as friends of liberty, Paul’s analysis of libertarianism and moral sanction, my post on the Brandens, particularly Nathaniel Branden’s deceptive and juvenile games, and my explanation of my intellectual history.

If a person can dismiss all that — as some have — with “Oh, Diana’s just gone off the deep end” or “Diana’s slipping to the Dark Side” or “Diana’s just enthralled with all the attention from ARI” or “Diana’s turned into a Randroid” or “Diana was always too judgmental” or “Diana thinks all her old friends are evil” or “Diana must have some other hidden reasons that she’s not revealing” or “Diana thinks that Ayn Rand said all that needs to be said in philosophy” or whatnot, then I am incapable of offering any facts, evidence, or arguments for consideration. Nor do I know how to reach those who regard rigorous scholarly standards in Objectivism as inherently restrictive, authoritarian, or dogmatic. And those who claim fidelity to Objectivism while regarding resolute moral judgment as unimportant, unnecessary, damaging, overblown, or hysterical are far beyond my present grasp. If such people wonder whether they ever really knew me in years past, rest assured, the feeling is often mutual, sadly enough.

I know that I can present a compelling case to people who are morally and intellectually serious, even if presently baffled or confused by my change in views. As for the rest, I can do nothing for them; only they can help themselves.

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Well, John Kerry is sure to win the election now! It looks like he might have captured the anarchist vote. Or at least the segments of it that are willing to set aside their political convictions to vote against George Bush. Heh.

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