Relationality and Rhetoric: Thoughts on Therapeutic Space, Conformity, and Irony

I am generally a 'relationally' oriented therapist and person.

Therapeutically, I think that the relationship with a therapist and others is the principal source of healing. Similarly, trauma, neurosis, psychosis, and suffering generally emerge from our relationships with others, places, things, and ourselves. Recently I tried to ask someone what led to them using substances again and they said "It's always persons, places, and things." This is a true statement.

As a person, I think that the reality of individuality (and there is reality to it) is less real than the fundamental fact of relationship. We are in relation, originally and always. We are not born alone, and we often don't die alone, despite what I may have been taught as a child. Individuality is an abstraction from our originally related condition, and it is unintelligible apart from this OG relationality.

One thing I have been experiencing in these early days of a therapist is how differently I speak based on the person and the situation. I find myself saying to one client that the notion of 'motivation' is bullshit. The next hour I may be talking to a person about finding genuine or real motivation for their life. In each case these words, of course, mean different things--they are connected to a different situation, a different body, a different network of relationships, and therefore the words possess a different depth in spite of their surface similarity.

In the first case, the notion of 'motivation' was being wielded in relation to friends and family members offering hollow advice about 'getting things done' and 'finding a fire in your belly'. The word in that context was spoken with little feeling, in a 'disembodied' fashion, as my old therapist used to say to me. In the second case, someone may be speaking about their genuine desire to reach out to others, or a new found desire to work hard, 'to have this moment be one where I really started working hard on where I want to be.' This is real, embodied, motivation.

Here I am relying on Eugene Gendlin's notion of 'experiential intricacy'. Gendlin, a philosopher and therapist, developed a compelling form of somatic work that he called 'focusing'. It is the somatic form of psychotherapy that I was introduced to in graduate school and that I have been most deeply affected by. To oversimplify, on Gendlin's account, words can be used in two distinct ways: one in which they make contact with our embodied or experiential 'felt-sense' of a situation, and another in which they are used as empty abstractions that feel disconnected from the embodied depth of our lives.  I will call this embodied and disembodied speech, respectively.

These two ways of using words both appear often in therapy.

Disembodied speech relies on phrases like 'Oh, I must be feeling this way because of X,' or 'I don't know what's wrong with me, I just can't seem to pull myself out of this,' or 'I guess I'm just crazy of weak or something.' These words here, 'must' and 'just', are indicative of a type of speech that is spoken from a distance, chastising the self as if from above or without. 'If I could only be like my sibling and snap out of this...'

Embodied speech, on the other hand, shows itself most clearly in a pattern of deepening, correcting, and refining the words we use to speak. 'There's something going on with all this... it's like I'm stuck.' Oh, you feel stuck. 'Well, stuck... sure... but it's more like I'm in a vat of honey and I can't move my limbs..." Oh, sticky, honey... 'Sure, its kind of like that... but its really more like...' This is a somewhat characteristic of a certain type of speech in therapy. In this case speech is taking place in direct relation with something else, a whole slew of embodied feelings and experiences that are guiding the speech in its unfolding. We are deferring to our bodies and the way that our feelings about the situation are showing up there.

I would imagine all of us know the feeling of searching for and finding the right word for an experience we are having. 'Oh, yes, I am feeling shame...' How do we know when we've found the right word? What are we checking the words against when we find that they are lacking or fitting? Gendlin's wager, and one that I agree with, is that we are checking the words against our 'bodily felt-sense' of a situation. a 'bodily felt-sense' is not a flimsy intuitive understanding: it is a comprehensive form of embodied organismic intelligence. 'My body knows more than I can form with my brain,' goes a song that I quite like.

These two types of speech, disembodied and embodied, can help explain why I speak differently to different people in different times and places. The meaning of the words does not live in a disembodied space, like some timeless form that never changes. The words mean different things depending on who is saying them and when they are saying them and who they are saying them to.

