I continue to be preoccupied with Descartes. It has been many years. 2006 that I first read the Meditations.
I go deeper into my preoccupation with Eugene Gendlin. I first heard of him in September of 2017.
A sound interpretation of Descartes is an important element in the task of making sense of Gendlin's work, its implications for our situation, and how to carry his work forward.
Ultimately, I take issue with Gendlin's analysis of the meaning of modernity. Descartes is often said to be 'the father of modern philosophy' or some other such statement.
Modernity, since Heidegger, becomes synonymous with forgetting: something is amiss, we are missing something, about ourselves, the world... what have we lost? And how do we get it back? Heidegger's answer is quite famous: We have lost the question of Being, we speak only of beings. The question of Being was obscured chiefly by Plato's profound and complex answers to these questions. With Plato and beyond the Western tradition is fundamentally locked into 'metaphysics', or technical analyses that make unjustified and unjustifiable presuppositions about Being, thinking, and their relation. Heidegger's account, I think, suffers from a failure to appreciate the significance of irony in ancient writers. The technical analyses of Plato's Republic cannot be taken at face value. They must be understood as belonging to the highly tactful, rhetorical, situated quality of Socratic speech. Heidegger, in short, failed to understand the relationship between irony, philosophy, and politics.
Gendlin's account of modernity is also an account of forgetting. In Gendlin's case, however, we have forgotten not Being, but 'implicit intricacy'. We have become convinced, he says, that 'all order is imposed order', that there is no such thing as 'nature'. Gendlin in this way was addressing the postmodern conviction that human beings are culturally constituted, pure and simple.
Gendlin tells a story in which the intricate order was forgotten in the progress of the modern project. Descartes, he says, knew that there was a 'wider order' in addition to the logical or symbolic orders. Yet, Gendlin claims, Descartes advocated for the imposition of mathematical order for the sake of usefulness. "Yeah yeah this mathematical grid isn't in accordance with this thing's nature, but I don't care. The mathematical grid allows me to master it, reduce it to its usefulness in my schemes."
It isn't until after Rousseau that the intricate order slips from view, and we begin to regard all order as imposed order. "With Rousseau the natural order has its last moment," Gendlin writes in Thinking Beyond Patterns (43). It is with Kant's response to Rousseau that we begin to lose the intricate order altogether. According to Gendlin, Kant wanted to understand how the hypothetical sciences could be so successful: Why does the imposition of order seem to work? He answered rhe question with a reversal: "The order we impose is the objective one, he said, because the same order is imposed not just in thought, but also on experience. All order found in experience is put there in the very making of experience. Nature is a product of our thought-forms." (TBP 44).
Kant is unfortunately still a blind spot for me, having glanced at the Prolegomena and read the introduction to the second Critique. The second Critique gave me enough of a sense of the truth of Gendlin's arguments. Kant admits that the attempt ground metaphysics in speculative or theoretical reason failed. He will now attempt to ground metaphysics in our experience of practical reason. The primacy of practical reason can potentially be interpreted as asserting that there are no existing external measures: Man is the measure of all things. (I am currently reading Plato's Theaetetus where Socrates takes up the Protagorian claim that 'man is the measure of all things'. Plato saw quite clearly the possibility of an ontology based on flux, becoming, imposition, the impossibility of saying what 'is'. As Gendlin knew, Plato already knew about these problems).
I think Gendlin is generally on the right track with his account of the imposed order. Clearly prior to Kant and Hegel there wasn't so much absurd denial of a natural order. Something happened here, no doubt. And naturally Gendlin is right that this transforms through Nietzsche and the romantics, again in Heidegger and phenomenology. Gendlin and Strauss both agree that posistivism and historicism are the chief antagonists of sound rationality, or philosophy, in our time. And both of them would agree that they share a common root: the unit model, materialism, or atomism.
