Cartesian Concerns

 I have recently produced a few essays I intend to send to some psychology journals.

I continue in my study of Descartes and Spinoza. The explicit attacks on teleology in Spinoza's ethics are alarming and strange.

While recently writing about Descartes as a political conspirator I came across a line in the Discourse on the Method that I find telling and humorous.

Descartes, in part 6, is explaining his reticence to publish, and the care he is taking to avoid any 'trouble':  

"But I thought that I should in no way consent for [my ideas] to be published during my life, so that neither the opposition and controversy to which they would perhaps be subject nor even such reputation as they could gain me should occasion any loss of the time I intended to use to instruct myself." 

Descartes, in other words, is apprehensive about publishing because he fears they may put him on house arrest, imprison, kill him, or otherwise 'occasion any loss of time...'

So much for the disinterested Descartes. He is clearly tapped into and concerned with the theological-political situation.

'Growing Up' as a White Person: Accounting for Where We Are, What to Unlearn, and What to Learn

 I have acquired but have not read Resmaa Menakem's My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Healing our Hearts and Bodies. I have spent much time reflecting on these issues in the last several years, and have been preoccupied with a number of major black writers, Frederick Douglass above all. Race has been an active issue in my clinical work over the last year, and I have done my best to invite conversation about race when it feels appropriate. 

I have tried to own my privilege as a white person, and to call out the power imbalances that exist as a white clinician working with black folks or other POC. I have been fortunate to have some wonderful relationships and conversations around these issues.

I recently was thumbing through Menakem's book and came to a chapter called "Whiteness without Supremacy." At this point in the book Menakem has devoted chapters specifically to healing white hearts bodies, and healing brown and black hearts and bodies. (Menakem is a somatically oriented therapist/social worker, as am I, and so he speaks of the 'body' in a broad sense in which it is not a mere physiological machine, but an intelligent organism that posseses its own intelligence and direction towards growth and healing). 

The chapter "Whiteness without Supremacy" raises a familiar problem. I quote him at length: 

"For genuine transformation to take place, white Americans must acknowledge their racialized trauma, move through clean pain, and grow up. African Americans and American police need to do the same. And, for now, we each need to do it in our own culture, and in our own way. When I explain this to groups, some earnest white folks in the audience often ask me some variant of this question: 'Resmaa, I'm totally up for this. But I have no idea what to do or where to start, or what the next steps are. Can you lead us or offer us a set of next steps?' My answer, of course, is no. The question is itself just one more expression of imaginary white fragility. It is white Americans turning yet again to a Black body and saying, 'Help us. Serve us. Save us. Bail us out. Do our work for us. Above all, don't make us stand on our own two feet and grow up.' But growing up is exactly what all of us--individually and collectively--need to do. I can't grow you up. You can't grow me up. Adulthood can't be outsourced." (262).

When I read this I cried and cried and cried for a few minutes. Something in it struck me deeply. I hear the voice of a friend who I have forgotten: "It is not the job of the oppressed to educate the oppressor." Nothing could be more obvious.

What would it mean to grow up? Why did it move me so much to read this passage? And what would a next step be, for a white person, from within whiteness, without outsourcing to the oppressed bodies that enable my privilege?

I want so badly to grow up. 

What I mean by this is that I want to become responsible (i.e. able to respond). I want to be able to look at the world, make an honest accounting of it, and of myself, and to act in a way in which I don't turn away from what I see. I want to be able to turn towards the pain of others and my own pain without shying away. Before the pandemic I regularly saw an acupuncturist who I felt very understood by. She once told me that I had a type of energy where I was able to look directly and move into deep territory with people. "You seem like you could almost spend all of your time in this process of looking." This is one of my strengths, but it also means that I am often estranged from my body and from the things that live there. I gawk and awe at the world, and in my gawking and awe I sometimes forget to live in it.

I so cherish the process of observation. I so badly want to be able to look carefully at what is happening. The essence of therapy is careful and loving attention. There is something in careful attention, in which it is identical with love, that is profoundly healing.

Sometimes all we need to heal is to be understood: "Really being listened to and being loved are so close to one another that most people can't tell the difference." I once shared this quote with a friend and she retorted: "I would argue they are the same." This is most likely correct. But we have different words, and so I think them two sides of the same coin, two aspects of the same reality.

To grow up means to understand and to act in light of that understanding, regardless of the pain it causes. This requires love. All those who say that love is the key to a higher reality, or that love is this higher reality are fundamentally correct. 

If white people need to grow up, and growing up has something to do with being able to love and pay attention carefully, then the question arises: Why do white people have a hard time seeing people as they are, pain as it is? Why do white people have a hard time loving? 

Love is fundamentally a matter of relationship. Love cannot take place outside of relationship, even if that relationship is with our own bodies, our own thoughts, our own souls. If we struggle to love, if we struggle to see reality, it means we struggle in some capacity with relationship.

There are many ways of relating, but two of the most fundamental are 1. relating to a thing in terms of its usefulness, and 2. related to a thing in terms of its fullness. For now I will call this the generality of a thing versus the particularity of a thing. When we concern ourselves with the generality of a thing we observe only what is relevant in that thing to our purposes: it isn't important to me which person picks me up when I call a Lyft because any Lyft driver will be able to get me where I need to go. During that Lyft ride, however, I will undoubtedly encounter a particular being that is filling a general role. I may, if we are lucky, even speak to this particular being in particular ways, and share a particular connection with them

This combination of generality and particularity is of the essence of what it means to be human: we always fill generic social roles, and we are always a particular being that is unique in ways that this role cannot account for. At the same time, we cannot exist in our raw particularity: no such human being has ever existed. Any novelty that a human being accomplishes is accomplished both through and in spite of  generic roles. We are fated to this peculiar fusion.

I was, for example, a barista of a highly particular sort. I excelled at the generic features of the role: I can crank out a line of drinks, know how to track a bus tub and stir station, and was a successful latte art competitor. But my particularity and idiosyncrasies also thrived as I filled that role. I had many important relationships with 'customers', I knew them as humans. I exchanged writing with customers. I became friends with customer. I would say weird things to people to play with them.

Relating to things or people in either general or particular ways is thus of the essence of being human.

I will hypothesize that something has gone wrong in the balance between these two ways of relating in European and American (ie white) societies. We are excessively locked into our general ways of being. Many people speak effortlessly of feeling like a cog in a machine, like they are dominated by the roles they are forced to play as a matter of course in being a social animal. Capitalism, mass industrial society in general, has made our being, our experience, overly generic.

MLK spoke of the way that capitalism 'thingifys' people: it makes us into objects that are valued only for our usefulness. Frederick Douglass writes beautifully in his Narrative Life of the struggle between his life as a slave, in which he is mere object, and his life as a full-blooded human being, in all of his complexity and intricacy. 

To thingify is to dominate or master.

Growing up, becoming responsible, means learning to recognize that our relationship to ourselves and others is one excessively oriented towards domination and mastery. This process relies on an attitude in which we regard people primarily as generic objects rather than particular beings.

At least two things, then, seem needed to grow up as a white person. First, we need to understand how we became so good at dominating ourselves and others. Only if we understand where this comes from can we unlearn it. Second, we need to learn how to positively regard other beings as full blooded human beings and not objects. We need to learn how to look and listen in the proper, deep sense of these words. We need, in short, to unlearn our spirit of domination or mastery, and to learn a spirit of love and care.