Thus I can go from one session where I talk about what bullshit 'motivation' is, to the next and talk about the importance of finding genuine motivation. In each case I am using the words that allow me to come into fuller contact with the person's lived experience of their life and their problems.

These two forms of speech, embodied and disembodied, also map onto two different understandings of the notion of rhetoric. Rhetoric is a notion I have become increasingly interested in, partly because of my reading of Plato, partly because of my reading of Emmanuel Levinas. My training as a psychotherapist has deepened my interest in that I speak differently to every client I encounter, sometimes using the same words in highly distinct ways in different sessions. With one client I may tell them that I have no wisdom because I feel that they are not giving themselves enough credit and being overly deferential to me; with another I may adopt a tone of competence and expertise because I sense that they are uncomfortable with the ambiguity of our encounter.

The two forms of rhetoric I will refer to as spurious rhetoric and genuine rhetoric. Spurious rhetoric is a description of rhetoric I see in Levinas, and one that maps onto disembodied speech. Genuine rhetoric is the Socratic understanding of rhetoric, and it maps onto embodied speech.

Levinas argues in Totality and Infinity that rhetoric is chiefly a form of violence. Rhetoric is a form of speech that does not seek to meet the other exactly as they are, that does not allow the face of the other to radically disrupt my subjectivity. Rhetoric, on the contrary, 'solicits the yes' of the other. Rhetoric, for Levinas, is fundamentally about persuasion, or better put, coercion. Levinas likely would have agreed with the critics of motivational interviewing that claimed the practice is subtly manipulative and uses 'rhetorical' skill to guide the client to a place that the therapist already knows is best ahead of time. Indeed, Levinas does grant that rhetoric in this sense is a form of dialogue, but it is violence nonetheless.

I write my paper in the SU Levinas seminar on his understanding of rhetoric, and argued that it is fundamentally immoderate. It misses something about the reality of our political situation, the fact that different people need to hear different things in different ways at different times. Rhetoric is less like manipulation, and more like tact. I think it undeniable that tact is one of the central skills a therapist needs, especially when we consider its relation to words like 'tactile', 'handling', 'being in touch'. All of these words are related. If you care, you can find that paper here.

Levinas, then, argues for what I would call spurious rhetoric, in which rhetoric is understood principally as manipulation, coercion, persuasion, and violence.

Socrates, on the other hand, is a practitioner of what I am calling genuine rhetoric. Genuine rhetoric is not about persuasion, but about tact, about relationship. Socrates speaks differently every single person he talks to, and the same arguments rarely repeat themselves in the Platonic dialogues. In fact, sometimes the dialogues radically contradict one another. In the Symposium, for example, Socrates praises Eros and identifies it as the principle source of the philosopher's ongoing desire for knowledge of the unchanging things. In the Republic, by contrast, Eros is identified as the main feature of the tyrannical soul: a desire to know and to control all. Both of these things are true. There is something tyrannical in philosophy, in the erotic desire to know. Mark Lilla explicates this problem well in The Reckless Mind. But Eros is also a vital force for philosophy. Moderation is thus crucial to the proper engagement with philosophical Eros.

It is moderation, too, that drives Socrates to say different things to different interlocutors. Indeed, it is a crucial point that Socrates is speaking to very different audiences when he makes these seemingly contradictory statements about Eros. In the Symposium he speaks in private to a group of friends who are attempting to understand the meaning of Eros in the wake of a poetic competition. In the Republic he speaks in a quasi-public environment with two politically ambitious young men. Socrates' speech changes  because he is moderating himself and his speech based on the political conditions of the moment. The Symposium, as a private conversation, is largely safe, and there is little danger that his praise of Eros will produce disastrous consequences. In the Republic, however, he needs to moderate his account of Eros because there is a danger that these two young men will be seduced by a more positive account of Eros. His goal is to guide them towards the middle path.

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics famously praises the notion of the golden mean, or the middle path. Aristotle also argues that it may be necessary to over-correct if one wants to achieve the middle path. I, for example, am excessively fearful, so it may be wise for me to act boldly, bravely, even brashly. In doing so, I may end up closer to the desired middle path. Someone who is wrathful, by contrast, may need to over correct in the opposite direction.

