Secondness

Imagine you were born each day with no memory. I don’t mean amnesia. Even a person with memory loss retains more than we realize. You forget a name, or a face, but you know a human from a wolf at a glance. You stand upright and walk without falling. A certain smell entices you, even if you can’t place it. When someone hands you a fork and a plate, you can put it to use. Language still flows from your tongue. Had memory truly disappeared, you would wake with the senses of an infant torn from its mother.

Everything you see, you see for the first time. Every sound is frightening or intoxicating. Smell means nothing. You feel pain, and know a soothing touch, but what brushes your skin eludes you. In fact, there’s no way to be sure the sensation is a result of an outside object contacting a knowing subject. With only the impressions of firstness to go on, you have experience without meaning. Only instinct guides your reactions.

We escape this ordeal because every day since birth, we organize our sensations—put them into file folders, if you need a convenient metaphor—and constantly refer back to them, comparing them to new things. Soon, we recognize our mothers, even ourselves. There are no words yet for the newborn. The capacity for secondness—making meaning by relating to the past—is what allows us to build a world that “makes sense.”

We learn what to trust and fear. We build categories based on what we encounter and how it made us feel. A shape becomes a bottle, and nourishment, and love. Sounds turn to meanings, and separate themselves into words. The experience of firstness gives us that apple, which leads to the concept of an apple, or a box of apples, if you will. Thirdness will bring us the truck carrying boxes of apples to the market, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I like to think of secondness as the reference files that bring meaning to what we sense. No sensation ever repeats. There are always differences. Everything you experience is a true individual. But left there, the world would be a meaningless cluster of unrelatable objects, an incomprehensible flux of motion. Some might say a cluster-flux.

But we do relate. We don’t need to encounter the same exact apple to realize the second one will do just as well as the first. It’s more useful to sand off the discrepancies in exchange for a map that saves us the work of starting each moment from scratch.

With enough of these files relating to one another, we can build context—a kind of meaning taken from the whole body of smaller meanings, which in turn alters the meaning of things that happen within it. If that’s confusing, think back to the waitress who brought the Denver omelet in the introduction. Many smaller meaningful impressions told the diner it was right to place an order. The details of the restaurant, the booth, the angle of sunlight, a pang of hunger, the question, “What can I get yall, today?” That sentence would mean little without the other cues.

When you pull off the highway because you saw golden arches, head for the stick figure man on a door, or recognize the taste of mayo on a burger despite the fact that you requested it to remain absent, you’re dealing in secondness. If the sight of your company’s logo fills you with dread images of your workplace, you processed the sign through secondness. The concept of “a weekend” and how it makes you feel—but not necessarily the word—belongs there, too.

We do finally get into words with this sign, but they’re things like, “Hi!” Or, “Bless you!” That includes the barest forms of small talk—sounds that have meaning to a speaker of the language in a context, but lack the maturity of signs of thirdness (This may explain to an extent why small talk feels so tortuous to some folks, including myself. We long for the nuance of thirdness, or the quiet of firstness).

Memory

Though we deal with these signs in the present, they always refer to the past. Without something in the past to compare things to, we would be lost. Our sense impressions from firstness give us the papers within the folders, but the filing system is the basis for memory, emotion, and the fundamental organization of our world.

A better memory makes for better health. When we fail to file an experience, we are doomed to repeat it. The more diverse the files we have, and crucially, the more ways of relating them to one another, the richer our potential experiences. I use files and data as a graspable metaphor. There’s no evidence to suggest our memories work like computers, or even filing cabinets if you can recall what those look like. Dealing with the human organism through mechanical metaphors can become problematic unless we keep the limitations in mind.

The people who win world memory championships (yes, those are a thing) tend to use memory palaces. These are imaginary places, stocked with striking images, sounds, smells, and more that the builder revisits with regularity. For our purposes, we don’t need such an advanced technique, though I can only imagine it would be beneficial.

Emotion

From memory springs emotional health. That may come as a surprising statement to anyone who’s ever dwelt too long in anger on something they should have brushed off years ago. The issue isn’t an inability to forget. It’s an inability to process, which isn’t the same, and a failure to call up broader information and context that puts the offending incident in its insignificant place.

Basic emotions are instinctual, but we can do a better job of deciding what qualifies as a life-and-death situation resulting in persisting trauma, for example, as opposed to a lazy kid who accidentally put mayo on a burger near the end of a shift. More complex nuances of emotion sprout from these foundations when they’re fertilized with personal experience.

All emotions evoke potentially valid responses, even unsavory ones like anger and hatred. We evolved these emotional states because at some time, they gave us a survival advantage. Good luck defending your young from a large predator if you’re predominant mood is “aloof.” In a healthy person, emotional states correspond with environmental triggers. They lead to useful actions, then they dissipate, but not before being filed away for future reference.

It’s a useful exercise to write down a list of every general emotion you can recall feeling. Then try to figure out how each would confer a survival advantage on our ancestors, living in a social group to survive a dangerous world.

