My plans for this evening were unexpectedly cancelled. I was supposed to have dinner with my aunt and a couple that she is friends with. Both of these people are mental health counselors, and one of them was a member of DSA and actively works and reflects on socialist causes. I, too, am a mental health counselor, and have strong socialist leanings. It would have been a nice night.
Alas, my aunt has the flu.
Instead, I cooked dinner, watched some of the beginnings of the opening statements of the Zizek-Peterson debate, worked on a painting, and, now, am writing a bit.
I mostly just wanted to write.
I have about six posts I have titles for on various topics, but I don't know that I will write them all, and they all feel to difficult right now. I am pleased with the overall direction of my thinking and reading right now. I feel that things are accumulating in a promising way. But I am reticent about preparing any type of documents suitable for publication.
I have been doing much reflecting and some writing about the problem of rhetoric in part because I am frustrated and irritated with the idea of having to write in a way that would be suitable for an academic audience. It isn't yet clear to me the value of trying to speak to such an audience.
I have come to make a pretty firm distinction between academia, scholarship, and philosophy. I am primarily concerned with philosophy and scholarship, and scholarship generally insofar as it contributes to philosophy. By scholarship I mean the careful study of texts and the production of writings about those texts. By philosophy I mean an ongoing effort to live in light of our ignorance about the most important questions, and a corresponding desire to pursue answers to those questions. I am a scholar. I read carefully and I try to write seriously. I would like to think of myself as a philosopher, but I relate ambivalently to that word, and to most labels in general. I, for example, write and paint quite a lot but do not call myself a writer or a painter or an artist. But more than anything else I supposed I'd like to call myself a philosopher. It just feels a little silly. For there are so many philosophers out there, and it still isn't clear to me if there are any philosophers among them.
I think I like to use words carefully, and all of those labels don't ever quite feel right because I never quite know what they mean.
Working as a therapist I am reflecting more on the notion of fine-grained distinctions and fine-grained feelings. Recently someone told me they were 'comfortable' where they were at, and didn't feel the need to, say, get a job or go to school. This person, like many of us, experiences pressure from family and friends to either get a job or go to school. I ended up making a distinction, saying by comfortable we might mean 'feeling good about where we are and not needing to answer to these external calls to action', or by comfortable we might also mean 'complacent, resigned, and settling for a situation that could potentially be better.' It isn't clear to me where this person lands.
I am still trying to understand the value of such distinctions. Once a therapist asked me to describe anxiety, and after I tried he said 'it sounds to me like you are describing fear.' Is there really a real difference between anxiety and fear? On what basis do we make these distinctions?
I am confident that the distinctions are more than just verbal: our body responds to these distinctions and knows when a word, phrase, or image is well suited to an experience. Again, Eugene Gendlin's work on 'focusing' and implicit intricacy has been hugely influential on me: When we pay attention to our body and the 'felt-sense' of a problem or situation we can literally feel the way that our bodies live in relation to these problems. When I think about people from my past or individuals I will encounter in the future I can feel my heart rate and breathing shift, I can feel my stomach turn and roll. The body understands in a way that already prefigures, or is, language.
One of these days I need to write more on Merleau-Ponty's chapter 'The Intertwining---The Chiasm.' It is such a remarkable piece of writing, and it demonstrates precisely what I am talking about: the body, as our privileged access point to reality, already gives us a way to understand the world as configured by language or as a kind of language. The world is made of wild logos, and we participate.
But how is it that the body responds to more and more fine-grained distinctions? Does the clarification of words really mean clarification of portions of the soul? When I learn the difference between jealousy and envy, do those experiences become more precise in my soul? When I learn to distinguish between comfort as confidence and comfort as resignation, do those distinctions register in my mind and body?
Did those things already exist, or has language brought them into being? The only reasonable answer is: both. Of course those experiences were already there, existing as confidence and resignation, and of course they have been given a new life when clarified.