Socratic rhetoric is a good example of this way of over-correcting so as to arrive at the middle path. What Socrates says in each dialogue to each interlocutor cannot be taken as the simple truth of Plato or Socrates teaching. Socrates speech is too politically conditioned, too tactful, too rhetorically sophisticated, for any of the teachings to be abstracted, generalized, and held up as the Platonic or Socratic teaching. We only ever get Socrates speaking in particular situations to particular interlocutors with particular political pressures that he must conform to. That Socrates practiced philosophy for 70 years before he was ultimately murdered by the Athenian community should cue us into the fact that he was a skilled rhetorical thinker who knew the proper place of conformity.

I identify far more with Socrates rather than Levinas on this question of rhetoric. When I speak differently to different clients I am not somehow betraying them or myself: I am responding to the demands of the moment, speaking to a particular person in the particular way that will allow them to hear the things that I am trying to communicate or explore with them.

This also does not imply any kind of relativism. I remain convinced that nature, or a stable external order, is real. There is 'a way things are'. It just so happens that this universal knowledge is only ever accessible through particular situations. The distortions of the particular moment are the only way we ever arrive at any type of universal understanding, but that universal understanding is in principle unchanging. Thus when Socrates implores his interlocutors to 'not absent from the logos, but to follow it wherever it leads us,' he is simultaneously affirming the two claims I am making here: First, that there is a logos that can show itself through rational inquiry, the is a nature, or an order, to this place. And second, that this logos, or nature cannot be pursued in abstract or general terms, but only in particular dialogues with particular interlocutors or in particular situations. Nature only shows itself through the distortions of our political situation.

My friend Keir believes that this is of the essence of Platonic metaphysics or ontology. Plato seems keenly aware that any pursuit of the question 'how things are' must necessarily traverse the political situation of 'how things seem to us. Thus Strauss, in his correspondence with Gadamer, draws attention to the distinct between 'first by nature' and 'first for us.' Socrates knows that there is no way of accessing what is first by nature except by navigating what is first for us. That means that the political conditions, the attitudes of the particular interlocutor, must be negotiated carefully in order to engage them in a conversation where the logos of nature can show itself.

Rhetoric is thus an indispensable skill in the attempt to speak about the truth of things with different people in different places. It is a baseline reality for us as political animals: prejudices always come first, and we must know how to skillfully navigate these prejudices if we ever want to make any philosophical or scientific headway. Socrates knows that he must conform to the standards of the community and of each situation if he is to philosophize. He knows that he must conform to the attitudes and possibilities of the individual in front of them if he is to successfully engage them in shared pursuit of the universal logos of nature.

It is this notion of conformity that perhaps separates Socrates and Levinas. Levinas whole project in Totality and Infinity excludes our political nature. It, instead, posits a primordial pre-political space in which two human beings encounter one another, unencumbered by the prejudices of the community. In such a space, where two individuals meet one another with no one else around and with no prior commitments, we would be able to have such an honest, direct, face-to-face encounter. Levinas admits, however, that this is an instructive fiction: “The description of enjoyment as it has been conducted to this point assuredly does not render the concrete man. In reality man has already the idea of infinity, that is, lives in society and represents things to himself" (139, my emphasis). It is this fiction of the two individuals encountering one another in the world that allows Levinas to denigrate rhetoric as violence.

The concrete human being is already in the grips of prejudices, already has opinions and commitments that generally interfere with, and at least structure, the process of philosophical inquiry. Socrates, having a highly politicized view of the human animal (as he should), is deeply attuned to the role of conformity in human affairs. Belonging, relation, is an original condition for us. We are not individuals that encounter one another in the open field. We are political animals that come to awareness of ourselves and others in light of the prejudices of the family and community. Rhetoric, then, for Socrates and for me, is simply an indispensable element of engaging others in philosophic or therapeutic speech. Because every person has different prejudices, different starting points, they must be spoken to differently. Again, this does not imply relativism of the ultimate or natural things. It only identifies the necessary problems that are present in all attempts to speak seriously about serious things. Perhaps this is why Levinas has very little to say about what philosophy is in Totality and Infinity. Levinas doesn't seem to think much about conformity.

