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...
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