Reflection

A Final Episode on Reflection

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0:30Hello, and welcome to Overthink. The podcast where the two philosophy professors you've come to know and love, bring big ideas into everyday life. I'm Dr. David Peña-Guzman. And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson. And for our entire backlog of extended episodes, community discussion, and more, check us out on Substack. David, it is a momentous day.

1:00This is our last ever podcast recording for Overthink. This is our final episode. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Okay, yeah, my musical effects are not very good, but I am feeling a mixture of emotions about the end of this project that we've been doing for half a decade. And it's just wild to think that we would end up here when we began this project from our living rooms and under our laundry baskets and containers and closets.

1:33Under our laundry baskets? Well, I was under a laundry basket. I was, like, under a laundry rack, maybe. That's more of the spatially accurate description. I was like, how do you get under a laundry basket? It's because I'm so tiny, Ellie.

1:54When we started the show, we were living in a very different time. I mean, for many reasons. But one of the things was related to how philosophy was perceived. I think in 2020, philosophy hadn't quite, like, really surged into the public.

2:13And I'm just really proud of the small part that we've been able to play there, to show people that our discipline is relevant to everyday life. It's important. It has tons of ideas worth thinking about. And yeah, I feel so happy with the audience that we've built, the community we've built. And I'm excited to see what's next for both of us. I'm just, like, I look back at our past episodes. I'm so proud. Like, look at this baby we made. It's been really validating, actually, to hear from people

2:44say how meaningful this project has been for them. That includes people who are professors and who incorporate our episodes into their teaching. But it also includes people who are completely outside of academia, who, in my case, they've come up to me and they've asked me, like, hey, are you David from Overthink? Like, I just want to let you know that I really love your show. And it's brought me back sort of under the wing of thinking conceptually and theoretically and enjoying that as part of my every day.

3:15Totally. I mean, I think it's safe to say this is the beginning, not the end for us in terms of our public-facing philosophy work. I mean, in the meantime, folks can continue to follow my work on Substack, where I'm on Instagram at EleanderPhD. I know the PhD is like a cringe part of the handle now. There has been a lot of change around that. But, you know, try having a name like Ellie Anderson and you'll see your options are relatively limited. So those are sub-second Instagram are currently the best ways to keep in touch with me. People can find me also on Instagram

3:45and they can also contact me via email at, oh my God, what is my email? DavidMPena at gmail.com. DavidMPena at sfsu.edu. Thank you, Ellie. Oh, SFSU. Yeah, it's just like over the years, I've had multiple versions at various universities and I just like hesitate all the time to give the right one. But, you know, you can- I had it right. I just didn't have the I. Yeah, you can Google the both of us and you can find us very quickly. But you are right that it is a momentous episode. And, you know, you said that the dominant experience or feeling for you right now is joy.

4:15I think I find myself in a meditative and reflective moment in connection to the end of the show. And I think that's part of the reason why we decided to do our final episode on the topic of reflection. Absolutely. Because I find myself wanting to reflect on what this project has meant, both for me as an individual, but also for me as an academic. And just the act of reflection is such a central element of philosophical discourse and philosophical practice that it just seemed like the rational thing to do

4:48to end reflecting on what we have done and reflecting on the very activity of reflecting. I'm feeling good about this final episode choice. I also want to say, I mean, when we were thinking about what final episode to do, we also wanted to keep in mind that, you know, hopefully people continue to discover Overthink for years and years to come. And if and when they do, this is going to be the first episode that comes in their feed. So they might not want an episode that's like a meta reflection on a podcast they've never listened to before. So I will say we have now indulged in some,

5:21you know, sweet reflection about the end of Overthink, but the rest of the episode is going to be about the concept of reflection in classic Overthink style. So we're going to pull back from the meta analysis now and get into the heart of it.

Physical Light Versus Mental Reflection

5:35David, what do you think about when you think about the term reflection? So as somebody who is interested in science and the philosophy of science, I immediately go to the literal definition of reflection, which is a property of how light behaves, right? Like light can be reflected off of surfaces and enable vision in that way. That's why we can see things because of the mechanics of light. And in thinking about that in relation to philosophy,

6:07it makes me reflect on how philosophers have understood and conceptualized the act of knowledge and thinking as a kind of reflection using light as a metaphor, right? Like we reflect upon the world and sort of reflect it back, creating representations of things outside of us. And what I maybe want us to just keep in mind is that the metaphor of literal light might be useful for thinking about what we're doing when we're thinking.

6:37But the metaphor also breaks down because in many, many ways, the act of thinking is not actually a reflective practice. It's not actually a reflection in the literal sense. And what is a reflection in the literal sense of things? It's the bouncing off and away of light. And so it is largely a passive practice. It's a bouncing back with some distortion. You know, like colors are like the part of the spectrum that an object does not reflect back. So there is a little bit of a change there.