The unlearning of our spirit of domination requires that we have an adequate story to tell about ourselves that can help us make sense of our implicit cultural viciousness and violence. This is particularly difficult for us because white intellectuals generally have their head up their asses with overly-sophisticated theories of knowledge. 'There are no more metanarratives... knowledge is impossible... all beings make their own meaning,' one screams into the void. 'Only physicalist science and medicine are adequate sources of knowledge,' another screams into their cold instruments. Postmodernism and Scientism, in other words, appear to be the only two forms of knowledge available to us. And, spoiler alert, neither of them produce the human knowledge, the unlearning and learning, that I am describing.

We need, against postmodernism, to assert that history is intelligible; that we can adequately account for our past in a way that allows us to see the present clearly enough to grow up. And we need, against Scientism, to assert that nature is more than the predictable movements of dead physical things. 

I raised these issues in my last post, which is the most programmatic piece of writing I have produced to date. Now I am putting these issues together with specific concerns about racial justice that have and continue to occupy me morally, politically, and clinically.

 

How is history intelligible? American and European history becomes more intelligible in terms of the rediscovery of the tradition of esoteric writing: or through the rediscovery of the fact that science and politics are in permanent tension, and that individual and communal growth are often antithetical. Part of the reason that we are so good at dominating ourselves and others is that we are so desperate to believe that these most cherished values can fit together. 

 

Surely, politics can be made rational? Surely, the well being of individuals and the well being of the community can be made the same?

It is not clear to me that either of these questions can be answered in the affirmative, and my reading and thinking incline me to say that they are indeed permanently at odds. 

Modernity and the Enlightenment were precisely processes of trying to bring about a harmony between science and society, and between individual and collective goals. Capitalism is a clever outgrowth of this project: 'What's good for the goose is good for the gander.' Nonsense. 'Selfishness is good because it generates competition.' What myths we tell ourselves to justify our childish spirit of domination.

Growing up as a white person means taking account of these eminently European and American projects, recognizing their failure, and reformulating a politics that can account for these tensions. Because the recognition of the tensions I have described does n ot leave us hopeless. It leaves us squarely in the face of the question of equity and sacrifice. If it is true that science and politics are at odds, then we need to take public education as seriously as possible. If it is true that individual and communal growth are at odds, then we need to equitably compensate those who must do the bad jobs in society. I would be delighted if garbage collectors made 60k with a 4 day work week. Hell yeah.

This is the answer to the postmodern assertion that history is unintelligible, or that we can only hope to 'make meaning' and never 'find it': We need to perceive our situation as the product of an uneasy marriage of science and politics, in which the most disparate and conflicting parts of human nature have been slammed into one another, making us into monsters. 

We no longer know how to move gracefully as the vertebrates that we are, combining generic roles and particular lives. The roles dominate. The machine crushes us, despite our raging against it.

But this account of history requires an account of human nature. It requires us to be understood in terms of our higher aspirations and the conflicts that arise from those higher aspirations: the glory of political life, with its requirements for deference and loyalty, are opposed to the nobility of science and philosophy, with its emphasis on individual reason and relentless questioning that undermines loyalty. And our account of human nature, is unfortunately been bastardized by the physicalist orientations of modern science.

Behaviorism is the most glaring contemporary form of this absurd view of human nature. We are not machines that need to be fixed, and the 'masses' of people do not need to be regulated by statistical masters. 

We need to assert, against behaviorism and physicalism, that healing, growth, and Life are real. Goodness or value is not a human invention. It is a reality that we all participate in. Human beings deserve to grow and flourish. Our societies of domination do not permit this growth, and I don't know how they can.

Growing up as a white person, becoming responsible for my involvement in a system of mastery and domination, means this dual unlearning. 1.We are not in an unintelligible situation, we can track the history that has brought us to this moment, and we can assert that we are the children and products of an uneasy fusion of science and politics forcibly brought about by propaganda wielding philosophers of the early modern period, and their alliance with financial and governmental institutions. 2. We are not mere physical machines, but growing organisms. We do not exist solely to fit into the social categories that dominate us. We need to assert a teleological view of nature. I am not explaining this well right now. There is too much else that I'm holding here and I'm tired.

 

Growing up as a white person also means learning to listen. It is so painful to understand the suffering that white people have brought onto the world with the invention of whiteness. It is so painful to openly account for the spirit of domination that predominates in white communities. We like being in control, we like the power. Baldwin was right that for some reason white people need black people as a fiction that can uphold our own cleanliness.

 

Perhaps we are ashamed of the extremes of human nature: the violence we are capable of, the brutality. So we tell a story in which that is not us, that is them. But it is us. It is me. I understand the appeal of violence. I understand the appeal of domination. Part of me revels in the possibility. But I know this is not the part of my nature that is worth feeding.

 

Baldwin is right to ask the question: When will the white person not need the fiction of the black person? When will the white person allow themselves to be human? We, of course, will likely never rid ourselves of these labels, now that we have them. But we can move through them, somehow, to reach something more human.

 

Learning to leave behind the fiction of whiteness means understanding that whiteness is a necessary invention of the Enlightenment project. It is a fiction that is required for the ever growing role of technology and domination in society. For unless there were whiteness, unless there were blackness, this spirit of domination could not thrive.

 

I fear I've become wildly speculative here.

 

But how to listen? How to not run from our own pain?

We must turn towards our own bodies. We must return to the fullness of the beings around us. Can we do this when we must interact in our generic roles all day, with the baristas, bus drivers, and cashiers?

This isn't some 'inner change' is the answer claim. Structural change is required. The transformation or abolition of prison systems. But structural change will never be enough if individuals are not healing.

I don't know. But I feel I've taken some steps in this writing.

I have explicitly raised some questions that I have been afraid to raise.

I want to grow up.

The Project as I Understand it Now: Politics and Psychotherapy, Metaphysics and a Metanarrative

I see more and more the importance of the late Mark Fisher's book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

 

It is a complex book that a I read a few years ago and need to reread. Nine chapters and 81 pages, the slim volume argues that one of the most promising points of resistance against capitalism is the proliferation of mental illness. So many of us are unhappy, seeking out therapeutic help in the form of psychotherapy and pharmaceuticals. I work in the world of mental health and think and believe that good work is taking place. 

 

I also think that much disturbing work is going on in mental health. There is an important 2014 article by H Hansen titled 'Pathologizing Poverty: New Forms of Diagnosis, Disability, and structural Stigma under Welfare reform." The article demonstrates how the Clinton era welfare reforms introduced unique psychiatric and pharmaceutical dimensions to the distribution of social services. If individuals want to receive government support they often must submit to psychiatric diagnoses, medication regimens, and ongoing observation by government licensed institutions. I have seen the insides of institutions that serve precisely this function. The reality of poverty, trauma, and their combination, is chocked up to mental illness. As if the actions of the 'mentally ill' were not understandable responses to distress and injustice. The medicalization of human growth permits these social-political problems to be explained in individualistic medical terms. In this way the language of 'mental illness' reinforces the oppression and suffering of the most marginalized and vulnerable members of society. Robert Whitaker's book Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill ( which I am slowly reading) has convinced me that medicine and mental health have often contributed to the mistreatment of the poor and vulnerable.

