A Report on My Reading: Heidegger, Trauma, Other Stuff

I was just on the East coast for 10 days visiting family for the holidays. I had a very good time.

I like using this blog as a place for my future self to return to and keep track of my learning and reading. I saw an old friend and he told me he still speaks of 'future Efron' the way that I used to speak of 'future Riley.' I used to say things like 'future Riley will have this figured out...' or 'Gotta do this now, future Riley will be glad I did.' I told my friend that I was thinking about how future Riley never really exists. It's always present Riley. There is, however, a past Riley. I see his traces in the world and I learn about him and me by studying those traces.

I thus leave a trace of what I've been up to.

On the plane ride out I read Heidegger's 'Letter on Humanism'. On the plane ride back I read his 'Question Concerning Technology'. Both are tremendously stimulating pieces of writing. I am happy that I am deepening my understanding of his idea of 'destiny' and the seeming project of 'waiting for the gods'. These are thoughts I became familiar with while reading 'What Are Poets For?' and 'Building, Dwelling, Thinking.' The 'Question' also makes a claim, briefly, provocatively, that physis and poiesis are in some sense equivalent, or that physis is a kind of poiesis. This seems peculiar and problematic to me. The ancient understanding of physis, or nature, as I understand it, was always spoken of in contradistinction to law, custom, or nomos. Nomos, I am sure, is a type of poiesis, or making--it is one of the quintessential forms of making.

There is a relation between nature and making, no doubt. And Heidegger is right that the chief task of making is to show things as they are. Making reveals nature. This is of the essence of Heidegger's definition of phenomenology as a type of speaking that reveals things as they are. But to claim that nature is itself a form of making... this seems peculiar to me. We are the being that by nature makes. But I am not comfortable or convinced by the idea that nature itself is a kind of making.

Keir will be exploring this in his dissertation on the notion of production and I look forward to the fruits of his inquiry and our dialogue surrounding it.

It is clear to me now that I need to understand Heidegger's relationship to Holderlin, and how in the world Heidegger arrives at this idea of the 'destiny of being' that reveals itself as the task of thinking. He is so powerful. But as Keir said to me in a text message this morning, 'Read poetry and await destiny. Thanks H that really helps us avoid the technological apocalypse.' There is something so strange in Heidegger's neglect of politics.

I am becoming more comfortable with the idea that history is really a substitute for the ancient understanding of politics, and that relational ontology is a degraded attempt to recover something like a genuine understanding of ourselves as a political animal. Perhaps that is the post I will write next. It feels rich.

I also read an excellent essay called 'Pathologizing Poverty: New Forms of Diagnosis, Disability, and Stigma Under Welfare Reform.' The essay illuminates the way that the 96' Clinton reforms of welfare essentially destroyed genuine social services in America and replaced them with a medicalized form of care that coerces individuals into accepting diagnoses, medication regimes, and inculcates new roles and identities that complicate questions of poverty and mental illness. Someone recently told me that they thought of community mental health as 'government mind control of the poor.' I am inclined to agree with this view, even if there is a part of me that wants to moderate the conspiratorial tones of it. I have, however, been becoming a more conspiratorial thinker.

I also read most of Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps The Score. A tremendous book that I am delighted to have read. My god. The research, the ideas, the practices. So powerful. I only have to read the epilogue in which van der Kolk seems to make a call for a new politicized understanding of trauma and mental illness. Indeed, I saw he wrote a 2019 article on the politics of mental health. I hope to build on that work. There are many places in the book where the significance of socialism is implied. I am more and more convinced that mental health counselors need to be advocates for socialism, and fierce opponents of capitalism, if we are to be anything other than tools of the system.

I also had a chance to see my aunt and uncle who are both therapists in the Virginia area. They told me that a while ago they were at a conference on the DSM-3. My uncle said he asked the chair of the committee, 'What about complex PTSD as a diagnosis?' to which he said 'If we let that trauma stuff in it will take over everything.' There is profound resistance in the psychological and psychiatric community to the idea that mental illness is about social and political violence and cannot be understood adequately through biological etiology. I am delighted that my uncle told me this. Delighted and horrified. It confirms so much of what I am thinking and what van der Kolk is writing about. My aunt bluntly confirmed many of my hunches as well, telling me that she really believed trauma to be at the heart of all this, and that the establishment likes to divide the world into 'those weird ones over there with mental illness and us normal people over here.'

It feels more and more urgent to understand trauma as an extreme manifestation of the violence and coercion that all of us experience at the hands of society. A conflictualist analysis of politics is invaluable in this respect.

I also read a paper on polyvagal theory that clarified my understanding of the significance of Porges' emphasis on evolution.

I also read a paper on Clausewitz and his relationship to Schleiermacher and, potentially, Plato. As Keir said 'everything is coming full circle.' I will speak to my undergraduate mentor, Jon Sumida, at some point, as his work is one of the main influence on that essay. I have been working, slowly and quietly in ways I don't understand yet, to integrate my undergraduate study of military history into my new orientation of politicized and philosophical psychotherapy/psychology. This includes a return to Clausewitz and Collingwood. I will undoubtedly do more work on Collingwood, and perhaps on Clausewitz.

I also read a fascinating essay by Jon Mills called 'Deconstructing Hermes', and when I arrived home last night my copy of his book Conundrums was at my apartment. I am excited to engage his work. He seems spot on with this critiques. I am not sure I am persuaded by his positive alternatives. I watched a lecture of his recently and he seemed to advocate for a return to modern sensibilities as opposed to post-modern decadence. I still favor something more aggressively 'natural' or ancient.

I will continue to reflect on the significance of esoteric hermeneutics. An adequate understanding of esotericism provides not only a viable hermeneutics, but also a politics, a psychology, and an ontology. It frees us from the modern emphasis on 'method', which so flippantly disregards the necessary links between epistemology and ontology.

