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.