The middle classes are also rife with issues surrounding mental illness. Depression and anxiety are widespread phenomenon, and there is increasing awareness and acceptance (even championing) of psychotherapy in most liberal circles. I have benefited tremendously from therapy, and am delighted to be at the beginning of a career as a therapist. A former therapist once referred to it as 'beautiful work'. I was then only doing the work as a client. I now am beginning to understand that statement from the other side. 

I also applaud and am excited about the proliferation of trauma research, and the growing public awareness of the implications trauma research. All of my work is informed at the deepest levels by my reading on trauma and polyvagal theory. It is essential to a full of account of what it means to be human, and how healing is possible.

Fisher's book is so important because it can serve as a load bearing point in the basic features of my project: A politicized form of psychology and psychotherapy that is both effective at producing practical and clinical insights, and theoretically coherent from the level of practice to metaphysics (or ontology, pick your word). I am emphasizing that this politicized vision of psychotherapy must be coherent practically and theoretically. Theory is far more practical than we sometimes think.

This emphasis on the relationship between theory and practice is significant in light of Fisher's argument that capitalism, fused as it is with medicine and the medicalization of human distress, relies on materialist or physicalist ontology:

“The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualism (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation.” (37).

The discussion of mental illness as an individual medical problem, in other words, prevents it from being understood as social and political issue. The medicalization of mental illness say their is something in your brain/mind/machine-body that is wrong and that needs to be 'fixed'. A politicized account of mental illness, on the other hand, would assert: your feelings of pain and distress can be explained by an unjust and exploitative society that has denied you the time and means for actualizing the potentials that are unique to you. A politicized image of mental illness says: there is a group of people that want you to be unhappy so you buy things.

The truth is somewhere in between the medical and political perspectives. There are genuinely organic or chemical causes of mental illness, and medication is an important and sometimes necessary tool in someone becoming well. The claim is only that the medical-physicalist ontology lends itself more to a politics of mastery or domination, and that we would do well to recenter politics in our understanding of human distress and well being.

 Clearly an alternative understanding of mental illness is needed. This means, in part, that a new ontology is required. We need an account of nature and human beings that can account for two things:

1. That mental illness needs to be understood primarily in terms of social-political injustice rather than individual medical causes.

2. That human beings do not need to be fixed, but need to heal and grow. The body, in other words, is more like a plant than a machine: it is a wild, organic, growing thing. A full account of mental illness thus requires an ontology of life.

Fisher thought that the left was particularly ill suited to articulating such alternatives because of the proliferation of 'postmodernism' and the suspicion of 'metanarratives'. He thought that it was time to reclaim the capacity for metanarrative: "Against the postmodernist suspicion of grand narratives, we need to reassert that, far from being isolated, contingent problems, these are all the effects of a single systemic cause: Capital. We need to begin, as if for the first time, to develop strategies against a Capital which presents itself as ontologically as well as geographically, ubiquitous." (77) Fisher is thus, in part, calling for a theoretically or ontologically consistent form of resistence against Capitalism. I think that the contemporary use of trauma research by political, queer, POC, or indigenous therapists/healers is precisely an ontologically consistent form of resistance to capitalism.

 

Does the full ontology or metaphysics matter? I'm not sure. Part of me thinks that going so far with the ideas  is... self-indulgent? Crude? Insensitive? I have concerns about becoming a disengaged academic some day. I have been doing political adjacent mental health work. I felt good about it. I will continue to be engaged with it, despite that I'm leaving my current job.

Surely ideas mean something? And surely the consistency of the ideas down to the metaphysical level has some significance? This is precisely the question of science and politics. I am not sure.

 

Regardless, I ask: What would such a fleshed out ontology and metanarrative of mental illness as a political problem rather than an individual medical issue look like?

 

Metaphysically, it would require a teleological account of nature as opposed to a mechanistic or physicalist account of nature. It would require us to understand nature as something that we belong to, and that is naturally a world of growing beings that are driven by their desire to pursue what is good for them. It means that goodness or 'value' is real and out there in nature. Trauma, and all that we are learning about the intelligence of the body, moreover, imply a teleological ontology of life, and a politics not of mastery, but of sacrifice and equity.

This stands in contrast to many modern accounts of knowledge, the most popular being physicalism, followed by forms of postmodernism in which language is said to be projected or imposed onto a silent world.

Fisher points out the fundamental compatibility of postmodernism with capitalist-medical-physical ontology. I think this is not incidental, as Stanley Rosen argues in Hermeneutics as Politics that postmodernism and physicalism are the two branches of enlightenment philosophy.

The dilemma, then, is this: both physicalism and postmodernism either reinforce, or are powerless to combat, capital's logic. A new ontology of trauma, the body, and Life are necessary.

Metanarratively, it would require in part what Fisher describes: a historical narrative that can account for Capital as the cause of contemporary despair and unhappiness.

Capitalism, as I view it, however, needs to be understood as part of a larger shifting that takes place in the relation between science and politics. This shift in the relation between science and politics is referred to as 'modernity' and saw itself flourish in the 'enlightenment'. 

 I believe the most striking way of analyzing this shift in the relation between science and politics is through a peculiar tradition of writing known as 'esoteric writing'. Esotericism I've written about here so much and I feel like I write the same sentences over and over. Esotericism is a form of writing in which someone is potentially obscure or misleading for a variety of reasons: to avoid political persecution; to avoid disseminating dangerous ideas; to agitate for political change; or to help other philosophers learn by providing them with challenging texts. People wrote this way up until sometime in the mid nineteenth century.

How did such a thing disappear from our view?

The issue highlighted by esotericism is precisely the uneasy and often contentious relation between science and politics. Science and politics, in other words, have generally been radically divided from one another. Our situation in which science and politics are so intimately fused is highly novel, and clearly highly volatile. To perceive this one need only reflect on the fact that a wildly irresponsible president has access to the most sophisticated and powerful weapons ever created.

Esotericism, its forms, and its disappearance, can offer a metanarrative that fleshes out the explanation of capitalism. Capitalism is a unique form of this attempt to bring about a fusion of science and politics. The changing relationship between science and politics can be traced in the way that philosophical and scientific writers relate to politics and society as a whole. 'How esoteric did they have to be?' is a crucial question for self-knowledge.

Developing an understanding of esotericism means coming to terms with the fundamental conflict between science and politics that is at the heart of our current political moment, in which there is an absurd and horrific amount of resistance against the basic measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

The Safety and Violence of Formality

Today someone pointed out to me the important relationship between trauma and formality. They explained that they knew people who were so traumatized, fearful, and disconnected that they reverted to a sort of brutal formality: everything was rigid manners, rote routines and roles. They described a human being bereft of Life, subsisting on the paltry scraps of formality.

And yet formality is necessary for life. We are vertebrates. We are combinations of living flesh and stable structure. 

The soul is nomic and natural, and that is okay.

Because formality also supplies safety, reliability, predictability. What would I do without the formality of the working week the grocery store? 

 

And how much pain did it cause me for my most recent living situation to collapse, for my routines to be threatened?

How strange, this delicate dance with shape and form that we undertake. We needs the forms. The forms are real and good and often natural.

What is a human trellis?