I will leave it at this. I am excited to be back and to continue my learning. I also just received a copy of Hegel's Encyclopedia, and have 1/3 of Aristotle's De Anima to finish. From there I will be reading, soonish, Aristotle's Politics, some Rousseau, probably some Mills and some other stuff. I'm excited to be able to keep working on this all. It is good to be back. It was good to see my family. I love them very much, and feel sad that this report makes it seem as if though my time visiting the East coast was about my reading. I loved reading while I was there. But I also loved being around them, seeing my old friends, remembering and seeing more deeply where I come from, and why I am this way.

I sent back my great-grandfather's letters from while he was in Germany in the wake of WWII. He had a nervous breakdown there... I want to understand what happened to him so I can have a deeper grasp on who I am, who my family is. I will keep learning.

Scratching an Itch: Thoughts on Distinctions, Reality's Layers, and Esotericism

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.

Thoughts on the So-Called 'Autonomy of Human Affairs': Nature and History in the Attempt to be a Responsible Human

My roommate and close friend is at the beginning of the graduate program that I recently completed: a master's in existential-phenomenological psychology. The program is philosophically grounded in Emmanuel Levinas' book Totality and Infinity. But Levinas, of course, was working principally in the wake of Heidegger. The first quarter of the program is spent reading in the neighborhood of existentialism and phenomenology: Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Buber, De Beauvoir, Sartre, Gadamer, Ricoeur, so on. The second quarter is dedicated to reading most of Totality and Infinity. At the same time course work is also being done on diagnosis, cross-cultural psychology, listening skills, therapeutic communication, etc.

The program is a wonderful thing. I learned a tremendous amount there, and felt very well clinically prepared to step into the world of therapy, if not entirely prepared for the realities of community mental health: case management, poverty, systemic violence, and the like.

The chief thing that impressed me in the program was encountering my body, or the depth of somatic, experiential, and embodied forms of psychotherapy. During my internship I was exposed to polyvagal theory and the basics of contemporary trauma research. I am still reading and reflecting on Heidegger, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and the other pillars of the program, but I am more interested in pursuing different questions through different writers. I spent this morning, Saturday December 7th, reading the first 50 pages of Aristotle's De Anima. Yesterday during my lunch break I watched an interview with Stephen Porges, the main proponent of polyvagal theory. As I've mentioned in other places, putting together my reading of Plato and Aristotle with my understanding of contemporary trauma and biology research is my main interest right now.

My roommate told me he was surprised to see me going in that direction. I have, for many years, been speaking of what is often called 'the autonomy of human affairs,' or more dramatically, 'the autonomy of history from the methods of the natural sciences.' These phrases refer primarily to the impossibility of reducing human affairs to any deterministic or predictive scheme culled from the physics, chemistry, biology, or the social sciences (which are generally attempting to imitate the natural sciences). Indeed, my friend said that my engagement with biology made him anxious and fearful about the possibility of neuro-biological determinism. I understand that fear. I feel it resonate in my viscera as I reflect on it. Yet I don't feel seriously threatened by it: I have been reflecting for long enough on my life that I do not feel my actions can be seriously affected by those considerations. There is a relative autonomy to human affairs; I feel it in my life; and I believe it to be an entirely cogent argument. It cannot, however, be secured on the foundation attempted by Heidegger, Collingwood, or anyone else working within that neighborhood of thought.

My engagement with the natural sciences (i.e. polyvagal theory, trauma research, nervous systems, etc) is actually an attempt to ground the idea of the autonomy of human affairs through a different avenue. I am still trying to understand what it means to be a responsible person, and how to speak about political and moral things in clear ways that facilitate this responsible activity. I think Collingwood, Heidegger, Levinas, and others, have been involved in a similar task. For, as Collingwood argued, we have somehow lost our honor and our nerve, by which he meant the ability to act in a reasonable manner, and our unreflective belief that we are capable of doing so. Collingwood argued that it was generally modern natural science and particularly modern psychology that had robbed us of our honor and nerve. On this point I think Collingwood is fundamentally correct.

Something has happened during the modern period that has shaken our confidence in the ability of human reason to grapple with reality, our own activity included. Just read H.P. Lovecraft or other horror writers to get a taste of this dilemma: the modern natural sciences promised unlimited power, and all they have done is reveal our finitude. We are dumb animals floating in the void; far from the masterful beings dreamt of by the early modern founders.

I am reminded of a line from Strauss' "An Epilogue" that I admire and continually return to: "The sphere governed by prudence is then in principle self-sufficient or closed. Yet prudence is always endangered by false doctrines about the whole of which man is a part, by false theoretical opinions; prudence is therefore always in need of defense against such opinions, and that defense is necessarily theoretical. The theory defending prudence is, however, misunderstood if it is taken to be the basis of prudence.” There is, in other words, a self-sufficiency to human affairs: prudence, politics, and morality has its own grammar. But there are theoretical views that can threaten our ability to engage intelligently with the sphere of prudence.

Modern natural science has had such vitiating effects on our ability to engage in prudential activity. The thought that the universe is mechanistic, determined, dead, has prevented us from believing in the experience of 'freedom' that we seem to possess.

Many thinkers have perceived and written about these detrimental implications of the modern mechanistic natural sciences. The Romantic movement, initiated by Rousseau (from what I'm told), was one of the original progenitors of this rebellion. Somehow the rebellion against the implications of the modern natural sciences took the form of a dualism between nature and history. History, it was posited by Hegel and others, becomes a distinct domain of freedom apart from the necessary world of nature. Nature is determined; but history is where spirit, freedom lives. John Searle asks the question quite clearly in Making the Social World. To paraphrase, 'How do we get from electrons to elections and protons to presidents?' How, in other words can physical things give rise to political things?

In my final integration paper for grad school I argued that this distinction between nature and history persists to the present day, and appears in implicit and explicit forms in most existing forms of psychology. Nature and nurture. Nature and culture. Nature and X. These dualisms are everywhere.