When you habitually repress a natural emotion, you’re blunting your range of experiences, and your capacity to deal with them. It can be helpful in circumstances, as long as the issue is dealt with soon after, but if the natural outlet is shut down, it leads to unbalanced thoughts and feelings. The plugged leak will just spring open somewhere else in the form of irrational behavior due to hidden associations.

For example, an inability to deal with grief can lead to angry outbursts when something in your environment relates to the source of sadness. This can happen entirely beneath conscious awareness.

The Ecosystem of the Past

In simplistic terms, secondness is the way we form relationships between signs. It gives us our past, which informs our actions in the present and leads to our future. There are many ways we can structure meaning, and none of them are “wrong.” Some just give us better maps and lead us more reliably to our intended destinations. Imagine the entire range of possibilities as a spectrum. The healthiest point, as in most organic systems, is the point of balance.

To one end, we have a tendency to err into firstness, the present, the fleeting. At the other, we drift into the abstractions of thirdness, and vague possibility. In the file folder metaphor, both ends of this spectrum contain fewer and fewer folders. At one end, they contain a single item if they exist at all. These folders may have a single line of connection to one another. In other words, they don’t refer or relate to many other things. That means I would tend to take sensations as new, or things I hardly ever experienced and knew little about. Comparing them to other experiences would be difficult, as the connections would not seem obvious to me.

At the other, we have the same flimsy folders. This time, they’re rich in connections, most of which race out of the jungle and into the clear, rational categories of thirdness. In this case, I lack depth of feeling and relation, but instead of seeing them as new sensations, I string large numbers of experiences to single words. These are potted plants, disconnected, filed in my greenhouse where I give each the same amount of water and call them all “garden.”

The files in the middle crowd thick like plant-life in a rainforest. Each contains a decent number of experiences—not too many, or too few. And they’re connected on all sides by a web, branching like spokes from every node. New files crop up, old ones wither. Connections form or drop away according to use. This isn’t some dull cabinet of folders, but a living ecosystem of meaning.

The First Problem: Underdeveloped Secondness

In the previous essay, we saw how failing to notice new sensations compels us to latch on to some familiar trait of those sensations and equate it to something else we’ve experienced. The rush to recognize channels us down the deep grooves of habit, for better or worse.

The first problem we encounter in secondness is twofold. In both cases, people have trouble forming healthy, diverse signs of secondness. Type I has the tendency to slip in the other direction: back to firstness. Type II closes its eyes and charges ahead to thirdness. This stunted ability to form signs of secondness can have many causes. It can be an accident of birth, or a result of brain trauma. It can also be a learned behavior imitating a role model, or a survival mechanism in the face of great difficulty. It manifests in a multitude of problems of varying degrees.

A person suffering from lessened secondness of Type I may simply fail to recognize things, or to file them away. If you tell your grandmother what you did over the weekend, then she asks again five minutes later, she never managed to take your initial answer out of the signs firstness into a reliable record in secondness. Likewise, someone who is autistic may fail to recognize body language cues or take meaning from tone of voice. Surely they see and hear you, but always as though it’s the first time.

There are subtler errors. A Type I may act surprised when others find the reaction strange, or easily get lost when navigating. If this person displays low empathy for someone who’s suffering, it’s because they can’t recognize it as such, or connect it to similar experiences of their own.

Phrases like, “Hi! How’s it going?” are almost pre-verbal in their simplicity, and belong to secondness, despite consisting of words. Someone who awkwardly launches into a report of their recent history misses the sign and treats it as an individual instance requiring a novel response.

In terms of critical thinking, Type I’s struggle to connect causes to effects. The world seems new and random, and they make the same mistakes again and again without any notion of why. At their most charming, they exhibit a child-like innocence, but they can also seem slow to learn.

A Type II also has a lessened ability to form signs of secondness, but they tend to hurry toward the overgeneralizations of thirdness. They may lack curiosity or surprise, having already decided on the label to apply to the event. Where the Type I doesn’t notice another’s suffering, a Type II notices but dismisses it as “just” spilt milk. Emotions are hurried into categories that strip them of their impact.

These people tend to rationalize things away, and have difficulty forming deep social bonds. We—because I’m one of them—hate small talk, which belongs to either secondness or the barest forms of thirdness. It lacks the complexity of more evolved signs, and instead aims to form emotional bonds along habitual lines in secondness rather than share ideas in thirdness. Here we see that some people, especially on the autism spectrum, can have issues of both Types I and II. They might miss body language signs, but pick up on complex patterns and deal easily with abstractions.

While many people of this disposition present themselves as highly critical thinkers, there are tremendous failures of rationality that accompany a poorly-developed capacity for secondness. They may see cause and effect where none exists, or assign the wrong effect to a cause in order to make sense of something quickly. Pet abstractions become lenses through which they can only see evidence of their beliefs, even when signs of firstness and secondness would seem to contradict them. If Type I’s seem “dumb” at times, Type II’s come off as arrogant and overconfident. The less severe among them can seem measured and brilliant.

Few people belong entirely to one type. We have our preferences, but it’s common for “ordinary” people to have some domains in which they makes the mistakes of Type I; others, Type II; and still others, do a wonderful job of forming healthy signs of secondness. Some may also have a third problem.