From History to Eternity, or the Path to the Field

Parts of contemporary philosophy and psychology are both vexed by the meaning of 'postmodernism'. This afternoon I was on the phone and I glanced at my bookshelf: "Beyond Postmodernism: New dimensions in clinical theory and practice," edited by Roger Frie and Donna Orange (both of whom I admire). Much of my current reading concerns the legacy of postmodernism as it appears in philosophical and clinical thought.

The notion of postmodernism implies that modernity was a real and discernible period of 'history'. It implies that modernity has now passed, and we are now in 'postmodernity'. The unconscious axioms, we are told, have shifted; we live under a new episteme, a new set of 'absolute presuppositions'.

I fear historicist hermeneutics. I fear the idea that we are locked in culturally and historically. I fear the denial of a common human nature.

Esoteric hermeneutics is a hemerneutics now of history, but of eternity. The soul can live forever in its signs, so long as another soul can recognize the life behind those signs.

 

Humanity may not be on a path. We may be in a field. Although development makes this hard to understand entirely. 

 

The beings grow by Nature, but Nature does not grow? This would seem to be the case.

False Starts

 I recently moved into a new apartment. It is quite nice and I have been here for about a month exactly.

I had minor surgery that affected me far more intensely than I anticipated. It was a difficult experience. A coworker and I had spoken about it: "General anesthesia will kind of rock your world, man." He was right. It rocked my world.

I have begun and stopped several pieces of writing.

One is loosely on Eugene Gendlin and the problem of human growth. Human growth is difficult because growth and violence seem to be strangely and intensely knit in us. Growth and violence are generally intertwined. Here I understand growth as the actualizing or fulfilling of natural potentialities. By violence I mean the impeding, arresting, or somehow hindering the actualizing or fulfilling of natural potentialities.

 

Violence reaches its peak or limit in the killing or murdering of a being; thereby the greatest violence has been done and the being can no longer grow. 

 

It is not clear where growth reaches its peak.

 

To fulfill one potentiality is to deny the possibility of another potentiality. If a being has more than one good alternative, then one good alternative must be denied. The denial of that potentiality is, by my current definitions, an act of violence. 

 

Thus choice, and perhaps action, is a necessary combination of growth and violence. 

 

Human life, growthful or otherwise, can be of a particularly violent sort. The dilemma seems to arise out of the divide in our nature between rational and politics, science and society, or individual and communal goals. I take all of these dyads to be synonymous, but they are different and its not quite right.

We cannot fulfill our individual potentialities without fitting our activity into the activity of those around us. We must find 'roles' or 'jobs' to fill. It is perhaps impossible to escape 'society' all together. 

But the roles available in a community are finite, and are not constructed, generally, with the purposes of makes individuals happy, but with the collective project of that society.

In good socities the pursuit of the collective goal does produce roles and occupations that are good for the individuals as well.

But more often than not there seem to be a lot of bad jobs. 

This means that my growth is predicated upon a certain amount of systemic social violence. I read Zizek's Violence in 2011. I suspect I still am carrying something from it.

The other two pieces of writing are both on R.D. Laing and esoteric writing. I recently finished reading Laing's The Divided Self and was delighted. What a wonderful book. What a wonderful thinker. I really enjoy his writing for its humor, clarity, and frankness. He has a pithy way of putting dilemmas. I haven't spent much time with his poetry, but some. 

The more I think about it the more it makes sense to connect esoteric writing and the problem of 'mental illness'. Esoteric writing refers to a complex rhetorical and philosophical practice used in the construction of philosophical (or controversial) texts in politically persecutory environments. Writers will have to seemingly outwardly conform by producing an 'exoteric' or surface argument of a book. At a deeper level, however, they are making perhaps more subversive or philosophically rich arguments in an 'esoteric'. 

 

The problem of esotericismis the problem of managing the relation between surface and depth in the necessarily double life of a human. 

 

I am me and the part that I am playing. 

 

I am Riley-being-a-therapist. Me and the role both are and aren't being something different. I am the role. I do not exist without roles. Yet I have persisted in spite of roles, implying that I am something more than the roles. 

What is this pretense that is necessary to human life? Why do we have to show that we know what we are doing. Part of being competent is being able to put on the performance of competence. The difference between being and seeming is so difficult for us.

Sometimes we feel the gap between ourselves and our role so violently. I love and hate the joke about an employee at Wal-Mart or somewhere similar taking off their name tag and fighting a customer that was being insulting. "I don't care about this job enough to not..." In a moment like that the being has erupted through its part in the action of that moment. 

"Yeah we're gonna need to ad lib this, this can't go down this way." Because there always scripts to get us through a moment. But the script does not necessarily give life.

I learned from Laing and others that there is a phenomenon within the world of schizophrenia referred to by clinicians as 'double bookkeeping'. Someone struggling with psychosis may have a good idea of what the 'external' world expects of them (how to behave in a store, etc), and they also answer to a different world, an 'inner' world in which the signs and symbols of meaning don't follow the same rules. They answer to a more exacting order. Double bookkeeping is meant to describe the phenomenon of individuals experiencing psychosis keeping track of both of these layers: surface and depth; inner and outer.

Esoteric writing is double bookkeeping that is necessary for the philosophical life, in the fullest sense.

My lasagna is ready and I'm tired. Goodbye.

Something Something Death... Something Something Passage...

The death of a Place,

The passage of A Time. 

What is that?

Clock time is suffered.

Real time passes, the way

We pass from This Place.

I was almost struck by a car on 17th and Madison while returning home from work. The day was difficult. August 6th, 2020. I had cravings that I intended to indulge, or wounds that I intended to lick. All day I had listened to and told stories  that involved people suffering things I hope to never suffer. Something something hospitalization, something something Ativan, something something decompensation.

 

My arms were full as I waited at the intersection: a loaf of bread, a steak, a small piece of cultured goat cheese. I had been looking at my phone but was not looking at it as I began to cross the street. The crosswalk changed. I began to walk. I did not look both ways. Behind me a man with a stroller screamed indistinctly, 'not even words just ahhhh ahhhh ahhhhh.' I froze.

As I looked to my left I saw a black Tesla pass through the intersection, several feet in front of me. I thanked this man and the woman that was with him and wondered about the child in the stroller. I wondered about what life meant to him now that he was responsible for a life that was small and nascent and not yet a Life. I thanked them both a few times and they told me they were glad I was okay. "I need to pay attention," I said. "Well, you assume it is your turn when the light changes," the woman said kindly and matter-of-factly. A mail carrier crossed from the other side of the street, "I'm glad you are okay." I thanked him as well. 

I went about my evening. I cooked the food I purchased. It was a delicious meal and I enjoyed it more having been reminded of how quickly I could pass from this place in a way altogether different from how that Tesla passed through the place where I almost was. 

I am soon moving from the apartment I have been living in for more than two and a half years. I am sad for a variety of reasons but am eager  for a new place where I can be alone with myself. I remember people who told me that they struggled being alone, they didn't like it. They don't like to be alone.

I suppose I understand what that means.

But I so love being alone. And it is not a matter of course, to be alone. It is not a fact of our birth or being. It is something altogether different; an achievement, a relief, a gift... something something whatever Rilke said about Solitude becoming Vast.... something something 'walk inside of yourself for miles without meeting another soul...'

I meet many souls and I am fond of them. I think some of them are fond of me. 

 

I hope for more.

I wonder which soul almost ran me over in their Tesla on August 6th, 2020. I wonder if they understand, imagine they understand,

                                the way that we all pass from this place.