This is indeed a tempting avenue for solving the dilemma of how the experience of human freedom can persist in a world that appears to be made strictly of physical things obeying the 'laws of nature'. The modern thinkers in hermeneutics, phenomenology history, so on, offer powerful critiques of the natural sciences, and do much work to help us come back to the reality of human experience.

My issue with them, however, is that they rarely explicitly challenge the modern understanding of nature as mechanistic. They generally acquiesce to an atomic metaphysics, ceding that they cannot speak to the reality of the universe, but only decide what it means to live meaningfully in a universe bereft of natural meaning. The desire to live meaningfully in a universe without natural meaning, however, leaves us in an awkward position: we are left to posit, assert, or will meaning into existence. Thus existentialism and existential psychology, in which I was trained, repeatedly uses a phrase that I find horrifying and untrue: meaning making. I do not feel as if though I 'make' or 'create' meaning. I am in the grips of meaning. It overtakes me. I am in the midst of the logos, not its source.

This generally willful character of the historical school is perfectly aligned with a deeper layer of the modern mechanistic sciences. For, as I understand them, the modern mechanistic sciences were never meant to be an accurate ontology or to provide insight into human nature. They were intended to enable a project of mastering nature that was meant to serve political ends. Robert Roecklein is the philosopher who has helped me see this most clearly. But Strauss is all over these questions, as is Richard Kennington, Paul Rahe, Caroline Merchant, and many others.

If the modern sciences were meant as tools of mastery rather than accurate accounts of what we are, then on what basis do we posit a domain of history as distinct from nature in which freedom lives? Shouldn't we, instead, go back to the early modern redefinition of nature, and try to understand where things went wrong there?

If the fundamental issue is that the modern conception of nature doesn't enable serious reflection on human affairs, then why are we busy positing history as an autonomous domain of human freedom? Shouldn't we just go back to this redefinition, see what was lost, and ask ourselves if there are other ways of thinking of nature that would enable us to reflect seriously on ourselves?

My wager is that something like the autonomy of human affairs can be approached more seriously simply by thinking through the problem of nature, rather than by doubling-down on the distinction between nature and history.

This is why I am reading polyvagal theory, looking into trauma, and engaging with my body as a somatically oriented therapist and person. These are contemporary excursions into the nervous system, trauma, and the body, in other words, can guide us towards an understanding of nature that is different from the mechanistic view that has proved so detrimental to reflection on human affairs. The body, understood properly, leads to a teleological understanding of nature and thereby to a version of the autonomy of human affairs.

Indeed, prior to the early modern redefinition of nature, teleology was the prevailing view of nature. Glancing at Spinoza some time ago I was amazed to see how explicitly he was attacking the notion of teleology; and Descartes was admittedly in the business of refuting Aristotle's teleological understanding of nature. There are contemporaries advocating for teleology: Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos has been hugely influential on me, and guides the way through the contemporary nonsense.

Teleology is a fancy word, but all it means is that goodness has a real existence in nature, and that every animal, every living thing, is in the business of pursuing what is good for it by nature. My dad once playfully asked me in an e-mail: 'Hey, are worms mechanistic or teleological animals? Neither brah, It's a fucking worm. I did get banana bread at work today though. ' He read my integration paper, which is occupied mainly with this distinction between mechanism and teleology. I replied: 'They are teleological for sure! Ie "what's good for a worm?" is a totally intelligible question, and the best way to find out is by watching worms worm!' He found this helpful: 'Your answer to the worm question is a perfect way for me to understand what teleology means. Onwards and upwards. Love you, Dad.'

A teleological conception of nature requires a certain account of the species. On a mechanistic or atomistic account the species is an illusion, the deeper reality being the undulating and transforming genetic material, the bits. The species, as a natural form, is called into doubt. As John Gray says in Straw Dogs, Darwin's teaching implies that the species is less real, or not real at all, and that it will be carried away in the flow of time.

If the species can be shown to have a deeper reality, and if each species is defined in large part by the ends or goods that that species pursues, then we have a potential basis for reflection on human things. Indeed, the analysis of teleology I am working on is not so much about ontology or metaphysics (though it is about that), but it is about securing a basis for reflection on human things. For if we can take seriously the idea that the species is real, and that species need to be reflected on as possessing unique goods, then several features of the human species become salient. Namely, we are animals that are rational and political by nature. We possess, in a sense, a split nature. Our rationality and our politicality come into conflict with one another. The misological character of society, the split between politics and philosophy, becomes a feature of our nature, not a bug. The Enlightenment in this sense is hostile to human nature as the ancients understood it.

This view of human nature, as divided between rationality and politicality, is what I've learned to call the tragic view of nature. Our nature doesn't fit together. We are monsters, composites. Polyvagal theory puts meat on this claim: we hold our entire phylogenetic history in our bodies. The vagas nerve shows our reptilian and mammalian ancestry. We are not human, pure and simple. We are achieving humanity all the time.

Polyvagal theory, trauma research, body work, all offer avenues to a teleological understanding of nature. I think Gendlin was onto this, although I've never seen him use the world teleology. I suspect it wasn't a creative enough term for him.

This is the significance of what I'm after with this work in the contemporary natural sciences. I see in them a possible alternative way of thinking of the 'autonomy of human affairs'. But it is not an autonomy grounded on the untenable distinction between nature and history. It is a grounding instead in a conception of nature that is pluralistic enough to admit the legitimacy of the species. It is worth noting that the Greek word 'eidos' could mean 'form', 'essence', 'type', or 'species'. It could also mean 'appearance' or 'looks' or surface appearance of a thing. The question of form goes so deep. What the hell are natural forms? Why do trees grow the way they do, and why do certain things help them grow when others don't?

