Where I've Been

I have not written here in two months.

Why?

I have had several false starts, several essays/posts begun and not quite finished. The writing was fruitful, and perhaps I will post it as a 'fragment'. Perhaps those fragments will be useful for me to display and study.

More likely I have been distracted by the pandemic that has seized the world. I live in Seattle. I have been working from home for 6 weeks. I do therapy over the phone for the time being.

I also recently learned that there is a conference in October on the work of Eugene Gendlin. It is hosted by SU and the Focusing Institute/Gendlin Center. I am preparing an abstract so to present at the conference. I hope to give a paper on the implications of Gendlin's work in forensic environments. I will be connecting Gendlin to the esoteric writing tradition in some capacity.

I seem to quickly grow weary of writing in this format.

Thinking in an organized way...

I have a complete draft of an abstract for a paper on Gendlin. It'll be done by the time it needs to be done.

I have been reading quite a lot.

I've read many of Gendlin's essays in Saying What we Mean. I numbered the paragraphs and made an outline of the first chapter of Thinking Beyond Patterns. I did the same thing for the entirety of Descartes' Discourse on the Method. That was very satisfying and confirmed my general reading of Descartes as political conspirator. The Discourse is somewhat like the Communist Manifesto, in that it is kind of pamphlet inviting others to join in a mass joint enterprise. Quite a document. I have looked at portions of Merleau-Ponty's Prose of he World and Phenomenology of Perception. I am almost done with the final lecture in Whitehead's Modes of Thought. I am 75 pages into Peter Levine's Waking The Tiger: Healing Trauma. I read a very interesting essay on clinical epistemology in Naomi Scheman's book Shifting Ground. Very interesting and relevant to my pscychotherapeutic clinical practice.

I keep meaning to look at Plato's Thaeatetus. I took Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy off the shelf today. Descartes' reading of Machiavelli seems to be of significance. I have a big biography of Descartres by a guy named Gaukroger that I just pulled off the shelf. A few significant references to Bacon, a good Machiavellian, but only a few thin references to Machiavelli. I need to look directly at Descartes' correspondence with Princess Elisabeth (I just found them online).

My project on Gendlin in some ways hinges on a reframing of Descartes as an inheritor of a tradition of philosophic propaganda that moves from Machiavelli and Bacon to Descartes.

Gendlin's project of rediscovering the 'implicit' or natural order relies on a narrative of the forgetting of the natural order. It doesn't happen until sometime around Kant. Coincidentally, this lines up with the forgetting of esotericism. Descartes, however, he claims, laid the groundwork for this by championing Gallileo's method of imposing geometric form onto problems for practical utility. Descartes made spherical cows politically useful and pursuable through a joint political project. Gendlin understands the first half of this formulation. I'm not sure he understands the depth of Descartes' political thought.

Gendlin's philosophical narrative needs to be broadened. Strauss and Melzer have a richer, more compelling account. And it has implications for work in forensic mental health.