But there is a crucial political dimension that I think Gendlin is missing. Because the significance of 'imposed order' in the early modern period needs to be understood as a type of effective or Machiavellian metaphysics. I write about this constantly: the early modern philosophers were simultaneously preoccupied with significant metaphysical questions, and with concrete political change of their situation. Beginning with Machiavelli, atomism or physicalism is viewed as a metaphysics that legitimates a politics of mastery. If we do not understand the political motivations of early modern materialism, then we will miss many of the important political implications of Gendlin's work, or the rediscovery of the intricate or natural order.
This is where the evaluation of Descartes becomes crucial. Gendlin is right that something crucial happens with Descartes, that a new type of science is crystallized and disseminated. Gendlin is further correct that Descartes was aware of the intricate order as well as the imposed order. But why did Descartes champion the imposition of mathematical orders? Why did Descartes value control or domination or mastery so highly? And is it really just Gallileo that Descartes is acting in relation to or carrying forward?
I think that Descartes' more significant predecessors are Machiavelli and Bacon. Descartes is the inheritor of a philosophical propaganda campaign initiated by Machiavelli and transformed by Bacon. According to Strauss, Machiavelli's chief goal is to make philosophy political useful so as to disrupt the rule of the Catholic church that was so persistently involved in the affairs of his home of Florence. Machiavelli begins writing books that reach towards propaganda; that seek to influence, agitate, and provoke change, rather than simply inquire into the truth. According to Richard Kennington, Bacon makes modifications to Machiavelli's project. He introduces the notion of Christian charity, and he introduces the notion of the mastery of nature.
Descartes picks up where these two leave off. He advocates for a collective, progressive project of mastering nature, and for the creation of an 'infinity of devices' that could help a class of philosophers win the favor of the common people. Descartes praises 'generosity' in this context of the mastery of nature for the improvement of the human situation. These are admirable goals. But clearly they had unintended consequences. Several hundred years later, we have many many sophisticated weapons, and we no longer believe that there is such a thing as a natural order, and therefore no natural restraints on what we do. All is possible for the human being.
All three of these figures are interested in atomism or materialism because it is conducive to the project of mastering nature. All three, moreover, were in the business of rejecting central presuppositions of ancient philosophy. Chiefly, all three rejected the notion of teleology; or the idea that nature is a nature of natural ends: goodness has a place in the world. Teleology, as a theoretical account of the world, placed goodness front and center, and demanded that the world be evaluated in moral and ethical terms. Caroline Merchant tracks the political tension between mechanism and teleology beautifully in The Death of Nature.
Descartes' texts, then, are not just philosophical documents that led to the assumption that there is only imposed order. Descartes' texts are more like Marx's Communist Manifesto than most would think: these are propaganda pamphlets, invitations to join in a revolutionary project. Indeed, as Arthur Melzer reports, D'lambert praised Descartes as " 'a leader of the conspirators'... who had the courage to be the first to 'rise against a despotic and arbitrary power and who, in preparing a resounding revolution, laid the foundations of a more just and happier government, which he himself was not able to see established'." (Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines, 252). This view of Descartes seems out of style. It is the only way I can make sense of his texts.
The politicization of Descartes' writings also casts greater light on his ability to navigate the relationship between the intricate and imposed orders. Descartes was a skilled practitioner of what is known as esoteric writing. Esoteric writing is a complex phenomena that points to the relationship between philosophy and society. More specifically, esoteric writing is a response to the fact that intellectuals or heterodox thinkers have almost universally been persecuted. Socrates, Bruno, Gallileo, countless others, were murdered or coerced for doubting the views held sacred by their political community. Censorship, however, cannot simply stop the occurrence and dissemination of heterodox thoughts. Descartes, after all, says that the Church's authority is over his actions; his thoughts he regards as subject only to his own reason.
Descartes skill as an esoteric writer is that he manages to conform sufficiently to the political-theological situation, accommodating certain statements about god, promising to respect conventions. He adopts a rhetorical front in which he seems to accept certain words, allow certain premises. Let us take the Discourse on the Method as an example. I recently read this book quite carefully. On its surface, it appears to be a peculiar 'fable' or tale whereby Descartes lets people know about his personal, private, very non-revolutionary project that he has been undertaking. Don't worry, this is harmless stuff. Descartes is very respectful, and just wants a good solitary life.