Atomism denies the reality of form. It argues that form is only the form of the smallest things. Of course there is a human form, a human species, a human nature. Such a conception of nature that makes this possible also makes possible reflection on what is good for us.

I am so worked up by this writing. I am so tired. It is 7:35 pm on 12/12. I fly home to see my family in 8 days and I am looking forward to it. But good god the dark is getting to me.

I feel so much stirring in these thoughts. These are the implications of my final paper in graduate school. This is the essence of my alternative to what that program offered me. It offered me so much. And I offer these thoughts as a compliment to that project.

Keir and I agreed our project is still to move beyond Heidegger. He is the giant of the twentieth century, 'a real fucking philosopher,' as Keir recently said to me. I will soon be reading his "Question Concerning Technology," where he apparently takes on the question of teleology.

I also want this to connect back to a question of the deeper meaning of esotericism as a hermeneutic. Reality has layers. We can feel them in our body. That is perhaps the next thing I hope to write on here.

All of this needs to take form.

Reflections on Political Anxiety: Friendship as the Foundation of Political Community and What I'm learning of Trauma and Polyvagal Theory

I find myself pained by the darkness currently settling over the PNW. I left work at 4:30 yesterday and there was a shred of light still in the air. I left work at 5:00 today and it was essentially night... dark dark dark. It is December 3rd as I begin this writing. I have been reminding those around me that the shortest day of the year is about 17 days away. December 20th. After that we begin gaining light again, something like 3 minutes a day.

I have learned to track this movement in and out of the dark. Every year I forget what the depths of winter and heights of summer are like. Every year I lose something of myself, die a little, as winter comes along. "Now is the time that everything not necessary for surviving is dying away," a friend recently said to me. There are depths to this statement. I am also reminded of a lyric from one of my favorite songs by Moonface: "Quickfire, I tried to not go crazy, but the winter got inside me anyway." It happens every year and I don't know what to do other than to be sad, to cook food, to try and see others and care for myself.

Recently I attended a friendsgiving that I have been attending for many years. There were many people that I love and am happy to see. I had several conversations that revealed to me pain that others are in. The pain that I saw from my friends and acquaintances was different from the pain of winter: it was the pain of political turmoil and instability; the pain of people trying to look at a world that more obviously offers misery and misanthropy than anything else.

I have a complex relationship with words like optimism and pessimism, cynicism and realism, hope and dread. They are complex experiences.

I want to relay several of these conversations, as I think they are reasonable starting points for reflecting on the meaning of friendship in relationship to political instability,  and can help me perhaps unpack some of what I have been learning about contemporary trauma and physiology research.

A strange new direction in my thought is to put together much of my reading of classical political philosophy with what is going on in contemporary trauma research. Plato and polyvagal theory actually compliment one another quite well.

I spoke with a person that I have met only recently at this friendsgiving. He told me at some point that he was moving away from thinking about justice and morality. This naturally piqued my interest. I inquired. He told me that 'these things were primarily just human constructs,' and that 'human beings are just blips in terms of cosmic or geological time'. When we are gone these ideas will no longer have a life in the universe. These arguments were used principally in the name of self-soothing: it is painful to look at the world and to consider it rife with immoral and unjust suffering. I asked 'Do you think this is a good attitude for engaging responsibly in the present situation?' 'Of course not...' he said, or something similar. Again, these are arguments of self-soothing, of comforting oneself in the face of what might be useless suffering.

I spoke with another person, a friend, about her anxiety watching the country move towards the 2020 election cycle. It will, indeed, be a fucked up year full of liars lying in order to do more fucked up things. She was somewhat adamant that Trump will most likely be reelected, 'when has America not been on the edge of a precipice and not just gone right over it?' I was and am sympathetic to her general political outlook, but found this statement immoderate and mostly just not true. I brought up the passing of the New Deal, the founding of the American social safety net, and the election of Obama and the passing of the Affordable Care Act. She assented that these were steps in the right direction. We both agreed, however, that they were far from enough. America has no real viable political left, and we are left largely with centrist policies that call themselves 'liberal'. David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism recently clarified some of these issues for me.

What I was most struck by in this conversation was the anxiety that seized my friend as soon as we began this topic, and the accompanying extreme views about American politics. I share her pain, just like I share the pain of the previously mentioned acquaintance. But I want so badly to retain my peace of mind in the face of observing horrible things. This may be foolish or naive. I can't tell yet. But the anxiety seized my friend, pained her. I could see it in her face and in her body; I could feel it in my body. My reaction was to try and soothe her. I think I put a hand on her shoulder and told her as much. I think of John Gray's basic argument in The Soul of the Marionette: when political instability becomes endemic it is vital to work to retain some kind of inner peace, as it may be the only freedom left available to us. I said this to my friend with an immediate caveat: this type of peace or equanimity is largely a function of privilege. We are both white, and I am a white man. I am afforded peace because I am free from the more violent and overt forms of coercion that others in America experience. The police have never fucked with me, and I've never been seriously threatened by poverty, illness, or other woes that destroy others' lives.

Yet if we want to be politically engaged, if we want to understand what responsible action or thinking is, we cannot allow our bodies to be ravaged by the stress and horror that comes from observing the horrors around us. These things will ruin our bodies: panic attacks, intrusive thoughts and memories, elevated nervous systems... trauma is a crucial engine of the police state, and this includes vicarious traumatization of the sympathetic and concerned observer. I once heard Alton Brown speak openly of his hunch that America would be interested in food television as a way to escape the horrors of political spectacle.