7:07But in general, the idea that the mind is almost like a beacon of light that shines upon the world is what grounds this notion that we are reflecting. Yeah. But it also might lead us astray if we think about it too much under that frame. Well, yeah, absolutely. And I think this idea of thinking as something that passively occurs or even of like experiencing of something that passively occurs is implied within a certain tradition of the philosophy of reflection, namely the tradition that emerges in the early modern period.

7:38And I think that's a view that you and I would like to cut against. So some of our reflections on reflection will be very much in contrast to that dominant picture. Today, we are talking about reflection. What does the myth of Narcissus tell us about viewing ourselves from the outside? How can reflection both pull us out of our everyday lives and connect us back to them? And how much do we know about non-human animals' capacity for reflection? If you've listened to our recent episode on weddings,

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The Myth of Narcissus

10:23David, you and I are going to start in a place of myth with the myth of Narcissus, especially as it's articulated in Ovid's Metamorphosis. We decided to read this myth and use it as an opportunity for thinking about one of the central images of reflection that culture has to offer us, right? Narcissus is this youth who basically dies because he falls in love with himself in front of a reflecting pool. Yeah, he falls in love with his own reflection.

10:55And the myth is great. So I hadn't read it in a very long time. I don't think I had read the myth since I was in undergrad. And so it was nice to go back to it, pick up my copy of Ovid once again, Metamorphosis. I couldn't find mine, so I had to borrow Trevor's. Oh. And it's a wonderful story that raises fundamental philosophical questions, like perennial questions about the nature of reality, about the nature of the self, about the nature of love, about the way in which we relate to other people. And so, Ellie, maybe you can begin us by telling us just some of the basics of the story,

11:29the myth of Narcissus. Who is he? What happened to him? Why did he end up falling in love with himself? He was born beautiful, essentially, from birth adorable Ovid, right? He's named Narcissus. And she asks the seer, the very famous ancient seer Tiresias, famous thanks to Oedipus and other important supporting roles in ancient myths. She asked Tiresias, will Narcissus live long? Will he live to old age?

11:59And Tiresias answers, if he shall himself not know. She's like, what does this mean? What does this mean? Okay, so Narcissus is kind of going about his life. He is the object of many people's obsession. He's particularly appealing to girls and young guys who think he's like the hottest guy that they've ever seen. And he just rejects. He's rejecting the young girls and the young guys left and right. I know, he's like the hot commodity in high school. He's 16, he's 16, yeah.

12:30And he's pretty arrogant as well. He not only dismisses all these would-be suitors and ladies who are pursuing him, but he also mocks them. And this nymph Echo falls in love with him. Narcissus rejects Echo, just as he has rejected everybody else. And one of the people he rejects, who is only described as one scorned youth in Ovid's myth, prays that Narcissus will never know love. And Nemesis is like, yeah, yeah, prayer fulfilled.

13:01So then Narcissus comes upon this pool, this sheltered pool surrounded by grass, nobody around. And he sees in the pool, the hottest person he's ever seen. Hair worthy of Bacchus or Apollo, face so fine, ivory neck, cheeks smooth, snowy pallor. Face card 10 for Narcissus. Doesn't realize it's himself, falls in love, and then is devastated when he realizes it's himself and basically dies of sadness.

13:32Okay, so now we have the basic ingredients of this Roman myth. Ellie, I want you to repeat one thing, though, because we were working with different translations. What was the prophecy that Tiresias gives of the condition under which he will be happy? If he shall himself not know. Okay, if he shall himself not know, because the version that I read translated that a little bit differently. And it was like, he will lead a happy and fulfilling life only on the condition that he shall not discover himself, which I actually like a little better

14:03as a translation. But that's neither here nor there. So the idea is that if he comes to know himself or to discover himself, that will be the source of his discontent. And I just want to say from the very beginning how quintessentially tragic that prophecy is. Because often we think that as you grow up, your self-knowledge is likely to bring about happiness, right? You become happier and more fulfilled as an adult, the more you get to truly know who you are.

14:33And here we have an inversion of that very common way of thinking about what it means to mature, where maturing is actually the very cause of your downfall, in this case, through this figure of Narcissus. Well, I wouldn't say it's maturing. It's so I hear your point that it's self-knowledge or self-discovery that is going to be his downfall. And so the idea is like he'll only live long if he doesn't know or discover himself. Equally important, though, I think is a second meaning here, which is he cannot know or discover himself as himself, right?

15:06And so he's not devastated when he knows himself by seeing himself reflected in the pool. He's devastated when he realizes, oh my God, that's me. That's not somebody else. The myth is so fertile for interpretation. It just like it leaves so many questions open and guides us to think about them in new ways. The idea here that he sort of gets broken down by getting to know himself, like the moment that he recognizes himself in his reflection on the pond.

15:38I'm not so sure about that. I think he really becomes heartbroken when he realizes that he can't possess himself because the person on the other side of the reflection cannot be grasped, cannot be touched. And so it's not the moment of seeing, but it's actually the failure of the moment of touching that follows that then throws him into a crisis. Yeah, yeah. But I didn't say it was the moment of seeing. I said it's the moment that he realizes that it's himself. Maybe that's not even quite right, though.