What would it mean to hasten the passage of a being from this place?

What will it be like, 

                                                    to pass from this place?

Something something 'being dead is not an experience one can have.'

Something something 'when we are, death is not; when death is, we are not.'

Something something the being of death is not the being of nothingness.

I wonder, what will happen, when I undertake my passage. 

 

I look forward to that learning, but I hope to delay it

                        until its due time.

Layered Texts, Conflicted Souls, Hidden Nature: What's This Unity of Hermeneutics, Psychology, Politics, and Metaphysics? Thoughts on the Limits of 'Esotericism'

I am so eager to write about something that I do not understand adequately. When I pause to reflect on it I find myself in the midst of the largest philosophical and psychological problems I am aware of.

The problems concern the relation between hermeneutics, psychology, politics, and metaphysics (or ontology).

Hermeneutics provides the most striking entry point: Leo Strauss (Persecution and the Art of Writing and everything else he ever wrote) and Arthur Melzer (Philosophy Between the Lines) have convincingly demonstrated that our era is unique in that we have lost touch with an ancient and abiding rhetorical practice known as 'esoteric writing'. Esoteric writing concerns the relationship between philosophy and society, and the relationship between truth (or nature) and language.

Pre-modern philosophers were consistently under the threat of persecution and censorship. Consequently, they could not openly discuss their more heterodox ideas, lest they open themselves to threat of death. Philosophers thus developed a rhetorical style in which they could communicate things to careful readers, and hide things from careless readers. Ways of tipping off the right kind of reader include: Purposeful mistakes and misquotations, long digressions, abrupt transitions, oblique prefatory notes, anonymous publishing, and so on. Annabel Patterson, a renowned literary historian, also demonstrates the existence of these rhetorical strategies in her book Censorship and Interpretation.

Esoteric writing is a hermeneutic strategy that above all demonstrates that great writers in all eras possessed a deep awareness of text and sub-text, surface and depth.

The implications of esotericism are vast simply in the world of philology and scholarship. If it is true that authors were forced to write in encoded ways due to the threat of censorship and persecution, and if it is true that we have forgotten how to read this way, than much contemporary scholarship needs to be revised.

But there are also deep implications in the world of psychology, politics, and metaphysics (or ontology)

Psychologically, it puts us face to face with a divide that sits at the center of our souls: we are, as human beings, often divided between, on the one hand, our allegiance to our political communities and the opinions that bring them, and on the other, to the truth or the reality of things regardless of their implications for our political communities. The love of one's own and the love of the good are often at odds.

I often say that I am interested in the psychology of conformity. Because in order to get by in our daily lives, in order to be what we are, we must conform to social roles and standards. But we are more than the roles and the standards. Yet we cannot live in this excess only. We must live as a fusion of role and life; structure and growth. We must, in Collingwood's phrase, be vertebrates.

Esotericism thus describes also the structure of our souls: we are a surface of social form, role, structure; and this surface always obscures, supports, and reveals a depth. The task is to become a surface that is the surface of a depth.

This puts us face to face with the political dimension of esotericism. The implication I would draw from the esoteric tradition is this: Society is inherently violent. It always coerces, it always shapes, it always enforces and forces us into a given shape. Unfortunately we are not able to absent from this violence. This violence is a precondition of our being.

All life and growth is also violent. Growth is the fulfilling of certain possibilities. Violence is the denying of certain possibilities. It is impossible for us to fulfill certain possibilities without denying others. Ergo growth requires violence. But some forms of growth are less violent than others because they fulfill our nature more full or 'fit' us better. Esotericism, in a peculiar sense, is a practice that mitigates the necessary violence of social life; it dampens and enlivens the conformity that, if left unchecked by the life of our lives, would transform us into cogs.

The most peculiar implication of the esoteric tradition relates to all of this, and is the most obscure to me.

I will refer to it as metaphysical esotericism (following Benardete). Metaphysical esotericism refers to the fact that reality itself seems to possess the structure of surface and depth. Phenomenology, in Heidegger's sense, can become ontology because there is a depth in the world that responds to the surface formulations of language. Merleau-Ponty says that 'to be is to be the surface of a depth'. No matter what facet of reality we look at, it always seems as it things appear a way, and are a way. The world unfolds from itself.

There is some sort of developmentalist ontology implied in this, one that I don't want to call historicism.

Our being as political animals, divided psychologically, finding ways of writing that mitigate the violence of society by navigating the relation between surface and depth, wouldn't be possible unless the world also possessed the structure of surface and depth.

The practice of philosophy, which is identical with esotericism, is the practice of learning that the surface depth relation that gives rise to philosophy (the discovery of nature) is identical in structure to reality itself.

I cannot say more. I am baffled by these problems.

But I like this formulation: the task of philosophy is to become the surface of a depth; and esotericism is precisely training in becoming the surface of a depth.

The link between ontology and politics is so real.

Our own waking up into the dilemma of philosophy, the ascent from political opinion to knowledge, becomes a guide to the nature of nature: Ie the movement and permanent relation between surface and depth, being bound to temporality, incompleteness and unfolding... Quid sit deus?

From Sacrifice to Duty Through Unconscious Fantasy as it Shows itself in the Body

The title demonstrates the trajectory of thought that I intend to trace here. I do not intend to do much more than sketch said trajectory. It is Friday evening. My working, reading, learning, and acting feel strained. I continue my study of DuBois and Douglass. I have just received Albert Murray's The Omni-Americans in the mail, along with Leo Strauss' The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism. I continue to be divided.

I begin with the problem of sacrifice. I speak of sacrifice in a very broad sense, but generally denoting the way that human life lacks harmony. We are composite both interpersonally and intrapsychically: we are many, both as we appear in society, and as we appear within ourselves. In order to manage this many-ness, we must make sacrifices: we live and (hopefully) choose among options, both interpersonally or intrapsychically.

Interpersonally, or socially, we occupy many roles throughout our lives and even on a single day. Monday through Friday 830-5, I am a therapist, case manager, coworker, employee, (or 'team member' if I want to abide by the language that my employers use to obscure the hierarchical relations between use), and many other things. During that time I may also be a customer, a pedestrian, an acquaintance, a friend (and what myriad things go into being these things?) Outside of those hours I am a roommate, a friend, a son, a brother, an image on a screen (both for myself and others). Roles roles roles, abound.

Intrapsychically, or within myself, I am also many. Both Plato and Freud thought it sensical, or at least expedient, to divide the soul in three: nutritive, spirited, and rational, for Plato; Id, Ego, and Superego for Freud. I grasp neither of these tripartite divisions sufficiently. But they point to an intuitive enough set of divisions within the soul: I recognize a part of myself that can think clearly; I recognize a part of myself that acts and 'thinks' at a level 'deeper than my thinking; and beneath all that my heart beats, my stomach digests, my body sleeps, heals, and cares for itself in a way that is deeper and more automatic than both my rational thinking and my semi-conscious bodily activity.

Socially, I fill roles, and am therefore both one and many.

Within myself, I am rational, habitual, and nutritive (physiological, automatically biological), and am therefor both one and many. (I imagine a particular friend, and others, who may take issue with the claim that we are one at all. I think this a signficiant but not insurmountable claim and bracket it here).