I spoke with another friend that was in pain in regards to his professional decisions. This friend is a very good writer who for a brief time made a living teaching composition after his MFA. He now works in coding, computers, programming. His plan was to work in that world until he could manage do it for 20 hours or so a week, spending the rest of his time making, writing, working on things that really mattered. He said something like 'I really only feel good or my best when I am creating, writing, working on stuff like that.' I sympathized and empathized with what he was saying. I, too, am making a sacrifice in terms of how I make money. I, too, would like to spend a life writing, reading, and attempting to care for others. Becoming a therapist, or a community mental health 'clinician' is a compromise or sacrifice I am making because it gets me closest to the kind of life that I want to be living. This friend, and I, were experiencing the low-grade forms of coercion that afflict almost everyone in America. We all have to make money in order to not starve. Rent never stops being demanded. The labor must be sold, and only after can we turn to our work.

We are the lucky ones. I am currently working very intimately with the unlucky ones. The institutionally sanctioned role for helping, however, feels like a mask for larger unaddressed political problems. Poverty has indeed been pathologized, and I have become one of the 'experts' doling out 'treatment plans' to individuals whose needs are simultaneously so much simpler and so much more complex than my faux-sophisticated position pretends.

Yet I am finding that some of my learning in this new world is deepening my reflections on political things. In particular, what I have been learning of trauma, bodies, and nervous systems has given me new ways to reflect on the political problems that I have been thinking about for a while. In particular, I want to reflect more on a claim that Aristotle makes in the Nicomachean Ethics: That friendship is the foundation of any strong political community. I will be reading De Anima in the next few weeks, and Keir and I intend to read the Politics within the next six months or so. I will not be returning to the Ethics right now because I am not in the mood to deal with that kind of text right now.

These reflections will proceed from an idea stated above: that in order to be responsibly and politically engaged individuals it is necessary to retain a certain peace of mind that keeps us from being too physically and psychologically taxed by the terrible things we are exposing ourselves to. I want to frame this dilemma in terms of trauma and perhaps the notion of 'trauma stewardship' (which I am insufficiently learned on at this point).

The essence of what I want to say is this: If we are to stay relatively healthy while engaging in taxing or traumatizing work we need to have a well regulated nervous system. The best way to regulate our nervous system is through relationship. This means both relationship with ourselves and our own minds and bodies, and relationships with others. The model of relationship that is most conducive to this task is friendship. Friendship is thus vital to any healthy political community because politics necessarily involves the traumatization of the many at the hands of the machinations of the few and of the community as a whole. Friendship is the private form of healing that makes possible engagement with the necessarily traumatizing space of the public or political. For even the most basic facts of being a political animal means that we will be traumatized: filling roles, occupying space, and interacting with other animals. All of these things act on us, shape our bodies, and the intelligent nervous system is the primary way that we fit ourselves to these public situations.

This is going to be rough, as I don't have a handle on this stuff yet.

I have been reading some in contemporary research on trauma, physiology, and biophysics. I am out of my depth. Yet I find the work of Bessel van der Kolk, Stephen Porges, and Peter Levine to be compelling stuff. Polyvagal theory is also something I have had exposure to professionally, as I wade my way into the strange and painful world of community mental health.

The thing that I find most promising about these various trauma researchers is the way they offer resources for understanding the body as a highly complex and intelligent organism that is constantly preoccupied with the question 'Am I safe?' The body, the nervous system, are constantly engaged with the environment, taking in information from all of our various senses, and making determinations about how safe we are in our current environment. It would be easy to say that the body is 'unconsciously' keeping track of these words. But I find this term insufficient for a few reasons. First, the unconscious is conceptualized as a mental phenomena as opposed to an embodied one. Second, these bodily processes are far more accessible to conscious awareness than a term like the 'unconscious' implies. The body is not a black box, and the workings of our organismic intelligence do not need to be opaque to us. We just need to learn to pay attention to our bodies in new ways.

It is not necessary to learn about biology in order to develop this type of bodily awareness. Gendlin's work on 'focusing' and implicit intricacy accomplish a similar result. But the biological research adds a layer to our understanding.

Polyvagal theory adds an interesting evolutionary element to this account of organismic intelligence. The vagus nerve is a core nervous system structure that is found in all vertebrates. It is the main source of control of the autonomic nervous system. There is an identifiable phylogenetic history to its development that corresponds to different survival strategies. In reptiles, the vagus nerve principally controls freezing mechanisms. Lizards and reptiles play dead as their principal defense. With mammals and other vertebrates the fight-flight mechanisms are introduced, as well as 'flopping' and other responses. With human beings and other mammals the vagus nerve is responsible for our ability to engage socially: it controls language, facial interpretation, head tilting, and all the subtle cues that go into our being social creatures.

We are composite beings, monsters, that possess all of these elements of our phylogenetic history within us. When we are traumatized, or even when we feel unsafe, the higher elements of the vagus nerve structures go offline. Trauma is 'unspeakable' because the language centers of the brain literally shut down when we feel unsafe. Additionally, if we feel unsafe, or have been repeatedly traumatized, we are more likely to interpret faces and voice tones as more hostile, we are less trusting of others. Trauma literally forces us to occupy older, more primitive places in our nervous systems, and it takes our consciousness there with it.

I have shared my interest in these questions with friends and they have told me it raises the specter of bio-physical determinism, that it threatens their sense of freedom, responsibility, or the 'autonomy of human affairs'. I have no such fear. I strongly suspect that there is a way for these insights into the nature of our nervous system to be completely compatible with a reasonable account of human 'freedom', or at least of responsible activity. I am displeased with how I'm formulating this right now. But somehow I feel that these insights about the body and its evolutionary history only serve to deepen my understanding of what it means to think about human life, about politics, about responsibility. Truthfully, I think of what Ta-Nehisi Coates says in Between the World and Me: Racial violence, violence of all kinds, happens to bodies. It is broken teeth and fractured bones, punctured skin and bruised organs. Violence is a nervous system that no longer knows how to engage with other beings; a nervous system, a poor body, that can no longer feel itself safe, but remains afraid, remains alert and aroused.

I am going to begin reading Aristotle's De Anima this weekend, and I hope that it will give me resources for conceptualizing these questions about bodies, minds, and souls in new ways.