16:08Maybe it's more that when he realizes that it's himself and therefore that he cannot possess himself. Yeah. And so I actually had a lot of empathy for Narcissus, to be honest, on my reading of this story, which is funny because like I've always read him through the standard reading of the arrogant youth who is beautiful, who mocks everybody and whose ultimate vice or let's say his error is loving himself too much, right?

16:39So traditionally, this is read as a story of vanity. And now I'm not so sure that that's how I read this story. But I want to know what aspects of this myth stand out for you as particularly illuminating to keep with the light metaphor. Well, I think a number of different things stand out for me here. I actually think the natural place to start here, given that you mentioned you felt like maybe he wasn't arrogant, is just to directly address that. I think it's, I was getting that from the point

17:10that he mocks not only Echo, but also everybody else who loves him. So I feel like that's a fair characterization. Although I guess you could say, you know, one of the downsides of being super, super hot is that you're getting constant attention and that can be kind of annoying. So I suppose you could do like a, you know, reading of Narcissus where it's like naturally he was rejecting all the people who were trying to get his attention because he was so overwhelmed by constantly being forced to, you know, give them responses.

17:40Well, so the reason that I'm saying it, I want to think about that a little more is because yes, he is described as beautiful and yes, he is described as rejecting other people. But when Ovid talks about Echo pursuing him, at least in the translation that I had, Echo is presented as somebody who is threatening his autonomy. So it's an other that wants his body and his mind and he doesn't want to give it. He's not interested. And Echo, kind of like the rest of the people

18:10sexually interested in him, is described as having encircling arms, almost as if like the other person is trying to absorb him and possess him. Yeah, she does grab him. Yeah, and so I read in this rereading of the myth, his rejection of others as a combination of him being a 16-year-old who is, also he's a hunter, right? Like he spends his days like going after animals. He's not particularly social. He's not described as having a lot of friends. So I see him as a loner who happens to be hot,

18:41who wants to preserve his autonomy. He's like a hot lumberjack who's 16. I think it's definitely fair to say that Narcissus is a loner. But I guess one question we might have is the fact that he did fall in love, a signal that he was open to love. He just hadn't found the right person. Or is it a signal that actually he really just wanted an image to love? And I think it's actually, it's not the latter because as you pointed out, David, he doesn't just want the image.

19:13He's really saddened by the fact that he can't embrace this image. And so I think also the vision element is super interesting here when it comes to self-discovery, self-awareness. When Narcissus is looking at himself in the pool, not realizing it's him, he's observing himself as if another. And in fact, he's seeing himself as others see him. He's like, oh my God, this hair, these eyes, wow, just stunning. So he has an outsider's perspective on himself. And that is important, I would say, for a lot of accounts of reflection.

19:43So Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, talks about how reflection requires distance. And part of the challenge is that with ourselves, we really can't achieve the requisite distance because we are ourselves. And so as much as we attempt to see ourselves from the outside, that's never quite possible. And so it seems, I mean, it's possible when it comes to the image of Narcissus, but it's not possible once he tries to bridge that gap through touch, right? And there's this really cool line where Ovid writes, the image is my own.

20:14It's for myself I burn with love. Like, I fan the flames I feel. What now? Woo or be wooed? Why woo it all? My loves myself, my riches beggar me. Would I might leave my body? So he's like, he just wants to get out of his body so that he can love himself as another. Okay, so this all happens in that critical moment of looking in the pond, right? And so part of the question is, how do we interpret what's happening

20:45in that precise moment of the myth? So is it that he recognizes himself in his reflection and like makes a mistake of falling in love with himself? Is he even responsible for this? Because remember, somebody prayed for his downfall and then, you know, the goddess of revenge, Nemesis, overhears it and is like, yeah, I'm going to bring this guy down. Is this a punishment rather than a result of his personal actions? Because for me, what's intriguing is the possibility that maybe the problem with Narcissus

21:17is not that he recognizes himself, but that actually he fails to recognize himself, right? So there's actually a moment of recognition that is the source of the problem because when he looks in the pond, he sees his reflection as another person. And that's a mistake. And it's not as if, you know, the Greeks and the Romans were not familiar with reflections, with images. They were extremely attuned to that. And so in one way, what goes wrong here is not an excess of, let's say, subjectivity understood as like a self-relation.

21:48It's actually that his self-relation is not strong enough to recognize the boundaries between self and other. And so I kind of want to emphasize the element of misrecognition that is at work here. But your discussion about distance is really important because there is a moment where when he is lamenting on the fact that he can't have himself because it's all a reflection, he does make an allusion to distance. He says, quote, I desire what I love to be distant from me.

22:19And that's when he recognizes, like, I cannot really love myself. There needs to be a distance between self and other that does not exist in the case of my self-reflection on a pond. And that's when the tragedy finally unfolds where he knows that he can't have that distance with his image. And in the myth, he just sort of like withers away and dies. It's almost like he falls into such a pit of depression that he melts into the ground. His body disappears.