Collingwood's theory of the imagination, expounded in his Principles of Art, makes precisely this claim. Relying on Hume's distinction between impressions and ideas, Collingwood argues that when we name a think accurately we both name it and transform it, we both discover it and invent it. But we invent it by giving it the name that it deserves or asks for.
Reality has to have layers, and these layers have to be able to show themselves as they are named, by their being named. This is in some ways what Heidegger's definition of phenomenology in Being and Time points towards: we wish to speak in a way that allows the beings to show themselves in themselves from themselves as themselves. We speak (logos) in a way that allows the things (phenomena) to show themselves.
In order for this to make sense, reality has to be the kind of thing that can be revealed. In order for reality to be able to be revealed reality must already be concealed. Heidegger is right on much of this.
Where he becomes frustrating is in his particular hermeneutic theory: a radical kind of poetic historicism.
I much prefer the hermeneutics advocated for by Leo Strauss and developed by Arthur Melzer. They argue for a type of 'esoteric' hermeneutics in which older texts have to be understood as written under the threat of political persecution. Esotericism as a hermeneutic also offers a potentially way to think of the issues I'm describing above: the way that layers of the soul are made apparent through proper naming of phenomena. Older writers had to worry about being murdered for expressing heterodox views in a way that is not true for writers after the French and American revolutions. Writers in the 20th and 21st centuries, too, have to worry. I recently saw that someone thinks Camus was killed by the KGB for his writing on the Soviet Union. This seems possible to me.
In order to write books and avoid persecution, older writers found away to 'write between the lines', or to communicate certain things to careful readers while hiding things from careless readers. Melzer explicates this very clearly in Philosophy Between the Lines. A careful reader, for example, will notice when a writer makes a substitution of a term, or misquotes another author. Plato's Socrates in the Republic, for example, radically conflates the philosopher and the gentleman in very strange ways at very peculiar moments. We know from reading Plato that he was a very careful writer, and that such a conflation is likely intentional. Older texts abound with these types of peculiarities, and we have to read them carefully and wonder whether or not they are purposeful guides to certain deeper questions of the text.
In addition to this defensive motivation, ancient and medieval philosophers also wrote this way to protect society from the potentially corrosive influence of philosophy. Society, after all, relies on prejudice, which philosophy generally doubts and degrades.
Modern philosophers also wrote in an esoteric fashion to wage wars of propaganda. The Enlightenment, on this view, is fundamentally a sophisticated and ongoing campaign of propaganda. Careful readings of Descartes reveal him to be a highly political thinker who obscured his teachings in the vale of pure metaphysics and theology. Richard Kennington knows how to show the way into these questions and Robert Roecklein offers great resources.
More interestingly, pre-modern philosophers (and potentially modern ones) wrote esoterically for pedagogical purposes. Philosophy cannot simply be communicated: you can't make a list of 'true things' and then hand it to a person and 'aha', they have the truth. Everyone has to do the work for themselves. Obscurity in texts then becomes a guide to thinking.
Connected to the question of pedagogical esotericism is metaphysical esotericism: a text needs to possess layers because reality possesses layers. This question of metaphysical esotericism, or the idea that reality possesses distinct layers, is related to the questions above about why it is that certain elements of experience can be clarified or made manifest by speaking about them carefully. Reality or experience knows when it has been named well. To observe something carefully involves naming that thing. Why would this be?
Older writers understood something like this, I think.
I regard this type of esoteric metaphysics and hermeneutics as a potential replacement for the notion of the unconscious. For the uncosncious is really just the wild logos of the world that reveals itself in our bodies, and can be revealed further by speaking of it carefully.
I'm far too tired to unpack this idea. Truthfully, this set of thoughts feels like the entire thing I have been trying to unpack for so long, and that I will likely be trying to unpack for so much longer. All of this is too condensed for others to make sense of. But I will think these thoughts more deeply at some point, perhaps even soon.
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