Leaving Our Nature for Nature: Compressed Thoughts on Political Philosophy as First Philosophy

We are the kind of being that by nature makes things. Nowadays we speak readily of ourselves as constructing or co-constructing reality. There seems to be something about being human that makes it necessary for us to make things.

The most characteristic thing that human beings make are laws, rules, nomoi, or, in a word, culture. Invariably human communities are bound by shared practices and customs that regulate the range of acceptable action and thought.

The laws or cultures of human communities generally originate in some relation to the sacred or the divine. Mythical founders were the children of gods, knew the gods, learned from the gods, or were the gods. In the last few hundred years we have seen for the first time governments or states that claim to be fully human, finally non-theological. These governments, states, and peoples, however, retain an awareness and a relationship with the notion of the divine. It merely takes different shapes, like scientific mastery, or history (as in 'history is watching you').

The most characteristic creation of the animal that by nature makes, law, is intrinsically linked to an awareness of goodness. The laws given to the founders were meant to be the laws of the good or best society. The law says what is good. Awareness of goodness implies awareness of badness, both of which imply awareness of better and worst.

The human being enters the world as a being most familiar with the sacred laws and customs made by the community. Nothing other than an ability to obey and fit into these laws and customs is required for a human life. The human being can live entirely within what they have made.

The being that makes by nature has the peculiar ability to hide nature from itself by its makings. Laws and customs about sex and gender, for example, can profoundly obscure the fluidity with which sex and gender and actually exist in the world. That men should have short hair is a social construction. That certain beings are capable of reproducing with others is not.

Nature should be understood principally as contradistinct from law, custom, and convention. Nature is precisely that which is not constructed. The natural is unchanging, and true simply.

Nature is obscured to the being that by nature makes.

In order for the being that by nature makes to attain knowledge of nature that being must learn to make things in a way that points beyond or transcends the thing made.

The creation of laws as the most characteristic form of human creation is logically preceded by a more fundamental feature of our nature: our ability to speak. Our ability to speak is what makes possible our nature as beings that make.

One of our principal ways of speaking is metaphor, or the making of analogically significant images.

The being that by nature makes seeks knowledge of nature by making in such a way so as to not mistake the thing made for nature.

The being that by nature makes seeks to make images that offer a potency or pregnancy that can make nature present to us.

Because the being that makes by nature always begins from the makings of the community, the pursuit of nature must begin from the predominant opinions of the community.

The laws and customs of the community structure the opinions of the community. The laws and customs are of divine character and speak to the good. The opinions of the community are thus opinions about the good way of living received from the gods.

The pursuit of nature is the pursuit of what is really good by nature, and not simply by convention or custom. The pursuit of nature must therefore ascend from the opinions of the community, the opinions of the political body.

Political philosophy is thereby a privileged starting point in the pursuit of nature.

To be a human animal that seeks knowledge of nature is to confront the prevailing views of the political community that serve as the original structure of our souls. To seek is to make images that can provide the questions obscured by the laws and provide answers that allow the next question to emerge.

Political philosophy is the necessary beginning point of philosophy.

Political philosophy in a most peculiar sense.

The Desire for a Project as the Desire for Wholeness

I spoke with my dad on Sunday. We talked about many things, but the notion of 'projects' came up repeatedly. I was expressing to him that I don't know what my current project is. I am hanging paintings at a coffee shop in about a month, and I feel myself wanting to pivot artistically. I don't feel inclined to condense my graduate school integration paper into a piece of publishable writing, as my professor suggested. I do want to write and attempt to publish at some point. But truthfully I am still sitting with all the ambivalence that I feel about engaging with the academic world. It isn't clear to me that publishing in some psychology, psychotherapy, or philosophy journal is a very meaningful enterprise.

My dad pointed out that it was peculiar, or interesting, or curious, that I found myself so badly in want of a project. I pointed out that he, too, has projects. But he said that his projects are more modest: 'I want to work on my car,' 'I want to paint some trees,' 'I want to build a table.' My projects are of a more scholarly and philosophical bent. I have produced many large writing projects over the last ten years that span somewhere between 1,000 - 1,500 pages of writing. I just looked at my old blog, www.civilizedriley.blogspot.com and clicked on the tag 'Substantial Essay'. I immediately encountered several  long pieces of writing that I had entirely forgotten about.

Why in the world am I always producing all these writings? What is going on? Why as I've grown older do I hesitate more to produce them?

I had the idea that part of what I want from a project is an experience of wholeness. Projects are, in some ways, extensive reports on a body of experiences that I have had. I move outside of myself and take stock. Collingwood talks this way about philosophical systems in his Essay on Philosophical Method: A philosophical system is nothing but an intermediary report on the progress that mind has made up until that point. All of this sounds very Hegelian.

A project allows me to stop and look upon my work as though it were done in the process of it still happening. A project is like hades: My life is over and I'm alive to enjoy it. A project allows me to die and be dead.

My final graduate school paper was such a project. That part of my life was over with that project. I was standing at the end of that experience, and I was looking back, with everything I had carried until that point. That is probably part of why I cried so much writing it, writing about my clients from my internship.

I can only conclude that I have not lived enough yet to have another project. I need to keep having experiences, reading books, meeting people, making art, working my job in forensic mental health. These things will crystallize when it is time.

It is not yet time.

There are other ways to feel whole, but there is nothing quite like the next Great Report.