22:50And later we're told he is reborn on that spot as a flower. Yeah. So that and the flower that's constantly looking into the pool, into eternity. Yeah. So this is also super interesting. My translation has it that like, I wish I could wish my love were not so near. So it's cool that yours has the distance point because that does make it like a little bit more explicit. I think what is revealed here is the tragic paradox that narcissists find themselves stuck within, which is that love by nature

23:20wants to draw nearer to the beloved. But the condition for the possibility of that love is that you're not so close to the beloved that you are them. Like the distance is required in order, you know, in order for love to be love, it has to aim to traverse that distance that can never fully be traversed. And the problem is that he doesn't have that distance to begin with. Right. And so there's just it's just him. It's just him. But I also want to put this too complicated in the context of the whole flow of the story. So in the moment in front of the pond,

23:51yes, we see him as falling into a moment of vanity, self-obsession. And he's just like kind of all sameness. It's all the same. But then I thought about this in connection to his rejection of Echo. Remember, Echo is a nymph who was for in a different part of the story, was condemned to only ever being able to repeat the last part of what other people say. Right. So she cannot say things of her own because at some point in her past, she said too much. And so that was her punishment. And so when she expresses interest in Narcissus,

24:24she actually represents a form of a reflection herself. Right. Like it's an echo is a bouncing back. It is a reflection of sound. And so I think we make potentially a mistake if we read Narcissus as narcissistic straight, like through and through. Echo, because if he was, he would have fallen in love with Echo of all people. Yes. Like of all the people that are interested in him. She's the only one that can only give him a reflection, literally like sound back, give him what he wants, what he is. And still he does not want that.

24:56And so there is something else happening, I think, in his mind and in this myth beyond that traditional reading of it as you shouldn't love yourself too much because that cuts you off from the rest of the world.

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Philosophy and Objectivity

25:47What can reflection bring us regarding knowledge of ourselves and the world around us? Philosophy as a discipline has historically been a massive advocate for reflection. Reflection shows up in the work of countless philosophers as a source of truth, as a component of reason, as part of what makes us human, especially in comparison to the non-human world. And the function of reflection is often thought to be a kind of stepping back from experience, viewing it from a distance.

26:18We just talked about distance in connection to Narcissus. Maybe that's essential to reflection. And in that sense, it is closely tied with objectivity. Without reflection, we wouldn't be able to be objective. And so reflection, going back to what Ellie, you said about vision a few minutes ago, it allows us to be spectators of the world of experience. And that is essential for the task of thinking. Yeah, this is true.

26:48And I do feel bad that there's a lot of philosophers who wrote a heck of a lot about reflection and not tradition of reflection as enabling objectivity, being part of reason. And we're not going to get into much here. Sorry, John Locke, for instance. But I think what interests me, frankly, a bit more is the fact that in the 20th century, there were a bunch of philosophers who turned against this picture of reflection and often against reflection entirely. In existentialism, you have an emphasis on what Miguel de Unamuno calls

27:19the man of flesh and blood. He thinks that philosophy has gone wrong by focusing on the rational spectator and instead should emphasize the living, breathing body that philosophizes prior to reflection. And then in post-structuralist philosophy, you have the realization that reflection might give us a fictional representation of the world rather than a depiction of it as it really is. And then in phenomenology, you have the idea that reflection is not a primary component

27:49of our experience, but a secondary one. For phenomenologists, reflection is derivative of pre-reflective consciousness, right? So we have this experience, this what James calls a buzzing, blooming confusion, and then we can reflect on it, but we shouldn't take that to be fundamental. And it's on this that I want to focus this part of the conversation. Why do the phenomenologists caution against overvaluing reflection?

Phenomenology and Pre-Reflective Experience

28:19Maurice Merleau-Ponty is a good person to go to here for this question. He, of course, is a French phenomenologist, writes extensively about the body. And in his book, The Phenomenology of Perception, he positions phenomenology as a school of thought that seeks to return us to the things themselves. That's the way he puts it very famously. And that's an expression that comes from the founder of the phenomenological movement, Edmund Husserl. And this return to the things themselves is for Merleau-Ponty.

28:50He says, a return to this world prior to knowledge. So there is something beneath the world of knowledge, something more primordial, something that is like a ground that is more basic and fundamental. And that primordial world is the world that we are typically immersed in. when we grab for a drink of water, when I go for a walk, when I give a hug to my mother, when I am sort of living in the moment in time, engaged in projects. And that's the world

29:22that, interestingly, philosophy overlooks all too frequently, precisely because it privileges that distancing, that reflection, that theoretical abstraction that takes us out of the flow of things. Yeah, and Merleau-Ponty thinks that starting with reflection, as so much philosophy does, simply goes backwards. What do we find in reflection? We find a subject looking out at a world

29:53that is distinct from that subject. But that's not the way our experience usually works. In most of our everyday experiences, there's no distinct subject. And there's also really no private sphere of consciousness. This is like always my secret gripe with the movie Inside Out, which we've talked about before. Many times. So philosophies that take consciousness to be, you know, the kind of separate from the flow of experience, because consciousness