To make our way in the world as these composite beings we have to make sacrifices. Socially, we have to decide that we want to go to this school as opposed to that school; fill this role rather than that role; pursue this relationship rather than that relationship. Intrapsychically, we have to choose that this hobby is more important than that; this set of emotions worth honoring more than that; this 'part of myself' more worth nurturing than that.

I believe that the problem of sacrifice is unavoidable for we composite beings.

If we are lucky, our sacrifices can become duties. By duty I mean something like: "the sacrifices we are happy to make." R.G. Collingwood, my first great philosophical love, elaborates his notion of duty in rich and concise ways, chiefly in The New Leviathan, but by other names in The Idea of History and other places. Duty, for him, is the act that is both possible and necessary, that speaks itself chiefly in the form of tautology: 'This is what I have to do because this is what I have to do.'

When we understand the situation that we are in, which includes our roles and what transcends them, and the parts of ourselves and what transcends them, we find that the situation is compulsory. We have choices, naturally. But the way to choose is not simply by choosing capriciously or following some overriding instinct. The most sound form of choice is rather to understand the situation and to understand ourselves, and to listen to the logos latent in the situation and in ourselves as deeply as possible.

If we have listened to the situation deeply enough, if we have sufficiently communed with the logos present in our situation and in ourselves, we will find that there is a 'best' option for us. This 'best' option will still involve sacrifices, both socially and intrapsychically. But it will no longer be a burdensome sacrifice: it will be the sacrifice we are happy to make.

To deny the possibility of duty is to be captive to the fiction that the human being can be a god: that we can make our way in the world without compromising, without fitting ourselves in relation to others and to other parts of ourselves.

How does one know what is a sacrifice and what is a duty?

I am interested in a possible answer from Jonathan Lear's wonderful lectures in A Case for Irony.

In the first lecture Lear defines irony as a form of 'erotic uncanniness', meaning that irony seizes us in moments when the familiar has become unfamiliar, when we experience the uncanny. But in the moment of this dislocation we are not left in the void, as our modern sensibilities might lead us to suppose. Rather, we are left erotically charged, longing for the truth about the thing that, moments ago, we thought we knew. Socrates, Lear claims, was ironic in this sense.

This is why Lear claims that irony shows itself most clearly in the form of tautology. "Among all the therapists, are there any therapists?" In the first instance the word stands for the socially available roles that are available to us as a matter of course. In the second instance the word points to a deeper possibility reality, ie therapist not as social role, but therapist as genuinely healing person. The tautological question, 'among the therapists, are there any therapists,' can thus be rephrased: 'Among all those who occupy the socially designated role of therapist, do any of them function as agents (persons, sources, sites) of healing?' The answer is surely yes, but my point isn't the answer. My concern is with this notion of irony.

In the second lecture Lear argues that this species of irony, as erotic uncanniness, is particularly significant in light of the human search for wholeness. Lear claims that we are generally given unrealistic and simplified images of life's harmony and the possibility for wholeness. In my master's thesis I made a similar claim, railing against Carl Rogers' and others' calls for 'congruence' and authenticity. These words point to real things. But Lear is on point when he claims "Ironically, the unity that is available to us is a peculiar form of disunity. In trying to work out the family of concepts that include rational will, action, and agency, philosophers have tended to rely on an idealized conception of unity that does not really fit the human soul." This is akin to the point I made from the outset concerning manyness and sacrifice: we cannot simply be whole. We are many, in many ways.

Lear believes that it is precisely our need to occupy social roles, and our need to fragment ourselves psychologically, that leads to this disunity that is our source of unity. The word sacrifice, however, occupies no significant place in Lear's analysis; it appears only once in relation to his depiction of Plato's Republic, where a character exits to make a literal animal sacrifice. Yet I find the notion implicit all over Lear's book.

Lear goes on to argue that 'unconscious fantasy' is one of the best places for psychic unity to emerge, in the peculiar way that it is possible for us. I don't understand this sufficiently, and I'm tired, so here is my best shot right now. Lear argues that 'individual formal causes' show themselves most clearly in the workings of unconscious fantasy. When we can allow ourselves, through dreams, or through psychoanalytic speech, to give voice to unconscious fantasy, we will encounter a sort of individual entelechy, a self-organizing care that is internally generated internally by the soul or organism. "The claim then is that the self tends to have a formal cause, unrecognized as such, which stands at significant odds with the conscious sense of practical identity."

If it is possible for us to have duties, rather than mere sacrifices, then something like this internal formal cause, this internal directedness, is necessary. If there were no internal formal causes, if I weren't 'a particular type of critter, with particular natural ends', then I would just be some malleable thing that social roles and intrapsychic organizations can just be imposed upon.

Why do certain roles fit better than others? Why do certain ways of relating to myself feel better than others? Why, in short, do I seem to have ends that are native to my particular being and not just the being of my species?

What Lear is talking about, then, is the discovery of duty as opposed to sacrifice. Because, again, these internal formal causes cannot just show themselves, willy nilly, without social form. We require social form. But certain forms are better. Why? I don't know why. But that seems to be what nature is, and it seems that we can listen to our natures.

I think Lear is onto something significant that is fundamentally correct. But I want to argue that 'unconscious fantasy' needs to be understood as emerging from a particular relation with 'embodied life', in a peculiar sense of embodied.

Here I follow the lead of Eugene Gendlin, who I am still hard at work on. Gendlin developed a somatically informed mode of thought that he referred to as 'focusing' and 'thinking at the edge'. Gendlin argues that words, or formulations, are most true if they correspond to an intuitively felt sense of things. Words don't just mean what they mean; words what they mean in situations. When I say the word 'slab', I may mean many different things, and the word functions in different situations in different ways.

If we want to follow our unconscious fantasies so as to understand our own unique entelechy, we need to listen to our bodies in the way Gendlin describes in Focusing and basically in every single one of his writings.

I am done.

We are many, never one. We are many in many ways. To navigate our many-ness means we must make sacrifices. But there is a unique species of sacrifice that is known as duty. A duty is a sacrifice we are happy to make because it accords with our nature. The best way to know our duties, or our internal formal causes, is to listen to the unconscious fantasies, as Lear puts it. And unconscious fantasy must be attended to in the experience of the body as Gendlin describes it.

Okay thanks bye I'll flesh this all out some day when I'm not so tired.

But I am convinced of the soundness of this trajectory.

A Fragment: Mastery, Spurious and Genuine: Ontology, Phenomenology, and Nature

I began this writing several months ago when I was excited about a conversation my friend Keir and I were having about the Platonic Forms. The question of 'form' of Plato's work on 'forms' has occupied us more intensely over the last year or two. The idea, roughly, was that the forms constitute some kind of weird navigating of the relationship between phenomenology and ontology, between what the world is like for us and what the world is. I don't think I can really return to this writing. Although I am still working on formulating the same problems in different ways.

Begin Writing:

My desire to write is stronger than my ability to write adequately about what I want to write about. "Don't write because you understand, write because you don't," I recently said to a friend. I'm trying to follow my own advice.

I want to write about different forms of 'mastery' as they present themselves in different threads of Western philosophy. My concern is how these different forms of mastery show themselves in the relationship between ontology and phenomenology. All philosophy, perhaps all thought, implicitly or explicitly answers the questions: 'What is the world?' and 'What is it like for us to be in the world?'. I mean to use the terms ontology and phenomenology in minimally presuppositional ways; they stand for those questions, respectively. Much follows from these questions, and even more follows from the relationship between these two questions.