Polyvagal theory also adds a deeper layer to attachment theory. The notion of weak, strong, insecure attachment circulates fairly widely. I never perceived the depth of attachment theory, however, until I read an article that claimed that it is really a theory of relational nervous system regulation. That is to say, the essence of attachment between children and parents, or between friends and lovers, is a matter of how our bodies and nervous systems relate to one another. When we are around another person our bodies organically understand and mirror how they are breathing, how their faces are expressing, how their bodies tell us about how they are feeling (See Iacoboni and Goldman on mirror neurons and simulation theory). When we notice that a partner or friend is uncomfortable, we see it in their breathing, and we feel it in our own breathing and our own heart rate.

Fortunately, we can develop strategies for regulating our bodies and nervous systems. Indeed, breathing and touch are the only direct connection we have to the autonomic nervous system, the vagus nerve. Everything else is fully automatic: hormones, heart rate, digestion, so on. All of these things are beyond us; yet our body is responding and adapting at every moment.

As a therapist, it is crucial that I pay attention to my body, and that I regulate it while I am with a client. I am attending to their body; I see them become dysregulated; I see them begin to breath; begin to rock back and forth; begin to look away. I feel it in my body. I feel my ability to listen carefully slipping away; my body is telling me to get out, that we are unsafe. I recognize this. I take a deep breath; I let it out slowly. I feel into my body, I bring it back to the moment. I return to the moment, and try to engage. Crucially, I keep myself regulated so as to provide them a point of relational regulation. I have to keep my nervous system, my body, in check, to give them the opportunity to regulate themselves in relation to me.

This is the connection I want to make between friendship, bodies, and political life. Modern political institutions have become exceedingly good at wielding trauma as a means of social control. Trauma is something that makes real changes to bodies and literally affects the way we are able to engage in the world. Friendship, as a process of regulating and caring for our bodies and nervous systems in relation to others, has to be a vital part of engaging responsibly with the public domain. Without the private nourishment of friendship we are left bare to the wicked winds of the public sphere.

Certain forms of public traumatization are obvious: the police state and its constant afflicting of communities of color; poverty and the ongoing fear and uncertainty of food, shelter, and safety. These are easy to see. What I also want myself and others to be aware of are the minor traumas that accompany the occupation of any social role. Because trauma is not an isolated event, but rather an extreme version of what everyone experiences every day: our intelligent bodies fit ourselves to situations; our intelligent bodies shape themselves into whatever shapes they need to be in order to survive. Psychosis, as a response to trauma, is deeply intelligent: the body finds a way to continue living when the world is intolerable; it finds another place. Neuroses, so-called mental illness, these things are also tremendously intelligent responses to painful and intolerable situations.

The public sphere will always shape us. Taking shape, filling roles is the stuff of political life. Political order makes itself by ordering bodies, to be here, to do this, to say that. These things show up in the nervous system. Every time I start a new job I have bizarre and stressful dreams. Last night I dreamt that I was crushing the skulls of kittens. I had been riding on a train with a former classmate, and somehow I knew these kittens were evil. I stomped on their heads. Then I was in the water, in the middle of the night, with a new coworker, trying desperately to avoid a menacing, violent presence in the water. I was terrified.

This is the necessary stress of my body responding to a new shape that is being imposed on me. I am one of the lucky ones in that I have options. I chose to take a job in forensic community mental health. I wanted to. Yet I am choosing among a limited number of options. There is an element of coercion and violence to all social life. Society demands that we acquire shape; it hurts to acquire shape; and our poor bodies are responsible for acquiring this shape. What does it mean to be flexible? What does it mean to find grace in the occupation of a social role? What does it mean to assent, willingly, to acquiring shape, to filling a role?

The poor, those struggling, the people I'm working with on a daily basis, do not have options. They are being shaped in explicitly and extremely violent ways. The violence or coercion I am afflicted with is more subtle.

The violence of capitalism is subtle. It claims it assures freedom. Nonsense. To be a political animal is to not to be free, but to be bound.

Friendship is, hopefully, a private space in which the violence of conforming to social roles can be mitigated. 'Friend' is also a kind of role. But it is a role that is closest to not being a role than perhaps any role. Friendship, in this way, is transpolitical: it stands outside the normal coercive pressures endemic to life as a political animal. I have ideas about therapy as a kind of friendship, the therapeutic space as a kind of transpolitical space. I wrote my graduate school integration paper about this question.

At that Friendsgiving I was watching my friends grapple with the sacrifices necessary to fitting into a world in which we are condemned to relation, to being political by nature. We can try to sacrifice the notions of justice and morality, trying to buy ourselves a peace of mind. We can sacrifice our own bodies, our sense of hope, and be racked by the anxiety of the ongoing political spectacle. We can sacrifice our time and our deepest desires to make our livelihood. None shall be free of sacrifice.

But hopefully we can all find places in which we find not only sacrifices, but duties, or sacrifices that we are happy to make. Friendship is perhaps such a place. Friendship can perhaps be a space in which we can nurture and nourish one another, care for eachother's s bodies, regulate each other's nervous systems, love one another.

Love shows itself in the way the nervous system works. Unless we feel fundamentally safe, i.e. loved, the higher portions of the brain go offline. Philosophy is impossible without friendship. Genuine engagement with the fundamentally unsafe world of politics is impossible without pain, trauma. We need to find ways to feed those portions of the soul as we wade out into public life in full awareness that they will be wounded and threatened.

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.

Images of Living Well: Artist and Philosopher, Creation and Nature

These days I work as a therapist. It is a new role for me, but one I feel well suited to.

Therapists are concerned with helping others live better lives. Therapists are then necessarily involved in the question of what it means to live well. The question of what it means to live well, as a human being, is a general or universal question, not a simply particular question. Some folks would assert that living well, or happiness, is a radically subjective phenomena: there are, allegedly, as many good lives as there are individuals. I am not persuaded by this claim. I think there are many general or universal things that can be said about what it means to live well.