30:23is a property of a subject, that's a problem. So Tu has this idea that consciousness is some organizing principle of experience that stands outside of experience itself. And that view would be associated for Merleau-Ponty with somebody like Kant. But I think we can also say the critique of reflection is targeted more broadly than at Kant. Descartes is also a culprit here for Merleau-Ponty. And he calls this picture of reflection reflective analysis. He thinks that reflective analysis substitutes

30:54a reconstruction of experience for a description of it. So what reflection claims to do is to describe experience, but it actually reconstructs it and kind of according to its own image. What philosophy should really be doing is describing experience as it is, not through this artificial reconstruction. Well, and I think that has a lot to do with phenomenology's picture of the self, of what the self is. And it's something that you have a forthcoming book about, Ellie. So to our listeners,

31:24be on the lookout for that. May 15, 2027. Anyway, so according to phenomenology, the point I want to make here is that we go wrong when we think about the self as a thing that exists inside of us, you know, kind of like in that movie. Like Inside Out. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Very much so. Even if it's five or more things inside of you, it's still you're thinking about the self as a thing inside of you. Yeah, you're thinking about it as a model of the self. Part contained that reflects the whole or something like that. And we've touched upon this misguided

31:54conception of the self in several past episodes. I'm here thinking about self-knowledge, but also authenticity. So if people want to hear more about that, they can check those out. But there is a quote from Merleau-Ponty that I think really encapsulates the spirit of this criticism of that notion of the self as like existing inside me as a thing or an object. Merleau-Ponty writes, There is no inner man. Man is in and toward the world and it is in the world

32:25that he knows himself. End quote. And so here the idea is that my primary mode of being is not setting myself apart from the world in order to look at it and attain something called truth or objectivity, but rather my primary mode of existing is being dynamically engaged with the world in the drama of the world, in the projects that are meaningful to me. And it's actually the act of stepping back in order to reconstruct it in language

32:56or through theories through this more like distance position that is the artifice. Yeah. And it's also not about like looking in the reflecting pool. The way that we relate to ourselves is not usually in that explicit fashion where we're looking at ourselves kind of as if from the outside, right? One of my favorite philosophy essays ever is Dieter Henrich's essay, Fichte's Original Insight, which is hard to find a full copy of in English translation. In fact, I would love to see somebody retranslate that. But in any case,

33:27Henrich in this article targets the idea that the self is reflection or also that it's a product of reflection. He thinks reflection really confuses us actually about the nature of the self rather than illuminating it or constituting the self. He says that the self can't be a product of reflection because reflection presupposes selfhood. So like in the case of Narcissus, it's not the act of looking in the pool that constitutes Narcissus's self, whether he recognizes it or not.

33:58He actually already had to have a self to begin with in order to be able to look at himself. And that's also definitely the condition for the possibility of him recognizing himself as himself, even though it took a while for him to get to that point. In order to be able to recognize your reflected self as you, that is, you have to have some pre-reflective awareness that you are already that self. And as you mentioned, you know, this is something I talk about in my book, so I could really go down a rabbit hole here. I will not, but I think the basic point for us is that reflection is an act of distancing

34:29and it's tempting for us to see in that act of distancing the origin of the self because that's the first place where we see our thought processes at work and we recognize that we're not reducible to the world around us. So the self shows up in reflection in a unique way and even explicitly for the first time. But even if the self shows up as separate from the world for the first time in reflection, that doesn't mean that reflection is actually the origin of the self. That doesn't mean that there wasn't a self prior to reflection.

35:00We just might not have recognized it as such. Well, and then the question is how do we make sense of the self that exists prior to reflection and then the kind of self that reflection produces or fabricates? Yeah. And, you know, here you might think that all these French and German thinkers that we've been mentioning are just like straight up anti-reflection in a simplistic or knee-jerk reaction kind of way, which would be weird because they are philosophers, which means that they are engaging in acts of reflection, right? Like they're reflecting upon the problem of reflection. So they're, you know,

35:31if they were just like straight up against reflection, there might be a performative contradiction of sorts happening there. But that's not quite right either. So they basically want to just acknowledge that reflection is not our default position in existence. It is derivative of our basic experience and that, in fact, it kind of distorts how we live and how we experience the world because it does require that stepping back. And Merleau-Ponty actually calls for something

36:01other than just abandoning reflection. He calls for a particular kind of reflection that he thinks is more valuable from a philosophical point of view. And that is what he calls radical reflection. And radical reflection, unlike typical reflection or the regular kind, which is that stepping back that we've been talking about, it doesn't erase its dependence on our experience prior to the act of reflecting.