This is the bulk of what I want to say. But I want to close with a few thoughts on irony as it relates to rhetoric.

I recently read the first lecture in Jonathan Lear's book A Case for Irony. It is one of the  most impressive things I have read in some time. As Keir said when I shared a passage, 'This guy reads like he is eavesdropping on our conversations. Indeed. It is making it clear to me that irony is the principal device of Socratic rhetoric, and the key to his playful earnestness.

For Lear, irony is not a practice of insincerity, but a necessary feature of human experience, and one that is required for any kind of earnestness or seriousness. Irony shows itself most clearly in tautological questions. He uses Kierkegaard as an example: "In all of Christendom, are there any Chritians?" he asks. THe meaning of this, Lear argues, is that Christendom is this institutional framework, a set of social roles, that are supposed to ensure the flourishing of Christian individuals. We all know, however, that just because you fill a role meant for a purpose doesn't mean you live up to that purpose. 

You can work as a doctor or therapist, for example, and not actually be very good at being a doctor or a therapist. You fill the role of 'healer', but fail to do any real healing. Thus, I can ask 'Among the therapists, are there any therapists?' By which I mean, of all the people socially designated as healers, are any of them actually healers? 

This, for Lear, is the core of irony: it is a type of disjunction that exists between the socially designated roles and the chief ideas that those roles are formed in relation to. In this sense, irony is a form of uncanniness: the familiar is suddenly rendered unfamiliar. But, crucially, it is not an ordinary kind of uncanniness, but an erotic uncanniness: when we find ourselves confused about these things, we still find ourselves directed, oriented, or longing for truth and understanding. When I ask, 'among the therapists, are there any therapists?' I am committed to the idea of being a therapist, of being a healing person. Yet I am keenly aware that all that goes into the idea of 'therapist' as a socially constituted role (i.e. the professional degree, the ability to say things like CBT, DBT, so on, or the badge that allows me into clinics) are not sufficient to the task of being a healing person.

Socratic rhetoric relies fundamentally on this kind of irony as erotic uncanniness. Socrates is constantly trying to find a way to relate to his interlocutor so that they can genuinely share in the inquiry into the nature of things. The Platonic dialogues often explore questions of 'What is X?'. The interlocutors, of course, have to traverse the world of receive opinion, because almost never are we asking questions which we are radically unfamiliar with. We generally have some opinion or idea about what a thing is. But Socratic rhetoric functions so as to prompt these experiences of erotic uncanniness in his interlocutors. Only by befuddling, dislocating, disorienting them can we begin to transcend received opinion and really wonder, what the hell do we mean by these words? When we live ironically, we can comfortably inhabit social roles (therapist) and still wonder about the depth of those roles (what the hell is a therapist, anyway?) without ever abandoning our commitment or desire to be what it is we are trying to understand. Irony, in this sense, is the most honest form of engagement that I can imagine.

This account of rhetoric and irony needs to be thought in relation to the problem of disembodied v. embodied speech discussed above. Rhetoric as violence belongs to the domain of disembodied speech; it is shallow, hollow, and dishonest. Rhetoric as ironic engagement in pursuit of the shared logos is embodied speech.

It is principally in our bodies that we detect these uncanny moments: for in the midst of the uncanny the words fall away, we don't know what to say. But we can feel it. Among all the therapists, are there any therapists? The question conjures such feelings in my chest. I have to breath, sit, wonder, feel, reflect. Socrates wants to commune with others in pursuit of the shared logos; he wants to join. This joining is facilitated by speech but permeates the living body, which is the living logos of the world.

The depths of embodied speech point precisely to these questions of relation, rhetoric, conformity, and irony. I hope I have made some sense of them here. I have been helped by this writing.