Here I am concerned principally with two images or ideas of the good life: the artist and the philosopher. In modern philosophy the image of the artist has become more and more predominant over that of the philosopher. Ancient philosophy, on the other hand, had an ambivalent relation to artists or 'poets' (makers in the broadest sense). The artist is a being of creation; the philosopher is a being that pursues the truth of nature.

The tradition of psychotherapy that I was trained in, existential-phenomenological psychology, certainly favors the image of the artist over the philosopher. In favoring the artist, EP psychology is following a general thrust of modernity that finds intense and hyperbolic expression in the major existential writers: Sartre and Camus. Their writings were deeply indebted to perhaps the wellspring of existential thought: Martin Heidegger. Heidegger is a much more powerful thinker than either Sartre or Camus. His relationship to art, poetry, and the question of the good life is far more complex and subtle than theirs. I am still working on thinking through his writing, and still reading more of him. Camus devolves into ridiculous statements about 'the artist giving the void its colors,'  and living your entire life as an act of rebellion. As if I don't have to go to work in order to not starve. Sartre lauds a silly form of radical freedom in which I necessarily strive after godlike control. That the human being necessarily reaches toward the divine I do not contest. But I do not believe that hubris is a necessary condition of a human life. Humility, piety, and faith are all real and important possibilities for our lives.

Even Heidegger, however, ends up abandoning 'philosophy' or 'metaphysics' in favor of a kind of 'poetic dwelling.' Again, Heidegger's thought is incredibly subtle. But he still belongs to this camp that gradually  moves away from the image of the philosopher and replaces it with the artist.

There is something troubling to me in this lauding of art, or creation, as the highest good. I often felt frustrated by signs I saw around capitol hill, Seattle, that said "Fucking Make Art!" or bumper stickers that say "Earth without Art is just Eh." I say this as someone highly involved with the making of 'artistic' things. I have been painting seriously for the last year and a half. I have been writing poetry, stories, and essays more or less organically for the last 10 years.  My father is a prolific multimedia artist. I could call myself an artist if I wanted to. But it is unclear to me what it means to be 'an artist'. I also don't really call myself a writer. I talk to my friends that I read and write with about this. They much more readily call themselves 'writers.' I prefer to call myself a maker or a thinker or something like that. I would call myself a philosopher but I'm not that vain and I regard that term principally as an honorific. I do not claim it for myself and hopefully never will. I am still too busy trying to understand what philosophy even is.

What is it about the modern world that has led to the image of the artist being one of the principal images of the good life? What is it about 'creativity', about 'freedom', about 'passion' that we all find so appealing? I of course admit that freedom is good, but not unqualifiedly good. Freedom to do what? To laud freedom in an unqualified fashion is to laud the freedom of the capitalist to exploit their workers just as it is to laud the ability of the worker to make art.

I want to explore the idea that the modern emphasis on creativity, and the modern valorizing of the artist, is connected to the fundamentally theological or biblical character of modernity. The early modern founders, as I have understood them,  were attempting to bring about transformations in the fundamental structure of society. Their chief target was the Catholic church. In order to contest the rule of the church, the alleged divine authority of the pope and his priests, the notion of God underwent some sort of transformation. The precise nature of this transformation is not yet clear to me. It is either a rebellion against the idea of God, a failure of the idea of God, a modification of the idea of God, or something like this. In any case, modernity, or the Enlightenment, was an attempt to do away with the fundamentally theocratic character of politics and to found governments solely on human reason. The idea of God, however, did not disappear: it became humanized.

The core of modernity, in other words, is an attempt for human beings to become godlike in some sense. In my last post I spoke of Feuerbach's explicit claim that the task of modernity was to recognize that what we had previously called God was really a part of humans that we had misidentified. Indeed, something like this is the ultimate conclusion of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, which Keir and I spent an agonizing 8 months going through together. Fabulous. I also noted that Descartes' claim that the modern natural sciences will make us 'masters and possessors of nature' is expressedly theological. Descartes understood that the sciences were about control, and that the biblical god was the model for this spirit of mastery or sovereignty. The modern natural sciences then ought to be understood principally as a tool for the waging of a philosophical war against the catholic church.

The most significant feature of the inception of the modern natural sciences is that the word nature undergoes significant modifications. Caroline Merchant, a brilliant historian, Leo Strauss, and many others, have helped me see that modernity is in part a shift from a teleological (or organismic) conception of nature to a mechanistic conception of nature. Defining nature as a machine, Merchant argues, frees human beings from moral imperatives and restraints that existed in an organismic or teleological account of nature. For if nature is an organism, or if goodness is natural, then science, as an attempt to think and act rationally, must defer to natural forms of goodness. When nature is defined as a machine, however, it is free to be manipulated and dominated. We can do what we please to a nature that is fundamentally a machine: human action is fundamentally liberated by any constraints imposed upon it by a theoretical order. The only limits of human action are self-imposed limits. The human being is essentially a god or can become godlike.

Indeed, the work of Richard Kennington, Paul Rahe, and Robert Roecklein has convinced me that the early modern founders were keenly aware of the political import of the new mechanistic sciences. Machiavelli actively looked towards ancient forms of materialism and Spinoza spoke openly of his attack on teleology. Both of these men were considered dangerous and heretical thinkers during their time and far beyond. That they were so involved with these questions about the meaning of nature should cue us into something strange. Through the mechanistic sciences human beings have indeed achieved profound mastery over the natural world, ourselves included. Transhumanist writers now speak openly of becoming technologically immortal.