Merleau Ponty and Radical Reflection

36:29So he says, radical reflection is conscious of its own dependence on an unreflected life. So it's the act of reflecting, recognizing that there is already a self before that act. It's just that that self was unreflected. It was the self before the advent or the appearance of reflection. And so it's a kind of reflection that essentially just recognizes where it's speaking from and what its starting point is and what the ground

37:00that it stands on represents. Yeah. I mean, you're right that the phenomenologists don't dismiss reflection entirely and Merleau-Ponty is upholding this notion of radical reflection. But I sometimes find myself feeling like the phenomenologists don't quite give us an adequate view of what is special about reflection and sort of demoting it, which I think has a fair point, and then kind of vaguely gesturing towards a different kind of reflection that is philosophy. I feel like, you know, Merleau-Ponty here is getting at

37:30something interesting but not really fleshing out, like, what does this radical reflection look like? And I think an interesting counterpoint to this is that counter-reflection from the philosopher Gabriel Marcel.

Gabriel Marcel and Secondary Reflection

37:41His 1951 book, The Mystery of Being, has an account of two different kinds of reflection. And Marcel, he's a French philosopher mainly known for being a Christian existentialist, and this account of the two kinds of reflection is part of a broader narrative around a distinction between problem and mystery. So you can, you know, pursue the mystery of being if you want more on that. With regard to the view of reflection he offers, he says there's one kind of reflection, this is the first kind,

38:12that is a detached form, requires that distance, and examines its object by abstraction. It breaks down the object into the parts that comprise it. And this seems pretty similar to what we usually describe as a process of reasoning. And it definitely involves a distance from its objects. It relates to the search for essences, definitions, and solutions to problems. We need to have distance from the object in order to get those things. Okay, so this is very similar to what Merleau-Ponty

38:42calls reflective analysis, and one that tries to, like, analytically break things down and give crisp conceptual accounts of things. And that's the kind of reflection that he thinks the history of philosophy has focused on for too long. Yeah, I think that's fair. And this form of reflection may be accompanied by what Marcel calls secondary reflection, which has a really different character. Secondary reflection unifies rather than dividing. It reunifies what primary reflection

39:13had separated out. Secondary reflection connects us with the mystery of life rather than focusing us on problems. And one way to think about the difference here is between what these two forms of reflection are directed toward. Primary reflection is directed toward what is outside of me, out in front of me. Secondary reflection, which begins by reflecting on primary reflection, is directed toward what is in me or what I am.

39:45And what's really special about this form of reflection for Marcel is that it is the properly philosophical form of reflection that reveals to us the unity of experience and the mysterious aspects of everyday life. So this allows us to see that primary reflection isn't sufficient for providing a true account of our most profound experiences, right? Nor is it adequate for providing a true account of the self. It's not that primary reflection is bad, it's just that it needs to be followed up with secondary reflection.

40:15Otherwise, we end up with a false picture of things, one that is overly abstract. Yeah, abstract and, I guess, fragmented since it's not unified. And in some ways, this is very similar to Merleau-Ponty's views, but also maybe different in other ways. So in both, we do find this idea that we humans are not cut off from the rest of the world, but we are originally unified. That primary position or that starting position is one of wholeness and unification. And in some forms of reflection,

40:46we find a way to get back to that unity. That would be what Merleau-Ponty calls radical reflection that I talked about a few minutes ago. And then what you are describing here as secondary reflection in Marcel, the sort of reflection that philosophy should aspire to or yearn for. And not only yearn for, but yearn to be, right? Like that's what philosophy should become. But one difference that I do think is relevant here is Marcel's emphasis on mystery, and that is just

41:16a reflection of his religious orientation. And you don't really find that in Merleau-Ponty's. So, whereas Merleau-Ponty wants us to return to the things themselves, you know, following Husserl, Marcel wants us to recover the mystery of being, and that is just automatically going to put him, philosophically speaking, on a different register than Merleau-Ponty, and it's going to give his conception of reflection a slightly different texture. During the

Animals and the Capacity to Think

41:5018th century, Immanuel Kant argued that what differentiates humans from other animals is our capacity to reason. Animals are not rational beings, so what we should expect least from them, it would seem to follow, is the capacity to reflect, independently of how we define reflection. Now, this view that animals are incapable of reflection has remained quite popular, I would say, among philosophers well into the present day, because

42:21many people continue to see non-human animals as thoughtless brutes, as beings who live and eat and poop, but who do not have the capacity to think, at least not think according to the tenets of reason. And here I want us to put a little bit of pressure on this view and consider more closely whether animals do or don't have the capacity to reflect. I know this is something you have worked on a lot

42:51since you're a specialist in philosophy of animals, it's something you've touched upon in your book, When Animals Dream, we have our animal consciousness episode from a few years ago, but I think there's still so much more to say here, and I was really excited when you mentioned you wanted to bring in the question of animal reflection into the episode today, because even though philosophy tends to be pretty humanistic, the so-called animal turn has been really important in the past decade or two, and that is a turn that tries to challenge core

43:22philosophical notions with research from ethology and evolutionary theory. Yeah, and the question, can animals reflect, is very much in the spirit of that animal turn that is taking place or has been taking place in philosophy for a few years. And of course, what position we land on will depend on how we define reflection, what we mean by it. And as we've seen, there are many ways to think about it, right, from Marcel's primary versus secondary reflection

