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.

Reading Feuerbach, Where I'm At, More Traces

I recently had the pleasure of reading a very peculiar, small, old book, Ludwig Feuerbach's 1843 piece Principles of the Philosophy of the Future. I read it with one of my closest friends and my intellectual collaborator, Keir. Feuerbach is often framed as a transitional figure between Hegel and Marx. He was one of the pivotal rallying points of the 'Left Hegelians' or 'Young Hegelians'. I put these words in quotes because I don't understand this period of intellectual history deeply enough to evaluate the significance or legitimacy of these labels. In any case, Keir and I became concerned with Feuerbach because Keir is currently working on a dissertation on Marx. We are trying to get a handle on this period, what Marx was dealing with. I say 'we' because I feel thoroughly invested in Keir's dissertation, as I regard it as part of a larger joint intellectual project that can be crudely construed as 'leftist Straussianism'. We, in other words, are attempting to rebel against probably the most intellectually significant figure of our young intellectual lives: Leo Strauss. We find Strauss' conservatism both distasteful and misguided. I say nothing of the crude students who bastardized,  distorted, and capitalized on Strauss' already objectionable conservatism.

Feuerbach's text opens in alarming fashion: "The task of the modern era," he writes, "was the realization and humanization of God--the transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology." I was pleased to see Feuerbach being so frank about the theological core of modernity. I recently completed an integration paper where I argued that modernity was always a project of mastery, one that took aspirations to god-like control as its chief goal. At this point it is too easy to talk about Descartes' claim that natural science will make us like 'masters and possessors of nature'. Indeed, the first section of the book is an explication of the way in which Descartes and Spinoza laid the groundwork for the theological ambitions of modernity. My recent encounters with the bizarre and provocative work of Brayton Polka has given me similar insights. The bible, Polka argues, offered Descartes, Spinoza, and modernity broadly, a model of sovereignty, mastery, that persists to this day. The core of modernity, in other words, is a theological-political. This, at least, is something that I think Strauss was correct about.

I applied this framework to twentieth century psychology and psychotherapy. I argued that many of the major forms of psychology still basically conceptualized themselves as projects of mastery. This is obviously true of B.F. Skinner's behaviorism; but I believe it is also true of Carl Rogers' humanistic psychology and existential psychology broadly. I was not surprised to see Skinner speak flippantly of 'playing god' in Walden Two, nor was I shocked to see that Beyond Freedom & Dignity ends with nearly explicit advocacy for the project of transhumanism. I also wasn't surprised to see that Sartre, Heidegger, Levinas, Rollo May, and other in the existential-phenomenological camp succumb to theological immoderation. I was, however, shocked to see that Rogers argue that an authentic organismic being is a power more commanding then the dictates of gods and governments alike. Rogers book on 'personal power' ends up looking an awful lot like the Nietzsche's will to power, and his organismic, authentic individual like Nietzsche's Ubermensch. Carl Rogers, the closet Nietzschean. I can hear the distant laughter.

Thank god that Feuerbach is here to show me that the theological immoderation of modernity is not incidental. Feuerbach knew it and he said it plain as day.

The second portion of the book is an extended critique of Hegel as the pinnacle of modern philosophy and science. He takes Hegel to task for ultimately upholding a radical diremption between thinking and being. Feuerbach, in the third portion of the book, offers a possible unity of thinking and being through his conception of materialism, which he also calls humanism, naturalism, and empiricism. Feuerbach seems to be radically conflating many things that ought to be kept distinct. He ends up advocating for a consensual model of truth, and making confusing arguments about the ultimate unity of love and empiricism. Buber apparently took him seriously in this regard, and there is much to take seriously.

As I said to Keir, however, I do not believe this text to be worthy of deep, serious study. There are contradictions in it. Feuerbach was not so powerful of a thinker that the apparent contradictions are solved at a deeper level. There are problems. I may sort it out at some point.

But for now, Feuerbach has done me an invaluable service. He has shown me that many understood the core of modernity to be fundamentally theological. I was not, in other words, off when I pointed to the theological and masterful elements of contemporary psychology. They are part and parcel with modernity. This becomes perhaps more compelling in light of the way that American psychologists learned extensively from German laboratory psychologists in the late nineteenth century; or from the fact that the American university system absorbed large amounts of German intellectual emigrees. As Bloom and Collingwood both noted, there is a profound connection between our present situation and the thought of German speaking peoples.

My current intellectual task is to compress my 161 page integration paper into a 15-25 page publishable piece. This will be my first genuine effort at publishing something. I was encouraged to undertake this project by my professor that supervised the writing of the integration paper. I am tremendously flattered by her suggestion, as I regard her as the best teacher I had at SU, and one of the most interesting and intelligent people I've had the joy to meet.

I want to return to this blog, to begin to leave traces here. I need to move deeper into my thinking. I need to move deeper into my writing, again. I want to be careful, though. I used to run from myself by writing. My stomach feels empty and anxious as I acknowledge this. But right now I have many more things happening. I have a budding career in mental health; I am working very hard on my painting; I am taking serious care of my body and soul; I am working on healing from the things that have hurt me. It is important that I write. I must write.