(Esoteric writing also possesses a 'metaphysical' as well as a political dimension. The esoteric text self-consciously works with the relation between surface and depth, imposed order and intricate order, because the world itself contains surfaces and depths, logical orders and intricate orders. This also explains what Melzer calls the pedagogical element of esotericism: the obscure text is an image of nature. Metaphysical and pedagogical esotericism belonged more solidly to ancient philosophy. It is not until the Enlightenment that esotericism as philosophical-political-propaganda begins to be more widely and aggressively practiced. Descartes is employing some mixture of these forms of esotericism, but the political dimension predominates in a way that is not true of, say, Plato).
As the text progresses the political context of the work emerges. Sections 2 and 3 are book ended by references to the wars of religion that were dominating Europe at the time. Descartes himself tells of us his soldiering and traveling. The violence of the wars of the religion is the backdrop to the entirety of the Discourse. I think it is reasonable to think that Descartes did not mention the wars of religion by accident.
At the beginning of section 6 Descartes becomes more explicit about his concerns with the theological-political situation. He tells us that he had intended to publish a book, but that the persecution of Galileo has made him apprehensive. Surely, he thought to himself, nothing in this doctrine of geocentrism could be offensive to the church? I have a hard time believing him here. I also have a hard time believing that Descartes doesn't perceive the revolutionary implications of the project he is laying out in the Discourse. The core of the project, after all, is the mastery of nature through a technologized form of natural science. Tell me, how is it that a project of mastering nature is supposed to be a solitary, apolitical project anyway?
Further into section 6 Descartes entirely drops any pretense of his project being merely personal. He essential makes a call for other like-minded scientists to join with him, to conduct their own experiments, to share their experiments with him. Descartes, in short, is inviting other philosophers to join in a joint and progressive project of mastering nature. And it is medicine, health, moreover, that presents itself as the chief good that the mastery of nature can offer.
The Discourse, then (I have insufficently demonstrated), is a politically charged document in which Descartes is attempting to gather like-minded philosophers. He hopes that these other philosophers will gain in a long term progressive project of mastering nature with the hope of improving the conditions of human beings through the development of medicine. The wars of religion and the persecution of Galileo are the backdrop to this writing.
Studying Descartes in a political way, then, opens up a deeper dimension of his awareness of the relationship between the imposed and the natural orders. Descartes is advocating for the imposition of mathematical order at the exact moment that he is also navigating and conforming to the imposed theological-political order: Descartes skillfully conforms the demands of the Catholic church and the possibility of persecution. Yet, on a deeper level, he is able to communicate to careful readers precisely what he is doing. Implicitly, between the lines, Descartes is not simply engaged in a personal project: he is trying to agitate others to imitate him, trying to get others to join him in the project of mastering nature so as to bring about a new theological-political order.
The real intricacy of the Cartesian texts is clearest in this navigating of the exoteric level (imposed order) and the esoteric level (the intricate order). The possibility of political revolution, major change, lies in the esoteric or intricate order.
This reevaluation of Descartes does not invalidate Gendlin's reading, so much as add a different dimension to it. Because Descartes is not the only practitioner of esoteric writing. Esotericism was practiced by basically all thoughtful philosophers for several thousand years. The forgetting of the esoteric tradition happens when governments became more tolerant of or involved with philosophy. Persecution lessens, the need for esotericism goes away. We don't need to write this way, we don't need to read this way.
The disappearance of the esoteric tradition lines up pretty neatly with Gendlin's claim that the intricacy disappears with Kant and Hegel. It is after the French and American revolutions that the tradition of esoteric writing seems to wane. Suddenly the older texts start to look like everyone is locked in their time. Conformity is mistaken for historical-lock-in syndrome.
Fleshing out Gendlin's narrative of modernity not only explains the forgetting of the intricacy. It opens the door to a practice that can unite the public and the private, the imposed and intricate orders, in our being. Socratic being is esoteric being.
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