43:53all the way back to Narcissus's pathological infatuation with himself. All of that falls under the category of reflection. And so maybe to avoid confusion here, I'll say that I'm thinking about reflection in two ways, and I want to think about animals in connection to both of them. First, as synonymous just with the act of thinking. It's reflection as the capacity to have thoughts, to have mental representations, and to use those representations to guide

44:23our behavior, right? Like, am I thinking things and am I acting on those thoughts? Now, the second way in which I'm thinking about reflection is as a metacognition, which is the ability to think not just about the world, but to think about thinking itself. And so, let's start with the very first one. And a number of philosophers of animal cognition often use this example. Imagine that there is a dog outside of me that is chasing a squirrel. And the squirrel is

44:54trying their best to escape this gigantic animal. And the squirrel runs up a tree and disappears into the leaves and the branches. And the dog can't climb, but it's at the bottom, sort of like looking up. And the dog is now, what can we conclude about this scene? Can we say that the dog has thoughts or beliefs about what the squirrel did and where the squirrel is at? Can we say, oh, the dog believes that the squirrel is up in the

45:24tree? Can we say that it hopes the squirrel will come down? Is the dog deliberating about the next steps? How far would you feel comfortable taking this kind of mental language potentially? Well, I think about reflection only in the second sense that you described, that is as metacognition. So I would say as an observer, I actually have no knowledge of whether the dog is reflecting or not, right? Like they very well may be thinking, but I as a random observer don't

45:55have access to that, let alone access to whether or not they're reflecting in the metacognitive sense. I think I'm, you know, just in general worried about like projecting our own experiences onto the dog and, you know, we can't ask the dog about his thoughts. And so we're left with just the observation of behavior. And I think for me, that leaves me in an agnostic position with respect to reflection. And of course, when we're talking about animals, we should worry about projecting too much of our human experience onto their condition, because

46:26that's how you get anthropocentric fantasies that are just not realistic. Like when people are like, oh, my my dog is a Democrat. It's like, no, you know, like that's just like going way too far. Trevor fully thinks that our dog understands English. Yeah. Like great example. Great example. And there are a lot of questions that we should be asking also more broadly about what animals know and what we can know about what they know. So, for instance, like even if we agree that animals think and that they are reflecting in that sense,

46:58can we know what they are thinking at particular moments? And if we know what they are thinking at particular moments, how far can we take that really in terms of putting content onto those thoughts or beliefs or representations? And I here want to bring in the work of the philosopher Hans-Johann Glock, who has written about the philosophy of animal minds from an analytic perspective and who says, look, even the concept of belief is kind of tricky in philosophy of mind.

47:28You know, usually because we think of beliefs as having a propositional structure, like I believe that X or I believe that Y, can a non-linguistic creature have a belief when a belief itself seems to have a linguistic structure in and of itself? And he says, well, let's begin by recognizing that animals have very impressive categorizational or categorizing capacities, like the ability to to create categories and concepts. And those concepts may

48:00not be the same concepts that we use, but they certainly have them. Right. So like that dog that we talked about earlier, maybe doesn't have the same concept of squirrel that we did. Maybe the dog groups like squirrels and mice and ferrets together under the category of like small edible thing that moves fast. But that's still, you know, like that's still like a way of categorizing things. Yeah, yeah, totally. And so then you already have the sense that they have a mental life and that they can manipulate

48:30these mental representations into the act of of thinking. And so if we define reflection in this kind of like more basic sense of just thinking, like thinking about the world is a kind of reflecting upon the world, then animals, it seems, would have the capacity to reflect. OK, so you and I are defining reflection differently. I'm happy to go along with your definition here, you know, which is kind of encapsulating the first part of it, that is that animals have thought. And so non-human animals

49:01have reflection as dynamic engagement with the world here. And it sounds like also in terms of concepts, what other non-human animal behaviors might speak to what we would call reflection? I mean, if that's even a valid question, because I don't know that any behaviors that I have can't speak to reflection. No, I think that's a good question, actually, because if you think about the behavior that we just talked about, like chasing a squirrel and then looking up at the tree, there are a lot of ways to interpret that, right? Maybe the dog is just

49:32smelling the squirrel and not really thinking. There are many ways of deflating the account. But there are some behaviors that non-human animals perform that make it really difficult to deny them this capacity for thought, where you can't really read the behavior otherwise. So one example of this is tool use and tool making, something that a lot of ethologists have written about. So think about a chimpanzee who is going to go to an area to crack nuts because they like to eat them and knows that over there

50:03there are no rocks to crack the nuts. And so they carry a big stone from here all the way to that other place, knowing that in the future they're going to need that as a tool, right? Like there has to be some inner mental process with means and reasoning that enables that behavior. Otherwise, it's really difficult to explain. One behavior that I think is really revealing for thinking about, especially whether or not animals have beliefs about the world, is the case

50:33of surprise. Often animals will experience or like express being surprised at the way things are. Every single time you ever come home, you're back, why? I mean, they're excited, but surprises is usually like a violation of your expectations, right? When like things are not supposed to be this way. And the surprise reveals that there was an expectation to begin with and an expectation is a belief about the way things ought to be.

