Symbol as the Birdnest of Humankind, and the Esoteric Text as Natural Artifact of Our Ambivalent Nature

I recently told my friend Eric about my developing thoughts on the relationship between life process and artificial structure.

Animals throughout nature seem to use tools, to take up and modify elements of their environment to elaborate and further their life processes. Otters and apes use stones to break open food; birds build nests to hold their young and attract their mates. Many forms of life find ways to 'use' things in ways they weren't 'intended' to be used. A blowfish's toxin is not meant to intoxicate a dolphin in a pleasurable way, but apparently dolphins have found a way to 'use' them in this way.

Human beings are apparently the most complex artificers, tool users, on this planet. We, too, make things in order to further or elaborate our life processes. Humans kill animals and wear their skins to keep warm; we create fabrics and materials to make slings to carry our young; we fashion instruments to cultivate and hunt food to eat. 

Eugene Gendlin's work on life process is absolutely decisive in my understandings here.

Perhaps the most notable human artifice is the symbol, or the separation of patterns from their instances. 😀 This smiley face, for example, is a symbol that is an abstraction from the life processes of the human body: the face that reveals the experiential processes of the organism. 

 

Symbols are crucial in our ability to organize ourselves socially and politically. When a group of people arrive at a camping site, for example, they may divide the necessary labor: you go get water, you go get the food started, I'll stay here and get the fire started. In that moment, each of these people acquires a symbolic role within the whole of that 'unit' of people, that 'society'. Roles are implicit in that moment: fire starter; water fetcher; cook.

 

A role is a peculiar form of symbolization whereby a particular person is made to fill a general role. The filling of roles is essential to human experience. We cannot be ourselves (particular, being) unless we also are something that we are not (generic role, non-being). I worked for many years as a barista, and currently as a psychotherapist. In one sense I 'was' a barista and 'am' a psychotherapist. In another sense I am neither of those things. Those roles are a symbolic artifice that I take on in order to further my life processes. 

 

It seems that human beings are the type of animal that cannot live without symbolically structuring itself. 

Because human life requires the occupation of roles, human life thereby requires sacrifice. I cannot be what I am apart from 'fitting' myself into the activity of the community. Therefore all of my potentials will not, cannot, be actualized. 

And this brings me to the point that I've been groping towards for many months or years now: the existence of esoteric texts, as uniquely human artifacts, is evidence of the type of animal that we are. We are a political animal, which also means we are a sacrificial animal and a symbolic animal. Because we are a political animal we have permanently ambivalent interests: we have the unique developments of our person, and the developments of our community. Both of these developments require sacrifices.

Esoteric texts, layered texts whereby individuals navigate the tension between individual and communal goods, are the natural artifact that is unique to the sacrifical-symbolic animal. An esoteric text allows a human being to develop a life process that is incredibly complex: How am I to further my growth as a unique, thinking being, when I am also a communal being that belongs? The esoteric text answers: I will further both of these processes by living a double life in which I care for myself in private while also preserving my belonging to a symbolic community.

Alexei Leontiev, an impressive Soviet psychologist I have recently made contact with, speaks of the 'double life of symbols'. On the one hand, they function publicly, designate roles, delineate abstract rules. On the other, symbols enter into unique relation with our individual souls, take on deeper meanings an intricacies.

The esoteric text is a perfect instantiation of this double life of symbols. And, I would add, it is evidence of the struggles unique to our animal. 

The esoteric text is the artifact that is essential to understanding the unique life processes of this kind of animal we seem to be.

The Emotional Difficulty of Writing, and the Relationship Between 'General Psychology' and Ontology

I produced five full length 'academic' papers in the last 6 months or so. I had intended to try and publish a few of them, but found myself profoundly frustrated with the process.

Showing my writing to others, in particular, occasioned challenging conversations, and feelings of alienation. I am inclined to alienation, so this is not altogether surprising. 

Yesterday I spent time with a friend (a pleasure) and spoke with him about my frustrations. 

I fear that I was irritable at the time, as I was expressing my irritation with how my writing is often met. "My writing," I said to him, "is the answer to a question and the solution to a problem." "How Collingwoodian of you," he humorously replied, as we just read R.G. Collingwood's Essay on Metaphysics together. Collingwood defines thinking as a series of questions and answers, and encourages other to write, not about him, but about the problems that he is addressing.

I want my problems to be shared. "I show people my writing and everyone takes issues with my formulations. 'This isn't clear...'. 'This metaphor doesn't quite work...'. 'This is ambiguous...'. These are proper critiques of my writing, and I want to learn to engage in the craft of writing, editing, considering audience. But I also get frustrated when I feel I am told that I am inventing problems, asking the wrong questions, or otherwise misguided.

I want to feel like I perceive reasonable problems in the world, and that my problems can be shared. But it is difficult when there is a lack of agreement in what problem,  what situation, we are even dealing with.

I have recently decided to not pursue a PhD, and to attempt to write beyond academia. I have also recently outlined a project of substantial length. 

There are a variety of to frame the project, but one is to discuss the relationship between 'general psychology' and ontology. 

I have recently been reading Niels Engelsted's book Catching up with Aristotle, an attempt to articulate a 'general psychology' that could offer greater unity to the fractured discipline of psychology. Engelsted argues that the Soviet psychologist Aleksei Leontiev and Aristotle shared a four-part scheme to capture the meaning of 'psyche', or soul, as they appear in the world: sentience (in basic life), intentionality (in conscious life), mind (in animals with locomotion), and human consciousness (in animals with a social debt economy). 

I am highly attracted to the project of general psychology because it is identical with the question, 'What is life?'

The question of general psychology cannot be raised without asking about the general nature of things, or the question of ontology or being. 'What is life?' cannot be asked without also asking 'What is the world?'

The fusion of general psychology and ontology is a feature of our present situation. I said to my friend, 'Behaviorism as a general psychology is predicated upon or consonant with materialism as a general ontology'. He asked me to repeat this. It felt like one of those simple and crystal clear formulations, obviously oversimplified, that I should hold onto. 

My friend was pointing out the theoretical extremes of my political analysis; my insistence on the significance of 'local teleology' for psychology and philosophy, my desire to attack materialist, crude 'empiricism', and the like. 

I understand this sentiment, and am also surprised by it. Pre-reflective experience is so theoretically intricate, so implicitly theoreitcal. Our entire situation feels so materialist, so behaviorist. 

How could we possibly approach general psychology differently without rethinking ourselves ontologically? 

And, yet, I speak so often of the impotence of philosophical analysis.