Some background:

My final project for my master's in existential-phenomenological psychology was concerned with a legacy of 'mastery' that pervades contemporary philosophy, psychology, and psychotherapy. I argued that a crucial feature of modernity was, among other things, a new form of science that sought to master the physical world largely for the sake of a political program of weakening the rule of the Catholic church. The early modern founders (Machiavelli, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza) sought to change the political landscape in ways that previous philosophers had never attempted. This forced science/philosophy to pursue practical purposes in a novel way. Philosophy, consequently, lost its contemplative character that predominated in pre-modern and ancient philosophy, and became expressly activistic, preoccupied with effecting change rather than pursuing knowledge for its own sake.

This effort to use science and philosophy to change the world is admirable and has led to many good things. I am no anti-modern, luddite, or the like. Yet there is no denying that the last several hundred years has seen the world radically transformed in not entirely positive ways. Science and technology leave us with an mixed bag.

What are the implications for this legacy of technological mastery in the present moment? How does it affect our ability to be human? How does it affect our ability to think about and act in relation to political things?

My sense is that the modern project of mastery splits off into two distinct forms that correspond to the contemporary analytic and continental traditions. These two forms of mastery correspond to different emphases on the relationship between ontology, phenomenology, and the meaning of nature.

The first form of mastery belongs to the analytic tradition of philosophy, privileges ontology to the point of denigrating or ignoring phenomenology, and regards nature as atomistic or materialistic. Analytic mastery is technical in character, and resembles the early modern project of mastering nature through material science and technological invention.

The second form of mastery belongs to the continental tradition, privileges phenomenology to the point of denigrating or ignoring ontology, and regards nature as secondary to 'history' in various senses of that word. The mastery of the continental tradition is poetic in character, and shows itself as an exaggerated conception of freedom in which the human being is essentially a 'creative' being that knows no reality other than the reality it creates.

Both forms of mastery show themselves in the longing for godhood, or the desire for control. The analytic god is a god of technological might; the continental god is a god of creative potency.

I regard both of these concepts of mastery as spurious.

This is oversimplifying, as I am aware of writers in both of these traditions that break from what I am describing. But I think this is an instructive way to oversimplify.

I also think there is another notion of mastery that is discernible from the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition. I regard this classical view of mastery as genuine mastery, as opposed to the spurious forms of mastery present in the analytic and continental traditions. It is not technical or poetic, but rather relational, dialogical, tragic, and political (in a particular or proper sense). It does not emphasize ontology or phenomenology, but seeks to navigate a middle path between these two questions. It does not regard nature as materialistic, and it does not posit history as a distinct domain over and against history, but regards nature as teleological and thereby relies on an analysis of the human being as an animal that is both rational and political,  and that must reckon with unique forms of goodness intrinsic to our rationality and politicality. The classical form of mastery would operate not with an image of a technician or a poet, but rather an inn-keeper. Here I think of Gendlin and Rumi: 'All your feelings/experiences/emotions are guests in your home and you must greet them and find a place for them.' The part of the mind that 'greets and finds a place for,' the inn-keeper, is the proper image of classical mastery. The inn-keeper, moreover, is not a god, but a daemon, a being that navigates the in-between of our humanness and the way our humanness reaches out towards the divine.

It is important to emphasize the moderate character of classical mastery because control and mastery are important terms that have non-pejorative meanings. I believe the spirit of control that belongs to analytic and continental forms of mastery is excessive, unhealthy, and unrealistic. They are spurious forms of mastery that do not sufficiently coincide with knowledge of our nature; they offer distorted images of human nature and thereby give rise to forms of mastery that are not germane to our being. Classical mastery, by contrast, is appropriate to our nature as animals that are both rational and political, and do not rely on distorted understandings of the affinity between humans and gods.

All of this can be expressed in a grid:

Tradition:          Emphasis:               Idea of Nature:              Form of Mastery:      Divine Image:

Analytic            Ontology                 Mechanistic or Atomistic     Technological          Crafting-God

Continental       Phenomenology      History over Nature              Poetic                          Artist-God

Classical           Middle Path of        Teleology and Tragedy         Political or                   Daemonic
                          Being and Seeming                                              Dialogical            Inn-Keeper

What I really want to understand is the possibility for the words 'metaphysics' to stand for a careful navigation of the relationship between ontology and phenomenology. Plato and Aristotle, as I understand them (so far), find a way to navigate the difficult space between 'what is the world?' and 'what is the world like for us?'. It only seems reasonable to me to assume that how we answer one of these questions has implications for the other. And it seems obvious to me that these questions have to be mutually-governing: i.e. what the world is has to have something to do with what the world is like for us and vice versa.

Let me discuss these different traditions and forms of mastery in turn: analytic, continental, and classical

Analytic Mastery: Nature, Technology, and Domination
- it coincides most fully with the early modern project
- it gives rise both to projects of actual technological mastery, ie behaviorism and transhumanism, and of conceptual mastery and the degradation of phenomenology ie eliminativism


Continental Mastery: History, Poetry, and Creation
- it is related to but separate from the original project of mastery.... the relationship between materialism and the meaning of history as a placeholder for the human-divine relation
- something to do with the intertwining of the biblical and philosophical tradition

Genuine Mastery: Rationality and Politicality; Coercion, Rhetoric, and Esotericism; Multiplicity of Roles, Internal and External, and being the Inn-Keeper
- the meaning of daimonic
- the meaning of being both rational and political
- the meaning of teleology and species specific issues
- Trauma and the species account of flourishing and violence... the relative character of trauma, and the necessity of trauma for a being like us that always has competing forms of goodness within it
- the esoteric tradition as offering the skills needs... healthy dissociation, healthy compartmentalization.

The problems of coercion, rhetoric, esotericism...

On the Compulsory Quality of Performance and the Performative Quality of Life

I went to drama camp from the ages of 7-12. I did not know it was drama camp. We put on little performances, skits, music numbers. We would spend 3 weeks preparing, and at the end we would perform for the parents and family members.

Performance has a peculiar quality of compulsion to it. Once you begin giving your monologue, begin your speech or speaking your lines, you cannot stop except at the cost of some violence. Imagine an actor in the middle of a play. They break character, "I can't do this." They walk off stage. The room freezes. No one on the stage knows what to do.

'The show must go on.'

But when the show doesn't go on, we feel it, this interruption, this disruption.

The machine grinds to a halt. It would have been smoother for the show to go on.

Our entire lives have this quality. We step into our characters, slowly, gradually, over the course of our lives. Major shifts in character come at a price.

Imagine a person dropping their role in the middle of a barista shift. There is a line to the door. It is hot, they are tired. "I can't do this anymore." They walk out. I once saw a coworker have a panic attack in the middle of a giant line. They took a minute.

What is this compulsory quality that overtakes our lives? What is this character that we can't stop acting out?

'The show must go on.'

But this isn't a show. This is my life.

That this is my life doesn't change the facts:

'The show must go on.'

"It's About Me..." Thoughts on My Current Project, the First Day of Kindergarten, My Privilege, Douglass and Write

I have been having a hard time with the isolation of the pandemic. I am all too keenly aware of how fortunate I am to have a home, to have a job, to have a paycheck. My job brings me into contact with many people who do not have homes, jobs, or paychecks. The regime is currently attempting to sacrifice them in the name of the economy.