51:03And so, again, that sort of requires an appeal to thinking. The last example that I'll mention here is choice. So in my book, When Animals Dream, I mentioned research on laboratory rats that suggests that if you give a rat a choice in a maze between going one way or another, like left and right, often when they come to that junction, they literally will stop, they will pause, and then from brain studies, we know they

51:35mentally replay both paths in their mind. like, oh, this is what it's like to go down this way, I remember what it's like to go down the other way before they make their decision. And that pausing, mentally replaying the two possibilities before choosing, also is a very good example of reflection here as thinking and even as deliberation. Hmm. Hmm. Yeah, that pause the dog gives and looks back like, I'm going to

52:06do something I'm not supposed to do, should I, should I do it? It does it anyway. Yeah, and I mean, all of this is like focusing on that first definition of reflection as just thinking. I agree with you that most people define it as metacognition. It's a much more demanding mental and cognitive capacity. And there is research that suggests that animals are also able to meet that condition even when we up the ante from just cognition all the way

52:37to metacognition.

Metacognition in Non Human Animals

52:39And the example that I want to give here is what is known as the uncertainty test. Now, this has been done on different species like dolphins, monkeys, chimpanzees, as well as rats, and they have passed this test. So I want you to picture the following experimental setup because it will change based on the species and based on their sensory capacities, but roughly it's the same idea. So first step, you take an animal and you give them a perceptual

53:09discrimination test. So let's say that you give them a picture and they have to decide if it's black or white. And then you just train them on that test. If they get the answer right, then they get a reward. So if you show a white picture, they have to press a lever. That means white. If you show them a black picture, they have to press a different lever. That means black. Step two, once the animals master this distinction using relatively easy tests,

53:39like very clearly white or very clearly black pictures, you then ramp up the difficulty and you start giving them harder images to classify, like a dark gray or a light gray. And then the animal is like, oh, what the hell? This is not exactly the same, but comparable. I just don't know exactly where to go. And so the animal will begin making mistakes, especially as it gets harder and harder to make the discrimination. Step three, finally, you then introduce a third

54:11lever, a third option that the animal can press whenever they are not sure that they know the answer. And if they press it, when it gets really hard, they get a reward. So it's better than trying to guess and failing because then they get nothing. But it's a reward of inferior quality relative to what they would get if they guessed and got the answer right. Poor animals. I know.

54:40And so the idea here is that the rational thing to do for a metacognitive agent, if they were metacognitive, would be to literally go for the smaller reward when you really are not sure. Like if I don't know, I just hit say I don't know and I'll get at least something. Otherwise, you risk getting nothing, which is not rational. And research, again, on chimpanzees, on macaques, on rats, on dolphins, has revealed that that's exactly what the animals do. They start hitting the I am not

55:12sure in this case lever. And the scientists who have conducted this research interpret this as evidence evidence of what is called mental monitoring, meaning that the animals are actually monitoring their own beliefs because they have to reflect on how certain they are about something before they decide to hit this third option. Yeah, but is that actually reflection like in terms of metacognition? Right. I would say monitoring. Sure. And usually when we think of monitoring, we have like we imagine it as happening at a

55:43different level from what is being monitored. But it sounds like the monitoring here is kind of an assessment or even a calculation of how certain one is. And that seems to me to arguably be happening at the same level as the decision itself. No, because the object is different. So when I make a decision about black or white and press a lever, I am directing my attention to the external world. I'm looking at the picture and making a choice. When I am thinking about how sure I am, the object of my

56:15reflection is my mental state itself. I'm thinking about my knowledge and that means that I have to be aware of those moments when I don't know. And in the literature on human metacognition, this is sort of widely understood to be a standard example of metacognitive capacity. Similar to like, you know, those like I have a name on the tip of my tongue, but I can't remember. Yeah, because it's like I know it. I just don't remember it. And I'm thinking about it and

56:45I just can't recall it. And so that's another instance. But we can't do that one with animals, obviously. We cannot.

Signing Off From Overthink

56:52Well, David, speaking of meta, our final Overthink episode has come to a close. If you were a Substack subscriber, stick with us. We'll have our bonus segment now where we will definitely do some more reflecting on the end of an era. Thank you all so much for listening. It's been the best. Please, please, please stay in touch and recommend Overthink to your friends because the catalog will still be there. And that means that they will have one hundred and eighty one, eighty two episodes to choose from.

57:23That's a lot of content. Keep assigning it in your classes if you found our episodes helpful. Yeah, I've got to say I'm really excited to re-listen to old Overthink episodes once there has been like a period where I'm starting to miss us. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. I'm excited for a break, but I'm like, I know there's going to come a day where I'm going to want to re-listen. Girl, us listening to our own episodes is like the modern reflection. It's the modern day version of narcissists. Like we're going to die and we're going to turn into flowers if we listen to our episodes.

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