Because the modern redefinition of nature was principally meant to utilize an attack on the catholic church, certain elements of the biblical tradition became integrated into this project. I am proposing that the notion of 'creation' was co-opted from the biblical tradition and made a major object of the modern natural sciences. Indeed, Bacon envisioned 'the arts' (i.e. the technical sciences) as providing human beings with fantastic new inventions or creations. He wrote in The New Atlantis, his utopian novel, of new species of plants and animals, never before seen, that could be created by the new physical sciences. Descartes wrote, similarly, of an 'infinity of devices' that would now be possible.

The notion of 'creation' is a biblical notion. I have been reading the first 15-20 pages of Genesis recently. I have never read it before. It is amazing, at 32, to be going through a book, no, the book, that shaped the Western world. The status of god as a creator, moreover, is quite strange. I am hung up on what it would mean for god to have knowledge of the things he created. If he created them, how can he have knowledge of them? Knowledge, to me, implies a stable type of understanding. We can know something because it exists in a capacity beyond us. If God made it, then can't he unmake it and make it into something new? Then doesn't that thing not have a nature outside of god's having created it? Then God only knows himself, not the things he makes. I don't know what to make of it.

The modern natural sciences, which were expressly theological in the early- and mid-modern writers, took over this fundamentally 'creative' character of god. We, the human being, was now the site of creation and creativity.

I am suggesting that the exaggerated notion of creation and creativity, and the lauding of the artist, is connected at some level to the fundamentally biblical character of the modern natural sciences. The reason that Sartre and Camus are able to speak so flippantly and comically of the radical freedom and creativity of the human being is because the modern project has been about cultivating a godlike stance for the human being. Sartre and Camus are full of these kinds of theological images. But they don't seem to perceive the link between their hubristic claims and the fundamentally hubristic character of the modern project as an outgrowth of biblical consciousness.

I do not believe that the image of the artist is sufficient for the question of what it means to live well. The good life is not necessarily the creative life, although a good life will probably involve 'making' things in some capacity. But making and creating feel quite different to me. So far, in my work as a therapist, I do not find anyone I am talking with to be a radically free being. We are sacrificial beings. We make compromises. We are shaped and coerced by institutions. We are frail and stand in need of others. We are anything but gods.

I am more interested in the image of the philosopher as opposed to the image of the artist. The philosopher, as I said above, stands principally in relation to nature, not creation. The bible knows no word for nature; creation is the closest equivalent. Nature here must be understood in the organismic or teleological sense outlined above: nature is a place in which natural ends exist; in which species and individuals have forms of goodness that are specific to them. The nature of a being, then, is identical to what is good for that being. The human being, being a political animal by nature, thus is coeval with the question of the good or best political order.

This concept of nature as teleological makes the fundamentally creative conception of the human  being impossible. Because nature is a nature of natural ends it is not up to us what is good for us. There is a larger, theoretical order that we are beholden to. Our task is to rectify our ignorance of that external order by pursuing knowledge of it.

In pursuing knowledge of nature we are attempting to overcome our original way of understanding: the opinions of the political community. This is why for Plato and Aristotle the pursuit of 'natural' knowledge is always pursued in contradistinction to 'conventional' knowledge. We are born in the cave, witnessing the shadows of the artifacts, fooled into thinking that the illusions and prejudices of the community are simply 'how things are'. Philosophy is the desire to know nature rather than the illusions of the cave; philosophy is the desire to ascend from conventional opinion to knowledge of nature. This is not a creative act. It is an act of longing; a pursuit of something that we piously and faithfully relate to. Socratic piety is perhaps the faith to continue pursuing nature despite the fact that all of our inquires continue to land us back in the world of human opinion and construction. We must have faith that there is 'a way things are'. Asserting the alternative, that there is no 'way things are' strikes me as absurd, dangerous, and driven by a spirit of control.

Our bodies will break down and we will die. If that isn't proof to you that there is an order greater then us, then I don't know how to speak to you. Perhaps the fragility of your body and the needfulness of your soul are seen as shameful to you.

I have never been so happy to acknowledge my weakness and to revel in the knowledge that I am beholden to so much beyond myself.

The freedom of the artist, of godlike creativity, is indeed alluring. But the pursuit of nature, the life of philosophy, offers its own kind of freedom. It is not always a practical freedom, but a freedom of mind and spirit: a theoretical freedom. To be in pursuit of nature is to know that the conventions that structure life, the roles and rules, are not 'natural', but incidental. That I am a therapist is a contingent fact: had I been born two hundred years ago rather than in 1987 I would not be a therapist. I would need to be something else because a totally different set of conventional structures would prevail. But because I am aware of the contingent, historical, or constructed elements of my life, I am able to ask myself what is natural in them, what I can do to become more human, in the broadest sense of that term. I must participate in capitalism. But I am free to wonder what in the midst of these creations is more than merely created.

Healing is a natural phenomena; the role of therapist is not. Justice is a natural phenomena; the injustices of capitalism are not. Friendship is a natural phenomena; Facebook and Instagram are not. I am only free to pursue these questions about nature because they show themselves to me through conventions.

The role, the constructed social part, is my only avenue to nature. I have no choice but to travel through artifice to try and understand what it might mean to be natural. We are never free from convention. We are never free from our roles. The philosopher, in being in pursuit of nature, is free from the domination of laws, customs, and illusions that are the fundamental human creations.

There is no problem being in the cave. It is okay to have to occupy roles. But do not think that the roles are all that exist.

There is something otherwise than creation. It is called nature. And it only shows itself through the created, made, or constructed.

The image of the artist will not do. We do not create all of this. The image of the philosopher offers something different; a sense of deference to things beyond us.

Isn't it a relief, knowing that this isn't all up to you? Isn't it comforting to think that we may be able to discover what is good for us?

I cannot bear the work of the gods. I am too weak; too wounded; too needful. I am not sorry.

I suspect that the people I will be working with and speaking to as a therapist also will not be able to handle the work of the gods. They, too, are weak and needful.

Perhaps I can work with them to discover what, by nature, is good for them, or me, or us.