I was recently in the shower when I began wondering about why I am writing and reading and thinking about the things I am. The single word I am most interested in right now is 'coercion'. Other relevant words: violence, conformity, compulsion, roles, belonging, attribution (thanks, Laing), compliance.

To be a political animal is to be subject to psychical and physical 'pressures' that 'shape' us into certain ways of being. Freud is right to emphasize intrapsychic conflict. We are rife with it.

Why am I so preoccupied with violence? I studied military history as an undergraduate. I sought out work in forensic mental health. I have been feverishly reading political philosophy for more than 10 years.

'Why am I writing about these things in this way?' I thought to myself in the shower.

'It's about me', I said aloud to myself.

Then I cried really hard for a while. As I was crying I was flooded with memories of the first day of kindergarten. I remember the fear, the anxiety, the crying, the desire to hide behind Dad's legs.

The memory was viscerally rich and imagistically sparse: 'Don't make me go there. I don't want to go there'. I said this aloud and I understood. I felt it.

Of course the writing is about me. Of course I experienced coercive elements of school. Of course it hurt to be pushed into an institution, to be forced out of the home, because my parents had to go to work. Of course I cried and it hurt.

Of course my parents experienced this violence before me, and in their hurt I became hurt too.

Hurt people hurt people. And we are all hurting in one way or another.

And I am among the most privileged individuals in the world. A white man born in the United States in a period of profound prosperity. How is it that I have experienced this much social coercion? How is it that I have been shaped in such palpable ways? How is it that I can sob and sob and sob in the shower upon realizing that my preoccupation with coercion and violence is my attempt to come to terms with myself?

How?

How must the violence experienced by the less fortunate, the poor, people of color, women and queer folks, how must that violence affect them?

I have spent so much time in the last number of years reflecting on the process of skillful conformity, or how to navigate coercive situations (i.e. all human situations) in a way that preserves what it is that is worth preserving in me?

I am currently rereading The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass with an eye to these questions. For the more I have read the most serious black authors of the last several hundred years (Davis, Baldwin, Douglass, Write), the more I see how much they understood, had to understand, the need for skillful conformity.

Skillful conformity is in some ways a process of dissimulation: of projecting a front, a cover, a surface, in order to obscure a depth, a soul. Douglass says that as a young man, still a slave, the slaves around him all competed to be able to work at 'The Great House Farm', the property where the big slave-owner lived. The work in the Great House Farm was preferable to the brutal work of the fields.
"The competitors for this office," Douglass writes, "sought as diligently to please their overseers, as the office-seekers in the political parties seek to please and deceive the people. The same traits of character might be seen in Colonel Lloyd's slaves, as are seen in the slaves of the political parties." A doubleness emerges.

Douglass claims that these slaves sang enthusiastically on their way to the Great House Farm. Their songs, he said, would be strange to those on the outside, for they "would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone." These songs, Douglass says, contained "words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves." He admits that he himself found them strange: "I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs.I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension.... Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains."

Douglass further claims that many in the North mistakenly took the existence of slave songs "as evidence of their contentment and happiness." Nonsense, Douglass retorts. "It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears." In this way, the songs, with their seeming interplay between surface and depth, content and form, exoteric and esoteric, were a way for slaves to resist "the soul-killing effects of slavery..."

Some sort of doubleness emerges from the experience of oppression, slavery, brutality, violence. I recoil at the idea that my experience could possibly ever be compared to what I read about in Douglass and others. I have cried every time I have read Douglass. There is no equating. But there is learning. And the extreme violence that Douglass experienced is pervasive at most levels of society. Only the super wealthy, or the divine, are free from these pressures. The super wealthy, I suspect, are slaves in a different sense: slaves to their greed; slaves to their distorted understanding of goodness; slaves to the idolatry of money.

Richard Write describes a comparable type of doubleness in his narrative preface to Uncle Tom's Children. He describes a process whereby white co-workers forced him into his role as 'lesser'. They accused Write of calling one of them 'Pease' as opposed to 'Mr. Pease'. Write was immediately caught in a double-bind. If he denied their claim he was in essence calling these men liars. If he assented to the claim he was agreeing that he had disrespected them. There was no way out. The only option was to assent to power.

Write tried to explain the incident to the people at home they admonished him: "they called me a fool. They told me that I must never again attempt to exceed my boundaries. When you are working for white folks, they said, you got to 'stay in your place' if you want to keep working." Write refers to this process of learning to 'play his role' as his 'Jim Crow Education'. Here I mean the phrase 'play his role' in a peculiar sense. Because Write did not simply cease learning; he continued to think, to try and read, to write. But in order to do so he had to conform, he had to shape himself to fit the images of his oppressors. "Here my Jim Crow education assumed quite a different form. It was no longer brutally cruel, but subtly cruel. Here I learned to lie, to steal, to dissemble. I learned to play that dual role which every Negro must play if he wants to eat and live." This was the price of his learning, his growth, his excess.

All of us necessarily exceed our roles. We are more than these truncated parts in society. The question is whether or not we are given leeway, wiggle room, space, to learn about what is more than our roles. Thus Write used his cunning to continue to learn, to exceed, in private, clandestinely. "Armed with a library card, I obtained books in the following manner: I would write a note to the librarian, saying: 'Please let this n***** boy have the following books." I would then sign it with the white man's name." Absolutely remarkable. Absolutely heart rending. I write with tearful eyes and tight lips.

I am so much freer than Douglass or Write ever was. This is my privilege.

Yet I experience violence. I experience coercion. I also must get up, go to work, and conform. But I thank God that I am afforded the excess. I do push against my role. And, unlike Write, I am not punched in the face and threatened with a steel bar. My fragile body and soul are not subjected in the same way; but I am subjected nonetheless; my subjectivity is crafted.

I need practices that allow me to preserve my excess from being devastated by the shaping power of institutions. I remember so viscerally sobbing as I was taken to kindergarten against my wishes. And I was cared for there! I was allowed to nap! I remember raising my hand for more tasty food that was served to me! It was so good for me. And yet I'm crying as I write this.

I am in want of practices that can preserve souls from the coercive effects of institutions and societies.

Doubleness, dissimulation, occupying the level of role and excess simultaneously, is the most imperative task if I am to continue to navigate this place, the world, America, Earth, history, whatever.

The most complex theoretical accounts of this phenomena are to be found in the tradition of esoteric writing initiated by Leo Strauss and deepened most significantly by Arthur Melzer; and the philosophy of the implicit as developed by Eugene Gendlin. I am currently working on combining these two views.

Gendlin, however, is wrong when he claims that the 'excess' or 'intricacy' is a discovery of our century. Douglass and Write understood the intricacy. All people who have hoped to be thoughtful in the company of others have understood the intricacy, or the need to conform if one is to think.

I am becoming more and more grounded in my desire to seek justice, to try to help, to try and do something in the face of all this.

There is a quotation I am trying to recall, but it escapes me. I paraphrase:

'If one wants to be free, one must fix as clearly as possible upon the ways in which one is enslaved.'

I am not enslaved. I am freer than most have ever been in the history of the world. But for my sake, and for the sake of clarifying the things I hope to work on, I am attempting to understand all of the forms of compulsion that rack my body, and the subtle cruelties that could make the first day of kindergarten an occasion worthy of tears.