I am currently working on what feels like my first book length project. It is an inquiry into trauma and the body that revolves around the categories of language, politics, and metaphysics/ontology/reality. I have identified a set of patterns that hold across all three of these domains, and all three domains have implications for how we understand trauma and the body.
I am designing the project so that the major concepts are mutually implying or entailed in one another. This design follows from certain convictions I have about what it means to think clearly.
Gendlin says in A Process Model that “To think clearly, one needs concepts that share an internal structure, that develop together, so to speak. What each is, and what the others are, constitute a single structure so that one can grasp what each does in relation to the others” (p. 114). This means that in order to think clearly about trauma, the body, language, politics, and reality, we need a set of concepts that is applicable (in different ways) across these various domains. This set of concepts, moreover, cannot be laid out in a linear fashion, but must be used to an eye with the overall structure, texture, or mesh that they constitute. The ultimate life of concepts is in the body. The body does not deal in units but rather an experiential mesh that has many pre-separated strands. Thus the real life of thinking is in this embodied, felt mesh. I am building an embodied mesh of concepts that can help me think clearly about this set of problems.
Thomas Nagel makes a similar point about thinking clearly in Mind & Cosmos. Nagel's argument foregrounds the peculiar status of the observer and the necessity of including the observer in our explanations of the world. Many 'theories of everything' developed in physics, for example, stop short of the human observer, the one who is articulating the theory. In this way these theories are incomplete: they can perhaps account for the world, but they cannot account for the existence of a being that is theorizing about the world.
The crucial issue is with third-person perspective taking, or with attempts to study ourselves "from the outside." Physicalism/materialism and theism, Nagel claims, are both forms of external explanation: both assume a view from outside human experience that is then supposed to explain our experience. This means that both of them seek transcendence: not just understanding of our experience, but how our experience belongs to the larger world. This ambition, Nagel claims, "appears to be irresistible—as if we cannot legitimately proceed in life just from the point of view that we naturally occupy in the world, but must encompass ourselves in a larger world view. And to succeed, that larger world view must encompass itself" (23). I agree that this tempatation seems unavoidable.
I cannot avoid the temptation or desire to think clearly. It feels commanding to me. I regard the desire for the truth, however problematic a concept, to be the only possible intellectual guide. It seems to me as though we are able to think about the world, and that our thinking can be more or less orderly, more or less true. Thus we must account for the nature of the world in such a way that makes our existence as thinking beings possible.
This explanation of the world that grounds our own experience will never be absolute. I'm sympathetic to Nagel's claims that radical skepticism is likely irrefutable. This doesn't strike me as a huge problem. But it does seem necessary to try and explain something about our presence as thinking beings. Thus Nagel is moderate and wise when he says that "The hope is not to discover a foundation that makes our knowledge unassailably secure but to find a way of understanding ourselves that is not raadically self-undermining [as certain skeptical Darwinian or materialist arguments are], and that does not require us to deny the obvious [again, as something like eliminative materialism does]. The aim would be to offer a plausible picture of how we fit into the world" (25).
I regard the living body as a crucial grounding place for thoughts about reality, and thus as indispensible in our attempts to think about reality. Whatever else we can say, you are all up in that body, living it every day. If you are reading this, you are/have a body. Unless we want to go full blown insane skepticism, we need to admit that the body seems to be continuous with the rest of reality. It is made of the stuff that everything else seems to be made of, and it is in constant intimate interaction with the world, taking in air and water, excreting liquids and solids that return to the world.
In my own approach to this problem I am trying to aggressively draw out the ontological threads of Gendlin's work on the body. I sense that he downplayed some of the ontological radicality because he doesn't want to use a term like ontology or metaphysics. But the more I read him he is clearly talking about reality or what the world is. At the end of "What First & Third Person Processes Really Are," for example, he says "Everything in nature is an implicit intricacy." Or in A Process Model he says "Experience, nature, or reality is much richer than that old view wanted" (245).
The old view that Gendlin is talking about is the unit model, or the assumption that reality is made of little units or atoms that get rearranged. Trying to talk about experience, nature, or reality as if it is made of little units gets very confusing. We get all kinds of distorted ideas about how things could be, it becomes hard to explain things like language or science. If it is all just the little dead atoms, how could all this magical living stuff happen?
The problem of thinking clearly about experience or reality is the problem of thinking clearly about life.
I haven't even been able to name the problem of language and how it fits into all this. But the problem of life of course becomes the problem of language, as there seems to be something symbolic or semiotic about life itself, in all forms.
But the relationship between language and nature is essential, decisive. There is temptation to say that language is the only order, as its capacity for creating is so profound, its ability to distort our view of things so certain. Indeed, a central pillar of Gendlin's philosophy is that the order of language is emergent from the order of nature. Language is both a development and a product of a larger order. "In Western science," he writes in 'Words Can Say How They Work,' "everything is passive, organized by externally imposed relations [i.e. by our conceptual structures]. But if we want to study the actual observers, we cannot attribute the interrelating to still another observer. Somewhere there is a self-organizing process. Let us say that a living body is a self-organizing process" (105 in Saying What We Mean).
The self-organizing processes of nature generate a being capable of using language. That language generates its own order, one that Gendlin says can capture us and that Plato depicts as a cave. How do we engage the order of our language in such a way that we can reasonably speak about the self-organizing processes that seemed to generate our language?
That's enough for now. I can't quite think clearly about all this right now.