The Second Problem: Overdeveloped Secondness

I might as well call the next folks Type III’s. In my badly-garbled metaphor of file folders and jungle, these are peppered throughout the healthy middle in little islands. They have few folders, each one full to the point of bursting. They’re patches of monoculture—a single dominant species that smothers competitors.

The first two types suffered from underdeveloped secondness. This one prefers signs of secondness to all else. When the problem pervades their entire life, they present as hyperemotional, irrational, and sensitive. If you traffic in stereotypes, you’ll notice that Types I and II, the dolt and the jerk, remind you of the typical male, while these, the swooners, sound like a lot of women. I hope that by the end of these essays you’ll roll your eyes at such hamfisted generalizations. Most of us are guilty of all of them if we look hard enough.

This sign error might also be called a “trigger.” Imagine you had a traumatic experience involving bubble gum. Now, every time someone blows a bubble, feeds a quarter into a gumball machine, steps in a rubbery blob on the sidewalk, speaks of flossing their gums, or smacks when they chew, you break into a cold sweat and your heart races with fear. If so, that’s because you associated too many experiences with one terrible event. You stuffed too many files in one folder.

That’s natural. From a survival standpoint, it’s more useful to be triggered and be wrong than to fail to notice a threat that nearly destroyed you in the past. But it also causes a lot of undue pain and affects your ability to live a healthy life.

There’s no right or wrong way to form these associations except maybe the one that keeps you alive. That said, broad triggers cause us to have intense emotional reactions and do things that most people would agree don’t make sense. They affect our ability to live authentically. Not everyone has experienced major trauma, but triggers come in many forms. A key word can remind you of a hot-button political issue and induce frothing at the mouth. An ad can tap into your pride, or insecurity, to separate you from your cash. Even subtle contextual triggers can make you behave as you did in grade school, or bring up defenses where none are needed.

Exercise 2

In Exercise 1, you improved your ability to sense first impressions, and to pay attention. Taking new signs is a fundamental tool of secondness. These bare signs can now grow, branch out, connect to neighbors, and share information. The more you notice, and the more you remember, the harder it is for people to mislead you. That includes yourself.

This skill is by far the most important. It allows you to build your core self from the real world around you. Things change. If we notice and adapt, we can avoid being left behind in old modes that cease to work. Old habits and beliefs make way for new ones better-suited to the present. Our very notion of the Self waltzes seamlessly with the movements of life.

You can take or leave these exercises as you see fit, but if you keep just one, I recommend making the first one a daily habit. You only had to notice the impressions of a single sense for the first week. Now try it with the other four—hearing, touch, smell, and taste—in turn. Notice, but don’t describe.

After that, use your independently-thinking noggin to integrate it into your life in a way that enriches your experience.

This Week

The current exercise has two parts that can be practiced separately, or rolled into one.

2a. Having noticed an object with your senses, allow it to remind you of as many things as possible.

Avoid thinking of words. We’re still dealing with pre-verbal signs, here. Let’s say I notice a bowl on my table. I won’t call it that, but starting with the method from Exercise 1, I’ll let the sensation impress upon me. Images of other bowls will come to mind. If you don’t think in images, it may still give you a certain feeling. There might be another bowl nearby, or another object around the room that seems similar.

The shape of the rim might call up circles, or domes, cauldrons, baskets. Don’t stop there. It might remind you, non-verbally, of a helmet, a hubcap, a pair of cupped hands full of mud right before your sister flung it on you at age eight. You might think of soup, or grains, or galaxies. Emotions could well up from a specific family dinner. Any and all is fair game, just don’t force it. Let it associate with whatever it wants. Nothing is wrong. If you stray into words, just brush them aside and return to the pre-verbal associations.

2b. With the same or a different object, strip away the similarities. Notice those details about THAT bowl that make it incomparable to any other object.

These can include imperfections, texture, a reflection of the space behind you. Keep looking until you sense no connection whatsoever between this object and anything else. Make your way back to raw firstness and the absolute individuality of what you perceive.

Repeat the motion in both directions if you like. Switch objects and try it again.

Why?

The errors of meaning-making in secondness involve failing to notice relations and connections (slipping back to firstness); or noticing only a few, ignoring the rest, and slapping on word categories (rushing to thirdness); or lumping too many associations into broad categories, irrespective of context and individual differences (loading up on triggers).

This pair of exercises requires you to process an object through the entire spectrum of secondness. Whatever your default, you’ll get to work on your weak areas, as well as the transition between them. That’s important, because nothing IS only one way or another. You’ll find that everything can be seen in a tremendous number of ways and related to the rest of the things you know with infinite variety. The bowl, the cloud, the rock, the tree, the person can play many roles. When we get caught in a narrow band of interpretation, we miss out on a lot of options, useful or beautiful. We have a hard time seeing things from others’ perspectives, or noticing when our own perspective limits our understanding.

The ability to freely associate and disentangle takes you from necessity to choice. And don’t be surprised if your memory improves as a result.